The Outcasts of Time

by Ian Mortimer

  Several chorus this with ‘Amen’.

  ‘He was a good man,’ says another.

  ‘I had my suspicions of Beddoes,’ says Edward Bowden. ‘He didn’t seem right for this job. I reckon that he only came out here to kill Richard.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘That we will never know,’ says another man.

  ‘Should we not chase after him?’ I ask.

  ‘Chances are you’d leave the path and fall into a mire,’ replies the foreman. ‘You’d be up to your neck in sucking slime before you knew it. No one would hear you cry for help, and no one would see you. If there is any justice in the world, then that is exactly what will have happened to Beddoes by now.’

  ‘Will we bury the body?’ asks Bowden.

  The foreman looks at him. ‘We’re in the forest of Dartmoor here, all of which lies in the parish of Lydford. Even if you know the way, the church is a whole day’s journey from here. So to take him to church burial, I’ll need to spare an experienced man and a stout pony. Then a day coming back. And payment for the digging of the grave, which’ll be another sixpence. A few of you knew Richard; I’ll not tell you what you should and should not do. But does anyone who knows the way to Lydford want to spend two days unpaid taking him to burial?’

  No one speaks.

  ‘Then that is settled.’

  ‘Do we just leave him there?’ I ask.

  ‘We’ll throw his body in the mire up the valley with a block of granite roped to his leg. First thing tomorrow. Before anyone else comes out here.’

  ‘What then of his clothes?’ asks William.

  ‘By custom, the clothes of a dead man go to the one that found the body. John can have them.’

  ‘They’ll be too big for him,’ says someone.

  ‘But not for my brother,’ I reply.

  ‘Give them to whoever you want,’ says the foreman. ‘Any money in his purse is to be shared out evenly, between us all.’

  William and I get up and relight one of the torches. No one says anything as we leave, fastening the door carefully. When we come to the corpse, William holds the guttering torch while I pull off his clothes, cap, belt, knife, purse and boots. I put rocks on the pile as it grows, to hold it down in the wind.

  Before we return inside, I kneel and say a prayer for the dead man’s soul. It will probably be the only prayer said for him. His family will never know he was stabbed in the back, or that his body was dumped in a mire on the moor.

  ‘If you are poor,’ I say to William, ‘you cannot help others. You are too busy trying to help yourself.’

  ‘What did you say?’ he shouts back.

  I look at his face in the flickering torchlight, and shake my head. Picking up the clothes, I head inside, with him following me.

  No one speaks much after that. Eventually, we all lie down to sleep – William wearing the dead man’s leather cloak, and spreading his own clothes over the top. He gives me his old mantle to help keep me warm. And then there is silence – but for the howling of the wind around the house.

  As I lie there, I try to acknowledge the meaning of this death in some way. It will not be written down in any books. In ten years’ time, few people will remember there ever was a man called Richard Townsend or what he looked like. In ninety-nine years, no one will remember him at all. Even the murder of a man can be a small thing. The word murder has such grandness in our minds but truly, all deaths are matters of slight importance, except perhaps the king’s. In four days’ time, when it is my turn to die, no one will care for a man who was called John of Wrayment, or John de Wrayment, or John Drayman. My wife and children won’t know a thing about it; they have already long since gone.

  In truth, I no longer fear death. I only fear not joining them.

  Chapter Five

  I cannot breathe. Trapped in freezing darkness, I do not know which way is up. I start to feel I am about to die. Not yet, I tell myself, I have four days left. But the need to breathe is overwhelming. I push forward, struggling as if I were trapped underwater. I move my arms and legs frantically. All of a sudden, I find air on my face. I gulp it in, unable to see anything.

  I am embedded in ice and snow. It is night – but I can see no stars.

  ‘William!’ I shout into the darkness.

  My voice falls strangely dead.

  ‘William!’ I shout again.

  I struggle to my feet. There is no wind, no noise.

  I stand there, shivering. There is nothing to hear but my own voice.

  Two hundred and ninety-seven years have passed since my own time, so the year must be sixteen hundred and forty-five, by the canon precentor’s reckoning. I remind myself that today is the seventeenth of December, and I work out that it must be a Wednesday. But these things are all I know. I cannot even hear the running water of the stream that once drove the blowing-house waterwheel. The only sense left to me is feeling – and my feet are numb with cold, my hands chilled to the bone.

  ‘William!’ I shout. ‘William!’

  I remember my travelling sack, which I was using as a pillow when I went to sleep. Reaching down into the darkness, I feel for it. I shovel piles of snow to one side with my palm, and eventually find the ties, and lift it, and hold it, feeling the shapes of the metal chisels and the crucifix, and the bundle of soaked clothes.

  What if there were to be no dawn? What if, in these days of the sixteen hundreds, the sun no longer rises? What if the whole world is caked in this silent covering? Despite all the things I have heard about the fires of Hell, I cannot imagine that anything could be worse than to be stranded in a lightless world of deep snow, unable to see or hear anything. An eternal winter. Worst of all, I am alone. Truly, the sinner who burns in the company of others is blessed by comparison with the soul who freezes alone.

  There is a rustling nearby, and I rejoice in the noise – even if it is only a fox making his way across the snow.

  ‘God’s bloody wounds!’ I hear William exclaim.

  ‘Thank the Lord!’

  ‘Have I gone blind or is it dark?’

  ‘If you are blind then so am I.’

  ‘Are you as cold as me?’

  ‘God’s grave, William, of course I am. I’m soaked to the skin. There’s ice all around us.’

  ‘I wish we’d never come out here.’

  ‘It was your idea. You said we should work for the tinners.’

  ‘My idea? It was you who said that we should go into the wilderness. “The wilderness is God’s Creation unchanged,” you said. Well, put your balls and breeches to that. The wilderness is where we are right now – and I am not hearing choirs of angels.’

  ‘William, you are altering things. It was you who said that we know nothing, and can do nothing, and are like children. “Coming out to the moor will be like a levelling of things,” you said.’

  ‘Damn you, John. Would we be here if you had not picked up the infected baby?’

  I have no answer to that.

  Even God would find this a cold, dismal place. Besides, what need is there for Him here? The place for God is in the cities and the towns – in all the places where, as Alderman Periam said, man is a devil to man, homo homini daemon. God should be in those places to soften hard men’s hearts and to stiffen weak men’s resolve.

  ‘Where shall we go?’ he asks.

  ‘Towards that patch of darkness over there.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How in God’s name should I know? We cannot move without danger of falling down a gully or into a ravine – or worse, into a mire.’

  ‘You chuckle-headed fool. Can you hear the gushing of a stream? No. Why not, I wonder? Perhaps some evil spirit has whisked it away in the last ninety-nine years. Or perhaps it has simply frozen over. You could go skating across all the mires of the moor right now, John.’ He pauses. ‘Look, we can set out by following the line of the hill. I slept in the middle of the house last night, so the door must’ve been on the far side of you from me.’

 
I hear him step towards me and feel his hand on my arm. Together we find the low ruined wall of the house and clamber through a four-foot-deep drift before turning along what we believe to be the path.

  The heavy snow is difficult to walk through and it takes us an age to reach the top of the ridge. By the time we are there the sky is beginning to lighten around us. But still we can see nothing. Everywhere the snow and ice drifts into the greyness, so that the eye has nothing on which to fix. There are no trees, only ridges and slopes of ice.

  We breathe heavily as we make our way across eastwards. Before us, the snow stretches away. And a slight strengthening of light behind the clouds illuminates a view that is serene, perfect and inhuman.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ he asks.

  ‘Richard Townsend hoped to make enough money to teach his son to read and write. That son’ll be dead by now. Townsend’s family would have been left destitute.’

  ‘That’s the passing of time for you.’

  ‘It’s more than that. I could not save the man – no more than I could save those children at the cottage in the woods the previous day. I could not do a good deed even when it needed to be done.’

  ‘Maybe this is God’s gentle way of warning you that you are not cut out for eternal bliss?’

  ‘Why are we here then, if our lot is to shuffle along a path and simply tip over into Hell?’

  ‘I’m cold,’ replies William. ‘I’m wet and hungry too. And there are no women. A place is desolate if it has no women.’

  ‘And that, you think, is the meaning of our lives? To stay dry and warm – and feed ourselves and fornicate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘John, this world is the right place for me, I know.’

  We walk on, regularly looking back to check the line of our footsteps in the snow, to make sure we keep heading eastwards. After two or perhaps three hours, we see a circle of stones, some fallen, some standing – on the side of a hill.

  ‘You know what that is,’ says William.

  Scorhill. Only one of the stones still stands to its full height. I recall my earlier desire to return here, and ask to die in my own time. Now there is no thought of that in my mind. Instead, we walk on, gladdened to know where we are. We are even happier when the sun breaks through the clouds and shines across the snows before us, dazzling our eyes. We trudge up over the hill and down the far side – and there the first trees come into sight. Their leafless boughs are crested with snow and they are all ringed with beauty and frail light. Somewhere nearby there are birds singing. Here too we see the first snow-capped drystone walls of enclosures.

  A few minutes later, we come across a short, squat fellow wearing a leather hat, a canvas smock and heavy leather boots. He carries a pitchfork that is longer than he is tall. The beard on the side of his face is cut away from his chin but covers his jowl on either side, as an extension of his sideburns. He has been strewing hay across a nearby snowbound field where a pair of grey nags are now feeding.

  ‘Are you for Parliament or for the king?’ he shouts at us, lowering his pitchfork in what is clearly intended to be a threatening manner.

  William turns to me. ‘The king or Parliament. Whose side are we on, John?’

  ‘We’ve no wish to be disloyal to either, being but travellers,’ I shout back.

  The fellow in the hat looks at me quizzically. ‘What’s that? Why do you talk in such a strange fashion? You’re Royalist spies, I’ll warrant.’ He pushes the points of the pitchfork towards us. ‘Let’s be going; you can account for yourselves to Mister Parlebone.’

  ‘Mister?’ William asks me. ‘What sort of name is that?’

  ‘I suspect it is a title, like “Master”,’ I reply.

  ‘Hands up,’ shouts the man, thrusting his pitchfork forward.

  We walk past a fine house of granite. Icicles seven or eight feet long hang down from the edges of its thatch, gleaming and dripping in the sunlight. I can smell a wood fire, and look up to see smoke rising from its chimney. But this is not the house to which the man is leading us. The ‘Mister’ must live in an even grander one. And about a quarter of a mile further on down the snowy lane, we see it.

  Mister Parlebone’s mansion house is also built of granite but much higher and wider, and the stones are carefully shaped ashlar blocks of the sort you would use for building the base of a cathedral pillar, which has to be exactly level. It has wide, well-carved mullion windows of four lights on the upper floor and, to the left of the porch, six spaces of glass, to allow light into what I imagine is the great hall. The porch has an arch over the outer door: this ends in carvings of sun motifs, one of which has been damaged. No icicles hang from the thatch of this house: lead guttering runs around the eaves and feeds through lead drainpipes. In front is a cobbled yard with a stable building. On the near side of this yard is a fence and a gate leading through to a farmyard, around which are barns, byres, henhouses and a sty.

  As I look across this farmyard, a number of chickens strut across the snow to where some grain has been scattered for them. Among them are three much larger, round birds: they have humped backs, black feathers, blueish faces and bare heads flecked with what looks like blood. Two more similar birds come across the snow, pecking at the corn.

  ‘What in the Devil’s name are those?’ says William.

  ‘Turkey fowl,’ responds the farmer, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

  ‘Where do they come from?’ I ask.

  ‘From over there, behind the barn,’ he replies.

  Before I can explain that that was not what I meant, a woman appears in the porch of the house. She is in her mid-thirties and wearing a long blue robe which has a sort of white apron pinned before it and a white collar around her shoulders. Her hips and backside are padded – they must be, for I do not believe any woman in any age can have a figure so curved. She has a basket looped over one arm and her hands are folded across her middle. But the most eye-catching thing about her is her hair: it is reddish-brown and falls in waves down either side of her face. In our day, only an umarried woman would show off her tresses out of the house in such a manner. But she is clearly of an age and a beauty to be married.

  She watches us approach.

  ‘Whose men are these, Caleb?’ she asks, looking from me to William and back.

  ‘They’re Royalist spies, Mistress Parlebone,’ replies our captor. ‘I found them searching round the top field.’

  ‘Studying our fine horses, no doubt.’ She looks at me. ‘Colonel Fairfax has already taken all our decent mounts.’ She looks at William. ‘Come, tell me, if you have tongues. What brings you to Gidleigh?’

  William replies. ‘We have come to admire your beauty, my lady. For those locks surely frame the face of an angel; your skin is as dazzling white as the snow on the moor; and your lips look like the curved bows of cherubs guarding all the sweet delights of Heaven.’

  ‘I doubt there are many spies who can make such a pretty speech. Even if it be a pile of dung for the truth.’

  ‘We’re not spies, Mistress Parlebone,’ I say. ‘We’re travellers who have got lost. Very lost. It is not that we don’t know where we are – we do – but that that is the only thing we know. I do not know how we got here, nor where we should be going, nor how to get to wherever that might be. What’s more, I don’t know how we’ll be received when we arrive, or when that’ll happen. In fact, I don’t know why we’re going there in the first place. That’s how lost we are.’

  Mistress Parlebone smiles. A tabby cat slips through the half-open door behind her and skips across the snow, and the man called Caleb raises his pitchfork to bend down and attract the animal, clicking his fingers so that it comes close. He strokes it.

  ‘Caleb, if you believe these men are spies, your priority should be them, not the kitten.’ She turns to us. ‘What are your names?’

  ‘I’m John Drayman,’ I say, using the form in which I heard my name repeated in Chagford. ‘And t
his is my brother, William.’

  ‘Are you hungry? Is that it?’ She looks from William to me.

  I am indeed ravenous. But to admit it would reduce us to the level of beggars. I shake my head.

  ‘We are starving,’ William says. ‘I could eat a horse.’

  Mistress Parlebone speaks to the farmer. ‘Caleb, you need not worry about these men. Go back to your work.’ Then she says to us, ‘Come and warm yourselves by the fire in the hall. As for food, we are a good Protestant family and will happily share what we have for our dinner.’

  I touch the damaged carving of a sun on the right hand side of the porch. Mistress Parlebone sees my interest. ‘It was blasted by the king’s men on their way back through here, after the fighting in Blackaton Mead.’

  ‘You mean – by a gonne?’ I ask.

  ‘That’s right. A musket, to be precise.’

  I inspect the smashed stone. Had we enough time, I could have offered to carve her a replacement. But it would be a good day’s work, to re-create one of these sun carvings. Granite is an unyielding stone, which crumbles too easily.

  William and I follow her inside. The inner door, which is a solid-looking barrier of many thick oak planks, is defended by a drawbar. This seems odd to me: on the one hand this house has huge windows of glass, which would easily be broken by anyone choosing to attack, and on the other they have a front door that is nigh on impregnable.

  Inside we go along a dark passage, and enter a great hall. The floor is flagstones, the walls covered with oak panelling. At the far end there is a huge fireplace, and the good fire burning there makes the air in the room noticeably warmer. I hear it crackle. On one side of it is a curved bench large enough for three people to sit, with a high back to keep the heat in. Immediately before us is a long table covered with a white cloth, with a bench on each side, a chair at both ends, and six places arranged around the table – each one with a napkin, silver spoon and silver platter. Four have glass goblets.

  ‘Wait here,’ says Mistress Parlebone. ‘I will go and find Carnsleigh, and ask him to attend to your needs.’