—J. Duchaussoy, Bacon, Shakespeare ou Saint-Germain?, Paris, La Colombe, 1962, p. 122
It seemed obvious to me that in the days that followed Jacopo Belbo immersed himself in historical works on the Rosy Cross period. But when he reported his findings, he gave us only the bare outline of his fantasies, from which we drew valuable suggestions. I know now that in fact he was creating a far richer narrative on Abulafia, one in which a wild play of quotations mingled with his private myths. The opportunity of combining fragments of other stories spurred him to write his own. He never mentioned this to us. I still think he was, quite courageously, testing his talent in the realm of fiction. Or else he was defining himself in the Great Story he was distorting like any ordinary Diabolical.
FILENAME: The Cabinet of Dr. Dee
For a long time I forgot I was Talbot. From the time, at least, of my decision to call myself Kelley. All I had done, really, was to falsify some documents, like everybody else. The queen’s men were merciless. To cover what’s left of my poor severed ears I am forced to wear this pointed black cap, and people murmur that I am a sorcerer. So be it. Dr. Dee, with a similar reputation, flourishes.
I went to see him in Mortlake. He was examining a map. He was evasive, the diabolical old man. Sinister glints in his shrewd eyes. His bony hand stroking his little goatee.
“It’s a manuscript of Roger Bacon,” he said to me, “and was lent me by the Emperor Rudolf. Do you know Prague? I advise you to visit it. You may find something there that will change your life. Tabula locorum rerum et thesaurorum absconditorum Menabani…”
Stealing a glance, I saw something written in a secret alphabet. But the doctor immediately hid the manuscript under a pile of other yellowed pages. How beautiful to live in a period where every page, even if it has just come from the papermaker’s workshop, is yellowed.
I showed Dr. Dee some of my efforts, mainly my poems about the Dark Lady—radiant image of my childhood, dark because reclaimed by the shadow of time and snatched from my possession—and a tragic sketch, the story of Seven Seas Jim, who returns to England in the train of Sir Walter Ralegh and learns that his father has been murdered by his own incestuous brother. Henbane.
“You’re gifted, Kelley,” Dee said to me. “And you need money. There’s a young man, the natural son of someone you couldn’t dare imagine, and I want to help him climb the ladder of fame and honors. He has little talent. You will be his secret soul. Write, and live in the shadow of his glory. Only you and I, Kelley, will know that the glory is yours.”
So for years I’ve been turning out work for the queen and for all England that goes under the name of this pale youth. If I have seen further, it is by standing on ye shoulders of a Dwarfe. I was thirty, and I will allow no man to say that thirty is the most beautiful time of life.
“William,” I said to him, “let your hair grow down over your ears: it’s becoming.” I had a plan (to take his place?).
Can one live in hatred of this Spear-shaker, who in reality is oneself? That sweet thief which sourly robs from me. “Calm down, Kelley,” Dee says to me. “To grow in the shadows is the privilege of those who prepare to conquer the world. Keepe a Lowe Profyle. William will be one of our covers.” And he informed me—oh, only in part—of the Cosmic Plot. The secret of the Templars. “And the stakes?” I asked.
“Ye Globe.”
For a long time I went to bed early, but one evening at midnight I rummaged in Dee’s private strongbox and discovered some formulas and tried summoning angels as he does on nights of full moon. Dee found me sprawled, in the center of the circle of the Macrocosm, as if struck by a lash. On my brow, the Pentacle of Solomon. Now I must pull my cap even farther down, half over my eyes.
“You don’t know how to do it yet,” Dee said to me. “Watch yourself, or I’ll have your nose cut off, too. I will show you fear in a handful of dust….”
He raised a bony hand and uttered the terrible word: Garamond! I felt myself burn with an inner flame. I fled (into the night).
It was a year before Dee forgave me and dedicated to me his Fourth Book of Mysteries, “post reconciliationem kellianam.”
That summer I was seized by abstract rages. Dee summoned me to Mortlake. There were William and I, Spenser, and a young aristocrat with shifty eyes, Francis Bacon. He had a delicate, lively, hazel Eie. Dr. Dee said it was the Eie of a Viper. Dee told us more about the Cosmic Plot. It was a matter of meeting the Frankish wing of the Templars in Paris and putting together two parts of the same map. Dee and Spenser were to go, accompanied by Pedro Nunes. To me and Bacon he entrusted some documents, which we swore to open only in the event that they failed to return.
They did return, exchanging floods of insults. “It’s not possible,” Dee said. “The Plan is mathematical; it has the astral perfection of my Monas Hieroglyphica. We were supposed to meet the Franks on Saint John’s Eve.”
Innocently I asked: “Saint John’s Eve by their reckoning or by ours?”
Dee slapped himself on the brow, spewing out horrible curses. “O,” he said, “from what power hast thou this powerful might?” The pale William made a note of the sentence, the cowardly plagiarist. Dee feverishly consulted lunar tables and almanacs. “’Sblood! ’Swounds! How could I have been such a dolt?” He insulted Nunes and Spenser. “Do I have to think of everything? Cosmographer, my foot!” he screamed at Nunes. And then: “Amanasiel Zorobabel!” And Nunes was struck in the stomach as if by an invisible ram; he blanched, drew back a few steps, and slumped to the ground.
“Fool,” Dee said to him.
Spenser was pale. He said, with some effort: “We can cast some bait. I am finishing a poem. An allegory about the queen of the fairies. What if I put in a knight of the Red Cross? The real Templars will recognize themselves, will understand that we know, will get in touch with us….”
“I know you,” Dee said. “Before you finish your poem and people find out about it, a lustrum will pass, maybe more. Still, the bait idea isn’t bad.”
“Why not communicate with them through your angels, Doctor?” I asked.
“Fool,” he said to me. “Haven’t you read Trithemius? The angels of the addressee intervene only to clarify a message if one is received. My angels are not couriers on horseback. The French are lost. But I have a plan. I know how to find some of the German line. I must go to Prague.”
We heard a noise, a heavy damask curtain was raised, we glimpsed a diaphanous hand, then She appeared, the Haughty Virgin.
“Your Majesty,” we said, kneeling.
“Dee,” she said, “I know everything. Do not think my ancestors saved the knights in order to grant them dominion over the world. I demand, you hear me, I demand that the secret be the property of the Crown only.”
“Your Majesty, I want the secret at all costs, and I want it for the Crown. But I must find the other possessors; it is the shortest way. When they have foolishly confided in me what they know, it will not be hard to eliminate them. Whether with a dagger or with arsenic water.”
On the face of the Virgin Queen a ghastly smile appeared. “Very well then, my good Dee,” she said. “I do not ask much, only Total Power. For you, if you succeed, the garter. For you, William”—and she addressed the little parasite with lewd sweetness—“another garter, and another golden fleece. Follow me.”
I murmured into William’s ear: “I perforce am thine, and all that is in me….” William rewarded me with a look of unctuous gratitude and followed the queen, disappearing beyond the curtain. Je dens la reine!
I was with Dr. Dee in the Golden City. We went along narrow and evil-smelling passageways not far from the cemetery of the Jews, and Dee told me to be careful. “If the news of the failed encounter has spread,” he said, “the other groups will even now be acting on their own. I fear the Jews; the Jerusalemites have too many agents here in Prague….”
It was evening. The snow glistened, bluish. At the dark entrance to the Jewish quarter clustered the little stands of the Christmas market, and in their midst, decked in red cloth, was the obscene stage of a puppet theater lit by smoky torches. We passed beneath an arch of dressed stone, near a bronze fountain from whose grille long icicles hung, and there another passage opened. On old doors, gilded lion’s heads sank their teeth into bronze rings.
A slight shudder ran along the walls, inexplicable sounds came from the low roofs, rattlings from the drainpipes. The houses betrayed a ghostly life of their own, a hidden life….An old usurer,
