Mortlake is the site of the novel’s meetings between Edward Kelley and John Dee, linking a private bargain over literary authorship to Dee’s grander claims about a cosmic Templar conspiracy. In Dee’s house, maps and concealed manuscripts make Mortlake both a place of intellectual exchange and a threshold to the Plan’s secret history.

Dee’s House and Its Objects

Kelley visits Dee at Mortlake and finds him examining a map. Dee appears evasive, his shrewd eyes glinting and one bony hand stroking his goatee. The scene establishes the house as a place where knowledge is guarded as carefully as it is displayed: Dee shows Kelley a manuscript said to be by Roger Bacon, lent by Emperor Rudolf, then hides it beneath a pile of yellowed pages when Kelley glimpses writing in a secret alphabet.

The map and manuscript are not merely scholarly furnishings. They make Dee’s study a material setting for the novel’s recurring entanglement of research and secrecy. Dee’s advice that Kelley visit Prague, where he might find something life-changing, extends the scene outward, while the concealed writing keeps the promised knowledge tantalizingly out of reach.

A Bargain over Authorship

Mortlake is also where Dee offers Kelley a covert role in literary production. Having seen Kelley’s work, including poems about the Dark Lady and a tragic sketch about Seven Seas Jim, Dee tells him that a young man of remarkable parentage has little talent but can be helped toward fame. Kelley is to write in that young man’s place, living in the shadow of another’s glory; only Dee and Kelley will know whose work it is.

The bargain turns Mortlake into the origin point of a prolonged concealment. Kelley says that for years he produced work for the queen and England under the name of the pale young man, an arrangement that divides literary labor from public recognition. The scene thus gives Dee’s household a second kind of secret: alongside hidden manuscripts and coded plans, it shelters an authorship whose true source is deliberately erased.

The Cosmic Plot and the Sealed Documents

Later, during a summer when Kelley is seized by abstract rages, Dee summons him back to Mortlake. William, Edmund Spenser, and Francis Bacon are present. Dee singles out Bacon’s lively hazel eye as that of a viper before describing a proposed meeting with the Frankish wing of the Templars in Paris. The purpose is to join two parts of the same map, making the map motif from Kelley’s earlier visit part of the larger conspiracy narrative.

Dee assigns Kelley and Bacon documents that they swear to open only if Dee and Spenser fail to return. The instruction turns Mortlake from a place of disclosure into a place of deferred knowledge: the documents are entrusted to Kelley, but their contents remain conditional on an outcome that does not occur. Dee and Spenser return, exchanging insults, and Dee insists that the Plan is mathematical and possesses the astral perfection of his Monas Hieroglyphica. Their failure to meet the Franks on Saint John’s Eve exposes a mismatch in calendrical reckoning, which Kelley identifies by asking whether the date was calculated according to the Franks’ calendar or their own.

Narrative Significance

Across these visits, Mortlake gathers the novel’s central tensions into one domestic setting: expertise and concealment, authorship and credit, elaborate design and practical miscoordination. Dee’s maps, coded manuscript, and sealed documents promise access to a hidden order, but the failed Paris meeting reveals how easily a supposedly perfect Plan can founder on a difference as mundane as how a date is reckoned.

The house also links Kelley’s personal history to the conspiracy’s larger machinery. It is where he accepts a life of uncredited writing and where he is later made custodian of documents connected with Dee’s Templar scheme. Mortlake therefore matters not as a backdrop alone, but as the place where private complicity and public legend begin to overlap.