The Forebear’s
Candle
Clive S. Johnson
Daisy Bank
This eBook edition first published in 2017
All rights reserved
© Clive S. Johnson, 2017
Ver 030517
The right of Clive S. Johnson to be identified as author of this work of pure fiction has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the author, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
This ebook is a work of fiction and no names, characters or places bear any resemblance to any person either living or dead, or to any events. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Also by Clive S. Johnson
Beyond Ever Blue Skies
Solem
And the Dica series:
Leiyatel’s Embrace (Book 1)
Of Weft and Weave (Book 2)
Last True World (Book 3)
Cold Angel Days (Book 4)
An Artist’s Eye (Book 5)
Starmaker Stella (Book 6)
Contents
1 First Two Phantasms
2 A Lover’s Gift
3 Jusuf’s Present
4 The Devil’s Own Breath
5 Circumstantial Evidence
6 Taken North
7 The Furtherance of Science
8 In the Land of the Gallants
9 Room at the Inn
10 No Time to Lose
11 To Lostwithiel
12 The Last to Know
13 A Bodmyn Smithy
14 Gateway to Cornwall
15 Donkey Lane
16 Proof Positive
17 Of Service to the Priory
18 Songs of Our Forebears
19 An Incoming Tide
20 Bodmin
21 Magna Britannia
22 “Wow”
23 A Tenure Due a Tenure
24 The Weaving of Strands
25 Finally Brought Home
26 Fingers Crossed
27 Nothing That Rings Any Bells
28 A Thin Line
29 Deceit
30 Armageddon
31 Mould
32 Down Through the Unfolding Years
33 Of Unions: Found Again and Forged Anew
34 An Oversight
35 The Power of Suggestion
36 An Initial Discovery
37 Loathsome Contents
38 Homebound
39 A Thousand Years
About the Author
I dedicate this novel to my partner and editor, Maureen Medley, for her assiduous attention to detail and vast knowledge of history, without which this work would never have been possible.
1 First Two Phantasms
A long hot summer of drought, parched grass and stifling nights; it was 1976, the year Colin had met Kate, their first intoxicating year of young love.
They’d bumped into each other that February as he’d staggered, dressed in borrowed pyjamas and a little worse for wear, across a beer-swilled dance floor. It had been his first year at the University of Salford, her final at prestigious Manchester. Had it not been for the student charity event of the Pyjama Dance, they’d likely never have crossed paths.
But now, eight years later and sitting in the spare back bedroom of their first home together, Colin stared at the screen of his new micro-computer and remembered back to that memorable night.
Kate had eventually invited him back to her flat in her university’s student accommodation block. It happened to be within easy walking distance of the drunken debauchery into which the event had steadily descended, as apparently it always did.
When they’d entered the flat’s common room, they’d been met by the boisterous banter of Kate’s flatmates, into which welcoming company Colin had quickly been accepted.
They’d eventually found themselves the last in that room when everyone else had gone to bed. He should have arranged to meet her again and then left, gone back to his own halls of residence, but this had been the nineteen-seventies and the night somehow magical, one neither had wanted to end. The offer of staying over had come quite naturally, for by then the bud of friendship between them had already blossomed.
In Kate’s small room, sitting side by side on her narrow, unyielding bed, their coffees on a cluttered bedside cabinet, they’d talked on and on into the early hours of the morning about all manner of things. Things that before long revealed the lost halves each had seemingly found in the other.
The patient blink of the micro’s cursor brought Colin back to the present, reminded him he’d yet to come up with a title for the story he’d at last decided to get down on paper. But as yet, nothing had sprung to mind.
He looked out into the short back yard of their terraced house, down at the suffusion of white pyracantha flowers that hid most of its redbrick wall. Along its top ran dark, almost black coping stones, their colour prompting him to look down at his hand. Even at the memory, his pulse quickened at seeing another man’s skin.
“I wonder,” and he took down his dictionary from its shelf and laid it on the desk, beside the micro. “Noun,” he read, “Archaic. a person with dark skin [C15: see BLACK, MOOR]”. His fingers soon flitted across the keyboard, swiftly entering “My Blackamoor Other” before he smartly stabbed the return key a couple of times.
“There,” he told himself. “At least I’ve a working title.”
When he sat back to think, he couldn’t remember having properly noticed the mysterious object that first night in Kate’s room. Other things had been more engaging at the time. The longest drought in living memory had reached its height by the time he’d been drawn to have his first close look at the thing. He’d been sitting on the edge of Kate’s bed whilst she’d gone to make them some coffee, his hair tied back in a ponytail to keep his neck cool as he wilted in the night’s oppressive heat.
Standing on her bedside cabinet, it had been nothing more then than a hollow joss stick holder, bristling with spent slivers of wood like a small singed hedgehog with alopecia. About the size of a large apple, and crafted from a dark, weighty metal of some sort, it had stood on three clawed feet, its body peppered with holes.
Peering at their random pattern, he’d lit another joss stick without thinking, but it had been as he was jamming it into one of those holes that the first phantasm had taken him.
Confused then stunned, Colin found the dimly lit room had somehow given way to a bright, sunlit day. Even more disconcerting, his long, slender, almost translucently white-skinned hand had become large and dark-skinned. It clutched a broad wooden rail, below which swept a slow-swelling sea.
It hadn’t been so much this startlingly unexpected vision, for no doubt a few spliffs had been shared by then, but the immediacy of the conjured surroundings he still so vividly remembered. A warm, stiff, southerly breeze had tugged at the fabric of some
loose garment he wore, flapping it about his partially bare legs, and beneath his soft boots rolled a hot, wooden, tar-stained deck. The air of that breeze had carried with it hints of spices, of sun-baked sands and dried salted fish, of latrine-fed alleys and the sweat of honest toil mixed with dishonest treachery. All things alien to his nineteen-seventies, northern-English mind, despite that unusual year’s parched Manchester summer.
A fleeting hallucination, he’d tried to tell himself. Probably just a bad score of dope. But it had happened again, a few days later when inserting yet another lit joss stick into the holder. That now familiar warm air had taken to it a gruff, Spanish-sounding voice.
“Jusuf al-Haddad?” it had called, unnerving Colin the more.
He’d hardly taken in the view of the sea before it spun away and a man appeared above him, looking down from over a dark wooden railing.
“Will you come up here onto the quarterdeck and meet my first mate, Rodrigo Fernandez?” the figure boomed, carrying an easy and clearly habitual authority. The man’s deeply tanned face remained immobile, as the rail beneath his hand, the mast at his back and its attendant rigging and sails all leisurely rolled from side to side against the cloud-marred blue of the sky beyond.
Colin was startled when his head nodded, then his foot seemed to jar down wide to one side at Jusuf’s first step. The queasiness swilling within his gut he was sure was also Jusuf’s. Then the almost sheer steps up to the deck above didn’t help, not with the sea’s oily swell so close beside and below. By the time the uphill walk across that upper deck had become a downhill stagger, Colin’s initial shock had tentatively given way to a perverse curiosity. He finally stood, unsteadily, looking down on the two shorter, now grinning men, hoping they’d make some sense of what was happening.
“It helps if you keep your eyes on the horizon,” said the man Colin somehow knew was the merchantman’s captain, who then turned to the man at his side. “Rodrigo, here, is prepared to offer you stowage in his own locker for your…” but he only waved his hand dismissively to one side. He drew in closer, his voice lower.
“We can’t have you tripping over your big land-lubber feet and smashing it—not before time, anyway. Now, can we? Your master ain’t paying me enough for that.”
Colin sensed Jusuf’s reluctance within himself as he staggered back a step, but the captain’s expression made it clear it had not been a request but a command. Then a loud rattle and clatter jolted Colin from the memory and he found himself blinking at the room’s central heating radiator that hung on the wall beneath the bedroom window.
Unsettled by the still vivid memory, even after all these years, Colin forced his thoughts to more prosaic matters: the heating system needed bleeding. He needed to buy a radiator key. Damn, he thought, but why don’t I ever remember when I’m near the hardware shop?
Turning back to the micro’s screen, he stared at the white cursor, still patiently blinking two lines below what he now recognised had been a well-chosen title. He blew out a long breath. “Well, that’s how it started, but how do I put it all into words? Into a story that’ll make some sense of it all, as Kate reckons it will.”
As he leant back in his chair, he clasped his hands behind his head and grimaced blindly up at the ceiling. “Had it lasted only as long as that sweltering summer?” Colin asked himself. “Just three short months of doubting my own sanity.”
Then he groaned, “It’s one thing putting together technical reports for work, but this looks like it’s going to be a whole different kettle of fish.” He opened one eye and peered at the waiting screen, willing the right words to appear as if by magic beneath those three stark title words.
But it had been a good eight years since that summer, since Jusuf had last said anything within his hearing. And Jusuf had proved to be a far more eloquent speaker than Colin ever could, and surely that was what his story needed. An eloquence to make some sense of the mystery it clearly held, and in which Colin was sure Kate’s joss stick holder somehow played a crucial part.
2 A Lover’s Gift
Although Colin had made mention of the weird experience at the time, he’d downplayed it, reluctant to reveal just how real it had felt. He’d been perhaps a little wary of Kate thinking him unhinged in some way, but he needn’t have worried. Even had their love not grown as strong as it had by then, Kate possessed depths he’d yet to appreciate.
Come the late July of that heatwave summer, Kate had finished her finals and moved back in with her parents in a suburb of Manchester. Colin had also, not long after, returned to his own parents, to their home on the outskirts of Halifax in West Yorkshire, his first year exams at last over with.
Although a good forty miles apart for most of that summer break, they’d often talked at length on the telephone. Kate eventually travelled over to stay with him for a couple of weeks before starting her search for a job.
She’d been enthusiastically welcomed by Colin’s parents, fussed over and made to feel at home, then Colin had shown her to her room. He’d carried her travel case up and placed it on the bed, but when she clicked it open, there on top lay a plastic bag-wrapped object the size of a large apple.
“I had to clean it up before Mum saw it,” Kate said, taking the object out. “Not sure what she would have thought of me using it as a joss stick holder.”
“But I thought it was meant to be one,” Colin said as he eyed it a little warily. “And why’ve you brought it with you?”
She put it on the broad sill of the window, beyond which the merciless sun highlighted the parched-yellow patches in the garden’s lawn. Then she gave him a half smile.
“Do you want to know where it came from?”
He only tilted his head inquisitively.
Her smile grew, softening her features, and Colin’s heart melted, as it always did at the way it gave her a faery-look.
“I got the impression,” she said, clearly distracted by the longing look he gave her, “that you’d…you’d found it interesting somehow, especially after that odd experience you told me about. Remember? When you’d been carried aboard some ship or other.”
Colin ran his fingers over the holder, its metal already warmed by the heat of the sun coming in at the open window. It reminded him of that hot wooden rail he’d felt beneath his strangely dark-skinned hand.
“But then I also noticed,” she said, taking his real hand in hers, “that not long after that you always left me to light the joss sticks.” He still didn’t say anything. She drew closer and looked up into his eyes, that evocative scent of hers filling his senses.
He kissed her, tentatively along her lips and onto her cheek, up across her brow and then down to the tip of her nose. He gave it a gentle nip and then leant back, his head again on one side.
“All right,” he finally said. “You tell me about it and I’ll tell you what more happened that I didn’t tell you about back then.”
She looked vindicated for a moment before saying, “You know I said my mum’s side of the family came from Plymouth, well, this used to belong to mum’s Aunt Bella.”
Kate sat on the bed, folding her long, slender legs beneath her. Colin perched his backside on the edge of the windowsill, the holder beside him, and pushed his long blond hair back behind his ears.
“When I was very young,” she told him, “about five or six, Gran used to take me down on the train to stay with her at the start of the summer holidays. Before mum and dad finished work and could get down themselves. Each year they rented a place on Whitsand Bay; one of the chalets there.”
“I thought you said your mum and dad owned one.”
“They do now, but not back then. And it was actually Grandad who bought it. But before that, me and Gran would stay at Bella’s for a couple of weeks before joining them for the rest of the summer.”
She glanced at the holder, a darkness entering her eyes. “Bella’s flat was in Stonehouse, beside the naval yards in Devonport. It was a bit of a frightening place, really, to me at
that age, anyway. I think her and her sisters traded in antiques and bric-à-brac and whatnot, so the flat was always dark and forbidding, stuffed full of old furniture and ornaments. And I was tiny at that age, like a pixie,” and she gave him that grin again.
Colin couldn’t help but grin himself, his eyes no doubt glinting the more. He then realised his hand had found its own way onto the joss stick holder, resting on its weighty warmth.
“When Bella died some years later,” Kate went on to say, “Gran went down for the funeral. When she got back, she gave that to me.”
He lifted his hand and stared down at the lustre brought out by its recent cleaning.
“I can’t say I remember much about it, to be honest, but Gran insisted I’d taken a liking to it and so wondered if I might want it as a memento of those stays. I can’t imagine why I would have taken to it, though,” and Kate laughed. “It’s hardly attractive. But then, who knows; maybe there was something about it that gave me a bit of comfort in Bella’s scary flat.”
“So it’s not a joss stick holder, then?”
“I don’t think people went in for burning joss sticks back then, Colin, so I doubt it. And anyway, it probably goes back way before their time.”
“I still don’t see why you’ve brought it with you, though.”
“I’ve had it since I was eleven, so I suppose it’s grown to be a part of me…well, a part of my past, anyway. And I thought…” She searched his eyes for a moment, a glint coming to her own. “I thought I’d like to give it to you as a keepsake…so you’ve a piece of me when we’re not together. Remind you of all those nights in my flat…”
She grinned again.
At first, he’d no idea what to say, other than “Thank you”, but then, despite his reservations, that it was her special gift to him finally sank in. “Yeah, that’s great, Kate. Thanks,” and a broad smile spread across his face as he dreamily added, “A piece of you I can always treasure.”
The Forebear's Candle: A time travel mystery and love story set against the intrigue of Henry Tudor's England Page 1