Therefore Father Guido Mori was supremely fortunate in possessing a superior with the ability and inclination to consider his plea in a spirit of understanding, although not sympathy. Others might have felt less inclined to humour him and had referral to their codes of discipline. Not so, Father O’Malley.
‘Well, Father, I must confess I’m somewhat surprised at this. What reasons can you offer me for countermanding the lad’s transference to Southwark?’
‘Only personal ones, Father O’Malley. I strongly suspect that the boy has been subject to malign moral influences, possibly for some considerable time and it seems to me that he cannot afford further exposure to wrongdoing, however good the cause.’
Mori felt this to be partially true and therefore justified; there was something suspiciously cold and abstracted about the boy, and Southwark would hardly help to remedy it. Yet his real concern was not specifically with Tobias, more with an abstract conception of all the children he had previously collected and handed over. But if he was to save this one from Southwark, he would be forced to recommend Rome as an alternative and the thought of doing so, reinforced by his vivid memories of his own Roman apprenticeship, made Mori feel nauseous and hypocritical.
O’Malley’s curiosity had been roused. ‘Do you have any idea of what these influences were?’
Mori knew a little of his superior’s history and realised he was on the right track.
‘It’s only speculation Father, and the boy, of course, says nothing – but I fear that elements of paganistic thought were involved.’
This guarded comment was the nearest Mori could come to any actual mention of magical learning outside the jurisdiction, and perhaps even knowledge, of the Church. It was not a subject on which free discussion was safe or encouraged. He half suspected the truth about Tobias’ education and this made him more determined than ever to save the boy from complete ruin. It would serve as a small act of reparation on his part on behalf of all the others, and as a grain of comfort for the years to come.
‘Point taken, Father,’ O’Malley said wisely. ‘I won’t press the subject further. Even so, I would have thought that the rigorous regime of Southwark would be the ideal solution for the lad. He’ll be among his own, watched and guided on a constant basis, it’s just as good a school as any other and if he acquits himself well his career will prosper, just as if he’d been to Rome. Why do you particularly wish him to go to Rome? If there is a good solid reason I could probably fob Sir Matthew off, even at this late date, but for the life of me I can’t see it.’
Mori was an intelligent man, and could have devised a good solid reason with ease, but he was very conscious of his priestly status and would not tell a direct lie. ‘It’s not so much Rome I’m keen on, but … Southwark I’m against.’ The last phrase he blurted out hurriedly to get the whole business over and done with as quickly as possible.
O’Malley’s face hardened noticeably. ‘Why, may I ask?’
Mori coloured slightly and went ahead to burn his last bridge. Slowly and coolly he announced, ‘I feel … no – I know that Southwark is the very last place this boy should go to, for the good of his soul. As I’ve hinted, he’s had no good influences up to now – are we to compound that by placing him in the worst establishment we can think of, and thereby set the pattern for his future career? No, it’s the wrong school; the wrong … lessons.’
Father O’Malley leant back on his chair, his face still rather stern. ‘I think you over-dramatise, Father Mori. It is true that Southwark has a training programme slanted to the more … practical, shall we say, elements of magic, but the use this training is put to is solely in the cause of good. It may be that in their later career the Church will occasionally pick out Southwark-trained people for specific tasks suited to their talents, but they otherwise remain perfectly normal magician-priests, just as if they had been at Rome or any other training school. Liverpool, for instance, devotes itself to the magical interactions between minds so that its pupils can assist in negotiations, interrogations and so on. Southwark, in turn, fits its charges to serve the Church in the vicissitudes of politics and affairs of state – hardly the “wrong lessons” you speak of. Surely you can’t believe that?’
Mori knew he could have no answer to this simple statement of the facts. One school was probably as good or bad as another, what stuck in his craw was the system in its entirety – and against that there was no struggling. The securing of Oakley’s passage to Rome would have been a minor victory for him; at least the training there was general and non-specific. It would also have been a salve to his troubled thoughts, but for Tobias himself the ultimate difference between the two courses proposed for him was probably minimal. Because his case and his strong feelings were based on sentiment, Father Guido had no real argument. He had lost.
O’Malley perhaps sensed the growing spirit of resignation in the man facing him across his desk, and since the matter was now beyond dispute he felt able to be conciliatory. ‘Father Guido, I think I know what is worrying you. You’ve got a good heart, but on this occasion I suspect you are allowing purely personal, even selfish considerations to overrule your good sense. Even worse, you’re masquerading them as concern for another.’
Father Guido coloured for the second time. ‘Alas, you are correct in saying that, but … not wholly correct … I mean that other considerations intrude.’
‘You refer to your anxiety for this youth’s moral welfare I presume.’
‘That and more. Father O’Malley, if we fling him into this system he will be lost. Entirely lost.’
The senior priest folded his arms and looked down at his desk to signify that the short exchange was at an end. The old man has lost control on this one, he was thinking. He’s on the edge. I must tread carefully if I’m not to break him – must keep this quiet from his superiors – how can I placate and save him?
He lifted his head and caught Mori’s gaze; something impelled him to charity. ‘Between you and me, I know Southwark is a bit of a rough house, and perhaps there are a few scoundrels in the training school – perhaps even a few more than you might find elsewhere. Even so, rest assured that they are kept well under control. Their lawless exuberance is harnessed; put to good use. The setting tempers the talents into useful tools for the Church, does it not? That’s the whole purpose and motive of placing the school there. Now if, as you say, this boy has had some bad teachers, surely the best thing that can happen to him is to be sent somewhere where such bad lessons are turned around and put to good use, eh? Perhaps we can even see God’s hand in all this?’
Mori looked unconvinced, but O’Malley persevered.
‘The crux of it all is that I see no good reason at all for countermanding this transfer. On the contrary: I think it will be the making of the boy … ’
Mori slumped dejectedly.
‘But don’t despair, Father, don’t despair.’ O’Malley was a sensitive man; he could perceive deep emotions and so his last exhortation was not a cliché, but more of a command. ‘What I will do for you is this; touched as I am by your Christian concern and diligence, I solemnly promise that I will make this … Oakley’s welfare my special responsibility. Normally my brief would end when he arrives at his destination, but I will ensure that he comes to no subsequent harm, whether it be physical or moral. For you and for the respect I bear you, I will make him my charge, how’s that eh? I can’t say fairer than that now, can I?’
Mori heard this and took it in, but the proposition, given in all sincerity, left him untouched. He had come to the end of the road, his own and the Church’s. Yet at least, he recognised, he had chanced upon a sympathetic ear, when he could just as easily have earned himself the perilous enmity of Southwark’s Bishop.
‘I must accept your kind offer, Father O’Malley, and I will pray for strength and clear-sightedness to be granted to you in this matter … please don’t forget,’ he added in an uneven postscript.
‘Assuredly not, never fear,’ smiled O’Ma
lley. He was determined to be as good as his word for, unbidden, stray memories had returned to him of his own tough days as an apprentice and his clinging ‘hedgerow wizard’ reputation. No – with his power and influence (and perhaps even a little magic) he would endeavour to keep this particular child relatively unspoiled. It would be his offering to a good priest and to the young man that he himself might have been.
Father Guido left feeling more weary than ever, but thanking God for his leavening of good souls. He’d almost welcome the marsh or moorland monastery now.
Fate, the power that Tobias thought slothful, decided against him having a chaperon.
Two months to the day after his interview with Mori, O’Malley (after the prescribed fasting) withdrew to his quarters to summon a spirit. He did not inform his staff as to the object of his attentions but the name ‘Astaroth, Prince of Hell’ was whispered about his house.
No one ever knew what happened. Perhaps O’Malley fumbled over the dismissal or mayhap his guarding conjuration lacked sufficient conviction and therefore the required strength for a split second.
Whatever the cause, whether Astaroth or some other, Father O’Malley’s head was neatly twisted off and placed, ready to be found, in the middle of his glowing pentagram.
Manifesting itself as an endless red-hot bronze plain, the force that human magicians named ‘Pikestaff’ idly tormented the residual life-essence of one such magician. Amusedly he, or it, looked down from a dizzy height and boomed in a metallic voice that filled the world. ‘You thought you had bound me, did you not? You considered me so safe that I would do your every whim, did you not? But now it is my whims that count because, clever and confident as you were, you made a slip – only a tiny weeny slip mind you, but sufficient.
‘Now you have all of created time to think on it, my love, while I hold you for my prolonged revenge. Your idiot servants talk of Astaroth, but you couldn’t even hold Pikestaff, one of his knights. How droll, how amusing – hark … I must go … for a short while … but I shall be back soon, beloved, I promise.’
Some other hopeful magician was summoning.
A short historical and social digression now becomes necessary.
Historians generally concur that London first came into being early on in the Roman occupation of Britannia. No evidence, written or otherwise, exists to contradict this theory and so it has become generally accepted. Following its foundation, the city waxed and waned according to time and circumstances, but its general trend was towards expansion and increasing importance. Boadicea, the Vikings, the Spanish and Charles I had burnt it, but every time it rose again, irresistibly, like truth in a dark age. It became the national centre of government, and the monarch and his lap-dog parliament resided there in between intermittent plague outbursts. The mighty Universal Church also had its temporal administration there, figure-headed by the Archbishop of London. Spiritual power, headed by its own Archbishop, was tucked away in the martyr’s town of Canterbury. This ‘Spiritual’ and ‘Temporal’ split was faithfully mirrored in the structure of the Church throughout Christendom.
Every large city breeds or attracts the entertainment it requires, much of which the Church would consider unfit. Therefore the more insalubrious forms of fun and merriment gathered as near as they dared without attracting the baleful glare of London’s prelate, or the wrath of his legions of papal troops (answerable only to himself and His Holiness in Rome).
Southwark-across-the-water was the obvious choice of site, and a curious little community grew up there, within its own walls but attached, like a barnacle, to London’s frailties. Whorehouses, inns and gaming centres of all types and quality abounded, tolerated only because of their decent separation from London proper and the lack of any alternative. An evening of ‘transpontine’ passed into London language and folklore.
Then, in the seventeenth century, just after the great rebellion, a well-meaning, but unworldly Archbishop of Canterbury decided that Southwark’s rôle must be acknowledged and its lost souls catered for. Little dreaming he was creating a dire embarrassment for every one of his successors, he appointed a Bishop for the newly created diocese, and from his own modest wealth he provided for a small but functional cathedral. Several knocking-shops were demolished to make room for it.
Opinion within the Church on the whole approved of this move and it was thought that many sinners otherwise Hell-bound, would thereby be saved from the servitude of evil. This may well have been the case.
Most regrettably, however, the question of finance had been overlooked. A Bishopric’s income, and hence status, entirely depended on the tithes it could levy. Since Southwark lacked a prosperous, respectable middle-class population (the mainstay of the Church economy), the first incumbent of the diocese had a very lean time of it indeed. The second turned a blind eye on occasion to the source of any gift or offering, in order to give himself the bare comforts of life. The third, utilising remarkable moral gymnastics, lived quite well and from then on the process snowballed, unremarked upon.
From time to time the Church applied certain ad hoc by-laws, to ensure ‘transpontine’ order and maintain strict insularity. Because of these and through a slow and complex historical process of legacies, seizures and appropriations, by 1976 and the time of this part of the tale, the Church had come to own nearly half of the illegal and semi-legal establishments in the township. The process was entirely unpremeditated and at first unnoticed. Later on it became profoundly embarrassing (if lucrative) but still the trend continued. Eventually, perhaps by the end of the century, Southwark would be one vast Church-owned brothel and gambling den. Even more remarkably the cathedral was packed to capacity, and beyond, every Sunday and Holy Day, unlike any other London church; however it was often an unconventional and abrasive congregation …
This unusual niche within the Church demanded a similarly unusual occupant and Southwark’s Bishops were sometimes faster and sharper than most of their flock. Even harder to credit is the fact that by no means all of them were wicked or corrupt men, many really did work hard to gather in the proverbial lost sheep. Nevertheless, whatever the motivation, it was a specialist job. And Londoners talked jovially of the ‘mucky Bishop’.
The Bishop’s staff were also far from ordinary servants of the Church; they were either recruited because they possessed the necessary qualities for the job or they rapidly acquired them in the performance of their duties. Senior members of the Church’s temporal administration eventually noticed this, and a decision was made to attach a small training school for thaumaturgists to the existing Southwark establishment. In so doing they would take advantage of the observed qualities of the area to produce a small but reliable stream of magician-priests with useful specialist training. From the time of the unit’s foundation, in the middle of the previous century, it proved to be of great use both in retaining order in the anarchically inclined township, and in providing suitable personnel for some of the more delicate areas of the Church’s endeavours. In fact so successful, that the Southwark training programme was extended and applied to all the other great training centres in England, until eventually there was very little difference between them all. Only the unique influence of its setting remained to differentiate Southwark. It continued to be a somewhat disagreeable embarrassment, but for most of the time the ‘mucky Bishop’ could be forgotten or even denied.
One out-of-favour theologian had proposed that since the Church supervised most of man’s activities, it was not in the least unreasonable for it to preside over man’s vices as well. Privately, a number of Archbishops of Canterbury had thought he’d had a point there, but none had dared say so.
Such was the mould in which Tobias was to be placed.
Tobias’ worldly possessions were few and, gathered together, fitted comfortably into a rucksack. They were by item:
2 suits of clothes, I black fustian for best and I patched-hand-me-down for everything else.
I embroidered kerchief (a gift from his sister
).
I waterproofed cape.
I hunting knife.
I comb.
I copy of The Book of Ceremonial Magic by Arthur Edward Waite, published in 1911 – this was a gift from Father Guido and immensely valued by its recipient.
Everything else owned by Master Oakley was on his head, body and feet, and therefore his packing took very little time.
On the day of his interview with O’Malley, Father Guido had returned and straightaway informed Tobias that he was no longer bound for Rome. The youth’s spirit had plummeted like a stone, and he tried to think of what he had done or failed to do to deserve this. Surely, he thought, he was able enough? In any case a shamefaced return to Clarkenhurst was unacceptable. But where else could he go?
Then, a mere moment later, Tobias learned that he was, instead, to be assigned as a trainee journeyman and attached to the household of the Bishop of Southwark. On hearing this, his hopes rose as high as they’d previously sunk. Why did Mori sound so solemn and look so sad? The more Tobias thought about it the better it seemed. To stay amongst fellow countrymen and in such a huge and fascinating town seemed considerably preferable to the dimly grasped prospect of Rome. Not only that, but also the idea of being attached to a functioning household seemed more promising than a long period in a training school, however good. All in all he was enormously pleased with the turn of events.
Father Guido was consistently less elated though and remained abstracted and unapproachable right up to the time Tobias was obliged to leave. Even so, Tobias still felt some gratitude towards him and, sack in hand, sought him out just prior to departure from the Church’s Whitehall ‘Citadel’. Mori was in his room in a deep armchair, fingering through an illustrated devotional work.
‘Goodbye, Father.’
Mori turned his head to look at Tobias, quite blankly at first, but then as if remembering something, with an intent gaze.
A Dangerous Energy Page 6
