But I digress. I am cold in this dungeon and my thumb hurts. I am writing, in the dim light of a dying lamp, the last works that will pass under William’s name.
Dr. Dee died, murmuring, “Light, more light!” and asking for a toothpick. Then he said: “Qualis Artifex Pereo!” It was Bacon who had him killed. Before the queen died, for years unhinged of mind and heart, Verulam managed to seduce her. Her features then were changed; she was reduced to the condition of a skeleton. Her food was limited to a little white roll and some soup of chicory greens.
At her side she kept a sword, and in moments of wrath she would thrust it violently into the curtains and arras that covered the walls of her refuge. (And what if there were someone behind there, listening? How now! A rat? Good idea, old Kelley, must make a note of it.) With the poor woman in this condition, it was easy for Bacon to make her believe he was William, her bastard—presenting himself at her knees, she being now blind, covered in a sheep’s skin. The Golden Fleece! They said he was aiming at the throne, but I knew he was after something quite different, control of the Plan. That was when he became Viscount St. Albans. His position strengthened, he eliminated Dee.
The queen is dead, long live the king…. Now, I was an embarrassing witness. He led me into an ambush one night when at last the Dark Lady could be mine and was dancing in my arms with abandon under the influence of a grass capable of producing visions, she, the eternal Sophia, with her wrinkled face like an old nanny goat’s…. He entered with a handful of armed men, made me cover my eyes with a cloth.
I guessed at once: vitriol! And how he laughed. And she! How you laughed, Pinball Lady—and gilded honor shamefully misplaced and maiden virtue rudely strumpeted—while he touched her with his greedy hands and you called him Simon—and kissed his sinister scar…
“To the Tower, to the Tower.” Verulam laughed. Since then, here I lie, with this human wraith who says he is Soapes, and the jailers know me only as Seven Seas Jim. I have studied thoroughly, and with ardent zeal, philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and, unfortunately, also theology. Here I am, poor madman, and I know as much as I did before.
Through a slit of a window I witnessed the royal wedding, the knights with red crosses cantering to the sound of a trumpet. I should have been there playing the trumpet, for Cecilia, but once again the prize had been taken from me. It was William playing. I was writing in the shadows, for him.
“I’ll tell you how to avenge yourself,” Soapes whispered, and that day he revealed to me what he truly is: a Bonapartist abbé buried in this dungeon for centuries.
“Will you get out?” I asked him.
“If…” he began to reply, but then was silent. Striking his spoon on the wall, in a mysterious alphabet that, he confided in me, he had received from Trithemius, he began transmitting messages to the prisoner in the next cell. The count of Monsalvat.
Years have gone by. Soapes never stops striking the wall. Now I know for whom and to what end. His name is Noffo Dei. This Dei (through what mysterious cabala do Dei and Dee sound so alike?), prompted by Soapes, has denounced Bacon. What he said, I do not know, but a few days ago Verulam was imprisoned. Accused of sodomy, because, they said (I tremble at the thought that it may be true), you, the Dark Lady, Black Virgin of Druids and of Templars, are none other … none other than the eternal androgyne created by the knowing hands of … of…?
Now, now I know … of your lover, the Comte de Saint-Germain! But who is Saint-Germain if not Bacon himself? (Soapes knows all sorts of things, this obscure Templar of many lives….)
Verulam has been released from prison, has regained through his magic arts the favor of the monarch. Now, William tells me, he spends his nights along the Thames, in Pilad’s Pub, playing that strange machine invented for him by an Italian from Nola whom he then had burned at the stake in Rome. It is an astral device, which devours small mad spheres that race through infinite worlds in a sparkle of angelic light.
Verulam gives obscene blows of triumphant bestiality with his groin against the frame, miming the events of the celestial orbs in the domain of the decans in order to understand the ultimate secrets of the Great Establishment and the secret of the New Atlantis itself, which he calls Gottlieb’s, parodying the sacred language of the manifestoes attributed to Andreae…. Ah! I cry, now lucidly aware, but too late and in vain, as my heart beats conspicuously beneath the laces of my corset: this is why he took away my trumpet, amulet, talisman, cosmic bond that could command demons. What will he be plotting in the House of Solomon? It’s late, I repeat to myself, by now he has been given too much power.
They say Bacon is dead. Soapes assures me it is not true. No one has seen the body. He is living under a false name with the landgrave of Hesse; he is now initiated into the supreme mysteries and hence immortal, ready to continue his grim battle for the triumph of the Plan—in his name and under his control.
After this alleged death, William came to see me, with his hypocritical smile, which the bars could not hide from me. He asked me why I wrote, in Sonnet in, about a certain dyer. He quoted the verse: “To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand….”
“I never wrote that,” I told him. And it was true…. It’s obvious: Bacon inserted those words before disappearing, to send some sign to those who will then welcome Saint-Germain in one court after another, as an expert in dyes…. I believe that in the future he will try to make people believe he wrote William’s works himself. How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon!
Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget’st so long? I feel weary, sick. William is expecting new material from me for his crude clowneries at the Globe.
Soapes is writing. I look over his shoulder. An incomprehensible message: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s…” He hides the page, looks at me, sees me paler than a ghost, reads Death in my eyes. He whispers to me, “Rest. Never fear. I’ll write for you.”
And so he is doing, mask behind a mask. I slowly fade, and he takes from me even the last light, that of obscurity.
Though his will be good, his spirit and his prophecies are illusions of the Devil…. They are capable of deceiving many curious people and of causing great harm and scandal to the Church of Our Lord God.
—Opinion on Guillaume Postel sent to Ignatius Loyola by the Jesuit fathers Salmeron, Lhoost, and Ugoletto, May 10, 1545
Belbo, detached, told us what he had concocted, but he didn’t read his pages to us and eliminated all personal references. Indeed, he led us to believe that Abulafia had supplied him with the connections. The idea that Bacon was the author of the Rosicrucian manifestoes he had already come upon somewhere or other. But one thing in particular struck me: that Bacon was Viscount St. Albans.
It buzzed in my head; it had something to do with my old thesis. I spent that night digging in my card file.
“Gentlemen,” I said to my accomplices with a certain solemnity the next morning, “we don’t have to invent connections. They exist. When, in 1164, Saint Bernard launched the idea of a council at Troyes to legitimize the Templars, among those charged to organize everything was the prior of Saint Albans. Saint Alban was the first English martyr, who evangelized the British Isles. He lived in Verulamium, which became Bacon’s property. He was a Celt and unquestionably a Druid initiate, like Saint Bernard.”
“That’s not very much,” Belbo said.
“Wait. This prior of Saint Albans was abbot of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, the abbey where the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers was later installed!”
Belbo reacted. “My God!”
“And that’s not all,” I said. “The Conservatoire was conceived as homage to Bacon. On 25 Brumaire of the year 111, the Convention authorized its Comité d’instruction Publique to have the complete works of Bacon printed. And on 18 Vendémiaire of the same year the same Convention had passed a law providing for the construction of a house of arts and trades that would reproduce the House of Solomon as described by Bacon in his New Atlantis, a place where all the inventions of mankind are collected.”
“And so?” Diotallevi asked.
“The Pendulum is in the Conservatoire,” Belbo said. And from Diotallevi’s reaction I realized that Belbo had told him about Foucault’s Pendulum.
“Not so fast,” I said. “The Pendulum was invented and installed only in the last century. We should skip it.”
“Skip it?” Belbo said.
