I finish my ale when the servant Kelley from Well House enters. Voices die away, as they are wont to do before a stranger on the Island. I take pity on the man, and wave to him, a little curious myself.
‘Master Vincent.’ He touches his cap, but does not remove it.
‘Fetch young Master Kelley one of your fine cups of ale, Beatrice,’ I call out. ‘How go your master’s experiments?’ I ask him.
The youngling, for he seems barely a boy and has little beard, bows his head respectfully before he seats himself upon a bench. ‘More questions arise than answers, Master.’
‘Then tell me of your travels, for you are not an Islander, with your fair speech.’
‘I am lately from Cambridge, sir,’ he says, nodding his thanks at the landlord’s wife for the ale. ‘I was assisting a Lord Robert Dannick with his studies and gained my education there. He introduced me to Master Seabourne.’
While he drinks of his ale, I wonder at his cultured words. ‘And of what stock do you come, Master Kelley?’
He hesitates, glancing into his cup before he looks up at me, very direct of gaze. ‘I am the youngest son of an Irish landowner recently fallen upon hard times, sir.’ Catholic, I imagine, and reluctant to recant. ‘My family name is Talbot, but I go as Kelley, which was my mother’s name.’ Ho, I think to myself. A bastard making his own way upon the world, no doubt, and I like him more for it.
My gaze is drawn again to his hat, and the ale loosens my tongue. ‘What do you hide beneath that cap, young man?’
He colours quickly, with a comical look between embarrassment and anger. ‘Vanity only, sir.’ He drains his cup, stands, and bows to me. ‘A baldness that is unseemly in one of my youth.’
I know he is lying. In truth, I suspect almost every word he speaks, yet I like him. One such as he, born with the stain of bastardy, must necessarily make his own story. But I still wonder about the hat.
Vincent Garland, Steward to Lord Banstock, His Memoir
17
Tuesday 2nd April
Sage crept into the back row of Professor Felix Guichard’s lecture five minutes after it started. The social anthropologist looked just as he had in the newspaper photograph Sage had seen, a tall man in his forties in a fisherman’s jumper and paint-spattered jeans, holding forth with some enthusiasm. She hoped Professor Guichard wasn’t the type to heckle latecomers.
As she took a seat, Guichard was introducing the ideas of magical belief and how they overlapped with early science. As he was an amusing lecturer, she settled into her seat.
‘Who believes in magic?’ he asked. The question surprised his audience, prompting a rustle of papers. ‘I’m serious. Who believes that you can say some magic words, and they will come true?’
No hands went up, but there was a small wave of laughter.
‘No one? I’m going to prove to you that most of you do believe in magic.’ Whispering and giggling suggested the students weren’t taking him very seriously. He lifted his arms to get their attention. ‘This is a serious point I’m making, people. I need you to think of a person you love, the person you would miss the most if you lost them. OK?’
For a few moments a current of murmurs circulated.
‘Now, stand up. Magic is easier when you stand up. All you have to do is repeat after me. I wish—’
There was an awkward mumble. Guichard laughed. ‘Come on now, big voices! This is a magic spell, remember.’
Sage added her voice to the next attempt.
‘I wish—’
‘With all my heart and every fibre of my being—’
‘With all my heart and every fibre of my being—’ The room had sobered, as if they were actually giving some sort of oath.
‘That my loved one called—’
Here the words became a jumble.
His voice resonated like a bell across the room. ‘—gets cancer, and dies.’
The voices faded away, into gasps and mutters. Only Sage finished the incantation as a wave of nervous laughter came from the students.
Guichard lowered his arms, gesturing for his audience to sit down. ‘Now, most of you decided not to say it. But you – the young lady in the back – you did. Can I ask why?’
Sage grinned. ‘I don’t believe in magic,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know your name?’
‘Sage Westfield.’
‘Ah! Dr Westfield is a visiting archaeologist, ladies and gentlemen; a scientist, a natural sceptic. But those of you who didn’t finish the spell, why not?’
The students gave various reasons for their reticence, some angry, some confused. Professor Guichard used them to support his theory that belief in magic predated scientific explanations in young children, creating an overlap and the retention of early belief systems in superstitions and quasi-religious ideas. Sage liked his theories. It had felt strange cursing her mother with cancer, and at the end of the session, she was happy to join in a sixteenth-century sorcerer’s ‘dispelling ritual’, which had the students stamping their feet and calling out blessings in Latin.
At the end of the lecture she walked down to the front of the hall to meet Guichard, whose long face creased into a lopsided smile. ‘Sorry to put you on the spot like that, but you were the perfect exception that demonstrates the rule.’ He put out a hand. ‘Felix. Nice to meet you, Sage.’
‘I enjoyed the lecture. I’m looking into a sixteenth-century sorcerer myself.’
‘Yes of course, Solomon Seabourne.’ He lifted a pile of papers and nodded to the doors. ‘Let me dump these in my car and we can find somewhere to talk. Would you mind if we combined it with lunch? There’s a nice bistro just off campus.’
Sage held the doors open for him. ‘That would be great. As I said in my original email, we’re excavating a well on the Isle of Wight, and have found two bodies, a woman and a child, likely from the late 1500s. The pictures I sent you – of the carved symbols – are from the inside of the well, and there are similar shapes carved into a beam in the nearby cottage.’ She paused. ‘What’s really interesting is that you suggested I look into Solomon Seabourne’s book, and as it turns out, the cottage was actually rented by Seabourne in the 1500s.’
‘Incredible.’ He led the way across the foyer to the car park. ‘Have you brought more pictures?’ He sounded as if he was hoping she had brought sweets.
Sage tapped her rucksack and grinned at him. ‘Lunch first. I am eating for two.’
* * *
Once they had ordered food, Sage handed over her computer tablet with the photographs.
‘These are fascinating,’ Felix said, looking at the images of the well stones. ‘Are these limestone?’
‘Yes, we think they’re from Banstock Abbey, broken up after the dissolution of the monasteries,’ Sage replied. ‘They aren’t religious symbols, then?’
Felix peered at them, magnifying details. ‘Definitely not. Besides, the abbey would have employed masons who would have carved them perfectly, whereas these are just scratched in with something like a chisel. Forty-eight of them?’
‘At least. They are the ones we’ve found. As I said, there are similar carvings in the house.’
‘Show me.’
Sage was able to show him the enlarged images. ‘These are from a beam over the fireplace, original to the cottage, as far as I can tell. But I don’t know when they were carved. Maybe they were just decorative.’
Felix shook his head. ‘No. Decoration in this period was very deliberate and loaded with symbolism. I recognise some of these symbols. They are sigils used in magic – sorcery.’
Sage couldn’t see what he was talking about; the squiggles looked like graffiti to her. ‘You are sure they were deliberate?’
‘The beam looks like it’s a hardwood. Slow-grown hardwoods were a lot harder to carve than modern fast-grown imports. That wasn’t a bit of whittling. They look like deeply incised marks.’ Felix leaned back. ‘Tell me more about the bodies.’
Sage sipped the
fruit juice he had insisted she try. ‘A woman and baby, unrelated, dropped several metres down a well, and then a midden dug out and thrown on top to fill it in. We have late Elizabethan pottery shards and artefacts at the bottom of the shaft, covered with earlier pot fragments. That’s consistent with someone having dug down to deeper layers in the midden to fill in the hole.’
‘Cause of death?’
She hesitated. ‘It’s just speculation, but the woman had a number of fractures that could have been sustained in the fall. The baby had a slashing wound across here.’ She drew a line from her chin, down her collar bone, to her arm. ‘If the injuries were sustained in life…’
‘Horrible.’ Felix’s eyes were full of sympathy. ‘I do recognise some of these symbols. Seabourne wrote extensively about summoning and banishing spirits and evil influences.’
Sage was surprised. ‘How many of his books survive?’
Felix smiled, then sat back as his lunch arrived. ‘Thanks.’ He waited until she had been served. ‘The British Library has some of Seabourne’s books and pamphlets. The bestseller was the one I mentioned, Casting Out Devils leading Good Women to Witchcraft, used against women through to the 1700s.’
Sage’s stomach was growling. She remembered she had left the Island at seven. ‘Banstock Manor has the covers of several of his books, but someone ripped out the pages.’ She took a big bite of pasta.
‘I’d like a look at that. Solomon was a bit of a mystery. He was always suspected of being a Catholic, and that adversely affected his career. Of course he was born in King Edward the Sixth’s time, grew up during Bloody Mary’s reign and died in James the First’s. Whether you were safe to be Catholic was more a matter of timing.’
‘I suppose being titled helped a bit.’
‘He wasn’t titled until later in his life.’ Felix sipped his own juice. ‘He was a youngest son who struggled to survive after his father virtually disowned him. At least until his thirties.’
Sage eyed him as he ate. He had dark curls, over his collar, tinged with grey. She could imagine him in a Tudor doublet. ‘So, what were the symbols in the well for? Some sort of blessing? Banishing evil?’
‘I need to do more research. But I don’t think they were for banishing anything.’
‘Oh?’
‘I think the symbols were intended to confine something. A kind of trap.’
‘Trap?’
Felix nodded. ‘People like Seabourne were looking for proof of the existence of angels and demons. They treated sorcery as if it were – I don’t know – quantum physics today. Just because you haven’t seen a quark doesn’t mean you can’t predict what it will do then demonstrate it, which helps support your theory. By his thinking, if you can summon a demon, it would prove the existence of other dimensions. And you could question it about the underpinning beliefs of Christianity. God, heaven and afterlife – they were the big scientific questions of the sixteenth century.’
Sage sat back in her chair and put her hands on her stomach. ‘I’m staying in the hotel down the road. Do you have any time tomorrow to talk about the symbols?’
‘Come to my office in the morning, I’ll look out what I have on Seabourne. I have a family thing tonight – it’s my partner’s daughter’s birthday. Otherwise I’d have more time for your strange carvings. So. What else was down this well? Apart from a woman and a baby.’
‘We found some glass. My PhD student thinks it’s from an alembic. A sort of chemistry still.’
‘Seabourne claimed to have managed to transform some metals into gold, in small amounts, with help from Edward Kelley.’
‘Kelley?’
‘He went on to be Dr John Dee’s assistant. Dee was the queen’s sorcerer and astrologer, and a famous alchemist,’ Felix said. ‘Kelley later exceeded his mentor’s knowledge in many ways, certainly in sorcery. He met Seabourne, they may have collaborated on chrysopoeia – making gold out of other metals.’
Sage laughed. ‘That’s a hell of a claim. You’d think he would have died a very rich man if he had managed to make gold.’
Felix smiled over the rim of his glass. ‘He did.’
18
20th August 1580
Two pairs of silk hose for your daughter Viola’s wedding clothes eight shillings and four pence
Accounts of Banstock Manor, 1576–1582
The seamstress Isabeau has been examined for her faith by the rector and has been found as observant as any of us who have lived through the great changes. Mayhap she does cling to beliefs from her childhood in the French court and mumbles the Protestant creed when it is politic to do so. But who has not? Even the queen, when princess in the reign of her sister Queen Mary, took Mass.
The rector’s sister has been physicked and is confined to her room. Agness’s intense dislike of Isabeau seems more than just suspicion of a foreigner. Her reason seems disordered.
I sit in my office for it is rent day, and each of Lord Anthonie’s tenants has their own tales to tell of why their rents are light. Each also seems to have a curiosity about the Frenchwoman, and I quell some rumours. I fine two, give others more time to pay, and caution many against the spreading of vile rumours about an innocent and hardworking woman. I shall be glad to see her leave; she has been much troubled and caused discord and suspicion.
So I find myself much surprised when the last visit to my office is the woman Isabeau herself, much distressed.
‘Master Vincent, I beg you to help me.’ She sinks into a curtsey, her kirtle splaying out around her in a pool of fine brocade.
‘I am trying, Mistress, the lies will abate—’ but she is shaking her head, sinking her face into her hands until she is kneeling on the floor.
‘I wish to go back to the mainland,’ she mumbles into her fingers.
‘But why? Any doubts as to your faith must have been allayed, at least for now,’ I say.
‘Je suis mariée – I am a married woman,’ she confesses, blushing and ashamed as if it were a sin. ‘My husband is un tyran, he is jealous. He beats me, so I run away to places far from London. If people talk, he may find me.’
I hold out a hand, and after a moment, she takes it, and rises to her feet. ‘You haven’t told Viola any of this?’ I ask, sternly.
She blushes again, and turns her face away from me for a moment, as she pulls her hand from mine. ‘Of course I have not. Lady Viola is a child, still.’
I study her averted face. So beautiful, so secretive. Her little teeth nibble her lip, as if trying not to say something. ‘What else, Mistress?’ I ask, but she shakes her head, and turns that sad face to me. ‘Well, I can tell you news moves very slowly off the Island. You will have finished your work in a few months, you say?’
‘Just after Christmas. Before le mariage, the wedding.’ This time I cannot mistake the tremble in her voice.
‘Mistress, something else troubles you sorely.’
Her eyes are full of tears. ‘I have sinned.’ She speaks in a low voice. ‘I have sinned in my marriage.’
‘What sin?’ I can see her tremble.
‘I left him. I feared for my life.’ She turns to me and wipes away tears. ‘He cannot find me. He would kill me.’
I am perplexed. The law says that a man may beat his wife if he finds fault, but no one would condone murder. ‘If that is so, we will protect you.’ I am reluctant to assist a woman to break her marriage vows but there is such sincerity in her voice, such grief in her face that I am moved. ‘No man shall harm you here.’
I stand and open the door for her. As she walks past it occurs to me that she moves with less grace than usual, bowed down with her sorrows.
Vincent Garland, Steward to Lord Banstock, His Memoir
19
Wednesday 3rd April
Sage spent a good night at her hotel and wasted an hour shopping in Exeter, treating herself to a baggy T-shirt and a tiny outfit for the baby. She walked up to the university and spent an hour or so looking at the books in Felix’s office, a cop
y of odd pages of what seemed to be magical potions and a sketchbook of Solomon Seabourne’s. His research assistant, a mature student called Rose, showed her a number of references from people like Robert Fludd and others, as they attempted to control an unseen world of good and evil influences and beings.
‘Before you go home to the Isle of Wight,’ Rose said, ‘it might be worth looking into his wife’s work too.’
‘You mean Viola Banstock?’
Rose ran her finger over a photocopy of the front page, badly damaged, of a manuscript titled Philosophy of Man and the Natural Science of Light and Darkness, by S. Seabourne. ‘I typed up a transcript of the first few pages of each of the fragments and the copies we have. This dedication just caught my eye. I wondered if we could find out more about it.’
The dedication was written, by hand, under the main title, with strong, slashing letters. ‘To Lady Viola Banstock, thatt shynes a light upon the mysterys of grate darkness, thatt almost had me enthralled and destroyed by madness.’
Sage sat back. ‘Viola again. I hadn’t thought about looking at her writing, though now I think about it, the historian at Banstock Manor did tell me that she was a celebrated poetess.’
‘There are three books of her poetry in the British Library, and a few pamphlets.’ Rose, a motherly-looking woman in her late forties or so, frowned. ‘It’s so horrible, a baby in a well. Do you think it was someone from the manor?’
Sage shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think so. I doubt someone from the manor could have gone missing or been buried so ignominiously without there being a fuss at the time, and local knowledge of it.’
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