I couldn’t help wondering whether that was because his ring had been stolen, or Helga the Swede might have escaped his room without putting out.
We didn’t ask for details. Apart from anything else, while we weren’t sure whether the rings were a real defence against Zelda of the burning spear, Alastair didn’t even have that possible protection.
We told him it was better that he relocated for his own safety. When we asked where his wife and six kids were, he told us California. Something about the way he said it suggested that they might not be coming back. But, from our point of view, his family tragedy was our logistical simplification.
We suggested, strongly, that he book in to the Hotel Russell, which was conveniently located across the square from the Folly. We’d discussed this contingency with Nightingale and, while we weren’t keen filling up the Folly with ‘guests’, it would be handy to have them close by – just in case.
While Alastair was upstairs packing a suitcase, Guleed asked me what all the business about the hard and soft c’s was about.
‘Latin pronunciation changed over time and different parts of Europe,’ I said. ‘Ecclesiastical Latin has softer consonants than Classical Latin – I thought it might give us a clue to what time and space the ritual spell came from.’
‘Time and space?’
‘Region,’ I said. ‘What country it came from.’
‘When do you find time to learn all this stuff?’
‘It’s like PACE,’ I said. ‘You learn the basics and pick up the details as and when you need them.’
‘The healing and the prophecy didn’t seem authentic to me,’ she said. ‘Why do you think the speaking in tongues is important?’
‘Because they weren’t speaking in tongues, were they?’ I said. ‘They were speaking actual languages, which could be connected to the rings, which are probably connected to Zelda, the Angel of Death,’
‘Spanish, Latin and Hebrew,’ said Guleed. ‘But not Arabic. So probably Southern Spain after the reconquest.’
‘Or a Jesuit mission in Mexico,’ I said. ‘Let’s see if Postmartin has worked out where the lamp came from.’
Back in the days of the Old Republic, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England and 360-degree religious zealot, believed fervently in the Second Coming of Christ his Lord, and that one of the preconditions for this was supposed to be the conversion of the Jews to Christianity. The Spanish monarchy, inspired by the same prophecies, took a robust straightforward approach and offered their large Jewish population a simple proposition – convert, leave or die. Most converted, and the rest left, heading for Antwerp, Italy and the Ottoman Empire – anywhere they could find a place of refuge, however tenuous. This approach proved popular in Spain and Portugal, too, and in fact in most Christian countries where the rulers needed to write off some debts, keep the mob happy or curry favour with the Church.
Cromwell, in marked contrast to his approach to the Irish and other dissenting voices, felt that it would be better to convert the Jews by setting an example of how decent, lovely and God-fearing his branch of Christianity was.
His main problem was that all the Jews had been murdered or expelled from England in 1290 by Edward I, and you can’t convert people who aren’t there. His solution was to advocate readmitting the Jews so that they could be shown the benefits of the true religion. That this would give the English better access to the capital markets of Antwerp and the lucrative spice trade in the Far East probably never crossed his mind – honest.
Cromwell convened an advisory council and asked their advice and they said no. So he convened a grand council consisting of lawyers, merchants and some of the finest and most august theologians in the land, and put the proposition to them.
Their response was fuck no.
But Cromwell hadn’t got where he was today, effective dictator of England, by letting other people tell him what to do. He invited the Jews back into England to inhabit a strange legal limbo whereby they weren’t explicitly tolerated, but neither were they bound up in the sort of rules that circumscribed the lives of Jews in other European countries.
Meanwhile there were, living in London, quite a few ‘Portuguese’ merchants who were probably not as Christian as the Inquisition might have wished. These were the New Christians, the Marranos, descendants of Jews who had converted rather than face death or exile from Spain and Portugal. Unfortunately, merely being baptised and attending church on a regular basis was not enough to allay suspicions, and the Inquisition, first in Spain and then Portugal, persecuted them for fun and the greater glory of God.
Some families forwent the dappled sunlit hills and red-roofed towns of Iberia for the dreary, crowded and pestilential confines of sixteenth-century London. There they could practise the religion of their ancestors in peace – providing they didn’t do it in public. When England went to war with Spain, again, these merchants went to court to prove that they were in fact Jewish, not Spanish, and so therefore shouldn’t have their stuff nicked by the state. They won their case and the resettlement of the Jews in England became a matter of common law.
These were the Sephardim, the Jews of the Southern Diaspora, and they built a great synagogue in Bevis Marks in Aldgate, which opened in 1701. There it has survived fire, riots and two rounds of bombing by the Germans and the IRA, to become the oldest synagogue in England still in use.
Shortly after its founding, a Sephardic family going by the name Alfonzo had deposited the lamp at the synagogue.
‘Although, maddeningly, there’s no mention of why,’ said Postmartin, who I’d found in the reading room, sitting at a table covered in papers, books and the remains of a light supper. Toby had jumped on a chair next to him, the better to clean up any crumbs or crusts that might have been left over.
I’d barely managed to sit down before I got the potted history of the early modern Jewish diaspora – or at least the bits of it that related to our mysterious lamp.
‘There’s no mention of the rings,’ said Postmartin. ‘But I do have a name – Moses ben Abraham Alfonzo. We have records of the circumcision and bar mitzvahs of two sons, but no record of his death, although he donated a particularly fine silver menorah sent down from Manchester in 1735.’
Postmartin showed me a close-up photograph of the candelabrum revealing that it bore two hallmarks, one of which was the distinctive hammer and anvil of the Sons of Wayland. The other looked like a sideways A, which Postmartin identified as the Phoenician letter Aleph.
‘Which was associated with a famous Manchester-based jeweller,’ said Postmartin, ‘whose name was Mordecai Alfonzo. One of Moses Alfonzo’s sons, as recorded at Bevis Marks.’
Postmartin tapped the image of the hallmark and managed to put his phone into sleep mode.
‘Blast,’ he said, and found the picture again.
‘A Mordecai Alfonzo is listed as master in the formal rolls of the Sons of Wayland,’ he said, ‘until his death in 1803. And that surname occurs twice more during the nineteenth century and never again.’
‘So the family died out?’ I said.
‘The name may have changed instead, because the hallmark continued to be used by the firm of Davies and Company.’
‘Any relation to Leon Davies?’
‘I’m looking into that. But it seems likely, given Leon Davies was the one who committed the lamp into the care of the Sons of Wayland at the start of the war.’
‘So Zelda could have been in the lamp for over three hundred years,’ I said, and then had to explain who Zelda was.
‘That would certainly explain her irritable nature,’ said Postmartin, but I was thinking of the raven on the moor and my theory that it had been used as a guidance system for a V1 cruise missile.