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

by Clive S. Johnson

  Rodrigo assured him they had the name of two good inns, but that they were hoping to search out Senhora Trewin first. That was if they got there before dark, he pointedly added. He then looked askance at Brother Thomas and his prospective combatant, each now pointing a finger at the other.

  Dom Francisco softly called out “Brother Hammett,” and the young monk from whom Rodrigo had learnt so much about the mining of tin stepped across, crunching on the newly spread ballast.

  “Dom Francisco?”

  As the two men fell into discourse with Rodrigo, Jusuf again cursed his slow-wittedness with the English tongue, although he heard Senhora Trewin’s name and the English word “Smithy” a few times.

  Finally, Rodrigo turned back to Jusuf and told him that Brother Hammett was to show them to Senhora Trewin’s when, or as he then corrected himself to say “If”, they ever got to Bodmyn. This time they both turned to stare at Brother Thomas’s even redder face, somehow reflected in the supervisor’s own.

  Dom Francisco stepped over to join the two men, a benign smile hiding the sparkle in his eyes as he spoke with them both. Brother Thomas presently fell silent, staring into the Dom’s placid eyes, then he nodded, the once, and withdrew.

  Once Dom Francisco and Brother Thomas had returned to the head of their reassembling party, Jusuf said to Rodrigo “Come on, then, what did he say?”

  “That he and his companion could do without their baggage, until it might catch up with them. So the handcart can wait for the wagon to work its way down to where they’re able to pass one another.”

  One of the brothers remained behind with the cart when the rest of their party carried on up the hill. The clatter of the cart’s descent was soon consumed by the sound of road ballast once again being shovelled from the wagon.

  Jusuf had expected a descent shortly after the road became level, but it carried on flat for some time, again winding its way between obscuring hedgebanks. When it did eventually show signs of dropping, it was only gradual, but gave occasional glimpses towards the northeast of a distant, higher ground, somewhere bare of trees.

  Bodmyn, though, lay in the North, the road’s last couple of miles hardly taking them much lower. So they had no sight of the town, not until they drew near its first few properties along the road as their party slipped into a shallow valley. But here the hedgebanks finally gave out, laying open an untilled rise of heathland to one side but a lower expanse of grass and trees to the other. Within this, Jusuf glimpsed large, stout stone buildings laced by tall windows, a tower rising from amidst them all. A way beyond this rose a tall spire, like some great ladder vanishing towards the heavens.

  His view quickly fell behind the first huddle of buildings lining the road, then behind more, until the familiar jostle of properties reminded Jusuf of Lostwithiel. The town didn’t seem quite as busy, though, perhaps less mercantile. Then they rounded a bend onto a wide but quiet descending street, rows of houses clumped along both sides.

  At its end lay a broad junction of four ways, on the other side of which rose a fair-sized church, from which the spire Jusuf had seen earlier rose high above the surrounding roofs. Now, though, the clear view revealed just how inordinately high it really was, far more so than the already impressive loft of Lostwithiel’s own church spire.

  “Our church of Saint Petroc,” Brother Hammett told them, even Jusuf recognising some clearly unchristian pride in his voice. “And where we three must part company with my brothers if I’m to take you to the Trewin smithy.” This latter somehow came more intelligibly to Jusuf’s ears.

  As the other brothers carried on down the road that ran past the south side of the church, Brother Hammett led them up a short but steep cobbled rise beside its west front. At the top, they turned onto a gentle incline between small and haphazardly placed houses, mostly single storeyed, many set apart from their neighbours.

  At times broad, and at others tightly squeezed between gable ends, the busier street ran straight in its aim towards the west. Eventually, though, Brother Hammett brought them to a halt before a low and seemingly jumbled building on its northern side. It immediately said “Smithy” to Jusuf. At its centre stood a ridged barn, an attached low cottage to one side, a smaller square building to the other—a forge, Jusuf realised from its chimney stack.

  “Is Mistress Trewin expecting your visit?” the brother asked them, to which Rodrigo shook his head. “In which case, perhaps I ought to raise her for you,” and he stared at Jusuf for a moment before pursing his lips and nodding to himself.

  He stepped from the dirt of the street onto an area of quarry-stone flags set before the barn’s large door, then rapped smartly on a wicket one set within it. A voice called from somewhere within, a young woman’s voice. Then the sound of boots on a stone floor escaped through the gaps between the door’s plain planks.

  “Who be it, there?” Jusuf managed to understand, along with Brother Hammett’s reply of his own name. A bolt could be heard being thrust back, then the door cracked open a touch and an eye peered out at the brother. It soon looked past him, directly at Jusuf as it grew wide in alarm.

  Brother Hammett said something more in English, or it could have been Kernowek, and the eye’s gaze returned to him, albeit briefly. Finally, it settled back on Jusuf.

  “A blacksmith?” he understood her to ask. “A Blackamoor blacksmith? He’m be no Turkoman, be he?” which he didn’t quite follow.

  This time Rodrigo spoke to her, and at some length, until he mentioned Capitão Treffry. He had to clarify it to “Captain Treffry” before the alarm finally drained from the woman’s eye and her voice lightened.

  That eye then dipped, clearly carried upon a nod, and the door creaked open. Then Colin gasped a sharp intake of breath at the sight of Kate, standing there, as plain as day in the open doorway.

  14 Gateway to Cornwall

  “At least let me write it down,” Kate said to Colin as she leant forward in her armchair, pen poised above the pad on her knee.

  “I’ve told you the important bit, Kate. There’s no point in going over the rest of it.”

  “But I’d—”

  “Don’t you see? It’s the conclusive proof I’ve been looking for. The lie to my own deception. I mean, how else could you be there and here. It just doesn’t make sense otherwise.”

  “Well, it could be that—”

  “When I saw you there, I knew it had to be some kind of illusion, something conjured up from my…from my subconscious. An hallucination, nothing more. A waking dream. Or… like you called it yourself, back when it first happened: a phantasm.”

  Colin sighed as he leant his head back against the sofa and stared up at the ceiling. “And anyway, I’ve fooled myself enough to feel like I’ve walked miles today. My feet ache. The power of self-deception, eh?” He lowered his gaze to Kate and she opened her mouth, as if to speak.

  “Can we just leave it?” he quietly implored. She hesitated, but then nodded.

  “Do you want a drink?” she finally asked.

  “No. Thanks. I think I could do with just going up to bed. Thank God it’s Friday. I feel like I need a week’s rest, never mind just a weekend.”

  Once they were both in bed and the lights out, the curtains dully lit by a nearby streetlamp, Colin found the image of Kate standing in the smithy doorway plaguing his mind. He realised just how jarring it had been: to be convinced of one reality one minute, only to have another smash in on it the next. He could tell from Kate’s breathing that she wasn’t asleep, too still beside him, clearly thinking. Then she propped herself up on one elbow. He could feel her eyes upon him, searching out his features.

  “Colin?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I’d like to know what happened before you saw me? Just to stop me wondering. You can do that for me, can’t you?”

  A sliver of orange light lay at a slant across the ceiling, coming in through where the curtains didn’t quite meet. It wavered slightly as the night air wafted in through the p
artially open window, nudging the curtains.

  “What? Now?”

  “It’s not too late, and we don’t have to be up early in the morning.”

  Colin knew it couldn’t be avoided. He didn’t want to hurt Kate’s feelings. So he pushed himself further up the bed, pulling his pillow higher behind his head, and quietly took a long breath.

  “I’m sorry,” he eventually said, hardly above a whisper. “It was just such a shock. You were the last person I expected to see. But it wasn’t just that you were there, Kate. I felt that shock of recognition actually course through Jusuf himself.”

  She laid her hand on his chest, her fingers lightly running through the sparse few hairs it boasted. “I don’t quite follow,” she said. “Jusuf’s recognition?”

  “It’s not easy to explain, but if Jusuf really did once exist, and I was experiencing his life through him, then why would he have been so startled at the sight of you? Because he was. Me, yes, certainly, but he would never have seen you before, wouldn’t have known you from Adam.”

  When Kate said nothing, Colin searched out the glint of her eyes in the darkness. “That’s what I meant by ‘Proof’,” he finally told her. “Jusuf’s clear recognition of you could only really have been my own. Therefore, Jusuf could only ever have been me, all along; me just fooling myself; ‘Q’, ‘E’, ‘D’.”

  Kate laid back down and cuddled up beside him, her arm across his chest, her hand this time stroking his arm. “So,” she whispered, “tell me about your…your dream, then,” and he did, knowing full well she’d remember it all, every last detail. Just as he would himself, yet easier this time, now content it really had been nothing more than a weird dope trip.

  In the morning, before they went out to do the weekly shop, Colin nipped into the front room and put the joss sticks and the holder at the back of the cupboard beside the fireplace, along with the small box of dope. And there they stayed, well out of sight and so out of mind, as the summer rolled on to a rather cold and wet first few days of August.

  “You can never tell,” Kate said as they were packing in their bedroom, the evening before their overnight drive down to Cornwall to avoid the traffic. “It tends to have its own weather down there, right on the coast. We always used to take the forecasts with a pinch of salt. I remember us quite often coming up from a sweltering day on the beach only to find it had been pissing it down just inland.”

  Kate dropped another bag at his feet. “Don’t worry. I’ve only one last big one, then it’s just bits and bats…honest.” Her pixie grin shone from beneath her new pageboy haircut. “Oh, and I found this.” She handed him his dope box, its lid’s psychedelic 3D pattern shimmering in the evening light.

  He rattled it.

  “There’s still some left. Thought you might fancy a spliff or two in the evenings. There’s bugger all else to do there once it’s gone dark, apart from going to the pub or staying in to read.”

  “Nothing else?” and Colin slipped a sly grin onto his face, getting another one of Kate’s pixie looks in return as she added, “Well, there is stargazing when it’s clear.”

  He managed to get their little Fiat coupe packed whilst it was still light, everything squeezed in with military precision. Its small boot soon filled up, the two excuses for rear seats likewise quickly overflowing with bags and boxes and overlaid with bedding. “Self-catering,” he muttered to himself when he checked and found he could no longer see anything through the rear-view mirror.

  Come one o’clock in the morning, he fired up the car’s sportily rasping engine and drove them away from their now dark and secured house, through the quiet neighbourhood streets and out onto the motorway. Before long, a completely empty M6 stretched ahead of them, through the almost dark Cheshire countryside. The car gabbled away to itself as Colin gave it its head, streaking towards the dark blue hem of the southern summer sky.

  The exciting prospect of discovering a wholly new place kept Colin company when Kate eventually fell asleep, somewhere not far north of Birmingham. He glanced at the tripometer: seventy-six miles, and did a quick subtraction from three hundred. Exactly, door to door, Kate had told him. Then he worked his way through his tapes of “New Order”, “Prefab Sprout” and a few other New Wave bands.

  Apart from a single distant set of taillights, glimpsed somewhere around Glastonbury, Colin never saw another vehicle until Exeter, where the motorway finally handed over to a dual carriageway. They’d not stopped once, the tank still a quarter full as they climbed a steep but fast incline towards a noticeably lightening sky.

  “Telegraph Hill,” Kate surprised Colin by saying, and she stretched as best she could in the car’s close confines. “It used to be a slow climb up here when it was the old road, stuck behind caravans and coaches. When I think back: the journey down was a full day’s drive then, early morning start, late night finish, picnics on the way. A real adventure.”

  The dual carriageway’s rollercoaster run, with its dips and brows and sweeping bends—and the odd sharp one to keep him awake—finally saw the low-fuel light come on. Its glow seemed to accentuate the darkness beyond the car’s headlights.

  “Er, Kate? Every garage we’ve passed so far has been closed, not that I’ve seen that many.”

  “Everywhere down here shuts at ten.”

  “Eh?”

  “I told you it was a different world.”

  “Shit,” and Colin eased off the throttle.

  When they eventually got to a long gentle descent towards a distant glow of sodium light against the brightening dawn sky, the low-fuel light had begun to flash. A sign for an exit slip appeared up ahead: “Plymouth, 1 mile”. Then he remembered they were now in a “Different world”.

  “Kate?”

  “Yes?”

  “Does that ten o’clock closing time apply to Plymouth?”

  The road into the city not only ran past a couple more closed petrol stations but also a long stretch of water, what Colin assumed was a first hint of the coastline awaiting them. The river Plym, Kate told him, although to Colin it looked too broad for a river.

  It wasn’t until she’d directed him through the deserted streets of the city, past the Barbican and out towards the ferry for Cornwall, that an open garage finally appeared. Relief flooded through Colin as he pulled up on its forecourt. When he got out to fill up, though, the sweet, rounded warmth of the heavier dawn air surprised him. It conjured boyhood memories of Mediterranean holidays with his parents.

  After he’d filled up, paid, found out there was no toilet, and was driving them off, Kate told him they were now in Stonehouse. “You remember?” she said, “where mum’s Aunt Bella’s flat used to be. Where the…the joss stick holder came from.”

  “Oh, right,” Colin said as he wound his window down to let in some more of that strong impression of being abroad.

  Before long they were into Devonport, the signs for the ferry taking them off down a short, steep hill into a large and deserted tarmacked area. Marked out into about half a dozen long lanes, a traffic light gantry ran across the far end. The one marked with a number “1” showed a green light. Beyond it and through a gateway, an illuminated sign declared “Ferry This Way”, complete with a helpful arrow. Beside this stood what looked like a Berlin Wall watchtower.

  “Just go straight through under the green light and follow that yellow arrow,” Kate told him, and he grinned and asked at what point they’d have to show their passports.

  They came straight onto the top of a wide and empty concrete ramp that slipped straight down into the lapping water’s edge of a broad river or estuary. As Kate clarified it was the River Tamar, Colin stopped the car and stared out at their first open view since sunrise.

  Bathed in a pearlescent light, the river seemed a cleaner blue and silver than Colin ever remembered seeing from within these his own shores. Its body of water appeared more immediate, as though flowing through his seemingly lighter heart. The sky looked closer, its few clouds a brighter white, slip
ping more fluidly through the sharper edge of its salt-laden breath.

  “And that’s Torpoint on the other side,” Kate added, nodding across the water at a jumbled mound of buildings on the far side, most tinted pink by the rising sun. Colin at last pulled his thoughts from the arms of this strangely seductive view’s promise.

  “So…so where’s the ferry?”

  “It’s there,” and she pointed.

  “Where? I can’t see one.”

  “Can you see that building next to—”

  “Hey! Just a minute. Something’s moving over there,” and Colin peered more intently. “You don’t mean that shed, there, do you?” and he too pointed. Kate burst out laughing, then choked it back when she stared at his confused face, until she couldn’t help but laugh again.

  “What?” but she only shook her head as she tried to get her breath back.

  After maybe four or five minutes, a large blue and white pontoon affair with tall, narrow superstructures down each side—one topped by yet another suggestion of a watchtower—neared the concrete ramp. When the ferry at last nudged against it, a man in Hi-Viz wandered out on deck. He swung back two gates that ran across the nearest end, opening the way from its four short lanes of floating road for the half-dozen cars aboard. Meanwhile, its wide, uplifted ramp-of-a-nose had steadily lowered, clattering against the concrete slope. The man waved the cars off, and their little Fiat on.

  “Off you go, then,” Kate said. “Our gateway to Cornwall awaits us. Oh, and we don’t have to pay going in, only on the way out,” and she grinned, knowingly.

  “Great,” Colin said, feeling he was beginning to get a sense of what Kate really meant when she talked about this remote corner of their country. Intrigue, but then mixed with a little trepidation, stirred in his soul as he slipped the car into first gear and revved its eager little engine. As he drove them down to board the ferry, though, he anxiously asked, “They do have a loo on this thing, don’t they?”