The Angel of the West Window Page 13
In the middle of March Queen Elizabeth, most unexpectedly, most perplexingly, sent Leicester to announce her intention to visit me in Mortlake. What can she want!? I asked myself at the time. Dudley had appeared on the Queen’s errand. To my astonishment, to my horror even, he asked me abruptly and in forthright words about a certain “glass” or magic crystal that was said to be in my possession and which the Queen would like to see. I was so taken by surprise that I could not conceal the truth and deny the stone, which Bartlett Greene had given me and through which I had already achieved so much. In a few brief words Dudley revealed that Her Majesty was informed of the stone, having seen it in my possession in a dream one night the previous autumn. My heart stood still for a moment when Dudley repeated his message but I managed, with some difficulty, to keep my composure, and recommended myself through him to my Lady’s favour, saying that, of course, everything in my possession was hers to command.
As Dudley left – oh, how long ago it all is! – he kissed the hand of my former wife, Ellinor, which she withdrew in unseemly haste. Afterwards she confessed to me, with a dark look, that as the lips of the noble Lord had touched her hand she had felt the breath of Death brush her skin. I rebuked Ellinor for such unbecoming words.
So the Mistress of Windsor came with Dudley and one squire. She knocked at my window with her riding crop. Ellinor was much startled, clutched at her heart and collapsed to the floor in a swoon. I bore her to a couch but ran out without examining her to greet my Lady. But she asked me how my wife did and, when she heard of the incident, told me to see to Ellinor – in the meantime she would rest in the park. She would not enter my house, however much I did entreat her. Then I went to the room where my wife lay and found her dying. With my heart full of dread, I crept away to my Mistress and took the “glass” to her; but no word was spoken between us of Ellinor. I could see from Elizabeth’s face that she knew my wife was at Death’s door. After an hour the Queen rode off. And that evening Ellinor was dead. A stroke had put an end to her life. – – – That was on the twenty-first day of March in the year 1575.
In the time before and after these terrible events my life force was at its lowest ebb. There is no need to say more on this than: I thank Heaven that today I can look back on those times of distress sound of mind and soul.
Whenever demons enter upon our frailty we are always touched with a premonition of the death of the body or, what is worse, the death of the spirit, and it is only by grace if we escape it.
After that day Queen Elizabeth never came again to Mortlake. Nor was I again commanded to court, and right glad I was of it. I had taken an aversion to my Mistress which was worse than hate, for it meant we were as far apart as possible and yet cursed with inward closeness.
To conclude, I decided to do of my own free will what once my Mistress had compelled me to: after three years as a widower and in the fifty-fourth year of my life I took a wife after my own heart, a wife who had never known nor seen Elizabeth and London, the court and the great world, an innocent and healthy child of nature; Jane Fromond was the daughter of a yeoman farmer, a commoner and therefore unworthy ever to be presented to her Majesty. But what did that matter? She was a sweet young woman of twenty-three years and completely devoted to me. And soon I sensed, by some strange knowledge of the blood and the certainty within my heart, that I had deeply wounded my Mistress and that far from me the impotence of her anger embittered her days. It doubled the pleasure I felt in the arms of my young wife that I was knowingly and wittingly hurting the one who had caused me so much pain. Then one day I heard that Elizabeth was sick with the ague in Richmond and when I heard it I was pierced with the dagger of remorse and sped, uncalled, to Richmond, to my Mistress; and I was not turned away but presently commanded to her sick-bed where I found her in great danger.
When I approached her she ordered with a wave of her hand all those, nobles and servants, who were about her to leave the chamber, and I was alone with her for half an hour and will never forget our talk for the rest of my days.
“Thou hast wounded me sore, friend John”, she began. “Twice thou hast put the witch between us, twice, with the potion and then with dreams, thou hast allowed another influence to step between us; little hast thou profited by it.”
My immediate response was to reject the imputation, for through my Jane’s simple and natural affection I had recovered my peace of mind and I did not intend once more to be caught up in equivocal games of lustful glances and cold rejection such as the capricious Queen loved. So my answer was duly respectful to her Majesty but, as I thought, both cunning and manly:
“Any potion that was drunk, if it were of free will and, perhaps, from an excess of high spirits, could not violate the laws of nature, nor those of the divine spirit. According to nature, anything harmful to the body is either the death of the body, or is killed by the body, which devours and discharges it. According to the law of the spirit, however, we are granted freedom over our will, so that our dreams, whether they feed the mind or are excretions from it, always come in fulfilment of our own will. Thus anything that was drunk without harm to the body is long since vanished; any dreams that were forced upon us will have been discharged by a healthy organism, so that we have every reason to hope that God will grant that Your Majesty will arise from any such afflictions strengthened in health and freedom.”
My speech had turned out bolder and more of a rebuff than I had intended when I began; I was afraid at the pale and severe features which stared at me from the pillows. However it was not anger I saw, but an unapproachable and alien grandeur which chilled me to the marrow; it seemed as if I heard the “spiritual” Queen speaking:
“You have wandered far from your destined course, scion of the line of Rhodri. At night you observe the stars in the sky above your roof in the cool light of reason; but you have forgotten that the way to them passes through the image of them that lies within you, and you do not realise that there are Gods there that would see you rise to join them. You have dedicated a learned treatise to me, De stella admiranda in Cassiopeia. Oh, John Dee, you admire too many things and have neglected to become a wonder of the cosmos yourself! But you were right in your supposition that the admirable star in Cassiopeia was a double star which revolves blissfully around itself, forever blazing forth and then drawing in upon itself, like the nature of love itself. Go on making your observations of the double star in Cassiopeia; I may soon leave this tiny Kingdom of the Islands to seek the riven crown which is reserved for me when I cross over – – –”
At these words I collapsed at my Mistress’ bedside and in my stupor was only half aware of what else was said between us.
But the Queen’s illness proved to be much worse than had been at first thought and the doctors began to despair of her life. Then I set out for Holland and Germany to seek the famous physicians who were known to me from Louvain and Paris, but none were to be found in the cities where they lived, so that I spent day and night galloping in search of them until news of Her Majesty’s recovery reached me in Frankfort on the Oder.
And so I returned for the third time from a fruitless expedition in my Mistress’ service and found my wife Jane had been delivered of a child, my dear son Arthur whom she bore me in the fifty-fifth year of my life.
Since that time my commerce with Queen Elizabeth and the court in London has been scanty and free of terrors as of joys, of sorrows as of the secret thrill of hope. My life in the last two years has flowed as smoothly as the little Dee outside my window – not without its pleasant aspects as it winds its way through the peaceful countryside, but without violent rapids or the majestic sweep of a mighty river in its destined course towards a distant ocean.
Last year Queen Elizabeth accepted one last tractatus from my pen: as a summation of my North American ambitions, which I had carefully planned in such rigorous detail, I dedicated to her the Tabula geografica Americae, in which I once more dwelt on the incalculable advantages of this enterprise, an opportunit
y to be seized which would never arise again. I have done all that lay in my power. If Her Majesty prefers the counsel of narrow-souled envy to that of friendship, then England will let this moment of destiny pass ungrasped. But I can wait, that I have learnt in my fifty years. Now it is Burleigh who has the ear of our Mistress – an ear that all too easily takes its cue from the eye and inclines itself to a handsome figure. There is no love lost between Burleigh and myself. I expect little from his judgment and less from his goodwill.
But there is another matter which serves to strengthen my composure, so that I no longer tremble at the decisions of the Privy Council. After the trials of all these years I have come to doubt whether it is the earthly Greenland that is the goal of my striving, the true object of the conquest prophesied me. Recently I have found cause to doubt whether I interpreted the words of my jack i’the glass aright; I have cause to distrust my satanic counsellor, Bartlett Greene, in spite of the accuracy of his supernatural foresight. His most devilish trick is to tell the truth, but in such manner that it is misunderstood. – – – This world is not the whole world, that was the message Greene gave me in the hour of his death. This world has a counterworld, a plurality of dimensions, which by no means exhaust themselves in the world of our bodies and our space; Greenland, too, has its mirror image, just as I do: on the other side. A Green Land! Are not my Greenland and my America over there? This thought has occupied reason and intuition since I sensed the other side. And Bartlett Greene’s insistence that I should seek the fount of being here alone, here and nowhere else, has become rather a warning to my intuition than an argument to support my reasoning. For I have learnt to mistrust reason as if it were Bartlett Greene himself. Greene is not my friend, however much he may play the part of my saviour and counsellor. It may be he saved my body from the Tower to destroy my soul! I recognised him when he brought the demon to me that clothed herself in Elizabeth’s astral body to take possession of me. I have received tidings from my inner self which make my whole former life seem foreign to me, as if seen in a green mirror, and which impel me to renounce that mirror whose prophecy once transformed my life.
I have become other than the one who was the chrysalis which now hangs dead from a branch of the tree of life.
This last twelvemonth I have no longer been the marionette, dancing on the strings that came out of the green glass; I am free!
Free for metamorphosis, ascension, empire! Free for the “Queen” and the “Crown”!
That is the end of the notebook in which John Dee recorded his life from his release from the Tower to the year 1581, that is a period of almost twenty-eight years, taking him up to the fifty-seventh year of his life, an age at which most ordinary men look forward to calm repose and the descent into old age.
A vibrancy, an inexplicable excitement, a more than usual involvement in the vicissitudes of this strange career all tell me, John Dee’s descendant, that the real storms, the decisive struggles, the titanic upheavals are only about to begin, they will erupt, seethe, rage – – my God, how is it that I am suddenly filled with horror?! Is it I who am writing? Have I become John Dee? Is this my hand? Not his hand? – Not his? – And my G..., who is that standing there? Is it a ghost? There, there at my desk! – – –
I am tired. I have not slept a wink all night. The shattering experience and the hours struggling to preserve my sanity are now behind me; the raging storm, which brings both devastation and refreshment, has passed over and the landscape is clear and calm once more.
At least now, in the first light of a new day, I am able to set down the external course of last night’s events.
It was about seven o’clock in the evening when I finished translating the Dee notebook with the retrospective of his life. The last words I wrote down reveal how deeply moved I was by his life history, more deeply, perhaps than seems necessary for someone mechanically transcribing old family documents. Were I given to such fancies, I would say that the John Dee that I, as the heir to his blood, bear within me, has risen from the dead. From the dead? Is someone dead who still lives on in the cells of his offspring’s offspring? – – – But I will not attempt to explain this excessive sympathy. It is enough that it is there, that it has taken possession of me.
It went so far that, in a way that is difficult to describe but that was not merely a kind of memory, I shared in all those fluctuations of fortune, shared the life of the the disappointed scholar living in seclusion with his wife and young son at Mortlake; I could not only see the house with its park, rooms and furniture – which, of course, I had never visited – I could see them with John Dee’s eyes and felt attached to them as he had been; but beyond that even, I could sense, with an uncanny, painful and oppressive force, fate looming up on my unfortunate ancestor, an explorer of the soul rather than of the globe; it was as if I could see in my mind’s eye my own inevitable fate, gathering like a dark bank of cloud over a landscape that was the geography of my soul.
I must stop myself from saying more, for I can feel my thoughts beginning to become entangled again and words are starting to slip the leash. It fills me with fear.
I will say no more of the nameless dread of that moment, but record the events as objectively as I can:
As I wrote those last few lines I had a physical vision of John Dee’s future from the point at which the notebook breaks off. It was a vision of such vivid intensity, as if I had lived through those later years with John Dee. What am I saying: with John Dee? I saw it as John Dee, I had become John Dee, of whom I knew, and still know, nothing other than what I have written down on these pages.
And at that moment of certainty when I knew I was John Dee, I felt a vague sensation at the back of my head, as if I were growing a second face there, a Janus head – – – the Baphomet! And as I sat there observing myself and my transformation with an icy, numb detachment, John Dee’s destiny took physical shape and played itself out in the room around me.
Between the desk and the window Bartlett Greene materialised out of thin air, his leather jerkin open at the neck, red hair on the pale skin of his chest, his broad butcher’s face on its thick neck fringed with a fiery beard and showing a wide, friendly grin not two paces from me.
Instinctively I rubbed my eyes and, when the first awful shock was over, examined what was happening in the clear light of reason. But the figure stayed there, standing in front of me, and I knew it was no other than Bartlett Greene.
And then the incomprehensible happened: I was – and was not – myself; I was here and over there at the same time, I was present and had long since passed over: everything at once. I was “I” and another, I was John Dee in memory and in immediate consciousness at the same time. It was a dislocation which words cannot put back into joint. Perhaps the best way to put it is to say that both time and space were dislocated, like something seen when you squeeze one eyeball: askew, real and unreal at the same time – which eye is seeing the “real” image? Hearing was as dislocated as vision. Greene’s mocking voice seemed to come both from the immediate vicinity and from the distant centuries:
“Still trotting along, are we, brother Dee? By my troth, thou takest the long way round. And it could have been so straightforward!”
“I” wanted to speak. “I” wanted to find words to ward off the ghost. But my throat was blocked, my tongue tied. I was fully aware of the unpleasant physical sensation, but at the same time I heard a voice “thinking” within me and speaking over the centuries, producing sound waves which my physical ear received; and the words were not words of my choosing, and they said: “Once more you stand in my way, Bartlett Greene, and try to stop me reaching my goal. Desist, and leave the way free for me to join my image in the green glass!”
The red-bearded ghost – or, if you like, Bartlett Greene in person – stared me straight in the face with his milky-white wall-eye. His smile gaped like the yawn of a big cat: “Out of the green mirror, out of the black coal the face of the maiden in the waning moon looks down on you
– you know, brother Dee, the good lady who is so concerned about the spearhead.”
I stared at Greene, holding my breath in horror. A welter of thoughts, curses, regrets, incantations poured in on me from outside, but they were held back, turned aside, repulsed by one single recognition, which suddenly galvanised my benumbed consciouness out of its lethargy:
“Lipotin! – – The Princess’ spearhead! – The spear is demanded of me! –”
With that it was all over. But I fell into a dreamlike musing in which my half-awake senses seemed to experience the conjuration of the succubus in the moonlit garden at Mortlake. What I had read about in the notebook now took on an immediate and sharp-contoured corporeality, and what had appeared to John Dee as the hovering figure of Queen Elizabeth was for me that of Princess Shotokalungin; and the Bartlett Greene before me faded before the dream I summoned up of John Dee’s carnal delight in the demonic phantom of Queen Elizabeth. – – –
That is all that I can recall of the mysterious events of yesterday evening. The rest is all hazy with mist – a dream gone out of focus.
John Roger’s legacy has taken on a life of its own. I can no longer play the role of uninvolved translator. I am involved, somehow involved with these – these things here, these papers, books, amulets – and with this Tula-ware box. No, surely not that; the box is not part of the legacy. It came from the dead Baron – – from Lipotin! From the descendant of Mascee! From the man who comes here looking for the spearhead for Princes Shotokalungin! – – It all hangs together!! – But how? Can chains of mist, bonds of smoke waft down the centuries to bind me, to enslave me?