A Dangerous Energy

by John Whitbourn

  The light was threatening to fade as they drew near to Pevensey village. Tobias was in no hurry to get home but, even so, was surprised to feel in himself a desire to take a stroll around the castle before calling an end to this ‘holiday’. Lacking any reason not to he communicated this wish to Maxted and very shortly the coach pulled up outside the East gate. Cormac jumped down and poked his bushy head through the open window.

  ‘Just the normal stroll, your Grace?’

  ‘More or less. If there’s anyone in there, turn them out first.’

  Cormac gave a few swift orders in incomprehensible Gaelic. The Irish attendants disappeared into the Castle and returned a few minutes later with a round dozen of disgruntled but acquiescent villagers – mothers and children for the most part but including one obvious courting couple. They looked blackly at the coach and its invisible occupant but moved rapidly off to their respective homes.

  Cormac informed Tobias that all was clear and then helped him to dismount. Two Irishmen stayed by the gate and the coach while Cormac and another accompanied the old magician at a polite distance.

  Midway along the north-west wall of the Roman fort, just by the edge of a long stretch of fallen masonry, was a small postern gate.

  Tobias had seen it during the course of his first visit, pondered briefly on its original purpose and then forgotten it. Today, he would not have noticed it at all if he had not, some thirty yards away, spotted a slim figure emerging slowly from the passage behind the gate. At first he assumed it was another villager and was about to call Cormac. But something made him take a second, closer look and instantly he came to a halt. It was Joan – beyond any mistake. She had not changed at all in the fifty years since their last meeting. Despite this long separation, Tobias had nothing to say to her. He made no move to approach. According to the way of her race Joan maintained an incommunicative silence as well. But if nothing was conveyed by sound, whole volumes were written on their faces. Joan’s wrinkled visage beamed with triumph, just as that of Tobias sagged with a defeat whose extent he finally realised. Her yellow eyes challenged him with her malicious victory and for the first time since childhood, he offered no defiance, no resistance. For a long while they expressed their mutual indebtedness in this way until Tobias was interrupted by a polite cough coming from beside him. He turned to look; it was Cormac.

  ‘Your Grace?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is all well?’

  ‘Do you see her?’ Tobias turned to look again. Joan was gone. ‘Did you see her, Cormac?’

  ‘I saw her, your Grace, yes. It was but a female from the village. Is anything the matter? You look pale.’

  ‘Where did she go?’

  ‘Back into the passage – where she came from.’

  ‘Get her – quick!’

  Cormac and his companion rushed off to investigate but, of course, there was no sign of Joan.

  ‘Take me home,’ said Grand Master Oakley in a weak voice.

  ‘She was lucky,’ said one of the Irishmen to Cormac as they trundled homewards. ‘The dirty old swine must have taken a powerful fancy to her. I’m glad she got away.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ replied Cormac.

  CHAPTER 15

  In which our hero undertakes a much longer journey.

  After this incident Tobias passed into a state of despair which made all past miseries seem affected. He had no doubt at all that this was to be the last evening of his long and eventful life. The knowledge caused neither distress nor rejoicing, but he was filled by a sense of waste. Nothing of this world could touch him now but the past was full of newly discovered pain.

  Doctors of an age yet to come would have pronounced him in a state of shock but, as he sat alone at the long dinner table, he was simply seeing his life pass slowly before him in solemn review. He wanted to reach out into this procession to change, alter, correct and transform; but it was far, far too late.

  He caused a huge blaze to be built up in the rarely used dining-room fireplace and sat beside it for a long time, drinking brandy which he did not taste. When the procession ended, he was left utterly empty: an old man, useless and finished, duped and destroyed.

  After an hour or two Stratter came in, back from some official errand in Hastings. Tobias called him over. As though from a million miles away and another time Tobias wondered what he should do. Kill his assistant? Give him all the knowledge acquired in a lifetime? Cling on to him and plead for another day of life? In the end all the possibilities were equal – equally pointless and unattractive and so he settled for doing nothing.

  ‘Goodbye, Father Stratter,’ he said dully.

  ‘I beg your pardon, your Grace?’

  ‘I said “Goodbye”.’ The Grand Master’s tone was decisive and final.

  Father Stratter was a magician and therefore capable of accepting abnormal and disturbing events without qualms. He was silent a little while, and then said, ‘Have you anything to say – anything to tell me?’

  Tobias tried to consider this but swiftly gave up because this was the easiest course of action. No trying or struggling for him anymore. He looked up.

  ‘No, I think not; help me up please.’

  Stratter did so. Tobias turned and looked at the last living creature he would ever see.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said again. Then, pursued by a host of phantoms, he ascended the stairs to bed.

  For a while he drank brandy and looked out to sea. The lights on a big ship slowly crossed his view and he watched this sign of life until it was no longer visible. Eventually he got into his large cold bed and soon fell asleep. When he awoke he was unsure of the time but thought it some hours before dawn. He listened to the regular roar of the sea and the miscellaneous noises of his house. As he had done so many times before, he looked up at the decorative panels on his ceiling and waited.

  He had been unsure in what form his release would arrive but it came as no surprise to him when, after only ten minutes or so, he felt the terrible blow to his heart. Suffused with pain he gasped and thrashed around in the bed but, at last, his final drop of energy drained, he went peacefully away.

  To his surprise, Tobias Oakley woke again – although he was not glad of it. He lay in bed and wondered how it was he knew that he would never sleep anymore.

  Nor was this the only information vouchsafed him in the brief, dark, interval between life and … this. Every cell of his brain, every nerve of his body, was suffused with a harrowing sense of error. He longed for life again that he might reform and amend and so escape this, the very worst of all his agonies. Then, despite the fear of learning more, in some desperate hope of alleviation, he opened his eyes.

  Far below, he could see another Tobias Oakley, in another bed, but this version of himself was lying absolutely still. Then the vision blurred and receded, taking in his room, the Palace, Pevensey, England, a blue-green globe, and – eventually – nothingness, a mist-filled void between there and here. Tobias’ all-consuming sense of wrong heightened. It was unbearable.

  Then, from out of his line of sight, a voice like the end of everything spoke.

  ‘Tobias,’ it said, implacable but not unkind, and drawing ever closer. ‘Tobias, you were … misled.’

  Tobias tried to scream but it was the merest mouse-squeak compared to the voice.

  ‘What does the Lord require of you,’ it said, ‘but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?’

  And thus Tobias Oakley, who need only have waited, at last learned the answer to all his burning questions and just who it was all his energy had been dangerous to.

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&
nbsp; Also by John Whitbourn

  The Downs-Lord Triptych Trilogy

  1. Downs-Lord Dawn(1990)

  2. Downs-Lord Day(2000)

  3. Downs-Lord Doomsday(2002)

  Other Novels

  A Dangerous Energy (1992)

  Popes and Phantoms (1992)

  To Build Jerusalem (1995)

  Royal Changeling (1998)

  Frankenstein’s Legions (2011)

  DEDICATION

  To: LIZ (of course)

  To: THE FAMILY

  To: ROSEMARY PARDOE – and all those who frequent her ‘Haunted Library’

  John Whitbourn (1958– )

  John Whitbourn is an archaeology graduate and has been a published author since 1987. His first book, A Dangerous Energy, won the BBC/Victor Gollancz Fantasy Novel Prize in 1991. Whitbourn’s novels and short stories tend to focus on alternative histories set in a ‘Catholic’ universe. Key characteristics of his works are wry humour, the reality of magic and a sustained attempt to reflect on the interaction between religion and politics on a personal and social scale.

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © John Whitbourn 1992

  All rights reserved.

  The right of John Whitbourn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 473 20089 0

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.orionbooks.co.uk