The Forebear's Candle: A time travel mystery and love story set against the intrigue of Henry Tudor's England

by Clive S. Johnson

  The sea rushed in about Jusuf’s knees, and he staggered away up the more steeply sloping deck, until he tripped and fell. Exhausted, he slumped down against a panting seaman, who promptly slapped him on his back. Yet more hands did the same, declaring the gratitude they were all plainly too exhausted to voice above the still howling storm.

  But others were active now, busy about the dangerously listing deck and its encroaching sea. The lamplight illuminated two men and their handsaw, precariously perched on the bulwark rail, either side of the fallen mast. They set to, furiously sawing back and forth, the sounds of ropes and rigging being hacked free accompanying the blade’s relentlessly rhythmic rasp.

  Before long a sharp crack rang out and the severed end of the mast thudded to the deck, which immediately rose, dragging itself from the water. Two of the crew quickly got to work, manhandling the baulk of timber, quickly joined by those who’d sawn it free. Between them, they cast it overboard, no doubt to join the rest of the mast’s far more perilous weight at last safely adrift upon the storm-tossed sea.

  And that storm raged on, unabated. It blew and howled and tossed the Nao Providência mercilessly for the hours to come, time Jusuf spent beside a pain-wracked Rodrigo as he slipped in and out of consciousness. They’d carried him to the captain’s quarters, stripped him as carefully as they could and then wrapped him in what dry blankets came to hand.

  He’d not looked good, not good at all, but his care had distracted Jusuf from his own fears. And when the storm at long last began to abate, life miraculously still coursed through Rodrigo’s veins.

  Jusuf had gone out onto the quarterdeck at first light, relieved of his vigil at Rodrigo’s side by one of the crew: a young lad clearly least needed for the repairs already in hand. About the now mercifully steadier deck and rigging, men were busy at work, hammering and hacking and sawing away. But the Nao Providência looked a sorry state.

  Of the mainmast only its stump remained, and many of the remaining spars hung limply from their mast, unfurled sailcloth caught in amongst the ropes, torn and tattered. The captain stood amongst a handful of seamen beneath the foremast, its lowered spar the subject of a heated discussion. He noticed Jusuf and barked a couple of commands at his men, then nodded towards him before making his way over.

  As the captain climbed onto the quarterdeck, he growled at Jusuf, “Well, my large, black biscoito gorgulho, you’ll certainly not be in Santander anytime soon.” He finally stood before Jusuf and drew in a long, deep breath as he tipped his head back, so he could look down his nose, regret clearly tainting his scowl. “I doubt we’ll make much more than a few knots with what we can recover from this mess.”

  Jusuf’s voice rumbled, low and menacing: “My master impressed upon you the need for a safe passage, k¡btn syd, above that of haste.” The captain stepped back a pace, a glance down at the deck below as his hand slipped inside his jerkin.

  Jusuf felt for his own blade, but the captain’s still empty hand slowly slid out once more into the open. A grin cracked his face. “You’ve done my first mate a good service, though,” he said. “As you’ve made no mention of him, I assume Senhor Rodrigo Fernandez still lives.”

  “He does, though he’s in great pain from his broken ribs.”

  “Shame. I could do with him right now. Still, he’s made of stern stuff. I’m sure it won’t be long before he’s at least able to—” The captain stared past Jusuf, his eyes rapidly widening, then he turned to the main deck and shouted for a watch to go aloft. “Diga-me que está o quarteirão de bombordo, senhor.”

  One of the seamen broke away from his task and quickly shinned up a foremast shroud to the topcastle. He wasn’t long in hailing down “Um navio inglês, capitão! Inglês!”

  “Shit,” hissed the captain through bared teeth. “That’s all we need, an Englisher. Blast this calmer sea; where’s the swell when it’s needed? There’s no way she’ll miss seeing us,” and he pushed past Jusuf to stare out across the rolling sea. Jusuf followed his gaze, and there, off the larboard quarter, saw a distant ship under full sail.

  “Devemos preparar o canhão, Capitão?” came up from the main deck, but the captain only shook his head, resignation seeming to flood his features. Slowly, he turned to face Jusuf, his jaw firmly set.

  “However fast we make repairs, we’ve no chance of running ahead. And it’ll only make matters worse if we try to fight them off with the cannon. So, my unlucky gorgulho, I fear you certainly won’t be seeing Santander very soon…if at all.” He turned back to stare at the navio inglês, now clearly bearing down on their becalmed and defenceless vessel.

  Jusuf’s heart sank, but then his mind turned to the first mate’s locker, and to what he’d seen about Rodrigo’s neck. His thoughts quickly filled with the one thing he knew had to be back about his person. With the captain’s own thoughts held elsewhere, Jusuf quietly slipped back in to relieve the young lad of his vigil at Rodrigo’s side.

  5 Circumstantial Evidence

  The printer chattered back and forth, its listing paper juddering out a line at a time. It carried Colin’s story onto a fanfold pile behind. He himself had been leaning back in his chair, trying to calm his nerves at the memories his story had brought back. Kate then called up the stairs that dinner was nearly ready.

  “Right down,” he called back, but waited until the listing had finished, then flicked the edge of the perforation and tore the sheets free.

  In the dining room, he tossed the short stack onto the table as he rushed past and into the kitchen. There, he quickly grabbed together cutlery, a butter dish and their salt and pepper mills. He was still setting the table when Kate swept in, putting his plate down at his place.

  “That looks good, as always,” Colin enthused, and pulled his chair up beneath him and sat down.

  “Well, we had some cheese that needed using up,” Kate said as she came back in with her own. “But we don’t need the butter,” she added, nodding at the dish as Colin tucked into his cheese and potato casserole.

  “Eh? Oh, right. Habit.”

  Kate sat down at her place, across the corner of the table, but then looked over at the short stack of paper on the other side. “Is that your story?”

  “Yeah, as best I can manage.”

  “I’ll read through it after we’ve eaten, then; although The Young Ones are on at nine.”

  Colin checked his watch, about an hour to go, and they both fell silent as they began to eat. But then Kate lifted her eyes to look at him.

  “Well,” she softly said, “do you think it’s helped any?” She gazed hopefully across at him as she slowly chewed her next mouthful.

  He kept on eating as he thought about it, finally opting for “Bit early to tell”.

  “Oh, I nearly forgot,” Kate then said, “dad phoned me at work today. Said they’d be coming back for the first two full weeks in August. He’s got some school commitment or other and his cousin’s fiftieth, so we can go down then.”

  “Ah, right, that’ll be good. I’ll book the leave tomorrow, then. It’ll be interesting to see the place, after all I’ve heard about it.”

  “Hmm, well, don’t expect too much. An outside loo isn’t much fun, nor the running cold-and-cold water, but that corner of Cornwall’s so beautiful; nice and quiet, and with plenty of good walks.”

  At the end of the meal, Colin cleared the table after them, washed up, then made some coffee. He finally plonked himself down in his chair in the front room, the television programme before The Young Ones already drawing to a close. He nipped back into the dining room and retrieved his story, putting it on the floor beside his chair for later.

  Rick, Vyvyan, Mike, and Alexei Sayle’s manic rampage across the screen kept them riveted for the next half-hour: a satirical lampooning of the snobbery inherent in the BBC’s own University Challenge programme. As the final timpani drumbeat of the closing credits faded away, Colin and Kate were left exhausted by laughter, invigorated by the show’s raw mayhem.

 
; Jumping to his feet, Colin suggested another coffee, to which Kate said she’d love one. “And if you pass me your story, I’ll read through it whilst you’re out there,” she offered.

  The thought took some of the edge off the programme’s clinging buzz, so it was with a little less pizazz that he passed her the sheets, turned off the television and went out to the kitchen. By the time he got back with the coffees she was reading down the last sheet.

  “You’ve remembered it well,” she said when she’d finished. “I know at the time, and when we discussed it over the weekend, that you said it’d been really vivid, but there’s stuff in here I don’t remember you telling me about at all.”

  “I’ve not made any of it up.”

  “No, I’m not suggesting you have, but, well, like this bit of spoken Portuguese. Now, where is it,” and she scanned back through the sheets. “You’ve never mentioned having studied it before.”

  “Portuguese? No, I haven’t. Just a bit of Spanish at school, but only for a year. But that’s one of the things that’s come to bug me more and more. I mean, I’ve no idea if it’s genuine Portuguese, but I know it’s certainly not Spanish.”

  “In which case, maybe that’s your proof, if only we knew someone who spoke the language. We could then find out if it was authentic. Mind you, there’s the name of the ship; that might be more useful; the… Now, where was it?”

  “The Nao Providência.”

  “That’s it. If there really was a merchant ship with that name, then that’d be even stronger evidence. Something to stand up to your… What was it you wanted? Scientific rigour?”

  “I don’t want to prove it happened, Kate; I want to prove it couldn’t have. And anyway, how the hell are we supposed to check that? I wouldn’t know where to start, nor for that matter what period in history we’re talking about, which might help.”

  “I thought you said a scientific approach was one that maintained an ‘Open mind’?”

  “Stop changing the subject.”

  “Well, there certainly doesn’t seem to be anything here that tells us when it hap…when it might have happened. For instance: cannons. Ships have carried them since about the thirteenth century to well into the nineteenth. I know that from my own research at the Rylands.”

  Colin breathed in deeply and let out a long breath. “If only Jusuf had come across a clearly dated newspaper, eh?”

  “Hmm, well, what about the hill you say’s behind Ceuta, the—”

  “Monte Anyera. But I’m not sure that’d prove anything. I spent a lot of my childhood poring over maps; you know, copying them out and stuff. So, if I were to be proven right on that count, it’d still only be circumstantial: possibly a submerged memory, or whatever they call them.”

  Colin then remembered something else he’d had back in his childhood: the family encyclopaedia, the one on the shelves in their middle bedroom. “Hang on a minute,” he said and rushed upstairs.

  “Here we are,” he told her when he got back down. “Everyman’s, volume three, ‘BUL’ to ‘COA’,” and he sat with it open on his lap, flicking through its pages. Presently, he looked up—deflated.

  “The nearest mention of any hill associated with Ceuta is: ‘It consists of an old town right on the tongue of the peninsula, and a new town running up the hill at the back’.”

  “No name?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, at least it’s a bit of supporting—”

  “Hang on. It’s only a short entry, but the last bit says: ‘It was conquered by King John I. of Portugal in 1415, but passed into the hands of Spain in 1580’.”

  “So?”

  “Jusuf’s on a Portuguese ship, Kate, not a Spanish one.”

  “Yeah, but there would have been loads of different nationalities trading through there. Even during wartime trade rarely got affected.”

  “But a ship an Arab like Jusuf, one from Ceuta, would have trusted? And when he was carrying something clearly valuable in some way? No, it wouldn’t have been a foreign one, I’m sure of that. They wouldn’t have risked it.”

  Kate seemed distant for a moment, then quickly turned back a few sheets, her finger tracing down the lines. “Here we are, early on, when Jusuf looked north from the ship at the Spanish coast, when he whispered ‘Accursed Christians’ and then said, ‘It won’t be long before we take our country back from you’.”

  Colin hadn’t the foggiest idea where she was going with this.

  “Don’t you see? For an Arab to consider Spain a stolen country, stolen from them, must put it not that long after the Reconquista, sometime around the end of the, er, fifteenth century, I think.”

  “Right. You mean when the Moors were turfed out of Spain? In which case, that’d narrow it down to sometime from just before the turn of the sixteenth century to no later than fifteen-eighty.”

  They were both quiet for a while, until Colin took a slurp of his coffee.

  “Mine’s gone cold,” he said. “Want a fresh one?”

  “It’s getting late for me, Colin. Work again in the morning, don’t forget.”

  “All right, but before you go up, can we just go through what we’ve got so far?”

  Kate reached into a cupboard beside the chimneybreast and found a highlighter and a pen, then went through Colin’s story again. Eventually, she summarised, “We have a big, strong Arab called Jusuf al-Haddad travelling on a Portuguese ship called the Nao Providência, sometime around the sixteenth century. And this Arab is taking something important to Santander—north coast of Spain if I remember rightly—seemingly with an eye to recovering more than the Moors lost when they were kicked off the Iberian Peninsula. Then they hit a storm that severely damaged the ship before they could reach Lisbon. Oh, and an English ship’s bearing down on them, which is a bit of a bum place to leave it, if you ask me, Colin.”

  “It’s all supposition, though; nothing concrete. Nothing much we’d be able to check, not without doing loads of research and legwork, and even then… And where would we start?”

  “Well, I doubt even the Central Library’s got a book listing all the Portuguese merchantmen from that time. I know the John Rylands library won’t have, so there’s no point me checking that at work.” Kate sighed and got up, clearly finally on her way to bed, but then paused, staring down at him.

  “We need to know more of Jusuf’s story, Colin, if you still want to prove whether or not it could really have happened. But that’d mean you being prepared to go back there again.”

  Colin gazed up at her for a moment, then drew a deep breath. “I don’t mind telling you, Kate: it scared me shitless, it really did. So yes, the thought of going through anything like it again does put the willies up me. But I know I can’t just let it go. It’ll only fester if I do, I know it will. So I really ought to settle it once and for all, if it’s at all possible.” He looked despondently at the sheets of paper still on the arm of Kate’s chair.

  “Only you can decide, Colin. It’s up to you. And anyway, where is the joss stick holder? I don’t remember seeing it since we moved in.”

  “Still in one of the unpacked boxes in the loft.”

  “Okay, but be that as it may, I’m afraid bed’s calling me. I’ll have to go up, Colin, I’m beginning to drop. There’s always tomorrow to talk more about it.”

  She put the pens away in the cupboard, but then mentioned, “There are still some joss sticks in here, by the way,” and she brought them out to show him: an old cellophane pack of patchouli.

  After Kate had said goodnight and gone up to get ready for bed, Colin went to make himself a fresh mug of coffee. Standing in the kitchen as he waited for the kettle to boil, he absently looked through the utility room doorway. Part of the stepladder he’d need to get up into the loft caught his eye.

  A cold shiver ran down his back, but then he told himself, “Well, there’s a few other things I could do with unpacking from that box, I suppose.” He glanced once more at the stepladder as the kettle came to the boil,
its whistle shrill and urgent. As he filled his mug, he could still hear Kate in the bathroom, cleaning her teeth.

  Before he knew it, he was carrying the stepladder carefully up the steep stairs, past the bathroom and along the landing. He clattered it down beneath the loft’s small hatch.

  “What you doing?” Kate called out.

  “Just nipping into the loft. Won’t be long,” by which time he had his head through the hatch and was reaching for the box.

  “You’re a bit in the way there, Colin,” Kate called up from below him as he squeezed the box between his chest and the edge of the opening, the ladder plaintively creaking. “You’re not going to try again tonight, are you?”

  “No,” he could only mumble against the lid of the box as it somehow became jammed.

  “Good, because I’d prefer to be there this time when you do.”

  “Don’t worry,” and the ladder swayed as the box jerked free at the sound of tearing cardboard. “I’m just bringing it down whilst I think on,” Colin assured her as he propped his head against the ceiling to steady himself. “Just want to check I did actually pack the thing.”

  Kate moved back as he came down the ladder and put the box on the floor to one side, quickly going back up to close the hatch before finally climbing down and folding the stepladder against the wall. At last, Kate could slip past.

  “Well, don’t be up late. I’ll be nice and warm when you come up. And tomorrow, don’t forget those first two weeks in August, will you? Starting on the sixth.”

  “I won’t,” then she was in the bedroom, its door closing behind her. Colin looked down at the box, the joss stick holder just visible through the half-opened flaps. Another shiver ran up his spine.

  Soon sitting in the quiet of the front room, Colin stared for some time at the pack of joss sticks and the holder he’d carefully placed to one side on the broad arm of his chair. Then a distinct and familiar clatter came from the utility room, and Grimalkin, their Russian Blue cat, wandered in. He jumped straight onto Colin’s lap.