The Outcasts of Time

by Ian Mortimer

  ‘Where are you from, really?’ he asks.

  ‘I am from the past. As I told you before.’

  ‘Do you know where you are going?’

  ‘The future. I have one more day to live. Ninety-nine years from now.’

  ‘And thereafter?’

  ‘What do you think? I suspect I will go to Purgatory. It is the length of time I must spend there that worries me.’

  ‘John, there is no such place as Purgatory. It’s just an old Catholic superstition. No amount of prayer after your death can change the course of your soul.’

  I look at him. But he smiles and says, ‘Who knows what the afterlife is like? Sometimes I think it is the biggest confidence trick in the history of the world. For two thousand years we’ve been telling people what tortures are done to you in Hell and never once have we explained exactly what is so attractive about Heaven.’

  Father Harington begins his tour of the city by walking me up and down both sides of Southernhay. Opposite his house there is a wide building fronted by tall columns: this is the Public Bath House, he tells me, where there are hot and cold baths for the public to enjoy. He points out the theatre to which we will head later. A huge brick building at the other end of the street is the Devon and Exeter Hospital. As we tour the precincts of the cathedral he shows me the Royal Clarence Hotel, which is like an inn, he explains: a place for food, drink, accommodation and entertainment. One of the houses nearby is full of books: he takes me inside so I can see the leather bindings that line the walls from floor to balcony, and then, above the balcony, up to the ceiling. Old men sit at polished wooden tables reading huge pieces of vellum which Father Harington calls ‘newspapers’. These, he explains, are produced anew every day, and thus readers learn about what is happening in different places. All those words need not be written by hand but can be ‘printed’ by a machine in a matter of seconds. And the ‘paper’ on which they are printed, he tells me, is not very thin vellum but a product of linen.

  Of all the times I have seen, this is by far the most civilised. The carriages are elegant, the clothes tasteful as well as elaborate. The library is a veritable palace of learning. The city’s buildings have grace and light and few draughts, because they all have glass. Life, in all its aspects, seems beautifully lived. This strikes me most when Father Harington tells me he has a letter to post, and so he takes me to the post office on the High Street. Here we enter a high-ceilinged hall and, at a counter, he pays a penny for a small piece of red paper that he calls a stamp. The man behind the counter cuts the stamp from a sheet with a pair of scissors and pastes it on to the front of the letter. And so it joins many others being delivered around the country. I marvel at this. ‘It won’t last long,’ he says to me, when we are outside. ‘Soon the telegraph will connect the whole nation. Then we won’t need to send letters.’

  Father Harington explains many of the changes to the city. The last of the gatehouses, he tells me, was taken down about twenty-five years ago, to allow coaches and carriages to pass more easily through the streets. The great iron bridge was brought here in pieces along the ship canal from a foundry in the north of the county. He shows me the Royal Public Rooms at the top of the High Street, where the old East Gate once stood: these days, there is a hall here for ‘balls’, which are huge dances for well-dressed citizens. At the place where the Dominican Friary stood in my day there now stands a great ring of fine brick buildings, called Bedford Circus; the curving frontages of the houses on this oval street seem to embrace you, bringing a touch of gentleness to the straight lines of this tall architecture.

  We walk down a grand street that has recently been laid out and named Queen Street in honour of the present monarch. The size and prestigious proportions of the buildings say much for the ambitions of the mayor and corporation. Next we walk up through the grounds of the castle, whose ancient walls and gatehouse I recognise. The old moat around the castle is laid out as a pleasure garden, and the law courts stand within the castle walls. So many public works have been completed that it feels as if the city has been turned inside out: what once was private now is public. Gentlemen’s houses and the old monasteries have been demolished to make way for public halls, churches, libraries and hospitals, opening up spaces in the city for the people.

  He takes me to a new cottage in his parish – one of five in a row. This is lived in by Patience Mudge and her daughter, Mary. ‘Patience is a poor woman of ninety-three years of age,’ he tells me on the way there. ‘Think of that, John, ninety-three. Think of all the things that have happened in her lifetime! When she was born we were still using the old Julian calendar – which, incidentally, is why you thought the date was the seventeenth of December when we first met. In her youth, the Americas were ruled by the British; we transported our prisoners there. Captain Cook had not sailed across the Pacific Ocean. No one had dreamed of using a steam engine to propel a train or a ship; now you have Brunel’s SS Great Western, which crosses the Atlantic Ocean in less than fifteen days. When Patience was born, the French Revolution had not yet happened. The Great Reform Act had not been passed. Almost all industrial power was derived from waterwheels. The population of England was less than half what it is today. Australia and New Zealand were unsettled except by their Aboriginal inhabitants. No one had ever taken a photograph or sent a telegram . . . England had barely stepped out of the Middle Ages.’

  ‘Father Harington, I saw Exeter ninety-nine years ago, and it was just as strange as this. Everyone thinks their own time the most different.’

  When we come to Patience’s cottage we go up two steps and through the front door into her parlour. This room has a metal fireplace in its brick hearth, three wooden chairs, a table and a bed, with blankets and clean sheets. It has glass in the windows and the walls are plastered. The floor is bare brick. There is a wooden-framed black-and-white picture on the wall. There is a pot beneath the bed. And there are cracks in the plasterwork, and cobwebs up in the corners. The old woman is with her daughter in the back room, which is a kitchen. The daughter Mary is old herself, chopping leeks and onions on a table top for their supper, and clearly worn down by the workload of tending for two at the age of seventy. She offers us a hot drink called ‘tea’ as we talk to the old woman, who is sitting close to the hearth, with a blanket over her lap. I say little, holding my tea on account of it being served to me too hot. I presume the heat of the drink is to kill off the impurities in the water. As I look about the place, I am left with two lasting thoughts. The first is that, for women like Patience and Mary, life is very much as it was for everyone in my day. There may be coal on the fire rather than wood or peat, and they may drink tea rather than ale – but the routines and frustrations of life are the same. And the second is that, when I ask Patience what has been the biggest change she has seen in her life, presuming she would pick one from Father Harington’s list, she replies without hesitation that it was the death of her husband. ‘Because that was the day I had to stop worrying about his drunkenness and swearing, and had to start worrying about money.’

  I remember talking to William, when we were out on the moor, and reflecting that kings always live in luxury. ‘Time stands still in the palaces of kings,’ I said that day. But here it is quite the reverse. The life of the poor is not changing half as much as that of those with money, who can go to the Bath House or to the post office. If your only family is your daughter, and she lives with you, what use is the post office?

  The last thing we do before returning to Southernhay is to enter a bookshop. Inside, as it is growing dark, the proprietor lights lamps: two enclosed lanterns, two suspended oil lamps and several candles in hanging frames behind glass. The glow gives the bookshop a haloed atmosphere. Father Harington pulls volumes off the shelves and nods appreciatively at what he reads by the light of one of the oil lamps. He reads a passage aloud to me from a book by a friend of his, Doctor Forrester, which is entitled A brief inquiry into the eternal soul of mankind.

  In the underwor
ld of the past, the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. Those who attempt to write about this place can only see things very dimly, and hear the vaguest sounds, as if they were coming across an immense distance. Only the learned scholar, who dwells on an intricate detail for many years, can hope to understand a single fact in all its complexity. But herein lies a question: is it better to have a blurred vision of all of the human past, or a clear one of a tiny particle of mankind’s experience? The learned scholar, peering at you over his spectacles and a pile of dusty tomes, will assert that just a little certain knowledge is worth a ton of mere fable. The man in the street, who puts a higher value on a little love than the greatest victory of a dead king, will reply that the years spent searching for an arcane truth are time wasted.

  He stops and holds the book solemnly.

  ‘Why have you ceased reading?’ I ask.

  ‘I am sure you must find this most tedious.’

  ‘No. I agree with your friend. The man who has no knowledge of the past has no wisdom. Read to me what follows.’

  He looks at me. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘The man who has no knowledge of the past has no wisdom.’

  ‘Yes, that is what I thought you said.’

  He looks at me for a moment longer, and then resumes.

  How then should we regard the past? Indeed, why should we study it at all but to prove to our fellow men that we can, and for the skill of disputation? The answer lies not in preferring the blurred, grand vision to the scrupulous detail, nor does it lie in the opposite prejudice: neither contains sufficient truth. Instead, we must find our own way, in the sure knowledge that we too will enter that underworld, where the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. If we wish to understand our own place on earth, we must seek to understand those who have gone on before us. We must look beyond the present moment and see ourselves reflected in the deep pool of time as individual elements of a greater humanity, and not as the passing shapes that we may glimpse every day in a looking glass, which then are gone forever.

  He gently shuts the book, replaces it on the shelf and pauses for a few moments. When he has finished thinking, he looks at me and says, ‘Let us go.’

  Night has fallen. But the streets are far from dark. Metal posts with glass lamps on top illuminate them. Not only can you see your way, you can see who is approaching. Father Harington explains that the lighting is powered by something called ‘gas’, which is like burnable air, and that every evening a team of men go through the streets of the city with a light and a ladder, setting each lamp going. It is a far cry from when I groped my way around this city in the darkness and rain, all those lifetimes ago.

  Back at Father Harington’s house the mood is sombre. His mother does not talk to him at supper except in the most clipped tones. ‘Pass the breaded ham, if you would be so kind, Edward.’ His sister seems a little regretful that she was so eager to defy her mother earlier but she does not want to admit she was wrong, so now she tries too hard to engage in pleasant conversation with her. Her efforts do not yield rewards.

  After the meal, Father Harington, his sister and I set out for the theatre. This building too is lit with gas, both outside and within. We leave our coats with a cloakroom attendant, just as men visiting a manor house used to leave their swords with the gatekeeper. I follow Father Harington up a cloth-covered staircase to our seats, which are in the gallery. A pair of enormous curtains covers the stage. There is an excited chatter all around. And then the lights in the seating area dim and go out, and the curtains are drawn back.

  There is a dais before us. Doctor Faustus is there in a huge library, like the one I saw earlier. One figure comes forward out of the darkness and offers him the works of Aristotle. Another emerges and offers him medical knowledge; another, jurisprudence. He scorns them all and, instead of these sciences, he holds up a Bible. ‘Divinity is best,’ he says. But then, torn by some inner frustration, he declares, ‘The reward of sin is death: that’s hard. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and there is no truth in us.’

  I am transfixed. I feel my fingertips are just touching a truth about sinfulness, and why we must all do good works. Then Doctor Faustus says that, if we sin, ‘We must die an everlasting death. What doctrine call you this? Que sera sera – what will be, will be?’ At that I hear Master Ley’s voice again: ‘The thing you seek to do can only come from you naturally. You cannot make it happen.’ I feel that I am on stage myself, in the drama of my own sinfulness.

  Doctor Faustus is lectured by two angels, one good and one bad. Despite the warnings of the good angel, he goes to a solitary grove at night. There, using the works of Roger Bacon and Albertus, he utters an incantation in Latin and summons up a devil, Mephostophilis, to attend on him. As he speaks to Mephostophilis, the lights around him dim to an eerie thin light. I remember the night on the moor, and the mysterious starlight in the stone just outside the stone circle: my skin is cold, trembling with the anticipation of real mysteries and deep truths.

  Mephostophilis steps forward and speaks, in the form of a Franciscan friar: ‘I am a servant to great Lucifer, and may not follow you without his leave.’

  ‘Was not that Lucifer an angel once?’

  ‘Yes, Faustus, and most dearly loved of God.’

  ‘How comes it, then, that he is prince of devils?’

  ‘O, by aspiring pride and insolence, for which God threw him from the face of Heaven.’

  ‘And what are you that live with Lucifer?’

  ‘Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer, conspired against our God with Lucifer, and are forever damned with Lucifer.’

  ‘Where are you damned?’ asks Faustus.

  ‘In Hell,’ Mephostophilis replies.

  ‘How comes it, then, that you are out of Hell?’

  ‘Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it. Do you think that I, who saw the face of God, and tasted the eternal joys of Heaven, am not tormented with ten thousand hells, in being deprived of everlasting bliss?’

  I cannot help but let out a gasp of alarm. Could this place be Hell? Are these people around me here not in Hell with me? Perhaps they, with their luxurious dining rooms and forks and pianoforte music and baths and paintings, are being prepared for Hell – being shown the treasures of eternity only to lose them all.

  Georgiana prods me in the ribs. ‘John, you must keep quiet. And do lean back. People behind you cannot see.’

  The next time we meet Faustus he is in his library again, asking himself ‘Must you needs be damned – can you not be saved?’ Mephostophilis tells him that Lucifer is offering him an agreement. For twenty-four years Faustus may have whatever he wants – money, power, knowledge and magic – but after those twenty-four years are up, Lucifer will come for his soul, and he will be damned forever. To agree the compact he must bequeath his soul to Lucifer in a deed, signed with his own blood.

  From the moment that Faustus stabs his arm and signs the bond, all is a descending spiral of mayhem. Giant dark devils appear on the stage, with Lucifer among them, and Lucifer declares to the wavering Faustus, ‘Christ cannot save your soul for He is just!’ Where does that leave me, I wonder? Have I sinned so much that Christ can no longer save me? Oh Lord! And what about William? Faustus summons Helen of Troy from the ancient world to satiate his lust, and he kisses her – at which Lucifer reappears with Mephostophilis and Beelzebub with him, to take him down to Hell.

  This is my fate and William’s being played out before me by some unknown, terrible power, written in an ancient book, long ago. I see the evil angel step forward to take the stage but I hear the voice that I heard at the cathedral, at Scorhill and in the cellar of the workhouse. The voice of my fate is addressing me as if I am Faustus. ‘Let your eyes with horror stare into that vast perpetual torture-house. There are the Furies tossing damned souls on burning forks; there bodies boil in lead; there are live quarters broiling on the coals, that never can die . . .’

  ‘I have seen enough!’ I c
ry. ‘I have seen enough to torture me!’

  The evil angel looks up at me in the gallery and says, pointing at me, ‘Nay, you must feel them, taste the smart of all. He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall. And so I leave you, Faustus, till anon; then will you tumble in confusion.’

  Suddenly there is silence.

  ‘John,’ whispers Father Harington, ‘are you unwell? Do you need to leave?’

  I am shaking, trembling. And I want to answer yes, I will leave now, but before I can say anything I hear the voice of my conscience coming from the stage, addressing me.

  ‘Now you have but one bare hour to live, and then you must be damned perpetually!’

  A clock strikes eleven times.

  ‘What can I do?’ I say. ‘How might I repent?’

  People around me tell me to be quiet.

  But Faustus speaks again in the voice of my conscience. ‘O, half the hour is past! It will all be past anon. May you live in Hell a thousand years, a hundred thousand! No end is limited to damned souls.’

  ‘I repent!’ I shout, standing up and being pulled back and hearing hissing and shouting all around me. ‘I repent! I repent!’

  But Faustus is not satisfied. ‘This soul should fly from you, and you be changed into some brutish beast! All beasts are happy, for, when they die, their souls are soon dissolved in elements. But you must live still to be plagued in Hell. Cursed be the parents that engendered you!’

  ‘No, Faustus, curse Lucifer,’ I cry, as people shout all around me. ‘It is he who has deprived me of the joys of Heaven.’

  And over the tumult I hear a clock chiming once, twice – all of twelve times. As it rings out I stare at those in the seats around me and see they are all snakes and bears, wolves and killing animals. From them I hear the verdict. ‘It strikes, it strikes! Now, body, turn to air, or Lucifer will bear thee quick to Hell! O soul, be changed into small water-drops, and fall into the ocean, never be found!’