‘Aye, he certainly does that,’ she agreed sadly. ‘Any woman should be glad to have him.’
They had reached the top of the hill. Swaying in his saddle, Fairfax peered down at the village – the mushroom huddle of brown thatched roofs, the square grey church tower with its orbiting black specks of soundless rooks, the silvery glint of the river. He wondered what it might have been like in Morgenstern’s day. Perhaps not so different. He could imagine the same suspicion of outsiders and eagerness to gossip, the same prejudices, superstitions, rumours. Of course, the inhabitants would not have been so isolated then. They would have been able to communicate more easily, and across vast distances, using their strange devices with the symbol of the bitten apple. But would they have had anything wiser to say, or would their local vices merely have been spread more widely? He let his eye wander up from the village and tried to search out the tower on the top of the opposite hillside, but either the density of the trees or the strange configuration of the Devil’s Chair hid it from view.
The narrowness of the path as they descended along the tunnel of trees precluded their riding alongside one another. He invited Lady Durston to go ahead of him. She was much more skilled in handling a horse than he was. From this trailing position he was able to admire the straightness of her back, the set of her shoulders, the way she swayed easily with her mount as if they were conjoined. He had assumed Hancock’s obsession with her was due to her house and her position in society – she had implied as much when he first met her at Lacy’s wake – but now he could see it must arise also from her dauntlessness. For a man such as he, she must present an irresistible challenge.
When they reached the plain and were able to travel beside one another again, he complimented her on her riding. ‘Your skill must have been learned young.’
‘Not at all. We were far too poor to keep a horse. I never so much as sat in a saddle till I was twenty.’
‘Ah, I thought …’ He was unsure how to finish the sentence.
‘That I was born rich? Alas, far from it. My father was a schoolmaster in Dorchester. I have not a drop of noble blood.’
‘Do you still have people there?’
‘No, like you I lost my family to the fever, though I was older – eighteen – and good at my books, so my godmother found me a position as governess in the house of a local widower. Now he was rich – which people, being cruel, maintained always was the reason I married him, but that was not the case at all. And now I can see I have said something even more outrageous.’
‘No.’ He tried to hide his surprise. ‘Why should I be outraged?’
‘Twice married to older men, twice widowed – I know how tongues wag. And now a third wedding in the offing? But if people think I’ve schemed to make myself wealthy … well, let me say it’s a poor job I have made of it. My stepdaughters inherited their father’s house and threw me out with nothing. I fled to Axford to escape their vile chatter and so met Sir Henry, who took pity on me, but then he proved to be ruined. And there is my full life story, all very neat, for use as a parable in your next sermon.’
Throughout this speech she kept glancing over her shoulder, and when she had finished, he turned to see what had been distracting her. There was a rider about half a mile behind them. ‘Is something wrong? Do you recognise him?’ He assumed it was a man, although it could have been a woman.
‘Not at this distance. He must have come from the valley – the road leads nowhere else.’
‘Is he following us?’
‘Let us stop and see if he will pass.’
She pulled up her horse. He did the same. They both turned in their saddles. The mysterious rider also halted. For a minute they waited. It was an unpleasant sensation in that wild and desolate landscape to feel oneself a stranger’s quarry.
Fairfax said, ‘We should continue.’
‘No, wait, look – he’s moving.’
The other rider had turned his horse off the road and up on to the moorland, then began heading away at a right angle, trotting at first before gathering speed to a full gallop. They watched him dwindle until the land dipped behind a tangle of yellow gorse, at which point horse and rider disappeared.
Fairfax said, ‘Maybe he was warier of us than we of him.’
‘Maybe.’
She did not sound convinced. He had to concede it did not seem very likely. They resumed their journey in silence.
After another hour of steady riding beneath a vast sky, the wildness of the moor began to yield to signs of cultivation – vineyards at first, then small farmsteads, allotments, orchards, olive groves, fields with dry-stone walls, fish ponds, cow sheds, henhouses – evidence that people were confident it was safe to move outside the fortified walls of the town now that England had been reunified and pacified under King and Church. The first sign of Axford itself was its church spire, fifteen hundred years old, poking pale and spindly out of the ground like a sapling. They crested a slight rise and the rest of the town arose around it.
Dust hovered over the road ahead. There was a commotion. As they came closer, the cause became clear. The advertised hanging had just taken place on the common. A big crowd, cheerfully sated, was streaming back towards the town’s gate – most of the population, or so it seemed by the time they caught up with it – men and women and a gaggle of excited children, who blocked the road and slowed their progress to a walk. From what he could overhear of their conversations, Fairfax gathered the condemned man had died contemptuous of his fate, as if he were no more’n walking out of one alehouse and into another. His bravado was recalled with admiration. Gave the hangman his watch as payment to do a quick job and said he’d better have it now, for in ten minutes the taking of it would be a crime. In the centre of the field, in full view of the prison, the hooded corpse of Jack Porlock, tomb robber, dangled from the scaffold. A cart was drawn up beside his gently swinging feet, its horse nibbling the grass, waiting to convey his remains to the gibbet.
Fairfax crossed himself and said a prayer for the dead man’s soul, and then for good measure added another for Lady Durston’s protection and his own. If tomb robbing and the looting of antiquities had been made capital offences to deter treasure-hunters, were they not in peril of the same fate? He glanced across at Sarah Durston and wondered if the thought had occurred to her. But she was staring straight ahead and her expression gave no clue to her feelings.
The river ran beneath the town’s western wall and served, for that section of Axford’s perimeter, as a natural moat. The press of the crowd carried them over the drawbridge and through the gate, where at once they were swallowed up in a noisy marketplace, bordered on the right by the prison and on the left by the assize court flying the red cross of England and the yellow dragon of Wessex. The local wine was being sold at a shilling a cup, and all manner of animals – chickens, rabbits, pigeons, piglets, lambs – were strung up dead, some skinned, some not, or caged alive, their terrified squawks and squeals as they anticipated their fate adding sharply to the din.
A man played a jig on the pipes; a girl dressed in a sailor’s outfit danced in spasms, as if having a fit. An aged muzzled bear, with patches of missing fur, was chained to a stake. There was a pillory and a whipping post. A pair of sheriffs in black uniforms and helmets, their belts hung with truncheons and handcuffs, and holding two powerful dogs on short chains, stood talking on the prison steps. Fairfax noticed how they watched as he and Lady Durston rode past, continuing their conversation but obviously interested in the sight of a priest and a well-dressed woman together. It was a relief when they had threaded their way through the last of the stalls, passed out of the market and were on to the main street.
A row of shops fronted by wooden sidewalks – a haberdashery, an ironmonger’s, a butcher’s, a saddle-maker’s, a barber’s – ended in the town’s main square, across which the Corn Exchange and the Swan Inn faced one another. In the centre of the unpaved space a circular stone drinking trough was surrounded by a post-and-rail fence to which hors
es could be tethered while their owners went about their business. It was here that Fairfax and Sarah Durston dismounted and paid a shilling each to the ostler. Lady Durston unstrapped her saddlebag and lifted it down. Fairfax offered to carry it – ‘The sheriffs will be less minded to search the property of a priest’ – but she refused: ‘The risk is mine and I should bear it.’
They joined a queue of about twenty waiting to gain admission to the lecture. Just inside the door, a hefty, handsome dark-haired man of middling years was seated at a little desk, collecting money and issuing tickets. He was evidently surprised to see a priest, although he quickly recovered his composure. Fairfax guessed he must be Quycke, one-time secretary of the Society of Antiquaries and the illustrator of Antiquis Anglia. He placed Fairfax’s pound coin in his cash box and said pleasantly, in an educated voice, ‘Sit wherever pleases you, Father.’
They crossed the vestibule and entered a large modern chamber with a vaulted timbered roof and high windows. Benches had been set out on the flagstone floor and were already mostly filled. At the far end, beneath the town’s coat of arms, was a platform on which stood a trestle table. Lanterns flickered on either side of it. Various bulky objects were covered by a green cloth.
They found a couple of places in the centre of a bench halfway from the front. People shifted apart to accommodate them, and Lady Durston pushed the saddlebag under the bench. Once they were seated, they were pressed together so tightly Fairfax could feel the rhythm of her breathing against his arm. He was conscious of her thigh hard against his and the scent of her skin and hair, perfumed with rose water and jasmine. He looked distractedly around the room. The chamber was full. There must have been more than a hundred in the audience, and he sensed that he and Lady Durston were the objects of some curiosity – the unknown young priest and the vaguely scandalous titled widow of Durston Court.
He felt her body tense. Captain Hancock was moving around the edge of the assembly, searching for somewhere to sit. He glanced over in their direction, staring at them for several moments – a hard look, full of suspicion. When he took his place, he sank from view, and almost immediately the door beside the platform opened and Dr Nicholas Shadwell, the Celebrated Scholar, emerged.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘The Heresy of the Ancient World’
THAT SHADWELL WAS the mourner who had shouted out in church was clear from the moment he opened his mouth. His voice, like his appearance, was peculiarly distinctive – reedy, elderly, old-fashioned, mannered. He was considerably below normal height, his thin frame clad in an eccentric form of evening suit made of shabby black velvet, with a red-dotted handkerchief protruding from the cuff, a brocaded waistcoat, a dark shirt with a matching cravat, and a black velvet cap pulled down low over straggling long grey hair. A pair of small, round mauve-tinted eyeglasses added a sinister final touch. He was some years past sixty. He stood at the front of the platform and spoke without notes, his fingers grasping his lapels, addressing his remarks like a blind man or a visionary to some indeterminate spot above the heads of his audience. He began without preamble.
‘It is our good fortune, my fellow countrymen and women, to live in the Age of the Risen Christ, whose return to Earth eight hundred years ago was foretold in the Book of Revelation. But by the same token, we also live in the Age of the Fallen Man, whose violent expulsion from the blasphemous Paradise he had presumed to create was God’s just punishment for his hubris.’
A woman in the audience cried out, ‘Amen!’
‘Amen indeed, madam,’ responded Shadwell. He began to cough – a dangerous cough, it sounded to Fairfax, of the sort he had heard in many a death chamber. He fumbled for his handkerchief and turned away from his audience until he had recovered. ‘Amen! How evil must have been their world to bring down upon its towers and steeples such a shattering punishment! According to the ancient sources, the population of England in the year before Armageddon was some sixty million. The census that our gracious lord the king has recently commissioned records our present numbers at roughly six million. And this is after years of stability and civil peace, during which the English people have grown steadily in numerical strength. How much lower must our numbers have plunged during what we call the Dark Age – that century when famine, plague and warfare devastated our island, and no one had the will, or even the means, to record it?
‘And this calamity, the immediate cause of which no one understands, was not visited upon England solely. Otherwise we would have been invaded, and either rescued from disaster or made vassals by some foreign power. No, ladies and gentlemen: it seems clear that the whole world was struck by the same blow at the same time. Our government rightly watches the ports and strictly licenses those foreigners allowed to visit here, and places close restrictions on those few of our citizens who travel overseas. But from such enquiries as one is able to make, it appears that the peoples of France and Savoy, of Bavaria and Saxony, of Tuscany and Genoa and Rus, of Africa and China and Japan, of the fifty independent states of the Americas who were once joined in a single country – all the nations of the world suffered the same calamity. The blow – whatever it was and whatever form it took – was at once overwhelming, instantaneous and universal.
‘Therefore, when I speak of “The Heresy of the Ancient World”, I do so not out of any sense of admiration, let alone out of a desire to recreate it.’ He looked directly at Fairfax, the only member of his audience wearing clerical dress, and held out his hand towards him, so that Fairfax felt himself again come under scrutiny from all corners of the hall. ‘As the Church teaches us, any attempt to recreate the ancients’ civilisation would be a grievous sin and an insult to Almighty God that would justly provoke Him to spread the same wrath across the Earth.’ He bowed slightly, and then his gaze switched up to its former fixed trajectory. ‘Rather, the purpose of my life has been to discover what errors brought the ancient world to ruin, with the sole aim of ensuring that we never repeat them. For this worthy – I might say noble – ambition I have suffered greatly.’ He pressed his hand to his breast. His voice trembled. ‘Poison has been whispered into the ears of the powerful by my enemies, and I have endured persecution and harassment such as few men on this island have ever known—’
‘Careful!’ hissed Quycke, but loud enough for all to hear. He had stationed himself next to the platform so that he could watch the audience, who were beginning to shift slightly with boredom at the speaker’s highfalutin language.
Shadwell stopped and peered down at his assistant, then blinked around the assembly through his tiny spectacles as if remembering where he was. Hesitantly, he began again. ‘So what … ah … was the source of their heresy?’
A man behind Fairfax called out, ‘Aye, why don’t ye tell us? That’s what we’ve paid for!’
Some laughed, others shushed him.
‘Yes, sir, that is what I’m about to do, although doubtless you will say I am describing a mythical kingdom. We know from drawings, and from extensive fragments of glass and plastic that have been discovered to the west of Hounslow, and which match those same drawings, that the ancients could fly, although the machines they used have entirely disappeared. We know that they had metal carriages that could move at tremendous speed of their own volition on cushioned wheels without the need for horses – although again these have rusted away entirely and barely a trace of them remains. We know that they had buildings in London, which was their Babylon, that were tall enough to touch the clouds—’
‘Nonsense!’ someone shouted.
‘No, sir, it is not nonsense: their existence is well attested. And we also know that almost every person, including children, was issued with a device that enabled them to see and hear one another, however far apart in the world they might be; that these devices were small enough to be carried in the palm of one’s hand; that they gave instant access to all the knowledge and music and opinions and writings in the world; and that in due course they displaced human memory and reasoning and even nor
mal social intercourse – an enfeebling and narcotic power that some say drove their possessors mad, to the extent that their introduction marked the beginning of the end of advanced civilisation.’
This was too much for many. Exclamations of disbelief erupted around the hall. People swatted their hands at the speaker as if dismissing some bothersome fly.
‘It is true, it is true,’ repeated Shadwell calmly. He waited for them to settle. ‘Allow me to give you two facts that are irrefutable. First, we know that compared to us the ancients were a race of giants, because the skeletons of people who died eight hundred years ago show they were on average a foot taller than ourselves. And second, we know they lived much longer than we do, because tomb inscriptions establish that a lifespan of ninety or even a hundred was not uncommon, whereas today a man is old at fifty. These are facts, ladies and gentlemen: facts, provable by bone and stone.’
The assembly was still again, height and length of life being concepts that everyone could understand.
‘The question is: how were these marvels achieved – the miracle of talking to their loved ones even when they were many miles distant, and performing the work of a hundred men with the press of a lever? These people may have been taller than us, and healthier than us, but they were mortals just as we are. Their brains were of the same size: I doubt they were much cleverer. They ate, they drank, they slept, they reproduced, they dreamed. But clearly they must have possessed some secret we have lost. Somehow or other, in the tumult of its sudden collapse, the vital animating spark of their civilisation was extinguished, and has never been rekindled. I should now like to demonstrate what I believe that animating spark to have been. Ladies and gentlemen, may I ask those beside the windows to assist me by closing the shutters?’ His breath gave out as he finished speaking, and he began to cough again.
Squeezed in the middle of their bench, Fairfax and Sarah Durston were obliged to remain in their places while the room was darkened. As the shutters banged shut, extinguishing the afternoon light one bright oblong at a time, there was an increasing chatter of anticipation. The occupants of the Corn Exchange seemed to be separating themselves from the everyday world and preparing to embark on a voyage to another. Sarah leaned in to Fairfax and whispered, ‘What will he do?’
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