As if he should have worried about hubris. If this comparatively frugal, cautious man had reason to think his line accursed, what could be said about the son who’d succeeded him in Arthur’s stead? Starting wars, building palace after palace – temples to himself – and then, to help pay for it all, directing the wreck and plunder of religious houses. Little wonder that the Queen feared the worst and thought herself haunted by evil.
Haunted.
I looked up in search of my far-off friends, the stars, finding Orion’s belt and then, prominent tonight, the seven-starred body of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, my hands instinctively reaching out to cup it like a cluster of jewels. While I was embraced by the skeletal frame of the abbey whose walls, honeyed by daylight, now came in weathered-bone shades of white and grey.
It was not a welcoming embrace. I heard a movement and turned and saw small, moonlit orbs.
Jesu…
Ewes. Sheep grazed in here, now.
I sat down on a low wall until my breath was regular again, imagining these walls aglow in the light of a thousand candles which would flicker in rhythm with the ethereal rise and fall of the Roman chant. It was this incandescence which I held in my head as I stood and, with right arm extended, inscribed, in the air and then on the ground before me, the sign of the pentagram.
The old protection, but it needed more. Kneeling in the centre of the imagined pentagram, amongst broken stones at the entrance to the nave, I began to pray in a whisper, invoking the ancient shield of St Patrick’s Breastplate, which would almost certainly have been known to Arthur.
‘Christ be with me, Christ within me
Christ behind me, Christ before me
Christ beside me…’
Breaking off, aghast, remembering how I’d held a bone purported to be part of Patrick’s actual breastplate.
What was I doing?
But the words went on inside my head, as if creating their own momentum.
Natural magic.
‘I bind unto myself the Name
The Strong Name of the Trinity
By invocation of the same
The Three in One and One in Three…’
When I’d finished, keeping my eyes tight closed, I called back the words of those who’d known the abbot in life, in good times and then the worst of times.
Cowdray: saw him lashed to a hurdle, dragged through the high street. Bumping along like a deer carcass. An old man, beaten, bruised and cut about like a low-born thief…
Mistress Borrow: remember his wrinkly smile, and his eyes had a kindness. For a long time, I thought I’d seen the face of God.
Better, yes. But more important…
The poor man has little cause for rest.
If he was still here and rested not, then this surely would not be the crime against God and State which was called necromancy.
Which, I swear to you, I had never attempted. Not my direction. Smelled too much of grave-dirt and divination by the examination of entrails. Necromancy: the very word whispered death. As if the dead had no purpose but to serve the desires of the living.
Afraid, then?
I came to my feet. After all my years of study, I hadn’t expected to be afraid. Our grandparents crouched over their fires, the slits in their walls shuttered against the storms. Even in Tad’s day there were still those who believed a ghost was a walking corpse, an earthen being rising putrid from the grave.
But now we live in the first age of light. Now we stand behind walls of glass like great lanterns and watch the bending of the trees and the bursting of the skies. We stand, protected, and study, in warmth, the force and the violence of nature. And thus old shadows fall away, and the spirits of the dead are become flitting, half-seen moonbeams.
I gripped cold stone, slick with slugtrails.
Perchance I can help.
Listen to me.
Perchance we might help one another, you and I, Abbot, two men of learning divided only by the thin skein of mortality.
Here, within my protective pentagram, upon the cold hearth of our faith, intoning words and phrases borrowed from the grimoires, rendered safe and wholesome, or so I must needs believe, by Christian prayer.
Not conjuring. I won’t command, in the manner of the old sorcerers. I only request…
‘…humbly, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, if the Trinity doth so consent. Dear God, if it be your will that I might help your servant Abbot Whiting find peace… that I may bear a portion of his burden, in return for some small enlightenment, then let him appear to me now in… in a not unpleasant form.’
A not unpleasant form. Essential, that. Always important in the grimoires to imagine how you would wish to view the spirit.
State it firmly. A not unpleasant form. Say it strongly, then let it go. Imagination, when bound to our human will, can be a powerful tool for altering the course of events but, when left to its own devices, can cause havoc in the mind.
So, do I feel, or do I imagine, the air growing cold around me? Should I, as a scientist, try to still such feelings, separating myself from them to stand aside, become an observer? Or allow these fancies to form around me, creating a numinous cloud into which a spirit, some watery essence of a man, might gradually become manifest?
The conjurer at work.
Dear God.
You think me reckless?
You who watch from behind your window glass. You who were not there that night, cold in the belly of the abbey.
Slowly lifting my face, I placed him there, imprinting him upon my closed eyelids, marking that look of helpless sorrow on his face and his hands raised in formal, weary benediction.
Who’s to say what are visions and what are signs of an oncoming madness?
I must have been close to the edge of a kind of madness when, in a instant of heart-lurch, I knew that I was not alone.
Knew? How did I know? How? Did I hear then movement, a footfall among the riffling of last winter’s crispen leaves, the slow beat of owl wings?
It was none of that. None of anything. Only an absence, a flatness, a deadness, a not-hearing. A void which spoke of the dreadful.
I’m trying, God help me, to explain this. Without diagrams or arcane symbols. To evoke the crawling fear it awoke in me as, with a last, slack-lipped prayer, wildly slashing another pentagram in the air before me, I began moving, open-eyed now, along the moon-washed, rubbled nave towards the chancel.
Towards what was there.
XIX
Beyond Normal
Cowdray came back with me to the abbey.
I’d battered every door in the George Inn until I’d found the chamber where he lay – with one of the kitchen maids, I believe. Now he stood on the edge of the chancel and shivered and looked again at what was there and shivered again. Crossing himself, I noticed, before turning away, almost in anger.
‘I’ll send a boy for Sir Edmund Fyche. And constables. There should be a hue and cry.’
‘No… wait.’
A little light. A single lantern, burning in the vastness.
Dear God, dear God, dear God…
‘Doctor, this is…’ Moonlight deepening the furrows in Cowdray’s face, turning them black. ‘’Tis beyond normal, man.’
‘What’s normal?’ I was barely in control. ‘How are men usually killed here?’
‘In hot blood. And strong drink.’ His voice flat. ‘Never like this.’
The man who lay dead had arms spread wide, like to Our Saviour on his cross. Shadows flucting like the wings of angels on the walls above and to the sides.
‘I must needs consult my colleague,’ I said. ‘Master Roberts.’
‘He’s ill.’
‘Yes, and needs sleep, however-’
‘He doesn’t need this, ’ Cowdray said. ‘God’s word…’
‘No.’
I’ve lived through violent times, seen men executed in divers gruesome ways but nothing, since the burning of Barthlet Green, so heartsick close. I turned again to face it, swallowing bile and self-loathing, the lantern held high.