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

by Clive S. Johnson

  Rodrigo only lifted his brows, clearly waiting.

  “I was fourteen when I left my village in the mountains, never to return. An uncle had encouraged me to better my smithying by going to Algiers—where he’d gone himself as a carter. I was to search out an apprenticehood there, where your Portuguese knowledge abounded. So, I left my village having reached an age when I still couldn’t be told much about my grandfather’s divine gift.”

  “Is this the ‘Songs of Our Forebears’ you mentioned?”

  Jusuf nodded. “I saw him do it a few times, though, from some hiding place, or beyond the light of the fire where I could watch and listen without being seen. He would sit on the ground and light some kief in his sebsi, then settle down to a quiet chant as someone else played softly on a taghanimt—a blown pipe not unlike your shawm. His singing and the taghanimt made for a haunting sound, especially when the chant rose to a song and his old voice steadily became stronger and sweeter.”

  A couple of drovers came into the tavern and settled in the far corner, shouting their needs to the keeper. Rodrigo and Jusuf raised their mugs to them, but then Rodrigo asked, “So, what did you see from your hiding place?”

  “Not see, Rodrigo; heard.” Jusuf took another swig of his small ale. “After singing for some time, the song would stop and a story begin.”

  “A story?”

  “Yes, a short tale that would draw in and enchant all those sitting around him, the many who came to listen. It would usually tell of some plight of a villager, a problem they couldn’t see a way through, or maybe an opportunity: to gain a profit or a girl’s hand. But they always ended with a surprise; a lesson, I suppose. Maybe a warning, of how not to live your life.”

  His mug proved empty when Jusuf once again lifted it to his lips, and so he called for another each.

  “You’re not putting off having to tell Mistress Trewin what we’ve learnt, are you?” Rodrigo asked, “for I don’t really see what this has got to do with you seeing her ghost.”

  “No, I can’t say I do, either, my…my friend. You see, they were stories spoken by our forebears, but through my grandfather. Tales from our dead kin to guide the living who followed on. But Mistress Trewin isn’t dead, nor could she be a forebear of mine even if she were. So no, I can’t yet quite see what it is myself that I feel deep down has some real bearing.”

  “So…why make mention of it now?”

  “Because I was once caught watching, and chastised by my father as he dragged me from the room. When I said I’d just wanted to listen to the stories, he told me I’d have to wait until I became a man. ‘Why?’ I’d said, as you do when you’re young. ‘They’re only tales, and I like tales’.

  “His anger had then drained from his face as he put his arm around me, which was so unlike him. ‘You cannot,’ he quietly told me, ‘for you are still too young to look from the eyes of those who have gone before us.’ But it was when he stared back into the room that I then saw his own eyes sharpen, saw them become fixed on a place all those inside had purposely left clear. I now know he was seeing, Rodrigo, seeing as I had seen on that rare and wondrous day in Foy, sitting there in the Ship Inn.”

  An ear-splitting crack of what Jusuf took to be thunder reverberated around them and Colin jerked his gaze up at the roof of the chalet, his heart beating ten-to-the-dozen.

  “Shit!” he yelped, and looked wide-eyed at Kate.

  “Seagulls,” she said. “Stomping around on the metal roof,” and she smiled. “You get used to it,” but then she frowned down at the single joss stick, sticking out of the holder, before lifting her frown to Colin. “But the joss stick, it’s… Did you…”

  Colin slowly nodded, his heart rate finally settling back to normal. “When you get all this one down,” he said, “I think you’ll find we’ve a fair bit to chew over this time, Kate.”

  “Okay,” she said, and noisily clicked the end of her biro. “Go on, then. Fire away.”

  19 An Incoming Tide

  By the time Kate had written down everything Colin could remember, midnight had passed and the soft sea air had brought them both teetering on the edge of sleep. Kate suggested they go down on the beach the next day. The weather forecast was good and the tide would be favourable. They could talk properly about Colin’s latest phantasm there. And so they were soon in bed, quickly lulled to sleep by the shush of the distant but carrying sound of the surf, rolling in on the ocean’s waves.

  In the morning, they packed a rucksack for their day on the beach, the sun already beating down on the chalet, its roof crackling as the metal warmed and expanded. Before long they’d walked back down the narrow track to the coast road, then across to the start of a steeply descending path.

  Spread out before them lay the ocean, its waters deeply blue beneath a seemingly endless dome of cloudless sky. The ascending sun slanted its golden light down from over a headland at the easternmost end of the bay, the land’s sharp outline suggesting to Colin a female figure lying on her back. Her head, though, appeared disconcertingly tipped beneath the waves that crashed in about her tapering throat.

  Kate stopped them and pointed unknowingly towards the maiden’s flat stomach. “You see those fields along the top of the headland? Well, just before they start there’s a spire sticking up to the right of some trees. You see it?”

  “Trees? Ah, right. Got it.”

  “You know last night I said Saint Germanus was nearby, well, that’s it, although people generally refer to it these days as Rame Parish Church. And that headland is Rame Head.”

  “Wow. I didn’t realise you meant it was that close. I wonder if Jusuf got there in the end.” Kate, though, had already pressed on, her head bobbing above the blanket of gorse that swathed the steep dip down beyond the clifftop.

  He followed, but the beach then came into view, clearly a long way below. It brought him to another halt. “Bloody ‘ell,” he called after her. She stopped and turned. “These cliffs must be two hundred foot high,” but she said nothing until he’d caught up.

  “From the road to the beach, yes. It’s much higher coming back up, though,” and Kate grinned before carrying on down the path.

  She eventually took him to an even steeper path, down into a small cove, then a short leap from rocks onto a stretch of smooth and empty beach, a single set of dog prints its only disfigurement. They found a suitable place against some rocks, laid out their towels and each stripped down to their swimming costumes.

  Kate was clearly excited, falling to recounting the many summers she’d spent on this very beach, of the adventures, hilarities and the quirkiness that came from being in this quiet corner of a forgotten land. For Colin, though, its foreignness overwhelmed much of what Kate was saying. The heat of the sun and the air, the colour of the sky and the sea, and the glare of the light off the fine-grained sandy beach all said he was abroad. Some secluded Mediterranean shore, it seemed, far from the England he knew so well.

  It also remained otherworldly quiet: a dog walker slowly passing along the distant waterline, then later a couple with a child, but no one invaded their seemingly private cove.

  “Is it always this quiet?” he eventually asked. “I mean, it’s the height of the season.”

  “Main Beach will be a bit busier, but pretty much, although it’ll be rammed further down, in Newquay and Penzance, places like that.”

  “I suppose it was more or less like this in Jusuf’s time.”

  “Fourteen-ninety-seven.”

  “Eh? How do you know that?”

  “After that last phantasm you had back in May, you said Jusuf and Rodrigo had overheard the brothers talking about a Cornish army setting out from Bodmin. You mentioned they’d said it was to do with Escócia and some unjust taxes. I looked it up at work. Although there were three rebellions around that time, it has to be the first Cornish Rebellion of fourteen-ninety-seven. When King Henry the seventh forced an Act through parliament in the January, to pave the way for raising taxes to fight the Scottish.
”

  “But why didn’t you say anything at the time? Ah…right. Okay. Yeah, well, I don’t suppose I’ve been that receptive until yesterday’s shock of finding it so familiar down here. Sorry.”

  She stood up and brushed sand from her slender and shapely legs. “I think I’ll go for a swim. The tide’s okay for another hour. Then a bit of sunbathing’s definitely going to be on the cards. You joining me?”

  “Swim? In the sea? In the sea off the coast of England?”

  “Once you get used to it, it’s great.” His expression must have said it all. “Well, I’m going in. I’m going to enjoy just being a grockle for the day, because—”

  “A what?”

  “What the locals call tourists; and because…because the first thing we need to do tomorrow is go to Bodmin, which I’m pretty sure has a small museum, and it should be open on a Monday. After all, that’s where Jusuf has spent most of his time so far, and we still don’t have conclusive proof he ever existed.”

  “But—”

  “Everything you’ve witnessed so far through him only goes to confirm the date; the Cornish army was defeated at Blackheath, and in the June of that year. But it’s still only circumstantial, what you could have read somewhere without consciously remembering. We need to find something that pins Jusuf down as having been here then, which we can’t do down here on the beach, but we might in Bodmin.”

  “All right. Agreed. But I’m still not going in the water.”

  “Well, when I get back, what we will have to do is go through that business of Mistress Trewin’s ghost and Jusuf’s ‘Songs of our forebears’. Because you can bet your bottom dollar Bodmin museum’s not going to have any answers to that one,” and with that, she made a beeline for the sea.

  As Colin watched her walk away, he realised what a clearer view Kate must have, her mind not clouded by the intimacy of feelings he clearly shared with Jusuf. For him, his worry over Mistress Trewin’s fears for her husband obscured much else, along with another but rather less altruistic feeling. One his view of Kate’s scantily clad backside, now walking away from him down the beach, brought into far greater relief.

  By the time Kate returned and was drying herself off on her towel he’d got a couple of chapters into Tom Sharpe’s Wilt.

  “Any good?” she asked, looking down at his book.

  “Yeah, great so far. Really funny. Has a ribald sense of humour, our Mr Sharpe.”

  “Thought you’d like it.”

  Colin marked his place and put the book back in the rucksack. “Good swim?”

  “Invigorating.”

  “Hmm, that sounds like a euphemism to me.”

  “No, really. It was.” Her skin, now coated in fine crystals of salt, glistened in the sun.

  “This visit to Bodmin tomorrow: won’t it kind of invalidate the reliability of any further observations I might have of Jusuf’s time there?”

  “If you can find your way about when we get there, however vaguely, I think we should be able to judge if you’ve seen it before through Jusuf’s eyes. So I wouldn’t worry. I also think you ought to leave going back to visit Jusuf until afterwards, seeing we’ve a clear record at the moment of what’s happened so far. We don’t want to have to assimilate a whole load of new stuff at the last minute. After all, we can always go back to Bodmin another day.”

  She spread her towel out on the sand, on which she then laid down, her eyes closed against the sun. “Oh, that’s lovely; nice and hot. If you want more sunscreen, the bottle’s in one of the side pockets.”

  “Okay.”

  When he didn’t stir, she told him, “The sun’s stronger than you think down here, Colin.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Colin propped himself up and stared at the sea for a while, at the sunlight glistening on the myriad strings of diamonds across its ceaselessly moving surface.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” he said, “how the tide always seems to be coming in, even when it’s going out.”

  “It’s not far off turning.”

  “Yeah, but I mean the way the waves coming ashore make it look like it’s forever coming in, that you don’t notice the water of the spent waves slipping back out beneath them.”

  “I can’t say I’ve ever really thought of it that way.”

  “Just an illusion, of course,” but then something else struck him, something else that must also have been an illusion, if his visits to Jusuf were anything to go by.

  “Like time,” he said, emphatically. “It’s just like time,” and he stared down at Kate.

  She opened an eye and stared up at him. “Time?”

  “It always seems to be going forwards, but…but we know now it also goes backwards. Somehow, in some way, it folds back on itself.” Kate had opened both eyes, both narrowed on Colin. “I’ve been doing what the surf’s returning water does, slipping back unseen beneath the illusion of time’s relentless onward march. And you know what, Kate? This must be how Jusuf sees it, too. But what we now know that he doesn’t know is that the returning water isn’t made opaque by the froth and foam of the breaking waves above it.”

  Kate had herself up on one elbow. “So?”

  “So…that returning water is clear. Clear water you can see through, both ways if you only turn to look …backwards and forwards in time.”

  “Oh, I get it. When Jusuf saw me—saw the future—he just assumed I was someone from the past.”

  “Exactly. That’s what’s left him flummoxed.”

  “I’m not surprised; I’m having problems myself getting my own head around it…and we know more about what’s going on than he does. But then, I don’t suppose his seasickness would have lent itself to him sitting there, contemplating waves.”

  “The trouble is, Kate, this is all effect, not cause.”

  “Go on; surprise me.”

  “Well, it may be a good analogy for how it works, but not the ‘Why’. I mean: why are Jusuf and I able to see through the clear water below the turbulence of time’s onward crashing waves? And why now?”

  “I dare say dope’s got something to do with it. Maybe what allows you both to dip your heads beneath the waves without drowning.”

  “Eh? Oh, right. Yeah, you’re probably right. Then there’s your family line going right back to Mistress Trewin. A sort of fishing line, maybe?”

  “I think you’re pushing the analogy somewhat, but I can see how that might work; the thing that links our two different times. But it still doesn’t answer the ‘Why’.”

  Colin stared again at the ocean, at the waves rolling in to crash as a racing surf up the wide and even beach. “But other than that, what haven’t we accounted for so far?” he asked her.

  Kate’s silence and stare eventually drew his gaze from the seagulls wheeling above a distant fishing boat. He stared back at her narrowing eyes.

  “You’ve thought of something?” he asked.

  “Where’s Jusuf’s burden?”

  “His… Oh, yeah, I’d forgotten about that. Let me see: the last I remember was when he was dozing outside the church in Lostwithiel, waiting for Rodrigo and the monks. I’m sure that’s what Rodrigo was referring to when he said ‘You want to hang on to that bag of yours—and what’s inside’. And it’s unlikely he’d have found a suitable hiding place on the way, so it should be in Bodmin with him. Probably hidden in the smithy somewhere.”

  “In the smithy where one of my ancestors once lived, and through whose descendants the joss stick holder eventually ended up coming into my possession.”

  Colin’s mouth didn’t stay open long. “Shit,” he barely breathed, and they both stared at each other.

  “The joss stick holder!” they both said as one.

  “It can’t be, Colin. It can’t.”

  “But I think it is, Kate; I think it bloody well is.”

  20 Bodmin

  They both sat either side of the table, staring at the joss stick holder, where it
innocently stood in the centre of the table top between them.

  “It doesn’t look very dangerous,” Kate said.

  “Nor fragile,” Colin reckoned as he bent to stare through its plethora of holes into what little could be seen of its interior. “It can’t be Jusuf’s burden. It can’t be. Remember how cautious the captain was, insisting it be kept in Rodrigo’s locker. And how they wanted him to hide it away somewhere safe as soon as they landed here.”

  Kate looked across at him. “You know where everything is, Colin. Go make us both a cup of tea, will you? Then I’ll think about getting our meal on a bit earlier. A day on the beach always gives me an appetite.”

  Colin got up and wandered into the galley. “It must have originally contained something, though,” he called back, “something Jusuf was going to use after landing in Santander. But whatever it was, it’s obviously long gone now. I mean, you can see it’s empty.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that; the holes are a bit too small to be sure.”

  “Yeah, but there’s enough of them. I put the torch on the shelf above you; see if you can see inside any better with that.”

  The kettle boiled just as Kate called in that there was too much reflected glare for it to be of much help. “I suppose we’d better take good care of it from here on in,” Colin said. “just in case. You never know, we might be missing something.”

  “To think,” Kate said, in a rather shocked voice, “I gave it a thorough clean before giving it to you, all those years ago.”

  “Well, it must’ve been through plenty of hands before then,” he said as he put two mugs of tea on the table, well clear of the holder. He sat down before his own. “What was it Jusuf said? Right at the beginning. Something like: ‘As easily as taking a babe from its mother’s milk’.”

  “What?”

  “On his way through the Strait of Gibraltar. You remember, when he was talking about taking their country back. When he said they were going to strike at the heart of the thieving infidels.”