The house of Doctor Dee

by Peter Ackroyd

  I sat up, for a moment convinced that the voice had come from somewhere within the room, until I realized that I must have slept and dreamed. But the brief rest had left me unsettled; the room was not cold on that summer's evening, but somehow coldness had entered it while I lay asleep. I got up from the narrow bed and switched on the electric light, hoping that it might dispel the ghost of my unease, but it spread too much brightness; the room must have been built in the early nineteenth century, and this was the wrong kind of light.

  *

  I woke up the next morning, feeling more hungry than I had ever been in my life before. But even though I had brought no food with me, I was still reluctant to leave the house: for some reason I was afraid that I would never be able to find it again. I lay upon the bed and waited. But who, or what, could I be waiting for? I was not going to wall myself up here like some sixteenth-century monk, however strong the temptation, and I roused myself at last. I had woken upon the bed fully dressed, and conceived a horror for the clothes I had slept in: so I took them off and laid them carefully in a corner. Then I washed and dressed again, before hazarding the outer air. I retraced my steps down Cloak Lane, but I could not resist looking back at the old house. It was mine now, I knew that, but I turned because I had the strangest fear that it might already have disappeared.

  I approached Clerkenwell Green, carefully skirting the grounds of the church, and looked about me. Once more the area seemed empty, somehow bereft, and as I walked down Jerusalem Passage towards the Clerkenwell Road I could see only boarded-up buildings, closed offices and tattered advertisement hoardings that no doubt concealed patches of waste ground. There was no evidence of a supermarket, or even a grocery, and it was as if the whole district had been separated from the rest of the city. I paused for breath beneath the remains of St John's Priory, but it was not until I had gone through Charterhouse Square and the congerie of narrow streets around Smithfield that eventually I came to a shopping precinct. What did I need? Bread. Soup. Cheese. Milk. Butter. Fruit. What people have always needed.

  But I enjoyed walking among the shelves of this Smithfield supermarket: the sandwiches in their sealed wrappers, the salads packed in cellophane, the plastic containers of milk and orange juice, all seemed to glow in the artificial light. I lingered among the chilled foods, and took particular delight in the cabinets of frozen goods where slices of plaice and breasts of chicken lay beneath a white covering of frost. Then there were the shelves of pickled vegetables and fruits, the rows of tinned peas and tomatoes, the piles of packaged bread and crumpets. I was at peace with a world which afforded so much bounty, and began to enjoy living at the very end of time. Just as I left with my carrier-bags, a wind started up among the green litter-bins and the black plastic sacks filled with rubbish; scraps of newspaper and discarded wrappers flew around the gaudily painted precinct, and I looked for my way home.

  I managed to find a taxi but, since the driver could not enter the one-way streets near Cloak Lane, I left the cab on the south side of the Green near a small printing works. I was beginning to understand the geography of this area now, and had no difficulty finding my way back to the old house. I had opened the gate and was about to walk down the stone path when I stepped back in alarm: there was a man in a dark coat bending over by the side of the path among the weeds and thistles. He had his back to me, and seemed to be tying his shoelace, when suddenly without looking around he hurled himself sideways as if he were trying to knock me violently to the ground. But nothing happened. He had melted away, or somehow melted into my own body.

  Of course I realized at once that this was my own foolishness — I had seen a shadow which moved, no doubt the shape of a large bird which had suddenly flown upward. But I was still shaken, even by my own delusion, and hurried towards the door. When I came inside the hall, I realized that the right leg of my trousers was torn; there was a wide gash there, just as if it had been made with a knife, and I must have ripped it when I stepped out of the taxi. Suddenly and unaccountably I became very angry — angry at myself, angry at my own fear, angry at the house for so unnerving me. After a few minutes I went into the kitchen, and arranged the groceries neatly upon their shelves. There was something about this house which demanded order. But I had no appetite now, and sat looking at the brightly coloured packets and bottles as if I did not know what they were.

  *

  Now all is done; bring home the child again. There was a steady knocking, which seemed to be coming from inside the room. I arched awake, with a confused noise something like a cry, and found myself still sitting in the kitchen; but I was in a different chair, and the noise was growing louder. I was so bewildered that I looked around to make sure no one was in the room with me, knocking against the wall with a clenched fist and grimacing at me; but then, as the sound echoed around the silent and sparsely furnished house, I realized that there was someone at the front door. I hesitated still. I went over to the sink and dashed some cold water against my face; then, very slowly and cautiously, I walked down the hall. Daniel Moore was standing on the path outside, looking up at my bedroom window as if he had known where to find me.

  'You're wet,' he said.

  'I know. I was asleep.'

  He looked at me curiously for a moment. 'I couldn't reach you on the phone.'

  'That's because it's not connected.'

  How can I explain Daniel? He was a professional researcher, like me, and we had seen each other so many times in the British Library, the National Archive Centre, the newspaper collection at Colindale, and elsewhere, that we began to talk. There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward. I must admit that I enjoy the sensation. One client might want me to investigate some eighteenth-century deeds, while another might need information on a nineteenth-century toolmaker, but for me the pleasure is the same; it is as if I were entering a place I had once known and then forgotten, and in the sudden light of recognition had remembered something of myself. On certain occasions this had a curious but no less pleasurable sequel: I would look up from the books or documents I was reading, and find that the immediate world around me had become both more distant and more distinct. It had become part of the continuing historical process, as mysterious and unapproachable as any other period, and I gazed around me with the same delighted attention that I would give if I suddenly found myself within a sixteenth-century scene. If my work meant that I often viewed the past as my present, so in turn the present moment became part of the past. I have always tended to keep my real feelings to myself, so I had never discussed any of this with Daniel Moore. He would have listened to me with his usual dry attention, his bright eyes resting upon my face, before moving on to some other topic. In any case he saw his work in a different light; it was for him, I suspect, simply an inconspicuous job which he could pursue in solitude. 'I presume,' he said, 'that, as usual, I'm too early?'

  I had quite forgotten that I had invited him to explore the house. 'Of course you are. Welcome to Nightmare Abbey.'

  'Thank you, Matthew. You do look a little Gothic, after all.' He was staring at my leg, and I realized with horror that I was still wearing the trousers which had been so unexpectedly torn.

  'A domestic accident.' I tried to laugh. 'Just give me a minute.'

  I left him in the hallway while I rushed upstairs to change, and when I returned he was examining the ground-floor room with his usual sharp, almost scornful, attention. He was a small man, with pale neat features, and he was on tiptoe as he put his hand against one of the walls. 'How old is this house?'

  'You tell me. You always give the impression of knowing about such things.'

  'At first I would have said eighteenth-century, but I would have been wrong. This room is older. Much older.'

  'That's what I felt.'

  'Sixteenth-century?'r />
  'Possibile.' I sounded like my mother then, and instantly regretted my tone.

  'Of course it's very unusual to find a house of this age in London. Rather a surprise, in fact.' He walked past me into the hallway, and went up to the basement door.

  'You can't,' I said. 'It's locked.' But as I spoke, he turned the handle and the door opened. He seemed to have no fear of the darkness below, but I followed him down the stairs more hesitantly. 'Do you think,' I whispered, 'there might be rats?'

  'Of course. Enormous ones.' It did not seem peculiar at the time, but there was no smell, no odour of dampness, no suspicion of rotting things. Then something moved softly across my face, and I stumbled backwards with a cry; Daniel laughed, and pulled what was the cord of an electric light.

  'Quite a little screamer, aren't we?' The basement room could be clearly seen now, with its stone floor, its whitewashed walls and its shallow alcoves, all seeming to ebb and flow in the sudden light; it covered the whole area of the house, and yet it was completely empty. Daniel had walked over to one of the walls. 'There was a door here, Matthew. Do you see how it has been sealed up?' He turned around, delighted to be in this ancient enclosed space. 'It looks westward, so it must have opened out near the Fleet River.'

  'O gliding down with smooth and subtle course.'

  'What?' He looked at me in surprise for a moment, but I just shrugged my shoulders. 'Now do you see this?' He pointed to some marks above the door, where the lintel must once have been, and his pale, carefully manicured hands seemed almost transparent against the white wall.

  'Aren't they just scratches?'

  He examined them more closely, although in fact very little could now be traced. 'No. They look like symbols.'

  'Builders' marks.' I put my hand up to my sweating face.

  'Do you know what I think? This wasn't a basement at all. This was the ground floor, and it has slowly sunk through the London clay. This old house is descending into the ground.'

  *

  We were sitting upstairs again, although my sense of what was above or below the ground was now subtly confused, and I was apologizing for having fainted away. I blamed it upon my hunger.

  'You didn't faint,' he said. 'You just closed your eyes and leaned against the wall. It was all very restrained.' He was looking at me intently but it was impossible to gauge what, if any, feeling lay behind that steady gaze. 'I do think, Matthew, that we ought to find out who owned this house. It's almost a professional duty.'

  'I'm not sure that I want to know.' I was very restless and, rising from my chair, I went over to a side-table which had been pushed beneath one of the narrow windows in this ancient room; it opened on to the west, in the same position as the door in the basement, and through the dusty pane I examined the area of the Fleet River where the Farringdon Road now flowed. My hands were upon the polished wooden table, and I could feel the handle of a drawer; I looked down, opened the drawer, and saw a glass tube lying there. It resembled a test tube from a laboratory, but it was about two feet in length and seemed curiously distorted at the end. I was disgusted by it, and closed the drawer quickly. 'It's very close in here,' I said to Daniel. 'Shall we go for a meal?'

  He did not answer, so I turned to face him. He was no longer there. He had vanished, and in a sudden panic I rushed out of the room; only to see him coming down the staircase with a smile of triumph. 'I just had to look around,' he said. 'I did ask permission, but you were miles away.'

  'I don't…'

  'You were lost somewhere. Looking out of the window. So I took matters into my own hands. Did I hear you say something about going out?'

  I looked back at the house as we left, and noticed for the first time that the eighteenth-century façade of the ground floor had been designed as a casing or shell for the sixteenth-century interior. I understood then that it had truly become my responsibility: it was as if some lost creature had come up to me, had attached itself to me, and pleaded silently with me to take care of its quiet life. That, at least, was what I thought at the time.

  *

  'Ah. Here's the well in Clerkenwell.' We had come out of Cloak Lane, on our way towards the Green, and Daniel had found a clue to the area which I had not seen at all. There was a flight of metal steps, leading down to a circular opening in the ground; there was even a wooden bucket, and a small model of the well as it would have looked five hundred years ago. I had not recognized any of this because it was protected by a thick glass window, and was now part of an office development in the street beside St James's Church. There was a small handwritten notice pinned to the bucket, and I crouched down in order to read it: 'There has been a well on this site since the twelfth century, when it was known as the Clerks' Well. Religious plays were performed on this ground during Advent, since wells were often considered to be emblems of spiritual blessing.' The water of life. And I had a vision of Clerkenwell as a holy place, a land of hills and running streams, where now the water underground was piped into my house.

  'This might be interesting. But no. It doesn't solve the mystery.' I stood up and went over to Daniel, who was looking at a small map framed just behind the plate glass. 'In the sixteenth century, this whole area was covered by a nunnery.' He looked at me for a moment, with the most peculiar smile upon his face. 'I see that nothing much has changed.' Then he went back to the map. 'Your house isn't marked as a separate dwelling.'

  'So I'm living in the nuns' house?'

  'Something connected with them, anyway. But don't worry. They didn't brick themselves up in the sixteenth century.' Yet I had an image of them already, silently moving against those thick stone walls and treading softly upon what was now my basement floor. 'In any case someone must have lived there after the Reformation. Your house survived.'

  And what else survived? I could imagine the sacred hills and fields of Clerkenwell but, just as clearly, I recalled every detail of my walk that morning through the streets which now overlaid them. There were so many watchmakers and watch-repairers in the Clerkenwell Road, so many small printers in the lanes leading down to Smithfield and Little Britain: had they chosen this place, or had the place somehow chosen them? Were they like the pilgrims who had once come to this well?

  'Now here is something unusual, Matthew. Do you see where a medieval brothel has been marked, just beyond the nunnery? Does it say Turnmill Lane?' He spun around, his bright eyes taking in the line of streets and buildings around us, before marching off in the direction of Farringdon.

  'I know it,' I said, trying to keep up with him. 'There's nothing there now except offices.'

  We walked beside the Green, and then crossed down into what is now Turnmill Street before coming to a sudden halt. There was a police van outside one of the nondescript office entrances there and, as we watched, three women were being led away. One of them was screaming abuse at a policeman, and Daniel seemed for a moment very shaken; it was as if some kind of violence were spreading out into the air. 'I do hate scenes,' he murmured. 'Do you mind if we go back the way we came?'

  I was silent until we had turned the corner. 'If you promise not to laugh,' I said, 'I'll tell you a very curious thing.'

  'I'll try.'

  'About a year ago I was walking by the Thames. Do you know, near Southwark? When suddenly I thought I saw a bridge of houses. A shimmering bridge, lying across the river.'

  'London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down.'

  'No, seriously. It was like a bridge of light. It only lasted for a moment, and then it was gone. But there was, for that moment, a bridge connecting two shores.'

  'It could have been anything, Matthew.' He scarcely paid any attention to me, and looked back as the police van was driven away.

  'And there was something else, too. Are you listening, Daniel? When I saw the bridge shimmering above the water, I thought I saw people crossing it along a line of light. They rose and fell together, just as if they were walking across waves. But I don't expect you to believe any of this.'
/>   He was silent for a few moments. 'Can we eat dinner now, please? I'm extremely hungry.'

  There was an Italian restaurant on the opposite side of the Green, about twenty yards from the site of the holy well, and he raced towards it as if he were being pursued. By the time I caught up with him, he was already seated at one of the tables. 'I've been thinking,' he said. 'Next week I'll find out more about the house.'

  I changed the subject and, as we ate, I tried to discuss my plans for the future — how I had decided to move to Clerkenwell permanently, how I intended to decorate and furnish the rooms, how I would hire a garden firm to clear and plant the waste ground around it. I was concerned only with restoration and renovation; by implication, its past did not matter.

  'Now that you're rich,' he said suddenly, as if we had been discussing nothing else, 'you won't have any interest in our old pursuits —'

  'I'm not giving up work, Daniel, just because of an inheritance.'

  'That's probably very silly of you. But let me finish my sentence. If you're busy with other things, I'm quite prepared to do a little digging.'

  The phrase alarmed me. 'No. Don't. It's my house. I want to do my own research.'

  He seemed disappointed. 'And how far do you intend to go?'