Peter Ackroyd - The house of Doctor Dee

'You have schemed farther than ever I thought, Doctor Dee. Why did you not tell me of these matters before?'

'I would have mentioned them then, if you could have understood me.' He was about to say more, and I brushed his words aside. 'But it is not enough to scheme and plan. It is for us to act upon such knowledge as we now possess. It was prettily devised of Aesop that the fly sat upon the axle-tree of the chariot wheel and said, what a dust do I raise. We must not be like the fly. We must turn the wheel with our own strength.'

'I do not see your meaning.'

'We must raise up our spirits in the stone, as we have done, but now we must question them clearly about these matters. We must ask them to guide our steps to the very treasures of the ancient city. We must approach them with prayer and trembling, so that one day they may lead us under the ground to find our forefathers. If they are our navigators, then we will need no other compass.' He seemed to recoil at my words, and began pacing up and down the study before breaking into a great storm of doubting and misliking of the spirits.

'They can be our instructors,' I replied.

'I do not trust them.'

'But you cannot condemn them out of hand, without having heard what they may say.'

'I have heard them already, have I not? Who knows if they will lead us to some place of night and terror?'

'Be more cheerful, Edward. They are our arrows. Do you consider we should not try to hit the mark with their aid?' I paused for a moment. 'It will make you rich.'

'I do not care for gold, sir, if it comes from devils.'

'Very well. I will make you rich. Depend upon me, and not upon these spiritual creatures.'

'Truly?'

'Truly. I will preserve you from their words and actions if you so desire it. Only do as you have done and act for me as their translator. I will expect no more. I will not set your house on fire to roast my own eggs.' This soothed him a little and, after more debate, he promised to question them at the time of our next action.

So it was with a trembling spirit that I approached the table of practice on that day. 'The noise is marvellous great coming through the stone,' he said, 'as if a thousand water-mills were going together.'

'Do you see anything?'

'I see two things, or spirits, I do not know what to call them now. There is a tall fellow on a horse; he has a cut beard and wears a sky-coloured cloak. I cannot see what road he follows, yet it is familiar: yes, he rides down Charing Cross. There is another man on horseback, a lean-visaged man with a short cloak and a gilt rapier.'

'Ask them where they are going. Perhaps they have the news that we seek.'

He repeated my question, and then listened intently with his ear close to the stone. 'They are going in no certain direction,' he replied. 'But now they are coming closer to me. The tall man holds a little stick with his fingers crooked and on his left hand he has the scar of a cut. The lean-visaged man has on a pair of boots, which come straight on his legs and very close. He lifts his stick and points to you from the stone.'

At this I was very much afraid, and felt myself turn pale as a cloth. 'Are they willing to do my bidding?'

'I believe so.'

'Then tell them to ride to the ancient city. Tell them to guide us to all that buried glory.'

'They hear you, and they begin to laugh. Now a young woman comes forward, covered all with a white robe; she takes the horses and leads them away from Charing Cross towards the city.'

'Perhaps she has heard my plea, and directs us the proper way.' I was eagerly on the chase now. 'What more do you see?'

'They are riding furiously, while the young woman still goes on ahead with her arms spread abroad and her feet not touching the ground by a yard in height. They seem to be passing through those fields behind St Botolph and just beyond Aldgate.'

'They are making their way to the site of the old city.'

'They come to a halt beside the drained land —'

'We have stood there ourselves many times.'

'Now they point to the foundation of an old building, as it were of a church or temple.'

'Has it something to do with the stone which we found lying there?'

He took no notice of me, but continued staring in crystallo. 'But now all is changed. All is bright. They are in the middle of a city, where the houses are of stone and very stately.'

'Is it possible? Is it the ancient city itself, as if seen in a vision?'

'It is not like the sight vouchsafed to me in Glastonbury, but I will ask them.' Then he listened again at the stone. 'Its name they will not tell me, or do not know.'

'What else do they say?'

'The lean-visaged man approaches and calls for you.'

'Tell him I am here to do whatever he commands.'

'He hears you and says thus. Dee, John Dee, I am here to instruct and inform you according to the doctrines delivered, which are contained in thirteen dwellings or callings. There are four natural keys to open five gates of the city (for one gate is never to be opened), and by their means will the secret of this place be righteously and wisely granted to you.' These were dark words, and I could not as yet puzzle out their meaning. Mr Kelley was gazing eagerly into the stone, and now continued. 'He approaches a broad open part of the city, like our Smith Field. There is a great stone in the middle of it, of about eighty inches square in mortal reckoning, and there is a fire in that stone. Now he takes out a casket, opens it, and there is within a waxen image of a pale colour like candle wax. Now his companion with the cut beard holds something like a glass vessel over the image, yet I still can see that it is marvellously scratched. Or perhaps it has been very rudely made with dents and knobs in the legs of it. I cannot tell. Now they pour blood out of a basin upon the fire, which springs ever higher in the middle of the stone, and now they cast the waxen image upon it where it seems to grow.'

I knew well enough the story here, since the spirits were acting in dumb show the very birth of the homunculus. 'What more now?' I asked him eagerly.

'Now all that spectacle is vanished away.' Kelley rubbed his eyes, before bending once more over the stone. 'The two spirits are looking out over the drained land where lately we walked. Both are sighing, and one points with his stick to the ground. Oh God, now he grows big and swells up within the stone. Now I see only his mouth, which gapes at me. Oh Jesus, protect me from this sight!'

At that he fell back from the table of practice, and had tremorem cordis for a while. But I was very glad and well pleased — not only to have had intercourse with the spirits through which they obeyed my commands, but also to have been strengthened and confirmed in my siting of the city. 'Make an end for today,' I told him. 'Give over. We have seen enough, and now we must make ourselves ready for tomorrow's action.'

'Tomorrow? Why change the order of our proceedings now?'

'We must warm our hands, Mr Kelley, while the fire is still high.'

'I had thought to rest myself, sir, for these things are terrible to behold. Yet now, so soon again…'

'We cannot rest now. We must march on.'

Soon after that he left me, pleading once more the great fatigue of the scrying, and I walked into my study for the better contemplation of all that had occurred. I will confess here that my mind was still troubled, so I took down and opened Of Wicked Spirits by the learned Abbot Fludd, in which he counselled against the calling-up of any apparitions whatsoever they might be. I did not follow him in this, however. If these spirits have knowledge greater than our own and if, as the commentators agree, all knowledge is virtue — why, then, where is the fault in acquiring virtue? The breath of the lion engenders the dove as well as the serpent, but for fear of serpents, are we to have no doves? I was meditating upon this when I heard my wife's foot upon my study stairs, and I counterfeited the reading of my book as she entered.