The Forebear's Candle: A time travel mystery and love story set against the intrigue of Henry Tudor's England

by Clive S. Johnson

  “Master Fernandez said he be back mid-morning,” and he thrust the metal into the glowing charcoal, laid the tongs and his hammer aside and began pumping the forge’s bellows. The charcoal quickly glowed white.

  “They be on bench for when him’s back,” she said from behind him, but then she was at his side, emptyhanded, staring at his sweat-glistening arm as it rhythmically worked air into the forge’s fire. She noticed him catching her stare and looked away, across at his heap of charcoal.

  “Need more bringing in?” she asked, and he too glanced at the pile. He nodded, a smile escaping the hold he’d had on his features. She turned for the backdoor, but then stopped at the sound of hurried footsteps approaching from the front. An out of breath Rodrigo rushed in through the open wicket door.

  He said something in English, too quickly for Jusuf to catch, but then, as Mistress Trewin’s hands shot to her mouth, said in Arabic: “Some men from the Cornish army are back, Jusuf.”

  Mistress Trewin was halfway into her coat before Rodrigo managed to say, “They were only passing through, Senhora, on their way to the priory. You’d be too late to catch them up by now.”

  “What did they say?” she urged as she slowly slipped her arm from the sleeve of her coat and hung the garment back up.

  “From what I could gather, the men were injured from the march, not from any battle. They couldn’t keep up so turned back. But people were saying they’d parted company just before Reading, and that the Cornishmen had got all that way without being challenged.”

  “Where’s Reading?” Jusuf asked, to be told it lay about forty miles west of London. “So why haven’t they been met by the king’s army?”

  “There’s talk in the Taverns,” Rodrigo said, “that it’s in the North, marching to meet a threat from the escocês.”

  Mistress Trewin clearly recognised the Portuguese name. “They’m Scottish be the curse of us all,” she almost spat. “What care be they of ours? They be hundreds of miles away. So why should we ‘ave a tax brought down on us to pay for a fight against ‘em, eh?” Through her anger, though, welled a vulnerability, her fears for her husband written plainly across her face and in the wringing of her hands.

  “It’d serve the king right,” she more quietly said, “if our men break in on him and force him to see reason. We ain’t no hung boar him can bleed dry.”

  Jusuf had managed to follow enough of her words, and seen more than enough of the hurt in her eyes, that he couldn’t help but stand before her, fighting back an urge to offer comfort. Instead, he fixed resolve onto his face and told her, “I have hinges done for Brother Jowan, sacrist at the priory. If I go fit them today, maybe I might learn more of them returned men. Maybe news of your husband.”

  She went to grasp his arm, but her hand stopped short as she turned her liquid eyes up to meet his own. Jusuf knew how hard this must have been for her, this not knowing. The more so as their army’s leader was her husband’s own cousin, another young blacksmith but from way down towards the Lizard Point. An unfortunate kinship, Jusuf thought, for it would surely put her husband in the very thick of any battle.

  And so Jusuf gathered his things together and hefted his leather bag onto his shoulder. The new hinges, the iron roves to secure them and his tools dully clattered from within. Rodrigo picked up Mistress Trewin’s bundle of repaired clothes and led the way out.

  “I’ll just have a drink of water,” Jusuf said and wandered across the road to a small spring, where a narrow lane from the road led up a low hill opposite the smithy.

  “Your English is good enough now to get you into the priory, Jusuf,” Rodrigo said, standing at Jusuf’s side as he knelt to scoop water into his hands. “Good enough to discuss the fitting of hinges to a chapterhouse door. So why do you need me with you?”

  “It’s a two-handed task, Rodrigo,” he told him, the water trickling between his fingers, “and I’d prefer your help than one of the brothers, seeing your ribs are just about mended. But the other thing is that I might miss overhearing something important. Something about this rebellion. And your better ease with their language means you might be able to get talking with the monks about their new guests. My dearest hope is to bring back some peace of mind for Mistress Trewin. She’s been very good to us since we arrived.”

  “She has that,” Rodrigo half-grinned at Jusuf. “But then, you have kept her smithy going, and very well by all accounts. Which must be something of a miracle when I think back to the way you acted when you first laid eyes on the pretty lass.” He cocked his head slightly and peered down at Jusuf.

  At first, Jusuf only stared up at Rodrigo, trying to get his thoughts in order, but then they struck him as too fanciful. He took his drink then shook his head and was about to urge them on when Rodrigo clamped his hand firmly on Jusuf’s shoulder.

  “What was it, Jusuf? What made you so unsettled when she first opened her door to us?”

  Jusuf stared at him for quite a while, feeling the man’s grip still firm upon his shoulder, the grip of a—of a valued but now worried friend. As though he’d been holding his breath since that first sight of their mistress, Jusuf let out a long and heartfelt sigh. He stood and looked back over at the smithy, his voice studied when it eventually came.

  “I’d seen her before, Rodrigo.” He could almost feel his friend’s puzzled look. “Not really in Foy, though, no; not there; nor anywhere else, come to that; but in…” His words—his own mother tongue of Arabic—finally failed him. He could only clutch at an insufficient “In a waking dream” before lowering his gaze to his feet.

  Rodrigo said nothing, but dipped his head into Jusuf’s line of sight, laying bare his confusion.

  “You remember,” Jusuf said, almost meeting Rodrigo’s questioning eyes, “the day my feet first stepped onto Cornish soil, the day before the captain left Foy for Londres? When we were sitting in the Ship Inn, just after he’d walked out and passed by the window?” Rodrigo nodded. “As I turned back to look at you, she…Mistress Trewin appeared before me, as plain as the light of that day. As clear and as real as you had been, only sitting off to your side.”

  “A ghost?”

  “No, not a ghost, Rodrigo. Too real and too solid, but…but dressed in strange attire, and lit by an unearthly light.” He flicked his gaze at Rodrigo, unsure he should have said anything. But the man seemed more puzzled than worried.

  “God works in mysterious ways, Jusuf…even through Allah,” and he gently urged Jusuf on, down the street towards the Tremethyks and their need of repaired clothes. He said no more, although Jusuf could see the words he’d spoken still occupied his friend’s thoughts.

  Having delivered Rodrigo’s bundle and carried on past Saint Petroc’s church and the short way out of Bodmyn to the priory, they had little hindrance gaining entry through its gatehouse and into its precincts. Someone was found to escort them in search of Brother Jowan. They bumped into him in the cloisters, the sight of Jusuf instantly cheering the man’s clearly clouded features.

  “Ah, Master Jusuf. Just the man,” he hailed, then tipped his head as he brought his hands together in greeting. He lifted a beaming face to Jusuf, then nodded at Rodrigo. “Your companion’s worth as a smith, Master Fernandez, has not gone unnoticed.” He peered at Jusuf’s shoulder bag. “The chapterhouse door hinges, I hope?”

  Jusuf nodded, clearly surprising Brother Jowan.

  “Ah, so your ear is at last finding its feet amidst the jostle of our language, eh, Master Jusuf?”

  Again, Jusuf nodded, carefully assuring him, “Ready for affixing, Brother Jowan.”

  “Good. Good. Very good. I’ll go with you,” and he dismissed the monk who’d escorted them. “I have another task for which I believe your fine blacksmith skills may very well prove to be of most excellent service.”

  At the other side of the cloister, the door to the chapterhouse remained chocked in place, seemingly as precisely as Jusuf had left it some few days before. As he carefully checked it was so, Brother
Jowan told them how glad they’d all be once they could shut out the wind again.

  “You wouldn’t believe how draughty it can get along here,” he said, swinging his arm to imitate strong gusts coming in from the cloister.

  As Jusuf got to work, Brother Jowan seemed to take great interest in what he was doing, as he chattered on about this and that. Nothing of it bore upon the uprising, though, not that Jusuf could tell, and Rodrigo looked just as wearied by it. Then the brother moved on to the nature of some further work he wished Jusuf to undertake.

  He’d just begun to explain that one of their Truro diocesan churches had been deemed in dire need of repair—to its bell’s headstock and frame—when the nearby ringing of a rather different bell interrupted him.

  “Ah, noonday. We’re called to dinner. I must leave you, but I’ll likely be back before you finish,” and he nodded to them both before walking off down the cloister.

  The monastery precincts soon fell to an even more eerie silence, into which Jusuf’s work on the door’s new hinges presently resounded. When it came to striking home the roves, Jusuf cringed at the clash of iron upon iron, seeming loud enough to raise the dead. They’d got as far as finishing the upper hinge, Jusuf by then kneeling to position the lower strapwork, when a familiar voice startled them.

  “I trust I find our Ceuta blacksmith in good health,” and Jusuf looked up to see Dom Francisco beaming down at him. “And the good Senhor Fernandez,” he then directed at Rodrigo when he stuck his head around the door from the other side.

  “Good day, Dom Francisco,” Rodrigo returned, but Jusuf saw a glint in the Dom’s eyes as he removed a couple of roves from between his own lips, so he too could bid the monk a proper good day.

  Then he surprised himself by blurting out, “Do you happen to know anything of the Cornishmen who’ve been brought to the infirmary here? Our Mistress Trewin’s husband is with their army.”

  Dom Francisco’s face clouded a little as he eyed them both. Then he glanced around before quietly telling them that more recent news had already overtaken whatever tidings the men may have brought.

  “The brothers,” he said in a whisper, despite speaking in Arabic, “received a messenger only yesterday. It seems the Cornish army reached Londres on the sixteenth of this month, whereupon they camped themselves upon a hill without its walls.”

  “Reached Londres?” Rodrigo gasped. “And three days ago. So the king’s army is indeed away in the North.”

  “Was,” Dom Francisco corrected. “Led by a Lord Daubeney, it appears it returned in good time to a place called Blackheath. By then the Cornishmen he met there were fifteen thousand strong. Although Lord Daubeney was greatly outnumbered, the Cornish army… Well, I’m afraid to say it was evidently not at all well led, and hence easily overcome.”

  “Overcome,” Jusuf said, his thoughts filling with the look he’d seen on Mistress Trewin’s face that morning.

  “They were quickly put to rout, but not until…” but the Dom’s face then dropped, as did his voice, “until some thousand Cornishmen had been felled. Their leaders, the blacksmith Michael an Gof and, er…Lord Audley I think it was, were both captured. So, it would seem the Cornish rebellion has in the end been brought to naught.”

  “Well, at least our captain should be safe in Londres now,” Rodrigo said, “but at what cost; a thousand dead!” and he looked at Jusuf. “And Mistress Trewin’s cousin-in-law captured. That doesn’t bode well for her poor young husband.”

  “Brother Thomas did make mention,” Dom Francisco said, “that you both fell to good fortune on the back of their smith’s ill-choice. I will pray for her foolhardy husband’s safe return. Something I’m sure the other brothers here would join me in doing, given the order is no longer in such an invidious position.”

  “Invidious?” Rodrigo said.

  “Caught between a king’s need to finance a war, a Cornish anger, and the diminishment of the priory’s own income.”

  “Well, I suppose that explains why they’ve been so loath to talk about it with either of us.”

  Dom Francisco looked meaningfully at them, then quietly suggested, “Best keep that close between us three,” before his face took on an air of innocence as he looked past them. “Brother Jowan, I do believe,” he called in English. “And how fares you this fine afternoon?”

  “Ah, Dom Fancisco,” the brother returned as he drew near along the cloister. “I am well, thank you. I trust the same may be said of yourself?”

  “It looks as though your spiteful draught will soon be banished,” and the Dom gazed admiringly at the chapterhouse door. “I can see your new blacksmith possesses fine skills, but I have equally rare skills in a far more venerable work to attend.” He bade them each a cheery farewell, then carried on along the cloister.

  “Would you be free from tomorrow to visit the church I mentioned earlier?” Brother Jowan immediately asked Jusuf. “I have a cart setting out from here early in the morning, returning in three days’ time. You’d be in purse by our agreed rate, of course, in addition to compensation for such short notice.”

  Jusuf could see no reason why not and so nodded.

  “Good. The next chance would be some weeks hence, otherwise. I’ll have a letter of introduction ready for you, instructing you be given food and lodgings, and all aid in surveying the bell’s needs of its new fixing.”

  “Is the church far?”

  “A day’s journey, Master Jusuf. A return to the coast for you, although this time not far from the town of Plymouth. To Saint Germanus in the parish of Rame.” He glanced at the chapterhouse door and smiled. “But for now, I’ll leave you to finish off this important task,” and he briefly dipped his head at them each in turn before leaving them to their work.

  An hour or so later, and Jusuf swung the door smoothly and precisely into its stone frame. He then opened it and pushed and pulled until satisfied it was secure before finally allowing a smile to suffuse his face. He slanted a look at Rodrigo.

  “Once we’ve made good here, I suppose we’d best get straight back to Mistress Trewin. I must say, though, I’m not looking forward to telling her what we’ve learnt of the fate of her husband’s army.”

  He took out a small piece of what he lamented was his too quickly diminishing kief and scraped a small amount into his mouth with his teeth. Then he briefly closed his eyes as he sucked on it, savouring its reminder of far simpler childhood times in the Rif Mountains. But when he opened his eyes again, he found Rodrigo staring narrowly at him.

  “What?” Jusuf exclaimed.

  “You don’t think your seeing the apparition of Mistress Trewin in the Ship Inn might be something to do with the kief you chew, do you?”

  “My kief?” Jusuf laughed, but it set him to thinking, thoughts that led him by a roundabout way to an obscure and arcane Berber practice. It wasn’t long before he began to wonder if this might not truly lend some sense to what had left him so perplexed ever since that strange vision. On a day he’d regarded as worrisome, when perhaps he should rightly have deemed it a rare and most wondrous day indeed.

  18 Songs of Our Forebears

  As the Priory’s gatehouse door closed behind them, Jusuf stood in the bright sunshine and thought back to the few childhood memories he held of his grandfather. One that had always stuck in his mind had been of the old man’s thin voice wavering as it tried to rise to the notes of some plaintive-sounding song.

  Then he realised he was alone, Rodrigo standing in the road a little way off, hands on hips, staring back at Jusuf as he waited. Jusuf wandered on to join him, his feet somehow feeling leaden on the road’s dry and dusty earth.

  “You all right, Jusuf?” Rodrigo said. “You seem far away.”

  Jusuf stopped before his friend, but could only stare through him, his father’s words this time tumbling through his mind.

  “Jusuf? You’re not seeing ghosts again, are you?” and Rodrigo turned to look behind him. “It’s not Mistress Trewin, is it?”

&
nbsp; When Jusuf said, “My father told me they were songs of our forebears,” Rodrigo turned back to face him, confusion filling his features.

  “I think, Rodrigo, I could do with wetting my throat; do you know that? There’s a tavern just down the road, opposite the church. Come on,” and he hurried Rodrigo on as he hitched his lighter bag higher onto his shoulder.

  The cramped “Salutation” proved both dark and sparsely occupied. They chose a bench around one of its small bay windows for the better light and squeezed in behind its table. Once they’d called their orders to the tavern keeper, and he’d brought them over, Jusuf paid the man before once more staring through Rodrigo.

  “What in God’s name’s got into you, Jusuf?”

  “Kief, you said ‘Kief’; my ‘Waking dream’, Mistress Trewin; my grandfather, may Allah preserve his soul; Allah the Great, in your name I bow down before you.”

  “I take it I should just wait until you make some sense,” and Rodrigo lifted his ale and gulped down a few mouthfuls as he warily watched Jusuf out of the corner of his eye.

  At first, Jusuf only took a sip of his own small ale, thought for a moment, then downed half the leather mug’s charge in one. He smiled at Rodrigo, which only seemed to worry the man further.

  “You know my Berber faith holds true to our forebears,” Jusuf eventually said. “That we revere their wisdom and hold them in great veneration.”

  Rodrigo nodded as he placed his mug down.

  “Well, there are some rare few of my people who can bring voice to those who have passed into Allah’s divine embrace; Allah the bountiful, may he ever grace me with his wise words.”