The men moved back and forth past him, shifting and shouting, and one of the men put out his back through heavy lifting, and made a cry about it, and Venetia ran to get him a pretty medal of St Christopher from her own closet, only a little mouldy, and his to keep, she insisted. It was not worth a penny, less than the worth of the work of furniture shifting they had done, and yet the man went away well pleased, and sweet on Venetia.
Outside the war-like sounds continued, and the smell of a hundred good Protestant bonfires drifted across the city, but Sir Kenelm was still absorbed in the tiny ox-blood volume. He held the book to his riddling, turnover heart. He had an inclination to believe it was the gospel of St Cuthbert, buried nine centuries previously in the saint’s coffin, in the salty earth of the holy island Lindisfarne, and used in many Catholic miracles since it was disinterred in the claw-like grasp of the saint’s crystalline, salt-preserved body. With the smallest flick of his tongue Kenelm licked the top cover of the book. It was salty. He wondered if he might be struck dumb with tongue-rot, so he could say no more Protestant prayers.
He realised the men had gone and it was dark, and he looked up and saw he was in the dining room, trapped in the midst of his old tutor’s precious library, and had to shift two stacks of books to get out. He kept the Gospel tightly in his palm. This little volume had not yet achieved all its miracles. In a few hundred years it would raise buildings and save souls.
‘The Society of Jesus has sold the St Cuthbert Gospel to the British Library for £9 million . . . Proceeds of the sale will support Jesuit schools in London, Glasgow and Africa.’
The Tablet newspaper, 2012
Kenelm climbed to the highest window in the house, where ashes from the city’s bonfires blew into his face like black snowflakes. Over the river a display of sparked-up military firepower spluttered, low, golden and bloody, like a demonstration of what the state could do to your guts, if it was so minded.
It was a potent celebration, this festival of fireworks – almost alchemical in its method. For it sought to convert a substance into its direct opposite. Powder had been a means to murder, now it was re-deployed as a means to delight. Screams of agony became screams of excitement. An act of terror became a celebration. A literal thinker would never have created this commemoration. Suitably for a Protestant occasion, everything hung on analogy.
As Kenelm’s private thoughts flared and sizzled, the display on the river seemed to grow out of control, fizzing ever higher into the sky, and just as he began to be afraid for the city’s safety, Kenelm thought he saw his father’s golden hair shining across the heavens, fading out of sight like a bounding Leo, for his father was born on the cusp of August. The bright form of the leaping lion was still there when he closed his eyes.
‘What is happening?’
It was young Kenelm in his nightclothes. ‘Well,’ said Kenelm, taking him onto his knee, ‘tonight is a festival in memory of your grandfather.’
It was almost true. There were some things that would need to be better explained to the boy, certainly, but he could start with the grand concepts. The detail – his grandfather’s treachery, trial, and so forth – could be filled in later.
The boy hid his face in Kenelm’s clothes.
‘The city is celebrating your grandfather with fireworks,’ he said. Less true, but never mind. ‘If you watch the sky you will see him glimmer and wave to us.’
A spluttering fusillade meant neither could speak or hear, then golden limbs streaked across the night.
‘He’s a Starman, waiting in the sky,’ cooed Sir Kenelm, as little fireworks whizzed round the sky like fiery maggots.
Over the music of crashes and rocket whines, he spoke urgently to young Kenelm. ‘I have told you that we Philosophers of Alchemy say that we are all Starmen, you know, and our bones are made of stars, and after we die we return to the stars.’
Young Kenelm nodded.
‘He’d like to come and meet us but he thinks he’d blow our minds.’
Kenelm hummed the song to his son, a lullaby he must have heard in his own childhood, a Buckinghamshire air, perhaps. The boy’s limbs became heavy, and the sleeping Kenelm was carried to bed, while outside, tortured rockets whined across the sky.
MARY TREE: 22 MILES TRAVELLED
I TELL YOU, the world is wider than you would ever think possible. The cruel shard I carry, which wounded Richard Pickett, is already tar-blackened, with no red on its bandage, and I have not even left the county of Devon. But I have learned so much. To begin with, I now know the proper name of the man I seek, the Keeper of the Powder of Sympathy: Sir Keyholme Digbin. A mighty pleasant name.
People in towns are very kind, I have discovered. I stayed in Totnes at an inn one night, where I paid the extra that was demanded so I might be in the warm company of many others, rather than in a drafty room of my own. I had expected the cost to be the other way about, but the inn’s hostess explained me my error. She seemed barely repelled by my Mark at all, but talked to me as any other. It was she who corrected me so I had Sir Keyholme Digbin’s name better. She said I should seek out one Sir Mungo Stump, who knows of all the great Men of the Age, and will blab about them moreover. And so I was sent onwards by cart to Dawlish, and as we ride I will tell something more of my strange business.
I saw to it that My Lady Pickett was funeralled and the bell tolled as she wished, even though Father Jonas was doubtful of such high ceremony. Being of a mind to pack me off to Virginia with the Puritans, he said he would come and see me that evening, and I said I feared I would be too busy and sorrowing, and he looked me deep in the eye and said it wasn’t a long business that he needed to do with me.
I went home and started to pack to leave at once, so I might evade him, and perhaps go into service at some house in Cornwall. I was considering whether or no I should take my three books with me, and I left without them, as they were not properly mine, and then went back to fetch them, when I heard a commotion at the gate and peeping from the window I saw a cart outside, with two horses, and a boy running after, and in the midst, a man, holding his feathered hat to his breast and gazing up at the house.
Richard Pickett it was, My Lady’s nephew, and a gentleman, come to claim her estate. He was bluff and pink-faced and with two thick grey whiskers, in the manner of a cavalier. His woolly dog, grey whiskered also, asked me with his eyes for a drink so I fetched him one. ‘What is his name?’ I asked Richard Pickett, but he ignored me. He was dressed all in black, but when I told him he had missed My Lady’s funeral he did not care and swaggered past me as if I had not spoke. I was afraid he was a strange man, possibly contemnable, to be so heard-hearted, until I discovered he was slightly deaf due to ‘service in the cannon’s mouth’, as he termed it, and he motioned to the right side of his head, by which do I mean the dexter? Yes, and on tiptoe, into this hair-sprouting ear, I shouted that My Lady was already buried, at which he looked most contrite and asked to visit her grave.
The loss of My Lady must have brought out a new boldness in me, for next I spoke quickly, into the same ear, that our vicar, one Dr Jonas, wished to transport me hence to the New World this evening. ‘And do you want to go?’ he asked, directly, which made me silent, unfamiliar as I was with questions concerning my wants. All I could do was shake my head. ‘Ye shall not go then, miss; ye shall not go,’ he said, and continued directing his boy with carrying in his books and properties.
And so I remained at Endcote Early, with Richard Pickett and Asparagus his dog, and though I was perplexed by them, and maddened too, they were the finest friends I ever had. As I journey now to Dawlish, the sword in the bag at my shoulder, I pray that Richard Pickett is in no pain. He is a man full of theorems and Ingeniose strategies, learning and deep thoughts. But aye me, he is a bodger. He could not milk a cow without receiving a kick, nor catch a fish without drowning himself. In London once at his friend’s house called ‘Tradescant’ they let him hold in his palm a Phoenix’s egg, from Araby-land, and as he told me t
he story I was full-fearing he drop’t it.
His gait is rolling, like one who has been too long i’the saddle, his hand is constantly cupped behind his ear to hear better. He is an antiquarian, and can see far into the past – he could converse with the Caesars, were they to visit Endcote Early – but he cannot see his own porridge without peering. He is followed everywhere by Asparagus, who pretends to be lame also out of sympathy with his master, but is able to run well enough on his own. Sir Richard is fanatical of naval history and soon after he arrived at Endcote Early he was out, striding about the lower paddock, prodding a stick in the turf and measuring distance with it as if he were prospecting for gold, or planning to sow the growing gold of wheat when, in fact, he was planning how he would dam the River Stickle and flood the lower paddock, the better to re-enact a naval engagement there. All it would take, he said, was six weeks of rain together, and I was thankful for the dry spell and his forgetting of the plan meanwhile.
Once an officer, always an officer, he says – and in the forecourt at Endcote Early he raised a standard. His greatest pleasure on a sunny day was to whistle through his teeth and mark upon his tabor a rhythm, while me and the little boy called William from the village would march up and down the garden with Sir Richard Pickett leading us and commanding – ‘Leftwards, HO!’ and ‘Eyes RIGHT!’ and sometimes, tapping me on the neck with his drumstick, shouting, ‘Shoulders back, sir! Should I take you for a scobberlotcher?’, by which he meant a dreamy jakes.
Supper he cared for not so much as the tobacco afterwards – a pipe and conversation were his favourite dishes. In the evenings sometimes he would read aloud passages of sulphurick philosophy, which reminded me of Mrs Able’s receipts, but for a devil’s larder, stocked with possets of mercury, pies of flux and fiery matter and cordials of moonbeams. I liked to listen, though I knew my questions were poor, and that Sir Richard wished for company.
Master Richard and me and Asparagus living in that former great house together must have made a strange picture to the village, but it suited us. After I stopped asking John Tupper to cut the elder-bush and the bindweed, a green-tangle grew up all around the house and the windows were hard to open. Tradesmen ceased to visit. Sir Richard noticed no difference, while I felt safe behind the overgrowth.
We marched to the tabor’s beat on the parade ground, for so Sir R called the paddock, although the little boy William did not join us any more, perhaps forbidden. In the evenings Richard would read aloud, mostly tales about matters very big or very small. It is either the heavens this or a grain of sand that. Sir Keyholme says the air is full of flying prawns that fit one hundred to a needle’s eye. He only told me of the flying prawns late at night when he was in his cups.
I asked him to tell me tales about the great personages of the day, the fine lords and ladies, and he would begin with the histories of their titles, lands, estates and tithes, slowly moving on to the detail of their heraldic arms, while I yawned greatly, but tried to make it look as if I only exercised my face. Once he told me of Sir Keyholme Digbin, the Keeper of the Powder of Sympathy, which could heal wounds at a distance, by means of acorns passing through the air. At least, I think she said acorns.
I sat up when he told me of Sir Digbin’s lovely wife, Lady Venetia, who he said was very fair, but more than that, all he could recall was that her grandfather was a so-called Wizard Earl, which sounded promising but soon moved back to Logick. Richard could remember nothing of Venetia’s shoes, nor whether her hair was curled or no, nor even whether she was an orphan.
He would only shake his head, and say she was a Beauty. I have seen many sights of beauty in my life – a hazel with every leaf frosted, a bowl of gravy with steam rising off it, and a sticky chick newborn, but I have never seen a Beauty, except the old carved Virgin at Snittlefield, who looks very kind but – I know I shouldn’t say so – she is squink-eyed with a long nose, God forgive me! I have seen how a loud and comely woman can work on a man – there is Moll from the village, chased by all the boys – and I saw a townswoman with a great forehead which they said she kept high by plucking, but I have never seen a Beauty, or a Fine Lady. And I wished then that I might behold such a lady, that she might walk close past me, if only once in my life.
Richard told me that Sir Keyholme’s mother disapproved of Venetia as a ‘libertine’, but when I asked Richard what it meant, he said we had talked the fire almost out and the man in the moon was wondering at us.
How could this dear man be done such harm? Some boys wanted to come to the house for naval training and drill, which pleased Sir Richard. He loved nothing more than to call commands, which made his voice quavery with passionate remembrance. ‘Stiffen your sinews,’ he would growl at the boys in their smocks. ‘Summon up the blood . . . Are ye not Englishmen born?’ They would try to stand taller than each other till they were fit to burst with holding breath. Sometimes their older brothers would come to visit also, and sit on our gatepost like jackanapes. I heard them calling Sir Richard ‘Ricketty Picketty’ and ‘R-r-r-r-r-ick – A-Pick-A’, and such like. None of them dared look me in the face, being afraid of my Mark, or so I guess.
But Richard wanted to school the bigger boys in musket practice, so that those who wished to might know a little of it, before the press master came to town. And so one afternoon we dried his powder carefully and the next day in the morning, some lads came by, three skinny pips and one big butcher’s boy, all very meek and none of them daring to look us in the eye or say aught but ‘Yis’ and ‘Nay’.
When the musket fired first, all four boys went leaping in different directions, made witless by the noise, if they had any wits to start with. The big one sat down panting. But little by little as the sun grew powerful and Sir R told tales of his expeditions, their fear gave way to boredom and thus to high spirits, and they began to whisper and snuckle among themselves, which Richard busy with his musketry could not see, and certainly could not hear. Richard went indoors, I think to visit the heads as he calls the privy after the naval fashion. While he was gone the naughty boys made a war-horse out of the butcher’s boy, who was romping on all fours with one of the skinny boys clung to his back. ‘Ride the elephans, ride, ride!’ shouted the other boys, and the skinny boy scrambled and waved the musket.
So there was I, shouting, and Asparagus, barking for the first time in years, and then a great bang comes, and a shatter of glass as the musket ball hits the upstairs casement. And I heard a high whine of horror, and there was Sir Richard still upright and walking from the house into the green garden, except as in a dream, out of his side protrudes a great dagger of glass. And as the wound’s blood spread, the colour drained from his face, till it was blanched and looking down I can see each pore on his white cheek as he lay in my arms. Two boys were running as fast as they could for the road while the other two were still climbing over the gate. At first I thought they were running for help but when no help came I realised they were only saving their skins.
‘Gus?’ said Sir Richard, calling his dog, who dragged him a marrowbone. While Richard gazed at Asparagus, I tugged the glass out of his side, which left a wound very long but not so deep, though I saw some of his yellow guts revealed. I staunched the bleeding with the nearest cloth to hand – Sir Richard’s garter. Then I wrapped Sir Richard like a dolly in a blanket and lit a fire for him, although it was a hot summer’s day.
He bid me go to London, and make my way in life. I told him it was only the wound talking, and hushed him. But he insisted, more strongly as he grew weaklier, that I should go and find Sir Keyholme Digbin, and prevail upon him to save him, by exercising the Powder of Sympathy upon the glass shard that stabbed him. He said I should know Sir Keyholme when I saw him because he looked very like the Angel on the Rood screen at West Wycherley, except his feet were not on fire. He could give me no other directions for finding Sir Keyholme, and told me the world would help me there.
I could not leave without making arrangements to keep him safe, in case the Powder o
f Sympathy was not immediately effective. John Tupper’s mother promised me she would take care of his victuals, and Midwife Barker I paid well to go and tend his wounds, so his healing might begin before I was home.
And so you understand a little more of my journey. Sometimes I fancy I can hear Asparagus keening at me to be quick, and yet I have many miles to go, and there could be no slower beast than this poor carthorse, bless its withers. My next task is to find the lodgings of Mungo Stump in Dawlish. I hope it will not prove too great and busy a town, and that he will receive me without displeasure. In Totnes I came close to seeing my reflection in a drinking-glass, but looked away at the last moment, having no need of that.
SIR KENELM’S INFINITE LIBRARY
SIR KENELM HAD the builders in.
This meant a great deal of coming-and-going in boots, which offended the floors and therefore Mistress Elizabeth, and cold drafts, which offended the baby, and noise of hammering, which offended everyone. What was worse was when there was no coming-and-going, and only the ominous silence of unfinished work, and deserted workbenches and dust sheets in the hall.
Kenelm had commissioned the finest private library he could design, with thematic shelving, harmonious proportions and a black-and-white chequered floor. Here, Universall Knowledge might come at last within the Grasp of Man. ‘You have my word of honour, I’ll not pay you another penny until you have completed the World, Americas and France,’ said Kenelm, when the builders’ foreman finally appeared.
The foreman, Thomas Clack, considered pointing out that Sir Kenelm had not yet paid him any pence at all, since he was working on credit as usual. Sir Kenelm had provided his material, forty good oaks from Gayhurst. ‘My forest – a fine crowd of old trees – has been cut down for our purpose, and I must have my library, or where will my poor books winter, in stacks on the frosty floor?’
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