It was a relief when the caravan at last reached Seville, and James was able to get away from her company, if only for a short while. But Seville had its own mysteries.
The Guadalquivir reminded him a little of the Thames in London. Navigable from the sea, the river was crowded with ships, and the wharves and jetties were a hive of activity, where sailors and dockers, beggars, whores and urchins worked and laughed, fought and argued in a dozen languages - the usual folk of the river, James thought, just as you would find in London. Trade shaped the city’s communities too; Seville was home to officers and sailors who had participated in Spain’s explorations of the Ocean Sea, and there were Genoese and Florentine bankers and merchants everywhere.
But in other ways Seville was quite unlike London. He walked to the site of a grand cathedral, bristling with scaffolding. It would be the largest in the world, it was said. But it had been built on the site of the city’s Moorish mosque, and a surviving muezzin tower still loomed over it; slim and exquisite, the tower would always draw the eye away from the solid pile of the Christian church.
And just over the plaza from the cathedral was an old Moorish fortress-palace which the Moors called the al-qasr al-Mubarak, and the Christians called the Alcazar. James peered curiously through its arched doorways. Though the Moors had been expelled from Seville by the city’s conquerors, later generations of Christian rulers had brought back craftsmen from Granada to work on these buildings, maintaining and even enhancing them.
Seville was not like London, then, where with their forts and cathedrals the conquering Normans had erased any symbol of the old Saxon state. Here the spirit of the Moors lived on in a Christian country.
Perhaps things were going to change, however. Two hundred and thirty years after its conquest Seville was still the southernmost Christian city in Spain. The great tide of Reconquest had stalled. The Christians were distracted by conflicts between their own rival kingdoms, and their vast project to repopulate the occupied country was diluted by the Mortality; where once the Moors had turned the land green, now only Christian sheep grazed. Seville remained a city on the cusp of a great change, James thought. Perhaps it was no wonder that apocalyptic legends had gathered around the place.
But James, in his first walk around this strange, complicated, muddled city, did not see a need for cleansing, but a kind of mixed-up human vitality he rather relished.
Near the Alcazar he came across two girls who sat on a bench, eating oranges they unpeeled with their thumbs. No older than twelve or thirteen, dark, shy-looking, they giggled with each other as they ate, but kept a wary eye on the folk around them. The girls both had yellow crosses stitched to their blouses. They were Jews, then. They had to wear ugly symbols on their clothing, but at least they were here. In England there were no Jewish girls like this, laughing in the sun and eating oranges.
When the girls saw James watching them, they looked away nervously. Embarrassed, annoyed at himself for frightening them, he hurried on.
He made his way back to the river, and walked to a complicated pontoon bridge of seventeen barges.
And across that bridge he glimpsed the brooding pile of the castle of Triana. It was the headquarters of the Inquisition.
IV
Before travelling to York, Harry returned to Oxford for a few days to put his affairs in order.
Then he joined Geoffrey Cotesford on the great north road, the old Roman route that ran from London to Scotland. Harry would have preferred to make his way by sea, which would have been far more comfortable, but Geoffrey pleaded poverty. So they clattered away in their cart, Harry wincing as they hit every pothole. In places the way was difficult because of fences left untended, bridges unrepaired, work left unfinished for more than a century because there was nobody to do it.
Geoffrey pointed out features of the landscape. ‘Still empty - I told you!’
Here was a town half given over to farmland. Here were villages abandoned altogether, the roofless houses slumped like old men, the fields overgrown. Swathes of the country had been given over to herds of sheep, which bleated piously as they nibbled the grass that grew around the ruins. Harry usually rode past such grassy mounds of tumbled walls and abandoned buildings without looking too closely; they were just part of the landscape. But Geoffrey was pitiless.
‘The country has a way of cleansing itself. Crows and rats and flies! Even they have a purpose in God’s grand scheme. But we have never come back, Harry; we have never taken back our villages.’
‘Why are we talking about the Big Death again?’
‘Because it shaped your family, Harry - or, rather, reshaped it. This is what I have discovered about you. The empty world after the Mortality was quite different from what went before. Suddenly there were too few folk to get the work done; a bad lord could not hold onto a man, for there was always work somewhere else. There were revolts as the nobles tried to stuff everything back into Pandora’s box, but it was too late. And opportunities opened up.’
‘Such as for my family.’
‘Yes! Your grandfathers saw the chance to slip the bonds of allegiance to the lords. You became merchants, wealthy in your own right, and you called yourselves Wooler - you had no surname I can trace before.’
‘And before the Mortality? What were we then?’
‘You were soldiers - perhaps all the way back to the days of William. It’s said you had an ancestor who came over with the Conqueror. But then every family in England says that. Certainly your forefathers fought alongside Edward Longshanks.’
‘The Hammer of the Scots.’This story of a lost and different age rather thrilled Harry the merchant.
‘And before that they rode with him to the Holy Land, for Edward was a great crusader. But to your family the crusades weren’t a mere adventure. To them, the Holy Land was home - or had been.’
And he told Harry of his ancestor Saladin, born and raised in the Holy Land, who had come to England, and fought in Spain, and then joined a crusade. Surviving, he returned to England to start a family of his own. ‘Saladin was always determined that his family should remember the Testament of Eadgyth; he thought it contained important lessons for the future. Your own father taught it to you, didn’t he? But other prophecies accreted around you too...’
The news about Saladin was disturbing for Harry. ‘Then I might have Saracen blood in my veins.’
‘A dash of it, probably,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Don’t worry, I’m keeping this to myself. I wouldn’t wish to harm your business reputation. Be grateful there’s no sign of Jewry in your blood line. But then, Edward Longshanks expelled all the Jews from England nearly two hundred years ago, by God. We were the first in Europe to do it, and we set a fashion, didn’t we?’
Harry, impatient, asked, ‘Just tell me simply - why are you so interested in my family’s past?’
‘Because you will need to understand your own complicated history if you’re to understand what has become of your sister. Poor Agnes! I got involved, you know, because my house is not far from the parish church where she lives.’
‘She lives in a church?’
‘You’ll see. I was brought to her. But she was calling for you, the brother she hasn’t seen for ten years. You always protected her, she said.’
‘So I did, I suppose,’ Harry said uneasily. ‘My father was always short with her. And when he was in his cups - I deflected his blows a few times. He repented before he died; I forgave him.’ Harry didn’t enjoy talking of his family’s past; it hadn’t been a happy time. ‘But my sister disappeared - she ran away, she was no older than ten. We heard nothing more of her.’
‘You didn’t try to look for her?’
‘At first. But after my father died I took over the business, and found he’d run it down - squandered the legacy of my grandfather. It was hard work restoring it. I had no time.’
‘I understand. And in all probability your sister didn’t want to be found. But she did not die, Harry; somehow she survived. And she fo
und a place in the world. But eventually her troubles overwhelmed her, and she asked for you. So I came to find you.’
‘It’s good of you to do this,’ Harry said, though he felt resentful rather than grateful. ‘To come all this way, to give up your own business for her.’
‘You’re welcome. But it isn’t just charity that motivates me. I rather think your sister’s plight has a wider significance.’ He eyed Harry. ‘I know you’re a sceptic, Harry, about matters beyond the material, and that’s healthy. But the fact is your family is steeped in prophecy...’
Harry didn’t want to hear this.
They lapsed into silence, as the countryside of England, echoing only to the bleating of the sheep, rolled past them.
V
York, within its rectangle of much-battered, much-repaired walls, was bustling, a city of trade. But it was dominated by its immense cathedral, the newest sections of which, only a few years old, were fresh-cut, bright and sharp. Geoffrey said the minster had been built on the site of a Roman military headquarters, and that the city after the Romans had become a sort of Viking trading capital, a tradition of commerce that still lingered. There were layers of history written in the stones, Geoffrey said, layers that shaped the present.
They stayed the night in the hall of Harry’s merchants’ guild. It was a grand building, with religious paintings hanging from the stone walls and long tables groaning with food and drink. Harry was made welcome. There was much business to discuss, for Harry only rarely travelled this way, and it was a great relief for him to be able to escape from Geoffrey and history and his family’s complicated past, and to immerse himself in the real world of commodities and prices. Geoffrey excused himself and went to sit with the apprentices at the hall’s service end. Later Harry found him in the basement, where the guild ran a small hospital for the poor, who were expected to pray for the souls of their benefactors.
In the morning they mounted their cart again and set off to find Harry’s sister.
The church she had attached herself to, another Saint Agnes’s, was a few miles north of the city walls. It was a small, modest establishment at the centre of a village built of stone recovered from a much larger, abandoned settlement, whose ruins lay all around. The church itself was quite new, in the Perpendicular style. But Harry saw it had been built on older foundations of blackened stone - perhaps a Saxon chapel burned down by the Normans; there had been a lot of that in this area.
They were greeted by the parish priest, a kindly, elderly man called Arthur. It was Arthur who had first called in Geoffrey to help him cope with Agnes’s requests. ‘But you must understand we very much value your sister’s presence with us here,’ he told Harry. ‘Very much. She brings the love of God into our small lives ...’
Geoffrey led Harry, not to the door of the church as he had expected, but to a side wall. Here a kind of cell protruded from the church’s wall, with no door, and no window save for a slit.
And here, Geoffrey said, was his sister: bricked up in the cell within which she would spend her whole life. Harry stared in horror.
Geoffrey touched his shoulder. ‘You must try to understand. This is the life your sister has chosen for herself. And she serves her people, you know. As the father said, most parishes are proud to have an anchoress attached to their church.’
A voice floated up from the slit window. ‘Geoffrey Cotesford? Is that you?’
The tone was deeper than it had been, softer, but it was unmistakable. Harry’s heart thumped; he had not realised how much he had missed his little sister.
‘It is Geoffrey.’
‘I knew you’d return.’
‘Your faith in your brother was justified too.’
She gasped. ‘Harry?’
Harry forced himself to speak. ‘I’m here, Agnes.’
‘Then come to my window.’
Harry knelt down. The window was a slit, just large enough to pass food and waste. Only a little light leaked into the cell within. He could see another window on the far wall where the anchoress was able to look into the church. The room was simply laid out, with a bed, a bench, a table, a crucifix on the wall. On the table were two books, a leather-bound Bible, and a copy of the Ancrene Wisse, the manual of the anchoress. The room’s only other feature was a shallow trench in the floor. It puzzled Harry, who knew little of the lifestyle of an anchoress, a walled-in hermit.
And through the squint, this slit window, his sister’s familiar blue eyes gazed out at him. ‘I prayed you would come. I knew you would. You always did protect me, Harry.’
But, he thought, I did not protect you from this morbid fate. ‘I have news of the family,’ he said.
‘My father is dead,’ Agnes said softly. ‘I know that much.’
‘Mother is well. She misses you.’
‘Tell her I pray for her ...’
Geoffrey interjected gently, ‘I will leave you to talk. But we must turn to business. Harry needs to understand why you summoned him, Agnes.’
‘I would not have disturbed you,’ she said. ‘But I had to.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of what I found. In this cell ...’
And she spoke of family legends: of Orm, who may or may not have sailed with the Conqueror, and Eadgyth, or Edith, the wife he may or may not have found demented and raving in the ruins of an old Saxon church outside York, while William’s Norman thugs rampaged across the north of England.
‘Do you know why I was called Agnes? It is part of the old story - my mother told me this - in every generation there is an Agnes, so we remember that Eadgyth’s church was dedicated to that saint. And it is said that Eadgyth returned to the church later, when she sickened, and her mind failed. Poor Orm had to seek her here again.
‘When I ran away from home, I was only ten years old. I had travelled no further than a day’s walk from home. I had no idea what shape England was, Harry! The only place I had ever heard of that had anything to do with the family was Eadgyth’s church near York. So I made my way here.’
‘This is Eadgyth’s church?’
‘Rebuilt since then - but yes, it is her church.’
‘Quite a journey for a child,’ Geoffrey murmured.
‘I hardened.’
Harry thought there was a whole desperate saga contained in those two words. He was full of guilt.
She whispered, ‘I worked here, on the farms. I knew how to shear a sheep. Then I worked for the parish. And, in time, God and Father Arthur granted me the privilege of this, my enclosed life of prayer. My only stipulation was that my cell had to be here, in this corner of the church, on the old foundations.’
Harry guessed, ‘Because this was where Eadgyth had hidden.’
‘And where she came back to at the end of her life. I know this, Harry, because she scraped an account of her visions into the wall. The lettering is faded and lichen-choked, half-buried by rubble, old-fashioned and hard to decipher - but it is here. And as I dig my trench, I have uncovered it steadily.’
Harry felt a return of that uncomfortable dread, a sense of enclosure. He wanted nothing to do with this antique strangeness. ‘I know the story of the man called the Dove,’ he said. ‘Who will be the spawn of the spider, and so on. And in the last days before the end of the world is due, he must have his head turned west to the Ocean Sea...’
Geoffrey quoted from memory, “‘All this I have witnessed / I and my mothers. / Send the Dove west! O, send him west!”’
‘There is more,’ Agnes whispered. ‘Orm remembered twelve lines. That is what we have come to know as Eadgyth’s Testament. But there is more.’
‘More lines scraped in the wall?’
‘Yes,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Ten more lines, Harry. In which Eadgyth records her vision of what would become of the world if the Testament was not fulfilled - of a future in which the Dove turned, not west as he should, but east. I can see you’re having trouble believing any of this, Harry. But when I tell you of this hideous future you will see why I
summoned you here. Not just for your sister. We have to work out what to do about this. For we cannot let this dreadful future come about. He crossed himself.
Harry felt his whole life hingeing on this moment. He longed to flee from this madness, the woman in the hole, the terrible words scribbled on a wall, the memory of his dying, drunken father. But, as Geoffrey had seen, he had a sense of duty which would not allow him to walk away.
He said impulsively, ‘Agnes - never mind prophecies. I still don’t understand. What made you do this? Why run away - why throw away your life - why wall yourself up in a cell?’
‘For the love of God.’
There must be more. ‘And?’
She sighed. ‘And because I thought I would be safe,’ she said softly. ‘If I am in here, far from Oxford, encased in stone, he could not reach me again.’
He thought he understood at last. ‘Our father.’
‘Yes. It was not until Geoffrey came that I learned he was dead.’ She closed her eyes.
‘What did he do, Agnes?’
‘He was maddened. He was drunk. He didn’t know what he was doing. I forgive him; I have prayed for him. But I was ten years old. I feared that if I stayed, if I became a woman, and if his seed was planted in me - I left to save myself, and him, from that terrible sin.’
‘Oh, Agnes. I didn’t know. You say I protected you. But I failed, I failed—’
‘It wasn’t your fault, but his. Agnes is the name he gave me. But Agnes was a holy virgin. I am no Agnes.’
Impulsively he pushed his hand through the slit window. Tentatively his sister clasped his fingers, and then he felt the softness of her cheek on his hand.
Later he asked Geoffrey about the trench in the cell. It was Agnes’s own grave, Geoffrey said, a grave she scraped every day, for an anchoress was commanded to keep her death before her eyes at all times. Agnes would live and die in her stone box, and when her life was done she would lower herself into her self-dug tomb.
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