The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  Angels, linked in sequence like the weave of a garment, hand to hand, mouth to ear, eye to eye to eye, ascending and descending forever on the world’s business with a sort of taffeta rustle that can be heard, if you stand silent enough, in the most silent places of the earth, or in the depths of a coiled shell.

  They are there; they are there, and if God were to withdraw them the universe would not only come to a halt and die, it would very probably disappear altogether with a single indrawn breath.

  They were there, Doctor Dee knew it, and they could be seen, those who were momentarily resting from their labors; they could be waited on, like great lords at court, in the corridors and anterooms of Being; as they passed their attention could be caught, they could be spoken to. Doctor Dee was sure that it was so; and yet not once, in any of the many glasses, mirrors, showstones, and jewels that he owned and stared into, had he ever glimpsed one of the angels he knew must be answerable to them. Sometimes, leaning close and standing stock still, he had thought he heard, far off and unintelligible to him, the chitter of their voices, as it might be mice, and laughter infinitely small. But he had never seen one.

  There was little else in spiritual practice that he had not done, or could not do if he chose.

  In the Elemental realm he knew medicine, of course, and arithmetic, not only Geometry but Perspective and Music and Megethologia and Stratarithmetria as well. He was a handler of mirrors, a worker in light, master of Catoptrics and several arts of shadow, reversal, inversion, and projection. He knew the Steganographia of Abbot Trithemius (in his youth he had copied out by hand a huge manuscript of it) and could do all that art of codes, ciphers, curtailed writing, casting messages afar at will, and so on—insofar as it operated here below; the old abbot also knew how to summon angels to a glass, and wrote their language, or so he said, but his prescriptions hadn’t aided Doctor Dee to reach them. He could astonish—he had astonished—his neighbors, and his fellow students, and his Queen, with what he could do, from making an eagle for Jove to fly in a play at Oxford to curing a wound by treating the weapon that caused it; he had astonished himself, for that matter, as once when, in stirring a jar of mutable airs, he had let loose a crowd of tiny elementals, which pursued him then like angry hornets, till with them shrieking at his heels and head he had leapt into the Thames to escape.

  In the Celestial world he was more learned still. He had made armillary spheres with Mercator, he had letters from Tycho Brahe praising his Propœdeumata aphoristica, wherein he had calculated that twenty-five thousand possible conjunctions influenced the life of man—a daunting figure, and Doctor Dee would end by refusing to cast nativities at all. He could not, however, refuse to cast the Queen’s: it was he who had chosen by his arts the very day for Elizabeth’s coronation, which had poured down rain (he hadn’t foreseen that) but which no one could say was not a fortunate day. He had cast the nativity of the King of Spain too (Saturn lying cold and heavy on his liver and lights, he would be great but never happy), and the King of Spain had given him in return a mirror of black obsidian brought a thousand miles from Mexico, behind whose dazzling doubling surface John Dee was certain angels would be forced to pause: but he could get no spiritual creature in it, though he uncovered it and looked in it now and then for years.

  He was a tall, long-boned, long-faced man with wide, always-surprised eyes made wider by the round spectacles that he had ground himself; his pointed beard would go white as milk before he was sixty. He was passionate, forgetful, restless, and good; certain of his own pious purposes; certain that the vast knowledge—vaster than the knowledge contained in all the folios and manuscripts of his library, the largest in England—the vast knowledge contained in God’s holy angels as in vessels could be obtained by man: that it could be drunk: and that if it were, then neither the man who drank it nor the world would be the same thereafter.

  And so he practiced his arts, and he schooled a generation of Englishmen (Philip Sidney learned mathematics at Dr. Dee’s house in Mortlake, Hawkins and Frobisher came to look at his maps); he went back and forth to court, and when on the Continent he kept his eyes and ears open, and wrote to Walsingham of what he saw; he made his mirrors and his elixirs, and raised his children, and dug in his vegetable garden. And pressed, always, in his mind and in his study, against that barrier beyond which the angels conversed among themselves.

  One means by which he thought he might get through was to go by way of the doors open in the souls of others.

  He came to be able, after long study, to discern those doors, though he could not have set down in any clear way what signs he went by. A kind of cast in an inward eye. An impression Doctor Dee would receive that someone he came across—a child he was tutoring, a young curate come to borrow books—was standing slightly elsewhere from where he appeared to be standing, or in a faint breeze that no one else felt. Through no virtue or choice of his own, it seemed, only by a sort of accident of birth (though Doctor Dee doubted it was an accident at all), a man possessed a door, like a strawberry mark; or was possessed by one, as by a falling sickness. With great circumspection (for however well he himself knew the difference between his enterprise and vile conjuring, it was a distinction that not everyone could—or would—make), Doctor Dee sought out the strange ones, and sounded them, and sat them before his stones and mirrors to see what they could see.

  They knew, in London, that anxious company of nativity-casters, philtre-makers, smokesellers and University roarers, that Doctor Dee in Mortlake would repay well an introduction to such a one, if he really was such a one, which Doctor Dee would know in a moment: whoever could be cozened by that company, Doctor Dee could not be. And yet he well knew—it troubled him—that it was not only the pious, not only the honest, through whom a way could come to be pierced. Nor that, just because a man might try to cheat him with false skrying, the same man could do no true skrying as well.

  Like his Queen—who didn’t always like to be reminded of it, except by her wise wizard, who had traced her line and his own all the way back to Arthur—John Dee was a Welshman; like his Queen he knew well that burden of feeling the Welsh call hiraeth, something neither hope nor regret, neither revelation nor memory, but a compound of all of these, a yearning that could fill the heart as with warm rain. He was fifty-six years old that night in March when a certain young man from the Welsh marches was brought to his house in Mortlake. The wizard had waited by then ten years for him, though it wasn’t anyone quite like him that he had expected: nor did the doctor know that in the weeks and months, the years to come, he would be bound (bound by the blessed Archangels themselves) more intimately and singularly to his skryer than even to the wife he cherished.

  * * *

  He had, in the first place, no name, this young man; or he had more than one, which seemed to him like the same thing. The name he had grown up with was a fiction, the result of his being raised the ward of a man whose bastard he may or may not have been, and having no other origins that he knew of. He had discarded that name, and the name he used now was merely that and not his own at all: Talbot, a hero’s name, though not chosen for that reason, chosen nearly at random from a church monument because he needed a new one. It was as Mr. Talbot that he was known to Clerkson and Charles Sled and those men in London whom he lived among and sat in taverns with, Edward Talbot of no particular place, living with one or another friend until a quarrel or a new friend of better hope appeared; it was as Edward Talbot that Clerkson introduced him to Doctor Dee.

  He had no ears, either: what he had were two scarred, docked humps at his ear holes, and he wore always a close-fitting black cap to cover them, which gave him a scholarly look, or anyway an antique look, like a doctor of Queen Mary’s days. The loss of his ears had happened in a town whose name he wouldn’t remember, for a crime (it was coining, or something worse, or quite different) that he had been mistakenly charged with, the result of slander and the ignorance of vulgar people, he would not rehearse the true story—his own versi
on of the story—not even to himself. All of that had happened after his time at Oxford, where he had earned no degree, and which he had left because of another story that he wouldn’t or couldn’t tell in a way that anyone else could understand; even years later Doctor Dee could not have told it over, though he had heard bits and fragments of it often. He was twenty-seven years old on that night in March, clouds flying fast as pinnaces over the moon’s face, when Clerkson brought him over river to Mortlake.

  He had a book, which he couldn’t read, which was the reason for his coming; and he had a friend, or an enemy, who had long accompanied him, whose breath he knew but whose name he did not know.

  —How do you come to have it? Doctor Dee asked him when the book was put before him.

  Mr. Talbot’s long white fingers plucked at the complex knots with which he had tied up his bundle.

  —Well, I will tell you, he said. I will tell you that whole tale. How I come to have it: I’ll tell you.

  Clerkson’s hands reached impatiently for the strings of the bundle, but Talbot waved them away; he said no more, though, only his hands trembled as he pulled aside the old cloths the book was wrapped in.

  Doctor Dee stood, moving aside his cup of wine so that the book could be opened.

  It was a manuscript on thick parchment, narrow and sewn up with heavy greased black thread. There was no cover or binding. The characters it was written in started immediately at the top of the first page without any heading, as though this were perhaps not the first page at all. Doctor Dee picked up the lamp and bent close over the page. Mr. Talbot turned the heavy worm-holed leaf. The second page was the same: a solid block of characters from top to bottom.

  —It is in a cipher, the doctor said. I can read a cipher, if it hides a language that I know.

  —A cipher, Mr. Talbot said. Yes.

  He looked down again at the page. So long had he stared at these pages that they were as familiar to him as any pages of any grammar he had ever memorized, and yet because he could extract no meaning from them, none, they kept all their strangeness. To look at them was to feel himself in a compact with mystery, at once excluded and privileged; it was the same sense he had used to have as a child, looking into books before he had his letters: knowing those marks to be meaningful, charged with meaning, and not knowing what they meant.

  He moved aside so that the doctor could sit before the book.

  —How, Dee asked him again, do you come to have this?

  —I was in a manner led to it, Mr. Talbot said.

  —In what manner? the doctor asked. He had picked up a stylus and begun touching different letters of the book.

  —Led, said Mr. Talbot. And the whole story, the marvelous story, filled him suddenly brimful, and he, encompassed in it, living in it, couldn’t begin to think how to tell it.

  —Do you, he said at last (lapsing into Latin to cast what he could not relate into a sort of discourse), do you have any knowledge of the things a man of wisdom might learn through, through congress with spirits? Certain spirits, do you know of this kind …

  Doctor Dee raised his eyes to him slowly. He answered in Latin:

  —If you mean the working of things by what the vulgar call magic, no, I know nothing of that.

  Mr. Clerkson sat forward in his chair. A smile was on his wolfish shaven face: it was for this he had brought Mr. Talbot here.

  —I have asked, Doctor Dee said, in prayers, for knowledge of things. Through God’s angels.

  He regarded Mr. Talbot for a time; then he said, in English:

  —But tell me what you had to tell: Led.

  —There was talk, Mr. Talbot said with a glance at Clerkson, about a dead man, and a conjuration; that the dead man was made to speak, or an evil spirit to speak through him; but all that is false, and no man who wished to learn wisdom could learn it in that way.

  He had a dreadful impulse to touch his ears, tug down his cap; he resisted it.

  —They think that if a man seeks treasure he wants only coin to spend, he went on. There are other treasures. There is knowledge. There are lawful means to learn where treasure lies, true treasure.

  The second offense, the justice had told him, got not the pillory but death. … How had that evil story come out of his mouth, and not the story he had started out to tell? For a moment he could think of nothing else. He watched Doctor Dee trace down the letters of the page to which his book was opened. He picked up the cup of wine he had been given but hadn’t touched, and drank.

  —A spirit led me to that book, he said. It was in old Glastonbury that I found it.

  Dr. Dee’s stylus stopped on the page, and he looked up again at Talbot.

  —In Glastonbury?

  Mr. Talbot nodded, and drank again, and though his heart had begun to tick quick and hard he blinked slowly and calmly at Dr. Dee’s stare.

  —Yes, he said. In a monk’s grave at Glastonbury. A spirit that I knew spoke to me, and told me; told me where to dig. …

  —Did you dig? At Glastonbury?

  —Only a little.

  Surprised by the old man’s fierce response, he began to spin out a circumstantial tale that hid more than it told. The part about Glastonbury was anyway the part he knew he would find it hardest to tell, though the spirit that had been repeating the story over and over to him was quite insistent about it. All that Mr. Talbot really wanted to tell, what was in his mouth to tell and confusing anything else that passed through it, was the end of the story: the meaning: the fact that he had been vouchsafed the book (and a stone jar too, a stone jar full of powder whose use he guessed at, that he had in his pocket) just so it could be given to this man, brought here on this night and offered to him. He knew it to be so.

  But he could not say so. A kind of shyness came over him, and with the story not told at all he could suddenly say nothing more.

  —No no no, said Mr. Clerkson. He means only that he brought it for you. A gift. Found in that holy place.

  He dared put out his hand and push the book an inch closer to where the doctor sat.

  —My thanks, then, said Doctor Dee. If it be a gift.

  —What Mr. Talbot desired, Clerkson said, was to learn somewhat from your worship in spiritual practice. As he has said often to me he knows himself to be apt in it. He …

  Without looking away from Doctor Dee, Mr. Talbot spoke to him:

  —I have no need of you to interpret me.

  —Mr. Clerkson, said Doctor Dee, rising. Will you go with me? There are the volumes you asked after, in the next room. I would speak to you a moment.

  Clerkson, still smiling, went with the doctor, passing back to his friend only a quizzical look that might mean anything. Mr. Talbot took the curved forelimbs of the chair he sat in in his long hands, and felt their smooth solidity. He looked about him at the place he had come to: at the books rising to the ceilings on swaybacked shelves, piled in corners and on tables in unsteady columns; at the optical instruments and the globes and the great hourglass, which just now wore a velvet hat of Dr. Dee’s. He took breath hugely, and rested his head on the chair’s back. He was where he had wanted to be, and he could stay.

  Doctor Dee came back alone. Mr. Talbot felt his round-eyed gaze, felt its warmth like the warmth of the sea-coal fire burning in the grate. The doctor closed the door behind him—Mr. Talbot heard it latch—then he went to a cabinet, and took from it a velvet bag, whose drawstring he loosed. He let fall from it into his hand a sphere of crystal the color of moleskin, pure as a tiny planet or a ball of gray evening.

  —Have you looked into a glass before? he asked.

  Mr. Talbot shook his head.

  —A boy I know, said Doctor Dee, saw somewhat in this stone. He was a player, and perhaps he lied to me, but he said that there are creatures who are answerable to this stone, only it was not he to whom they would speak; that he to whom the stone belonged was to come later.

  He took a metal frame, like a claw, and set the stone within it.

  —Perhaps, he
said, if you look, you will see the face of that one who led you to the book.

  He could not have spoken more gently, more meekly; yet Mr. Talbot heard or chose to hear a command: Come, look into this glass. And hearing a command, a command that would brook no denial, he chose to think that all which would come of his going now to look into it, to kneel before it and look, was not his fault but the fault of him who with a long white hand showed him the glass in its frame: and of those who beckoned to him already from within it.

  He had not known that he was groaning aloud.

  When Doctor Dee took his shoulder, everything in the glass—the ship, the child, the powers, the depths—closed up one after another as though he hurtled backward away from them through curtains rapidly drawn: backward through the window, through the showstone in the armed child’s hand, through the row of strong young men in green whose names all began with A (seeming startled and windblown just for a moment, looking on one another, before a hand—it was the skryer’s own—drew a bright curtain over them and they too were gone), and he fell backward into the upper chamber at Mortlake and the night: the real globe of smoky quartz came into view, and his own hand before it was the curtain drawn over it; he was groaning, and Doctor Dee was helping him to his feet and to a chair.

  Doctor Dee looked down upon him as he might upon some rare and strange creature whom he had just captured, or just released.

  —I felt faint, Mr. Talbot said. Just for that moment.

  —Was there anything more spoken to you, Doctor Dee said, gently but urgently. Was there anything more said.

  For a long moment Mr. Talbot said nothing, feeling his heart return into his bosom. When he had had time to think what he should say, what it would be best to say (he could not remember if anything had been spoken to him) he said: