He has been allowed to accompany us down into Doctor Hajek’s cellar. –
The seance begins in the gloomy cellar. All is just as it was the previous time. Only Jane is missing. I feel as if I am suffocating, so tightly does expectation constrict my throat. Now the Angel must answer for the woman I sacrificed to it.
Rosenberg is trembling all over; he keeps on mumbling prayers to himself.
Kelley is in his seat. He falls into a trance.
Now he has gone. In his place a green glow announces the arrival of the Angel. Rosenberg prostrates himslf in awe before the vision. I can hear his choking sobs: “I have been found worthy ... I have b-been f-found ... worthy ...”
The sobs become a whimper. The Count lies in the dust, babbling like an old man in second childhood.
The Angel turns its icy eye on me. I want to speak, but my throat is dry. The sight is too much for me. I make a supreme effort; I pull all my strength together – once – and again – and again – – in vain! The stony stare paralyses me, paralyses me completely.
From an immense distance the Angel speaks to me:
“Thy presence is not welcome to me, John Dee. It is not wise to kick against the pricks, not God-fearing to set thy face against the trials. How shall the holy work of salvation be performed if the apprentice cannot free his heart of unholiness? The key and the Stone are won by obedience alone! Disobedience brings waiting, banishment. Attend my will in Mortlake, John Dee!”
The signs of the zodiac in the sky? What can they signify? A turning wheel? Ah, I understand: years and years and years that slip by: time, time. Then desolate, burnt-out ruins all around.
I am walking through blackened walls, with rotten tapestries flapping in the wind. My foot stumbles over long-lost thresholds without me, the former carefree lord of the castle, being able to tell into which room they have led me. And I cannot say that I walk; I shuffle, dragging tired, tired feet.
I clamber up a half-burnt wooden staircase. Splinters and rusty nails tear at my threadbare coat. I enter a musty room – the laboratory where once I made gold! The floor is made of worn-out bricks packed together, ends uppermost. In one corner is a stove on which sits a bowl my dogs used to drink out of; there is a little pool of milk at the bottom and a crust of dry bread next to it. The room is protected from the open sky by a sloping roof of bare planks; the cold autumn wind whimpers through the gaps. This is Mortlake Castle which burned behind me when I left for Prague and Emperor Rudolf five years ago.
The old laboratory is the best-preserved room within the walls. With my own hands I have made it into a rough and ready shelter that I share with the owls and bats.
I see myself: completely neglected, a tangle of snow-white hair, a tangled silver beard sprouting from my nostrils and ears.
A ruin of a house and a ruin of a man.
No crown of England, no throne of Greenland – no Queen at my side and no crystal shining over my head. My one happiness is to know that my son, Arthur, is safe with relatives of my dead wife, far away in Scotland. – I have been obedient to the Angel of the West Window, obedient to his command and obedient to his sentence – – – of banishment?
I am freezing, even though my friend Price has brought blankets to wrap me in. It is the cold of old age within me. And always deep within my decaying body there is a burrowing pain, something gnawing at my vitals.
Price bends over me, listening at my back with his doctor’s trained ear. He murmurs:
“Healthy. Sweet breath. Bodily fluids well balanced. A heart of iron.”
I giggle:
“Yes. A heart of iron.”
And Queen Elizabeth is long since dead! The charming, courageous, cutting, seductive, regal, destructive, gracious, ungracious Elizabeth is dead ... dead ... long since dead. She left no message for me, sent me no message where I should seek her. No sign that she sees me. I sit in my chair at the brick stove under the deal roof, listening to the crump of the mass of snow as it slips to the ground and cocooning myself in the past.
Price appears at the ladder, old Talbot Price, my doctor and my last friend. I talk to him about Queen Elizabeth. Only of Elizabeth ...
After a lot of hesitation he tells me a strange story. He was called to her sick-bed as she lay dying. She insisted on having the Windsor country doctor about her; in the past he had given her much good advice. He was alone at her bedside one night. She was feverish, her mind wandering. She talked of her departure for another land. For a land across the sea where her bridegroom lived, the bridegroom who had been waiting for her all her life: “There, where stands the castle with the fountain and the water of eternal life!” There she would go and there she would live in the sweet-scented garden and wait for her bridegroom. The waiting would never seem too long. There neither age nor death could harm her. For there was the fountain with the water of life; she would drink of it, the water would keep her young – young as she had never been since the days of King Edward. And there she would be queen in the gardens of the blest until the gardener gave the sign to the Bridegroom to come and take her from the enchanted castle of patient
