Under the Pendulum Sun

by Jeannette Ng

Has learned Messiah’s name.

  What though the spicy breezes

  Blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle;

  Though ev’ry prospect pleases

  And only man is vile;

  In vain with lavish kindness

  The gifts of God are strown;

  The heathen in his blindness

  Bows down to wood and stone.

  Waft, waft, ye winds, His story,

  And you, ye waters, roll,

  Till like a sea of glory

  It spreads from pole to pole;

  Till o’er our ransomed nature

  The lamb for sinners slain,

  Redeemer, King, Creator,

  In bliss returns to reign.

  Collected by Rev John Sanford, Psalms, paraphrases, and hymns,

  adapted to the services of the Church of England

  It was Sunday, and after weeks of mumbled service from The Quiet’s captain, I longed to hear my brother’s sermons again. He had a passion that surged under the measured cadence of his voice and, more than that, I had begun to miss his discordant singing.

  I wandered into the dining room to find Mr Benjamin in his Sunday best, which constituted the addition of a large straw hat, a grubby handkerchief to his front pocket and a bright lilac fern to his lapel.

  “Good morning, Miss Helstone.” He bowed, sweeping off his hat. “I look forward to your sermon today. Will we be singing Jerusalem today? I do love that hymn.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You will be speaking today?” His eyes seemed to widen with hope. “Yes?”

  I shook my head, taken aback by his assumption.

  “But a sister for a brother, is fair trade,” he said. “And the brother has been away for so long. The chapel has been empty and–”

  “How long has Laon been away?” Worry leapt in me. “You said he’d be back–”

  “Long! Forever and a day!”

  “That–”

  “He’ll be back. You have faith. We all believe he will be back.” He gave a long sigh. “All the parishioners were excited because we had you. Thought we had a Helstone to spare.”

  “All the parishioners? I thought you were the only convert.”

  “Me is all. All is we. We is me.” Mr Benjamin faded to a mumble, playing with variations of the words; he was easily delighted by wordplay.

  “Well, I cannot give a sermon or conduct the service or sacraments. I’m afraid I am not a priest the way my brother is. I am not a priest.” I was moved by his obvious need. I had always been a timid thing growing up, relying on Laon to speak for me, and thus I did not entirely believe my own voice when I said, “But I can pray with you.”

  For all the thoughts of adventure, I had not forgotten that his purpose here was that of a missionary and he – we, even – were here to turn whatever simulacrum of soul the fae possess to the service of the Lord Above.

  It was a great work, though not one I imagined myself capable of being part of.

  Yet here I was, being led by a gnome to the chapel in Arcadia.

  “Chapel in the garden,” he told me with a backwards glance. “Is where the Reverend Roche put it.”

  Walking behind Mr Benjamin, all I could think was that he was even shorter than I had originally observed and that the soles of his bare feet were very dirty.

  He led me through half a dozen dizzying corridors that seemed to all spiral in on each other until we reached a large courtyard.

  Looking up, I saw a blue sky hemmed in by high stone walls. A great history of glaziery stared down at me, from small, stained windows to elaborately latticed contrivances.

  A small brick chapel had been built leaning against the far wall of the courtyard. In shape it was squat and inelegant, not unlike my father’s church at Birdforth. A bell tower had also been built against the corner of the courtyard, completely dwarfed by the surrounding walls.

  “Is Miss Davenport joining us?” I asked. Remembering her tales of growing up in London, I had assumed her at least passingly devout. But now I could not recall a single mention of church.

  Vigorously, he scratched his head. “Think not, though your brother used to wait.”

  “Then we should too.”

  He shrugged. “Changelings. Their fingers bend out and not in.”

  “Do you care to explain that?”

  “Changelings just need to be not like their people. They need to be a little odd, not quite fit in. Is just their way of being made wrong. It’s in her nature.”

  “That…” I swallowed. “That seems quite sad.”

  “No, no. Isn’t in their nature to be.”

  I unlatched the double doors and pushed in.

  I had expected the whitewashed severity that I had grown up with, where all the medieval excess had been purged by the Reformation and all that was left was a hollow shell of a building.

  This was not my father’s church.

  A series of elaborate gothic bay windows looked into the chapel. Whomever built this place against the castle had not bothered to dismantle the windows that were originally set into that wall. The ornate stonework set the simple brick chapel to shame. Stone vines and stone rosettes framed each window. The faces and hands of the figures that crowded the surrounding panels had been worn away and their stories were unrecognisable to my eyes.

  As I lit the candles and set them in their wooden holders, the light reflected against the thick, uneven crown glass. Each tiny pane of it in the lattice bulged in fishy scrutiny of us below.

  Four rows of dusty pews faced an altar and a lectern.

  “I ring the bell?” said Mr Benjamin.

  I nodded.

  I pulled out my handkerchief and, coughing at the dust, wiped down the pews.

  A single bell sang out, clear and very loud. It was an earthly sound, very like that of the church at Birdforth. Though I knew it should raise up my thoughts to heaven, it merely reminded me how far away I was from home.

  I struggled to imagine this church full of fae. I tried to fill it with all the strange faces and twisted forms I neglected to study on my first day at port and now felt as though I would never see again. I tried to imagine my brother by the altar, his curate’s surplice always seeming too short on his tall frame. I remembered his smile.

  My eyes stung from all the dust as I shook clean my handkerchief. I pushed the water from my eyes with the back of my hands.

  I missed Laon. I used to tickle him in church to keep him awake. All too often, we’d giggle and bicker under our breaths until our father cast us a stern gaze from the pulpit and we’d silence. I’d keep holding his hand, though, as he needed my nails in his palm to not fall asleep.

  “We start?” said Mr Benjamin, re-emerging.

  “The bells call to the faithful,” I said. “We should wait. If my brother waits, then we should wait.”

  Perhaps all missionaries thought that of their own place, that it was uniquely difficult in the challenges it presented the devout soul. Yet where else would hold inhabitants so familiar with the English mind yet alien to it? For all the weird and wonderful accounts of Captain Cook, I had no idea what to expect beyond the walls of this castle.

  “What is beyond the castle?” I asked.

  Mr Benjamin looked up from the hymnal he was clutching and drew together his wide brows. “Beyond?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I want to know what’s outside. When I came in the carriage, I saw nothing but mist. And Miss Davenport tells me I shouldn’t go out.”

  “You shouldn’t go out.”

  “What is outside?”

  “Not much, mot nuch.” The gnome grinned to himself, causing the lines of his face to deepen as he noticed his verbal fumble created words that pleased his mouth. He savoured them like someone would sweets or chocolates. “Mot nuch, not much.”

  “That isn’t much of an answer, Mr Benjamin,” I chided.

  He shrugged. “It’s not much of a place.”

  I could not help but think on the missionary reports tha
t I had studied in anticipation of this journey. How differently they had described the distant shores that teemed with savages and cannibals, each unenlightened race finally brought to the faith through the eloquence of the missionaries and the good work that they do. It was not simply a battle of words, however, as for many the cultivation of the hearth mirrored the cultivation of the heathen. The accounts described the world beyond as a wide, wild waste awaiting the seed of instruction so that sure word of Prophecy could grow.

  I had always wondered at those wastes, if they truly were wilder than the blasted heaths of home.

  When I was young and I walked on the moors with Laon, I could not imagine a wilder place, given over to nature. The biting chill in our faces and the mists hanging over the endless, treeless dales. We chased each other, through the rippling heather, through ruined farmhouses. We would pretend that we were the only people left alive in the world; there was such a loneliness under that infinite Yorkshire sky.

  Yet even those seeming wastes were carefully cultivated. Heather, sapling trees and other plants were culled with fire so that they might be suitable for grouse and sheep.

  I still remember seeing it for the first time: the sea-like fire engulfing the banks of heather. It was a rising tide – that consumed seemingly everything. I remember the blaze on my face as I clutched Laon’s hand and explained as our nurse, Tessie, had explained to me that morning: It is how things are done. The moors need to stay the moors. It’s just like cutting your fingernails.

  For all that we may be surrendering that land to nature, we chose for the moors to be empty.

  As such my mind simply could not imagine truly empty, unclaimed land and I wondered if the wild wastes that those genteel missionaries wrote back to us about were as carefully cultivated as our own. If someone was choosing it to be empty.

  Still, none of the lessons taught by those faraway tales seemed relevant here.

  We waited for an hour for Miss Davenport.

  In that time, Mr Benjamin asked further questions that arose from his reading of the Testaments. His asked them most sombrely, though some I had to smile at. I had resolved to answer each of his questions with a referral to my brother, but the gnome’s enthusiasm was infectious. He took a great interest in the importance of sacrifice and the significance of price – he explained that fae liked numbers and costs.

  “It is as a debt paid in full by Christ with his death, his sacrifice. A debt to redeem the first sin,” I said. “The transgression in the garden, the forbidden food.”

  “But it is human sin? Or is it the sin of all? Did we all fall or is it just Mankind?” Mr Benjamin had a habit of referring to Adam by the literal meaning of his name in Hebrew, Mankind.

  “I would hold that it is shared, by she who first bit into the fruit, at least.”

  “It is dangerous eating forbidden foods.” He frowned, nose wrinkling as he tried to remember. “This is in the Psalms, is it not? Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me?”

  I nodded. “Yes, it’s often cited in reference to original–”

  “It is about fae. I think. Maybe. But we are made that way. So it is about us, yes?”

  “I don’t know.” I was dreading his answers. “How… how are you made?”

  “Like it says. They are true words.”

  From there he pressed me to explain more of ransom theology and original sin, but an aside soon had us talking of antediluvian monsters. Soon we were in a lively discussion about the apocrypha and how an archbishop once decreed any who published the Bible must do so with the apocrypha intact, else be imprisoned for one year.

  “What’s in them, this apocrypha?”

  “Wild stories,” I said, only half remembering. “Some of the youth of Jesus and how he gave life to clay birds. Judith and Holofernes is apocryphal, of course. And there’s all the fallen angels and nephilim in the books of the watchers.”

  “It’s the wild word weeds,” said Mr Benjamin. “They spring up even if you pull them out. No place for them in gardens.”

  “Scotland’s Bible Society thought so. They petitioned the British and Foreign Bible Society to not print it. I still remember my father marching up and down his study about that.”

  “He was angry?”

  “He was opinionated on the matter, but also torn. He no more wanted to teach us the apocrypha than to uproot it entirely.”

  “Weeds happen. You can never pull them out completely. I’m a gardener, I should know.” He nodded very sagely at that, and I could not help but laugh.

  My various disagreements with Miss Davenport only made me all the more hesitant to share my discovery of the papers with her. It was thus a few days before I was able to study them in earnest.

  I waited until the few hours of true night, when the fish moon swam from the dark clouds and its light reminded me of standing at the top of the coal cellar stairs in the dead of winter, gleaming black blocks of brittle coal beneath me. I opened the travelling case of papers and reverently took out each page. Carefully, I sorted through them, spreading them out on the threadbare carpet.

  I allowed myself a moment to appreciate the beauty of a simple mystery before plunging in.

  The papers varied greatly in size and shape and texture. Some had torn edges, some were crudely scissored and others caught the light as though they were pages torn from a gilt-edged book. Most of them were scrawled over in that arcane lettering.

  Enochian.

  The name was one I had encountered before, but I still could not quite recall where. Medieval gnostics perhaps? Or part of Nostradamus’ speculations? My father didn’t have a copy of the seer but one of his books did quote the mystic for purposes of refutation.

  Then I came to the book I had found on my first night here. I flicked through it, noting that it was written over in several different hands and that the words jostled against each other for space.

  …There is something they aren’t telling me. I can feel it in my bones. The house they keep me in is wrong, everything is wrong. I should have known. They are duplicitous by nature, but more than that, I can tell that they are keeping secrets. Yet truth is their weapon. How can I make them tell me? I am full of fear, but also so very full of hope…

  …They barely speak our tongue, more a mockery of it. I cannot keep my salt close enough. The covenant will protect me…

  …I know now more than I thought I could and I thought I should. Things that should not be written down…

  I was then on the first page, which declared it the private journals of Rev Jacob Roche. The original missionary.

  I snapped shut the book.

  My heart was thundering. I should not be reading this. The Reverend Hale had warned I should not read the journals of the previous missionary. He was explicit in how I needed to find them and bring them back, untouched.

  And yet.

  My eyes followed as my fingers caressed the worn leather spine. He did not ask that I refrain from studying the bindings, after all.

  It was bound in a very thin, papery leather. The candlelight exaggerated the rough rise and fall of the leather’s texture, though it was hard to see the animal’s exact scarring.

  There were a series of half-moon scorch marks down the middle of the back cover, arranged in a slight curve. Wondering, I placed the tips of my fingers against each of the marks. Under my thumb was the fifth half-moon mark, soot-black against the pale leather. Squinting, I could see the suggestion of whirled patterns in one of the half moons and indents at the arch of each.

  As I turned the volume over and over in my hands, I reasoned that Rev Hale had asked me to not read them so that I would know to not tell him that I had read them. He couldn’t possibly expect me to restrain my curiosity.

  I knew so little of Arcadia and, after Miss Davenport’s cryptic warnings about what happened to the previous missionary, I couldn’t help but wonder if his journals could contain a clue.

  Resolute, I set down the journal and tu
rned attention again to the papers.

  Translation of the Bible into Enochian.

  That one line in the Queen’s English was my key. Assuming this to be the work of a student of these strange glyphs, “Enochian”, then the lines by the Latin could be but translations. This also made sense of the more repetitive, shakily written pages which had the air of someone practising their letters, like Laon and I used to do, filling page after page with our intertwined names.

  I had a firm grounding in French and German, taught to me so that I may translate poetry and pursue other such genteel pastimes. My knowledge of Latin and Greek was rather paltry, borrowed, as it were, from Laon’s books.

  Still, I knew enough of Latin and translation to start comparing the verses. I didn’t think it entirely possible to piece together an entire language through these fragments, but the recognition of a few repeated words seemed very much in my grasp.

  There were more edges to maps than simply the physical. Though confined as I was to Gethsemane, my soul was singing in the excitement of exploration. I could not help but imagine myself now standing at one such border of our knowledge, staring into the shadowy abyss of mankind’s ignorance.

  It was, perhaps, a foolish thought. But I had been restless for days and both soul and mind needed more than simply bread to sustain them. Presented now with something more, I eagerly plunged into that darkness.

  My fingers itched for something to note my observations. My haphazard guesses needed to be recorded to be made sense of and picked apart later. It was all too easy to leap to conclusions when one was clutching a dozen disparate pages. Experience has taught me the importance of being systematic about such things.

  I glanced up from my work and noticed that the door to empty air was unbolted. I had assumed myself negligent or forgetful the first few times it had happened, but now suspicion was festering in me. I tried to pay no heed as I pulled the bolt firmly across the lock.

  It was just a door. There was no need to be afraid.

  Glancing down at the lock, I saw that it had little angular symbols etched into it. I brought the candle nearer and upon closer inspection they seemed similar to those in my papers. It might even be a word that I could translate. I smiled in anticipated triumph.