She thrust her fists into the pockets of her ancient cardigan, and regarded Pierce with what, unmistakably, was compassion. “Of course we forgive them, we must. As we would forgive our own family. Because, you know, that is what they are."
* * * *
No: he hadn't really sat like Alice between her and her sister, to be pointed on his way; never even left London once he'd come back from Glastonbury. He saw her—he really did see her, round little figure in the lobby of the Warburg Institute, tugging on a mac and hefting a plump belted briefcase while speaking in atrociously accented French to a tall gent who bent to hear. It had to be her. Maybe if she'd been alone he'd have spoken to her—he really did have Barr's regards to deliver—and who knows what might have developed then; but surely the first question she'd have asked him would have been about that albatross around his neck, and he grew shy or sad or ashamed and said nothing, only nodded at her as she nodded inquiringly at him.
He did find, in a tomblike mystic bookstore, a copy of her newest book, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, and bought it, and from out of it she did keep speaking to him, though she would not answer his questions. She said that the Rosicrucian movement arose from what she called “Dee's Bohemian mission"—even though Dee had gone back to England, and was dead some years when the Rosicrucian rumors started to run, still there must have been something. Something that he did or left behind there, something that he saw or learned or preached, something that people remembered. In Kraft's story, whose plot Pierce was following here—which was like trying to get around Lake Superior with the help of a copy of “Hiawatha"—the thing left behind in Prague wasn't a lesson or an achievement but a claim, or a promise: that he could make the Stone for the Emperor Rudolph. That, and the body of Edward Kelley, out of which Dee's gold had come, and his angels, and everything.
Whatever it was, maybe young Frederick had to find it if he was to go on being king, and had reason to think he could. And he never found it. Not in our story of the history of the world.
The frontispiece of her book—which is what started Pierce's mental journey to the suburbs and Dame Frances's villa and the book he imagined to be standing on her bookshelf—was the same picture that in the Dictionary of Deities, Devils, and Dæmons of Mankind had illustrated the entry on the Invisible College. The picture, a surreal wood engraving, came originally, it said here, from a book or tract called Speculum sophicum rhodo-stauroticum. “Speculum sophicum rhodo-stauroticum,” Pierce said aloud, reading this on the Tube, then again out on the street; he would find himself saying these dactyls over to himself aloud or silently all winter as he walked the continent, like someone repeating the name of the thing he's mislaid as he searches for it. Speculum Sophicum Rhodo-staur Oticum. The picture showed—you remember—the Invisible College of the Rose-Cross brothers, a ludicrous high wagon that is a house or mansion, crowded with the Brothers at their work, the house mounted on inadequate wheels but really powered by wide saillike wings: if he'd been asked to draw the thing from memory, Pierce would actually have given it not wings but sails.
As Fellowes Kraft had done, in his last unfinished book. In which this winged wagon appeared as John Dee's own wagon, sailing over high Germany with Dee and his wife and children aboard. And also a werewolf, an angel in a jar, and a fortune in fairy gold.
Rosie—I think the unfinished parts of Kraft's book were going to be about the Rosicrucians, and about a marriage. A prince and a princess. The sites are marked in the guidebook, and I think I know now how to follow them, or at least I can go the same way they went. There is a jukebox in this pub, I wouldn't have thought that was allowed, it's playing a loud country version of “Rose in Spanish Harlem” and I'm not thinking straight. The guidebook will guide me. By the way forget that last card; it was a joke sort of.
The coldest winter since the Little Ice Age of the Jacobean period, said the television mounted above the bar in this actually rather squalid saloon he had wandered into. The queen herself had been stuck in the snow on her way to Scotland, and had to get off her train, and be taken in by her subjects, given warming drink. A gill of Scotch, called whisky, was in the bottom of Pierce's glass; he swallowed it, took out his guidebook, his gloves, and his map of the Underground: down into which he now he must go.
We emerge from Charing Cross Station to view, at the head of Whitehall, the statue of Charles I now so weathered and decayed. Opposite the gate into the Horse Guards Parade stands the magnificent Palladian Banqueting House, designed by Inigo Jones with the ceiling by Rubens (1630), glorifying the House of Stuart and in particular King James I. Today it houses the United Services Museum; visitors may view among other exhibits the skeleton of one of Napoleon's chargers.
Now on either side the broad expanse of Whitehall is lined by the great buildings of government. Once upon a time, one entered upon Whitehall Palace precincts at this point through a magnificent towered gate wrongly called “Holbein's Gate.” Going forward through that gate, you would find yourself walking by a tall brick wall on the left, which was the wall of the old Whitehall Palace but if you stepped backward instead, backward through the Holbein Gate, to pass along that high brick wall, which is now on your right side, then beyond it would lie the Privy Garden, all knots and neat geometries, where the lords and ladies may frequently be seen awhispering; and across from it, the ball courts where court tennis and featherball and on rainy days even bowls are played. Here young Prince Henry fenced and played tennis daylong, and here after a hot sweat on a cool day he contracted his last fever. West of the bowls-house is the cockpit, which is a theatre as well, and adjacent are the Cockpit Lodgings, where Princess Elizabeth, who loves plays and players, awaits her husband to be. On your left will be the shabby and inadequate Banqueting House, not yet replaced by Inigo Jones's creation; it has been in use since Cardinal Wolsey's day. Thereby opens the great Court Gate that leads to the Palace proper, where there was wont to be a continual throng, either of Gallants standing to ravish themselves with the sight of Ladies handsome Legs and Insteps as they tooke Coache; Or of the tribe of liveries, by whom you could scarce passe without a jeare or a saucy answer to your question.
Leave the Great Court if you have the entrée and go up the flight of stone stairs to the Guard Chamber, where his Majesties great Beefe-eaters are in attendance, which is nothing but to tell Tales, devoure the beverage, keepe a great fire, and carry up Dishes, wherein their fingers would bee sometimes before they come to the king's Table.
Leaving thence we come out upon the Terrace, a cloister that runs round the open square known as the Preaching Place and connects the Royal Quarters with The Banqueting House, and which is now so rotten and ill repaired that it will collapse in a year and nearly kill the Spanish Ambassador, and where on a December night, a Masque being presented at court, one woman among the rest lost her honesty, for which she was carried to the porters lodge, being surprized at her busines on the top of the Taras.
At Christmas along this Terrace or Taras, in furs and holly crowns, snow hissing in the cressets, the Court passes, newly come out of mourning for Prince Henry. There are to be plays and music, for this is the day of the betrothal of Frederick and Elizabeth, two handsome and personable young people who are actually in love, who fell in love at first sight; theirs will be the preeminent dynastic coupling of Protestant Europe, though it is whisperd hee is much too young and small timbred to undertake such a taske.