Did I feel that, too? Maybe. I found I was gazing not at the shewstone but into the ingle, where a fire of logs and coal would soon be lit that would last all winter long. The warm core of the house where a stewpot would hang, the air pungent with cooking herbs grown by Jack Simm and the mellow crusting of bread in the side-oven.
But now, in this thin, uncertain, peripheral time between seasons, it was only a mean cavern of ill-dressed rubble-stone, and cold.
A cold reaching out of the ingle along with a stillness which could be felt, like to the rancid, waxen stillness of a stone chapel where a corpse lies before burial.
I liked it not. I tell myself I don’t fear death, but the presence of the dead conveys no sense of peace to me, and there can be no beauty without life.
Clack.
Something wooden falling to the floor.
A stool. Rolling away under the board, and the cat rushed between my ankles and I heard a poor cry, of the kind made without breath, and saw that Goodwife Faldo was backed against the wall by the shuttered window. Her face shadow-lined and stretched in agony, her coif dragged back, and she was pointing at the maw of the ingle and whimpering like an infant.
As if in another world, the hands of Elias were held apart, two inches from the globe, as though his fingers were bathed within its aura.
He said, with mild curiosity, ‘Tell me what you see, Goodwife.’
I followed her wretched gaze, heard her hoarsened voice.
‘Death.’
‘In what form?’
‘Oh my dear Lord!’
Both hands over her face, peering through her fingers, the candleglow cold as a haloed moon.
Her voice was held in my head and then faded as if it had lain down and died there. Panicked, I lurched to my feet and tried to follow her gaze into the ingle. All I saw there was packed rubblestone fading into the blackness of soot.
Nothing more.
Nothing. Jesu, have I ever felt more worthless than when I stood there, sightless, hearing the returning voice of Goodwife Faldo, an arid panting.
‘Does this mean death for us? Oh please God, make it go away. Please God, Father, I’ve two sons!’
One moment, her body was bowed over in anguish upon a sob, and then she was twisting around, squirming upright and stumbling into the ingle where I could hear her fumbling about and then the muffled clang of the bread oven’s door.
When she emerged, her hands were clasped together as if she held a baby bird. Holding it out to Elias, hands shaking.
‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘I beg mercy, Brother. I’ve sinned.’
Her shadow skating on the wall, she opened out her hands and the ring clinked upon the board next the crystal. Goodwife Faldo, scrabbling after it, shoulders still hunched and heaving. Snatching it up and ramming it on her finger.
Losing her coif as she tumbled away across the room and dragged the shutters wide to expose the purpling dusk.
VI
Cousin
IT WAS LIKE to the air after a storm has blown itself out. The candle extinguished, the hall draped in a drabness of brown and grey. I felt weakened in a way I could not have anticipated, and saw faces everywhere, staring in from the unshuttered window and over the threshold where the door had been flung wide.
And one was my mother’s.
Jane Dee stepping through the doorway, dark-gowned, full of a fury seldom seen and so not easily dismissed.
‘Your doing!’
‘Mother—’
‘What have you caused?’
A tall woman of sixty years, admirably unbowed by circumstance, but ever dismayed by what I did and pained that my meagre earnings were spent more on books than repairs to the house my late tad had half-built.
However, Jane Dee was never more formidable than when bleeding from another’s wound.
‘Goodwife Faldo’s in bitter distress.’
‘Yes,’ I said tightly. ‘I know.’
‘What have you brought into her house? You tell me, now, John, what have you done?’
We were alone. Goodwife Faldo had not returned, and I looked around for Elias, but he too was gone, along with Jack Simm and the shadowed faces at the open door and the window. Some of them melting away upon the arrival of my mother, who, like my father, had been a good Catholic but now mistrusted the miraculous.
Was it? Was the miraculous ever so mean, cold and squalid as what seemed to have happened here this night?
‘On second thought, don’t tell me,’ my mother said.
I let go a sigh.
‘It’s gone, anyway.’
As if I knew. As if I was in any position to state that what I’d never seen was now no more. But my shivers recalled the deep bone-cold which no fire can reach because it’s forever beyond this life, beyond the air that we breathe. And I did not want to look again into the ingle. And see nothing.
‘… believing her family will perish for her sins,’ my mother was saying.
‘Any sin this night,’ I said, almost angrily, ‘is mine.’
‘John,’ she said sadly. ‘As if I didn’t know that.’
The way she’d spoken to me when I was six years old.
‘Mother,’ I said wearily, ‘I beg mercy, but it wasn’t—’
‘Don’t beg mine, beg hers.’
‘Yes… yes, I’ll do that.’
Gladly, for Goodwife Faldo was a good and generous woman, and I must needs make it clear to her that there was nothing for her to fear. And would have tried to explain it to my mother if I’d thought that, for one silent minute, she’d listen.
It had been no more than we’d deserved. I knew that now and profoundly regretted involving Goodwife Faldo in this conceit. Even the protective prayers intoned by Brother Elias would have been ineffective because our sitting was built upon deception. Any summoning not grounded in full honesty attracts only that which thrives on lies, confusion and all the lower longings of humanity which remain undissolved by death.
And I knew I’d get no sleep this night if I’d failed to find out what form it had taken. What they’d all seen and I – Oh, blood of Christ – had not.
‘Here.’ My mother drew something from a fold of her gown. ‘This was delivered.’
Placing on the board a thin letter with a seal which – Oh my God – I recognised at once. I picked it up and knew the paper.
Of all the times for this to be delivered…
‘Mother, when did this arrive?’
‘Not ten minutes ago. It’s why I was coming to find you… amid all the clamour and upset.’
I carried the letter to the window and broke the seal, tension quickening my blood as, in the fading light, I read,
Dr Dee
There is a need to speak with you on behalf of our Cousin. My barge will dock in Mortlake tomorrow at eight
Unsigned, yet I knew, my heart all aquake, that it was from Mistress Blanche Parry, my elder cousin on my father’s side. But that the cousin referred to in the letter was someone to whom neither of us was related. This term had been used before to disguise the identity of she whom Blanche served as Senior Gentlewoman. It was significant that this was far from a formal missive. It meant I was to be consulted in confidence.
‘Mother, the messenger… he’s not waiting for a reply?’
My mother, who also knew that seal, shook her head and then found a strained smile – any kind of summons to court would renew her hopes of me finding a stable income. She was of good family and had barely spoke to me for a week after I turned down the offer of a permanent lecturer’s post at Oxford.