Again the desolate room. I am alone. Price is not with me any more; is it days or weeks since he was here?
I sit facing the stove and poke the dead ashes with trembling hand. Twinkling sunbeams slant through the gaps between the planks of my roof. Has the snow gone? It is all one to me.
Kelley suddenly comes to mind. The only thing I know of him is that he met a gruesome end in Prague – or was that only a rumour? It is all one to me.
What was that? A noise on the rotten staircase? I turn my head slowly: laboriously, panting at every step, someone is clawing his way up the stairs. What is it that makes me think of the cavernous cellar with the iron ladder in Doctor Hajek’s house in Prague? It was just the way that I climbed from the depths, feeling with my feet for every rung, my knees trembling because Jane ... And at the top, above the void – Kelley.
There! There: Edward Kelley, as large as life; his head gradually appears at the stairhead, then his chest, his legs; he sways as he stands leaning against the doorpost – no, he isn’t standing; I look more closely: he is hovering, perhaps a hand’s breadth, above the floor. He couldn’t stand if he wanted to, both his legs are broken, broken several times at the thigh and shin. Here and there the bones poke out through the mud-covered trousers of finest cloth like bloody skewers.
He is still richly clad, the man with the cut-off ears. But his face is ravaged and his courtier’s garments are in tatters. – The man is dead. Blank eyes stare at me, blue lips move soundlessly. My heart beats calmly. The deep calm of my senses is undisturbed. I watch Kelley ... Then:
Images, like coloured scraps of wind-tossed mist. They gradually come into focus: a forest, the Bohemian forest. Above the tree-tops a tower with the Habsburg double eagle as a black weather-cock on the roof: Karlštejn. High in the donjon tower which is built against the smooth-ribbed rock face a cell window has been forced open. A human body is clinging to the precipitous rock like a tiny black spider, scraping and fingering its way down, its life hanging from a thin thread ... slowly, slowly it descends the weak rope attached to the mullion ... pity the poor insect trying to get down there! Now it is swinging free in the air, for the wall curves gently inwards; the man who built these cells thought of every possibility; there is no escape, poor human spider on your thin thread. The man spins round in the air as he tries to climb back up. Then: a flurry in the window frame, the curling drop of the rope, a scarcely perceptible impact. The pale visitor on my threshold gives a spectral groan, as if he has to go through the moment of falling again and again, of falling into the green depths from Karlštejn, the fortress of a capricious emperor. I see how Kelley, the ghost on my threshold, keeps trying in vain to speak to me. His tongue has gone, decayed in the earth. He raises his hands beseechingly. I feel that he wants to warn me. What of? What is there left for me to fear?! Kelley’s efforts are futile. His eyelids begin to tremble and close. The phantom loses all appearance of life and slowly pales into the empty air.
It is summer in my ruined castle in Mortlake. Impossible to say how many years have passed since my return from exile. Yes, from exile! For the exile in Mortlake to which the Green Angel condemned me – I am beginning to smile to myself at the dark orders of the Angel – exile here is really a homecoming! Here is the maternal ground – oh, had I never left it – from which my worn-out body draws healing and strength. Strength which may yet help me to find the way to myself. Here my foot treads in the footprints of my Queen; here the evening breezes over Mortlake are scented with the breath of the high hopes of youth. Here is the tomb of my ruined life, but here too is the place of my resurrection, however long it may be in coming. I sit day after day at my cold hearth and wait. There is nothing left to do, for Elizabeth has reached “Greenland” and nothing now can take her from me, no pressing affairs of state, no wild chase after the illusions of vanity.
Another noise on the stairs! A royal messenger stands before me. After he has looked round in some surprise, he gives an extremely stiff bow:
“Is this Mortlake Castle?”
“It is, my friend.”
“And I am speaking to Doctor Dee, Lord of the Manor of Gladhill.”
“You are, my friend.”
It is grotesque how pained the courier manages to look. The fool can only recognise an English gentleman if he is dressed in silk and satins. Clothes do not make the gentleman, nor rags the beggar.
The messenger hastily hands over the sealed packet, bows stiffly with all the grace of a puppet without joints and scurries back down the rickety stairs that lead to my “audience chamber”.
In my hands is a packet sealed with the arms of Count Rosenberg, Lord High Constable of Prague. When I open it the miserable belongings of the late, unlamented Kelley roll to the floor; there is also a smaller bundle with the Emperor’s seal.
The black and yellow ribbon is well tied; tear at it as I might, it refuses to undo. Have I no knife on me? Instinctively my hand goes to my left side; where is my paper knife? The place where I used to carry the dagger, the heirloom of the Dee family, is empty. – Now I remember that the ghostly phantom of Elizabeth took
