The House on the Strand (6 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

THERE HAD BEEN no perceptible transition. I had passed from one world to the other instantaneously, without the physical side-effects of yesterday. The only difficulty was mental readjustment, requiring an almost intolerable degree of concentration. Luckily the vicar preceded me up the aisle, chatting as we went, and if there was anything strange in my expression he was too polite to comment.

"We get a fair number of visitors in the summer," he said, "people staying at Par, or they come over from Fowey. But you must be an enthusiast, hanging about the churchyard in the rain." I made a supreme effort to pull myself together. "In point of fact," I said, surprised to find that I could even speak, "it was not really the church itself or the graves that interested me. Someone told me there had been a Priory here in former days."

"Ah, yes, the Priory," he said. "That's been gone a long time, no trace of it left, unfortunately. The buildings all fell in after the dissolution of the monasteries in 1538. Some say the site was where Newhouse Farm is now, just below us in the valley, and others that it occupied the present churchyard itself south of the porch, but nobody really knows."

He led me to the north transept and showed me the tombstone of the last Prior, who had been buried before the altar in 1538, and pointed out the pulpit and some pew-ends, and all that was left of the original rood screen. Nothing of what I observed bore any resemblance to the small church I had so lately seen, with the grille in the wall dividing it from the Priory chapel; nor, as I stood here now beside the vicar, could I reconstruct from memory anything of an older transept, an older aisle.

"Everything's changed," I said.

"Changed?" he repeated, puzzled. "Oh, no doubt. The church was largely restored in 1880, possibly not altogether successfully. Are you disappointed?"

"No," I assured him hastily, "not at all. It's only that... Well, as I was saying, my interest goes back to very early days, long before the dissolution of the monasteries."

"I understand." He smiled in sympathy. "I've often wondered myself what it all looked like in former times, with the Priory close by. It was a French house, you know, attached to the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Sergius and Bacchus in Angers, and I believe most of the monks were French. I wish I could tell you more about it, but I've only been here a few years, and I'm afrald I'm no historian."

"Neither am I," I told him, and we retraced our steps towards the porch.

"Do you know anything", I asked, "about the lords of the manor in early times?"

He paused to switch off the lights. "Only what I have read in the Parochial History," he sald. "The manor is mentioned in Domesday as Tiwardrai—the House on the Strand—and it belonged to the great family of Cardinham until the last heiress Isolda sold it to the Champernounes, in the thirteenth century, and when they died out it passed to other hands."

"Isolda?"

"Yes, Isolda de Cardinham. She married someone called William Ferrers of Bere in Devon, but I'm afraid I don't remember the details. You would find out more about it in the Saint Austell public library than from me. He smiled again, and we passed through the door to the churchyard. Are you staying in the neighbourhood or passing through?" he asked.

"Staying. Professor Lane has lent me his house for the summer."

"Kilmarth? I know it, of course, but I've never been inside. I don't think Professor Lane gets down very often, and he doesn't come to church."

"No," I replied, "probably not."

"Well," he said, as we parted at the gate, "if you feel like coming, either to a service or just to wander around, it will be nice to see you."

We shook hands, and I walked up the road to where I had parked the car. I wondered whether I had been impossibly rude. I had not even thanked him for his courtesy, or introduced myself. Doubtless he considered me just another summer visitor, more boorish than usual, and a crank into the bargain. I got into the car, lit a cigarette, and sat there to collect my thoughts. The fact that there had been no physical reaction to the drug whatsoever was an astonishing relief. Not a suspicion of dizziness or nausea, and my limbs did not ache as they had done the day before, nor was I sweating.

I wound down the car window and looked up the street, then back again to the church. None of it fitted. The green where the people had so lately crowded must have covered all the present area, and beyond it too, where the modern road turned uphill. The Priory yard, where the bishop's equipage nearly came to grief would have been in that hollow below the gents hairdresser, boundering the east wall of the churchyard, and the Priory itself according to one theory mentioned by the vicar, filled the entire space that the southern portion of the churchyard held today. I closed my eyes. I saw the entrance, the quadrangle, the long narrow building forming kitchens and refectory, monks dormitory, chapter-house, where the reception had been held, and the Prior's chamber above. Then I opened them again, but the pieces did not fit, and the church tower threw my jigsaw puzzle out of balance. It was no good—nothing tallied save the lie of the land.

I threw away my cigarette, started the car, and took the road past the church. A curious feeling of elation came to me as I swept downhill past the valley stream, and so to the low-lying, straggling shops of Par. Not ten minutes since the whole of this had been under water, the sloping Priory lands lapped by the sea. Sand-banks had bordered the wide sweep of the estuary where those bungalows stood now, and houses and shops were all blue channel with a running tide. I stopped the car by the chemists and bought some tooth-paste, the feeling of elation increasing as the girl wrapped it up. It seemed to me that she was without substance, the shop as well, and the two other people standing there, and I felt myself smiling furtively because of this, with an urge to say, You none of you exist. All this is under water.

I stood outside the shop, and it had stopped raining. The heavy pall that had been overhead all day had broken at last into a patchwork sky, squares of blue alternating with wisps of smoky cloud. Too soon to go back home. Too early to ring Magnus. One thing I had proved, if nothing else: this time there had been no telepathy between us. He might have had some intuition of my movements the preceding afternoon, but not today. The laboratory in Kilmarth was not a bogey-hole conjuring up ghosts, any more than the porch in Saint Andrew's church had been filled with phantoms. Magnus must be right in his assumption that some primary chemical process was reversible, the drug inducing this change; and conditions were such that the senses, reacting to the situation as a secondary effect, swung into action, capturing the past. I had not awakened from some nostalgic dream when the vicar tapped me on the shoulder, but had passed from one living reality to another. Could time be all-dimensional—yesterday, today, tomorrow running concurrently in ceaseless repetition? Perhaps it needed only a change of ingredient, a different enzyme, to show the future, myself a bald-headed buffer in New York with the boys grown-up and married, and Vita dead. The thought was disconcerting. I would rather concern myself with the Champernounes, the Carminowes, and Isolda. No telepathic communication here: Magnus had mentioned none of them, but the vicar had, and only after I had seen them as living persons. Then I decided what to do: I would drive to Saint Austell and see if there was some volume in the public library that would give proof of their identity.

The library was perched above the town, and I parked the car and went inside. The girl at the desk was helpful. She advised me to go upstairs to the reference library, and search for pedigrees in a book called The Visitations of Cornwall.

I took the fat volume from the shelves and settled myse]f at one of the tables. First glance in alphabetical order was disappointing. No Bodrugans and no Champernounes. No Carminowes either. And no Cardinhams. I turned to the beginning once again, and then, with quickening interest, realised that I must have muddled the pages the first time, for I came upon the Carminowes of Carminowe. I let my eye travel down the page, and there Sir John was, married to a Joanna into the bargain—he must have found the similarity of name of wife and mistress confusing. He had a great brood of children, and one of his grandsons, Miles, had inherited Boconnoc. Bococcoc... Bockenod... a change in the spelling, but this was my Sir John without a doubt.

On the succeeding page was his elder brother Sir Oliver Carminowe. By his first wife he had had several children. I glanced along the line and found Isould his second wife, daughter of one Reynold Ferrers of Bere in Devon, and below, at the bottom of the page, her daughters, Joanna and Margaret. I'd got her—not the vicar's Devon heiress, Isolda Cardinham, but a descendant.

I pushed the heavy volume aside, and found myself smiling fatuously into the face of a bespectacled man reading the Daily Telegraph, who stared at me suspiciously, then hid his face behind his paper. My lass unparalleled was no figure of the imagination, nor a telepathic process of thought between Magnus and myself. She had lived, though the dates were sketchy: it did not state when she was born or when she died. I put the book back on the shelves and walked downstairs and out of the building, the feeling of elation increased by my discovery. Carminowes, Champernounes, Bodrugans, all dead for six hundred years, yet still alive in my other world of time. I drove away from Saint Austell thinking how much I had accomplished in one afternoon, witnessing a ceremony in a Priory long since crumbled, coupled with Martinmas upon the village green. And all through some wizard's brew concocted by Magnus, leaving no side-effect or aftermath, only a sense of well-being and delight. It was as easy as falling off a cliff. I drove up Polmear hill doing a cool sixty, and it was not until I had turned down the drive to Kilmarth, put away the car and let myself into the house that I thought of the simile again. Falling off a cliff... Was this the side-effect? This sense of exhilaration, that nothing mattered? Yesterday the nausea, the vertigo, because I had broken the rules. Today, moving from one world to another without effort, I was cock-a-hoop.

I went upstairs to the library and dialled the number of Magnus's flat. He answered immediately.

"How was it?" he asked.

"What do you mean, how was it? How was what? It rained all day."

"Fine in London," he replied. "But forget the weather. How was the second trip?"

His certainty that I had made the experiment again irritated me. "What makes you think I took a second trip?"

"One always does."

"Well, you're right, as it happens. I didn't intend to, but I wanted to prove something."

"What did you want to prove?"

"That the experiment was nothing to do with any telepathic communication between us."

"I could have told you that," he said.

"Perhaps. But we had both experimented first in Blue-beard's chamber, which might have had an unconscious influence So... So, I poured the drops into your drinking-flask—forgive me for making myself at home—drove to the church, and swallowed them in the porch. His snort of delight annoyed me even more.

"What's the matter?" I asked. "Don't tell me you did the same."

"Precisely. But not in the porch, dear boy, in the churchyard after dark. The point is, what did you see?"

I told him, winding up with my encounter with the vicar, the visit to the public library, and the absence, or so I had thought, of any side-effects. He listened to my saga without interruption, as he had done the day before, and when I had concluded he told me to hang on, he was going to pour himself a drink, but he reminded me not to do likewise. The thought of his gin and tonic added fuel to my small flame of irritation.

"I think you came out of it all very well," he said, "and you seem to have met the flower of the county, which is more than I have ever done, in that time or this."

"You mean you did not have the same experience?"

"Quite the contrary. No chapter-house or village green for me. I found myself in the monks dormitory, a very different kettle of fish."

"What went on?" I asked.

"Exactly what you might suppose when a bunch of mediaeval Frenchmen got together. Use your imagination."

Now it was my turn to snort. The thought of fastidious Magnus playing peeping Tom amongst that fusty crowd brought my good humour back again.

"You know what I think?" I said. "I think we found what we deserved. I got His Grace the Bishop and the County, awaking in me all the forgotten snob appeal of Stonyhurst, and you got the sexy deviations you have denied yourself for thirty years."

"How do you know I've denied them?"

"I don't. I give you credit for good behaviour."

"Thanks for the compliment. The point is, none of this can be put down to telepathic communication between us. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

"Therefore we saw what we saw through another channel—the horseman, Roger. He was in the chapter-house and on the green with you, and in the dormitory with me. His is the brain that channels the information to us."

"Yes, but why?"

"Why? You don't think we are going to discover that in a couple of trips? You have work to do."

"That's all very well, but it's a bit of a bore having to shadow this chap, or have him shadow me, every time I may decide to make the experiment. I don't find him very sympathetic. Nor do I take to the lady of the manor."

"The lady of the manor?" He paused a moment, I supposed for reflection. "She's possibly the one I saw on my third trip. Auburn-haired, brown eyes, rather a bitch?"

"That sounds like her. Joanna Champernoune," I said. We both laughed, struck by the folly and the fascination of discussing someone who had been dead for centuries as if we had met her at some party in our own time.

"She was arguing about manor lands," he said. "I did not follow it. Incidentally, have you noticed how one gets the sense of the conversation without conscious translation from the mediaeval French they seem to be speaking? That's the link again, between his brain and ours. If we saw it before us in print, old English or Norman-French or Cornish, we shouldn't understand a word."