‘You know how you always take over from someone? In my case, there’s you and the other one – Mr Flask. I’ve seen exercise books with the names rubbed out – I mean, as if it’s . . .’
‘Dead man’s shoes?’ suggested Fanguin. After weeks of evasion, the bluntness shocked. ‘Well, let’s say Robert Flask left abruptly.’
Oblong blurted out his next question. ‘The Mayor implied he taught early history against the rules.’
Fanguin, whose eyesight had appeared impeccable, began polishing a pair of spectacles with a spotted handkerchief, a theatrical performance designed to give maximum effect to his reply. ‘Oh no,’ replied Fanguin, ‘Robert Flask didn’t teach old history – he did something far worse. He went in search of it.’
‘I see.’
‘He wasn’t called Flask for nothing – liked a jar of the Old Peculiar, did Robert. But after he vanished, I never heard a squeak. Thin-air job. Nobody knows where he went.’
Oblong tried again to elucidate Fanguin’s own fate. ‘But why is your name scrubbed out too?’
‘I did the decent thing. I didn’t report it.’
‘Report what?’
‘Flask broke cover one morning and told the form some most inappropriate things about history.’ Fanguin paused. ‘Still, as you’re his and my successor, you’d best have this.’ He handed Oblong a small plastic bag bound with elastic bands. ‘That’s Robert Flask’s notebook – what’s left of it.’
‘How did you get it?’
‘His general person found it in a drawer.’
‘Not Aggs?’
‘Hair like a bottle-brush, teeth like tusks and a heart of gold.’
‘Why did she bring this to you?’ muttered Mr Oblong, remembering her denial of any connection with Flask.
‘I was Flask’s best friend – and the young Aggs looked after me in my bachelor days.’
‘Where could Flask have gone?’
‘Something was up. He moved from nice rooms in the School to a seedy back street. A few days later he’d vanished – puff of smoke. Guess he’d had enough of Rotherweird.’ Fanguin peered at his watch, hurriedly put on his coat and hat and shook Oblong’s hand with alarming vigour. ‘Be sure to keep in touch. You have much to contribute, I feel certain of it.’
With that, Fanguin rolled precariously down the steep staircase and out into the night.
Oblong went straight to the package. The pages of the notebook had been ripped out. Inside the front cover the name ‘Robert Flask’ had been written in ink with the address of his first lodgings – Exterior School Tower East, third floor – but was otherwise blank. On the back inside cover was written the following in ink in stilted handwriting:
STOLE CAR
ASC 1017
The banal entry hardly justified Fanguin’s theatrical presentation. Oblong was not interested in vehicle theft – still less a vehicle this old – but he hid the remains of the notebook in his sock drawer, just in case.
*
Fanguin plodded home, finding it hard to resist the urge to self-pity. He lived for his class, and his dismissal had left him bereft. He liked the outsider, although Oblong lacked the charisma required for high-tier teaching. The contrast with Flask could hardly be greater. Flask had played the fool to get the post, only to display a ferocious intellect as he set about befriending Rotherweird’s more maverick citizens and chasing down her remote history. Fanguin hoped the notebook might hold a clue as to why and where Oblong’s predecessor had disappeared. If Flask had been onto something of importance, and he could discover it, might he not get his post back?
In this endeavour he expected competition. Flask’s other close friend, Strimmer, whom Fanguin cordially disliked, was not a man to leave stones unturned if what lurked beneath might offer him power. Flask, ever playing off one friend against another, had hinted to Fanguin that he had confided important information to Strimmer.
Another matter troubled Fanguin. His downfall stemmed from a notorious history lesson in which Flask had encouraged Form IV to investigate the town’s origins. The pupils reported this crime to Fanguin, who decided not to report his friend to the Headmaster or the Town Hall – then Flask vanished, the truth seeped out and Fanguin paid the ultimate price for his loyalty. But why would Flask, hitherto so careful as to what he said to whom, commit professional suicide in such a flagrant way? Hopefully in the new historian’s hands the strange notebook would yield the answer.
He felt a familiar tickle in his throat, an irritation that alcohol caused, cured and then caused again.
*
The Journeyman’s Gist had endured a quiet night, custom halved by the weather. Bill Ferdy, the landlord, put out the fires, cleared the glasses, squared the accounts, discharged the staff and locked the tills. He helped himself to a pint of Sturdy and sat by the fire. With conditions treacherous, sleeping overnight in the pub appeared sensible, even though it was illegal for countrysiders. Nobody would know. He had already warned his wife, Megan, of the possibility.
He reflected on his good fortune. He had the only pub in town, and was more tolerated than any other countrysider. He grew his own hops and brewed his own beer. He had three delightful children – Gwen was unusual, true, but her mathematical gifts were a source of pride. He was dozing when there was a knock at the door – 1 a.m., long past closing time. A tall man with strangely neutral colouring stood in the doorway, his dress expensive, and not to Rotherweird tastes.
‘Bill Ferdy?’ He spoke impersonally as if making an arrest.
‘Bar be closed, I’m afraid.’
‘I drink only the best.’ A leather suitcase stood in the snow beside the man’s feet. Bill Ferdy was not in the mood for confrontation –
he decided to hear him out. The man sat down at the nearest table. ‘The name is Slickstone.’
‘Is that a first name – or a second one?’
‘I am Sir Veronal Slickstone, and I’m here to make you an offer. Eight hundred thousand for the pub, no strings.’
‘Pence?’ laughed the landlord.
‘Guineas,’ replied Sir Veronal with the straightest of faces.
Bill Ferdy gawped. The lease was renewable every seven years, and not worth a fraction of his visitor’s offer. ‘It’s a bit sudden. The pub has been in our family since—’
‘The best offers are sudden. The secret is accepting before they vanish.’
‘Give me a day or two.’
‘No time.’ Sir Veronal took several brown envelopes out of the bag and a one-page agreement, in duplicate. ‘Here is a ten per cent deposit, and your copy of the contract. You have only to sign.’
Bill Ferdy reflected. Gwen was unlikely to take up the reins, but one of her brothers might. Nor had he any idea what to do with such money – all he could think of using it for was repairing and restoring the more dilapidated parts of a pub that would no longer be his. That triggered a thought.
‘Would you keep The Journeyman’s Gist going?’
‘I would keep the pub.’
‘With Ferdy beer?’
‘I would keep the pub, but for this price I do not expect questions. Yes or no?’
The blunt reply brought Bill Ferdy to his senses. He was landlord of the only pub for miles, which brought happiness to many, and therefore to him. It was without price.
‘Thanks, but no—’
‘I always get my way, Mr Ferdy.’
Ferdy suppressed a surge of dislike. A ‘Sir’ can buy anything, he seemed to be saying, including the right to threaten strangers. ‘I’m locking up,’ he replied curtly.
Without a goodnight his visitor strode off into the night.
Old History
1556. The Tower of Knowledge.
Here in the tall tower in the grounds of Rotherweird Manor Sir Henry Grassal works, grinding glass and observing the heavens.
Here too, in daytime, a swineherd admits two children.
‘These be the two with the gifts,’ he says. ‘They are peasant stock, all ear
th, dirt and feral looks. Born together, ever together,’ added the swineherd.
‘What gifts?’
‘The lad finds and names all that moves. He knows the differences between everything living. And she brings them alive with her knife.’
Sir Henry smiles. ‘I know she does.’ The mysterious carvings on the dead plum tree at the edge of the Manor gardens have long puzzled him: butterflies, bees, animals and insects, all vital and painstaking. One moonlit night he has caught them at work, the boy and the girl; she with her knife, he investigating every cranny in the bark for signs of life.
‘They live by the pigpens. Their mother is dead and their father is a sot.’
By their best estimate they are ten years old. He gives them new names, Hieronymus and Morval Seer, which he announces by placing a hand on each head as if baptising them. ‘Seer means a person who sees more than is visible.’ Sir Henry likes outlandish names, names from his travels. ‘Now you will live with me.’
Two idyllic years follow, filled with learning, security and physical wellbeing. Sir Henry, a polymath and widower with no surviving children, invests in them his considerable emotional and intellectual reserves. Reading, writing and the spoken word occupy much time, but he also encourages their original interests, with Hieronymus studying lifecycles and biology and Morval drawing whatever her brother finds. Clothed, fed and washed, they are transformed in appearance too.
Notebooks fill. Morval’s knife cuts woodblocks and sharpens quills. At fourteen she has mastered ink-making, using plant sap for fluidity of line. Sir Henry brings back tiny quantities of lapis and cochineal. The two children are bound by complementary talents as well as kinship and shared adversity – his knack for questioning the natural world, focused but practical, and her instinctive gift for reproducing the appearance of things, eye to hand, every vein on an insect’s wing, every line on a human face. Remembering their Copernicus, they see themselves as twin moons bound by a common sun: Sir Henry Grassal.
1558. The Rotherweird Valley.
Hieronymus and Morval Seer are in the orchard with Sir Henry studying the structure of flowers – where the fruit will grow, how and why. Down the hill judders a cart with hide awnings, an ordinary sight, but for the outrider, scabbard bouncing on the thigh, fine saddle, the velvet cap, the air of authority.
‘New friends,’ cries Sir Henry, but for once he will be wrong.
*
They stand in the Great Hall, ten children in a line, every one of them twelve years of age. The old man with the kindly face opens his arms. ‘I am Sir Henry Grassal, and this is Rotherweird Manor, my home and now yours. You were in peril but are no more. For reasons that are forgivable, your queen mistrusts you. So do not stray beyond this island. You will have more than enough to occupy you here, doing justice to your abundant talents.’
Of the ten, only Malise wilfully mistranslates the invitation. I will indulge my talents, he muses, by taking your house, your island and your power. He watches the captain of the escort, Sir Robert Oxenbridge, watching them, feeling relief that he will be leaving. Grassal’s face is kindly, but weak; Oxenbridge’s hardened, a soldier’s look.
Two children walk in, a boy and a girl, their own age.
‘Meet Hieronymus and Morval Seer, born in this valley the time that you were born, and with equal gifts to your own,’ says Sir Henry.
Malise feels jealousy in the air from the other girls and a corresponding interest from the boys. The girl has an astonishing beauty, and innocence too: Eve in the garden. He feels a new kind of desire for a new kind of power. The effect of her brother on the new arrivals is less pronounced. He appears studious to the point of remoteness.
March 1559. London.
Geryon Wynter tires of London, and London tires of him. The vigilance of the new Queen’s Council inhibits his researches into the darker reaches of knowledge. The right books are elusive, and spies insinuate themselves into the city’s society like worms in cheese. Strangers peer in his windows; servants talk more than they should.
The fifth son of a clergyman, the corruption of Wynter’s learning stems not from exposure to vice but to an excessive preaching of virtue. Listening to his father’s interminable services and sermons, he concluded in childhood that gods are created by man to inspire in life and to comfort in death. But where are the new gods? Isn’t it time to start again? And what might the recipe be?
He isolates the most potent elements in his father’s belief: prophecy, a code of behaviour, the Passion and resurrection; the rest he finds insipid. He tracks down Latin translations of Greek texts and then learns Greek himself and rifles these works for their invented deities and the fabulous stories that give them permanence. He is drawn to the monstrous – gorgons, furies and three-headed dogs – and how these classical gods meddle in the affairs of men, and vice versa.
But there is more to the young Wynter’s life than hunting down mythologies. He tests, dissects and explores. He is a scientist, focusing on the destructive forces, from gunpowder to untraceable poisons.
An extravagant ambition takes shape. He will create a new god, even gods, with the sinew and scientific reality to survive and flourish. He does not know how, but believes this to be his destiny. For the present, however, he has more mundane challenges.
There is the issue of servants. They cook and clean, but are dumb souls. He craves an intellect to share the burden of his research. He trawls prisons and courts and after many months is rewarded at the Middlesex Assize. It is the charge that catches his eye: theft of a book by night (A Miscellanie of Peculiar Weapons), and the defendant’s demeanour. The squat, ugly young man fences with the visiting judge, showing more wit than sense.
‘It is a serious business to assail a man’s house in the early hours.’
‘It is a serious business to leave a book shrouded in dust.’
‘Not this book, perhaps.’
‘Weapons are a subject for study. Wars are won by them.’
The Judge can tell from the accused’s clothes that the upstart has more learning than money. The sentence has limits – first offence, and a man who can read, which gives him what the poor do not receive, the ‘benefits of clergy’. Yet Judges have a knack for finding a way.
‘Brand him in the brawn of the thumb, unless he pays ten shillings within the week – your own ten shillings, mind.’ He addresses this last to the defendant.
Wynter stipulates his terms for a retainer in the Court cells, the young man accepts and Wynter pays the fine. He renames him, an act of ownership, Calx Bole – Calx for the chalky whiteness of his skin, Bole for his corpulent torso. Bole prefers to cook and clean himself, rather than have other servants between him and his new master.
At night they research together the location of tumuli, burial mounds in the English countryside, from Saxon round barrows to later, more sophisticated sites. They identify the Rotherweird Valley as especially rich in these untapped sources of hidden treasure. Wynter even gains access to the Winchester copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in its present home at Canterbury. It makes interesting reading.
He sells up his London residence in favour of a manageable house near Hoy, a village above the Rotherweird escarpment. The mouse-haired Mrs Wynter has no say, as this is not in her husband’s book a domestic matter. Bole’s surliness soon dissipates. He wears the gratitude of a rescued dog.
*
So here is Wynter, this cold but clear February afternoon, watching Bole dig beneath the rim of a semi-circular prominence on the western side of the Rotherweird Valley. Their labours have yielded a silver spoon and a hollow torc, damaged but in fine gold. Wynter, seeing the vestiges of an old road entering the hollow below them, descends the steep slope and makes a most unexpected discovery.
Set in the ground is a white tile, incised with a tiny flower. The palm of his hand prickles as he holds it close.
‘Stand there,’ he says to Bole, who does so, and promptly disappears.
A magical door! Wherever it
leads, destiny has handed him a base ingredient for creating his new god: a mystery to wonder at. He peers at the tile. The exquisite workmanship suggests reverence and confirms that someone has entered and safely returned. Is the tile itself the door, or does it mark a deeper gateway? Hell or Paradise?
He closes his eyes and follows his servant in.
*
Hell and Paradise both lie beyond the tile, it turns out. He and Bole explore, map and analyse, but only the open ground and only in daylight. It is a fantastical but dangerous place. Wynter takes a close interest in the locals now. Someone else must know this secret.
He visits the tavern in Hoy for the chance of stray intelligence, and again destiny is kind. The carter talks to a gardener who talks to a farmer who confides in a tinker who speaks loosely. A wagon of children, finely dressed, was unloaded last year at Rotherweird Manor; and Sir Henry Grassal has turned schoolmaster in his dotage. They reputedly have unusual talents. Wynter smells opportunity. He gleans what he can of Sir Henry – kind and therefore vulnerable, knowledgeable and therefore easy to lure. He crafts a letter to fit.
*
Sir Henry finds Wynter’s house pleasing, though no manor. The walls are panelled with carved oak. His host has a library and well-turned furniture. Wynter shows his knowledge without flaunting it. Mrs Wynter says little, but is considerate and kind. She compliments him on his riding and his horse.
Yet Sir Henry feels on edge. The servant has a predatory menace. Wynter’s manners are too polished, over-perfect, like a diplomat striving for a treaty. In the library several shelves have their books double banked – forbidden texts behind, or just too little space?
At the end of a fine lunch, in terms of food and drink at least, Wynter dismisses his servant and his wife. He eases into the subject, but Sir Henry senses a well-worked design: again the diplomatic game.
Wynter slices two peaches with a silver knife. ‘I have designed a new dwelling. I call it an ice-house. It will keep ripe fruit to the spring. We have a pond, shallow enough to freeze solid. Talking of early fruit, you teach, I understand.’
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