Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt
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Rosie—I am going on the train today to meet Frances Yates, Dame Frances Yates, you've heard me talk about her. If anybody can tell me what I'm supposed to do next, she can. She lives with her sister and her dogs and cats an hour from London, and we're to have tea. I can't explain here how it happened. Excuse the postcard. Pierce
"Now tell me where you've been,” she said, clasping her hands before her as though in supplication. “And where you mean to go."
Everyone who's seen her says she looked just like Margaret Rutherford, but in her shabby overcoat buttoned one button wrong (she'd just come in from the potting shed) and her hair coming loose from its great pins, she was the White Queen more exactly.
"Well,” Pierce said, “I've been to Glastonbury, and..."
"You've bean to Glostonbrie?” Her mobile eyebrows rose. “Why, you might be in search of the Grail."
He had gone to Glastonbury, the first of all his memory places, or Kraft's, starred in the guide, and site of more than one scene in Kraft's last novel. The Isle of Avalon. He would enter many churches in the coming months, very many, and of them all it was this ruined one alone that didn't inspire in him an awful trepidation: guilt, threat, pity. Its nave and transept frozen grass, its lead roof the leaden English sky. Nice. He had imagined, without thinking it through, that the places he was to go to would be somehow lost in remoteness, fallen and neglected, like ziggurats in Yucatán. This was so mown and tidied, so worked up and mapped and labeled and furnished with souvenirs, that what mystery it might once have had could not reach him, and for that he was grateful. In Kraft's old guidebook, he read about Joseph of Arimathea, Aldhelm and Dunstan, Arthur and Guinevere. He walked the ruins, the vanished cloister, fratery, library. He went out to Chalice Hill and the Holy Well. The masonry of the Well has been the cause of much discussion. Possibly it is connected with the Druids, associated with ancient rituals of sun and water. Certainly it is orientated, as has been proved by measurements on Midsummer Day. The stones are placed in wedge formation, as in the Pyramids. Sir Flinders Petrie was of the opinion that the Well might have been rock hewn by Egyptian colonists in about the year 200 BC.
Well, okay. He let the icy bloodred waters flow over his hand (chalybeate, radioactive, neverfailing) and then went up the bare Tor on a spiral track (the ascent from Chilkwell Street is easy) toward the tower on top. Soon the air was sharp as knives in his throat.
"You didn't quite reach it,” said the Dame. She let her folded hands fall in her lap, his own spirit or lame body dropping from the unscaled height. “Well. A shame. You have such a view from there. That's the reward."
"Panoramic,” her sister said. In all her books, Dame Frances credits her sister, indispensable helper and friend. It was she, lean and sharp faced as the Red Queen, who brought the tea, then sat, picked up her knitting. “Your friend Dr. John Dee knew that spot well, of course."
"Our friend Dr. Dee,” said Frances, and they both smiled at Pierce.
From the top of the Tor John Dee could have seen all the way to Wales, from where his people came. In Kraft's last unfinished book, he can also see from there a great ring of landscape giants, signs of the Zodiac marked out for miles around in the earth of Somerset by churchyards, knolls, river bends, rock outcroppings. Later Pierce found this supposed zodiac and its giants described where Kraft had doubtless found it too—in the pages of the Dictionary of Deities, Devils, and Dæmons of Mankind, by Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle.
When Dee at the end of his life returns to the well and the Tor, the Zodiac in the earth is gone, can't be seen any longer from the hill's height. In Kraft's story. Just earth after all.
"But,” the Red Queen asked the White Queen, “how would he,” indicating Pierce in the chair opposite, “have come to know of John Dee atole? It seems quite unlikely."
"Well, of course John Dee has a history in America,” said the White Queen. “He went to America.” She bent her head to Pierce. “With the group you there call the Pilgrims."
He could only regard her, goggling probably, trying to remember Dee's death date—1609? Not later, surely.
"Not the man himself,” she said, buttering toast. “But his thought, and his mark. Oh yes. John Winthrop was a devotee of Dee and his learning—you weren't aware? He brought a whole alchemical library with him to the New World, and he used Dee's Monas as his personal sign.” She bit into her toast with large strong teeth, lifting her eyebrows merrily at him. He began to suspect that she knew very well she was being unsettling. “Think what its adventures might have bean, thereafter."
"Yes.” Among them his own chapter of the Invisible College, in the mountains of eastern Kentucky twenty-five years before; himself, his cousins, his heroes.
"And where do you go next?” she asked. “On your quest."
"I'm going next to Germany,” Pierce said. “Heidelberg."
At this name she and her sister turned slowly to look on one another with unreadable expressions, unreadable to him, British expressions of alarm, or astonishment, or amusement, or all of those and more. As one their looks returned to him, and both at once said, “Ah: the Winter King."
"Excuse me?"
"You are in pursuit of the Winter King,” said the Dame.
"The winter king?"
"You know of him."
"No. Well, yes. There was a novel of Kraft's. That novelist who."
"Ah, he."
"The Winter King. I read it. I must have. I don't remember it."
"No? You will want to know the tale. The whole tale."
"Oh?” He thought that in British English want meant need, or had once.
"It's quite a tragic one,” her sister said. “Best to hear it before you go."
He said nothing, unable to refuse. Dame Frances clapped her hands before her like a concert singer about to begin. “King James I, who feared so many things, who wanted to secure everyone's good opinion, was angling for a Spanish marriage for his son, Henry, to protect him from the Catholic powers. Then Henry, whom everyone loved and admired, parfit gentil knight, died suddenly."
"A fever,” said her sister. “From sweating after a game of tennis. So they said."
"And so then James married his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, to the German prince palatine, Frederick, who was—or was likely to be when he was a bit more secure—the leader of the Protestant powers in Europe. A very suitable match. Two young people, quite attractive, it's said, certainly energetic and with a great deal of dash—actually they seem to me a very Shakespearean couple—they are married with great pomp in the winter of 1613, and go back to Frederick's capital, Heidelberg. Which is extensively modernized and beautified with gardens, grottoes, statues. They seem a sublimely fortunate pair.
"Then.” She lowered her chin, looking at him above her glasses, mouth solemnly pursed. “The Holy Roman emperor, an aged nonentity named Matthias, dies. He was not only emperor but also the Catholic king of a largely Protestant Bohemia. The crown of Bohemia is, theoretically at least, elective, and when the archduke of Austria—a devout activist Catholic who is certain to be elected the next emperor—wins the Bohemian crown for himself as well, a group of Protestant nobles in Prague revolt. From a high window in Prague castle the archduke's surrogates are thrown..."
"The Defenestration of Prague,” Pierce said. Long, long ago they had asked Axel on television: By what name do we know the event that took place in Prague in 1618 and began the Thirty Years’ War, and what does the word mean? Defenestration: throwing-out-of-the-window. “For heaven's sake."
"The Bohemians then turn to Frederick and elect him their king instead. And he accepts. And for a single winter, while the imperial armies gather force and the German Protestant princes waver and argue, and James in London offers no help atole, the two of them, Frederick and Elizabeth, reign in Prague castle. Then, in one sharp, quick battle, the emperor's forces defeat him utterly. Utterly. He barely escapes, his reign is over, he and his queen flee into exile, and all is as though it had not
bean. Soon his home country is devastated. Thirty years of war begin, the first European world war.
"And the question is: why did he do it? Why did he think he could? And why did anyone else think so? Answer that, and it will lead you back to that sign, and poor John Dee."
She said it as though she herself knew the answer very well, and her sister too, who now lowered her knitting and said—like a character in a play, filling in an audience by telling another character what both of them know very well—"Why, was it not poor Alexis who first put this question to you? And challenged you to answer it?"
"Alexis,” said the Dame, putting a finger to her chin in thought. “In service of his Dictionary. Do you think so?"
"Yes.” The thing she knitted had grown noticeably longer.
"So long ago,” said the Dame, regarding Pierce. “I knew so little."
"You don't mean,” Pierce said at last, “an author, a sort of author, named St.-Phalle? Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle?"
Dame Frances blinked. “Oh, did you know him?"
"Well, no. I mean I didn't know him."
Dame Frances bent inquiringly to her sister, who said loudly, “He didn't know him."
"Poor old dear,” said Frances. “I knew him, oh not well, but for quite a long time. Yes. You mean this fellow.” She went again to her shelves, and drew out a large book, bound in imitation leather, that bore on its spine the sign of the Monas.
"He used often to come to the institute,” she said dreamily, opening the book. “When he was in good health, in the days I first began to work there. Always busily collecting references and making memoranda. For his books. Though this may have bean his only one, in fact."
Pierce had in his life seen three copies of that book. This one of hers; before that, the one in the Blackbury Jambs Free Library, that Fellowes Kraft had so often taken out; and before that, the one sent to his house, unasked for, by the state librarian in Lexington, Kentucky, a woman surely of the Yates type, a chain to her glasses.
"But you see he wasn't a scholar atole, really,” she said. “He was a sort of antiquarian, a jackdaw, collecting shiny bits of this and that, whatever caught his fancy. Indeed he looked rather like a jackdaw. That was how he seemed to me then, at any rate. I was very young."
Pierce stood, unable to stay seated, and came closer as she turned the pages of the Dictionary she held. Soon she would come upon the entry for the Invisible College.
"I imagine he took a bit of a fancy to you,” her sister said, resuming her knitting. “So many of the older ones did."
Frances closed her eyes, so as not to hear this, and went on. “We did rather stay in touch. He ceased to come round, later on, and I learned where he kept himself, a couple of rooms in Notting Hill. Now and then if convenient I'd look in. Bring him some beef tea. Fetch him a book. For his researches.” She smiled: a gentle, a wholly gentle and knowing smile.
"Notes,” said her sister. Her scarf was long enough to strangle her with.
"He'd write me little notes. Peculiar little notes pointing out small things. Only when I found them recently in a box, all clipped together—you see I am of the jackdaw clan myself—they seemed to make a kind of story or narrative, like the clues of a scavenger hunt."
She shut the book, not perhaps noticing Pierce's index pointing to the entry, the picture, his mouth open; and she replaced it, not in the place from which she had drawn it. “I have bean,” she said to him confidentially, as though she might be overheard, or as though she said something that might be thought unkind, “so embarrassed by the sort of person one can encounter, when doing the work that I do. Those who believe that age-old conspiracies are still afoot, reaching back to the Pyramids; that the Rosicrucians are now about, and working on our behalf; that there is a story ongoing. I supposed him to be one such. But he was something different, I think. He was a Rosicrucian, you see; he believed himself to be one. But he also knew the secret to being a Rosicrucian: that you can only strive and hope and wish to be one. That is what a Rosicrucian is; it is all that one is."
Two Siamese cats had come into the room, and now wound themselves around the Dame's thick legs, looking at Pierce as though they too were in on the joke.
"The great genealogy of knowledge,” Dame Frances said, sighing. “The transmission of occult understanding from master to master. All of them longed to be part of it, you see. To be tapped, to be taken in, taught the secret language. The Invisible College. But there were no masters, no brothers. It was never anything but a chain of books; all that it ever was. Books and their readers. And Plato said: We think, when we read a book, that we hear the voice of a person; but if we try to question a book, it can't answer."
She thrust her fists into the pockets of her ancient cardigan, and regarded Pierce with what, unmistakably, was compassion. “Of course we forgive them, we must. As we would forgive our own family. Because, you know, that is what they are."
* * * *
No: he hadn't really sat like Alice between her and her sister, to be pointed on his way; never even left London once he'd come back from Glastonbury. He saw her—he really did see her, round little figure in the lobby of the Warburg Institute, tugging on a mac and hefting a plump belted briefcase while speaking in atrociously accented French to a tall gent who bent to hear. It had to be her. Maybe if she'd been alone he'd have spoken to her—he really did have Barr's regards to deliver—and who knows what might have developed then; but surely the first question she'd have asked him would have been about that albatross around his neck, and he grew shy or sad or ashamed and said nothing, only nodded at her as she nodded inquiringly at him.
He did find, in a tomblike mystic bookstore, a copy of her newest book, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, and bought it, and from out of it she did keep speaking to him, though she would not answer his questions. She said that the Rosicrucian movement arose from what she called “Dee's Bohemian mission"—even though Dee had gone back to England, and was dead some years when the Rosicrucian rumors started to run, still there must have been something. Something that he did or left behind there, something that he saw or learned or preached, something that people remembered. In Kraft's story, whose plot Pierce was following here—which was like trying to get around Lake Superior with the help of a copy of “Hiawatha"—the thing left behind in Prague wasn't a lesson or an achievement but a claim, or a promise: that he could make the Stone for the Emperor Rudolph. That, and the body of Edward Kelley, out of which Dee's gold had come, and his angels, and everything.
Whatever it was, maybe young Frederick had to find it if he was to go on being king, and had reason to think he could. And he never found it. Not in our story of the history of the world.
The frontispiece of her book—which is what started Pierce's mental journey to the suburbs and Dame Frances's villa and the book he imagined to be standing on her bookshelf—was the same picture that in the Dictionary of Deities, Devils, and Dæmons of Mankind had illustrated the entry on the Invisible College. The picture, a surreal wood engraving, came originally, it said here, from a book or tract called Speculum sophicum rhodo-stauroticum. “Speculum sophicum rhodo-stauroticum,” Pierce said aloud, reading this on the Tube, then again out on the street; he would find himself saying these dactyls over to himself aloud or silently all winter as he walked the continent, like someone repeating the name of the thing he's mislaid as he searches for it. Speculum Sophicum Rhodo-staur Oticum. The picture showed—you remember—the Invisible College of the Rose-Cross brothers, a ludicrous high wagon that is a house or mansion, crowded with the Brothers at their work, the house mounted on inadequate wheels but really powered by wide saillike wings: if he'd been asked to draw the thing from memory, Pierce would actually have given it not wings but sails.
As Fellowes Kraft had done, in his last unfinished book. In which this winged wagon appeared as John Dee's own wagon, sailing over high Germany with Dee and his wife and children aboard. And also a werewolf, an angel in a jar, and a fortune in fairy gold.
The coldest winter since the Little Ice Age of the Jacobean period, said the television mounted above the bar in this actually rather squalid saloon he had wandered into. The queen herself had been stuck in the snow on her way to Scotland, and had to get off her train, and be taken in by her subjects, given warming drink. A gill of Scotch, called whisky, was in the bottom of Pierce's glass; he swallowed it, took out his guidebook, his gloves, and his map of the Underground: down into which he now he must go.
We emerge from Charing Cross Station to view, at the head of Whitehall, the statue of Charles I now so weathered and decayed. Opposite the gate into the Horse Guards Parade stands the magnificent Palladian Banqueting House, designed by Inigo Jones with the ceiling by Rubens (1630), glorifying the House of Stuart and in particular King James I. Today it houses the United Services Museum; visitors may view among other exhibits the skeleton of one of Napoleon's chargers.
Now on either side the broad expanse of Whitehall is lined by the great buildings of government. Once upon a time, one entered upon Whitehall Palace precincts at this point through a magnificent towered gate wrongly called “Holbein's Gate.” Going forward through that gate, you would find yourself walking by a tall brick wall on the left, which was the wall of the old Whitehall Palace but if you stepped backward instead, backward through the Holbein Gate, to pass along that high brick wall, which is now on your right side, then beyond it would lie the Privy Garden, all knots and neat geometries, where the lords and ladies may frequently be seen awhispering; and across from it, the ball courts where court tennis and featherball and on rainy days even bowls are played. Here young Prince Henry fenced and played tennis daylong, and here after a hot sweat on a cool day he contracted his last fever. West of the bowls-house is the cockpit, which is a theatre as well, and adjacent are the Cockpit Lodgings, where Princess Elizabeth, who loves plays and players, awaits her husband to be. On your left will be the shabby and inadequate Banqueting House, not yet replaced by Inigo Jones's creation; it has been in use since Cardinal Wolsey's day. Thereby opens the great Court Gate that leads to the Palace proper, where there was wont to be a continual throng, either of Gallants standing to ravish themselves with the sight of Ladies handsome Legs and Insteps as they tooke Coache; Or of the tribe of liveries, by whom you could scarce passe without a jeare or a saucy answer to your question.