‘Will you be staying long?’ I asked.
‘I hope so. Months,’ he replied.
‘He’s very similar to Matthew,’ Uncle Dylan whispered to me, ‘and I have given him the triangular room.’
He wore casual but smart clothes with a pale blue shirt missing the top buttons. There was a scorch mark around his throat as if friction had done him a recent disservice. I wondered about the inhabitants who had greeted Matthew Loveday all those centuries ago, who had beheld a similar mark on his neck but who tolerated his presence anyway, even allowing him to plant a tree on the summit of a sacred mound.
‘Oh yes! We have a ghost,’ Uncle Dylan was saying in his usual bluff manner; and I snapped back to the present.
Jerome Nightjar grinned immensely.
A large bird flew past the window. I waved at it.
AN INCOMPLETE APOCALYPSE
Mark Valentine
‘I think you make out your case quite well,’ conceded Burns, leaning back in his crimson leather armchair ‘but there’s something missing that would really clinch it.’
Hugo Winwick gazed across at him with pale, silvery eyes, and made a noise indicative of polite curiosity.
They were discussing his paper on later medieval English apocalypses, submitted to the journal The Hourglass. It was a respectable place to be published, and Winwick was quite keen to appear there. In looking at illustrated manuscript volumes of the Revelation of St John the Divine, he had, some months ago, experienced his own minor revelation. He had begun to speculate that there had been a turning point in the production of these vivid apocalypses, when they were no longer made mainly for pious use, but simply as aesthetic objects, as ornamental books. They had moved from the preserve of the abbot, the prior and the bishop to that of the courtier, even the dilettante. Noble and gentle folk, he contended, had them made simply because they liked looking at fiery monsters. It could be seen, if you liked, as a first surging of the longing for the Gothic in the human spirit: an important new artistic thesis.
Winwick was fairly certain that in his specialist field this was quite a new line to suggest, and he wanted to get his work known soon, in some authoritative venue. Up until then, the assumption had been made that any illuminated and calligraphic text on a biblical theme (and there were hardly any others) had been painstakingly produced by monks in their scriptoria for the edification of zealous patrons, keen to study scripture in handsome volumes. Yet he had found, by a fresh scrutiny of several fragmentary examples, that in later years, just before the dawn of printing, many had been made by skilled, secular scribes: artisans, creating their work for worldly and wealthy clients who simply wanted something luxurious and magnificent to feast their eyes upon—and, no doubt, to flaunt at their neighbours and visitors.
‘Yes,’ the editor of The Hourglass continued, ‘what you need to find is an apocalypse completely out of any churchly context. I’m quite persuaded by your line of thought, but in each example you’ve found, a conventional religious motive might still be possible. If you could find and describe one that was bound up only with purely literary or scholarly pages—oh, legends, fabulous histories, almanacs, that kind of thing—your argument would be so much more powerful.’
‘Yes, I quite see that,’ his would-be contributor agreed. ‘And I’m convinced some must exist. But I haven’t come across one yet. We’ll have to do without. Unless you have any ideas?’
Burns seemed to hesitate, and began to scrape his pipe out with a silver device designed for this purpose. This was evidently a sign that he wanted to think. The scraping marked out the silence like a clock’s ticking. At last he paused, and looked at Winwick in a sideways sort of way.
‘We-ll. There certainly is a likely contender. The Draycott. Do you know it?’
‘The Draycott Apocalypse?’ The name murmured at the back of Winwick’s mind, though he could not say quite why.
‘Yes. Incomplete, of course. But they so often are.’
‘Pages sold off to collectors by indigent owner?’ asked Winwick, to show that he knew the way of these things.
‘No doubt.’
But the author felt an unusual quiver of frankness pass through him.
‘I don’t know much about it, I’m afraid,’ he confessed.
Winwick was hesitant in admitting to this deficiency in his learning to the notoriously severe editor. But to his relief Burns shook his head.
‘I’m not at all surprised. It’s never been written up. But from what I understand, it’s bound up with all sorts of other stuff, not in the least pious. That might be the lead you need.’
He agreed, keenly.
‘We’ve had a few chaps in the past offer to do a feature on it, as it happens. I even gave them introductions to the owner. It’s supposed to be quite fine, what’s left anyway. But for one reason or another, they never did send me a paper. Flighty blighters, I expect, who liked the idea of getting their name in, but couldn’t be bothered to put in the fieldwork.’
He cocked a sardonic eyebrow, and blew lustily into the pipe bowl, as if scattering such idle defaulters to the winds, with the dead ashes.
Winwick took the hint.
Before pursuing the obscure apocalypse further, Hugo elicited from the editor the names of the two young scholars who had each raised with him the idea of writing an article about it. And then he checked various digests and catalogues to ensure that they had not, in fact, already written up the book in some other journal, spurning Burns: he would look foolish if he had been forestalled. But there was no sign whatever of any work of this kind: and, indeed, no sign whatever of the supposed authors, so that Winwick began to wonder if the editor of The Hourglass might have got their names wrong. However, when he asked amongst some of his academic acquaintances, he found that a few had indeed heard, rather vaguely, of the two young antiquarians, though none recently. Some wondered if they had been lured by American universities.
‘Yes, they’ve probably gone off to the New World,’ said one, old McGibbon. ‘Warmer climes and brighter sparks and all that.’
Winwick had, anyway, satisfied himself that he would certainly be amongst the first to write up the Draycott Apocalypse, and he composed and addressed a formal letter asking for permission to view the book. It was still, it seemed, in the ownership of the country family who had given their name to the work. He hoped he had offered the appropriate mingling of authority and deference in his application: the college arms upon the notepaper, and some mild flattery about the family’s dedicated guardianship of so important a relic. And it seemed that he had: an invitation promptly followed. The Draycotts, of Draycott Hall, in the village, or rather hamlet of Draycott (for there appeared to be no church), in some dim region of Northamptonshire, seemed to have dwindled to a single scion, named by Burns as Miss Lily Draycott. He had given her first name with a slight sneering hiss, as if he did not quite approve, perhaps because it had, in his day, been bestowed upon actresses and courtesans.
The place was, at least, only a fairly short journey from Winwick’s college, but it was a dispiriting one, through wan fenland, and across low, dun, ridges faint against a dwindling winter sky. There was no-one to meet him at the station, but the directions supplied, in a hand of rather quavery dark ink, showed that he had a walk of about forty minutes ahead of him. There was a chill breeze to face, which bit at the delicate spirals of his ears, and whetted its teeth too on his rather austere nose. He strode on as resolutely as he could, and all around saw only frosted fields and hedgerows, coated with a clinging white fire.
The hall, when at length it glimmered into view in a sort of dreary haze across descending moorland, was of a pale, friable, weathered stone, and as he approached Winwick found himself thinking that it looked almost as if its very walls had been made of timeworn parchment: there was the same dry, dusty appearance. It stood far back from the nearest road, behind a screen of larch trees, whose thin limbs rattled in the bitter air.
Most of the windows, on the three rather squatting
storeys that could be made out, still wore shutters, scarred by the winds and with paint peeling in grey flakes, as if they were the scales of some creature sloughing off old skin as it slept. The doorway was not a grand gesture, as so often in country houses, but a simple, low, almost square dark slot in the walls. Winwick looked about, but there appeared to be no bell, only a brass knocker rimed with a green crust, in a twisted shape that might have been intended once for an elephant’s trunk. Perhaps, Winwick reflected, one of the Draycotts had been a servant of the empire and had installed this curio as a remembrance. He seized the brazen coil, which, despite the bleak wind, had a tingle of warmth to it, as if it had caught the rays of an unseen sun, and rapped it against the door.
The woman who answered his hollow knock after a short echoing silence wore a long dark gown relieved only by a scarlet, silken sash around her waist, from which depended a peal of silver and bronze keys. It was difficult to tell her age from her appearance: there were no obvious signs of wear in the amber-tinted skin of her long face, and her eyes still seemed to have a lively glimmer. But a great tower of silvery-black hair suggested the passage of a certain number of years, at least. She gestured to him to follow her along a stone passageway, and ushered him into a bare parlour where a table was carefully set out for a meal. He had not been certain at first whether he had been met by a housekeeper, or the chatelaine herself, and had proceeded with circumspection: but his doubts were resolved when she proffered her hand, elaborately festooned with gems, and he gave this the briefest of touches. She gestured him to a chair, and poured a dank wine into the glass before him. Then she signalled with a fluttering motion, almost like a blessing, over the silver chafing-dishes, and they helped themselves. When the genteel scraping and clattering had subsided, his host addressed him once more.
‘We are extra parochial, you understand.’
He could certainly imagine that the obscurity of the place would make its inhabitants more than usually interested only in their own local affairs, but it seemed an odd beginning.
Her black, glistening eyes, rather like skinned grapes, detected his confusion.
‘I mean that we do not here belong to any parish—we are quite free from all civic or ecclesiastical interference. Usually that is only the case where the land formerly belonged to an abbey or to the throne. But here, neither ever applied. So it is not clear to historians why we have been left alone.’
There was almost a melancholy fall to her last words, and her eyes glinted in the glow from the corroded candlesticks. Her long fingers, ornamented with the many bizarre rings, which were twisted like serpents around the waxen sticks of flesh, wafted once more in the dim light.
‘In those days, Mr Wanwick, it was said men feared the Church, the King and the Devil, in that order. Since we have never had any very obvious affinity with the first two, it has sometimes been supposed that we must have thrown in our lot with the, ah, junior partner—d’you see?’
She laughed to herself, in a series of throaty surges that were not unlike a purring.
Her visitor smiled weakly.
‘Actually, it’s Winwick,’ he murmured. But his hostess appeared not to hear him.
‘Be that as it may, if we can hardly say that we have ever flourished as a family, yet we have at least enjoyed a long decay.’
Winwick felt these phrases had been deployed before.
‘Charming place . . . warm welcome,’ he muttered. His feeble remarks went unregarded.
‘You know the meddler, Mr Wanwick?’ he heard her ask.
Her guest cast about anxiously in his mind for any of his acquaintances who might be regarded as unusually meddlesome. Perhaps Burns was meant, who had put him in touch?
‘Well, I . . .’
‘The medlar fruit. It may only be taken when it is in decay. And then, I say, a very noble taste: autumn leaves and sweet dates. We nurture it here. In the old orchard.’
There was a slight emphasis on the word old, as if to imply that there had been many other fruit groves since this original.
Winwick expressed polite interest, but this was lost in the next remark.
‘As with that rare fruit, so with some old families, perhaps. Finest in decay.’
It was difficult to know how to respond with politeness to this, without admitting either that he discerned the decay or that he disputed the fineness, so Hugo Winwick allowed a silence to elapse, before attempting the brief speech of thanks he had mentally composed and refined on his train journey and on the brisk walk from the station.
‘. . . particularly as I understand you have already given your most generous hospitality to scholars before me. . . .’
Miss Draycott had been regarding him with the sort of amused and inquisitive look one might bestow upon a pet that has learnt a new and slightly unexpected trick, until he petered out with this final remark.
She sighed, disturbing the candles, whose amber flames flickered as if shrinking back in dismay.
‘Perhaps you would like to go to the Revelation now, Mr Wanwick?’
Miss Draycott rose, with a rustle of her dress, which had the dark polish of old mahogany. The pleats seemed to shimmer in the candlelight like black flames.
The manuscript was kept in a casket in an upper room, which had a single arched window. It was barely furnished with a riddled wooden table and a chair whose legs ended in worn claws. And it was cold: the bleak wind that had assailed him on his walk to the hall was not kept out here, but seemed to whisper and moan in the crevices of the walls. He rubbed his fingers together, and carefully raised the great dark binding of the book before him.
As Burns had surmised, the book was indeed bound up with other, wholly secular material. So far as Winwick could make out, on a first rapid examination, there was, firstly, some sort of treatise on orchardry, full of the shapes of trees that he certainly did not recognise, some bearing fruit that appeared to possess the ability to grimace and stare; then a herball, among whose illustrations he noticed a mandrake, a moly, and a monkshood, together with stranger blooms still, with limbs like twisted homunculi; and then a set of pages indited with archaic symbols, angular and, as it were, stalking over the page. There was perhaps a hint of Hebrew in their calligraphy, or some even older language, which he did not now have the time more thoroughly to examine. And then, at last, as he turned the pages ever more eagerly, there came the apocalypse itself, and Winwick dwelled upon each leaf with wonder. This was one of the most strongly imagined he had ever seen.
The figures had been drawn in fine black ink first, and the colour added by means of a tinted wash. This was, he knew, a special craft secret of English illuminators, more subtle than the smears of raw pigment used elsewhere. It was particularly suitable, Winwick noticed, to depict the proper colour of an English sea: the grey-green was admirably achieved, and much more realistic than the bright blaring blue of convention, which might just about do for the Mediterranean. It was a delicate, careful art, which seemed apt for the limners at work in a rainwashed and misty island. He turned the pages with a quick delight, the zeal of the scholar leaping up inside him, and the desire to be the first chronicler of this exquisite masterpiece crackling within him.
The realism had also been applied, he thought, to the rather splendid seven-headed, crowned and horned serpent or dragon. It looked like something that just might have been drawn out from the dreary depths of some English fen to confront and carry off all the kingdom’s sinners. Despite its beady eyes and lashing red tongues, its slime-coloured scales and spurred wings, there was just the faintest air of melancholy to it. He looked at the human figure painted as if writhing before the monster. Perhaps, he thought, rather too irreverently, the beast was disappointed because its prey did not have a face that it could threaten.
For here was one part where the Draycott Apocalypse, which otherwise seemed remarkably intact, was indeed incomplete. There were no features on the believer confronted by the dragon with seven heads: everything else was limned in, thei
r body, limbs, clothes, shoes, and they were even depicted under a withered black fig tree, but they had no face. For some reason the artist had simply stopped short.
Winwick looked at the pale oval carefully, bringing his gaze close to it, in case he could detect any signs of erasure. There were very slight, minute ripples in the paper, which for a moment gave the impression of quivering. He narrowed his eyes and stared even more intently. Was there the merest hint of a skein of flesh coloured in there, or was that the fading of the manuscript? But, yes, the pink tint began to seem more substantial, and he even felt he could discern the smudges of eyes, ears and nose. He drew back, to look away and give his eyes a rest, blinking. And then he regarded the picture once more. The seven-headed monster in its hues of English mud and rain and marsh still glimmered upon the page, and its victim’s clothes had their autumn hues of scarlet and gold and brown. But the white void, the solemn blank mask, on top of the figure’s shoulders, indeed seemed much more defined now. It was certainly possible to make out the lineaments of some of the features. The eyes were a wan grey, the ears rather like delicate shells, and the nose, narrow and sensitive. As if in a paper mirror, Hugo Winwick found himself staring at his own face.
Something that might have been the wind roared among the walls of the room.
FIRST NIGHT
Anna Taborska
They chased the fleeing girl relentlessly, their horses snorting and sweating in the sultry air. Sooner or later they would catch her—she knew that, and headed for the lake at the edge of the village. For a while she lost her pursuers among the dense trees. A fresh wave of tears stained her youthful face as she burst out onto the bank. There she paused a moment, trying to catch her breath amidst the beauty of the desolate place with its vast expanse of dark water and row of weeping willows, their leaves rustling uneasily as she moved past them towards the water’s edge. She could hear the shouts and the thunder of hooves coming closer. Dizzy with fear and exhaustion, she leaned for a moment against a willow tree. Then, casting a glance over her shoulder, she threw herself forward. In that final second, her thoughts turned to her beloved. Her heart was broken even before the dark waters closed over her head.
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