A tall man, slender and handsome, with a fair face and a tapering beard, appears in a pale artist’s robe with wide hanging sleeves at the water’s edge. He is followed by his wife and servants and a tangle of children, who are scurrying across the garden and down between the houses and outbuildings toward the embankment steps. He has been hoping that the royal barge would stop on its return journey from Oxford to London. The fanfare of the royal trumpeters announces the arrival of his Royal Highness, Lord Albert Laski, Palatine of Sieradz, with his charismatic friend and pupil, the courtier Sir Philip Sidney, and their other companions. His hopes are realized.

John Dee has been alert to the great debates that have been taking place at Oxford over the past few days. Rumors of them have been swirling down the river with the current. Now, Dr. Dee is curious to meet the infamous Italian monk, Giordano Bruno, who has thrown the university into turmoil by propounding a series of scientific and philosophical theses that Dee believes are beyond the area of understanding—and therefore acceptability—of the conservative university fathers whom Bruno has called “pedants.” “A juggler,” they have called Bruno in their turn; but sterner charges of heresy and blasphemy are also being leveled against the man. He has ideas about the immortality of the soul and the doctrine of reincarnation, as well as talk of other solar systems and the suns—many suns—being self-luminous, the planets merely a reflection of that light. Copernicus’s theory is heliocentric—the sun at the center of all; Bruno talks of a theocentric universe—God at the center of all. Dee has been taken with his ideas: that we should look for God in Nature, in the light of the Sun, in the beauty of all that springs from the earth. “We ourselves,” he has said recently to friends, “and the things we call our own, come, vanish, and return again.” It is a powerful and compelling idea—a little strange, perhaps? And yet, from what Dee can gather, Bruno’s work is also closely within the area of his own study, which he wants to explore further.

“Great Prince, you are come to do me honor, for which God be praised.” Dee’s bow is deep and elegant before the velvet-clad man. “Lords and gentlemen, you are welcome to my cottage and my house of books.” He addresses now particularly the arresting young courtier, who bows gracefully in his turn, then clasps his own hands very warmly to those of his host and longtime tutor in a less formal greeting. The two men turn briefly to look out across the Thames.

Dr. Dee now studies the small, dark man from Naples. Unconcerned with social courtesies, however, and much preoccupied with the river itself, the Italian asks Dee simply: “You have just seen? The dark beauty?”