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

by Clive S. Johnson

  She choked back her tears and took in a deep breath. “I’ve tried hard, Jusuf, I really have, not to make you feel trapped. You’re too kind and gentle for that, too honest and trusting, which is what… Which is what has so stolen my heart,” and she buried her face in his shirt, shuddering in his surprised embrace. And before long, the breath of her sobs spread a deep but damp warmth against his chest.

  When her distress continued unabated, he gently slipped his hand to her cheek, then under her chin and angled her face up to his own, her silken lips to his, their breaths then mingling as one. Their kiss, though, quickly pressed beyond uncertainty, urgent in its hurried heat and hunger. Gwenna’s chair then tumbled unheeded to the floor as Jusuf stood, lifting her into his arms as he pressed her close to his heart.

  27 Nothing That Rings Any Bells

  A hollow echo reverberated through Colin’s mind as he found himself standing at the chalet’s table. The look on Gwenna’s face seemed somehow more familiar, then it was Kate’s face; her eyes narrowed, intent, lips slightly parted. She slipped around the table without a word and embraced Colin close to her heart, then drew him down to the sofa.

  The evening steadily grew older about them until they eventually stilled in each other’s arms, entwined as one. Kate must have felt the cooler night air for presently she stirred, pressing herself yet closer. She trailed her finger down his back, his soft sigh following in its wake.

  “Well,” she barely breathed, her voice tickling his chest, “that was quite a surprise.”

  Colin kissed the top of her head, then remembered Gwenna’s face, before her cottage had given way to the chalet, and he wondered. He must have tensed, for Kate angled her head to look him in the eyes.

  “Something wrong?” she said.

  “No, nothing.”

  She tilted her head away and studied him more closely.

  “You know how I made a wish on that shooting star?” to which she nodded. “Well, it didn’t come true.” Kate shivered and slowly untangled her limbs from his. She kissed him on his forehead and got up in search of her clothes.

  “So, what did you wish for?”

  “To find out if that really is Jusuf’s burden,” and he nodded towards the joss stick holder.

  “And you didn’t?”

  He shook his head. “But I reckon your wish came true,” and he smiled up at her.

  “Mine?”

  “You thought Jusuf and Gwenna had the hots for each other. Well, I can tell you now: they did.”

  “What? Come on, then, Colin. Tell me all,” and as he did so he finally got dressed. By then Kate was sitting at the table, scribbling away on her pad.

  When Colin had finished, she sat back and stared at him, where he sat on the sofa.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she said in growing wonder. “That out of the blue I somehow picked up on…”

  “It does seem a bit odd, and I definitely felt I’d been pushed out of Jusuf’s mind somehow. Sort of…excluded at the crucial moment, which only seems right, I suppose.”

  “But… But that would mean there’s a connection between me and Gwenna, not just you and Jusuf.”

  “What did I say the other day, down on the beach? You as the fishing line. But maybe it’s more than that.”

  “More?”

  “Maybe you’re the…the anchor.”

  “Now you really are stretching the analogy.”

  “But think about it. You’re somehow of the same line as Gwenna, the same blood, whereas I’m certainly not of Jusuf’s. And you wondering if there really was something developing between them does seem to have guided my phantasm—straight to the defining moment.”

  “Shit. But do you think so? Really? Damn, but I can’t remember what it was that was in my mind before your other visits.”

  “Well, it doesn’t really matter now. But if I’m right, I reckon it will next time. Before I stick another lit joss stick into that holder,” and again he nodded towards it, “we’d better make sure you have just the right question in mind, nice and clear and targeted.”

  “Nice and clear and targeted,” Kate repeated, like a mantra. “But which question? And if it’s not how Jusuf and Gwenna’s entanglement’s getting on, then how do I stop my natural curiosity from spoiling whatever we do decide we want to know?”

  “Ah. Maybe this isn’t going to be quite as easy as I thought.”

  Kate stared blankly at him for a moment, her skin still glowing. “The weather report for tomorrow’s not ideal for going on the beach,” she finally said. “How do you fancy a walk?”

  “Yeah. I think we need a break from the fifteenth century, and it might just give us a fresh focus on what we want out of the next phantasm.”

  “Give me a focus,” Kate said, more to herself, “but how can I stop wondering how Gwenna and Jusuf are making out?” then she smiled, a hint of the pixie once more about her gleaming eyes.

  “Shall we go to bed?” she said and grinned, and Colin was more than happy to be led there.

  The following morning, Colin drove them the few miles east along the clifftop road to where it turned sharply inland. On the inside of the bend lay a triangular verge on which a couple of cars had already been parked, and where Kate suggested they leave their own. From a junction opposite, a narrow open lane carried on towards the peninsula, down which Kate led Colin as he hitched their rucksack onto his shoulder.

  “I thought we’d go along the coast path from Rame Head to Cawsand and Kingsand,” Kate said, “have some lunch there and then make our way back here on the road we used the other day; you remember? Coming back from Millbrook.”

  Colin did, recognising the sharp bend they’d parked by as the one that had so suddenly revealed this dramatic view of Whitsand Bay. He also remembered Kate mentioning that the Lizard Point was sometimes visible and turned that way. Gwenna’s cousin-in-law, the fateful leader of the rebellion, had come from there, but the view this time proved even hazier.

  The lane slowly slanted them away from the coast, then past a large farm and to a junction, where they followed a signpost for Rame Head and its coastguard station. Presently, when the tree-arched lane climbed more steeply around a bend, a church slowly came into view beyond. Somehow, it all looked familiar, but when a lychgate and a narrow spire-topped tower appeared, Colin came to an abrupt halt. A shiver ran down his spine.

  Kate backtracked and stood beside him, intent on his face.

  “You recognise it?” she quietly asked.

  The small, low church stood stark against an open and expansive cloud-studded sky, beyond where the trees bordering the lane finished. The way it seemed to squat into the brow of the rise, aloof but somehow enticing, held Colin from answering at first. It wasn’t so much the rough dark grey slate of its walls, nor the unfussy climb of its short tower and spire that stirred his memory, but more its setting. He felt as though he’d once before laboured up this incline, a leather bag upon his shoulder, and once before been caught by its unexpected and unassuming appearance.

  He slowly turned his half-seeing gaze upon Kate and realised his mouth felt slack.

  “This is Saint Germanus, isn’t it, Kate?” and she nodded.

  “But you never saw this in any of your phantasms, not that you told me about, anyway.”

  Colin narrowed his eyes, his brow puckering, his thoughts going over all he could recall from each time he’d spent in Jusuf’s mind. Finally, he concluded he’d never been here before, and certainly not with Jusuf.

  “So you must have had some kind of access to his memories, then,” Kate suggested. “It must’ve still been on his mind when he neared the smithy that day Wilfred brought Gwenna the bad news.”

  He nodded, already delving into what else he may have unknowingly carried back, but nothing came to him.

  “Let’s go in,” he said, his voice seeming to come from a long way off. “If it’s open.”

  “It will be. Churches are never locked, Colin. Not remote ones out in t
he countryside like this. After all, they are meant to be a refuge at any time of day for those in need.”

  The short sloping path beyond the lychgate up to the entrance porch ran a good eighteen inches below the level of the surrounding graveyard. The church itself likewise stood below that same level, behind a narrow dry moat of sorts that ran around the base of the ancient slate walls. Colin stopped at the entrance to the porch and turned to stare at the forest of raised gravestones.

  “I suppose getting on for a millennium of stacked remains is going to do that to a churchyard,” he mused. But Kate had slipped inside the porch, the sound of a latch and then a door opening drawing him to follow her in.

  The interior seemed no more familiar than any other church. It had a musty smell he’d now come to associate with great age and its silence with a long tradition of reverence. Naturally enough, the bench ends first attracted his interest. Most were plain or simply adorned, just the odd few blessed with more interesting designs. None, though, rivalled Rodrigo’s.

  Kate, he noticed, seemed more intent on him than their surroundings. He finally smiled at her and lofted his brows.

  “Nothing?” she asked into the deserted stillness.

  He shrugged as he shook his head, then caught a glimpse of an archway, partially hidden beneath a low organ loft at the west end of the nave. Beyond it he could see uneven stone flags in what looked like a small room. Then he realised it must have been the base of the tower, and that earlier shiver returned to his spine.

  As he passed beneath the organ and through the archway, Kate behind him, the dimly lit space he entered struck him as even smaller than he’d thought. A free-hanging bell rope caught his eye and he looked up, following its rise to a hole in a high wooden ceiling. Before he knew it, he’d grasped the soft cladding of the rope’s end, feeling the resistance of what it was attached to, out of sight in the belfry above.

  “Probably best not ringing it,” Kate said as she placed her hand on his at the rope, and Colin nodded, staring back up at the ceiling.

  Although only lit by the meagre light of a louvered slit opening half way up the wall opposite the archway, he could see a trapdoor in one corner. From it descended an aluminium ladder, bolted to the wall behind him.

  Colin cocked an ear, then poked his head back through the archway, to check the entrance door. “Nip back to the porch and watch out for anyone, Kate. I’m just going to see if I can get a quick look into the belfry.”

  She looked up the length of the ladder. “You sure?”

  “Yep. Cough loudly if you see anyone coming. Okay?” to which she nodded uncertainly as Colin put their rucksack down on the floor. He grinned reassuringly and waited until she’d gone to stand by the door, which she then cracked open. He was quickly up the ladder, its creaking seeming loud enough to raise the proverbial dead.

  He stopped at the top and listened. All remained quiet. The hatch had no handle or latch, and so he reached up and firmly pushed at it. It lifted easily, a light draught slipping through to cool his face. He climbed a little higher and swung the hatch fully open, poking his head through the opening.

  Then Kate coughed loudly and he heard the door close, her footsteps hurrying back as he hastily closed the hatch above him. When he stepped off the bottom of the ladder, the door’s latch rattled and voices drifted into the church.

  “Grockles?” Colin whispered, shouldering the rucksack again, to which Kate grinned back as she nodded. Then, having said “Hello” to two middle-aged women who’d not yet got further than a table of pamphlets near the entrance, Colin and Kate wandered out into the churchyard.

  “Well?” Kate said.

  “I only got a quick look, and it was all poorly lit, but nothing rang any bells.”

  “There’s unlikely to be much left from Jusuf’s time, I wouldn’t have thought. However well made his stuff might have been, it has been five hundred…” then Kate sighed and slowly shook her head as Colin broke into laughter.

  “Ha, ha,” she laboured. “Funny man, eh?”

  He gave out a couple more short laughs and clapped his hands as he set off back down the path to the lychgate and the lane.

  “Come on, then,” he called back. “Let’s get on with this walk of yours. I can feel a thirst working up for some of the local ale.”

  Soon side by side, they carried on up the lane beside the churchyard’s high retaining wall, the spire beyond silently pointing at the heavens. The narrowed lane took them onto the back of the headland, here exposed beneath a broad and open sky.

  At its end would be Rame Head, where Kate had planned they’d join the coastal path for Kingsand and Cawsand. But for the time being, with little to see but cloud-dotted sky beyond the low hedges, nothing rested in Colin’s mind but the prospect of an ale or two when they eventually got there. And maybe an oggy—as Kate had told him pasties were called down here—to soak it all up.

  28 A Thin Line

  Presently, they came to a roughly surfaced car park at the end of the lane, beyond it a small, squat white building festooned with aerials—clearly the coastguard station. A long window on its far side faced out to sea, to a view that took Colin’s breath away.

  Against the broad spread of ocean before them rose a steep-sided hill at the near head of the peninsular—the woman’s breast Colin had seen at his first sight of Rame Head. Upon its narrow summit stood proud a small, simple and clearly ancient stone building.

  “Rame Head Chapel,” Kate told him. “Originally the head was an Iron Age hillfort—you can see the remains of the ditch and rampart across the narrow part.”

  Colin looked down the slope of an open field below the station, down to the saddle of land below, not at all sure he could.

  “The chapel’s not as old as that, of course; not even as old as Saint Germanus.”

  It turned out to be little more than a hollow rough-slate building, earthen-floored but complete with a solid ridged roof. They clambered down onto the concrete base of an old World War Two gun emplacement on its seaward side. The view from there proved even more spectacular, nothing but ocean on all three sides. A good few miles straight out to sea rose the lonely finger of the Eddystone lighthouse, defiant and protective upon its remote pedestal of rock.

  The headland marked the very start of Whitsand Bay, its long sweep stretching away into the heat haze towards the west, like a broad and welcoming smile. To the east, the coastline curved gently away, ultimately hiding Cawsand, Kingsand and finally Plymouth itself.

  The sense of being so exposed—of being thrust out into the lonely sea’s embrace—kept them there for a while. Despite the sun feeling hot when it came out, in the shade of the slow moving clouds the ocean breeze felt chill on Colin’s bare arms. It eventually urged them back the way they’d climbed, down into the field below and onto the coastal path.

  Here, the bordering hedges held a close heat that chased away the memory of the ocean breeze. It held to it a bejewelled haze of butterflies, each gem fluttering joyfully from the warmth of the ground and magically ahead of Colin and Kate’s approaching feet. Glimpsed through gaps in the hedge or laid open where the rise and fall of the path lifted them above it, the gorse-shrouded land fell away to hidden cliffs far below.

  Eventually, they came to what Colin thought was another romantically ruined chapel. It turned out to be a folly at what Kate then said was Penlee Point. Beyond it, where the coast curved away from the ocean, the path dipped into the cool shade of woodland, and here the world of their walk abruptly changed. Now cool, still and enchanting, the cathedral of trees steadily took them lower and nearer the village of Cawsand. Occasionally, they’d briefly glimpse its gaily rendered houses through gaps in the steeply sloping canopy.

  Their woodland path became a track, then a narrow lane, before finally channelling them out into Cawsand’s small village square. About it, a higgledy-piggledy rise of pastel rendered properties clung to the steep confines of the narrow valley. On the far side more buildings stepped up th
e side of a short promontory that hemmed Cawsand in to its narrow cove.

  A tumble of Jusuf’s memories crashed in on Colin’s mind, not of Cawsand itself but of its similarity to parts of Fowey. It shocked him that he’d almost forgotten about his phantasms, so enthralling, enchanting and wholly engrossing had been their walk. Then he saw a sign for pasties and suggested they eat.

  Hot greaseproof paper bags in hand, Kate led Colin from the store and across the square, then down an alley to the small cove’s busy beach. To one side of a short and low concrete promenade stood a couple of benches, up against a grey stone wall bathed in the heat of the midday sun. They found space to squeeze in and tucked in to their meals, forced to silence by the wonderful taste.

  Colin stared absently at a half dozen tarpaulin covered boats and dinghies pressed up against the edge of the promenade in front of them. Then his gaze wandered over people enjoying the beach, and out amongst the clutter of bright white boats and yachts anchored in the small bay. By the time he’d finished eating, the question of what Kate needed to ask of his next phantasm had likewise slipped in and quietly dropped anchor in his mind.

  “Time for a drink, then?” he said as Kate finished her oggy, wary of any talk of phantasms being overheard in the press of grockles, and Kate nodded.

  “We’ll walk through to Kingsand,” she said. “There’s a nice pub on the seafront there.”

  Colin had no idea when Cawsand gave way to Kingsand, the whole place seeming to be all one and the same. From there, though, it became clear the two conjoined villages were on the same small bay, although each clearly had its own short stretch of beach.

  Mere yards from Kingsand’s own, the Devonport Inn looked straight out to sea from within its eclectic, brightly rendered row of ancient properties. Colin and Kate sat outside with their drinks, on a rickety wooden high-backed bench, and let their eyes follow the inn’s own contented gaze.

  “This place is magical,” Colin said, having wiped the foam of his first drink of beer from his mouth. “It’s just wonderful. Who needs to go abroad, eh?” and he relaxed into the slow-paced, seagull-whirling warmth of this still foreign land.