Ben could have replied that he wasn’t Eric. But he decided not to.
‘Eric, what if they know the angel sh-shuns me? What… what’ll I do?’
Preston slumped back in the cot, his head resting once more against the pillow.
‘Just words…’ he wheezed quietly, his voice softening, spent. ‘They’re just words… just my words.’
His eyes closed again. ‘My words,’ he muttered, slipping back into a restless and troubled sleep, ‘not God’s…’
Ben sat and watched over him for a while, fidgeting in his sleep, several times murmuring, but nothing Ben could understand.
He knew the stronger tonics could do that — take the small whispering voices at the back of a person’s mind and turn them into a deafening scream. He was wondering what was troubling Preston in his sleep and had a mind that the answer might lie inside the metal chest just beyond him, when he heard Dorothy Dreyton stirring on the floor and begin to rise.
‘Did he wake you, Mrs Dreyton?’
She said nothing, sitting up and staring wide-eyed at Preston. There was something about her manner that troubled Ben.
‘Mrs Dreyton?’
Her eyes were distant. Without a word, she got to her feet and, stooping low, she pushed the flap aside, letting in a gust of freezing wind that set the flame on the oil lamp dancing, and stepped out into the cold day.
Above the rumpling wind, he thought he could hear distant raised voices; a commotion from across the clearing, and a ripple of disturbance and questioning from the Mormons standing nearby. Something was going on.
Ben stood up, and stooped as he swept the flap aside, squinting at the brilliant all-white glare of the day.
‘What is it?’
A man standing dutifully beside the entrance, Mr Hollander, with a dark beard almost down to his belt, pointed across the clearing. Ben could see Keats and several others moving quickly down-slope and emerging from the tree line onto the open ground of the camp, their guns unslung and held ready, anxiously looking back over their shoulders.
‘Thought I heard someone shout something about Indians,’ said Mr Hollander.
CHAPTER 29
Monday
Central London
Julian found a number of books on the subject in the library’s index. The librarian helped him locate them amongst some shelves towards the back. He thanked the young man and sat down at a table to work his way through them.
He realised he knew absolutely nothing of the Mormon church. He hadn’t even realised that they were otherwise referred to as the Church of Latter Day Saints. It had quickly become evident to him that if he was going to be pitching this project to a commissioning editor or two, it wasn’t going to look good if he hadn’t at least done some token research into the faith of Preston and his followers.
At an instinctive level, he wondered if there was another angle to this story; an angle other than a simple survival story.
What if this was some kind of Jonestown thing?
The idea was as intriguing as it was chilling; that a community led by some charismatic religious nut had been steered into a remote wilderness — by accident or design — and there, every last one of them was talked into taking their own life for some bizarre theistic rationale.
There were several books he’d pulled up on Amazon that looked interesting and he had quickly printed out the details of them, before taking the District Line tube into town.
Here in the library they had copies of three out of the eight titles he’d listed. Not bad, considering how obscure some of them were. To be fair, it wasn’t as though Amazon was likely to have all of them in stock either.
He started by flicking through a recent edition of the Book of Mormon, quickly becoming irritated with the confusing language and woolly, meaningless terminology. He moved swiftly on to the second book: Mormonism, and Departure from Christian Convention. Without drawing breath, it jumped straight into a detailed theological discourse comparing the tenets of Mormonism with those of conventional Christianity.
He sighed and pushed it to one side.
The third book was called The First Mormon by one J.D. Pascal. The opening prologue of the book dealt with the Mormon church’s founder, Joseph Smith, and the story of how the Book of Mormon came to be written.
An atheist for pretty much most of his life, Julian had never had much time for what he considered the incomprehensible, paradoxical rambling of most writing on religion. A classic example of nonsensical theistic nit- picking being the eternal debate over the daily miracle that was said to occur with every communion; the debate over when the bread actually became Christ’s flesh, whether it occurred in the priest’s hand or on the recipient’s tongue… or, in fact, whether it was now meant to be considered merely a metaphor — downgraded from being taken as a literal miracle — because by today’s standards it was too far-fetched.
For Julian, the discussion, at best, was a waste of everyone’s time, up there with ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’
However, despite his irritation with that kind of nonsense, he found this particular account of the birth of a brand new faith utterly fascinating. Joseph Smith’s was a tale of divine inspiration, and profound discoveries in the wilderness of Utah of religious relics and seer stones, of ancient angels from bones, and sacred golden scrolls delivered from God in a long-lost language.
It was pure theatre.
‘My God, this is priceless,’ he muttered, scribbling down notes in his jotter as he leafed through the prologue.
This stuff is fantastic.
He read on with a growing sense of astonishment at the tale, affirmed regularly by the author as Joseph Smith’s direct testimony, and not enhanced or exaggerated in any way.
When he had finished he looked at his watch to find the afternoon had slipped away from him and that he had to make tracks to his meeting with Sean. He returned the books to the librarian to file away and stepped out onto Basinghall Street, to be greeted by the jostling hubbub and rush of pedestrian traffic, flowing like a human river towards Mansion House tube station.
But his mind was on what he’d just spent the last few hours reading — and one circling thought kept bubbling up over and over, making him shake his head with incredulity.
And… this is the fastest-growing faith in America?
CHAPTER 30
20 October, 1856
The ‘others’ — I call them that instead of referring to them as Mormons now. Sam has made it quite clear to me that they don’t think of themselves as members of the Church of Latter Day Saints, nor have they since they left Iowa with Preston. They view themselves as quite apart from anyone else.
The others, whilst Preston is still convalescing, have been prepared to take instruction from Keats with regard to the setting up of night watches around the clearing. There is a great concern throughout the camp that the Paiute hunting party encountered three days ago might just return and seek revenge for the Indian shot dead by Mr Hearst. I suspect fear of those Indians has driven them all some way towards accepting Keats’s way of doing
