A light snow lay on the roads and cottages when Hugh O’Neill and Philip Sidney, Sir Henry’s son, went from Penshurst, the Sidney house in Kent, up to Mortlake to visit John Dee. There was a jouncing, canopied cart filled with rugs and cushions but the boys preferred to ride with the attendants, until the cold pinched them too deeply through the fine thin gloves and hose they wore. Hugh, careful now in matters of dress, would not have said that his English clothes were useless for keeping out cold compared to a shaggy Waterford mantle with a hood; but he seemed to be always cold and comfortless, somehow naked, in breeches and short cloaks.
Philip, rubbing his hands, his narrow blue-clad buttocks clenched, dismounted and threw his reins to the attendant. When Hugh had climbed in, they pulled shut the curtains and huddled together under the rugs, each laughing at the other’s shivers. They talked of the Doctor, as they called Dee, with whom Philip was already studying Latin and Greek and mathematics—Hugh, though the older of the two, had had no lessons as yet, though they’d been promised him. They talked of what they would do when they were grown up and were knights, reweaving with themselves as the heroes the stories of Arthur and Guy of Warwick and the rest. When the two of them played at heroes on their ponies in the fields of Penshurst, Hugh could never bully Philip into taking the lesser part: I will be a wandering knight, and you must be my esquire. Philip Sidney knew the tales, and he knew (almost before he knew anything else of the world) that the son of an Irish chieftain could not have ascendancy even in play over the son of an English knight.
But whenever Philip had Hugh at stick-swordspoint in a combat, utterly defeated, Hugh would leap up and summon from the hills and forests a sudden host of helpers who slew Philip’s merely mortal companions. Or he postulated a crow who was a great princess he had long ago aided, whose feet he could grasp and be carried to safety, or an oak tree that would open and hide him away.
It wasn’t fair, Philip would cry, these sudden hosts that Hugh sang forth in harsh unmusical Irish. They didn’t fit any rules, they had nothing to do with the triumph of good knights over evil ones, and why anyway did they only help Hugh?
“Because my family once did them a great service,” Hugh said to Philip in the rocking wagon. The matter was never going to be resolved.
“Suppose my family had.”
“Guy of Warwick hasn’t any family.”
“I say now that he does, and so he does.”
“And there aren’t … fairy-folk in England.” That term carefully chosen.
“For sure there are.”
“No there are not, and if there were how could you summon them? Do you think they understand English at all?”
“I will summon them in Latin. Veni, venite, spiritus sylvani, dives fluminarum…”
Hugh kicked at the covers and at Philip, laughing. Latin!
Once, they’d taken the issue to the wisest man they knew, excepting Doctor Dee himself, whom they didn’t dare to ask: Buckle, the Penshurst gamekeeper.
“There was fairies here,” he said to them. His enormous gnarled hands honed a long knife back and forth, back and forth on a whetstone. “But that was before King Harry’s time, when I was a boy and said the Ave-Mary.”
“See there!” said Philip.
“Gone,” said Hugh.
“My grandam saw them,” said Buckle. “Saw one sucking on the goat’s pap like any kid, and so the goat were dry when she came to milk it. But not now in this new age.” Back and forth went the blade, and Buckle tested it on the dark and ridgy pad of his thumb.
“Where did they go?” Philip asked.
“Away,” Buckle said. “Gone away with the friars and the Mass and the Holy Blood of Hailes.”
“But where?” Hugh said.
A smile altered all the deep crags and lines of Buckle’s face. “Tell me,” he said, “young master, where your lap goes when you stand up.”
Doctor Dee’s wife, Jane, gave the boys a posset of ale and hot milk to warm them, and when they had drunk it the Doctor offered them a choice: they might read in whatever books of his they liked, or work with his mathematical tools and study his maps, which he had unrolled on a long table, with compass and square laid on them. Philip chose a book, a rhymed romance that Doctor Dee chuckled at; the boy nested himself in cushions, opened his book, and was soon asleep like a mouse in cotton-wool, Jane Dee said. Hugh bent over the maps with the Doctor, whose round spectacles enlarged his eyes weirdly, his long beard nearly trailing across the sheets.
What Hugh had first to learn was that the maps showed the world not as a man walking in it sees it, but as a bird flying high over it. High, high: Doctor Dee showed him on a map of England the length of the journey from Penshurst to Mortlake, and it was no longer than the joint of his thumb. And then England and Ireland too grew small and insignificant when Doctor Dee unrolled a map of the whole wide world. Or half of it: the world, he told Hugh, is round as a ball, and this was a picture of but one half. A ball! Hung by God in the middle of the firmament, the great stars going around it in their spheres and the fixed stars in theirs. The world did have another side.
“This,” the Doctor said, “is the Irish island, across St. George’s Channel. Birds may fly across from there to here in the half-part of a day.”
Hugh thought: the children of Lir.
“All these lands of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland”—his long finger showed them—“are the estate of the British Crown, of our Imperial Queen, whose sworn servant you are.” He smiled warmly, looking down upon Hugh.
“So also am I,” said Philip, who’d awakened and come behind them.
“And so you are.” He turned again to his maps. “But look you. It is not only these Isles Britannicæ that belong to her. In right, these lands to the North, of the Danes and the Norwayans, they are hers too, by virtue of their old Kings her ancestors—though it were inadvisable to lay claim to them now. And farther too, beyond the ocean sea.”
He began to tell them of lands far to the west, of Estotiland and Grœnland, of Atlantis. He talked of King Malgo and King Arthur, of Lord Madoc and Saint Brendan the Great; of Sebastian Caboto and John Caboto, who reached the shores of Atlantis almost before Columbus sailed. They, and others after, had set foot upon those lands and claimed them for kings from whom Elizabeth descended; and so they adhere to the British Crown. And to resume them under her rule the Queen need ask no leave of Spaniard or of Portingale.
“I will find new lands too, for the Queen,” Philip said. “And you shall come too, to guide me. And Hugh shall be my esquire!”
Hugh O’Neill was silent, thinking: the kings of Ireland did not yield their lands to the English. The Irish lands were held by other kings, and other peoples altogether, from a time before time. And if a new true king could be crowned at Tara, that king would win those lands again.
It was time now for the boys to return to Kent. Outside, the serving-men could be heard mounting up, their spurs and trappings jingling.
“Now give my love and duty to your father,” Doctor Dee said to Philip, “and take this gift from me, to guide you when you are grown, and set out upon those adventures you seek.” He took from his table a small book, unbound and sewn with heavy thread. It was not printed but written in the Doctor’s own fine hand, and the title said General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation. Philip took it in his hands with a sort of baffled awe, aware of the honor, uncertain of the use; he sat and opened it.
“And for my new friend of Hibernia,” he said. “Come with me.” He took Hugh away to a corner of his astonishingly crowded room, pushed aside a glowing globe of pale brown crystal in a stand, lifted a dish of gems, and with an Ah! he picked up something that Hugh did not at first see.
“This,” Doctor Dee said, “I will give you as my gift, in memorial of this day, if you will but promise me one thing. That you will keep it, always, on your person, and part with it never nor to no one.” Hugh didn’t know what to say to this, but the Doctor went on speaking as though Hugh had indeed promised. “This, young master, is a thing of which there is but one in the world. The uses of it will be borne in upon you when the need for them is great.”
What he then put into Hugh’s hand was an oval of black glass, glass more black than any he had ever seen, black too black to look right at, yet he could see that it reflected back to him his own face, as though he had come upon a stranger in the dark. It was bound in gold, and hung from a gold chain. On the back the surface of the gold was marked with a sign Hugh had never seen before: he touched the engraved lines with a finger.
“Monas hieroglyphica,” said Doctor Dee. He lifted the little obsidian mirror from Hugh’s hand by its brittle chain, hung it around the boy’s neck. When Hugh again looked into the black sheen of it he saw neither himself nor any other thing; but his skin burned and his heart was hot. He looked to the Doctor, who only tucked the thing away within Hugh’s doublet.
When he was at Penshurst again and alone—it was not an easy thing to be alone in the Sidney house, with the lords and ladies and officers of the Queen coming and going, and Philip’s beautiful sister teasing, and the servants passing this way and that—Hugh opened his shirt and took in his fingers the thing the Doctor had given him. The privy (where he sat) was cold and dim. He touched the raised figure in the gold of the back, which looked a little like a crowned mannikin but likely was not, and turned it over. In the mirror was a face, but now not his own; for it wasn’t like looking into a mirror at all, but like looking through a spy-hole into another place, a spy-hole through which someone in that place looked back at him. The person looking at him was the Queen of England.
On the Impregnation of Mirrors was not a book or a treatise or a Work; it wouldn’t survive the wandering life that John Dee was to embark upon as the times and the heavens turned. It was just a few sheets, folded octavo and written in the Doctor’s scribble hand, and no one not the Doctor would have been able to practice what it laid out, for certain necessary elements and motions went unwritten except in the Doctor’s breast. Only one mirror of those that he had worked the art upon had succeeded entirely, only one had drawn the lines of time and space together so as to transmit the spirit of the owner to the eye of the possessor.
The making of it began with a paradox. If the impregnation of a mirror required that the one who first looked into it be its owner, then no other could ever have looked into it before, not he who silvered the glass, not she who polished the steel. How could the maker not be the owner? John Dee had seen the solution. There was one perfect mirror that needed no silvering, no polishing: it needed only to be discovered, detected, its smooth side inferred, then taken from the ground and secreted before even the finder’s eye fell upon its face. He knew of many such fragments, taken from the lava fields of Greece or the Turkish lands, first found, as Pliny saith, by the traveller Obsius; his own he’d found on a lesser field, in Scotland. He remembered the cold hill, the fragments sharp as knives; his eyes kept steadily on the fast-flying clouds above while his fingers felt for the perfectest one, pocketing it unlooked-at.
He had placed it in the Queen’s hand himself. Slipping it from where it hid in a purse of kidskin, feeling for its smoother side: which he held up to her face for a long moment, as long a moment as he dared, before giving it to her to examine. She seemed dazzled by it, amazed, though she had seen similar obsidian chips before. None like this one: Doctor Dee had bestirred its latent powers by prayer—and also by means that he had learned from helpers he would not name, not in the hearing of this Court.
And then forever there was the Queen’s face within, and more than her face, her very self: her thought, her command, her power to entrance, how well the Doctor knew it. She had not asked to keep it—the one outcome he had feared. No, she had given it back to him with a gracious nod, and turned to other matters, for it was his. And now it was not his. Having taken its owner’s face and nature, it could be handled, and the Doctor had milled it and framed it in gold and given it to the Irish boy to be sole the receiver of what the Queen, the sole giver, might give.
It may be there are ways.
Doctor Dee at month’s end stood on a Welsh headland from where, on this clear day, the Irish coast could just be seen across St. George’s Channel. The sun was setting behind the inland hills of the other island, making them seem large and near with the golden brightness. There where the sun set, Hugh O’Neill was one day to become a great chief; the Doctor’s informants had let him know of it. In those years to come the little Irish chiefs and the old Irish lords would press Hugh to make a single kingdom out of the island that had never been one before, and to push out the English for good. But Hugh O’Neill—whether he ever came to know it or did not—was as though tethered by a long leash, the one end about his neck, the other held in the Queen’s hand, though she too might never know of it; and the tug of it, of her thought and will and desire and need, would keep the man in check. She could turn to other matters, the greater world, more dangers.
And turn to Doctor Dee himself as well, his needs, his scope.
He turned from the sea. A single cloud like a great beast streaked with blood went away to the north with the wind, changing as it went.