Or they really did put him by, like the cordial a housewife puts by, a whole summer’s fruits distilled and bottled with a cork, to sit on a shelf dusty and neglected, but still potent within. On that very night, or possibly another, John Dee awoke alone in his bed in the midnight, and sought a light, and his paper and his pen.
Dream of EK dead. Methought I saw in chrystallo that he was dead, and in a great black Coffin seeled and carried by many into a caverne in a Mountayne, there a Stone being rowled across the entrance to close it. Whereupon I saw no more.
John Dee had written that the one who achieves knowledge of the Monas is rarely seen after by mortal eyes; and he was not much seen in his last years. After Jane’s death he gave up his duties in Manchester to curates, and came back to Mortlake, cared for by his daughter Katherine; there he lived almost forgotten. John Aubrey, collecting stories of the old wizard late in the century, has mostly the tales of old Goody Faldo, whose mother tended him in his last illness; she told Aubrey how by skrying the Doctor once recovered a basket of clothes that she and Dee’s daughter Madimia lost when they were children together, and the evening when he laid a storm, or raised one.
Long before the old Queen died she had ceased to remember him, and the new Scottish King feared witches above all things. John Dee had no means of making a living except to sell his books. By two and three he let them go for a few copper coins, or sometimes for much more to those who thought them to be worth more, whose eyes lit at a title or an incipit in the way that Doctor Dee’s had too, once, in his youth. Trithemius his Steganographia. Agrippa his twelve books of magic. They were to John Dee so much lumber; he would never open them again.
He sold Marsilius, Libri de vita, and his Theologia platonica, and the books of Mercurius Trismegistus put into Latin by him.
He sold the Hierogliphica of Valerianus, and other works of Ægypt, Iamblichus and Porphyry.
He sold his Black Books too, his Picatrix and his Clavis salmonis and the others, and his alchemies. The actors came and bought his Holinshed and his Cooper and his Stowe and the other histories and travels. He sold his Copernici revolutiones, Nuremberg 1543; let the true go with the false, it was not of his charge.
When his best books were gone he sold his pewter, and when his daughter wept, he said it mattered not much, they could eat on tin as well. Tin tastes, she said. Wood then, he said, and be glad we have victuals to put on them.
He said it was no matter, that none of it mattered, but he couldn’t bear the great house’s emptiness, and left it to his daughters; he lived with a few books and tools in a cottage he had bought years before with a plan to add it to the house. He had practically stopped eating, as an old cat or dog does, seeming to live by consuming the last of his life itself, day by day, till it was all gone.
Still, now and then, a dealer in old things came calling. His name was John Clerkson, and more than twenty years before he had brought Edward Kelley to Mortlake, thinking an advantage might come to him from making the introduction, and it had; from certain books given to him for that service then, he had learned a profitable line in spell-lifting and the finding of lost or stolen goods, and had even kept a tame demon for a while.
—Those were good days, Doctor.
—They are gone now.
—They are. It’s a new world, and not a better one.
He fingered the things John Dee had brought out for him, a bound Bible, some glassware he had cast himself long ago, a vial of Mercurius solis. Caught between his need to have them cheap and the claim that the past and the great Doctor had on him.
—Here is a fine thing, he said.
He took out from the old leather trunk a little globe of brown glass and lifted it so that the light pierced it. Not perfect: it had a ray of bubbles that rose from a star or tear of lighter stone, not quite at its heart.
—Pretty, said John Dee.
Clerkson turned it in his fingers, which protruded from a worn glove’s. He did not recognize it as the same one before which John Dee had seated young Edward Kelley on that March night in 1582, the night Clerkson had brought him hither.
—You may have it, said Dee; it is no good to me. It is crystal, though not of the best.
Clerkson named a figure larger than he had intended to name. John Dee nodded, nearly imperceptibly, and drew his old robe more tightly around him. After he had watched Clerkson count out the small coins, and had put them away, he said he had no drink to offer his guest. Clerkson said it was no matter. He talked a while with the old man, reluctant to leave him. He thought that he would most likely not sell the stone he had just paid for; not with the new Act against Witchcraft. This season the King’s Men played a Scottish play full of witches, to please the King. The great fear raged on unabated. No one but those who had used those Arts great and small for many decades knew that all the true sorcerers, both the wicked and the wise, were dead, and what they had once done could be done no more.
No one knows on what day he died, though it was near the winter solstice. He was buried in the chancel of Mortlake church, and must have had a stone above his head, for Goody Faldo remembered how the children used to use it for a marker in their games, and dare one another to run to the wizard’s grave. But in Cromwell’s time the chancel steps were levelled, and children stopped playing in churches, and the stone was removed, for no reason that’s known.
Anyway he had long since set out. Happy is he that hath his skirts tied up, and is prepared for a journey: so the angels had told them, himself and Kelley, speaking to them out of the glass in Cracow, the many, the sweet, smiling, unforgiving faces. For the way shall be open unto him, and in his joynts shall there dwell no wearinesse. His meat shall be as the tender dew, as the sweetness of the bullock’s cud. For unto them that have shall be given, and from them that have not shall be taken away; the burr cleaveth to the willow stem, but on the sands it is tossed as a feather without dwelling.
But who said those things? Who spoke?
6
On a winter day in 1953, the librarian of the Kentucky State Library in Lexington packed up and sent a buckrambound folio, among other books new and old, to the tiny town of Bondieu, in response to a request, or maybe in advance of one, from a family there. And a boy living in that house, displaced from his home in the far North, read it and reread it; and he found in it a name for the society he himself belonged to, which he had thereupon invented, and into which he initiated all his cousins so that he would not be alone there in those mountains: the Invisible College. There was its picture, the winged wagon moving by itself, the mystic riders aboard it.
Now in December twenty-six years later, Pierce Moffett stood in the Religion section of the little Carnegie library in Blackbury Jambs in the Faraway Hills and looked down at the same picture in the same book, Deities, Devils and Dæmons of Mankind. He hadn’t known the book was here in this library, a copy not bound in maroon buckram like the one he had known but in its original leather or leatherette, worn and decaying somewhat repulsively around the folds and corners, on its spine blind-stamped the Monas, the little horned one, geometrical infant Pan or Omniform or Pantomorph, son and father of all things.
That was what had drawn him to the book, that sign. He had taken it out from its place in Oversize Books and lifted it into the lamplight, knowing even as he opened it that it would ask something of him or offer him something. He could almost hear the whir of gears, the clickinginto-place of works long stopped, like the man in a dozen movies (Lou Costello one of them certainly) trapped or locked up in the great library, fingering helplessly the spines of old books until by chance the right one is pulled out, and the shelves swing open smoothly; behind them a stone passage and a stair, down which he must go.
He checked out the book, handing it to the librarian, who was now familiar enough with him to pay him a small smile. She withdrew a card yellow with age from a pocket on the book’s back cover, gave it to him to sign, and stamped it with the date, the date on which he was required to retu
rn it, or pay a fine.
“Thanks,” he said, and she nodded, having done what she stood there to do.
A few yards down River Street from the library is that small nineteenth-century office block called the Ball Building. Inside, the halls are wide and the ceilings are high, with ceilings of stamped tin; there is an elevator with a rackety gate and a beautiful brass handle to make it go, and the janitor will sometimes be available to run it. Most people just take the stairs, as Rosie Rasmussen was doing; she went two at a time, holding on to the banister and making a soft moaning sound of anguish under her breath, a sound she had not ever heard herself make before. Some of the varnished doors of the offices—architects, dentists, a surveyor—still have frosted glass in them lettered in gold, and transoms above them that open and shut; some have been changed for modern steel-clads, like Allan Butterman’s. Rosie tore it open.
“Is he here?” she cried to the secretary at her desk.
The secretary, maybe not unused to seeing people who looked as Rosie did, leapt up, pulling her headphones from her head, and without a word but holding her index finger up, wait a sec, opened the door to Allan’s office. He was out before Rosie could reach his door.
“Allan they took her away.”
“Rosie. What.”
“They took her away. I lost custody.”
“No you didn’t. No.”
“I did.”
“No no. Rosie come inside. Come in and sit.”
She came in, but couldn’t sit. She had taken a wound, one of those wounds whose first symptom is certainty that what has happened can’t really have happened, that the world and time have made a mistake, a dreadful mistake that has to be made right but can’t be: those wounds can take a long time to heal.
“Tell me.”
“I missed it.”
“You didn’t go? You forgot?” He was unable, even he, not to express astonished horror. Rosie’s hands went to her face.
“I didn’t forget. I was there. But I missed it. Oh Allan.”
She had gone that morning, wearing the same sober suit and heels she had worn for Boney’s funeral and carrying her papers and her beating heart; it was clear to her by then that she had pulled a Rosie and leapt in where fools fear to tread or whatever the saying is, that taking this on and throwing Allan aside was one of those big sudden gestures she had now and then made in her life, those ones that sometimes took years to make up for. She no more wanted to face a judge and lawyers than. And the closer the hour and the place came, the clearer and deeper these convictions grew.
But she was there, not only on time but early, walking into the old Cascadia courthouse with its familiar smell of floor polish and contention, and asked the aged uniformed man at his little desk where Room Two was, where she had been directed to appear; he pointed a thumb down the hall, and almost immediately she had come upon a door marked with that number, and gone in.
“Oh no,” Allan said. “Rosie.”
The hearing before hers seemed to be running late. The big room looked like the room she had been in before with Mike; she supposed they all looked about like this, these rooms, nationwide. She sneaked into a seat in the back, looking around for Mike but not seeing him or the crowd of suited lawyers she expected him to have with him. Maybe they knew what she didn’t, that there was no reason to show up on time. She rehearsed, again, the talk she would have with Sam, if arrangements got changed, or even if. If. Sam, sometimes when mommies and daddies don’t live together. She listened to the proceedings, though she couldn’t follow them; she wondered how people could bear to live their lives, as Allan did, as Mike seemed not afraid to do, in the struggle to get from others and not to give. No she must not think that way; she had to fight, she had to. And she had to pee. What was the delay, anyway?
“This is my fault,’” Allan said. “This is entirely my fault.”
“No, Allan, no.”
The hearing stopped at last, nothing apparently resolved, and people began to leave, noting incuriously or with interest Rosie sitting there with her legs crossed; the judge or magistrate too, before he slipped offstage like an actor, through a back door. And the place was empty. Rosie sat in the silence for a moment before she opened her papers once more to look, to be absolutely sure. And the old man in uniform who had directed her here came in the door and looked at her in mute puzzlement.
“Part Two was where you were supposed to go,” Allan said. “Part Two of Family Court. Upstairs. Not Room Two, whatever that is.”
When she did reach Part Two of Family Court she already knew that something irremediable had happened. And she found the room empty. Everything over and decided, all in a minute, by default, in her absence, because of her absence.
Gone.
“They were there, you weren’t,” Allan said. “First requirement in making your case. Show up.”
That, in other terms, was what the judge told her when Rosie found her, just leaving for lunch: a stern lean rouged old woman, rings on nearly every finger and a white silk blouse whose costly beauty Rosie registered even as the woman told her that her ex-husband now had custody of their child.
“You told her, didn’t you?” Allan asked. Rosie sat now and Allan shut the door to the outer office and the secretary. “You told her it was a mistake, that you, that …”
“Of course I did. Of course.”
But she hadn’t. The woman had regarded Rosie with the remote pity or censure of a being of some different moral order from her, and in her few words passed a judgment on Rosie that Rosie seemed to have been expecting to hear for a very long time, all her life, and to which she could not respond. She heard laughter far down the hall, people departing that way, triumphant; and a voice—her own, actually, though she heard it as someone else’s, the voice of someone who wasn’t going to surrender—said maybe they’re not gone yet. And Rosie broke her gaze from the judge’s face and began to run.
To the parking lot, first, where Mike wasn’t, nor the van from The Woods he had been using. The halls again, empty, all the doors shut, lunchtime. Then to her own car, and back to the Jambs at a speed the old station wagon hadn’t ever hit on this stretch of road before, to Beau’s house on Maple Street. Beau still wasn’t there. Neither was Sam. It’s okay, the woman in the kitchen said, her dad just came and picked her up.
Then here.
“This won’t stand up,” Allan said. “Obviously justice was not served here. I mean that’s the point. Even that woman must see that.”
Rosie leapt to her feet at a sudden understanding. “Mike,” she said. “He must have known.” She had been returned in spirit for an awful moment to the courthouse and its halls and people (the judge, the guard, the people in the hearing room), as she would be returned over and over in the next months, awake and asleep; and there she perceived for the first time that Mike must have known. “He must have known I wouldn’t just not show up. That something had happened.”
Allan looked at her, those deep dark sympathetic eyes, and he nodded. “Sure. He must have known. And he didn’t say anything. Not a word.”
While she had sat like a dope in that other room, the wrong room, where other people’s lives were changed, Mike had stood before that judge and said not a word, hadn’t asked for time, hadn’t asked for. For mercy.
“We can get this reopened,” Allan said. “This is a travesty.” She could see him choosing the moral ground he would fight on, his head lowered and the corners of his mouth down-drawn. “A travesty.” His eyes focussed elsewhere, thinking; he patted his inner coat pockets for his glasses or his pen or something, and checked his tie knot. As though arming. A painful gratitude swept Rosie.
“Allan,” she said. “I was really stupid.”
“It doesn’t matter, Rosie. What matters is what we do now.”
“It matters. I was really stupid and I can’t be anymore.” She met his look. “Listen, I want to say. I’m going to take the job. The directorship. I’ve changed my mind.”
“Yo
u don’t have to say that, Rosie.”
“Don’t you think,” Rosie said, “it might help? A real job? Wouldn’t it look good? Not to mention that what the Foundation does is important to them. Isn’t it? Isn’t that true?”
“Well they did have some funding at one time. Who knows now. But those aren’t good reasons for committing to the position. I was wrong to suggest anything like that.”
“Those aren’t the reasons.” She rose and smoothed her skirt, her gabardine business suit. “Really they aren’t.”
“No?”
“No,” she said. “Actually no. I think I’d be good at it. I ought to do it. I want to.” She felt enter her, last thing she would have expected, a steely resolve; it was the unfairness, the stupid cruelty, that did it, for she knew now she couldn’t plead or beg or even make deals with that, that mercilessness; everything in her had wanted to, and would have too if she had come into the room with Mike and he had shown any kindness, any love, but that was impossible now, and she wouldn’t weep, she wouldn’t weep again till this was over.
She didn’t, either, not for the remainder of the morning as she and Allan planned and Allan made calls, and not for the days that followed; only when she left Allan’s office that day and went down to her car again, and on the floor of the front seat was a shoe of Sam’s and an apple half turned brown and odorous, she did. If because of what she had done or failed to do she lost Sam to them and they took her away with them, then her heart, which had just begun to awaken and grow again, would die forever within her and never be able to be resuscitated, she would carry it from then on, a cold cinder in her breast.
And that wasn’t even the worst part. Just don’t let them hurt her she begged someone, not Mike, not anyone; just please don’t let them hurt her. She wept and wept, and the gods drank up her tears, as they have always drunk up our tears, yours and mine and everyone’s, and by their sweetness were sustained for another day.