Aegypt

by John Crowley

  Somewhere, tucked in among bills and receipts in Burbage’s lead box, was that ridiculous paper of Will’s. He had better burn that.

  For Will had not grown lissome and small: he had grown like a weed. His knees great knobs holding calf and thigh together like a poor piece of furniture. His red hair had gone dull and thin, a big bulge of forehead swelling out from it, Burbage wondered if he had water on the brain, for sure he had grown vague and silent and almost idiotic in the last year. And that voice: that sweet, piercing voice was broken: broken and showing coarse squawks and toneless tones like hay stuffing.

  What if he had clipped him. Clipped his little stones in time as the Italians do. Burbage shuddered to think of it.

  —We shall have them, he said. If the antique theatre had such marvels, this age should show them too. Now. Doctor Dee will know about this. We must get from him his book of Vitruvius, or have him look in it, and draw for us a picture and a plan of them, so they can be cast. Leave that, leave that.

  Will looked up from his playbook. The one thing he had to make him a player, Burbage thought, was the memory. Verse caught in his brain like sheep’s wool on briars, he could gather it at will. He would have all the parts in the new piece tomorrow. So. If anyone fell ill.

  —Listen, he said. He took money from his purse. I want you to go down to Mortlake, to Doctor Dee’s house there; go down by water. Are you listening? To Mortlake. Between the church and the river his house is, ask the way at the church.

  Will had tossed down the playbook and stood, nearly tripping himself on his big feet.

  —Yes, he said. Mortlake, between the river and the church.

  —Give him, Burbage said, my duty. Say to him, say . . .

  —About the brazen vessels. I will. I understand.

  —Good lad. Now brush yourself and clean your nails. Find a clean shirt. That is a learned man, and the Queen’s friend. Hear? Don’t dawdle.

  Will took the coin, and turned to go.

  —Will.

  The boy looked back. That way he had come to have, that not a thing mattered to him, that he was hereby only by some accident, with his big head and loose bones, it had nothing to do with him: all that belied by his great watchful eyes. What to do, what to do.

  —Ask Doctor Dee, Burbage said. He is a wise man, lad, and could help you. Tell him to look into your nativity, and see what he can see. Tell him the expense is mine. Tell him that.

  Will turned to go without answering.

  Down by water all alone! He was not to dawdle, but it was impossible not to dawdle, down Bishopsgate street and through the city wall at Bishopsgate, past the inns on Fenchurch street where plays were cried. At Leadenhall street he turned right and into the Cheapside throngs; carriages – only come to share the narrow streets with chairs and drays and people in these last few years – pushed through them arrogantly, the coachmen up behind lashing the horses forward. Several rich carriages were standing outside the huge new emporium built by Thomas Gresham for his own glory and the realm’s: the Exchange, newly dubbed ‘Royal’ by Her Majesty, a whole world’s worth of markets under a pillared roof. Inside – and through ’Change was a shortcut riverward that Will knew – inside the merchants fat and lean in sad gowns of stuff did important business in grains, hides, corn, leather, and wine in the cloistered shops of the ground floor, while above, in the Pawn, the jewelers, instrument-makers, bookbinders, the glovers and hatters and haberdashers, the armorers and druggists and clockmakers did their business and sold their wares. At the doors, though, and along the walls and streets beyond, smaller merchants without shops carried on their trade too, carrying it on their backs, crying oysters, apples, cherries ripe and cockles new, brooms good brooms, samphire gathered from the cliffs of Dover, even water, sold by the tankard.

  Will bought a pippin, and ate it on his way down Cheapside toward Paul’s, past the shops of the goldsmiths where the swells and the foreign gentlemen went in and out, and the nips and foists and cutpurses too who preyed on them. By the time Paul’s yard was reached the crowds were thick with beggars, old soldiers limbless or eyeless, counterfeit-cranks pretending to loathsome diseases who pawed or tried to paw you, only bought off with alms; at the cathedral doors the poor like a flock of importunate geese set up a clacking with their clap-dishes whenever anyone likely-looking passed within. Paul’s had lost its wooden steeple to lightning long before, and was anyway as much public concourse as church – though divine worship did go on daily; the beruffed boy choristers (oh Will pitied them, with glee in his heart) sang out by thoughtless rote into the vast spaces.

  Will, cutting through the church from the north-side door to the south-side across the nave, stopped to read the notices posted up on the pillars: men offering themselves for hire, dancing-masters and fencing-masters offering lessons, teachers of Italian and French and doctors and astrologers advertising their services. He read an apothecary’s broadside:

  These Oiles, Waters, extractions or Essences, Saltes, and other Compositions; are at Paules Wharfe ready made to be sold, by IOHN CLERKSON, practisioner in the arte of Distillation; who will also be ready for a reasonable stipend to instruct any that are desirous to learne the secrets of the same in a fewe dayes &c.

  And look what he offered: essentia perlarum, was that essence of pearls?, and balsamum sulphuris, and saccharum plumbi or sugar of lead, the vitrum antimonii; that was the antimonial cup; sal cranii humani (Will shuddered to translate this, salt of human skull, what could it be); and more ordinary stuff too, ‘divers and sundrie vernishes, strange and terrible Fireworks.’

  An aged bawd who mistook his idling over this fascinating notice came close and made to speak to him; Will, startled, moved quickly away, stumbling over his feet, and a knot of lawyers watching for clients at their accustomed pillar laughed together, perhaps at him. Quickly he went out, back into the sun.

  There was another world there: Paul’s churchyard was London’s book market, and in stalls sheltered amid the buttresses, under the sign of the Hart or the Compasses or the Dolphin, books were offered that Will could not buy but could look at: Holinshed’s chronicles in enormous folios, Joyfull News Brought Out of the Newe Worlde. And amid and among the stalls went the ballad-and-broadside sellers, with news of their own: Spanish plots and double murders, rules for love and rules for chess, stories new-brought out of the Italian, all true, all true.

  Past Blackfriars then the traffic was all for the water, the greatest thoroughfare of London. Will was chivied down the water stairs with all the others, to contest with them there for the watermen’s services, and only made his way onto one after being shouldered aside by an alderman and his servant for the first boat to stop; and then down the river. Clouds scudding fast beyond the crowded steeples outpaced the fast river traffic, the eelboats and wherries and other light craft bobbing with bellied sails and the towering merchantmen. Will hugged his knees in his cramped space aboard the boat, and listened and saw and tasted the whole September day, seeming to have all of it inscribed on his heart for good.

  Late now, and hurrying, he climbed the water stairs at Mortlake and asked the woman washing for Doctor Dee’s house, and asked again at the church, and again at a gate leading into a garden, where a woman leaned, smiling, her cheeks blushed like September apples and so plump they narrowed her smiling eyes.

  —Doctor Dee is it. And who might you be.

  —I am sent by Master James Burbage of the Theatre in Shoreditch.

  —A player.

  —I am that.

  She studied him, amused and good-natured, and at last opened the gate she leaned against.

  —The doctor is in the garden, she said. This is his house. And this is his wife.

  She curtseyed slightly, mockingly. Will bowed.

  —Go quietly in, she said. He is busy there, with I know not what. But then he ever is. Busy. With I know not what.

  Will went where she pointed, into a well-kept garden now pillaged and gone yellow with autumn. There were kn
ots of herbs and a carp pool and two, no three sundials of different kinds; and in the center something that didn’t belong to a garden. A sort of small house or tent, rigged up on poles with heavy cloths hung around it, and on the front of it a panel, painted black, in which there was a glass, a lens, a small round lens that caught the sun.

  The curtains fluttered and bellied, and out from the little house came stooping a long man, made longer by a long sad-colored robe and a long narrow beard going gray. He glanced at Will and raised his eyebrows, but took no further note of him; he took from his clothes a little round cap, and with it he covered the glass eye in the black panel. Then he went back within.

  Will stood, shifting from foot to foot.

  When he came back out, Doctor Dee wore a pair of black-rimmed spectacles with claw-ends that fitted to his ears; they made his round wide eyes even more surprised, even more round, than they had been.

  He motioned to Will.

  —Come here.

  Will went to him, and the doctor took his shoulder. He led him to stand in front of the tent house, facing the blinkered glass; then he bethought himself, and moved Will back some feet from it.

  —Master Burbage, sir, sends you his duty, and . . .

  —Now what you must do, said the doctor, holding up a long finger in warning, is to stand perfectly still. Bat not a single eyelash till I tell you so. Do you hear?

  Will nodded. He was growing alarmed. Was he to be charmed? Best to do what he was told. Doctor Dee went back to the black house, stood by it, and again warned Will with a skinny finger.

  —Still. Still as the dead. Now.

  He snatched off the little cap that covered the glass eye, and seemed to count or pray under his breath.

  Will, motionless, stared at the glass eye as though from it, as from a basilisk’s, killing rays might shoot. Then the doctor covered it again; he breathed deeply, and disappeared within.

  Will stood frozen, hearing his heartbeats, tears gathering in his unwinked eyes.

  At last Doctor Dee came out again, and seemed to see Will for the first time.

  —I beg your pardon, sir! You may move, move, leap and dance.

  He carried something, something flat like a plate, wrapped in black velvet.

  —Come, he said. Come along, and tell me what my friend Burbage wants of me.

  The house Doctor Dee led him into seemed to be more than one house, several thrown into one, with doors broken through walls and passages made to lead from barn to kitchen to still-room to washhouse; Will followed along after the doctor’s billowing robe and slipslop slippers, into a large long room, windowed on both sides with small mullioned windows, and stuffed full of more things, in greater disorder, than any room he had ever been in or dreamed of.

  It was a wizard’s den for sure. What made it so wasn’t only the brass armillary sphere, bones of the whole heavens in small, which any wizard might have; it wasn’t only the two parchment-colored globes standing together like different thoughts about the world, or the astronomer’s staff marked in degrees, which Will couldn’t understand the use of but which was surely more marvelous than any lignum vitae. It wasn’t exactly the clutter of objects rare and common, the yellow-toothed skull (sal cranii humani), the gems, prisms, crystals, and bits of colored glass gathered together in earthenware pots or scattered on tabletops or hung in windows to color the daylight; or the manuscripts tied up with string or the slips of paper written on in three or four different languages and tacked up here and there as though to remind Doctor Dee of secrets he had concocted but might otherwise forget; it was all these things, and the convex glass on the wall that reflected it all, and the black cat that sniffed at the remains of a plate of supper there (pigeon’s bones and a rind of cheese), and even the feather duster protruding like a shabby bird from the pocket of a coat hung on a nail. Most of all it was the books: more books than he had ever seen gathered in one place together, books in tall cases, books piled in corners, books leaning wearily together on shelves, books bound and unbound in this room and in the passage beyond and rising to the ceiling on shelves in the next room; open books laid atop other open books on tables and in the seats of chairs. In the houses of his Arden relatives, Will had seen many books, dozens together, locked up in cupboards, silent. These hundreds – thousands it might be – he could almost hear them whispering together, whispering to each other of their contents.

  Doctor Dee, hearing Will’s footsteps slow and halt, came back from the passage.

  —Are you a lover of books?

  Will couldn’t answer that.

  —There are books here a player might study, he said. I have Aeschylus. Euripides. Do you read Greek? No. Well, here are histories too, Leland and Polydore Vergil. I have bought Holinshed’s new chronicle, but it has not yet been brought me. Plutarch, Englished by North. Those are fine tales.

  —Have you read them all? Will asked, not quite in a whisper.

  Doctor Dee lowered his strange spectacles and smiled at him.

  —If you like, he said, you may come back, and look into them. Read what ones you like. There are many who come here to find this or that. Tales. History. Knowledge.

  For a moment he waited for the boy to say something, a thankee sir at least for politeness’s sake, but Will only stared.

  —Come along then, he said, and tell me what my friend Burbage wants of me. Come.

  He led Will out of the room and down a twist of corridors and into an odorous still-room where there were jugs and bottles, retorts and cucurbites like great fat birds, corked jars full and empty; he pushed the boy before him through a door and a heavy curtain into a darkened shuttered room in which a single candle burned.

  —Come, he said. Your business, sir.

  As best he could Will stammered out what it was that Burbage wanted to know, about the brazen vessels, which after all he hadn’t really understood; Doctor Dee nodded and hummed in his throat, going on with his work, which must, Will thought, be magic for sure.

  —And cast back, throw back the voice, over, under . . .

  —Mm. Mm-hm.

  He had taken out from the folded velvet a square of thin metal, blackish, which he took carefully by its edges. He slipped it into a small basin full of fluid, where it sank, turning brown, then reddish brown. Doctor Dee studied it carefully. Black streaks began to appear on its surface, a dapple of marks coming forth, making shapes.

  —Ah, said the doctor.

  With a tiny pair of tongs he lifted out the square of metal, turning it this way and that, letting the fluid run off it. Then he took it and the stub of candle to the end of his workbench, and slipped the candle under a little pot on a tripod.

  —Mercurius, he said. Smiling, he pressed his finger to his lips.

  When the mercury in his pot was hot enough, he held the metal square over it, at an angle, fumigating it, peering at it now and then with satisfaction. At last he pushed open the shutters, daylight flooded the little chamber, he held out the metal plate to Will.

  Will took it and looked. On its surface, as on an engraver’s plate, but far clearer, there was a picture: a boy, solemn, rigid, standing in a garden, a sundial behind him. Himself.

  Himself, these clothes he wore, this old hat on his head; his face. Will was looking into a mirror: a mirror he had looked into a quarter of an hour ago, and still stood looking into. Forever.

  Doctor Dee saw him speechless, and with two fingers took the picture from him by an edge.

  —A toy, he said, and tossed it into an open box there of other stained plates. There are greater things. There are even greater toys.

  He put his arm around Will’s shoulder.

  —Now, he said. We will look into Vitruvius. And into your nativity too, is that not it? And see what we can see.

  ‘What’s the book?’ said a large shadow that had come between Rosie and the window light.

  ‘Hi,’ she said to Spofford’s bulk above her. ‘Pretty crazy. This sort of magician character just took a photograph
of Shakespeare.’

  ‘No kidding.’

  They looked at each other for a silent space, smiling.

  ‘What are you in town for?’ Rosie said.

  ‘Brought my friend Pierce in to catch the bus. Picked up some stuff. And you? Mind if I sit down?’

  ‘Well sort of. Yes and no. Oh heck sit down.’

  He slid carefully into the booth opposite her, watching her lowered face. ‘What’s up?’

  She huffed out a sigh, cupping her cheek in her hand and staring down at her book as though still reading it. Then she closed it. ‘I’m going to see a lawyer this morning,’ she said. ‘Allan Butterman, up the street.’

  Spofford said nothing, and the wary smile he had retained from his greeting didn’t alter, but he seemed to expand in the seat; his long legs stretched out under the table and a brown arm hooked over the booth’s back.

  ‘There’s something I want to say,’ Rosie said, folding her hands as in prayer. ‘I like you a lot. A lot.

  You’ve been great. Swell.’

  ‘But.’

  ‘I don’t want you to think I’m doing this for you. ’Cause I’m not.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘I’m not doing it for you or anyone. I’m just doing it. The whole idea is that I’m doing it alone, it’s something that makes me alone. Whatever happens later on.’ She drummed her fingers on the table between them. ‘That’s why I sort of didn’t want you to sit down. Why I sort of don’t want you to say anything about it.’

  She meant she refused to have him as a reason. If other and larger things, more desperate things, could not be reasons, then Spofford, a good thing, could not be one. It was only fair: to her and everyone.

  ‘I won’t,’ he said. He crossed his arms before him. There was a pale fish tattooed on the back of his left hand; sometimes it was invisible. ‘The black dog’s day is not yet.’

  ‘What?’