She nodded doubtfully and left to find the kitchen. Dee went back to the front room and stood before the fire.
A moment later the door opened and he looked up, expecting Jane. Prince Laski stood there. One of the shutters flew open and banged loudly against the wall; Dee jumped at the noise and looked at the window. The forest began a mere few yards from the inn, he saw, the serrated edges of the pine trees cutting at the sky.
“The angels speak to us tonight, yes?” Laski asked in his outlandish Polish accent. Kelley's angels had promised Laski that he would become king of Poland, and the prince was eager to learn more about his fate.
Dee went to the window, staring out at the darkness of the forest. What was he looking for? The thing he feared would not show itself; he almost wished it would, wished he had something tangible to fight. “No,” he said slowly. “We must not summon the angels in such a godforsaken place as this.”
The minute the words were out of his mouth he wanted to call them back. The place was not godforsaken; surely God would not forsake any of them. One of his children cried from the next room and he excused himself and hurried toward the sound. Dreadful imaginings filled his mind, and he prayed under his breath as he went. Prayed quietly, so Laski would not hear him and guess that anything was wrong.
Nothing is wrong, he told himself fiercely. Their first attempt across the channel, when they had been driven back to
shoreâthat had been perfectly natural and not the action of some supernatural force. The shadows he sometimes saw leap upward when there was no fire to make them danceâthat was his imagination. And the children's illness ⦠He shook his head. No, they had left the thing behind. He was certain of it.
The child was Katherine, crying in her sleep. He hurried toward her and held her. Poor Katherine, he thought. The scars on her palms had not yet healed. He studied her as she fell back to sleep; she looked peaceful enough.
Jane came into the room. “The innkeeper's wife nearly ordered me out of her kitchen,” she said. “I had to beg her, to tell her our children were sick. And then she thought we carried some contagion and wanted us to leave the inn entirely.” She woke Arthur gently and lifted the broth to his mouth.
Three days later the children were recovered enough to continue on. At Hamburg, on November sixth, they parted company with Laski and his retinue; Laski needed to attend to some business. Borrowing money, probably, Dee thought. He had learned on the journey that the prince was nearly penniless; it was no wonder he wanted the kingship so badly. They hired wagons and drivers and transferred their household goods, and pushed on by coach to Lübeck.
There were hills now, and villages nestling among them, nearly hidden by the trees. Churches thrust up steeples sharp as daggers. The roads grew more crowded. They passed soldiers, pilgrims, wandering scholars, merchants with packtrains. Peasants dragged their two-wheeled carts to market. Twice they shared the road with a group of monks, and Dee looked at them in wonder; there had been no monks in England since bloody Queen Mary's time.
In the outskirts of Lübeck they passed an orchard, its few leaves flaring gold in the setting sun. “Oh, please, stop the coach!” Jane called out suddenly.
The driver stopped. “What is it?” Dee asked.
“There's an inn behind those trees,” she said. “Let's stay there tonight.”
Now he could see a spacious whitewashed building sprouting all manner of turrets and chimneys and gables. Roses climbed trellises halfway up the walls. It was the kind of inn, he knew, that would strain his meager budget. But it would be good for the family to stay somewhere pleasant for a change; they all looked pinched, anxious, even the children. He nodded and they stepped down from the coach, then began the laborious task of carrying the trunks and bundles inside.
The innkeeper, a widow, led them upstairs to a group of clean, freshly-aired rooms. Jane unpacked a bit and sat down, looking with satisfaction at the plump featherbeds. But Dee's fears had not left him, not even here. They should be moving, he thought, hurrying without ceasing until they reached their destination.
They went downstairs to a supper of very good fish pie cooked with ginger, pepper, and cinnamon. “May I speak with you?” Kelley whispered to him.
“Certainly,” Dee said.
“I'm sorry I was so angry earlier,” he said. He was always penitent after an argument; it was as if two angels struggled for his soul, one good and one evil. “I will look in the glass again for you. Tonight might be an auspicious time.”
They might be able to risk it, Dee thought. He could not imagine a demon haunting them here, in this place that seemed so ordinary, so good. Perhaps if Kelley was truly repentant the good angels would return. And Laski would expect them to resume the experiments sometime; if they started tonight, with Laski gone, at least the prince would not be there if they failed.
They went up to their rooms after supper, and he saw Jane and the children to bed. Then he took out the red silk cloth embroidered with powerful signsâthe Seal of Solomon, the
names of angels, some of the hidden names of Godâand spread it on the table. On top of that he set the wax tablet, inscribed with stars and pentagrams and the symbols of the planets, and the stand for the showstone. He moved carefully, aware that one misstep might bring disaster on them all.
Finally he reached into the gray velvet bag for the showstone, a perfect sphere of transparent crystal about the size of a baby's head. He peered into the glass, still hoping after all this time to see something. There was only his reflection, upside-down, as though he had drowned. He looked older than he remembered, older than he felt. Others had found wisdom in his long face, his piercing eyes, and Jane, he knew, thought him handsome. But he saw only the harsh lines scouring his cheeks and forehead, saw that his beard and his neat cap of hair had become almost completely white. He set the ball carefully on its stand.
The two men prayed, and then Kelley bent over the glass. “I seeâit is Madimi who comes to me,” he said. The child-angel Madimi was one of their most frequent visitors. “She saysâshe is dancing now, she is very pleased with something.”
Kelley raised his head. “Look,” he said, pointing to one of the chairs. Dee looked, though he knew he would see nothing. “There she is, dancing on the back of the chair. She is wearing a gown of changeable silk, red and green.”
Dee wondered for perhaps the hundredth time what it would be like to see angels everywhere. If it was true that everything in the world had its own angelâevery person and clock and book and stoneâthen whatever you looked at would be incredibly alive, a constant shift and play of colors and motion. And he wondered again why this sight had been given to Kelley and not to him.
Kelley stopped. The silence in the room grew. Something moved in a dark corner. It is the fire, Dee thought. The fire is making the shadows dance.
There is no fire.
His heart kicked at his ribs. He looked quickly at Kelley. Kelley was bent over the crystal once more; he had noticed nothing. Because there is nothing to notice, Dee thought. It is your imagination, it is nothing ⦠.
Suddenly he realized how cold he was, how the cold permeated every part of him. A powerful shiver shook him like a seizure. “Whatâwhat do you see for me?” he asked, breaking the silence.
“I see eleven noblemen in rich sable,” Kelley said. “One man wears a sable cap and sits on a chair inlaid with precious stones. âPluck up your heart,' he says to you. âYou will become rich, and you will be able to enrich kings and help those who are needy. Were you not born to use the commodities of this world? Were not all things made for man's use?'”
Dee forced himself to relax. Most of the angels Kelley summoned spoke in convoluted metaphors and parables; this one was far more forthcoming. And he would not mind being wealthy, not for Kelley's reasons but because, with enough money, he would finally be free to pursue his studies without worry.
“What about Laski?” Dee asked. “What do you see for him?”
“He will become king. He will triumph over the Turks. His name will be spoken in every capital in Europe.”
Suddenly one of the shadows seemed to detach itself from the rest. A change came over Kelley. He laughed harshly. “All gone,” he said. “All gone. No hope.”
Dee clutched one hand tightly with the other, only dimly aware that he was hurting himself. “What is gone?”
“Castles, swords, kingdoms, crowns,” Kelley said. “His name will be spoken in every capital in Europe.”
“IâI don't understand.”
“All gone. Your books. Your library. What you value most in this world.”
“What happened to my books?”
Kelley laughed gleefully. “Fire, flood, destruction,” he said. “Your library is gone.”
“Master Kelley!” Dee said desperately. “Master Kelley, stop! Look at me.”
“The queen is your enemy,” Kelley said. “In England they condemn your doings and say you are a renegade because you left without the queen's permission. They say you despise your prince.”
“Edward Kelley!”
Kelley looked up from the glass, his face showing confusion. “All gone,” he said softly.
Dee felt hopeless, defeated even before he began. Dread weakened him like an illness. Something was about to go terribly wrong, some force was building that would destroy him and his family as easily as he crushed an insect, and he was powerless to stop it. Worseâit had already happened, had already been set in motion, like a wave building out in the sea. He would find out what it was only when it came to shore, and by then it would be too late. By then his ill fortune would have overtaken him.
He roused himself to glance at Kelley. The other man's face looked normal enough, and his voice had not changed; he had not been taken over by the demon this time. Perhaps it was not here. Perhaps they had outrun it. But what if they hadn't?
“Master Kelley,” he said. “What did you mean? Do you remember what you said?”
The confusion cleared slowly from Kelley's face. “Yes,” he said. He shook himself, like a dog coming out of the water. “It wasâit was a small foolish devil, nothing more.”
Dee spent the night in the bedroom, praying and pacing,
sometimes both at once. Jane slept, her face clear and untroubled. Once in a while he stopped to look at her, as if to remind himself that innocence still existed in the world.
His conflicting thoughts whirled like a maelstrom. If Kelley had called up the demon then they should flee now, hurry on and hope it would not follow. But this spirit had harmed no one; it was probably not the demon. But it had taunted him maliciously. Would an angel do that? But what if they were not taunts? What if the angel was telling the truth? But if it was telling the truth that meant that his library had been destroyed.
In the end it was the fact that Kelley's voice had not changed that decided him. Kelley had not been able to summon the good angels, he thought, but this one had not been the demon he feared. “A very foolish devil,” Dee wrote with relief in his book. Still, he began to record the angels' speech in Greek to hide their conversations from the malign spirit, though he knew it for a vain hope even as he did it. Angels spoke all the tongues of the world.
They pushed on, slowed by snow and ice. On Christmas morning they came to Stettin. Dee was never more desirous of going to church, but he saw only a Catholic cathedral, its stained-glass windows lit like a vision from another world.
He thought long and hard about worshiping there: in England he would be arrested as a heretic if he were found at a Catholic service. But it hadn't been so long ago that Queen Mary had enforced the Catholic religion, and then everyone had gone to a cathedral like this one. All worship was the same thing, really, he thought suddenly, and then understood to his surprise that he had always thought so, and that it was only away from England that such a foreign idea could become clear.
He led his family into the cathedral. The old sonorous
Latin phrases sounded like a secret language from his childhood, familiar and mysterious at the same time.
Laski and his retinue rejoined them at the beginning of January. Heavy snowfall turned the road as white as unmarked paper, and the trees to either side were sere and bare; their branches knocked boldly against the coach like spirits seeking entrance.
On February third Laski, who was riding on horseback next to Dee's coach, suddenly called out. “There it is,” he said. “That is my tower, over there. My tower, from my castle.”
Dee looked out the window, hardly daring to believe it. They had reached their goal, the prince's estate at Lask.
He had hoped that Laski would give them rooms on the estate, but instead the prince directed them to lodgings in town. His first sight of the estate was a confusion of outbuildings and people and a great castle on a hill, all of it covered in a fresh dusting of snow.
A soft dusk had fallen by the time they got to their inn, but enough light remained for Dee to see that it stood near a church. He took that as a good omen. He gave orders for the baggage, helped Jane prepare the children for sleep, and then collapsed on one of the beds with weariness. Safe, he thought as his dreams began to gather around him. We'll be safe here.