Somnium Read online

  Cynthia, when I asked this afternoon, was prompt enough to provide me with a further bottle of ink, from out the hotel’s stores; and told me if I wished for any other thing she’d have it brought from Woolwich. She asked me of my writing; I blushed and told her I had barely started, had no pages yet to show to anyone at all. She looked so disappointed I almost said I had.

  And there’s a thing. If I was writing sat at home, I’d show my work to Liz, the queen of heart and household; I never thought to have an audience here. But having someone here to ‘write for’, close at hand; it could be good, to make me work the harder.

  But this is all of dreams and fancies. She’d hardly have the time; and surely I’ve misread her interest.

  But Somnium itself is all of dreams and fancies. So let’s pretend my audience has doubled: my Liz at home and Cynthia here. And now to write, for both these darling ladies, my most embroidered prose…

  Maroon the hose Lee wore when next he came to Somnium’s Queen, with deep blue velvet doublet, sewn with rows of seed-pearls and slashed to show a scarlet lining. Soft calfskin boots were on his feet, and lace the simple collar round his neck. Rings were on his fingers, all of silver, and he thought that, even in the court of mighty, fair Elizabeth herself, he never had been dressed the better.

  ‘And are the rooms to your liking, dearest sir?’ she asked, when he was brought to her again. His answer waited on his eyes, for she had changed as well, and first they needed look their look. Now Queen Diana, still with crescent-brow, was dressed in merest film alone, as evanescent as a dream. He thought of Botticelli or, nearer to his time, of Titian… but there never was a painter here on Earth who could capture any of her loveliness divine.

  ‘I like them much, beloved Queen, and find them quite surprising. I never thought to see a bath like that: a hot pond in the floor, and big enough for seven.’

  ‘For nine,’ she smiled. ‘Hereabouts, we always think by nines. And …?’

  ‘And I had not thought your maids would stay with me, and try their hands at my undressing…’

  ‘And let me guess, my sweetest knight… you sent them all away…’

  ‘My dearest Queen, I did. And would a gentleman do any other?’

  ‘And if, instead of them, it had been I… what then?’

  ‘Sweet Queen,’ he smiled, and looked her in the eye. ‘A lady should not ask.’

  She chuckled then, and bade him take a seat at table.

  ‘And the clothes we had prepared?’ she enquired next. ‘To your taste? A good fit?’

  ‘As good a fit as ever I was measured for, and finer far than any that I wore before. But not, perhaps, as surprising as yours, my Queen, either earlier in the day or now.’

  ‘Ah,’ she grinned, ‘the first I wore in honour of your English sovereign lady, although she never wears the like. Such was the dress of Europe’s first-most queens, in Candian Knossos, Achaean Mycenae, and ancient holy Troy. Such did wondrous Helen wear, to capture Paris’ eye. So she was dressed when Trojan Brutus saw his city burn, and set his sails a-westwards. And so I myself appeared in dream to Brutus too, when he slept upon a doeskin in my temple, on Leogetia in the Mediterranean Sea. He promised, when I told him then of distant Albion’s isle, to worship me all down the ages, but died before I tired of his adoration. His descendants grew forgetful, until your Tudor queen, who comes yet of his blood. And you, I think, if you return to court, may yet remind her still, that the Moon looks down on Albion and, if only for a while, would make a lunar dream of all her world.’

  ‘Then if you honoured my dread and sovereign queen, I thank you for it,’ he replied, a lopside smile upon his lip, ‘though the nature of the honour, I fear, she may have found a little hard to understand.

  ‘And these wisps in which you dress yourself to dine?’

  ‘A little for my comfort,’ she softly laughed, ‘but more to make you welcome, and give pleasure to your eye.’

  ‘Then never was a guest more welcomed or more pleased,’ he told her. ‘And if Helen launched a thousand ships, then a thousand Helens you’d laugh to shame.’

  ‘You’re gallant, my knight, but rather too much merry; for none should laugh at Helen. For Helen, by her beauty and her fate, became much more than human; became a legend, and a dream, and little short of Goddess. Indeed, sometimes I envy her, for being born here in the world of matter, she transformed herself into an idea that now will last for ever; while I was always of the Moon, and of those spheres above… and though I live as long as her, I have not had her triumph.’

  ‘My lady is too modest,’ he assured her, then paused at the entry of her nymphs, bearing cuts of venison, vegetable pies, and strange assorted dainties, as well as fresh baked steaming bread; accompanied all by choice of sack, canary or of Rhenish wine. And while they served, with smiling grace and beauty, Endimion Lee took pause to look around.

  The chamber in which he was entertained was hung about with tapestries, all wove with lovely Diana, deer-hunting in the woods or bathing naked with her nymphs. An oriel window opened on a vista, across a fountain-court all lit up by the Moon, of cupolas of selenite and obelisks of jacinth, pylons tall of chrysoprase and domes of gleaming onyx. And everything else his eyes lit on was all of silver or of gleaming gold.

  ‘Dearest lady,’ he said at last, ‘pray answer me two questions. The first is, how should I address your grace? For I hardly know if you are Queen, or Goddess, or something more than these by far.’

  ‘My knight,’ she smiled, and glanced down at herself. ‘I hardly bothered to collect a dress, so correct address means little more besides. I told you some small while ago that I have many names; I tell you now that I have many titles too. So call me what you will; I doubt not that I’ll like it.’

  ‘And if I called you sweetest heart, or treasure of the world?’

  ‘Why then I’d smile like this, and ask you straight to tell me next about your other question.’

  ‘Then, lady of the lovely eyes, pray tell me… what place is this? And how comes it here on vacant Shooters Hill? And why? And how did I come here? Why have you favoured me with such wondrous sights that take away my breath? And are you really of the Moon? And what purpose, then, in all of this?’

  ‘Sir knight, I think you play the scallywag!’ she laughed. ‘For now you’ve asked me seven questions, at the least, or mayhap eight, or more!’

  ‘Nine,’ he grinned, and nodded her a bow. ‘For, as you see, I treasure up my lady’s words, and try to speak her language when I can.’

  Her laughter tinkling then like tiny golden bells, she raised a glass of clear canary, a-toasting of his wit.

  ‘You and I,’ she told him then, ‘I think will be the dearest friends. For the Moon ever loved the mercurial.’

  ‘And did Mercury ever love the Moon?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘but even Goddesses have their secrets. Yet long ago your ancient namesake loved her; and she came kissing sweetly in the night.’

  ‘Then for the sake of ancient name and long-gone love, I’d hope for nightly kisses sweet.’ And there was yearning in his face, which could not quite be masked.

  ‘For your gallantry,’ she told him then, and slipped a moonstone ring from off her middle finger, brushed it past her lovely lips and proffered it with a smile. He took both ring and hand in his, and lingering kissed them both.

  ‘My lady’s favour, worn with pride,’ he told her then, and slid it home along his little finger. ‘And now I am your champion knight, my lovely queen of all the fairies in the Moon, my lance all ready at your service… my other questions?’

  ‘Your lance? Ah, you’re bold and have a forward wit, Endimion Lee, but now is not the time for tilting at the Moon. Instead …

  ‘Perhaps you’ve read, in histories true and false, of those who’ve journeyed to the Moon. Antoninus Diogenes, and Lucian of Samosata, most honest liars of their times, and many more besides. They’ve come and gone, have they, and haven’t too, and I have loved them with the
same pretended love that they pretended me. Dear Lucian I always thought the better of than most, because he thought the worst of me; and because I always dress to please, he always saw me naked.

  ‘But then you dwellers here below, all strange and too perverse, invented up the church, an institution of the mad, that kept your souls in thrall. And never then was loving eye upon the Moon, no compliments paid to lunar beauty, no passion spent for me, except they called it sin. And all the poetry departed from the world.

  ‘These centuries of the Great Endarkenment passed by, and I grew dull, unloved and unfulfilled. And so, I thought, if merry-minded Lucian, unafraid, could cross the gulf of broad sub-lunar space, then so could I. And so I did, with all my lunar nymphs around me, and if you ask me how we came, then all I’ll say is that I dreamed it so, and so, of course, it was.

  ‘And so I dreamed of Somnium, a palace of the Moon upon the Earth and embassy of yet more spheres above, all made of dream-stuff quite ethereal. And dreamed this just for you, and with you too, for without some Earthly dreamer too, then none of this could be. And this is what you see before you, and me, myself, besides, and if I’m not the total sum of all you’ve ever dreamed, then I shall call you truest liar that ever was, since Lucian walked the Earth.’

  ‘You are indeed the dream of all men’s dreams,’ he told her, gently sighing, as she poured him more canary.

  ‘Oh come now, sweet Endimion Lee, eat supper, drink your wine, and gaze not so distracted quite at all my tempting flesh, your ears blocked by your eyes, for otherwise I’ll tell you naught. Ah, you colour, and you smirk, and I have found you out. But let this pass. Your priests would damn your eyes for sin, but I care not at all. Look all you wish, but listen too, for I’ll say nothing twice.

  ‘Why here? I chose your wooded Shooters Hill because, when looked on from the lofty Moon, it has a crescent shape. And more than this, it is all made of selenite; and more yet still besides, the jasmine grows white-flowered here, and never was more lunar scent than this.

  ‘Yet more, it’s near enough at hand to your sovereign lady queen, at Eltham or at Greenwich, or anywhere round London. And where your queen is, there are poets, playwrights, makers of masques and plotters of fictions, pamphleteers… and, in a word, writers, simultaneous the scum of all the earth, and its very salt besides. For they are mine, and I keep them mused… and in their musings, I am theirs, and they keep me.

  ‘And now, my lusty knight whose lance is mine, I’m sure you’ll tell me next why I chose you to dine with me, and not just any other.’

  ‘I think I can, although your wondrous beauty distracts me all too greatly,’ he shrugged then. ‘And, besides, you know already. Our lady Queen has eyes for no one but Lord Leicester and so neglects those, like myself, who’ve sworn to her the same regard. And yet, upon her next most royal progress, my sovereign honours me by feasting overnight at my decaying manse near Ashford. And so I had a tragical entertainment quite in mind, for my sovereign’s pleasure… where, of old, the Grecian youth Endymion, exiled from court and royal favour, and dying more for love, sleeps the years away in darkling Latmian cave, and dreams the fair reviving kiss of visiting queen Selene. It’s but a little jest, but heartfelt.’

  ‘And so you wrote of Selene, who is Diana, who is me. And thinking, as you did, of me, so you made me think of you. And so we mingled all our dreams, and so I dreamed a coach for you, and so you dreamed yourself inside, and so, of course, the both of us together, we dreamed you here with me, and me with you. And was there anything ever simpler, in all the world below the Moon?’

  ‘I think, perhaps, there was,’ he grinned. ‘But are you really of the Moon?’

  ‘Good knight, I am the Moon.’

  ‘Then to the Moon I raise my glass, more beautiful than any woman in the world… for all the mortal women of the Earth stand far beneath the Moon. And if ever mortal men loved mortal women, then as you are more beautiful than they, then so much more my love for you.’

  ‘You, my sweet Endimion Lee,’ she laughed, ‘are near as silver-tongued as any I have entertained since Samosatan Lucian. The difference, I think, is that all your words are truly meant and come straight from your heart; while roaring Lucian lied his tongue to rot, in hope he could seduce me. Which I prefer, I cannot say, for Lucian made me laugh, but you just make me sigh. I sigh, of course, with the sweetness of all this, and yet, at the same time I have to say, you have not yet imagined all my clothes off.’

  ‘Perhaps I never could,’ he said, ‘or perhaps I never would. For old, bold Lucian, I suspect, for all he saw you naked, probably then gained nothing more. And if he did…’

  ‘He didn’t.’

  ‘But if he had, would he have any more than held you down in bed and triumphed in your body? And is that stud-beast mating, then, the all that there could be, even with she who’s Goddess quite supreme? I think there’s more than this. Your body is too sweet to contemplate, but to love your heart and soul and mind…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It may not make you laugh, my love… but wouldn’t you rather sigh?’

  ‘Ah, now there’s a mystery you might never solve,’ she softly said. ‘To laugh, to sigh. Lost in laughter we forget even our own selves, with all our parts, the miseries and the joys…’

  ‘While melancholy,’ he responded, ‘is the most seductive emotion of them all. And if we could combine the two, and seduce ourselves into forgetting all the world but simplest heart-consuming love …’

  ‘Why, if you remembered naught but love, then I would be forgot!’ she laughed. ‘And what kind of love is that to offer to the Moon?’

  ‘An impossible love,’ he told her, a little flush-faced but raising up his glass unto her honour. ‘For once seen, you never could be forgotten.

  ‘And yet,’ (a sudden mock leer upon his lips, suggesting she was overdressed) ‘you laughed…’

  ‘At your innocence, my knight,’ she told him gently, ‘rather than your wit.’

  ‘And have the innocent, then, no hope at all?’

  ‘The innocent…’ she inclined her head, ‘… the innocent have the most to hope for, because they have so little else.’

  ‘Then perhaps the innocent should not be mocked,’ he smiled, ‘for a life that lacks all hope is hardly life at all.’

  ‘It seems to me, Endimion Lee… and now perhaps I say it with a sigh… that the more you drink, the subtler you become. And now you show me wit in innocence, and how the melancholy laugh… and how a mortal man who seems to speak quite straight can even ’wilder up the ever-changing Goddess of the Moon.’

  ‘Dear divine Diana,’ he soft remarked, ‘far rather would I amuse you than amaze you, although I know them both the same. But perhaps our conversation’s grown too deep for pleasant entertainment.’

  ‘Perhaps it has,’ she grinned. ‘And now we’ve supped in full, will you take my hand, and walk me to the balcony without?’

  ‘Gladly,’ he told her, rising from his seat and offering her a bow. Then hand in hand, they passed through doors of crystal pane and found themselves outside, uncovered to the glowing Moon. And there awaited sweet Diana’s nymphs, with virginals and viols, with tabors, hautboys and with fifes.

  ‘And do you dance the galliard, good knight?’ she asked, with sudden, radiant smile.

  ‘I do indeed,’ he chuckled in reply, ‘though hereabouts we think it, like its name, a little too much “French”.’

  ‘Admit it, though,’ she smirked, ‘the “French” is rather to your taste, I think.’

  ‘Perhaps it is,’ he then confessed, rising on his toes as the nymphs struck up. ‘And never would a man have lovelier partner, more softer or more sweet. And yet… did ever poet think that sweet Diana danced like this?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ then she laughed, and so she led him onward, enormous-eyed and lovely. ‘Yet up there in the Moon, why, dearest sir, we dance no other step…’

  ‘Then let us dance, sweet Goddess, ’til we can dance no more. And then,
with fondest glance, retire…’

  Tuesday, 25th September 1803

  And so last night, as usual, when the sun set and the Moon appeared, full of claret, pipe a-fume, I began my nightly ritual, withdrawn here in my room. I invoke Diana-Selene-Hecate, I offer her my love and ask her for her help. And then I write in Bacchic frenzy ’neath the beaming Moon, barely sane, pen a-dancing, words appearing, sentence after sentence, in my fervid brain, and scribbled, scribbled scrawlish all across the page, with spattered ink and crossing nib, as fast as e’er I can, to get them down before they’re lost. Because they come from Dreamland, and Diana, and from that very Somnium of which I write. And words are in my ears and in my hands, and all my mind is full of sweetest Liz and all her honeyed kisses; who is not here and who I have not got, and only can I summon her with words and metaphors Dianic, and drunkenness, and memories of sparkling eyes (so large and bright), and longing.

  And longing.

  I wonder if I could ever make her understand, but fear I never could, the strangeness of it all: to write. Not to create from nothing, but to open the mind and let the images flood in: from somewhere; from Moonland; from madness; from that same ideal world I see whene’er I look upon my sister’s eyes, so brown, so dark, so large, the perfection of all women’s eyes that ever I have seen; her hair so long, her smile so sweet, her skin so smooth, her flesh so soft. A world, not as it is, nor as it should be, but as it is desired to be.