I felt excited, but also uneasy. I’d done classics at uni and I knew what these were — books of magic. The one in Old English was a grimoire. A scrap of notebook paper fell out of it, covered with writing in Biro. Julian’s writing, I knew that without being told. A spidery hand to suit those spidery fingers.
I thought he’d copied out a spell. Later, when I heard the Wylding Hall album, I realized it was an old ballad by Thomas Campion — a song in the form of a spell, dating to the fifteenth century.
Thrice tosse these Oaken ashes in the ayre,
Thrice sit thou mute in this inchanted chayre;
Then thrice three times tye up this true loves knot,
And murmur soft, shee will, or shee will not.
Goe burn these poys’nous weedes in yon blew fire,
These Screech-owles fethers, and this prickling bryer,
This Cypresse gathered at a dead mans grave:
That all thy feares and cares an end may have.
I thought I heard voices, so I dropped everything and scrambled back to my feet. But no one came, and when I listened, I could tell they were in the kitchen with Tom. I knew he wanted to go over some of the details about studio time.
I figured they might be a while, and this might be a good time to do a bit of exploring on my own, without someone at my shoulder steering me past whatever it was I wasn’t supposed to be looking at. This is why you have to be very careful when you invite a journalist into your midst.
The big room where they rehearsed was in one of the newer sections of the farmhouse, eighteenth century, tacked onto the Victorian addition. Tom had told me that the original manor was Tudor, and parts of it were older than that, fourteenth century.
So, I did a bit of exploring. Their bedrooms were all in the newer wing, and I knew these would be off-limits to me. But one of the doors from the rehearsal room opened onto a hallway, and I followed that.
The place was immense. From outside, you just had no idea of the scale. It was originally a manor house, where a knight would have lived — you could see where the old part began, because the walls changed from wood and plaster to herringbone brick, with massive oaken joists and beams.
The hall grew narrower as I wandered along. Diamond-paned windows, that beautiful leaded glass that catches the light and throws it back in rainbows, like a prism. There were crooked wooden doors, oak planks banded with iron, so heavy and warped I couldn’t open most of them.
And of course I tried — who wouldn’t? The ones I could open seemed to be have been used as storerooms for the last few hundred years, dank and musty and dark. I wasn’t going to start poking around in them.
So, I kept going, until I found a stone stairway and climbed to the next floor. It was so dark, I kept my hand on the wall the whole time to make sure I didn’t lose my footing. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, and the passage was so narrow that my shoulders brushed the walls. It was like climbing into my own tomb.
I’d forgotten my watch, and so I lost all track of time. But finally I reached the top of the stairs and stepped out onto a landing. There, to one side, was an open door. Light poured into the hall, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust before I walked in.
It was a library — a very, very old library. You’re supposed to keep books out of the light, but this room must have been at least five hundred years old, built at a time when you’d want — need — natural light to read properly. Assuming you were literate and could read.
I’ve never been in such a beautiful room. Dark oak walls with carved linenfold paneling, hand-carved bookshelves. A row of diamond-paned windows, with leaves blown against them on the outside, so that the light that filtered down seemed to come from a forest canopy. One of the windows must have been broken — there were leaves scattered across the floor, green willow and birch.
And there was a fireplace big enough to walk into, filled knee-high with gray ash. The room smelled of woodsmoke: when I held my hands above the ashes, the air felt warm. Someone had been burning something.
Another odd thing was the walls. When I first walked into the library, I assumed the paneled walls were linenfold — what you usually find in posh houses of that vintage. But when I looked closer, I saw the paneling was carved like overlapping feathers — there must have been thousands of them. Not big peacock feathers, either: small feathers, about the size of your thumbnail. The detail was extraordinary; you could see every quill, and the wood was so smooth it felt like silk.
The bookshelves were carved, too: a repeating pattern of twigs and leaves with a little bird like a sparrow worked in here and there. You had to look carefully to find the birds, they were so small and carefully concealed within the larger pattern. The shelves weren’t filled, but there were still a lot of books — several hundred at least. Not very orderly. It looked like a library used often by the same person, someone who always knew where to find whatever book he wanted to put his hands on.
There were more books on a table by the window, in a language I couldn’t make out. Arabic, maybe? I can’t remember, it’s been so long. And another grimoire, not much bigger than my hand. It was in good nick, the leather cover very soft. The pages felt stiff and new. The ink looked new as well, not at all faded: black ink, not that dull brown you find in most very old books.
And this book was very old. I’m no expert, but even I could tell it must have been written around the time this wing was built. When I opened it, I swear I could smell fresh ink. I looked at the frontispiece for a date or name, but found nothing.
I did come across a bookmark — a birch leaf that had been picked within the last day or so, still green. Beneath it was a fragment of manuscript covered with writing, so old it crumbled when I touched it. I had my notebook with me — I’m a journalist, remember — and I quickly began to copy out the writing word for word. I thought it might make good copy.
“Burna thyn haer yn flamme
Tiss wrennas fedyr and thyn hatte blod.”
That’s all I got down when I heard someone behind me. I whirled around, but there was no one by the door. When I turned back, someone was at the other end of the room, watching me. A very old woman I thought at first, not as tall as me, slight and white-haired. But she wasn’t old — it was a trick of the sun in the window above her, bleaching the color from her hair.
Then I saw that her hair really was white — bright as silver, rather mussed-up hair that fell just above her shoulders. She didn’t look more than fourteen or fifteen, wearing a plain white dress that came just below her knees. A vintage petticoat, the kind of hippie frock that girls snapped up at Portobello Road. Strange tawny eyes. She took a step toward me and stopped. She looked surprised, as though she’d been expecting someone else.
“What are you doing here?”
I jumped: it was a man’s voice. And it didn’t come from her, but from the door, where Julian stood, staring at me. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or just confused.
I said, “Nothing,” and glanced back at the girl.
But she was gone.
Tom
It was a good article, what Patricia Kenyon wrote for NME—a very good piece. Unfortunately, by the time it appeared that fall, we were all focused on damage control. The album had to come out on schedule, and there was a tour all lined up — shows in London and Brighton. I was in the last stages of booking them in the United States around the holidays. The rumor mill had been running for a few months by then. Patricia’s article did a lot to calm that down, put things into perspective. I suspect she could have caused us a lot of trouble if she’d wanted to.