‘The Number of Days.’
‘Exactly so.’
‘You can’t mean—’
‘I think I do mean that, yes. If James made a record of the divine intelligence entrusted to him and arranged with his Pharisee friends to have it secreted in some vault beneath the Temple prior to his death, it may have lain there, undiscovered, until the Knights Templar began their excavations in the twelfth century. What they found would have been, of course, no harmless relic, but the heresy of a revelation that could not be countenanced in Rome. We should envisage an inscribed tablet, I think. Papyrus would not have been durable enough. Besides, no-one in their senses would have sent a papyrus text to Cornwall. Far too damp. No, a stone tablet it has to be. The inscription would be in Greek, of course, rendering it unintelligible to the average medieval man. James’s command of Greek was excellent, to judge by his New Testament epistle, which even Rome finds it hard to attribute to anyone else.
‘The Greek numbering system used letters: alpha for one, beta for two, gamma for three and so on up to ten, except that the extinct letter digamma stood for six; then kappa for twenty, lamda for thirty and so on up to a hundred, except that another extinct letter, koppa, stood for ninety; then sigma for two hundred, tau for three hundred and so on up to a thousand, except that yet another extinct letter, sampi, stood for nine hundred. A thousand was alpha with an accent, as I recall, and started the sequence over again. The point to bear in mind is that a number—a date—would look like just another word to the uninitiated. And a Greek word depicted in a stained-glass window in medieval Cornwall would doubtless have eluded the subtlest of interpreters.’
‘I remember the phrase—the Number of Days,’ Nick said dreamily. ‘But not the rest. Not any of it.’
‘I dare say you will, in time.’
‘And I don’t believe it anyway. There is no Day of Judgement. No set date. No pre-ordained apocalypse.’
‘For our purposes, Nick, the ultimate reality of Doomsday is neither here nor there. The discovery of an inscribed tablet beneath the Temple of Jerusalem seeming to confirm the legend of James’s unique foreknowledge of the Second Coming was a remarkable, astonishing, awe-inspiring event. It makes not a jot of difference what we think about it. The people who found it believed it. As many still would. Unless the time recorded has already passed, of course. That would be a crack of doom of an entirely different order.’
‘You think the Doom Window of St Neot held the secret?’
‘Yes. I do.’
‘And you think the glass from the window—with the secret in it—is walled up at Trennor?’
‘Yes. Don’t you?’
Nick thought for several long moments before replying. But thinking changed nothing. In the end, he sighed and gave a nod of resignation.‘Yes. Of course I do.’
Nick felt confounded by his own certainty. Whether he believed the legend or not was irrelevant. Others had believed it—and acted accordingly. In that sense, the legend was bound to be true. The secret was that there was a double secret: one of finding; one of knowing. What the walls of Trennor held they could be made to give up. Nick and Basil could will it to be so. But they could also will it not to be so. The choice rested with them. And it was really no choice at all. Nick understood that with the sharp and sparkling clarity of finely cut glass. The secret was a secret they could never allow to be known.
A few minutes later, the brothers Paleologus could be seen crossing the Pont Neuf linking the le de la Cit with the right bank of the Seine. They were walking fast and confidently, almost jauntily. They were walking, in fact, like two men who knew where they were going.
It was a chill winter morning, chiller inside St Neot Church than out, with no sun to gild the low and meagre light trickling through the windows of the south aisle. Richard Bawden stamped his feet and blew on his hands, his breath clouding in the air. His wife had sought to dissuade him from coming and there had been moments since his arrival when he had regretted not heeding her. But he knew the cold could make a fleeting coward of any man. When he opened the tower door and gazed up at the west window, he was strengthened at once in his resolve. This was God’s work and his conscience would not permit him to turn aside from it.
He had always found it hard to believe how very old the window was. The colours in the glass were bright as new, even without the sunlight shining through them. It appeared to his eye no older than the Noah and Creation Windows at the other end of the church, which had been there for nigh on a hundred and fifty years. But the Doom Window dated from much further back, according to local lore, which also ascribed to it an importance beyond estimation.
The window was made up of twelve panes, nine main lights arranged in three panels with three tracery lights above. The images within—of flood and fire, of the dead rising from their coffins and sinners being ravaged by demons, of the ladder leading from hell to heaven and the scales of judgement in which every soul was to be weighed—had been familiar to Bawden since childhood. Often he had stared at them in awe and wonder and sometimes in doubt. But the war had banished his doubt for ever. Those who would destroy such a work of art and faith could not be in the right. And its destruction could not be permitted. It had to be made safe, without further delay.
They had perhaps waited too long already. But the vicar, who had kept of late to his other living at St Aus tell, had only recently and reluctantly given his consent. As matters now stood, there was no time to be lost. Fairfax was already reported to have taken Launceston and the havoc his troops might wreak did not bear contemplation.
Still Bawden was aware that what they meant to do amounted to sacrilege, justified only by the need to prevent a much greater sacrilege. He closed his eyes and uttered a prayer, begging God’s pardon for the offence. Soon, very soon, the sexton would arrive and they would set about dismantling the window, prising back the leads and lifting out the panes, wrapping them in several layers of sackcloth and carrying them to the cart, where they would be placed in a crate and swathed in straw for their journey to Landulph. Bawden’s prayer became a plea for God’s blessing as well as his pardon.‘Let the day go well, Lord,’ he murmured.
Opening his eyes, he looked from one light to another, taking his private farewell of them in their appointed places. It was idle to suppose that he would live to see their restoration. He could hope, of course, but his hope was more fragile than the glass itself. He pondered then the abiding mystery of the window: the green-garlanded gold letters at the base of each light. What did they mean? What was their message? Some and by implication all of the letters were Greek, a language of which he knew no more than any other parishioner. It was generally believed that they stood as symbols for some matter of deep significancy, but, if so, the symbols were too abstruse for men of this century and Bawden’s limited learning to comprehend. He had heard the vicar express the opinion that the letters and pictures together formed what he called a rebus—a visual riddle, which he confessed to find unfathomable. Something of the kind had surely to be the case, though the truth of it might never be known. Certain it was, however, that the mystery could only be solved if the glass was preserved. And Bawden was determined to do everything in his power to ensure that it was.
The rattle of the latch on the south door drew his thoughts back to the task at hand. He retreated into the nave as the door creaked open just far enough for the sexton to make a sidelong entrance. Their eyes met.‘Metten daa tha whye.’ The sexton, even if he was old enough to have served in the militia at the time of the Spanish Armada, as he claimed, was not old enough to recall a still more remote time when Cornish had been the common language of discourse in the parish. His use of it now was in part an acknowledgement of the secret nature of their meeting. He was carrying in his right hand a heavy leather bag, in which he transported his tools. Pushing the door shut behind him, he advanced into the church.
‘Good morrow, Master Davey,’ said Bawden.
Davey moved past him into the tower,
lowered the bag to the floor and glanced up at the Doom Window, then bowed his head.‘Agon Taze nye, eze en Neve,’ he murmured.‘Benegas bo tha Hanow.’ Bawden recognized the words as the Cornish rendering of the Lord’s Prayer. He too bowed his head as Davey continued.
When he had finished Davey opened a cupboard next to the gathered bell-ropes, lifted out a ladder and propped it against the wall beneath the window. Then he turned to face Bawden and stared at him in solemn scrutiny.
John Davey was a difficult man to know. He was not of Bawden’s generation, nor yet his cast of mind. He so seldom disclosed his opinions that it was tempting to believe he had none. Bawden knew the untruth of that, however. Since the matter of the glass had grown so pressing, he had come to understand the sexton. Though scarcely companionable, Davey was utterly reliable. What he believed, he could not be shifted from. What he undertook to do, he always did. Bawden knew he could have no firmer ally in the business of the day. And he reflected that he could have no more appropriate ally, either, in the putting beyond danger of the Doom Window than a gravedigger.
‘Have you heard from Mandrell?’ Davey asked, reverting to English.
‘I have,’ Bawden replied.‘He will ride out to meet us on the road.’
‘You trust him?’
‘I would trust him with my life.’
‘Reckon you’re a-doing that.’
‘I know.’
‘And mine along of yours.’
‘I know that also.’
‘But there’s nothing else for it.’
‘Truly there is not.’
‘Shall us begin, then?’
‘Yes.’ Bawden looked up at the window.‘Let us begin.’
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This novel has its origins in real places and their equally real if enigmatic histories. Why Richard, Earl of Cornwall, decided in 1233 to build a castle of no conceivable military value on the headland at Tintagel remains a matter of speculation. Similarly, the absence of a Doom Window from the remarkably well-preserved medieval glazing scheme at St Neot Church has never been satisfactorily explained. Theodore Paleologus was certainly buried at Landulph Church in 1636, but his descent from the last Emperor of Byzantium, as proclaimed on his memorial plaque, has not been conclusively proved. Genealogists have traced his own descendants as far as a great-granddaughter, Godscall Paleologus, born in Stepney in 1693 but as yet no further.
Days Without Number Page 36
