Angels in the Architecture

by Sue Fitzmaurice

  ‘Maybe’s no’ man killed i’. Maybe’s some monster, or is devil’s work.’

  ‘Stop tha’ story-tellin’, y’ idjit. Is no such thing and you jus’ let’n’ tha’ old woman ge’ in yer ’ead, jus’ lark she wants. She’s a fool an’ is no reason t’ listen anythin’ she ’as t’ say. Is a man, or some animal we kno’, ’nother swan maybe. I says I saw ’em foightin’ each other a’ Lincoln. Maybe’s wha’ ’appened. Jus’ forge’ i’ now, we go’ work t’ be doin’. So ge’ on.’

  It was a short distance to the Priory, although to Gamel Warriner drawing his precious cargo slowly along, it seemed a while to get beyond the town and up the river road to the lord’s manor. They saw no one, since anyone who would be on the road was already in the village for the market, or they were in their fields working. There was a daily rhythm to peasants’ lives that would have caused Bennet and Gamel to wonder at the presence of any person on the road at this time had they seen any. Apart, of course, from the lord himself or his men, no one ever wanted to come across them if they could avoid it, most especially not as now as they were carrying a dead beast, property of the King, effectively therefore owned by the local Lord. Bennet and Gamel may be leading men among the peasants but to the lord or his men, they were the same human dross available for their pleasure, sport or waste as any other.

  ‘Wha’ ya’ thinkin’ then, Benne’? Who’d d’a thin’ lark this?’

  Gamel was not a suspicious man. It wasn’t that he didn’t abide Berta Draper or her like, but he certainly did not regard them. A realistic man though, he saw the seriousness with which the swan’s death captured the village and its thoughts.

  ‘Aye, aye’, Bennet Williams just shook his head, distraught. He’d seen more than his share of sickening, appalling scenes. His medicine was largely herbal, and some of it still reliant also on superstition, even though he would put himself about as a man of science; in fact, he was as likely as any other to be stirred by this death of a Swan, and he felt an uncertainty around him and in his small world. This was the sense of both men, and neither had any other words for it.

  Thomas though was neither distraught nor anxious nor in any way frightened. As the swan had been placed at his feet, he’d been drawn to the bird’s hard leathery beak and its open red-brown eyes. While those about him knew the creature to be dead, Thomas could see the light that still remained in it. A pure light, holy and gentle and sweet. The light reached out to touch Thomas, and he toyed with it a few moments, enjoying it for what it was. It beseeched him and longed for connection with the boy’s own light, some energy to nurture it a small enough amount. The light of the bird did not play with Thomas though, as Thomas wanted it to, and Thomas did not hear the bird’s prayer either and so left its message hanging in the ether between them. And then the light faded from the dark red eyes and was gone, and the bird’s eyes closed slowly on the world. Thomas cocked his head to one side and measured their closing and some distant remembered pain circled briefly around him, so he looked away to the corner of his eye hoping for the goodness he liked, that he loved, and that warmed him.

  The two men and the boy delivered the sad load to a shocked Father Taylor at the Priory, promising to send some men back to bury the bird should the Father need it, for they themselves had to return to their tasks at the town.

  ‘Where was the bird found?’

  ‘At edge of Thane’s land, Father. Between there and town,’ Bennet replied.

  ‘And who is responsible then? His Lordship will want recompense.’

  ‘There’s no knowing at all, Father. No knowing. I’m not so clear as how any man could kill such a great beast as this. And broke i’s neck indeed. A mighty strength is what it would’ve took. Maybe no’ a man ‘t’all.’

  ‘Of course it was a man. A poacher, no doubt. We cannot tolerate this lawlessness. The Thane will surely bring in more of his thugs, and heaven knows they only add to the lawlessness, bullying as they do. It’s more than we need. It’s more than I need!’

  ‘Aye, Father.’

  Father Taylor sternly bade them keep about their business and he would report the loss to the King’s Thane, for which the men were more than a little relieved. Poachers were treated swiftly and violently and neither man wished to be mistaken for such, despite their honest paths and obvious standing in the town, albeit the physician’s was much lower than a churchman, and the peasant’s much lower still. A man’s reputation was something better than nothing.

  Neither man was ever encouraged by the disposition of the local priest, who took a too serious and dark view of the World and its peasants. But to deliver the consequences of this monstrous deed to a Man of God seemed far and away less formidable than to venture anywhere near the Thane’s manor. Better leave that mission to the Father. And so they turned back to the village in silence to resume the tasks they’d set upon that day, Gamel back to his sons at the market square and the dispatching of their goods. He was keen to leave behind the experience of the morning and distance the superstition and fear from his thoughts. It had no place with him and no good could come of it.

  A whispering lingered about the villagers and none took their commerce too seriously the rest of that morning. By the afternoon, Gamel was annoyed not with the ruckus of the morning so much as with its impact on people’s pockets, and he was more than usually brusque in setting his sons to reloading their cart and turning their thoughts to their return journey. All thought of superstition was gone from Gamel but apparently it clung elsewhere. Berta Draper’s reputation for prescience was simple enough – a death predicted here and a birth there, some of course unexpectedly as there’d be no such reputation otherwise; folk weren’t so foolish as all that. So her predictions of impending threat hung in people’s minds, and they were hard-pushed to ignore them; indeed they could not.

  It was the social nature of the market that aided its business. People wanted to meet up with friends and family from around the parish, to hear each other’s news and pass on wishes. There was no other means by which they connected. So they wandered stall to stall to talk, and along the way bought a bit of this and that, or exchanged one thing for another. Events of the morning, followed by Berta’s outburst, had stifled all notions of small talk and camaraderie, and many left the market early. If there was to be trouble, best be behind their own closed doors when it came.

  And so the Warriner men and boys, rattled and begrudging, set themselves back in their cart with less traded than they ought, and each boy knowing the hunger of a poor trade, and the father knowing the guilt of it. Not a man to wonder why though, but consider instead the means by which his fortunes may be reinvigorated, Gamel wandered through a list of possibilities in his head. The effects of the day would pass before the next market so this hardship would be short-lived. Gamel had no particular fear of the old woman’s warnings. It was possible of course that some other minor calamity would ensue and then folk would point to Berta’s prescience and they’d feel safe the worst had passed, and then of course it all would.

  Gamel was as simple as any other such man in that his life and the laws of it were simple and clear-cut, and that he was no man of learning. But he held a strength of insight that went beyond the superstitions of his day and for that he was unusual. He did not tolerate much small talk, could not abide gossip, and he knew of little that was not of this world that he ought to give much attention to, other than that it was wise to give heed to Church teachings and whatnot, for appearances mattered in some things..

  Thomas noticed, in part, the feelings of those around him. They came as a dulling of the normal light, and he instinctively knew to remain more still and quiet.

  Later that day, the water of the Dyke went unusually calm. Riding along its side and atop their wagon Thomas eyed its shining surface and his soul knew that it foretold a warning. Thomas felt the same pang of darkness that he felt briefly with the swan in the cart earlier in the day, although he’d forgotten that now. He was used to seeing the
lights play on the water of the dyke, but the way the light played out now did not make him want to look, and he looked at his father’s back instead.

  When a great rumbling began to be heard, which was not the noise of a hundred cartwheels turning, Thomas was the only one not to wonder what this was and not to feel so uneasy.

  Because Thomas saw light that others didn’t, he knew also when his brothers began to be scared. He saw the light go dark in their stomachs first, and then in their hands and finally their eyes. He couldn’t see his father’s hands or his eyes as he drove their cart home, but he felt his father’s stomach greyed just like the others. They didn’t draw light into their mouths, and even though no one breathed many still screamed. Because they screamed without taking breath, they were swallowed into a dark fear very quickly, and Thomas couldn’t see them anymore.

  Gamel Warriner halted his nag and fought to control the horse’s uppitiness, as the earth shook and swayed beneath wheels and hooves. The boys weren’t sure to jump from the cart or hold on for dear life, as it jostled as much from the horses’ rearing as the ground’s uproar. Pots and baskets fell about, and some of their unsold produce leapt into the dust, spoiling now for its further trade, although no one cared nor even really noticed. A split fissured from the side of the dyke ahead of them and water spilled into it, a small rivulet crossing the cart’s path.

  ‘Wha’s i’, Pa?’ screamed one of the boys. ‘Wha’s i’?’

  Gamel struggled with his horse and did not answer the boy as the shaking went on and on. As with any event causing great fear, time slowed down and the agonising over life or death in such uncertainty was an interminable suffering for almost everyone in the County, but especially the ignorant, which was still most people.

  For Thomas there was some more message reaching out to him in-between things, and some part of him tried to distinguish a new light from an old one. And it seemed like a reflection of himself in the far distance and he thought perhaps he might respond to this mirror image in some way, as indeed it seemed to want to connect with him also.

  History would record that day the almost complete collapse of the cathedral at Lincoln and the multiple ruptures in the Foss Dyke. The practices of God and Commerce were equally disrupted. The rational called for repairs, the ignorant called for heads, and it was never a simple matter to predict from whence the powerful holders of such divergent views would emerge.

  The social fissures exceeded the earthen ones, and their tremors ran for weeks, months, and even years. Some women and children whose husbands and fathers were lost to the earthquake, or called to the mason’s lodge at Lincoln for work, were taken in to some of the kinder homes of Lincolnshire, although it was a struggle to feed more bellies. Others were less fortunate and were forced to a wandering life, lucky on occasion to find company with some younger roving labourer, less lucky to find an older one, having only themselves to give alongside their own pair of working hands and those of their children.

  Families were rent, and new embitterments would be sure to keep them divided for a generation’s memory and more. God Himself became a particular victim of rancour among those less inclined to fear Him, and even among those who did.

  There was no logic to the varying physical effects of the earthquake. Some things fell and some things stood. In a single street in Lincoln, among an entire row of houses all exactly the same, one house fell completely and not another. In another street, almost the opposite: all fell but two or three. When the news was heard of the cathedral though, there was not an inconsiderable fear and superstition as to why God would allow such a thing to occur, and ordinary folk wondered what they or someone else had done to offend the holy order of things and whether enough retribution had been exacted by the earthquake or whether there may be more of such to come.

  Gamel Warriner had no care for this superstition any more than he did for dead swans or the like. He sought simply to get his boys, his horse, and his cart home again to their small holding, along roads whose obstacles were previously only well-trodden ruts in the clay, but which now offered up no-longer-bridged streams, and bottomless clefts in their once familiar and worn track now filling with silt and water from countless creeks and streams whose courses had already shifted. Gamel offered no peace of mind to his children; he had little himself, and he used a great strength to maintain the sort of composure suited to a man before his sons, despite his own unnerving. Besides which, life held fear aplenty, and the sooner boys became men the better for them. Best they learn that to carry on with a view to protecting one’s own and putting one’s fear aside was the best course.

  Still, the shaken earth rendered up shaken hearts and minds and bodies, and each fresh rumbling heard from the distance set the guts of Lincoln and Torksey and their surrounds to shiver anew.

  At the ruins of the cathedral in Lincoln, all that remained was a part of the limestone west end of the great Church. It had been consecrated nearly a hundred years before by Remigius, a Benedictine monk and a supporter of William the Conqueror.

  The new Bishop, Hugh of Avalon, a Frenchman, away at his palace at Stowe, forsook any thought of prayer for the ruins he was soon told of and prayed instead for the souls of Lincolnshire. Walking from his manse to the Minster Church of St Mary – or Stowe Minster as it was generally referred – he was frustrated by the fawning of young monks from the Abbey, offering their assistance to him. He would soon return them all from whence they came in Oxfordshire and be rid of the daily reminder of the multitudes of useless clergy who had no sense for the aid they may provide the community they supposedly served. He glared and muttered past them all.

  At the little church in Torksey, Father Taylor held a less charitable view of things. He had not yet been to the Thane’s manor and felt some relief that this new turn of events would, if briefly, overshadow the finding of the dead swan and thus his task of bringing such tidings. He was angered at what he knew would be the response of characters such as the old Draper woman, who would make much of the connection and create a renewed superstition that he himself sought always to undermine to only meagre avail. He despised the small-mindedness about him, and sympathy or sensitivity deserted him as usual, as he knew it would. And he disliked his own heart, for he wished above all to be more charitable, but could not find it in himself.

  At the village of Nocton Fen, several miles directly the other side of Lincoln from Torksey, young Timothy Watson made his first really noticeable acquaintance with an Angel.

  Hello, Timmy. We’ll start soon. Are you ready?

  Timmy looked at the light. He liked the light. It made him laugh. So he started looking for it as often as he could. It was very playful with him, hiding and then coming back out again.

  He’d seen the light before – often in fact – but today it was brighter than usual, and he eyed a reflection of himself in the angles the light struck, and along which he liked to stare. Tim wondered how he might get that particular light to play with him; it didn’t seem too hard because after a while he could tell that it very much wanted to.

  Not that he knew it, but with this exchange Timmy had just taken part in the most important scientific discovery of the twentieth century.

  2

  Don’t be afraid to see what you see.

  Ronald Reagan, fortieth US president (1911–2004)

  If Faith was the essential element of religion, so it was also with science.

  Dr Alicia Watson lived on what she liked to refer to as the dark side of physics. Her bright office walls were a testament to it. Two vivid blue walls, two crisp white ones, with low bookcases all around, all evidenced a desire to clear the rubble of the true theoretician in favour of newness and clarity – a blank slate.

  Alicia felt any inspiration that came to her in her work came from a universal ether of scientific truth, not from within her own head. She disliked the terminology of discovery. She knew all science already existed; hers was only to come to know it herself. That knowing came in part from
experimentation, but more from her thoughtfulness about information known and consideration of other information that may be lying just beyond the known. She thus claimed her work not entirely as her own, although this was not a view she shared with those other devotees about her. She would never have said she had any belief in a god, but her own studies and research indicated the reality of a universal energy underpinning all things, that had will of its own and existed outside the minds of men. Some may have called this God, but Alicia was never so foolish as to cross over entirely from the dark side and into sheer quackery. She believed in what she saw, and what she saw was more than just particles and more than just light, and it did not conform to most of recent known science. She wondered at times that it had more to do with the ancients of Aristotle and Plato and Pythagoras whose science at least connected them with the universe instead of putting them apart from it, and whose search was one of heart and soul as well as mind. That they were philosophers as well as scientists – and philosophers first, and that these two departments were separated by most of the rest of the university – was an irony of history not lost on Alicia.

  Alicia’s science required an open-mindedness that would surely have been a prerequisite for any self-respecting scientist, except that in Alicia’s view this was shamefully not always the case. She tried to encourage that openness among her students, along with a sense of fun and adventure also not common among her profession. She fancied her office a breeding ground for young talent, with an odd kaleidoscope of thick felt-tip penned equations covering one white wall, a reward to creativity in students. Not just any old brilliance, but daring and imagination were the criteria for this privilege.

  ‘Write your favourite equation up – one that’s meaningful to you,’ she’d say.

  And if the offer baffled, clearly they were not, at least yet, of the chosen. Some needed encouragement not to write shyly, but in large and bold characters, and this was her spur to those she felt may benefit from such a declaration. Many were even given repeated opportunities. Similarly, there was evidence of the mass of fondness for the same equations. E = mc2 was written several times over, in different colours and scripts. As was also E8  E8 – string theory, andxp ≥ h/2 – the uncertainty principle. Indeed, Einstein’s oft-quoted formula had rather poetically found itself in one instance at the centre of the wall scrawled largest of all in multiple colours, a spectrum of imagination and potential she sought to foster, mirroring the brightest of young students of her science.