‘There might.’ He nodded. ‘Most of the ancients’ business was conducted not with coin or even paper but with electric tokens of money sent flying through the air. When the Apocalypse overwhelmed them, their devices failed and their wealth vanished. A man as wise as Morgenstern would have foreseen the danger, and might well have had the prudence to lay down a store of gold – the only safe money since the beginning of time. Might I trouble you for more gin, Captain?’
Hancock leaned over and filled his glass. ‘If the ancients were foolish enough to trade with airy tokens, ’tis no wonder they were ruined.’
‘It both made their vast trade possible and rendered them beggars when it failed. Consider waking up one morning entirely destitute, with skills no longer of value or of any use in the struggle for life! Their world was based upon imagining – mere castles made of vapour. The wind blew; it vanished.’
Fairfax felt obliged to object. ‘Come, Dr Shadwell, it is possible for men and women to live without money.’
‘For us, sir, with our simpler way of life – perhaps. The grass grows. The sheep feed. The loom turns. Captain Hancock takes his cloth to market and exchanges it for food. I share with him my learning and he gives me onion soup. But consider, for example, London – a city that on the eve of the Apocalypse is believed to have boasted a population of some eight million. We know from ancient sources that it had great areas of open spaces – parks and gardens. But none, that we can see, was given over to crops or farm animals. How were those eight million souls to eat? You will recall that in his letter, Morgenstern declares that London existed at any moment only six meals removed from starvation. Every morsel of food had to be imported, and at the same time as their devices failed, the supply of food failed also, for how could it be paid for? Who would move it? Once one thing failed, so did another, and another. Their society became harder to recover with each day that passed. It was like a ship that had slipped its anchor and drifted off, leaving its crew stranded helpless on the shore. And that was when the Great Exodus began – but this was an Exodus without a Moses to lead it.’
Sarah shivered. ‘Eight million starving souls in flight from their homes! It is a most fearful vision you conjure.’
‘It is. Sometimes I wish I had found a less melancholy subject for my life’s study. And yet there is a certain wonder in it – the wonder that we see expressed in the grandeur of their ruins.’ He looked around the table. The heat of the fire and the food in his belly had restored his strength. Plainly he was a man who enjoyed an audience. ‘The things we have observed, my lady! We have seen the great mass graves beside the roads leading out of the city – at Redhill, St Albans, Chertsey, Dartford – where the bones still lie scattered over the fields like stones. We have made copies, Oliver and I, of the writings on the walls of the churches left by those searching for lost relations eight centuries ago – such pitiful messages! – for families lived much apart in those days, and if they were separated at the time the blow fell, and could no longer communicate, how would they have known where to meet again? Those abroad must have vanished for ever. I am sure that no greater calamity has ever happened in the history of the world. It would have been better never to have been born than to have lived through it. Starvation would have taken most. Disease and massacre carried off the best part of the rest.’
Fairfax said, ‘And the cause of the catastrophe? What was that?’
‘None can say for sure. For my part, I believe it was most likely what Morgenstern listed as his fifth conjecture: “A general failure of computer technology due either to cyber warfare, an uncontrollable virus, or solar activity.” Human nature being as it is, warfare is my guess.’
‘And yet the country rose again,’ said Hancock.
‘Indeed, after a long interval, little by little, life picked up. Man is a stubborn, cunning animal. And in this, Father Fairfax, I grant your Church was key, for amid the chaos, if nothing else, almost every village retained its stone-built church. We know from the ancient sources that even in those godless days there were still some thirty-seven thousand churches in England. That was where those who survived the Exodus gathered – at first no doubt for safety; then for fellowship, welfare, schooling. And it was in the churches, a generation or two later, when all who could remember the old way of life were dead, that their descendants found in the Scriptures a simple answer to the question of what had ruined the world. To their still numbed and fearful brains it could only be the Apocalypse – Armageddon, as foretold in the Book of Genesis. On that assumption our present state was founded.’
‘But ye do not believe it?’
‘No, sir. If I cannot say for certain what did cause their world to fail, I can at least state with confidence that the answer must lie in science and nature, and not in the appearance of a beast bearing the number six hundred three score and six! That is a tale maintained by the Church to keep the people tame. In my estimation, half of the bishops do not believe it either – among whom, I might add, I number Bishop Pole.’
Fairfax laughed. ‘Bishop Pole does not believe that God sent the Apocalypse? What evidence do you have for such a charge?’
‘The evidence of my ears, Mr Fairfax!’ Shadwell drank more gin. ‘When the Society of Antiquaries was suppressed and its officers arrested, the bishop visited me in my cell on several occasions. He was most interested in our work. He questioned me with regard to Morgenstern in particular – who he was, what he sought, what might have become of him. He made no attempt to deny the truth of Morgenstern’s letter. Rather the contrary: he took pleasure in speaking frankly to a man who could not escape. He said that the very fact it rang so true meant that all trace of it must be destroyed – that the Church could not allow its teachings to be so baldly contradicted. “The path to Hell begins with too much seeking into the past. The story of the Apocalypse is the locked gate that stands across that path. It can never be allowed to be opened.” Those were his very words. I had five years in prison to remember them.’
Hancock said, ‘I’m surprised he didn’t burn ye as a heretic.’
‘“Burnings make martyrs” – that was another of his sayings. So he merely branded me and burned my books instead, and I was left to languish, forgotten. Oh, he is a most subtle, worldly man, is he not, Father Fairfax?’
Fairfax was almost too stunned to reply. ‘If what you say is true, Dr Shadwell, I am not sure any longer what he is. But worldly, certainly.’
‘And what of you, Mr Quycke?’ asked Sarah, turning to his secretary. ‘Were you imprisoned also?’
‘My part was considered less, your ladyship. I served a year. But the society’s officers were quite wiped out. Poor Mr Berkeley and Colonel Denny both died in prison. And Mr Shirley never recovered from the shock and fell into an acute melancholy.’
‘Now tell us about Morgenstern,’ said Hancock.
Shadwell eyed the table. ‘May I take a little of your capon first, Captain? All this talk has made me hungry.’
There was a lull in the conversation while Hancock carved the two plump birds and piled their plates with meat and pickles. He sent out the maid to fetch more gin. Shadwell ignored the cutlery and tore his share of the carcasses apart with his hands, feeding the pieces into his mouth and gnawing on the bones, looking from side to side occasionally as if he feared his plate might be taken from him – like a man, thought Fairfax, who had been a prisoner for five years. He finished noisily, sucking the grease from each of his fingers in turn, dried himself on his napkin and drank some more gin. Then he sighed and sat back in his chair. ‘That is better.’
‘So,’ said Hancock, resting his hands upon the table. ‘Morgenstern?’
‘I shall tell you all I know, which is little. Of Imperial College – the place from which he wrote his letter – nothing to my knowledge now exists, except a piece of stone tablet on which are carved the names of all those members of the college who were honoured with this Nobel Prize. It must have stood in the hall or some such place. Morgenstern
’s name appears upon it, beneath the word “Physic”. I have not seen the tablet myself, but a friend of mine, now dead, who collected such artefacts sent me a drawing of it. So we may take it he was a scholar of great eminence.
‘We may also hazard a guess as to his age. His daughter, Julia, was wed three years before the Apocalypse. Women of that era married mostly at an advanced age – a time when, for our females, the fertile years are almost past. Thirty was most common. So if we take that as the likeliest possibility, and reckon Morgenstern to have been perhaps thirty himself when his girl was born, we may speculate that he was sixty-three or thereabouts at the time of the calamity. We know of no family except this son-in-law named Singh: England at that time, before the massacres, was full of foreigners. Singh is of Indian extraction. Perhaps there was a grandchild – who can tell? Most likely there was a wife still alive.
‘All else we know is thanks to the efforts of our colleague Mr Thomas Howe, whom Oliver will remember well.’
Quycke nodded. ‘Indeed, I remember Tom Howe keenly.’
Shadwell said, ‘I guess none of the rest of you has heard of Howe’s Corpus Inscriptionum Angliarum?’
They looked at him, uncomprehending.
‘It is as I feared, Oliver – we have fallen among barbarians!’ He allowed himself a smile, and then his face was serious again. ‘Just as I set myself the task of listing every surviving concrete monument, so Mr Howe undertook the transcribing of all the inscriptions made in the course of the Exodus – a labour of Hercules not yet completed at the time of his death. He would travel from church to church, sometimes visiting ten in a day, and copy down all the piteous messages carved therein, and in this way built a mighty catalogue containing upwards of fifty thousand names. The index to this great work made it possible, in rare cases, to follow a person or a family until they vanished. For the first time their stories flickered briefly in the darkness.
‘Morgenstern’s name appeared twice. Once was on the wall of the church of St Peter and St Paul in Thruxton, Hampshire. A message from his niece. The date was a week after the start of the Exodus: “I seek my uncle, Peter Morgenstern. I shall return here every day at noon.” Something of that sort – I cannot recall the words exactly. Can you, Olly?’ Quycke shook his head. ‘So: nothing more.
‘The second time was further north, in Pewsey, in the nave of St John the Baptist. The name of the writer cannot be made out, but that of Morgenstern is plain enough. The hand differs from that of the niece, so the seeker was someone other. The message similar, the date the same.’
Hancock, who had been listening eagerly, looked disappointed. ‘That does not tell us much, Mr Shadwell.’
‘On the contrary, Captain – to the antiquarian it tells a good deal. Thruxton and Pewsey lie to the west of London, so it tells us that those who sought him believed him to have headed in our direction. Remember his letter was discovered with the corpse of the man to whom it was most probably sent – Professor Chandler of Cambridge. He was buried near Winchester – again to the west of London. All the skeletons in the Chandler grave site bore marks of violence. Nothing of value was found with them. It seems quite likely they were on their way to meet with Morgenstern when they were waylaid, robbed and murdered. Forgive me.’
Shadwell’s voice had become hoarse. He began to cough. Quycke rose to help him, but Shadwell waved him away. When he had recovered he resumed. ‘Our belief – well founded, surely – is that Morgenstern had prepared a refuge at the Devil’s Chair. Perhaps he was there when the Apocalypse struck. Or, more likely, he set out for it from London the moment he understood that what he had long predicted had begun to happen. He would have had a day’s head start before the general fear set in. He knew better than any man the lawlessness and disorder that would soon descend. It seems to me impossible that he would not have wished to protect his closest family. That is human nature. They must have gone with him, as must the families of any others who had helped prepare their ark.’
Fairfax said, In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem and Ham and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark.
‘Aye,’ said Shadwell, ‘but as the Scriptures tell it, no one else.’
‘That is true,’ conceded Fairfax. He had never considered the implication before.
‘Which is why the tale of the ark has always seemed to me the cruellest in the Bible, for Noah must have had many others in his family he would have wished to save, and so surely did his sons’ wives – they lost everyone. But the number who can be rescued has a limit. The niece seeking her uncle in Thruxton, the unknown wanderer in Pewsey – you asked what we could learn from them, Captain Hancock? In my opinion, they were the family members Morgenstern had to leave behind to drown in the rising waters.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Two sleeps at Addicott Mill
SHADWELL LAPSED INTO silence and turned away from the table to stare once more into the fire. Behind his back, Quycke gestured to Hancock that it was time the old man retired upstairs to bed. Hancock nodded. ‘The hour is late. We have much to do tomorrow.’
Fairfax said, ‘You mean us to go back up on the hill so soon?’
‘Indeed I do. When else? Mr Shadwell must be surrendered to the court on Monday. We cannot afford to lose a day.’
‘But the day after tomorrow is the Sabbath. I have a sermon to deliver in Addicott. I need to prepare my text.’
‘If it must be done, then do it. But I say it is a confounded waste of time.’
‘Could we not argue about this in the morning, gentlemen?’ said Sarah. ‘I for one am ready for my bed.’ She put down her napkin and stood. Hancock, Fairfax and Quycke all made haste to rise politely.
Fairfax was grateful the supper was over. He was over-fed with Shadwell’s theories and revelations. He needed to retire to digest them all, and to order his thoughts for Sunday. ‘Could I trouble you, Captain Hancock, for pen and paper? I must make a start on my sermon – waste of time though it may be.’
‘Of course. Pay no heed to my rough humour. I’ll have a maid bring it to your room.’
Quycke helped Shadwell to his feet. Hancock went and spoke to his servants, who were waiting by the door, then picked up a candle. He led his guests out into the hall and up the stairs while behind them work began clearing the table.
It was a much bigger house than the parsonage – built, the captain informed them proudly, exactly to his own design. He pointed out the height of the ceilings and in particular of the oak wainscoting: ‘A tall wainscot is always the mark of quality in a property, and these are half a yard.’ Stout panelled doorways led off one side of the wide passage. Hancock opened them in turn. The first he designated for Shadwell and Quycke. ‘I trust ye don’t mind sharing. The bed is large enough for two. Candles are lit and the bedding warmed.’ The next he chose for Fairfax. ‘A fine room also. I have it in mind for a nursery one day.’ He risked a wink at Sarah. ‘Write well, Parson.’
‘Good night, Captain Hancock. Lady Durston.’ For the first time, Fairfax kissed her hand.
‘Good night, Christopher.’
He lingered just long enough to observe Hancock throw open the final door – ‘Now here is a chamber fit for a lady!’ – and see the two of them step inside.
He crossed the threshold into his own room and stood listening to their voices muffled through the wall. He reproached himself for eavesdropping. What was the point of tormenting himself by listening to their intimacy? Yet he could not help it. The conversation was brief at least. He caught only the parting exchange, when Hancock returned to the passage.
‘Well, good night then.’ He sounded reluctant to take his leave, his words slightly slurred by gin.
‘Good night, John.’
The door shut firmly, and after a pause, Hancock’s heavy footsteps continued along to the far end of the house.
Fairfax closed his own door and took stock of his chamber – the whitewashed walls ochre in the
candlelight, the floorboards pooled with slightly trembling shadow. A candle flame wavered on top of a small table next to a shuttered window. A water jug and goblet stood on the nightstand. The bed was large. Poking from beneath its coverlet was the long brass handle of a bed warmer. He folded back the blankets, removed the pan and laid it on the floor next to the chamber pot, then smoothed his hand across the warm linen sheet. Martha Hancock plainly ran an efficient household: her resentment at the arrival of a new mistress was understandable. He lay down, careful to keep his boots from the clean linen, and savoured the comfort of the heat.
A light tap at the door forced him to his feet. A maid stood in the passage. She handed him paper, pen and ink, curtsied and scuttled away. After the click of her heels descending the stairs, the Mill was silent. He closed the door again.
Too alert for sleep, he sat at the desk and confronted the blank sheet of paper. Now it came to it, he regretted his offer to conduct a service. His mind was churning with other matters. He dipped his pen in the ink pot and scratched across the top of the page: ‘Sermon. Addicott St George. Sunday 14th April 1468.’ But nothing more would come. A barrier composed of images of bones and earth seemed to have arisen in his brain. Normally he could reach into his memory and retrieve whole chapters of the Bible and recite them by heart. Now the verses seemed to slide away from him, random and meaningless.
An hour passed and still he was without even the semblance of an idea. It was as if God had looked into his heart, seen the state of his faith and decided to punish him. The thought induced a mild panic. He found it hard to breathe. He went over to the window, opened the shutters and lifted the sash.
The sudden draught caused the candle flame to bend almost double. The shadows lurched. He could hear the river rushing close by, the sound of its movement indistinguishable from the wind lashing rain against the massive trees, and in that instant he had a vision of what it must have been like eight centuries ago for people to be pitched from the safety of their former lives into a night such as this, with nothing to eat save what they could forage, nothing to warm them except what they could find to burn, and the constant threat of predators lurking in the darkness to attack them. The epiphany was so vivid he banged the sash down again in an attempt to block it out. He closed the shutters and kneeled by the bed. But it was not God’s voice he heard, only Shadwell’s: If I cannot say for certain what did cause their world to fail, I can at least state with confidence that the answer must lie in science and nature, and not in the appearance of a beast bearing the number six hundred three score and six …
The Second Sleep Page 20
