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

by Clive S. Johnson

  Part storeroom, part office, the room Derek took them to looked neat and tidy, as though used by more than one person. He offered Kate the only chair other than the one behind a small desk, leaving Colin standing like a spare part. Derek then leant to a long metal document cabinet and opened a drawer, taking a cloth bag out. He laid it on the desk and sat down before removing a leather-bound volume. Opening it at one of its bookmarks, he carefully placed it on a bookstand sitting to one side of the desktop, turning it to Kate.

  “Here’s the entry for Bodmin,” he told her, his fingertip hovering above the thin paper. Colin moved in closer, beside Kate, and bent to see. He then had to lean in yet closer still, so small was the print.

  “As you will know, Mrs McKinley, the Magna Britannia is a collation of both existing and previous primary and secondary sources, so,” he then directed at Colin, “it is rather ad hoc. But one of the things it does is to present extracts from various accounts, to illustrate such things as the cost of living at the time, for example.”

  He turned the page over and again pointed. “Here we have some items from the ancient corporation-accounts during the reign of Henry the seventh.”

  Kate read one out as Colin followed her finger: “Paide and yeven in malmesey to the under-sheryff, 4d”.

  “Indeed,” Derek said, “all quite interesting in their own right. But your mention of a blacksmith reminded me of one taken from the priory’s accounts,” and he ran his finger further down the column of text until it came to a halt. “Here we are, what the author describes as ‘the following curious items’, from which you’ll probably see why it stuck in my mind. Rather unusual, wouldn’t you say?”

  Kate and Colin brought their heads together as they leant even nearer the text. There, running from beside Derek’s fingertip, read the line: “Item. Paide and yevyn to the black moor smythe Joseph to his costs when the had hung anew the chapterhouse door, 16½d”.

  As close as their heads were, Kate and Colin turned to each other, she grinning broadly before she stole a quick kiss from his uncertain lips.

  22 “Wow”

  They sat together on a bench in the square outside the museum and Colin lit a cigarette. Its smoke curled up into the still afternoon air and seemed to take with it most of his cares—except one.

  “You sure it’s conclusive, Kate?”

  “Yes, which is another way of saying ninety-nine point nine percent, where old documents are concerned.”

  “But…but the name was Joseph, not Jusuf.”

  “Spelling hadn’t been standardised by then, Colin. Caxton had only recently died, so it was too soon for printing to have had its effect. People chose whatever letters and their arrangement suited their purpose.”

  “Like using a ‘y’ for a ‘g’?”

  “Exactly, as well as for an ‘i’.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “And just imagine Brother Jowan telling his accounts scribe that the Blackamoor smith Jusuf had done the job for one and fourpence ha’penny. Quite understandably, he’d have likely heard Jusuf’s name as the more familiar ‘Joseph’. It is, after all, the anglicised version of his name.”

  “Is it? Oh, right,” but being an engineer, Colin still wasn’t entirely convinced, and it must have come out in his voice.

  “Trust me, Colin. Trust my feel for these things, and don’t worry about it,” and so finally he didn’t, which freed an exhilaration that promptly took him by surprise.

  “Wow,” he at last managed, then stared into the distance as he tried to come to terms with the impossible. “I still can’t believe it, Kate. It’s… It’s like when I phoned up uni’ to get the results of my finals. You remember? And they’d said I’d got a first.”

  “On holiday, yes, I remember, in that phone box just outside the west front of Wells Cathedral. And then you asked them ‘Is that a pass, then?’,” and she laughed as she shook her head at the memory. “You wandered around in a daze for the rest of the day, saying ‘Wow’ every now and again, exactly as you did just now.”

  He turned to face her, fixing her amused eyes in his gaze. “Wow!” he said again, and they both broke into laughter.

  When they got to the car park, Kate wondered if Colin fancied calling in to have a look around Lostwithiel, or maybe Fowey, on the way back.

  “It’s a bit late, isn’t it?” he said, looking at his watch. “It’s getting on for three. Maybe another day, eh? I wouldn’t mind taking a bit of time just to digest today’s revelation, maybe with a little spliff or two.”

  “Which brings us,” Kate said, once Colin had slipped in through the driver’s door and reached across to unlock her own, “to what we do next about Jusuf,” she concluded having swung it open. But she froze, staring off into the distance, her hand resting on the door, until Colin asked if she was all right.

  “I think it’s only just sunk in with me, Colin.”

  “What has?”

  She got into the car and slowly turned to face him, wide-eyed. “That we’re blithely talking about someone who…who really did exist; a real person; real flesh and blood and living here five hundred years ago.”

  “I know. Wow, eh?”

  She nodded and echoed “Wow” herself as Colin started the car.

  They drove out of Bodmin in silence, each lost in their own thoughts, Colin’s going back over what he’d experienced through Jusuf—through the real flesh-and-blood man. He eventually got to remembering their arrival at the smithy, and then something struck him.

  “What did Mistress Trewin mean when she asked Brother Hammett if Jusuf was a Turkoman? You remember, before she’d let them in at her door.”

  “Hmm? Oh, that. Yes, I do remember. Well, the Turkomans were slave traders who used to pillage these coasts, stealing Cornishmen off to work in the mines of the Ottoman Empire, and other labour elsewhere. It went on for hundreds of years.”

  “What? They came all the way from Turkey to Cornwall?”

  “No, they weren’t really Turks. They were Barbary Corsairs from the north and west African coasts. I think the ‘Turk’ part came from the Turkish Empire’s early influence on their cultures.”

  “North Africa? You mean like Morocco, where Jusuf came from?”

  “Yeah, black Africans taking white Europeans into slavery.”

  “I never knew that.”

  “Nothing’s new in history, Colin, and evil’s always been a two-way street. It’s still part of the folklore down here, though. At its height, a couple of hundred years after Jusuf, some fishing villages were abandoned. It was just too risky living on the coast. Imagine what that did to their fishing industry.”

  “Blimey. So that’s what old Derek meant by that entry of Jusuf’s being ‘Rather unusual’? A blackamoor blacksmith in Cornwall!”

  “Exactly. But more especially, so far inland; in Bodmin. They were probably quite used to seeing black sailors in coastal places like Fowey, but far less so here.”

  “I wonder if that was something to do with why the old woman came over to touch Jusuf when he first arrived outside the Ship Inn.”

  Kate laughed. “I’d not picked up on that, but it sounds like something my gran once told me. She said that when she was a young woman in Plymouth, seeing a black man was regarded as lucky; like a black cat crossing your path, I suppose. I don’t remember her saying anything about touching them, though.”

  “Jusuf was lucky himself, then.”

  “In what way?”

  “Bumping into the brothers. He might have had a different reception had he not been with them.”

  “Yes, I must admit, I did wonder about that myself.”

  As they eventually got nearer the chalet, back along the coast road that was already starting to feel more familiar to Colin, his thoughts began to crystallise. “You know, Kate, there are a couple of things about all this that really bug me.”

  “Only a couple?”

  He took a glance at her before the next bend coming up forced his eyes back to the road. �
��The biggest one for me is how the hell this could be happening. What mechanism’s allowing me somehow to pass back in time and occupy a real person? Someone real from the real past, for Christ’s sake.”

  “And for that real person to see into our own present.”

  “Yeah, there is that. And in some ways that’s even more mind-blowing.” He concentrated on taking the bend around the head of the cove they were presently above, then the turn for the track to the chalet appeared ahead. “There’s some bloody earthshattering new laws of physics involved in this, Kate. I can’t help thinking we ought to tell someone.”

  “You’d have to be able to demonstrate it, though, otherwise it’d be just a story, something you could easily have made up after doing the research. And anyway, what was the other thing bugging you?”

  He drew the car to a halt in front of the chalet, beyond which the clouds he’d seen in the morning had grown to a white-topped wall of grey above the sea’s dark horizon. Colin applied the handbrake and turned to face Kate.

  “Why. We still haven’t answered the ‘Why’. Today we’ve discovered that the ‘Effect’ is certainly real, but we’re still ignorant of the ‘Cause’. Why is this happening? Is it just some random phenomenon, or is there a conscious purpose behind it, and if so, whose?”

  “Well, Colin, there’s only one way we can possibly find that out.”

  “Yeah, well, first off, I’m going to have at least one spliff for my own enjoyment, before I have one for the road—the road back to Jusuf that’s now clearly beyond circumstantial.”

  23 A Tenure Due a Tenure

  As Colin hitched his leather bag higher onto his shoulder and wearily approached where the dirt road widened outside the smithy, his long day’s walk demanded he quench his thirst before going in. He made a beeline for the spring opposite, absently noting a handcart standing in the late afternoon sunshine before the barn’s door, its shafts tilted down against the quarry flags. Some of their neighbour’s children were playing there, briefly halting their game of tag to wave across and call “Master Joseph”. He waved back, smiling, although the children themselves seemed not to smile.

  One of the smithy’s buckets stood beside the spring, full of water and unattended, and at which Jusuf frowned before dipping both hands in to lift a drink to his lips. His narrowed gaze drifted across at the smithy again, at the half-open wicket door, through which one of the boys now slipped. Although dark within, he could just make out people milling about.

  Jusuf scooped up another drink, its invigorating cool edge bringing him to close his eyes. When he reopened them, Rodrigo stood before him, his usually sunned face seemingly wan and drawn.

  “I suspect you’ve ill-tidings to unfold, my friend,” Jusuf said, wiping his sleeve across his mouth as he stood and once more stared across at the smithy. “It’s not Mistress Trewin, is it?”

  “Not exactly; her husband,” which words captured Jusuf’s gaze. “One of her neighbours from down the road returned this morning.”

  “From the rebel army?”

  “They’ve only just brought him up to see the senhora. Although he’s in a poor way, he insisted on speaking to her face-to-face. He…he saw her husband fall at the battle of Blackheath.”

  “Fall?” and Jusuf could barely bring himself to imagine Mistress Trewin’s distress.

  But Rodrigo surprised him when he said, “She’s been remarkably strong; seems keen to see you.”

  “Me?”

  “I said I’d take you to her as soon as you were back from Rame.”

  When Jusuf came to stand in the smithy’s doorway, its barn seemed smaller, crowded as it was by its half dozen awkwardly disposed men and women. The subdued hubbub dwindled away the minute he stepped in, towering above them as he stared amongst their faces for that of his mistress.

  “She’s in her cottage,” Rodrigo quietly told him, coming up beside and nodding towards the door through from the barn, the one beyond which he’d never dared venture. “She’s with Old Meg from next door, the man himself still and a couple of his women neighbours who helped him up here.”

  Jusuf passed between the familiar but averted faces and approached the doorway. In the poor light within the cottage stood two women, either side of a man clearly uncomfortably seated on a wooden chair set before an unlit hearth. Their backs to Jusuf, they faced Mistress Trewin, herself sitting in a chair behind which hovered a grim-faced Meg. The old woman noticed Jusuf and beckoned him in before bending to whisper in the ear of the mistress.

  Mistress Trewin immediately lifted her haunted gaze to him, recognition and a fleeting glint of something else distracting him from her resolute lips. She placed her hand on the man’s then looked up at Jusuf once more. Those about her followed her gaze, each settling their own on Jusuf.

  As though by prior arrangement, in turn they nodded first at her and then at him, before helping the injured man up and finally to hobble past Jusuf as he stepped aside.

  “Thank ‘e, Master Wilfred,” the mistress called after the man. “I be grateful for thy time and kind effort. God speed your healing,” but he only paused in the doorway and nodded before briefly turning his scarred face up at Jusuf. Then he hobbled out, leaving Jusuf and the mistress alone together.

  “Please, come in and sit ‘e down, Master Jusuf.”

  “Shall I close the door, Mistress?”

  “No…no, best not. We can…we can talk privy enough.”

  He eased himself into the man’s vacated chair, its wood creaking at his weight, and placed his shoulder bag down by his side. At last, he nerved himself to look her in the face, unsure what he saw there other than an emptiness about her eyes.

  “Mistress,” he slowly said, searching for his words, “my English be too poor still to speak true of what I…of what I feel at your loss. But—”

  “Thank ‘e, Master Jusuf,” and she sniffed back a tear as she briefly leant forward and touched his hand. “‘Tis good of ‘e, but your concern can be of more use if you just let me tell you something of my past.”

  She smoothed her skirt at her knees and stared down at her hands, which she then folded upon them before looking aside at the cold hearth. The light coming in through the window opening at the end of the room behind Jusuf painted the beauty of her features pale against the dimly lit room behind, like a half-moon in the grey sky of a cold winter’s eve.

  “Once, Master Jusuf,” she quietly said, her gaze still fixed upon the hearth, “the flush of love for my husband-to-be coursed hotly through my blood. The kind that can only spring forth from a maid of fourteen years. The kind that before long quickened my belly in our carefree pleasures, despite us not having plighted our troth. That left me foolish enough to hold a still warm heart so close to a man ill-chosen.”

  When Jusuf only frowned, now looking himself at the hearth, the mistress turned back to him, her gaze catching his eyes, drawing them to the wet glaze of her own.

  “Maeloc, my husband, did right by me, though, Master Jusuf. He eventually stood at my right side before the door of Saint Petroc’s, before its canon priest, and there we said us vows to each other in front of those gathered to witness.”

  “You had a…a child?”

  “Nay, Master Jusuf. Within a two month, poor mite had slipped from my carrying, a three month afore due and me left sickly near unto the same fate. But Maeloc cared for me, I’ll give him that. Worked harder then for his father and me than ever he did thereafter. Certainly not once I took to looking after this smithy’s affairs when we came to dwell here. But though I remained a wife to him, my womb never quickened again, my love all the while waning at the prospect that lay before me. I grew up quickly then, Master Jusuf, saw my husband for what he truly were: lazy and a poor workman. As the proverb goes: ‘Hot love be soon cold’.”

  Voices rose in the barn, one of the women who’d attended the man popping her head through the doorway to announce: “We need to get Master Wilfred home, Mistress Trewin. He be none too good all of a sudden
, but better for having told ‘e himself. We’re truly sorrowful for your ill-tidings, mistress, that we are. ‘Tis a shame an’ all, but we want ‘e to know us thoughts be with thee,” and at a nod from Mistress Trewin, the woman was gone.

  “I don’t understand, Mistress,” Jusuf presently said. “But why are you telling me all this?”

  “Maeloc’s death—if it truly be so—most cruelly straitens my prospects, Master Jusuf. And so I’m brought to lay my future in your good hands…your more than capably good craftsman’s hands,” and she briefly placed her own on his.

  “You said ‘If it truly be so’, but Rodrigo told me your husband had been seen to fall.”

  “Fall, aye,” then she looked about the dimly lit room and softly sighed. “Maeloc be a tenant blacksmith here, Master Jusuf. This smithy and its land be demesne of the priory, us tenure here held in consideration of moneys paid each quarter day. That contract, though, be in his name only.”

  A quiet knock at the open door interrupted, and Rodrigo called in if he may enter. He carried a mug of small ale for Jusuf and asked after Mistress Trewin’s needs, but she demurred. Then she clearly realised and bade Jusuf forgive her her thoughtlessness.

  “You must be parched after your long journey. Are you hungry?” but Jusuf shook his head.

  “Later, Mistress,” and he thanked Rodrigo as the man quietly slipped from the room. The ale did far more to quench Jusuf’s thirst than had the spring water, and he felt a little sharper of mind when the mistress carried on.

  “At my husband’s death, that contract, and so my own right to dwell here, will come to an end.”

  “And so, too, my service to you,” Jusuf voiced, a sadness washing over him: the thought of having to find a new position elsewhere, but also the predicament in which it would then leave his mistress. “But surely, with Master Wilfred’s report, isn’t the contract already broken?”

  “Master Wilfred saw Maeloc’s fall, not his…” but the wetness that had hung about her eyes at last trickled onto her cheeks. She checked herself, dabbing at her eyes with her sleeve. “Forgive me, Master Jusuf, but though my love for Maeloc long ago cooled, I will sorely miss him still.”