Endless Time

by Frances Burke

  ‘Oh, it will be a very fine work, with His Highness in garter robes,’ said Karen, and could have bitten her tongue.

  Lady Hertford looked at her strangely, and began to converse with her neighbor. Karen felt annoyed at her slip, but felt little harm had been done. She threw herself into a light-hearted conversation with the Duke of York, who was only too pleased to explain to a pretty woman just how he would have won the Battle of Trafalgar in half the time it took that fellow Nelson.

  Finally, in the early hours of the morning, the Prince rose from the table and released those persons who could still stand. Many slumped quite comfortably in their chairs, snoring. Some even lay on the floor.

  ‘Would you care to see the gardens, Caro?’

  She looked at Antony with gratitude. ‘Fresh air, and a chance to walk off this dinner! Please, lead me to it.’

  Outside there had been other transformations. Karen found no vistas of trees and lawns, but covered walks with painted trellis and flowers and mirrors, and more tables set up to accommodate the guests who could not be fitted indoors.

  ‘We might as well be at Vauxhall with all these artificial galleries and promenades.’

  ‘But you have enjoyed the evening?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I would not have missed such an opportunity. Do you think we might steal just one glimpse of the throne room before we leave?’

  Antony laughed. ‘What, you still have stomach for more splendors?’

  How could she explain that she was storing up memories for the time when these would be unique to her alone? Her face clouded as she thought of the difficulties still in her path. Amanda was proving less helpful than she had believed. There had been no word from the French seer, Pierre Marnie, and now that she thought of it, her friend seemed to be avoiding the house lately. This should be looked into.

  Apparently mistaking her suddenly dimmed mood for weariness, Antony soon arranged for them to take their leave, postponing the viewing of the throne room to another occasion.

  They drove home in the dawn light, hearing London come awake all around them. Street criers were out in force, vending everything from milk to rabbits, and the saucepans to cook them in. A chair-mender staggered by, a wooden frame slung over his shoulder and a bundle of canes under arm. Carts rumbled in the distance, carrying produce into the markets. A weary child stumbled out to sweep the crossing for a pedestrian. It was all so misty and theatrical. Karen, her head nodding on her shoulders, felt she was adrift in a dream world. Any moment she would waken in her bed in St. John’s Wood, hearing Dali’s peremptory call to be let in the window after his nightly prowl.

  She felt Antony place an arm around her and lay her head on his shoulder, and she slept.

  Facing the stairs to her apartments she gladly accepted his support. At the door of her bedchamber she turned and gave him a tired smile. She felt his mouth warm on her fingers. Amazing, how different the sensation when it was done by a man she liked.

  He said, ‘I shall be forced to make another trip into the country very soon.’

  Something inside her lurched. Her fingers tightened on his. ‘Oh? Will you be long away?’

  ‘A full se’ennight, at the least.’

  ‘What a pity. You will miss Lady Scranton’s ball,’ she said mechanically, hoping her face had not given away her dismay. He was going into danger once more.

  ‘I pray you will give my excuses.’ His smile lit his eyes and hers sparkled in acknowledgement. They both knew he loathed balls and attended only under duress.’

  ‘Will you be seeing your father?’ She questioned him at random, unwilling to let him go.

  ‘Not this time. I must journey… north.’

  Sweden? Russia? It was so terribly dangerous anywhere on the Continent for an Englishman. She wakened to the fact that they were standing holding hands and not speaking. But his eyes said much, and she feared hers did, too.

  ‘Caro, may I say how greatly I have enjoyed the privilege of your company these past hours? What should have been a tedious duty, for me has become a memory to be treasured.’

  Intense pleasure flooded through her. He had liked her company. And she… Oh, God, how much she had enjoyed his. Seated beside him for hours on end, constantly aware of the short distance separating them, their fingers occasionally brushing as she reached for a wine glass, or he prepared fruit for her plate; watching him applaud the wit and beauty of other women and feeling the shaming stab of jealousy; knowing when he turned back to her by the sensation of light flooding through every cell of her body, warming, enlivening. It had been a night of magic, made all the more unreal by her fairytale surroundings. Cinderella in borrowed finery in a world far distant from her own. Cinderella with the clock about to chime midnight.

  Hastily she retrieved her fingers to stifle a false yawn. ‘I am weary. Pray excuse me, my lord.’

  He stood so close. She felt him looking down at her, but dared not meet those disturbing eyes. Then he leaned forward and opened the door. Warm perfumed air rushed out to meet them.

  ‘Your bower awaits you, milady. But where is your maid?’

  ‘I will not let her wait up for me until such an hour. She has to work during the day, as well.’ Karen moved inside, now anxious for him to go. She glanced up and surprised an expression of shock on his face, which was swiftly hidden. Almost too quickly, he had made his bow and gone.

  What had she said? What was so startling about letting her maid have her rest? What an enigma he was, and how dangerous to her peace of mind.

  She set about the task of getting herself out of her dress without help. Too tired to do more than wash her face and pull on her nightgown, she flicked back the sheet and stood frozen.

  In the middle of her bed lay a crude wax doll. Dressed in a scrap of green silk, it had big paper eyes colored crudely in blue chalk, and a clump of glued-on hairs of a coppery shade that she knew had come from her own head. But the thing that held her transfixed was the sight of a thin, ivory-handled blade thrust into the doll’s breast, in roughly the position where the human heart would beat.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Saturday, December 8

  Tom made lunch for Habbakuk and himself and settled down with his textbooks in search of witches.

  He began with the early Christian and Hebrew attitudes towards the devil, that he was the instigator of man’s unacceptable behavior, but that man did have some responsibility in the matter. It seemed that, prior to the Middle Ages, churchmen such as St. Augustine writing in his Confessions, did acknowledge other outside influences. All the same, the devil was believed to be a real force working against the power of God. During baptism a form of exorcism was used to drive out the evil spirit felt to be in possession of the babe.

  About the time of the sixth century a new belief crept in, that sexual misbehavior of men was caused by women, and that ‘woman is a temple built over a sewer’. Women with psychological problems, and those who consorted with monks and other ‘holy’ men, were accused of being in league with demons. The female sex as a whole became linked with witchcraft.

  Heretics were seen as followers of the Antichrist, and therefore sexually degenerate. At trials they were accused of extraordinary practices, including child sacrifice (of children born as a result of sexual orgies), the burning of infant bodies so that the ashes could be made into a paste that enabled people and objects to fly, and cannibalism. By the time the Inquisition came into being in the thirteenth century, the stage was set for an orgy of torture and murder of millions of innocent people.

  As Tom read on he began to wonder whether he should have eaten lunch. Decidedly queasy at the descriptions of Black Masses and other coven rituals, he skipped over the more fanatical excesses of the flagellants and the orgies enjoyed by Luciferians, who believed that sexual activity on the face of the earth was sinful, but fine when practiced underground. About to take a rest from such indigestible matter, his eye was caught by two words – Malleus Maleficarum.

  ‘Witch Ham
mer’, he muttered. Hadn’t Valerie used the word ‘hammer’ in her accusation against the priest? He looked up the allusion and found that a book of that name had been written around 1485 by a Heinrich Institoris, which became a guideline for inquisitors and others seeking to identify witches. It advocated almost unrestrained torture, among other things, and was an indictment of the author’s own mental stability.

  But it did help to explain some of the excessive zeal of the witch-hunters. People lived in a fear-filled world. Witches were regarded as being responsible for sickness and disease, the loss of children and all kinds of personal tragedies. Society in the Middle Ages was victimized by plagues and famines. Life was short and hard, and the only hope lay in God’s offer of eternal salvation in exchange for the hunting down and stamping out of evil. In fact, it was abnormal not to believe in witches and demons.

  ‘Poor devils.’ Tom was not clear whether he sympathized with the victims or their tormentors. Perhaps both. It wasn’t easy to enter the medieval mind. But then, judging by the current interest in films about demons, witches and vampires, the subject might not be such an outmoded interest after all.

  His own attitude towards Valerie worried him. The dream in which he’d seen himself as the harrying priest of her regression showed strong reservations. Did he see her as practicing the black arts on the people she ostensibly helped? Or had she merely been the victim of a man blinded by fear and prejudice and, perhaps, hope of preferment?

  ‘You’re out of your tree, Tom Levy,’ he told himself. ‘You’re treating a dream as if it were an actual happening. It’s time to take a good hard look at yourself.’

  He glanced up to see Habakkuk’s mesmeric yellow eyes on him, and shivered. It was easy to imagine more than animal intelligence there. No wonder that the impressionable and the superstitious had seen familiars on every hearthstone.

  The following day he abandoned witchcraft for everyday mysticism, and as a result of a few enquiries, took a trip to Earls Court.

  Guru Rama Satya’s rooms smelled musty and sandalwoody, and the fumes of burning incense choked Tom as he pawed his way through the gloom of drawn curtains and multitudes of bead hangings to the inner sanctum, otherwise known as the Guru’s sitting room. A gnome-like figure of indeterminable age, he squatted cross-legged on a cushion, his eyes rolled up so far he seemed to be looking at the inside of his turban.

  Tom crouched on another cushion in front of him, trying not to cough in the thick air, and beating down a host of negative reactions.

  Reedy music whined in the background somewhere, and as his vision adjusted to the gloom Tom was confronted by several pairs of slanted eyes glinting from different heights and angles. One lot even seemed to hang in the air above the guru’s head. These eventually incorporated into the outline of a cat perched on a cabinet behind the holy man.

  Evidently he favored familiars of his own.

  Tom organized his thoughts and made his challenge. ‘I want to know about karma and past lives. Can you help me?’

  Slowly the turban nodded. A soft whispering voice issued from beneath. ‘For the soul there is never birth nor death. Nor, having once been, does he ever cease to be. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, undying and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain.’

  ‘Yes. Well, does that mean that the soul inhabits many different bodies in many lives?’

  ‘As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, similarly the soul accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones. It is said that the soul is inconceivable, immutable and unchangeable. Knowing this you should not grieve for the body.’

  That seemed fairly definite. Tom considered his next question. ‘How, then, does a person escape from this eternal round of rebirth? Surely there comes a time when he’s paid all his debts and earned his reward.’

  The turban nodded. ‘A man engaged in devotional service rids himself of both good and bad actions, even in this life. Therefore strive for this yoga, which is the art of all work.’

  ‘But… what is yoga?’

  The turban sighed. ‘Abandon all attachment to success or failure. Such evenness of mind is called yoga.’

  It was Tom’s turn to sigh. ‘But if a man detaches himself from ambition, what is left for him?’

  ‘I have said, the wise, engaged in devotional service, take refuge in the Lord, and free themselves from the cycle of birth and death by renouncing the fruits of action in the material world. In this way they can attain that state beyond all miseries.’

  Tom was dissatisfied. In his book, life certainly wasn’t all misery and therefore to be avoided; and while devotional service to the Lord was okay to a point, the world would soon stop working if everyone decided to do it at once. This guru was decidedly impractical.

  As if reading his mind, the turban intoned in a stronger voice, ‘One who is not disturbed in spite of the threefold miseries, who is not elated when there is happiness, and who is free from attachment, fear and anger, is called a sage of steady mind. He who is without affection either for good or evil is firmly fixed in perfect knowledge.’

  ‘Then I doubt whether I’ll be attaining that state. To be without affection for anything in the world would be like cutting myself off from humanity. It’s monstrous!’ Thoroughly ill at ease, Tom scrambled up off the cushion, barking his shin on something metallic that went rolling away in the gloom.

  The turban hissed. As Tom felt his way back to the door he could hear the guru having the last word.

  ‘When your intelligence has passed out of the dense forest of delusion, you will become indifferent to all that has been heard and all that is to be heard.’

  Clattering downstairs and emerging into a street cloaked in misty rain Tom laughed to himself, ruefully. He hadn’t even got as far as asking about karma. The old boy was too mystical to be understood.

  He was disappointed. He’d hoped for much more. Surely there was someone who could explain in western terms the concepts that Phil and Valerie seemed to find so easy.

  He took a bus back into the city and soothed his soul with a walk down the undeniably material world of Bond Street. Here, amongst some of the richest shops in the world he’d expect to find many a person firmly attached to success, and its fruits.

  A jeweler’s window attracted him and he stopped, fascinated by the glitter of fabulously expensive baubles. Two women stood in the shelter of an awning, admiring and coveting the display. Their voices began to annoy him, whingeing, dissatisfied, dripping with greed. He tried to turn them off. And in his ear came a reedy whisper that startled him.

  ‘While contemplating the objects of the senses a person develops attachment for them, and from such attachment lust develops, and from lust anger arises. From anger delusion arises, and from delusion bewilderment of memory. When memory is bewildered, intelligence is lost, and when intelligence is lost one falls down again into the material pool.’

  Tom whipped around, but there was no turbaned guru nearby. There was no one at all within ten feet. He shivered and glanced again at the two women, whose faces mirrored unintelligent lust. He began to glimpse something of the truth behind the holy man’s words.

  He walked on, deep in thought, until he found himself before a window displaying an exceptional artwork, the face of Karen Courtney’s Bella Donna. He turned into Sampson’s entrance.

  Theo himself marched up and down in the foyer, directing the rehanging of yards of gray silk curtaining. He pounced joyfully and dragged Tom forward to give an opinion.

  ‘What do you think, dear boy? A trifle dim, perhaps? You think a trim of gold braid on the pelmet would lift them a little; or, no, perhaps not. Much too Monte Carlo for Sampsons.’ He broke off to dart forward and chide a workman swinging a ladder in imminent danger of meeting with the draperies.

  When the crisis had passed and Theo was able to give him more than half an ear, Tom did a pounce of his own and propelled him into the office.

  ‘Theo, I want a word with you.
Can you give me ten minutes without rushing off to supervise the resurfacing of the dome, or something?’

  ‘Of course. Let me give you a drink.’

  Comfortably lost in the depths of gray leather chairs, the two men surveyed one another. But Theo still had his mind on his premises.

  ‘Did you hear about the fire? Disastrous! I assure you. I expected to see the whole collection go up. Quite irreplaceable! And she’s so young.’

  Tom sat up. ‘What fire? What happened?’

  ‘You didn’t know!’ Theo seemed put out, but decided to overlook such a philistine lack of interest in his important world. ‘It must have been after you left. Some triple-dyed idiot let his lighter catch on my lovely new drapes and they went up in banners of flame.’

  He stopped, overcome by the vision of his memory.

  Tom felt the brush of panic somewhere under his ribs. ‘Was this the night of the Courtney exhibition, ten days ago?’

  ‘I was just telling you, dear boy. Such a loss it would have been. But my quick action and that of some other people saved us. We tore down the shreds and threw them outside before the sensors could start the sprinkler system. Nothing was lost. But I’ve had the most dreadful time replacing the fabric. I give you my word, I’ve scoured London and Paris, and only yesterday –’

  ‘Never mind your rubbishy curtains. Was anyone hurt? You said something about her being so young.’

  Theo’s cheeks reddened. Then he looked hard at Tom and grinned. ‘Well, well. Interested in our Miss Courtney, are we?’

  ‘She has a fantastic talent,’ said Tom, coldly. ‘Are you going to answer me?’

  ‘Karen came over all peculiar when she saw the flames. She let out a screech and ran for the door. I could see she wasn’t herself and sent some of the lads after her. They chased halfway across the city before coming up with her. She’d cut her feet a bit – a few bruises and other lacerations. Nothing much.’

  Tom relaxed. He took a sip of his drink, saying casually, ‘So, she’s at home now? I wonder if I could have her address from you, Theo.’