What are you up to, girl? And how do you even know me, let alone know me so well?
Unless it was all chance. All screw-up. Maybe she’d been watching the warehouse, too, and that was why she’d spent so much time there.
Like Kennedy, he had a sudden, uneasy feeling that he was a piece in a pattern he couldn’t perceive. Not acting, but acted on. And that the pattern, when he finally saw it, might be one he wouldn’t like much at all.
39
And the False word wille die, and the True worde live. As on the threshing Floor, when Chaff is sorted from Wheat, that all who worke dilligently and earn their Hire may finally eat. The Infidels who soile the Holy Worde will bewaile their Blindness, and repent. Even in the House of the faithlesse Soldier they will repent. And in Münsters Churche, so, and likewise, they will repent. But such repentance wille come too late and Helles Fires will take holde on them.
Gods Angel will stand over Zion with a flaming Sworde outstretched in his hand, ready to doe Execution. But his first Stroke he will withholde awhile, because the Houre is not yet come.
Where the Highest bled, the Lowest wille likewise bleed. Even the vermin, that all shunne and disdaine. Shall it not be below as it was above? God has even promised this (Matthew 6:10).
The water of Ister will runne red, as with Blood — a greate Wonder, and one that all will attest. They that touche it will be stained. They that drinke it will be cursed.
Kennedy shoved the thin sheaf of typewritten pages away from her and massaged her eyes with the heels of her hands. She’d learned a lot about Johann Toller in the last three hours, but was starting to wonder how much more she could take.
Toller described the source of his revelations as an angel made all of fire, with six wings and multiple pairs of eyes under each wing — Revelation 4:8, he had helpfully added. The angel had appeared to him when he was close to death, and recounted the prophecies to him.
And they were deeply strange. They soared and plunged from the sublime and the cosmic to the sordid and the petty. God would deal out vengeance upon the nations that denied him, but also on specific, named people: minor officials in Cromwell’s Barebones Parliament and its successors, quartermasters in the New Model Army and even clerks in government ministries.
But riding behind the local details was a religious fervour freed from the confines of workaday sanity. Toller believed that Christ was on his way, ready to keep a date he’d made with the faithful long before. He was already late. He was already looked for. If you held your breath and closed your eyes, you could hear his footsteps.
A conviction grew in Kennedy as she read. The terms of Toller’s rhetoric were so similar to the Judas Gospel, as Emil Gassan had once read it to her, that she knew, somewhere beneath or beyond reason, that the echoes meant something. Like Toller, the Judas People were obsessed with timing and haunted by the fear that the Lord might have turned his face away from them — that their precious covenant might come, in the end, to nothing.
The similarities were too close to be accidental. Toller even mentioned the same figure of three thousand years, which was central to the Judas tribe’s theology but made very little sense to regular Christians. A three-millennia cycle was about to close, Toller said, and once it was complete, everyone would see God’s final purpose. Which was exactly what Kennedy had read, three years before, in the forbidden pages of the Judas Gospel.
While she was still trying to make sense of this discovery, the door behind her opened. Gilles Bouchard stepped inside and skirted the little desk to stare down at her, moving with the silence of a monk in a cloister. She gave him a nod of acknowledgement, and saw Bouchard measuring with an expert eye the number of pages she’d turned.
‘You should skip to the climax, Ms Kennedy,’ he said, smiling. ‘There is, I promise you, a great deal of repetition along the way.’
Actually, Kennedy had already skipped ahead to the last page. It was the same as the rest, maybe a little more wilfully opaque and fantastic in its imagery, but cut from the same cloth as the rest of the book.
And the Stone shall be rolled away from the Tombe, as it was the Time before. Then will a VOICE be heard, crying ‘The Hour, the Hour is at Hand’ and all Menne will see what heretofore was hidden. The Betrayer will condemne a great Multitude with a single Breathe. On the Island that was given for an Island, in the presence of the Son and of the Spirit, hee will speake the Names of the thousand thousand that will be sacrificed. And from his Throne in the Heavens, the Lord Jesus who is our Glory and our Life will speake the Names of the few that will be Saved.
Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison.
Amen.
‘It’s an unfathomable and pointless book,’ Bouchard murmured. ‘But typical of its time.’
Kennedy put down the page she was reading and swivelled on the chair to face Bouchard, resting an arm across its back. ‘Is it?’ she asked. ‘How, exactly?’ She was looking for reassurance, she realised. If all this madness was in the air back then, the eerie parallels she was seeing would be a lot less disturbing.
Bouchard made a non-committal gesture. ‘I didn’t mean anything profound,’ he assured her. ‘I just meant that Toller’s argument would have been far less controversial in the 1600s than it sounds today.’
‘The religious mania?’
‘The second coming of Christ. Specifically that. A great many people, in Toller’s time, took it as a given that the Day of Judgment was at hand. Not sad, troubled men with sandwich boards, but influential thinkers. Entire religious movements, in fact.’
Bouchard leaned back against the wall, since there was nowhere in the room that he could sit. ‘It’s strange, in some ways,’ he said, ‘and very understandable in others. Strange in the timing. The word “millenarian”, by its etymology, explicitly addresses a phenomenon that happens at the end of a millennium — the end of a great swathe of time, which is easy to mistake for the end of time itself. The late seventeenth century was a long way away from one of those watershed moments. But it seemed like an ending for other reasons.’
‘What reasons?’ Kennedy asked. Dry as the subject was, she was keenly, even urgently, interested.
‘You’re inviting me to give you a lecture,’ Bouchard warned. ‘You may come to regret that.’
‘Go ahead,’ Kennedy told him. ‘You don’t scare me.’
Bouchard grinned, and spread his arms in a declamatory gesture. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’ he said. ‘Well, mostly it was just the worst of times. Or at any rate, the most unsettled. The most unstable. The upheavals of the seventeenth century had the feel of a great and irreversible change, a culmination of human history. In Britain, the monarchy was overthrown and the king beheaded by his own people. In Europe, the Lutheran challenge to the Roman church seemed to echo the cataclysmic battles promised by St John in his Apocalypse. If Mother Church could be attacked, undermined, forced to fight for her survival, then what was safe?’
‘So there was acid in the Kool-Aid,’ Kennedy summed up. ‘For a century or so. Across a whole continent.’
Bouchard shrugged, seeming unconvinced by the metaphor. ‘Johann Toller belonged to a group called the Fifth Monarchists,’ he said. ‘Have you heard of them?’
Kennedy shook her head. ‘I’m probably not going to have heard of any of this stuff. Assume I’m completely ignorant. I won’t be offended.’
‘They were one of many, many radical organisations at that time. Religious zealots — and as part and parcel of that, political dissidents. They came from many different backgrounds — prominent politicians, magistrates, writers and high-ranking army officers — but they were united by a single article of faith. They believed that there was a shape to human history, which the wise and the good could analyse and understand.’