for a notorious truant who legend said had threatened to jump from Exeter city wall rather than be hauled back to school.
I neither knew nor cared which way I went after that. Stumbled through walkways and doorways, under arches where the mortar seemed barely dry. If this place would ever be a college, it was unlike any I’d known.
Came at last to a dead-end. A door to either side of it. The one on the left had a window with bars. The cells? The armoury, more like.
The door on the right opened into a short passage, with almost no light. I edged my way slowly along the left-hand wall.
Steps. Narrow steps leading down. From the stairwell, the faintest of glows.
Was this the way to the dungeons? Was my phantasy to be realised? I held down the brief flaring of excitement. It could never be so easy.
And then, as I descended slowly, there was a voice, yet some distance away. A single voice, a low and rhythmic mumble. One voice, no exchange, just one man addressing not another man but… his God?
In Latin, I thought then, which is my own second language and the language in which God was habitually addressed.
Sometimes, we find ourselves in situations which seem to have been fore-planned by some greater agency. I may have written earlier of the feeling of becoming a chess piece upon a board, moved by a player in some bigger game whose rules I could not yet comprehend, and I had the sense of it again – that sense of the predestined – as I walked softly towards the sound of the voice.
And also the only light. Reaching an archway of stone, beyond which candles glimmed piercingly upon what looked to be an altar.
In a niche above the altar was a statue of Mary, the Virgin. The kind of statue which, all too recently, was torn from the walls of churches throughout the land. A man was kneeling before it, arms at his sides, head bent, and the litany he was chanting came not from our Book of Common Prayer but from something older that lived in his head.
Its language proving not to be Latin after all, but French. My third language, or possibly fourth.
I stood and watched and listened for what must have been over a minute. And then, for some reason, I felt obliged to cough.
At which the man arose, quite slowly, and turned in the stone space, the prayer continuing to issue from his lips.
Not a prayer, nor a voice I’d heard before.
Nor expected to, from a deaf mute.
LIII
In the Night Garden
I made no move.
‘Frere Michel,’ I said softly.
‘Qu’est-ce qui se passe?’
Peering at me. After staring into the altar candles, he’d see me only as a shadow, while I saw his full face: eyes bulging slightly under heavy lids, a jutting lower lip, that grey beard like a pointed shovel.
Seizing this momentary advantage, I told him, in French, how delighted I was at the miraculous restoration of his speech, trusting this would not affect his renowned visionary powers.
Fyche in my head from that first afternoon on the tor.
… with no men’s talk to distract him, he hears only the voices of angels. Thus, as you may imagine, his moral and spiritual judgement is… much valued.
Brother Michael blinked and, without ceremony, snatched up one of the candlesticks from the altar and held it aloft, to the right of me.
Then nodded solemnly.
‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘When we met upon the tor, your host seemed to think he had no duty to introduce us.’
He made no reply.
His age? Yes, that would be about right. Around my mother’s age, nearing sixty. The way his felt hat was pulled down suggestive of baldness.
‘I should have realised,’ I said, ‘that you’d be here. Obviously, much to interest you. Not least in the remains of the finest library outside London. Or even Paris.’
Continuing to speak in French, for I wasn’t aware that he knew English. As good a reason as any for someone in his position to be introduced as deaf and dumb.
‘And more than this,’ I said. ‘Far more. I’ve read of your interest in old monuments and Druidical remains. Which here are, I’d guess, more numerous and more impressive than in France. One of the advantages of being an island.’
He still held his candlestick… and his peace.
‘One of the disadvantages, of course,’ I said, ‘is that more people here are superstitious and less open to progressive learning. One good reason for your presence to be concealed – although some of us would welcome it. All the hours we might spend in discussion of astrology, alchemical texts, the Cabala…’
It occurred to me then that he thought my questions speculative, posed to draw him out, establish final proof of his identity, and he was holding out. In truth, I was burning up. Time to lay down my cards.
‘I didn’t, at first, think that you’d have been at Montpellier College at the same time at Matthew Borrow – you being most of a decade older than him. And then I remembered, from my documents, that you were there as a mature student of medicine – in your thirtieth year?’
I’d watched his eyes move for the first time at the mention of Matthew Borrow.
‘I’ve been reading some of the letters you’d sent him. Not easy. How the hell did the apothecaries decipher your instructions? You could’ve poisoned someone.’
Neither of the two letters I’d stolen from Borrow’s surgery had been signed, but handwriting’s been one of my more recreational studies. I’ve ever enjoyed the analysis of styles and the development of divers approaches to lettering.
‘Your writing’s even worse now than in the early manuscripts on my shelves,’ I said.
He might have smiled. I don’t know, for that was the moment when he chose at last to lower the candlestick.
‘I heard you were building a library,’ he said.
‘Early days.’
Absurdly flattered that he’d heard of my library. Or even of me. Gratified that he’d spoken at last.
‘The day we were on the tor,’ I said. ‘Were you aware then… of who I was?’
I watched him pondering the question, as if it might contain some hidden snare. As indeed it might.
‘Not then,’ he said, ‘no.’
‘Maybe later, though?’ What was to be lost? ‘Maybe after Fyche’s crazed son had extracted the information from my colleague’s groom? Before finding it necessary to kill him?’
No reply, and I could no longer see his eyes, but I kept on, the wild lights back inside me, and now they were dancing.
‘Whose idea was it to have the dead man taken to the abbey and then dress up this murder of expediency as a ritual killing? I only ask because – as the assize court would have been told, had the trial of Eleanor Borrow ever taken place – the mutilation of the body seemed to call for a certain surgical skill. The kind of skill for which a younger Michel de Nostradame was, I believe, quite well known.’
With that first use of his full name, a mystifying lightness was grown within me. As if I were thrown back into the night of the storm when the dust of vision had me and I floated like an angel in the night garden. I gripped a stone ledge behind me, as if it would hold me down.
At length, there came a reply.
