The Alchemist's Door Read Free Page B

his family as easily as he crushed an insect, and he was powerless to stop it. Worse—it had already happened, had already been set in motion, like a wave building out in the sea. He would find out what it was only when it came to shore, and by then it would be too late. By then his ill fortune would have overtaken him.
    He roused himself to glance at Kelley. The other man’s face looked normal enough, and his voice had not changed; he had not been taken over by the demon this time. Perhaps it was not here. Perhaps they had outrun it. But what if they hadn’t?
    â€œMaster Kelley,” he said. “What did you mean? Do you remember what you said?”
    The confusion cleared slowly from Kelley’s face. “Yes,” he said. He shook himself, like a dog coming out of the water. “It was—it was a small foolish devil, nothing more.”
    Dee spent the night in the bedroom, praying and pacing,
sometimes both at once. Jane slept, her face clear and untroubled. Once in a while he stopped to look at her, as if to remind himself that innocence still existed in the world.
    His conflicting thoughts whirled like a maelstrom. If Kelley had called up the demon then they should flee now, hurry on and hope it would not follow. But this spirit had harmed no one; it was probably not the demon. But it had taunted him maliciously. Would an angel do that? But what if they were not taunts? What if the angel was telling the truth? But if it was telling the truth that meant that his library had been destroyed.
    In the end it was the fact that Kelley’s voice had not changed that decided him. Kelley had not been able to summon the good angels, he thought, but this one had not been the demon he feared. “A very foolish devil,” Dee wrote with relief in his book. Still, he began to record the angels’ speech in Greek to hide their conversations from the malign spirit, though he knew it for a vain hope even as he did it. Angels spoke all the tongues of the world.
    They pushed on, slowed by snow and ice. On Christmas morning they came to Stettin. Dee was never more desirous of going to church, but he saw only a Catholic cathedral, its stained-glass windows lit like a vision from another world.
    He thought long and hard about worshiping there: in England he would be arrested as a heretic if he were found at a Catholic service. But it hadn’t been so long ago that Queen Mary had enforced the Catholic religion, and then everyone had gone to a cathedral like this one. All worship was the same thing, really, he thought suddenly, and then understood to his surprise that he had always thought so, and that it was only away from England that such a foreign idea could become clear.
    He led his family into the cathedral. The old sonorous
Latin phrases sounded like a secret language from his childhood, familiar and mysterious at the same time.
    Laski and his retinue rejoined them at the beginning of January. Heavy snowfall turned the road as white as unmarked paper, and the trees to either side were sere and bare; their branches knocked boldly against the coach like spirits seeking entrance.
    On February third Laski, who was riding on horseback next to Dee’s coach, suddenly called out. “There it is,” he said. “That is my tower, over there. My tower, from my castle.”
    Dee looked out the window, hardly daring to believe it. They had reached their goal, the prince’s estate at Lask.
    He had hoped that Laski would give them rooms on the estate, but instead the prince directed them to lodgings in town. His first sight of the estate was a confusion of outbuildings and people and a great castle on a hill, all of it covered in a fresh dusting of snow.
    A soft dusk had fallen by the time they got to their inn, but enough light remained for Dee to see that it stood near a church. He took that as a good omen. He gave orders for the baggage, helped Jane prepare the children for sleep, and then