Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [196]
Dee wrapped himself in his cloaklike coat, and only his eyes, glistening and malign, could be seen. “Come, Kelley,” he said. “This man is now ours. And you, Khunrath, keep the golem well away from us until our return to London. And then, let all Prague burn as a sole pyre.”
He started to go off. Crawling, Khunrath seized him by the hem of his coat. “One day, perhaps, a man will come to you. He will want to write about you. Be his friend.”
“Give me the Power,” Dee said with an unspeakable expression on his fieshless face, “and his fortune is assured.”
We went out. Over the Atlantic a low-pressure air mass was advancing in an easterly direction toward Russia.
“Let’s go to Moscow,” I said to him.
“No,” he said. “We’re returning to London.”
“To Moscow, to Moscow,” I murmured crazily. You knew very well, Kelley, that you would never go there. The Tower awaited you.
* * *
Back in London, Dee said, “They’re trying to reach the solution before we do. Kelley, you must write something for William....something diabolically insinuating about them.”
Belly of the demon, I did it, but William ruined the text, shifting everything from Prague to Venice. Dee flew into a rage. But the pale, shifty William felt protected by his royal concubine. And still he wasn’t satisfied. As I handed over to him, one by one, his finest sonnets, he asked me, with shameless eyes, about Her, about You, my Dark Lady. How horrible to hear your name on that mummer’s lips! (I didn’t know that he, his soul damned to duplicity and to the vicarious, was seeking her for Bacon.) “Enough,” I said to him. “I’m tired of building your glory in the shadows. Write for yourself.”
“I can’t,” he answered with the gaze of one who has seen a lemure. “He won’t let me.”
“Who? Dee?”
“No, Verulam. Don’t you know he’s now the one in charge? He’s forcing me to write works that later he’ll claim as his own. You understand, Kelley? I’m the true Bacon, and posterity will never know. Oh, parasite! How I hate that firebrand of hell!”
“Bacon’s a pig, but he has talent,” I said. “Why doesn’t he write his own stuff?”
He didn’t have the time. We realized this only years later, when Germany was invaded by the Rosy Cross madness. Then, from scattered references, certain phrases, putting two and two together, I saw that the author of the Rosicrucian manifestoes was really he. He wrote under the pseudonym of Johann Valentin Andreae!
Now, in the darkness of this cell where I languish, more clearheaded than Don Isidro Parodi, I know for whom Andreae was writing. I was told by Soapes, my companion in imprisonment, a former Portuguese Templar. Andreae was writing a novel of chivalry for a Spaniard, who was languishing meanwhile in another prison. I don’t know why, but this project served the infamous Bacon, who wanted to go down in history as the secret author of the adventures of the knight of La Man-cha. Bacon asked Andreae to pen for him, in secret, a novel whose hidden author he would then pretend to be, enjoying in the shadows (but why? why?) another man’s triumph.
But I digress. I am cold in this dungeon and my thumb hurts. I am writing, in the dim light of a dying lamp, the last works that will pass under William’s name.
Dr. Dee died, murmuring, “Light, more light!” and asking for a toothpick. Then he said, “Qualis Artifex Pereo!” It was Bacon who had him killed. Before the queen died, for years unhinged of mind and heart, Verulam managed to seduce her. Her features then were changed; she was reduced to the condition of a skeleton. Her food was limited to a little white roll and some soup of chicory greens. At her side she kept a sword, and in moments of wrath she would thrust it violently into the curtains and arras that covered the walls of her refuge. (And what if there were someone behind there, listening? How now! A rat? Good idea, old Kelley, must make note of it.) With the poor woman in this condition, it was easy for Bacon to make her believe he was William, her bastard—presenting himself at her knees, she being now blind, covered in a sheep