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

by Clive S. Johnson

  “Which we took to mean some sort of physical attack.”

  “Like the last component for a bomb. But maybe we were wrong, eh? What if it was… Well, I dunno. Something else, an information attack, say.”

  “A what?”

  “Intelligence. Some dirt on the Spanish king, or something like that.”

  “But why worry about it getting broken?”

  “Ah, well. There you have me.”

  “Because the captain made it sound like it posed a direct threat to their lives. I can’t think of any information that could be that much of an immediate risk.”

  Neither of them could come up with anything more constructive during what was left of the afternoon, nor through their meal and into the evening. As on the previous night, they both retired early, exhausted by the sun, the fresh sea air and the steep climb back up from the beach to the chalet.

  The following morning looked set to be fine when Colin stumbled through the nettles to the outside toilet, although a high bank of cloud marred the ocean’s southwestern horizon. Otherwise the sky arched blue above him as he opened the dew-dampened door. It seemed a shame to be going inland and away from the beach on such a promising day. But then part of him really did want to see how much of Bodmin he might recognise.

  Before long they were motoring back between rolling fields, the coast behind them, the main road for Bodmin ahead. The journey proved as straightforward as their road atlas had promised, but as they at last drove towards the town centre and into heavier traffic, Colin cleared his throat.

  “You know,” he said, rather reticently, “the sun down here really is pretty strong. The…the tops of my feet are really stinging.”

  Kate lofted her brows and drew in a long and quiet breath. “And probably as red-looking as your face and nose are now, especially your nose, Colin.”

  They’d agreed they’d follow the first signs they came across for parking, hoping to get on foot at the earliest. They wanted to minimise the chance of Colin getting a feel for the place before they could do a proper cold test on his recall. But as they came into the centre itself, Kate warned Colin to keep his eyes on the road and try not to look around.

  “Why?” he said, glancing at her, but she just pointed two fingers at her eyes, then jabbed them forward at the slowing traffic ahead.

  Not long after, she said, “Aha, just the thing: a sign for the town centre car park. Left at the next mini-roundabout,” then she pointed out a tourist sign that showed the Town Museum was also that same way.

  Colin found it hard not looking about, although it had the feel of the market towns he knew in Yorkshire, places like Skipton. Before long they’d left the roundabout behind and climbed a short rise, following the next sign at a set of traffic lights into a side street and to a Pay and Display at its end.

  “I can’t see any spaces,” he said, crawling along the lines of parked cars.

  “Let me out here, Colin. I spotted a Tourist Information Centre back at the lights. I’ll go get us a town guide while you find one. Wait at the entrance once you have,” and when he’d stopped the car, she got out.

  On his third circuit, Colin noticed someone pulling out and was soon parked up and buying a ticket at the machine. The notice board behind it announced he was in “Bodmin Town Council’s Priory Car Park”. He froze, a ticket in his hand, as a flashback overwhelmed him.

  Bright sunlight slanted dark shadows down the front of the priory’s gatehouse, now before him at the end of a short dirt track. Its double gate was closed, a smaller wicket door wide open within it, a paved pathway beyond in yet deeper shade. Even its familiar smell pervaded his nose and mouth.

  “I’m sorry, but are you finished?” a man’s voice said, and the vision evaporated.

  “Oh, sorry. Yes. Just reading the sign,” and Colin stepped out of the way. But as he turned around in a circle, the lie of the land about him somehow didn’t feel right, then he spotted Kate coming towards him, leaflets in hand.

  “Found somewhere then?” she called.

  “Yep. I’ll just put the ticket in the car and I’ll be right with you.”

  Once back, he told her about his vivid flashback, but also that he was sure the priory’s gatehouse he’d seen hadn’t been where they were standing. He pointed out the car park sign.

  “I think it was just the name, not the place itself, because there’s nothing here I recognise from my time with Jusuf.”

  “I’m not surprised. I asked at the information centre and they said there’s hardly anything of the priory left, and most of that’s stones now incorporated into other buildings around the town.”

  She then waved one of her leaflets at him. “You know how I am with maps, but I reckon, from this one,” which she carefully avoided him seeing, “the road that runs past here at the lights is the one from Lostwithiel, the one Jusuf must have arrived by.”

  Colin’s mouth went dry.

  When they got to it, he stared back down towards the mini-roundabout. None of it looked familiar, although this time the lie of the land told him it should have been.

  “It’s just so much busier, cars and people and far too many buildings. It’s hard to say,” but then he looked across the road at what appeared to be a municipal building on the far side of a small square. “There’s something familiar about that place, though, but it’s only vague.”

  “Come on, then, let’s carry on. Just say if anything strikes you,” and Kate stepped out, leading the way down the hill. She kept looking back, but none of it struck a chord with Colin. When they arrived at the roundabout, it was the confluence of its roads that brought his eyes to narrow. Then he looked across at a church on the other side.

  “Ah,” he sighed, but somewhat uncertainly. “A tall, square entrance porch. And three west end windows under their own separate gables.”

  “You recognise it?”

  “Hmm, well, yes and no. It looks remarkably like Saint Petroc’s, but there’s no spire. This one’s got a squat square tower on its far side, so…well, no, not really.” When Kate again glanced at her leaflet’s map and said that it was indeed Saint Petroc’s, Colin felt disappointment flood in and swamp his hopes.

  “So it’s not as Jusuf saw it?” she asked.

  Colin turned his mouth down as he shook his head. “Although that road up the side looks right, the same bend and rise. I remember it being cobbled, though. But if that is Saint Petroc’s, then that’d be the way to Mistress Trewin’s smithy.”

  “Okay. Let’s carry on that way, then. See what we see, eh?” and they were soon climbing its short incline.

  Again, little seemed familiar to Colin, far too many properties, a lot fewer trees and bordering paddocks and fields, the road straighter, busier and largely of an even width. They walked for a good ten or fifteen minutes, until Colin called time.

  “The feel of the land’s deserted me,” he told her. I don’t recognise its lie anymore, and we’ve been going too long. Let’s backtrack a bit.” Then an idea came to him: “As I’ve never experienced Jusuf going any further up this road than the smithy, then when it feels right again that should be where it was.”

  He took it slower on the way back, reaching his senses out to feel the land beneath his feet, the contours of the surrounding terrain, the shade and shadow and light—then, before long, he stopped and looked around. “The feeling’s back. Ah, of course.”

  “What? Is this it?”

  “This junction; the lane round the back,” and he slowly turned around, “and the rise of the land opposite; that other lane coming in over there, on the other side of the road…Chapel Lane,” he read from its nameplate. Then he turned back to stare at their own side of the road, blankly at a patch of grass on the other side of the junction. Nipping between cars queueing to get out onto the main road, he was soon standing before it.

  “Well?” Kate said as she joined him, staring minutely at his face.

  Colin could almost see the smithy’s barn before his eyes, where t
he grass of the verge beyond a low wall now grew. Its quarry flags lay beneath the pavement at his feet, the gable end of its attached cottage sticking out to the edge of the dirt road at his back, the forge off to his other side. Then the quietness of everything around it seeped in to fill his ears. He remembered his thirst as Rodrigo had led him out to call at the Tremethyk’s on their way to the priory.

  He turned once more and stared hard across the empty dirt road, intent only on a short wall of rough stones to one side of the lane’s narrow entrance opposite.

  “That must be the spring,” he said, without looking aside at Rodrigo, and stepped out to cross the road to find out.

  A deafening blare startled him, brought a loud screech to his ear as his sight bleached bright blue and pain shot down his arm.

  21 Magna Britannia

  A shout of “Colin” screamed loudly in his ears as his gaze snapped back to the road. Slewed to a halt in front of him was a car, mere inches away.

  “For Christ’s sake, Colin; what the fuck are you doing?” and he recognised Kate’s frightened voice as he stared into the startled face of the car’s front seat passenger.

  “Eh? What? Er…where did that come from?” he stammered, but couldn’t quite hear Kate’s reply, not against the deafening sound of the blood pounding in his ears.

  “Shit!” he eventually heard her say as she dragged him further back. “Here, sit down on this wall,” she said, and before he knew it he had a cigarette between his quivering lips, his shaking hands failing to light the Zippo they somehow held. In a daze, he watched the short queue of traffic he’d caused finally growl off down the road.

  “Ow! My arm hurts,” he said, once Kate had taken the Zippo from his fumbling hands and flicked it to a flame. She snatched the cigarette from between his lips and lit it for him.

  “You’re damned lucky that’s all that hurts, you idiot. What were you thinking?” and she jabbed the cigarette back between his lips.

  He felt at his shoulder and quietly moaned as he took a long, deep drag.

  “I’m afraid,” Kate said, “that was me. I grabbed your arm.”

  He could hear the tremor in her voice and lifted his bemused eyes to see anger in her own, but an anger tempered by fear-filled relief.

  “Christ, Kate, but I don’t know what came… No, that’s not true. I do know what came over me—this place.”

  Her shoulders slumped as she let out a long breath, then she sat down beside him on the wall. “Do you want to tell me?”

  He looked at her and drew his lips to a thin line, but then nodded. “Can we go somewhere a bit quieter, though?” and he remembered the spring that had caused all this. “Let’s go across to the lane over there. It’s a bit more away from the road than here.”

  “All right, but you’re going to hold my hand, you hear? I’m not having you scaring the shit out of me again.”

  “Okay.”

  Together, hand in hand, she led him a few yards down the road to a pedestrian crossing and pressed its button. Her grip of his hand tightened as she held him back from the kerb. The lights changed, marked by the usual rapid beeping, and she walked him smartly across, back up the road and to the start of Chapel Lane.

  To one side stood a modern retail unit selling tiles, but on the other ran a short verge backed by a stone wall, its nearest end doglegging around a small, neatly bordered pool. Colin wandered onto the grass, Kate still clutching his hand as she followed, and they stood before it. Where the wall ran behind the pool, two verdigris-stained taps jutted out just above the waterline, a date stone inset a few feet above them.

  “It wasn’t like this in Jusuf’s time,” he told Kate.

  “Clearly not,” she said in a steadier voice, and he saw what she meant: “1849” stared at him from the date stone.

  “This was where I…where Jusuf told Rodrigo about his vision of Mistress Trewin, well, of you really.” Colin slipped his hand from Kate’s and knelt beside the pool, dipping his cupped hands in, as Jusuf had done.

  “I wouldn’t drink it, Colin. It says here,” and he looked up to see her reading one of her leaflets, “that in eighteen-eighty-one it was the source of Enteric Fever, similar to Typhoid, and that thirteen of sixty cases proved fatal.”

  Colin opened his fingers, letting their scoop of water rain back down into the pool.

  “Hey, but listen to this: it also says that there were two blacksmiths amongst the victims, who, ‘through their hot work, drank large quantities of the water’.” She stared aghast at him. “Blacksmiths whose…whose ‘smithy once stood opposite’.”

  Colin got to his feet, wiping his hands on his jeans, and together they looked back at the empty grass verge directly across on the other side of the road. “Well, Kate, what do you reckon? Have we gone beyond circumstantial yet?”

  “Hmm, well, technically, no,” and she held up the leaflet, “but I have to say: it’s looking a lot more convincing.”

  But then Colin thought of the deaths of the two blacksmiths and took Kate’s hand in his, his gaze searching her eyes. “I don’t think I said ‘Thanks’, so…so thanks for pulling me back,” and the pain in his shoulder seemed suddenly small in comparison.

  She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tightly, her voice small and muffled against his chest: “You’re an idiot, Colin. Do you know that? But I’d hate to be without you.” Her body shook against his for a moment, then she rubbed her eyes against his arm. “What would I do without you?” and he tenderly stroked her back.

  They called in at a café on their way back into the centre of Bodmin—together settling their nerves—then climbed the hill towards the car park. Just before the traffic lights, though, they followed a sign for the town’s museum.

  It took them across the small square to a strangely ancient-looking building. Its Romanesque windows struck Kate as being at odds with a high oriel window at one end and a narrow balcony at the other.

  “It looks strangely Romano-Italianate,” she expanded. “Like an abbey that’s been mucked about with by Giotto.”

  “Right,” Colin said, spotting the sign for the museum’s entrance. “Looks like something Disney dreamt up, to me.”

  The building turned out to be the town’s Public Rooms, the museum itself confined to its lower ground floor. The usual glass cabinets in its almost deserted rooms displayed an eclectic assortment of artefacts, mostly from considerably more recent times than Jusuf’s. Something in a tall and wide display case, though, eventually drew Colin’s eye. He stood before it, scanning the objects standing on their small Perspex shelves.

  “Hey, now this is interesting,” and he pointed out a leather mug, described on its label as “A Drinking Jack”. “That’s what Jusuf and Rodrigo were drinking from in the Salutation tavern, although theirs didn’t have silver rims like this one. I think Jusuf’s was more likely pewter.”

  For the next quarter of an hour or so they searched through the displays, finding nothing of further interest. That was until Kate drew Colin’s attention to an old book, open at a page containing a drawing that had Colin closely bending over its cabinet.

  “Wow. That’s it, Kate. Saint Petroc’s. The one Jusuf saw,” and there in the small drawing rose its tall spire. “Struck by lightning in 1699,” he read out to her, but she was already ahead of him.

  “The resultant fire destroyed both the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot spire and its roof.” She lifted her gaze and gave him a smile.

  “Phew,” Colin drew out to a long sigh, before grinning broadly. “So that answers that one. But,” and his face dropped, “it’s still only circumstantial.”

  “Keep looking.”

  They were about to move on when a man’s voice interrupted them. “I couldn’t help overhearing,” and they turned to find a tall, elderly gent smiling welcomingly at them both. “I work here. Well, actually I’m one of the volunteers, helping with the cataloguing. You sounded as though you were after something in particular, and I wondered if I might be of assis
tance.”

  “Thank you,” Kate said, smiling at him. “Yes, we’re…we’re doing a bit of research into my family tree.”

  “Ah, yes,” the man said, as Colin narrowed his eyes at Kate, “that does seem to be becoming something of a popular pursuit these days. And your family were from Bodmin?”

  “A long time ago, yes.”

  “Well, we do have a lot more in storage than we can put on display, some of it going back to the seventeenth century,” and his words carried a hint of pride.

  “How about the fifteenth?” Kate enquired. The man’s eyes widened, his brows lofting.

  “The…the fifteenth. Well, not a vast amount from so early, I’m afraid, most of which is already on display. Do you have a name? It may jog my memory, you see. I have been a volunteer here since seventy-one, when I retired, so you never know.”

  “We only have a surname, I’m afraid: Trewin, Mistress Trewin…wife to a blacksmith at a smithy on…” and she quickly checked one of her leaflets. “On Dennison Road, as it’s currently called, opposite Cock’s Well at the end of Chapel Lane. Fourteen-ninety-seven…or thereabouts.”

  The man pressed his lips together and stared between Kate and Colin.

  “Well, we do have an early edition of Magna Britannia, Volume Three for Cornwall. Not a first edition of eighteen-fourteen, you understand, but it’s still old enough to need rather, well, rather careful handling.”

  “I’m Kate McKinley,” and she extended her hand as she added, “An assistant archivist and researcher at the John Rylands Library in Manchester,” and with her other hand she rummaged in her handbag for her ID card.

  “The Rylands? Oh, well,” and he vigorously shook Kate’s hand, “in which case, please, if you’d like to follow me. I’ll take you through to my little den,” and he grinned broadly at them both.

  “I’m Colin, by the way.”

  “Oh, how do you do,” and he briefly shook Colin’s hand, too. “I’m Derek Foster, one-time borough surveyor of this fair town, but long since put out to grass,” he addressed primarily at Kate and grinned again.