The house of Doctor Dee

by Peter Ackroyd

  'The moon's my constant mistress,

  And the lowly owl my morrow,

  The flaming drake and night-crow make

  Me music to my sorrow.'

  'It is a fitting tune,' I said, 'to accompany me on my way. For now I must rise and leave you gentlemen — ' I looked across the board, where they lolled in various stages of drunkenness. 'I am tired now after my spectacle.'

  'I sat amazed,' one of their number said, looking down into his cup, 'when the spheres came down amidst the brightness. And all revolved. It was well done. It was very well done.'

  'I wish you good night,' I said again. 'I must return to my own proper sphere.' I bowed to Nathaniel Cadman, who could not raise his head from the table and sat like some poor shrunken thing. 'I wish all of you good night.'

  I came out into New Fish Street, when a boy walked forward with a lantern. But I waved him away. It was a clear night, and the fixed stars were all I needed to light my path to Clerkenwell.

  TWO

  I DECIDED TO walk through the night. I had already left the churchyard and started in the direction of the old house, but I hesitated and stopped. I did not want to go back to Cloak Lane, not yet, and, as so often before, I turned towards the winding streets of London. I prefer the city in darkness; it reveals its true nature to me then, by which I suppose I mean its true history. During the day it is taken over by its temporary inhabitants, and at those times I feel as if I might be dispersed and lost among them. So I keep my distance. I imagine them in the clothes of another century, for example, although I realize that this is very fanciful. But there are occasions when a certain look, or gesture, plunges me back into another time; it is as if there had been some genetic surplus, because I know that I am observing a medieval or a sixteenth-century face. When the body of a neolithic traveller was recovered from an Alpine glacier, sprawled face down in the posture of death, it was considered to be an extraordinary act of historical retrieval. But the past is restored around us all the time, in the bodies we inhabit or the words we speak. And there are certain scenes or situations which, once glimpsed, seem to continue for eternity.

  No, that's not the way to describe it. They are already part of a continuing history even as they occur and, as I said once before, there are times when I walk through the contemporary city and recognize it for what it is: another historical period, with all its mysterious constraints and docilities. There was a sentence which my father taught me — 'To see eternity as part of time, and time as part of eternity'. I once saw a photograph of Whitehall, taken in 1839, and it imparted to me something of that; there was a small boy in a stove-pipe hat sprawled beneath a lamp-post, while across the road a line of hansom cabs waited. Everything was in the eye of eternity, and even the dirt of the streets seemed to glow. But that is also the sensation I experience now, as I walk away from the churchyard and watch that woman opening her street door while at the same time I hear the sound of a car backfiring in a nearby street. These things fade, and yet somehow they exist for ever.

  I crossed Clerkenwell Green into Jerusalem Passage. It was almost midnight, as I could tell from the neon clock which hung from the building beside me; I watched it for a few moments as it swayed in the wind, and the digits glowed upon its face. In the fourteenth century there was one stone which was very highly prized — it was called sadastra. In its outward appearance it was black or dark brown but, when it was broken open, for a few moments it glistened like the sun. I imagine it had the same kind of brightness as this neon clock which I now passed. There were two or three people nearby; their pale faces gleamed in the orange street-light, and they seemed to be walking silently over the pavements. I came out of Jerusalem Passage, crossed the Clerkenwell Road, and made my way beneath the arch of the Priory of St John of Jerusalem. There was a foundation stone here, marking the site of the twelfth-century abbey of the Knights Templar, which had been destroyed at the time of the Reformation. No doubt its stones had been used to construct some of the grander houses of the neighbourhood (perhaps some of them were still lodged within the walls of my own house), but they were the sad remnants of a great wreck. This was one of Daniel Moore's beliefs, at any rate, and I had come to accept it — that the destruction of the great monastic libraries, with all their manuscripts and treasures, meant that a great part of the history of this island had also been lost. Not only had an entire Catholic culture been erased, but, just as damagingly, the old monastic records of early British history had been destroyed. A large structure of the past had effectively been buried.

  But what was this noise by Holborn Viaduct? A furious shout seemed to be coming from some place beneath the earth; it was stifled, enclosed, echoing in some small space. Then I turned the corner of Giltspur Street and saw an old woman bowed within a telephone booth; she held the receiver up to her ear, and was screaming into the mouthpiece. I carried on walking towards her, until I could see an 'Out Of Order' notice pasted on the window. So what kind of connection had she made? I remember the time I had picked up one of the telephones at Chancery Lane station, and heard a multitude of voices murmuring like the sound of wind about a house. Perhaps there is always someone at the other end of the line. No, all this is nonsense. Do you see how a journey through the night can provoke strange fears? There was a small satellite dish on the roof of the flats at the corner of Snow Hill, and as I watched it absorbing its patterns from the sky I saw again my vision of the man rising upwards into the air above Cloak Lane.

  'What? Is it you? Are you here, after all?' The old woman had come out of the telephone booth, and was shouting after me. I walked away as quickly as I could. 'You know about all the shit on the streets, don't you? It's not the dogs. It's the old-age pensioners.' She started laughing as I made my way towards Fetter Lane and High Holborn. There is a video shop by the entrance of Dyer's Rents and, as I hurried towards it, I could see a dozen screens glowing with the same picture; there was so much light and energy here that the shop window itself might have burst open or exploded. When I came closer still, having looked back to make sure that she was not following me, I could see many stars and planets hurtling past the screens. It must have been one of those science fiction epics of the seventies or early eighties, and there was a young man watching the cosmic adventure with a look of absolute concentration. He had put his arms out against the plate glass window, and it looked as if he were being crucified by all that brightness. I wanted to tell him that it was all delusion, a trick of the cinematographer, but for him it was probably a true vision of the universe. I said nothing and walked on.

  I can tell you when I first began to understand London. I must have been fifteen or sixteen, and I was travelling on the bus which goes from Shepherd's Bush to Dulwich; the sky above Notting Hill Gate and Queensway was covered by cloud, but suddenly those clouds broke and a shaft of sunlight shone down upon the metal rail in front of me. I could not turn my eyes from that intense brightness and, as I gazed into the depths of the light and the shining metal, I was filled with a sense of exhilaration so profound that I left my seat and jumped off the bus as it came to a halt by Marble Arch. I felt that some secret had been divulged to me — that I had glimpsed some interior life and reality which glowed within all things. I thought of it as the fire-world, and as I turned into Tyburn Way I believed that I would be able to find traces of it everywhere. But that fire was also within me, and I found myself running through the streets as if I possessed them. Somehow I had been present at their beginning; or, rather, there was some presence within me which had always existed in this soil, this stone, and this air. That original fire has left me now, which is perhaps why I seem such a stranger to myself; slowly, over the years, the city has darkened within me.

  But there were certain places to which I still returned. Sometimes I found myself walking down Kingsland Road and stopping at the old Hoxton asylum by Wharf Lane; it was here that Charles Lamb used to take his sister, at her own request, and once I tried to track their footsteps through the fields wh
ich are now concealed beneath the stone pavements of the area. She always carried her strait-jacket with her, and they wept when they came up to the gate of the asylum. I stopped where they had stopped, just before the archway, and whispered my own name. I often revisited Borough High Street, and followed its route from Southwark Bridge to the site of King's Bench Prison and the Marshalsea; this journey always weighed heavily upon me, and yet I continued to make it. There were times when I walked around the area until I was lost and tired and unable to think. I wanted the Borough to bury me, to hold me down, to suffocate me. Surely among all the dark shapes of its past, there was one in which I could be concealed? But not all my haunts were so oppressive. There was one place in particular where I knew I could find rest: again and again I returned to Fountain Court within the Temple where, beside a small circular pond, a wooden bench had been placed beneath an elm tree. The sense of peace, even in the middle of the city, was so strong that I presume it came from some powerful event in the past. Or perhaps it was simply that people like myself had always chosen this place, and over the years it had accepted the stillness of its visitors. I often think about death as if it were a state such as this — as if I were waiting beside an elm tree and a pond. My father had approached his own death peacefully enough, almost happily. I remember him whistling in the bathroom, even when he knew that he had only a few months of life ahead of him. He never complained, and showed no signs of self-pity or anxiety. It was as if he possessed some information about the next stage of his journey; he was a Roman Catholic, as I said, but he seemed to harbour some more private belief which reassured him. And once again, as I came out into Red Lion Square from High Holborn, I considered the old house which he had bequeathed to me. Why was it that, during all my walks through the city, I had never seen Cloak Lane or its vicinity? Why had I shunned, or forgotten, Clerkenwell?

  I had come up to the fragment of the old stone pillar which marks the site of the Red Lion Fields massacre of June 1780; at the time of the Gordon Riots a group of children were killed by troops here, and three months later John Wilkes started a subscription for this memorial. The stone was now so cracked and worn that it might have been a piece of nature in decay but, on an impulse, I knelt down and touched it. I had another connection with the place, after all. Only a few yards away, on a stall by Red Lion Passage, I had first come across the work of Piranesi. It was a book with many of his etchings reproduced; its title was Imaginary Prisons, but as far as I was concerned there was nothing imaginary about them at all. I recognized this world at once; I knew that it was my city.

  I took the book home with me — it must have been six or seven years ago now, but I still remember the excitement with which I turned its pages. In the first etching two small figures were standing in front of a vast stone staircase; there was nothing but stone all around them, spiralling upwards into galleries, arches and domes. Piranesi's world was one of endlessly ruined masonry, of labyrinthine passages and barred windows; here were blocks of stone, massive, dark, their textures swamped in shadow; here were giant recesses of brick, huge banners of tattered cloth, ropes, pulleys, and wooden cranes that towered up to broken balconies of stone. The artist often used the framing device of a ruined arch or gateway, so that I was drawn into the scene and knew myself to be part of it; I was in prison, too.

  Everything looked as if it had been abandoned — the bridge hanging precariously between two decayed towers, the rotten beams, the cracked windows, the massive porticoes with inscriptions too faded to read. A giant race of builders had declined and died, leaving these monuments behind them. But no, that could not be true. There was a sense of continuing power, of living force, here. It was beyond death; it was the condition of the world. I was looking at the last etching, which showed an indeterminate small figure mounting a stone staircase only to be confronted by another steep bulwark of stone. In this tiny figure I thought I could see something of my own self, when my father tapped me on the shoulder. He must have been watching me for a few moments because he said, softly, 'It needn't be like that, you know.' That was all he said, and then he put his hand upon the back of my neck. I shook him off and looked down at the etching again, only to see another flight of steps that seemed to lead down into an abyss of stone. It occurred to me then that this was really a city under the ground. It was the eternal city for those who are trapped in time. I was still kneeling beside the memorial in Red Lion Square, but now I seemed to be entering the stone wall of the basement in Cloak Lane. I was becoming part of the old house.

  I got up quickly, brushed the dirt from my clothes, and walked out towards New Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. There is a patch of cobbles just by Bloomsbury Square, where a row of new Mercury telephones had been placed, and in the dark I stumbled over them. 'London stone is different from this,' Daniel Moore had told me when I showed him Imaginary Prisons. 'You have to learn Italian just to look at Piranesi.' I had been trying to share my enthusiasm with him, but he simply peered at the reproductions with something like distaste. 'He's a sentimentalist,' he said, 'not a visionary.'

  'But don't you see the wilderness of it?'

  'No. Not really. You may see the stone, but I see the people. Why do you think I'm writing my book?' This book, upon which he had been working ever since I had known him, was to be a history of London radicalism. He had explained it to me once, in his usual embarrassed dismissive way, but all the Muggletonians, and Ranters, and Behmenists, and members of the London Corresponding Society, confused me and seemed to become members of one vast sect or community. But this was his great theme — this fastidious, delicate man was obsessed by the aspirations of some disturbed, even dangerous, Londoners. Once he took me on a tour of the taverns and meeting-houses which they had used; only a few survived, mainly in the east of London by Limehouse and Shadwell, and they looked so insignificant, so grubby, that it was hard to imagine the visions and dreams that had been conjured up within them. The Behmenists believed, as far as Daniel could explain it to me, that men and women carried the heavens within them and that the universe itself was in the shape of a single person; he was known as Adam Kadmon, or the Universal Man. They did not necessarily believe that the entire cosmos was in fact a human form — although there were some radical Swedenborgians who proclaimed that there was just such a correspondence — but rather that the world, and the entire universe of being, was infused with the qualities of humanity. We had come up to the Seven Stars in Arrow Lane, where some Moravians used to meet in the early eighteenth century, and Daniel told me the story of the mystic who was continually asked by a small girl to show her angels. At last he agreed to do so and, taking her into his house, led her over towards a curtained recess. 'Do you really wish to see an angel?' he asked her. She was still very eager, so he pulled back the curtain and, on the wall behind it, was a mirror. 'Look there,' he said. 'There is an angel.'

  'It's a charming story, Matthew, don't you think?'

  'Oh, yes.'

  'But do you understand how radical it is? The humblest person can be filled with grace. Divinity is within us, and there is no sin. There is no heaven, no hell.'

  Why should such strange doctrines emerge in this city? This was the question he posed to me as we walked down Shadwell Reach. The answer seemed obvious enough: this was the area where artisans and small tradesmen were to be found in the largest numbers, and they were the ones most prone to this form of madness. And yet Daniel seemed to believe that it had something to do with the spirit of the place itself. But I had seen enough. Limehouse was filled with the fumes of traffic, with smoke, with the debris of unfinished buildings; I found it hard to get my breath, but I managed to drag him away to the upper level of the Docklands Light Railway. That was the end of our journey in search of what he called the 'everlasting gospel'.

  There was also the time he drove me to the south-west of England, and to the old radical centre of Glastonbury. A fourteenth-century London sect, God's Brothers, as they called themselves, had fled from persec
ution in the city and established a community in that area. We must have chosen the worst day of the year for such a journey — from London to Andover we were buffeted by rainstorms, and then on the way from Hampshire we were caught in a thick fog which hovered along the motorway. We crept towards Glastonbury, since the road was hardly visible; the posts along the route looked like sentinels huddled in their clothes, while the pylons seemed to be the spires of churches rising out of the mist. There were clumps of trees in one field that we passed, and they might have been the members of some small congregation struggling onward. No doubt these are the materials out of which local legends and 'sightings' are manufactured, but all I could think of was the warmth and safety of London. There were no remnants of the old community when eventually we arrived in Glastonbury itself, and the area which they had colonized was an industrial estate — we should have guessed as much, but Daniel was oddly silent during the return journey. The fog had lifted by the time we came home; it was late in the evening, and I knew that we were approaching London from the diffused red light in the sky which blotted out all the stars. It was as if we were returning to a furnace, and I was at peace.

  I came out from New Oxford Street into Tottenham Court Road just as the clock of St Giles-in-the-Fields struck the hour; I walked more quickly here, since in the porches and doorways along the street lay the army of the night. I was afraid of them, these men and women huddled in filthy blankets, but it is not simply the vagrant or the homeless who disturb me. I know very well that I turn away from any kind of human extremity. I turn away from suffering. Now as I crossed the street and glanced towards two piles of clothes stirring uneasily in the night air, I was afraid of dirt, and of disease, but I suppose that I was most afraid of being attacked. What had they got to lose? If I were like them, I would scream against the world and burn the city. I would want to destroy everything, and everyone, that had conspired against me. I would pillage the shops which denied me entrance, and break up the restaurants which denied me food. I would even rage against the street-lamps which displayed me to the enemy. Yet, as I walked by, none of them asked me for anything, or spoke, or looked at me; I might have been part of some other world. Were they truly resigned, patient, uncomplaining — or were they waiting for something, like the Moravians who met in the Seven Stars?