The Muse and Other Stories of History, Mystery, and Myth

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Jake groped for solid facts. “You didn’t tell anyone Dicky was dead because you were afraid you’d have to explain why he was startled, even frightened of you. And then you might be prevented from—walking?”

  “Richardson was suspicious of the horoscope you made for Nurse O’Neill,” said Skelton. “But what’s all this about a zodiac?”

  “Have a look.” Andy handed over the rolled paper. Jake opened it up and turned it to the firelight. Skelton leaned closer.

  Jake had no trouble recognizing a map of Somerset. Or of this part of Somerset, at least. There was Glastonbury, West Pennard, Street, the River Brue, Lydford itself. But on top of the usual lines of roads and field boundaries were drawn black borders, in some places interconnecting, in others enclosing angular shapes. One at the bottom of the paper, beyond Charlton, looked like a rough approximation of a dog—or a lion.

  “The symbols are quite distinct, really, once you know where to look,” Andy assured them. “The Glastonbury Zodiac has been marked out by hills, trackways, watercourses, and the like. It was rediscovered very recently, by Katherine Maltwood whilst she was researching the quest for the Holy Grail as enacted here in Somerset. The chance of such patterns being found on the ground randomly, patterns that harmonize so closely with those in the sky, is on the order of 149,000,000 to 1 against.”

  Skelton looked at Jake. Jake looked at the map. Only by a stretch of his imagination could he see any likeness to real objects in the indicated shapes.

  But Andy’s eyes were shining with his vision. “This house was built betwixt Virgo and Libra. At the equinox. But the Glastonbury Zodiac uses the dove of peace instead of the traditional symbol for Libra, the scales. See, there it is in the center of the circle, just above Barton St. David. St. David’s symbol, you’ll remember, is the dove. And Glastonbury itself is in Aquarius, the beginning of the year, which here is not a water-bearer but a phoenix rising from the ashes. How better could the ancients have signaled to us the importance of this site in wartime than by using such symbols?”

  He’d put together a string of coincidences the same way Harry had done with his evidence, Jake told himself. Give either of them a map of Missouri and they’d find Mickey Mouse between Kansas City and St. Joseph. “I’ve flown over this area. You can’t miss the Tor and the square of the ruined abbey, but I’ve never seen any of these outlines.”

  “One always sees patterns in the earth,” Skelton cautioned.

  “But the Temple of the Stars is a pattern in time as well as space,” said Andy. “It’s the world’s greatest feat of engineering, repeating in the natural forms of the earth’s surface the patterns of the stars themselves. For the earth and heavens are linked, and the forces of one affect the other. As above, so below.”

  “You mean streams, roads, and so forth were engineered to form the shapes of the zodiac?” asked Jake. “But streams and roads change course. People build by-passes, that sort of thing.”

  “Who’s to say whether the minds of the surveyors are being directed by planetary forces? The Roman road to the east, for example, the Fosse Way, has a kink in an otherwise dead-straight stretch just at Virgo’s clasped hands. Hands clasped in prayer, no doubt.”

  “Planetary forces.” Skelton was looking dazed, but then, he wasn’t used to talking to Andy.

  Not that Jake wasn’t starting to wonder if he were experiencing some bizarre after-effect of the cider. “So this zodiac was built by the Romans?”

  “Oh no, it’s much older than that. Older than the ancient temples of Stonehenge and Avebury. Once we believed in such spiritual matters, and were sustained by them. Now we place our trust in rationality and science, and look where we are—bombs are raining down upon our cities!”

  Muted lights flashed across Andy’s windows. A car. More than one car. The police. Jake looked over at Skelton.

  With a grimace almost of embarrassment, Skelton stood up. “Your Lordship, would you be so kind as to join me in the entrance hall? I’m afraid the local authorities must be told about Pilot Officer Richardson’s—tragic accident.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” But Andy made no move to get up. The light in his eyes winked out and his face went cold and bleak as moorland beneath a sleet storm.

  Jake got to his feet, watched Skelton walk out of the room, then turned back to Andy. His symbols were only shapes in the fire, in blotches of ink—or in blood. But he saw those symbols because he had to. “Why do you need to walk over part of the zodiac pattern tomorrow, Andy? What are you trying to do?”

  “I’m hoping to raise the powers of England’s ancient soil, the soil from which we sprung, to repel a German invasion. Some prayer is a laying on of hands. This is a laying on of feet.”

  “A prayer? Or a magical rite?”

  “Both,” Andy replied. “Even such an enlightened Renaissance prince as Elizabeth the Great kept an astrologer, John Dee. He lived here at Glastonbury. Here he raised the power that repulsed the Spanish invasion of the Armada.”

  The ships of the Armada were dispersed by a sudden storm, Jake knew, but he’d always thought Dee was a charlatan.

  “And here, in the Vale of Avalon, is where Britain’s greatest warrior, Arthur, was laid to rest. Because in life he, too, walked the zodiac, and so defeated the invading barbarian hordes at Mount Badon.”

  Jake didn’t mention that the invading Angles were the ancestors of the English, and that they won their war in the next generation.

  “During the eighteenth century Glastonbury became, briefly, a spa. People came to drink the healing waters of Chalice Well. How many of them were then inspired to walk through the countryside and, however unaware, trace the zodiac? Soon afterwards Napoleon threatened to invade England, but never did so.”

  Jake could only shake his head in something between astonishment and admiration.

  “This evening, this accident—fate can be cruel and capricious—perhaps it’s written in the stars that England should fall.” Andy looked up, his face twisted in pain. “And yet fate is balanced by free will, isn’t it? Jake, my lad, you’ve told me your date of birth, you’re an Aries, active and courageous. Why else would you volunteer to fight here when your own country isn’t at war?”

  “A lot of people volunteered,” said Jake.

  “But you are here now. If you could possibly see your way clear to volunteering one more time, to making one more effort for your old and beset mother country. . . .”

  Jake looked down at the map he was still holding.

  “The notebook beside my bed, the pages devoted to Virgo and Libra,” Andy went on, his voice winding tighter and tighter. “They list the exact paths to take, the places where you must stop and make small offerings—a bit of food, a drop of wine or beer, a flower. The going isn’t difficult, you’d manage quite well even with your cane. Jake, I know you’re thinking I’m daft, but. . . .”

  He’d come this far, thought Jake, from the Great Plains of America to the antique landscape of Somerset. He’d offered to lay down his life. Why shouldn’t he lay down his feet, too? What difference would a few more steps make?

  According to Andy, a big difference. If he didn’t walk the zodiac tomorrow, Jake asked himself, would the Germans invade? If he did, would they stay back? And he answered, no one would ever know what was cause and what effect. If you see the future and then do something to alter it, then it wasn’t the future that you saw. The future, like much of the past, was a matter of perception.

  If Andy wanted to perceive meaningful symbols in the spilled blood, the death in war, of so many young men, let him. The tragedy wasn’t that a troubled old man saw symbols where there were none but that the unimaginative minds of people like Dicky couldn’t see symbols at all.

  Jake said, “I’d be honored to walk the zodiac in your place.”

  “Thank you.” For a moment Andy went limp with relief. Then he pulled himself together, stood up, seized Jake’s free hand, and wrung it between his own. “Most kind. Very good of you.” />
  “Seems the least I can do,” Jake said with a wry smile.

  Brisk male voices echoed from the entrance hall. Bridget hurried down the corridor and stopped in the door. Her voice was music compared to the crow-like clamor of the others. “Doc Skelton just told us what happened. Andy, I’m so sorry.”

  Andy’s skin crinkled in Jake’s hand like the paper of the map. Inside his tweeds he seemed very old, very small, sucked dry. But still he summoned up a hint of a twinkle. “Thank you, Nurse O’Neill. You and Pilot Officer Houston make quite a handsome couple, don’t you now? Did I tell you, Nurse, that your horoscope predicts a long happy marriage to an Aries? Houston here is an Aries.”

  Jake opened his mouth to protest. But the words were spoken—the die was cast. He stole a glance at Bridget.

  A log collapsed in a shower of sparks and a sudden flame shot upwards. But the rosy glow in Bridget’s face, he decided, wasn’t from the fire. Releasing Andy’s hand, he slipped his arm around her waist and told himself that some prophecies just might be self-fulfilling.

  She leaned against him. Together they watched Andy walk, slowly but as erect as a soldier, out the door and down the hall.

  “Thank you, Jake,” Bridget murmured. “I was seeing myself sacked and deported. But that poor old man, now, will they be sending him to a home?”

  “This is his home,” Jake told her. “And sometimes I think he’s more sane—and more sober—than anyone else in this crazy world.”

  “Do you now? With him reading the future in the stars and all? Or is he reading the past this time round?”

  “A bit of each. Here, let me show you.” Jake unrolled the map and angled it so she could see. “The storm’s lifted. I think we should take a walk tomorrow morning, follow some of these paths and have us a picnic in honor of your birthday. The exercise will do me good, shake out the knots in my side.”

  She eyed the distorted shapes of the zodiac, her head tilted, then turned her face up to Jake’s. “I’d like that. Especially if you’re after explaining it all to me.”

  “I’ll try,” Jake assured her. “I’ll try.”

  The flare of light from the fireplace died down. Shadows oozed in from the corners of the room, but still the windows gleamed faintly. An airplane droned overhead, making the panes of glass reverberate. Jake looked toward them. Even though he couldn’t see the Tor he imagined it reaching toward the stars, steady, solid, reassuringly permanent, a bridge between earth and heaven.

  Bridget took his cool hand in her warm and capable one and tugged him toward the door. “Let’s get on with it, then. There’s a war on.”

  “Yes,” he said. “All we can do is get on with it.”

  Author’s Note

  “The Eye of the Beholder” first appeared in Death by Horoscope, edited by Anne Perry, Carroll & Graf, date, and was reprinted in The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories III, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, Tor Forge, 2002.

  In my personal library I have several books on “landscape mysteries”, ley lines and such. A quite sober take on the Glastonbury Zodiac is in Richard Muir’s Riddles in the British Landscape. He shows how you could find the head of a bear on a map and then make a connection with “Arthur” meaning “bear”, and so forth. My favorite book about Glastonbury is Geoffrey Ashe’s Avalonian Quest. I read my paperback so many times the pages started to fall out—so I bought a hardcover as well. I’ve visited Glastonbury a couple of times, and much of Lucifer’s Crown is set there.

  As for why I set this story in World War II, I don’t now remember, other than that I enjoy reading about that era—one in which horoscopes were not common knowledge. I may also have recently read P.D. James’s mystery, Shroud for a Nightingale, which takes place at a nursing school and whose plot reaches back to the war.

  I chose an American protagonist because I needed an outsider who would notice the things locals take for granted. The story Jake tells about getting the names and titles confused while reading British history is exactly what happened to me in my youth. Even as an adult, I’m still a bit confused. Death by Horoscope’s editor Anne Perry, who is British, had to correct the way Skelton addresses Lord Brue.

  Way Down in Egypt’s Land

  From the veranda of the plantation house, Alexander Fraser could hear only faintly the crack of the lash and the cries of the wretch it was laid upon.

  The prospect before him was admirable—the lawns dotted with grand old trees, the river a sheet of silver reflecting the last pink glow of the sun, and on the far shore, two miles away, the groves and fields of the neighboring estates. A cool breeze not only diluted the heat of the day, but also carried the fragrances of wood smoke, tobacco, and roasted meats to his nostrils. He should have been content. Instead, he stirred uneasily.

  Fraser was not unfamiliar with the screams of soldiers in battle. Here, though, he was not on the field of battle, riding with the Scots Greys in their bravura charge against Bonaparte’s Guard. Here he was a guest. If Edwin Harrington was bound by the conventions of hospitality, then so was he, compelled to make no comment about that peculiar institution upon which his host’s prosperity was founded. And yet the subject was the most disagreeable and the most difficult that could engage the attention of a visitor to these southern American states.

  A movement at his elbow drew him abruptly from his grim reverie. The household’s footman stood beside him, proffering a silver goblet so brightly polished it put the shine of the river to shame. With a polite if distant nod to the young bondsman in his tidy white and blue livery, Fraser took the goblet and drank deeply of his host’s whiskey. Its acidic tang caught his throat.

  The youth’s whiskey-colored face turned toward the sounds of violence and misery and his dark eyes sparked, then quickly hooded themselves. For a long moment he stood as still and cold as a statue upon the Acropolis or, more aptly, as one of the great statues along the Nile. Then he turned and slipped back into the house.

  The discomforting noise ceased at last. Along the row of small houses almost hidden behind a cedar hedge, set aside from the general prospect, the Ethiopians in bondage shook off their own petrifaction and continued about their work. They gave wide berth to the man striding amongst them, his white face reddened by his ire and his exertions both.

  Pollard, the plantation overseer, was neither fish nor fowl. By lack of possessions he was excluded from the ruling class, by virtue of his color he was set above the bondsmen. Save for his Saxon name, he could perhaps be descended from one of Fraser’s fellow countrymen, those Scots transported to the American colonies as indentured servants after Prince Charles’s rebellion of 1745. Some of them had prospered. Some of them had been reduced lives as unwholesome as those of the African captives.

  Pollard stamped toward the veranda and threw himself down upon the top step so heavily it creaked beneath his bulk. “Mason!” he called.

  The stripling footman reappeared in the doorway.

  “Whiskey!”

  Mason vanished. Pollard glowered out into the twilight, still holding the length of cowhide that was his badge of office. Its end was dappled in crimson, and crimson flecks lay upon the white skin of his right hand. Only when Mason returned with another serving of the water of life, American-style, did Pollard drape the lash across his lap. His besmirched fingertips took the goblet from the tray without looking at the dark hands that held it, and he gulped down its contents. “Well then, Captain, you see what we are up against here.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Fraser replied.

  “I have no choice but to use the lash, on both men and women. Some I must whip four or five times a week, some only twice or thrice a month. But all attempts to make these people work by advice or kindness is unavailing, for their general character is stubborn idleness. And yet Mr. Harrington is obliged to feed and house and clothe them, even when they are sick and cannot work at all.”

  Mason walked back into the house, his back straight, his shoulders set, his eyes lowered
submissively. And yet behind his long lashes that same spark Fraser had earlier detected flashed like a dark lantern unshuttered, and then blinked out.

  Fraser thought of the great disparities in quality of food, housing, and clothing not only for black but for white he had observed in his visit to the chief families of Virginia. At last he said, “Could it be that slave labor is less cheap and profitable to the proprietor than popular wisdom assumes it to be? Perhaps the estate would produce more revenue if the property were divided into freeholdings under lease to farmers of every hue. Why, the tenants on my father’s lands in North Britain are as proud a race of men as ever . . .”

  “Hunh,” scoffed Pollard, but before he could add words to his derisive sound the door opened and Edwin Harrington stepped out onto the veranda.

  “You must understand, Captain Fraser,” he said, “that we are doing God’s work here, improving and civilizing the Africans’ barbarian state.”

  Fraser half rose from his chair, bowing slightly and withholding what might have been his tart response. The English had said they were civilizing the Scots, not so long since, and the tenants still whispered around their peat fires of the barbarities such an excuse allowed. Admittedly, though, the denizens of Africa could hardly be compared to Fraser’s own highland cousins, however rough.

  Harrington turned to his overseer, who scrambled hastily to his feet. “Mr Pollard, if you would be so kind as to step into my study. Please excuse us, Captain Fraser.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Harrington.”