by Giles Milton
The register was difficult to decipher. It was written in an ungainly, cursive hand that had turned every twirl and letter into a spirograph of squiggles and loops. In places it looked as if an ink-toed spider had danced a quadrille across the page.
‘No, no – nothing for 1685,’ said Mrs Woolley. ‘Let’s try 1686.’
The three of them scanned the page, looking for any entry that looked like a Humphrey. There was a surprising number of mortalities in 1685; Edward counted them and found that no fewer than sixteen people had died that year, including four members of one family.
‘Ah, look, look – now, here we go,’ said Mrs Woolley. ‘Here he is – isn’t this your chappie? Humphrey Trencom?’
Edward and Elizabeth peered closer at the handwriting to check that she hadn’t made a mistake. But no – she hadn’t. Humphrey Trencom’s name was clearly marked in the register.
‘Well,’ said Elizabeth with a relieved smile. ‘That’s good news, isn’t it? You’ve found him at last. And in less than five minutes.’
‘Oh – oh – oh. But what have we here?’ said Mrs Woolley, sounding a little disconcerted. ‘Hello, hello – what does this say?’
There was a faint sepia scrawl in the margin of the register – a note that had been added at a later date.
‘Well, that is strange,’ she said. ‘Well, I’ll be blowed.’
‘What does it say?’ said Edward, who was straining to read the writing.
‘Your Humphrey Trencom,’ said Mrs Woolley. ‘He was indeed buried here in Piddletrenthide – yes – buried here in this very churchyard. But look what it says underneath – right here. Apparently, his body was disinterred less than a week after his funeral.’
‘What!’ exclaimed Edward. ‘Disinterred?’
‘Apparently so – at least, according to this. Look – his corpse was stolen. Dug up and taken away. Your Humphrey Trencom was never seen again.’
Mrs Trencom glanced at Edward. Her heart sank. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘That’s all we need.’
At approximately the same time as Edward and Elizabeth were investigating the source of the River Piddle, Herbert Potinger was to be found sitting on the top deck of a Number 12 bus. The bus was almost empty and Herbert was most annoyed when a tall, foreign-looking man – who had been waiting at the same bus stop – sat down next to him. ‘Two dozen seats,’ sighed Herbert, ‘and he chooses the one next to me.’
Herbert was heading to work (rather later than was usual) and normally spent twenty minutes on the bus making a checklist of all the things he needed to do during the day. But on this particular occasion, he had rather more pressing matters on his mind. As the bus crawled along Denmark Hill, passing Ruskin Park and Camberwell Green, Herbert found himself drawn into his own private world.
The person who so occupied his thoughts was none other than the chimerical Humphrey Trencom. Herbert had spent the previous night in bed with Humphrey, trying to piece together Mr H.T.’s whereabouts in the days that followed his sudden departure from Constantinople. It soon became clear to Herbert that Humphrey’s written account was not nearly as straightforward as it first appeared, and in places seemed to be deliberately misleading. The ship on which he had made his escape was bound for Salonika (or so he claimed) but if this was to be believed, then it had by no means taken the most direct route. The captain had first sailed to the little island of Ayios Evstratios, where the vessel had made its first port of call. ‘We rested five dayes,’ wrote Humphrey, ‘and the agha did rommage my possesyons.’
Humphrey spent much of his time trying to get passage to the nearby island of Lesbos, although he gave no inkling of what he wished to do there. ‘I can’t understand why a man like Humphrey Trencom would be so keen to go to Lesbos,’ said Herbert as he scratched his scalp. ‘After all – Lesbos, Lesbos – no, I can’t think of any obvious attraction on the island.’
After a week on Ayios Evstratios, Humphrey and the crew set sail again, this time heading due north. It was not long before they found themselves in serious trouble. On their third day at sea the vessel was struck by a tremendous storm.
‘It did bellowe and puff into an exceading tempest,’ wrote Humphrey, ‘and we did most sorely fear that we wuld be drowned.’ The storm raged for a day and two nights, tossing the ship into cavernous troughs and plucking its cladding from the frame. Twice it almost capsized. Twice the crew managed to right it. ‘And the rayne did come down in torrents,’ wrote Humphrey, ‘sluicing the decks and flooding the hold.’
The men lost their bearings and feared they would be drowned. ‘And each and every one of our companye did make his peece with God, knowying that every wave myght be our last.’ Not until the second day did the storm finally abate. The wind dropped to a breeze and the sea calmed. And when the sun finally rose to burn off the sea mist, the men found themselves in sight of a coastline that was unfamiliar to everyone on board.
‘And we came,’ wrote Humphrey, ‘unto a fayre enchanted isle with a mountain that touch’d the heavens.’ He claimed that there were twenty bejewelled cities in this uncharted realm and each was inhabited only by princes and men. ‘And these men do reproduce by themselves,’ he wrote in typically cryptic fashion, ‘like unto the twin-sexed hermaphrodyte.’
Humphrey left his readers in little doubt that this was the place he had been searching for all along. ‘This was the realm I had hoped to discover,’ he wrote. ‘This was my Promised Land.’ He added, ‘It was with the greateste solemnity that I offered over my parcel and was greeted with prostrations by all the princes of that isle.’
It was this mysterious and quite possibly fantastical island that preoccupied Herbert’s thoughts as he sat atop the Number 12 bus. At the exact moment the driver swung into Walworth Road, a reversing van collided with a roadside vegetable stall, spilling half a hundredweight of parsnips across the street. Yet Herbert was so distracted by his thoughts that he failed to register the sight of buses, cars and taxis swerving violently in order to avoid colliding with a thick carpet of root vegetables.
It was with a start that he realized he had missed his stop. The vague awareness that he was crossing Southwark Bridge triggered something in his brain. It clicked him back to the here and now and told him (quite unconsciously) to push the ‘stop’ button. By the time Herbert finally got off the bus, he was more than six hundred yards from where he wanted to be. He noticed that the man sitting next to him got off at the same place. ‘I seem to have made a new friend,’ mused Herbert with an inward chuckle.
When he at long last reached the library, he headed straight into his office and pulled down an atlas of the Mediterranean. If Humphrey was to be believed, then the island to which he referred must lie within a few days’ sailing of the coast of Asia Minor. Herbert located Ayios Evstratios on his map – Humphrey’s last known port of call before the storm – then allowed his finger to trace an arc of ever widening circles.
He quickly realized that there were only three possible contenders to be the ‘fayre enchanted isle’. There was Limnos, a large and once-wooded island that Herbert knew to have been the home of the god Hephaestus, patron of metal-workers. ‘A most unlikely destination,’ he thought. ‘After all, its population was largely Turkish in Humphrey’s day.’
The second possible island was Thasos, which lay some eighty miles to the north. This was famous for its wine in the seventeenth century but – like Limnos – it, too, had a large Turkish population.
The only other possibility was Samothraki, a much less populous island that lay to the north-east of Limnos. Herbert knew little about Samothraki and looked it up in his copy of Islands of the Eastern Mediterranean. ‘Ah, yes, yes,’ he said as he scanned the page. ‘This sounds much more like Humphrey’s goal.’
It certainly had a mountain that ‘touch’d the heavens’ – Mount Fengari stood more than five thousand feet above sea level and its peak was often shrouded in cloud. Moreover, although the island was not inhabited exclusively by ‘princes and men’ –
and certainly not by hermaphrodites – it did have a reputation as the male island. For centuries in antiquity it had been the home of the cult of the Cobeiri, a Phoenician fertility god whose symbol was a large phallus.
The most cryptic detail in Humphrey’s account was his description of the island’s capital. ‘I walked to the chief citadel of this fayre isle,’ he wrote, ‘which was perched on the edge of a cliff. It was called A+9VATPD70+O.’
What could Humphrey have possibly meant by that? Herbert checked the principal settlements of Samothraki. There was Samothraki itself. There was Palaiopolis, the ancient capital. And there were the two towns of Kamariotissa and Chira. And that was it. None of these bore any resemblance to the code-word in Humphrey’s journal.
Herbert returned to his account to see if there was any more information, but Humphrey was frustratingly circumspect. ‘In A+9VATPD70+O I had the good fortune to meet Anathasius, Antonius and Nicholas,’ he wrote, ‘who were each more than seven hundred yeers of age.’
‘Is it all fantasy?’ Herbert asked himself. ‘Perhaps Edward is right – perhaps the answers lie in Piddletrenthide.’
He knew little about codes and ciphers and, since Saturday was one of the quieter days of the week, he devoted much of the morning to reading the three books that Southwark municipal public library possessed on the subject. It soon became apparent that unravelling Humphrey’s code would not be easy. According to Hartwell’s Secret Ciphers, codes that mixed letters, numbers and symbols were the most difficult to solve. ‘The greatest achievement in the Guy Fawkes’ conspiracy,’ wrote Hartwell, ‘was the deciphering of his encrypted letters. It took the genius of Sir Howell Stokes to crack the code.’
Herbert was disheartened when he read this. ‘If it were written in letters alone,’ he thought, ‘I’d only need to work out the substituted letters. But this …’
He scratched his head with unusual vigour. The one thing of which he was reasonably certain was that Humphrey’s code-word seemed unlikely to refer to any of the towns on the island of Samothraki. Herbert was left with the impression that Humphrey’s ‘fayre enchanted isle’ was not an isle at all.
‘He’s playing games,’ thought Herbert to himself. ‘And I’ve always been good at games.’
He looked at his watch and then glanced around the room. He was most surprised to see that the man who had sat next to him on the bus was now sitting in the library, less than twenty feet from Herbert’s desk.
‘Surely he’s not following …’ thought Herbert, before dismissing the thought with a shake of his head. ‘No, no, Herbert. You’ve been reading about too many mysteries lately.’
He was about to start answering the pile of letters on his desk when he had one last thought about Humphrey Trencom. It was a thought that, with hindsight, struck him as rather brilliant. He reached for volume seven of the Oxford English Dictionary and looked up the word hermaphrodite. ‘An animal in which the male and female sexual organs are (normally) present in the same individual,’ read the entry. ‘Some hermaphrodites are self-impregnating.’
‘Of course!’ thought Herbert. ‘I should have guessed. A r-r-r-red herring – yes, indeed – a whopping, Humphrey-style red herring. But not an out and out lie.’
2 SEPTEMBER 1671
It is a stifling autumnal day and the crowds are strolling aimlessly down Seething Lane in the city of London, trying to cool themselves in the faint Thames breeze. The lane is just close enough to the riverside wharves to catch the scent of Oriental merchandise that is stored in the nearby docks of Wapping. It is also one of the only areas of the city to have escaped the devastation of the Great Fire. Little has changed since medieval times and, bordered on its southern side by the Tower of London, this network of streets and alleys has long been home to a sizeable population of foreigners. According to Tobias Smythe’s Wards of London (1670), there are more than half a dozen nationalities living in an area not much larger than St James’s: Swedes and Russians, Balts and Venetians, Genoese, Turks and Greeks.
It is this latter community that is of particular interest to Mr Humphrey Trencom. Greek merchants and mariners have lived in the area around Seething Lane since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and the focus of the community is the little church of Aghia Sophia which stands out from the surrounding buildings because of its tiled Byzantine dome. The Greeks who worship here will tell you that the church was built in the early Middle Ages. This is not, in fact, correct. It was actually constructed within a few months of the 1654 Act of Tolerance and, ever since, the Greeks have been celebrating their liturgies, feasts and festivals under its cuspidated dome.
At the far end of Seething Lane, a familiar figure can be seen struggling through the crowds. He has put on weight in recent weeks – plumped out his skeletal frame with a hearty diet of soused herrings and venison pie. His belly is once again as smooth as a porpoise; his under-chin has regained its drapes of pendulous flesh. There is no mistaking Humphrey Trencom and he looks to be in fine fettle.
He must be in something of a hurry, for he is walking much faster than usual. The physical exertion has left him gasping for breath. As he charges down this narrow thoroughfare, jostling traders and passers-by, he can be heard grunting and steaming like a warthog. ‘Damn this waistcoat,’ he mutters to himself as he struggles to undo the top button. ‘I’m too hot.’ This is self-evident. His armpits are wet and his cheeks are flushed. His head is a hairy watershed that is drenched and dripping with sweat.
Humphrey reaches the church of Aghia Sophia and pauses to sniff the air. Then, after polishing his nose on a purple kerchief, he climbs the two steps to the entrance and pushes open the door.
As he enters the church, he blinks several times in the hope of adjusting his eyes to the darkness. His nose twitches as it detects the thick scent of frankincense. ‘Ah, yes,’ he says to himself. ‘Thuriferous – thuriferous. It’s good to be home.’ Candles are flickering before icons and an oil lamp adds its reflective glow. Humphrey is still looking around when the following scene is played out before his very eyes. A priest and two monks appear from the altar, emerging into the body of the church from the doors of a carved and gilded iconostasis. They catch sight of Humphrey’s figure, which looms large in the gloom, and shoot nervous glances at one another.
Suddenly, and with choreographic precision, all three drop to the floor and prostrate themselves before Humphrey. Their behaviour might be taken as unusual – unorthodox, even – but what makes it all the stranger is Humphrey’s reaction. He seems to see nothing untoward in their manner; indeed, it is almost as if he expects them to prostrate before him. After a pause of at least a minute, perhaps longer, Humphrey summons them to their feet. ‘You may arise now,’ he commands in a tone that is marvellously grandiloquent. ‘Come now – get up.’
‘Basileus,’ begins Father Panteleimon, addressing Humphrey with the title that custom and tradition reserved for the holy emperors of Byzantium. ‘We have been expecting you, Kyrie eleison. News of your visit to the holy city has reached us from Patriarch Bartholomeus, may God bless him, and we have also been informed of the success of your mission.’
The father then embraces Humphrey and, in a rather more familiar tone, enquires as to his health. ‘Better,’ replies Humphrey as he slaps his belly. ‘Much, much improved.’ He inadvertently lets slip a loud belch, the result of too many oysters in the Three Choughs. He coughs slightly to mask the noise, hoping that his little audience has not noticed. But they have, and they recoil slightly as they catch the unpleasant whiff of old seafood.
‘Yes,’ continues Humphrey, swiftly changing the subject. ‘It was just as I’d been led to expect. Below the Porta Aurea – and it’s now in safe hands. Never in a thousand years will the Turks recover it.’
In the pause that follows, he takes the opportunity to rub his belly. Come to think of it, he has a slight ache in his gut. Yes, and a bitter-sour taste in his mouth. ‘I hope that the oysters weren’t bad,’ he thinks. ‘They certainly tasted rather
stronger than usual.’
‘But the timing,’ he continues aloud, ‘well, it was not good. No, the time was not and is not right.’
‘No,’ chime the two monks who flank Father Panteleimon, ‘the time is most definitely not right.’ One of them, warming to his theme, adds a few more thoughts. ‘The sultan is too powerful – see how he’s planning an assault on Vienna. If we make an error now – if we slip – the future of everything will be compromised. The empire will be doomed for eternity.’
Father Panteleimon takes Humphrey by the arm and moves closer, only to move back again when he catches that same whiff of seafood. ‘But did you bring the imperial crystobull?’ he asks in a low voice. ‘We were told you’d have it with you.’
‘Yes,’ says Humphrey. ‘I have.’ He reaches into his breeches and, after loosening a couple of notches on his belt, pulls out a small scroll of parchment. It is tied up with a frayed purple ribbon which Father Panteleimon (after seeking Humphrey’s permission) deftly unties with the fingers of one hand. He then unrolls the document and smooths it flat in order that he can read it more easily.
‘Ah, yes,’ he says as he scans each line. ‘Exactly as we thought.’
‘Yes,’ says Humphrey, ‘and it’s exactly as I’d been led to believe by my late mother. Read it aloud – read it aloud.’
‘The Palaiologi are the rulers in perpetuity of our most glorious and sacred city of Constantine,’ begins Father Panteleimon, reading from the scroll. ‘Blessed by God and sanctified by the Church, they shall remain so until the end of time.’
Humphrey listens enraptured as Father Panteleimon speaks, but then lets out a low sigh. ‘It’s one thing to be an emperor,’ he says, ‘and quite another to have an empire.’
‘Patience,’ says the Father, ‘is one of the virtues. Remember, our city is under the protection of the ever-virgin, most holy Mother of God. Our time will come.’