telling me that this is the beginning of a new enlightenment, an explosion of spiritual light such as the Earth hasn’t seen since the days of old Greece and the ancient Egypt of thrice-great Hermes, who walked the night sky as if it were his kitchen garden.
As above, so below.
Elias’s hands were lifted and, for a brief moment, it was as though the candleglow shone from the hollows of his palms.
Below them, the true source of it, a small planet of light.
It was no bigger than a cider apple. Beryl, I guessed, a gemstone which comes in several colours and the shewstone possessed all of them: now a lucent brown, like the brown of an eye, now the soft ambered pink of a woman’s cheek.
It was as though the wan light had been expanded by some substance in the air, making everything more vivid, and I considered how this might be done, what theatre the scryer might employ to render us all dizzy with delusion.
I watched his plump hands as they spread apart either side of the stone, as if they were holding light like some solid object. I watched his lips forming words I could not hear and thought him to be summoning some spirit from the ether. I wanted to kill my fear by rising up and screaming at him,
… and then time had passed, maybe faster than I knew, in a hollow of muttering and liturgy, and Elias was whispering, not to me but to Goodwife Faldo.
When she held it up, hesitant, he reached out quickly and seized her wrist and pulled her into the light, and I half-rose, fearing for some reason that he would feed her fingers into the candle flame.
But his own hand fell away, and hers stayed in the air, as if held there by strong light. As if detached from Goodwife Faldo at the elbow. Had she met his eyes? Did he have the ability, which I’ve marked in others, to hold her in thrall?
Or even all of us. I shook myself, blinking wildly, fearing that long minutes may have passed in a state where my senses were not my own. I saw that the scrying stone was duller now but seeming to quiver, like to a toad, on the boardtop, and I didn’t notice that the ringless hand had gone until I heard Jack Simm draw breath, sharply, as if aware of an alteration in the air.
Did I feel that, too? Maybe. I found I was gazing not at the shewstone but into the ingle, where a fire of logs and coal would soon be lit that would last all winter long. The warm core of the house where a stewpot would hang, the air pungent with cooking herbs grown by Jack Simm and the mellow crusting of bread in the side- oven.
But now, in this thin, uncertain, peripheral time between seasons, it was only a mean cavern of ill-dressed rubble-stone, and cold.
A cold reaching out of the ingle along with a stillness which could be felt, like to the rancid, waxen stillness of a stone chapel where a corpse lies before burial.
I liked it not. I tell myself I don’t fear death, but the presence of the dead conveys no sense of peace to me, and there can be no beauty without life.
Something wooden falling to the floor.
A stool. Rolling away under the board, and the cat rushed between my ankles and I heard a poor cry, of the kind made without breath, and saw that Goodwife Faldo was backed against the wall by the shuttered window. Her face shadow-lined and stretched in agony, her coif dragged back, and she was pointing at the maw of the ingle and whimpering like an infant.
As if in another world, the hands of Elias were held apart, two inches from the globe, as though his fingers were bathed within its aura.
He said, with mild curiosity, ‘Tell me what you see, Goodwife.’
I followed her wretched gaze, heard her hoarsened voice.
‘Death.’
‘In what form?’
‘Oh my dear Lord!’
Both hands over her face, peering through her fingers, the candleglow cold as a haloed moon.
Her voice was held in my head and then faded as if it had lain down and died there. Panicked, I lurched to my feet and tried to follow her gaze into the ingle. All I saw there was packed rubblestone fading into the blackness of soot.
Nothing more.
‘Does this mean death for us? Oh please God, make it go away.
One moment, her body was bowed over in anguish upon a sob, and then she was twisting around, squirming upright and stumbling into the ingle where I could hear her fumbling about and then the muffled clang of the bread oven’s door.
When she emerged, her hands were clasped together as if she held a baby bird. Holding it out to Elias, hands shaking.
‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘I beg mercy, Brother. I’ve sinned.’
Her shadow skating on the wall, she opened out her hands and the ring clinked upon the board next the crystal. Goodwife Faldo, scrabbling after it, shoulders still hunched and heaving. Snatching it up and ramming it on her finger.
Losing her coif as she tumbled away across the room and dragged the shutters wide to expose the purpling dusk.
VI
Cousin
IT WAS LIKE to the air after a storm has blown itself out. The candle extinguished, the hall draped in a drabness of brown and grey. I felt weakened in a way I could not have anticipated, and saw faces everywhere, staring in from the unshuttered window and over the threshold where the door had been flung wide.
And one was my mother’s.
Jane Dee stepping through the doorway, dark-gowned, full of a fury seldom seen and so not easily dismissed.
‘
‘Mother—’
‘What have you
A tall woman of sixty years, admirably unbowed by circumstance, but ever dismayed by what I did and pained that my meagre earnings were spent more on books than repairs to the house my late tad had half- built.
However, Jane Dee was never more formidable than when bleeding from another’s wound.
‘Goodwife Faldo’s in bitter distress.’
‘Yes,’ I said tightly. ‘I know.’
‘What have you brought into her house? You tell me,
We were alone. Goodwife Faldo had not returned, and I looked around for Elias, but he too was gone, along with Jack Simm and the shadowed faces at the open door and the window. Some of them melting away upon the arrival of my mother, who, like my father, had been a good Catholic but now mistrusted the miraculous.
