Daemonomania

  Peace: Perpetual Peace. The Emperor in his palace ordered torches and many-armed candelabra lit so that he could go on standing before his new portrait.

  —I am not a god, he said.

  Arcimboldo, still smiling, bowed again: as you say.

  —Nothing I have wanted for the people have I been able to create for them.

  —Your Majesty is beloved for the mercy you have shown.

  —You mean, the Emperor said, for the evil I have not done.

  Arcimboldo bowed again.

  Wrong, wrong, he had been wrong about everything. He had believed that by shutting himself within his palace to study the making of gold, by learning to hasten the birth of gold from what was not gold, he could thereby hasten also the return of the Age of Gold. What gratitude for him then! But the one thing the Age of Gold had not contained was gold. It contained peace, not justice; liberty, not might; plenty, not lucre. The golden wheat; the golden cherry, golden marrow, golden grape: not gold.

  What had that Italian said, that uncowled monk. Toil destroyed the Age of Gold, and created injustice, and want, and inequity. And only more toil could correct this.

  He must not be still, any more than the productive seasons could stand still. Not even Winter stands still, but nourishes Spring in his old cold heart. He must work, and not for himself; roll up his sleeves and humbly toil. God had not taken from him the strength of his hands by anointing his head.

  What was it he must do? The old fear threatened his heart. He could do nothing. Nothing he had ever tried to accomplish had been completed; it was a curse or a sin in him, a lack like a cast in his eye or a short leg: he said to this one Come, and he goes, and to this one Go, and he comes.

  The Italian had said he knew what must be done, and how to do it. Believing he had himself known better, the Emperor had not bothered to listen.

  Love, Memory, Mathesis. What he had said. And the greatest of these is Love.

  —Call him again, the Emperor said. Everyone started at his sudden command.

  —Call … said Strada hurrying to his side.

  —The Italian monk. You know the one, Braun or Bruin, a little bear-like fellow, oh you remember!

  —Bruno.

  —Call him again.

  Strada bowed, backing away as fast as he dared, turning at the door and calling for servants even as he left the chamber.

  —Call him again, he cried. The Italian, the little man, Brunus Nolanus Italus.

  His servants called their own servants, and sent them into the city, to Bruno’s lodgings at the Golden Turnip, to the libraries and the schools and the taverns; they sent a message to Tebo to ask John Dee what had become of the man. But no one knew.

  John Dee knew one thing for sure: if the Emperor was still demanding the Stone of him (the thing of value he had written in his note to Dee, as though shy to speak its name) it meant that the gold Kelley had learned to make—and taught his old friend to make—was barren. Dee had already guessed that it was. It would not generate a son, filius Philosophorum, the reason or Logos of matter whose juice or blood was the Elixir the Emperor sought. And everyone knew that the greater the hopes a practitioner raised in His Sacred Majesty the harder it would go with him when those hopes were dashed.

  So it was time to be gone. Yes there was a new world to cry; no he would not cry it. Let him once reach his home again and they would not see him more.

  Around Romberk’s house in Teboa the spies had increased in numbers, not only the Emperor’s but the Papal Nuncio’s as well; they could be seen from the windows of Dee’s apartments, genial loiterers with hands clasped behind them, approaching the carters and purveyors coming out of the gates to ask a friendly question. What new people are in the house? When does the Duke return? What is that smoke? One thing those spies learned was that a young countryman had lately been taken into the house, a dark strong lad with a limp. He was noted in the reports; the Nuncio’s reports went to Rome, and would still be able to be found there four hundred years later; maybe the cryptic references in them to Giovanni Dii e il su compagno, il zoppo, “the cripple,” refer to this young man, glimpsed taking the air with the old one, or pulling a cartful of children.

  By now the news had reached Prague that King Philip of Spain had failed in his attempt to conquer England. His Armada, greatest Catholic fleet to put to sea since the Battle of Lepanto, had been turned aside: by the Queen’s steadfastness (I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, she told her army at Tilbury, words generations of Englishmen would commit to memory, but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and a King of England too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm) and also by English seamanship (Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, they had all been there, Dee’s old fellows, he had made maps for them in years past and had long pleaded with the Queen to buy them ships, see now), and—at the last moment—by a wind, a marvelous wind, a wind out of nowhere, blowing from the wrong quarter, blowing nightlong: a wind that, by dawn next day, had changed everything. John Dee, hearing the news weeks later, thought of the tower room, that summer night, and of his imp; he computed the time, and laughed: laughed aloud as he had not laughed in many months.

  Then he sat down, and cleared a table in his busy study, and with good parchment and new pens wrote in his best hand a letter to his Queen.

  Most gratious Soveraine Lady, The God of heaven and earth (who hath mightilie, and evidently, given vnto your most excellent Royall Maiestie, this Triumphant Victorie, against your mortall enemies), be all waies thanked, praysed, and glorified.

  His wife Jane put her hand on his shoulder.

  —Husband, the carriage maker sent for is here below to see thee. And a harness maker is come too.

  —Yes. Soon, soon.

  Happy are they, that can perceyve, and thus obey the pleasant call of the mighty Lady, OPPORTVNITIE. And, therefore, finding our duetie concurrest with a most secret beck, of the said Gratious Princess, Lady OPPORTVNITIE, NOW to embrace, and enioye, your most excellent Royall Maiestie’s high favour, and gratious great clemencie, of calling me, Mr. Kelley, and our families hoame, into your Brytish Earthly Paradise, and Monarchie incomparable,

  He paused and dusted his nose with the plume of his pen; the letter that Sir Edward Dyer had brought him from England, hinting that the Queen might receive him kindly, was a year old at least. He spoke for Kelley here, as well as for himself: but he no longer knew Kelley.

  we will, from henceforth, endeavour our selves, faithfully, carefully, warily and diligently, to ryd and untangle our selves from hence: and so, very devowtely, and Sowndlie, at your Sacred Maiestie’s feet, to offer our selves.

  He completed it with compliments, signed it, sanded it.

  The answer would be long in coming, if answer there was. A safe-conduct out of this land, Dee hoped, and a welcome into his own. At least that much.

  To Edward Dyer, who was to carry the letter, he told more, for the Queen’s and Burleigh’s ears only: a tale about gold, and that wind that had blown away the Queen’s enemies. Of this last, he said to Dyer, speak very delicately. For everyone knew who it was that could raise destructive winds, and by whose agency they did it.

  Meanwhile there was much to pack and ready; many farewells to make, not all openly

  —I am summoned, he told Duke Romberk. I have been long abroad, and my Queen, to whom my services are owed, has called me home.

  He said it gravely, with regret, and the Duke bowed, and assured the old man of his eternal admiration; offered him every help he could give in preparing the journey. Dee asked but one thing: that it be kept, for the moment, secret. Another bow. And then the Duke, as quickly as was consistent with a solemn and regrettable parting, left for Prague and Kelley: Dee from the room over the gate (furnace gone out) watched his coach tear away, the driver wielding his whip, the postilions galloping, footmen clinging.

  Home, home, sang Jane Dee, as she gathered and put into trunks her f
ine new and plain old clothes, her cuttings taken from the Duke’s kitchen-gardens; home again home again jiggety jig. She packed the clothes her children could still wear—her children, the two youngest of them born here and speaking prager Deutsch more readily than English, poor younglings: she sat down in the midst of her packing, pressed her apron to her face and wept for the years.

  —The Emperor in Prague, the Doctor said, desires that you be returned to him.

  He had found Jan the wolf-boy in the kitchen, in his chimney corner, with his stick by him. He liked to stay here, in the warmth and the odors, with folk who spoke the tongue he had grown up speaking.

  —When the Emperor gave you into my care, Dee said to him, it was because I told him that I could cure you of your affections of mind. Your melancholia, your delusions of being a wolf. I failed. He wants you returned.

  Jan lifted his face to the old man’s as though to read in it a gloss on the words he had said.

  —I cannot cease to be what I am, he said then.

  —No more can the Emperor, said John Dee. I am leaving this country, and can no longer keep you.

  —Then, the boy said, tomorrow when you come for me I will not be here.

  John Dee answered nothing, nor did he make any sign of assent.

  —You would not lock me in, the boy said.

  —No. But think. There is nowhere you can go. Nowhere in Christendom you will not be hunted. A stranger too; everywhere you would be the first to be noticed, and pointed at. You must go far, if you go.

  —Nowhere far enough.

  Dee pondered. He held his long staff behind his back in both his hands.

  —Atlantis, he said. On the other side of the sea.

  The boy tried to see in Dee’s face if he were being mocked.

  —A wolf might do well there, Dee said. Never be caught, never be seen. They say the forests are infinite, and as full of game as a menagerie. They say there are few men there, and those men savages, who speak not nor think nor pray, and harm no one.

  Jan had been listening intently; now he laughed aloud, as though waking from a spell.

  —And how would I get my living there? he said. I am most often only this fellow you see. Lame now too. I don’t know how to be a savage. Or how to get over the sea.

  He struggled to his feet.

  —I will not go back, he said. Better to die quickly. I will not go back.

  —What am I to do with you then? Dee asked. Cut your throat? Poison you? No no.

  —Listen, the boy said, and stood to whisper urgently into the old man’s ear. Do this for me. Keep watch, and when next I am abroad and yet seem to be still in my bed asleep, here is what you must do: turn the body lying there over onto his face. That’s all.

  —And if I do?

  —If you do that, the boy said, then when the night is done and I come home again, I will not be able to return into that body on the bed.

  —The spirit’s way out is by the mouth, said John Dee. I have heard the tales.

  —And the way in again. And if day comes and I have not returned, I never can. I will remain where I have gone, to wander there till my appointed death-day comes.

  —Why then do you ask me to do this?

  —Better my spirit never return than that I be shut up in that Tower. Let the Emperor have my body. I will not be there.

  He had begun to tremble, and gripped the collar of John Dee’s robe in his hands.

  —Do this for me, he said, and wherever I am and wherever I go I will bless you for it. If I can bless.

  John Dee took the boy’s hands from his robe and helped him sit again. He wondered if what the boy had said could be true, if such fates really existed for souls, and could be chosen; he hoped not. He said in English:

  —Somewhat we will do.

  Not till Christmas did an ambiguous but perhaps not useless answer come to John Dee from his Queen. Enough to keep him from the Emperor’s prisons at any rate if he left quickly enough—and if he left behind the things the Emperor desired. One of them was the wolf-boy; the other was Edward Kelley, whom he had led, or had followed, to this shape-shifter’s city.

  Kelley was in the Imperial service now. The Emperor had required of Duke Romberk that Kelley be released to him; he had promised not to keep him, but did not intend to part with him. And was it Kelley who suggested to the Emperor that, though born in England, he was of a noble Irish family and of the gentry of that unhappy kingdom; or did he simply not object to someone else’s suggestion to this effect? Anyway from then on it was true: the Emperor granted him a patent of nobility. He was thenceforth eques auratus.

  —Gilded knight? John Dee asked him.

  —An ancient term of honor, Sir Edward said. Of old in this land a knight’s armor was gilded.

  He took wine the Doctor poured for him. On the long table in Dee’s Tebo apartments were all the treasures that John Dee had brought out to give him, to keep and use for as long as he needed: his convex glass, the small original of those great ones with which he had tried to cure the wolf; the vessels and other necessaries with which Kelley and he had first made gold in Dr. Hagecius’s house; all the powders remaining from Dee’s own recent work, all the glassware and waxes and resins and spirits.

  —All as stated, John Dee said. He held out a catalogue to Kelley, and handed him the pen. Subscribe it with your name, we will seal it, it is yours.

  Kelley stood and clasped his hands behind his back. He seemed not to have heard; he looked weighted down by the brocade gown he wore, the gold chain.

  —I too will return to England, he said. Soon. Tell Burleigh, and the Queen. I have had letters imploring me.

  He had recently sent to the Queen in London a warming pan, an ordinary copper warming pan, from which a piece had been broken, and by action of his powder turned to gold. (This pan and its golden shard would go into the royal collections and persist there for a long time; Elias Ashmole actually saw it, or knew someone who had seen it, and drew a picture of it to put in his book Theatrum chemicum Britannicum, where it still is: on page four hundred and eighty-one. The pan is lost.)

  —The Italian didapper has come here, Kelley said. The one we were shown in the glass. Who came to Mortlake house.

  —Yes. I have seen him.

  —Why have the spirits summoned him here?

  —Have they summoned him?

  Kelley stopped his pacing.

  —Ask them, he said. The know-alls from heaven, or t’other place. You may, and see if they will answer you.

  He said it tauntingly. John Dee pushed away his cup.

  —I have heard her voice, he said. Edward, she has spoken to me.

  He had not intended to reveal this; like any poor child with one thing he is forbidden to say, who is told that it must never be said, who then blurts it first thing.

  —Who has? Kelley asked.

  —Madimi, said Dee. She spoke to me, and told me of many matters.

  He could not tell if Kelley heard. There had been times before, in Poland, in England, when Kelley could not hear the plain things spoken to him by his fellow-men, as though the crowd of other beings were too thick about him for the words to reach him.

  —She said, John Dee went on, that you have gold in overplus; that you may eat it and drink it if you like; that you have not praised her for it.

  Kelley laughed, so hugely that Dee could observe a missing tooth or two. No longer a youth, and no elixir for that.

  —Old friend, Kelley said. Think you that it was they or anything they said that opened those secrets to me? Do you think so?

  John Dee laced his fingers together. He asked: If not they, who?

  —Who. Who. I told myself. Where did I learn? From myself. Who did I teach? Myself. I fetched out the secret, I took myself by the sleeve and whispered it in my own ear.

  —Jest not with me.

  —Thou’rt a wise old fool, Kelley said. And I love thee. Therefore for my love I will tell thee. I make gold from nothing, not because I have learne
d how, no not from the angels nor from the devils of Hell nor from old books of shitty rhyme. I followed no recipe. I do not know how the world works. I make gold because I am I. Because of the power that I am. It matters not how I do it; I make gold because I know I can.

  He had leaned his hand upon the table and bent into his old friends face; he pounded his breast as though in confession.

  —I can, I can, I can. And because they cannot keep me from it I can give the same to you if I choose. To the Emperor too when it suits me. Gold was never made before, but now ever after it can be, from this time to the ending of the world.

  —And when is that? said John Dee. If you know, say.

  Kelley remained still leaning forward on the table, mouth ajar and eyes wide, mouth stopped.

  —I do not know myself, John Dee said to him. But I think this. I think the ending of the world comes to every man alone, soul by soul; when it is ended for you and for me it will not be ended for all; it will not be done till the last soul says Amen.

  Kelley, burdened with his things, left the Tebo house, and John Dee rode with him as far as the high road to Prague. The wind was cold and sharp, making their horses dance and toss their heads, wanting to be home. The two men took hands, and John Dee saw that a tear coursed across Kelley’s face. From the wind, he thought.

  —I’ll await you in Bremen, Dee called over the wind’s blowing.

  —I will be there, Kelley said.

  —Then England.

  —England, Kelley said. He turned, and raised a knight’s gauntlet; set out without looking back. John Dee never saw him again.