DEE PACKED QUICKLY, MAGDALENA HELPING him. It was only when he finished that he realized he had nowhere to go. He was not welcome in Transylvania or Prague, or even Poland, where Prince Laski had been growing more and more angry at not having been made king.
He felt cursed, condemned to wander the earth with no
rest. Like the Wandering Jew, he thought, and reflected how ironic it was that Loew the Jew was snug at home, surrounded by his family.
“What about Trebona?” Magdalena said.
“What?”
“You can go to Trebona, can’t you? Loew says that Count Vilém and Rudolf are feuding, so Vilém will never tell him where you are. And Vilém’s an alchemist—he’d love to talk to you.”
“You read my mind, didn’t you?” Dee said, smiling wryly. “Very well, I’ll go to Trebona. I might even find Petr, Vilém’s servant. But what about you? You can go back home, if you like.”
“I’m coming with you. I’ll be your servant.”
“Oh, God. Look—you can’t even stay out of trouble for two minutes at a time—”
“You need someone to protect you—”
“I need someone? Who was it who ended up bent over the tub with Erzsébet’s knife at her throat?”
“If it wasn’t for me you would have starved—you couldn’t even find the kitchen by yourself—”
“I’d rather starve than have to worry about you constantly.”
“I’m coming with you. If you don’t let me I’ll just follow you to Trebona.”
Dee sighed. “Very well. But for God’s sake change back into an old woman. I can just imagine the scandal if I showed up with a young girl as my servant.”
Magdalena looked surprised, as though she had forgotten what shape she held. She changed quickly.
“I’m almost getting used to you doing that,” Dee said.
They clattered down the steps of the castle. A guard at the entrance opened the iron gate for them. As they went through Dee saw Marie walking toward the town below them, carrying a large leather bag. He ran to catch up with her.
“Marie,” he called. “Where are you going?”
She looked back at him, her expression fearful. She relaxed when she saw who it was. “Prague,” she said. “I cannot—cannot to stay—”
“Good,” he said. “We’re headed the same way. I’ll see you get there safely.”
He took her bag, and the three of them went into the town and caught a coach heading to Bohemia.
WHEN THE COACH STOPPED AT TREBONA, DEE AND MAGDALENA said farewell to Marie and got out. They looked around them; Count Vilém’s estate was as large as Loew had said. They passed a sawmill, a soapworks, and other outbuildings whose purposes Dee did not understand before they came to the manor house. Winter had come early this year; a chill rain drizzled down as they made their way to the manor house. He shivered and worried about Magdalena, whose response to the cold was to pile on more and more layers of clothing.
The manor was made of gray stone, darker gray where the rain had washed it. The servant who opened the door looked at them doubtfully. Dee supposed he couldn’t blame him; he in his fur coat and Magdalena in her rags must look like beggars or Romanies, the people they had called “minions of the moon” in England. His bags had been scuffed and stained beyond repair by all his traveling.
“I’d like to speak to Count Vilém, please,” Dee said.
“What business do you have with milord?” the servant asked.
“I am—I am an alchemist,” Dee said, and to his surprise he realized that that was almost true. “I come from England. My name is Doctor John Dee.”
“One moment,” the servant said, and closed the door.
“Do you suppose he’s gone to get the guards?” Dee asked.
“Perhaps his orders are to tell Vilém about any alchemists who show up at the door,” Magdalena said.
He wondered how she could be so optimistic, when her entire life had taught her such a vastly different lesson. But just then the door opened. “Count Vilém is expecting you,” the servant said.
He led them through a number of rooms, each large and well-furnished but with none of the clutter or excess of Rudolfs castle. Finally the servant pushed open a door, said “Doctor John Dee,” and motioned them inside.
Count Vilém of Rosenberg sat in a leather chair and indicated a chair opposite him for Dee. He was a large man, with thick white hair and a bristling white mustache; his face was reddened from working outdoors. No one seemed to notice Magdalena; she took a stool against the wall and settled back into the shadows. The servant bowed himself out.
“Doctor John Dee,” Vilém said in German. “You are in Rudolfs service, are you not?”
“No, milord,” Dee said.
“No? That is not what I heard.”
How much should he tell this man? “King Rudolf imprisoned me, milord. I would not tell him the results of—of some of my investigations.”
Vilém smiled. “Good,” he said. “Well, you are welcome here, very welcome. I have a workshop you can use, and a room for yourself and another for your—” He glanced briefly at Magdalena. “—your servant.”
“Thank you, milord. Thank you very much. I must ask a favor of you, though. It would please me if you do not mention to Rudolf that we are here.”
Vilém laughed. “I had not intended to in any case,” he said. “Rudolf and I—well, we play an elaborate game. I pretend to be his loyal courtier, and he pretends to be my gracious king, and each of us searches assiduously for the Philosopher’s
Stone without telling the other of his progress. To be honest, I fear for the kingdom if Rudolf discovers the Stone before I do. As I said, you are very welcome here.”
Count Vilém proved as good as his word. He gave Dee a suite of rooms, a generous allowance, and a fully furnished workshop. Even better, he urged Dee to send for Jane and the children. “There is room here for all of them,” he said.
For the first time since he had set out from England Dee felt able to rest, to take stock. It seemed to him that he could finally take deep breaths, could stop looking over his shoulder at something he felt to be gaining on him. In spite of the winter and the settling snow, it was only now that he felt truly warm.
Jane and the family could not travel through the snow, so Dee celebrated Christmas with Vilém and his wife. Vilém was a learned man with a library to equal Rudolf’s, and they spent many evenings discussing treatises on alchemy and other branches of magic. Polyxena sometimes joined them and showed herself to be almost as well-read as her husband. She was a small woman, with fine features and dark black hair and eyes; she dressed more sedately than Vilém, in the browns and reds fashionable in Spain. Sometimes Magdalena came down from her room and sat quietly in the shadows as they talked.
“So far,” Dee said one evening, “all I’ve learned is that I don’t know anything. I’m beginning to think that all my assumptions are wrong, that the alchemists we’re studying aren’t writing about turning lead into gold but about something else.”
“What, then?” Vilém asked.
“That’s what I don’t know. Something about—about the union of opposites. The books talk of the marriage of mercury and sulphur, but sometimes I think that’s only a code, that they’re hiding something important. That they don’t mean mercury and sulphur at all.”
Other times he talked to Magdalena. She had discovered that Petr worked in the kitchens, and whenever Petr served a dish or cleaned up after a meal Dee studied him surreptitiously, wondering if he was the one they sought.
He asked Magdalena to talk to him as one servant to another, to discover what she could about him. There was little to tell, she reported. He and his wife, a ladies’ maid, lived in the servants’ quarters on the top floor of the house; Magdalena had a room down the hall from them. He kept mostly to himself, but once or twice, the other servants said, he had stepped in to resolve a quarrel, and had gained a reputation for being a fair and honest man.
“You have not been entirely straightforward with me, Doctor Dee,” she said one evening, after she had reported on the latest events in the servants’ quarters.
“What do you mean?”
“When I asked you to teach me magic you said you knew very little. And yet when I hear you talking with the count and countess I see that you are very wise indeed.”
“You seem to know a good deal already. Where did you learn to change shape like that?”
“A friend taught me,” she said. She smiled at some memory. “An Englishman, like you. That is where I first heard of you, and where I learned English. He’s gone back to England, though. When I heard you were in Prague I knew I had to seek you out, to continue my education.”
Dee thought of the few simple magics he could do—moving things, creating light, changing shape. She already knew how to change shape, of course, but should he teach her the other things? He still believed women should not learn magic; he had only to look at Erzsébet to see where that disastrous path led. On the other hand, one of his tricks might save her life some day.
“Why don’t you continue to listen to Count Vilém and me
in the evenings?” he asked, postponing his decision. “You can learn a lot just by hearing us talk.”
“But I need to ask questions as well,” she said. “And you and the high-and-mighty count and countess ignore me whenever I speak.”
“That’s not true, surely,” he said. “I don’t remember you saying anything.”
“That’s just what I mean. I’m unimportant—no one hears anything I say. I’m a woman—”
“Polyxena is a woman—”
“A servant, then. An old servant. No one is interested in talking to me.”
“Well, of course they have to get used to the idea that you know something—”
“You would think they’d be used to it by now,” she said angrily.
In the days that followed she did not come down to join their conversations. But Dee soon had other things to occupy him. The snow and ice on the roads melted, and Jane wrote him that she had booked passage for the family to Trebona.
It had been nearly a year since he had last seen her, and when she and the children came into Vilém’s house he found himself unable to take his eyes off her. The reddish blond hair was thinner and mixed with gray now, and the lines on her face had grown deeper, but he still thought her the most beautiful woman he had even seen. He held her tightly. “I feel as if I’ve come home,” he said softly.
Michael had grown from an infant to a toddler and was beginning to speak a few words. “He speaks Czech, mostly, and German,” Jane said. “So do the other children. I can barely understand them sometimes.”
Jane and the children settled in. Arthur and Katherine ran wild over the estate, climbing trees, fishing in the artificial ponds, helping the huge shaggy white dogs herd the sheep.
Their skin turned a deep nut brown from the sun. Dee worried that they were growing unfit for life in London, if they ever returned to London, and he took time out from his research to tutor them several days a week.
Once or twice Dee heard something clatter to the floor as Katherine passed. There was nothing uncanny about it, he told himself firmly; his daughter was growing, and still clumsy, like all young children.
One day Dee and Jane passed Magdalena in a corridor. “How did she get here?” Jane asked him.
“She followed me to Hungary, actually,” Dee said. He had a brief thought of her as a young woman, but he thrust it away. “She wanted to be my servant.”
“You’re a good man, husband,” Jane said.
“I hope so,” he answered.
In May of 1586 a traveler brought Dee some bad news. King Rudolf had convinced the new pope, Sixtus V, to issue an edict banishing Dee from Prague. Dee had been charged with “necromancy and commerce with Satan.”
“This is not as grave as it appears,” Vilém said. “Rudolf does not know of your presence here—you’re safe as long as you stay on my estate. And we can find ways to persuade Sixtus to rescind his edict.”
“It’s worrisome in one way, though,” Dee said. “I’d hoped Rudolf had forgotten all about us.”
“Perhaps he will, eventually,” Vilém said. “I’ve never known him to keep his mind on one thing for long.” He looked thoughtful. “Except for his grievances against Matthias, of course.”
Dee smiled ruefully. “You don’t comfort me, my friend.”