SONNET
‘Tis not the stars that twirl
About our heads to dizzy our minds.
The firmament remains on guard—a diamond-belted Earl;
Laughing at us when we forget our winds
Of a capstan to turn the clockwork in a wooded shire.
Yet must be heaved each ten generations interval.
At World’s End if time expires,
The planet grinds to a whimpering halt.
Seek the cord to set the world a spinning,
Engage with Nature and chorus its song.
Like a traitor the Earth must be put to rack–singing;
A few days past it will all be wrong.
Man is wound up inside his own head,
Heave each four centuries afore we’re all dead.
LETTICE, IN HER FIRST JOB as assistant curator in Trinity, read the newly-discovered sonnet and sucked on her HB pencil. She flicked away her mouse-brown hair and wrinkled her nose at its lavender scent reminding her to find somewhere else to live. Cheap though her room was at her aunt’s, it was turning her into an old lady.
“Move in with me,” her fiancé had said and perhaps she should although the financial expediency was outweighed by his need for heirs while she still wanted a life without. No doubt Bryant was a catch, with connections and charisma but she shied from his progeny issues. She shook her head, sending aromatic hair fragments dancing into the sunlight slanting through the mullioned windows.
The sonnet possessed its own smell too, a hint of camphor, possibly as a preservative. She lifted more brittle papers out of the cardboard box FB1617-4-4a, expecting to see crystals beneath. Nothing but desiccated insect fragments. Reading, classifying, recording and laminating the box contents would take a week. She could do it in a day but she loved luxuriating, soaking up the provenance.
The warning had its own smell but she couldn’t decide if it was of red herring or... She replaced the papers in the box, except the sonnet, which she placed in a plastic zip bag ready to photograph. She noticed a green smudge on her white nitrile gloves. Sniffed. Thyme, she was sure of it being a connoisseur of endless bedsit fry-ups. It brought a smile, as she disposed of the gloves and pulled on a fresh pair before unravelling a brittle ribbon that might have been blue four centuries before. It was tied a around a moleskin notebook nine inches by five and on top was a card: ‘deposit date 12th April in the year of our Lord 1617 Entrusted to the Trinity curator to be read in four-hundred years of the Gregorian calendar or equivalent.’
She’d laughed at the time of her assignment at the propensity for numerology in Bacon’s era. No one had opened this box, Dr Alison Chandry had said, as she handed it over. “We knew of the note to open it before now, but those seventeenth-century literati and scientists were all drama queens.”
She placed the card in a zip-bag then readied the document camera to record each page of the notebook as she read them. She sat on a padded lab stool, stretched out her arms and exercised her neck to begin reading. She noted that the document was unattributed but was in the same box as the sonnet, allegedly penned by Sir Francis Bacon. She turned the front cover and a spider crawled at her. She gasped and stood, her stool falling, clattering on the floor. With her hand to her mouth, although she never understood this instinctive gesture, she recalled stories of black widows biting the unwary. With relief she saw it was a desiccated sprig. Her heart calmed and she waved back a concerned archivist approaching from the nineteenth-century stack. Although she was certain it was vegetable, her nose approached it with caution. Ah, the thyme she detected earlier.
She turned her attention to the text. As was his habit it was narrated in Latin, except for dialogue. She translated as she recorded.
APRIL 4TH 1617, THE COUNTY OF SOMERSET, ENGLAND
The long grass and bronzed bracken tug at my boots as I chase Blizten. The white terrier is too small to see in the wild field but the scientist in me smiles in admiration of its path winding through the ripples. Ah, the meandering has ceased. I should attach a lead before I lose the dog. I’d miss it terribly in these trying times. I rummage in my satchel for string as I catch up.
“Blitzen, you mangy cur, leave that maggoty pheasant to rot.” I pinch my nose at the earthy aroma, my eyes darting around seeking the nest. The magical April early-morning sunlight offers a contrasting delight to Nature’s struggle on the ground. No doubt a fox had devoured the eggs then was disturbed when it attacked this bird.
“There,” I say as I lean forward to tie a cord around the dog’s collar then stroking its wiry, chalk-white hair while we engage watery eyes. “Sorry to do this old chap but I hear the mournful bleats of sheep and I’m not wanting Ned Hobb coming after us with a pitchfork, again.”
I shiver in the misty, morning air. “This is it, Blitzen. There’s nothing like Somerset in springtime. I wonder why Napier’s daughter invited us to her home here, eh? Want us to check out his arithmetic? Hah, he’s the number genius of the century while I be a mere wordsmith, a servant of Parliament and the King.”
I fumble in my satchel for my ceramic bottle, uncork it with my teeth and take a swill of the weak cider with infused cloves. The dog implores with its doe-like eyes so I allow it a slurp. No sooner had I re-buckled the satchel when Blitzen pulls at the lead.
“Ah, yes, the country is splendid here and you want to explore yonder Ops Wood for its rabbits. Steady though, don’t drag me through nettles.”
Clearly, the hound holds no fear of the spiky thistles and stinging nettles that sends fierce tingles into my naked fingers. My cream linen trousers are tucked into scarred but dependable over-the-knee leather boots bought from the cobblers next to my Gray’s Inn residence. I need to return on Tuesday in time for Parliament but in the meantime I smile at the chalky cumulus scudding across the blue sky. Anne Napier told me, with a wink, to look out for the end of the world. At my own gatherings it is I who create riddles, so it pleases me to be tested.
I drop my eyes while more tightly gripping the lead. Ops Wood is ahead, only two-hundred yards away. Impenetrable to anyone without the keenest cutlass, the copse of ancient oaks and beeches crowds the summit of a low hill. Dogs, though, would not hesitate an incursion. Against the undisciplined canine force I have to yank the lead but worry over its efficacy under such duress. I’m not suitably dressed for a run, especially in oversized boots more fitting a pirate like Walter Raleigh, than for Parliament’s Attorney General.
I stumble along as if I’m a tumbrel being pulled through the field. Blitzen is on a nose-inspired mission and I, as his master, can do nothing but tag along. I gasp for breath and yell, “Enough, cur.”
As luck or scent would have it, the onward rush halts. The pet noses around in the grass between two trees and cocks a leg at one. No sign of breathlessness unlike the nobleman whose breath soughs out as if I’m twenty years older than the fifty-six I’ve left behind.
“What have you there, Blitzen?
A short bark precedes a growl of contented worrying. He finds a scent if his nose uplifting is a truthful indication. The dog sets off to the right alongside the trees. This leads us to circumnavigate the copse in an anticlockwise direction. Thankfully, the absence of walls and hedgerows around the wood proffers me relief from the prospect of undignified scrambling. Clouds gather but I don’t fear getting wet, nor being late for dinner even though we would be chided. In fact, my spirits rise into exuberance at this exercise as if returning to childhood antics. I turn my good ear to potential noises within the wood but instead hear sheep bleating without—a mile away. After an estimated hour of rambling, urging and contemplating both Nature and Parliamentary business to come, we reach a shoulder-high sandstone milestone. Blitzen noses in the undergrowth leaving me to interpret the artifice.
Moss hides much of its pinkness and ivy had crawled over indistinct lettering. I pull away the strands, revealing an inscription. “Would you believe this, Blitzen? We’re at World’s End.”
A canine whimpering answers me. The dog has a cord between its teeth leading from within the wood. Growls of a mock fight escape the hound as it pulls and works at the cord. It’s head going from side to side as if grappling a viper. I slacken the lead and remove my hat along with my black, day wig to facilitate bending down to inspect the rope. It was no thicker than my finger, black and properly braided. In moments the dog is drawn between the trees and into the maw of the copse.
“Curses, Blitzen. Let go the serpent and come back.” The dog fails to answer, no doubt because its jaws are firmly clenched. It’s quarry, new game, takes it into the unknown.
With my curled wig replaced I wait a while in case the animal returns without the need for forced entry into the wild wood. Has Blitzen been taken like a fish on a line? More like the monkey who wouldn’t let go the banana in a glass jar.
I see that with luck I can squeeze in between the trunks of the nearest two trees. If only I’d brought an axe, but I don’t want to spend another hour finding the nearest farm for one. I’m going to meet lacerating brambles, and possibly wild boar, but I bear a responsibility to rescue the hound. I gulp then edge in sideways but stop at a Scottish female voice behind.
“Sir, what ye are about to enter might be hazardous yet my father implores ye to do so.”
Anne, daughter of John Napier. I’ve hardly seen her in person since arriving at her home a few days ago. A red neckerchief blends with her wild, crimson hair flying in the wind. Probably in her thirties judging by the few silver fronds in her hair and crows-feet laughing in her now-smiling face. A delightful visage marred only by eyebrows meeting in the middle. Her hazelnut-brown velvet dress matches eyes that flash, not to admonish but implore.
“My father needed to do this task himself but he is ill with the gout in all his joints.”
Many of my friends are of this condition. I place my hand on her shoulder. “What is this mission although I see it might have something to do with this marker stone?”
She walks to it and caresses its rough surface with her elegant, long fingers. “Aye, this was visited four-hundred years ago this week... Sir, I see you smile at such unlikely accuracy but my father—”
“You are talking about the father of logarithms and a true exponent of the precision brought about by the use of the decimal point. So, I am not surprised at such accuracy, but why—”
She faces the trees. “Why this auld stone, this wood and why is it dangerous? Well, my father has studied the Sibylline Oracles.”
“So has every well-educated person engaged in classical Greece. Ah, yes I read his pamphlet predicting the end of the world in 1688. I’d worry, but that is seventy-seven years away.”
She turns to face me. “It’s mair complicated. He discovered that the apocalypse could be avoided if the device is wound up every four-hundred years. It has been too, by other learned scientists, engineers, astrologers—”
“Why me?”
She looked down. “I argued just that, Sir. Ye have the gift and the ken to know the else of it, and there might be—”
“Danger?” I dimwittedly laugh. “Not in this lonely, beautiful place.” I place my hands on the upright stone monolith. “You said earlier this is at least four centuries old. So if we...” He tried to turn it, but it stayed fast.
“Nae, Sir Francis, this stone marks only this wee entrance into the wood.” She waves a thin arm at the gap between the trees. “The remarkable thing is—”
“The gap is older than the trees.”
“Aye,” she says, “perhaps there are forces here beyond our ken. Ye are going in though?”
I could just call again to Blitzen. The dog would exit eventually, surely? I’ve only met John Napier once and that was at Grays Inn when the mathematician talked of his decimal tables. I expressed an interest and mentioned his work in favourable terms to the Scots King James. Such a tenuous link hardly ties us to a dangerous venture and yet this situation is intriguing. I step over a low shrub, failing to avoid brushing my hand on a prickly thistle.
“How appropriate, Miss Napier, for me to be injured on the symbol of your mother country.”
“A good omen, Sir Francis.”
“Hrrmph. If you see or hear nothing of me when the church bells ring noon, send for Sir Henry at Frome. He’ll gather his guardsmen and... I see you smiling. Fair enough, with God’s grace and your charms willing, it won’t come to that. Here I go.”
The temperature drops within a few steps into the dark wood. Roots and rotting timber threaten to ensnare but there is a path, of sorts. At least the absence of trees directly in front means I don’t need to take diversions although holly and other dark-tolerant undergrowth and the dense overhanging canopy reduce visibility to mere yards. My nose pinches at the sour aroma of rotting fungi. Spiders’ webs and ivy tendrils aim themselves at my face. Maybe there’s evil here. Certainly, my stomach tightens as a flurry of beech leaves fall just as I look up. My neck hairs prickle. Perhaps it would be wiser to retreat. I’d better call my hound.
“Blitzen, announce your position at once.”
The sometimes loyal dog, barks as if desperate, from directly ahead. Emboldened, I battle onwards even though I’m assaulted as if by verdant, pirate grappling-hooks, testing my determination.
Blitzen’s woof is less frantic, more welcoming as he sees me. I greet him in a small clearing, the mutt’s tail a blur of delight. A shaft of sunlight illuminates the white terrier and the pale yellow grass in which it worries.
I brush leaves off sleeves and remove my wide-brimmed hat wishing Roberts the milliner would permit a tidier version. A sprig of wild thyme tumbles from my sleeve. I retrieve it, admire its fragrance and stick it in a pocket for luck.
I stroke the hound. “What have you there?”
Its teeth grips the same black cord. Not wishing another incident of the dog being yanked into the unknown, I grab hold of the plaited rope a few inches in front of Blitzen’s nose and lift it. To my surprise it’s more like a serpent than a forgotten piece of agricultural twine. It wriggles. The shock of it makes me let it go and I fall backwards into a blackthorn bush.
“For the Lord’s sake, Blitzen, look what your playfulness has done. Me, the Attorney General and the King’s ear, one of the Nation’s most dignified citizens, ensnared and savaged by a bush.”
The dog yaps and ignoring its hapless master, returns to worrying its prey.
Grumbling at my misfortune and cursing at the blood spots on my fine, third best, blue robes, I ease out of the thorns. I find a stick to poke at the rope. Interesting to see strands of silver and copper woven into its braiding. It can’t be alive and I spurn numinous attributes. Ah, didn’t my friend, William Gilbert demonstrate that silver conducts electricity? But surely not out here without his laboratory dynamo unless the Earth itself possesses such energy. More likely Blitzen had bitten into the rope and yanked it. My desire to help Napier and his daughter now waned and yet I shouldn’t allow a few scratches deter me.
I grasp the rope. Is that the smell of blood? This time it lacks animation so I lift it to waist height, grass tugging at it but falling away. The trees are but three yards in front and the line parts the long grass to only halfway until I pull at it. Encouraged by my dog, I stride forward between trees, pulling the rope while astride it. The rope becomes thicker by unseen layers until it’s as thick as my wrist. Now there’s no gap big enough for my corpulence to squeeze through but I see an artificial structure among the tree trunks. Head height and cylindrical, as if a beech had been truncated and painted silver. A capstan with a few winds of the rope.
Blitzen emits a growl and looks back the way we came. I peer and see a shadow flit between oaks. “Is that you, Ned?”
The dog grumbles and whines as if composing a canine cantata, climaxing with a bark. The apparition thinks better of approaching and is gone.
“Well done, me lad. Never liked him, always a chill when he’s close. Keep an eye and nose open for me.”
I attend again to the rope trying to decide to pull. I exchange glances with my dog, whose eyes say, ‘I dare you.’
“That’s easy for you to say, Blitzen, you have all the exuberance of youth and frivolity without the burden of responsibility. Napier relayed to his daughter that I’m to do something in this wood to prevent the world from its demise. Is this it? To heave like a matelot on this rope? If so, my wagging guardian, it’s just as well my stomach is the last known address of many a pie.”
With a sense of doom, mixed with a tinge of excitement, I gently tug on the rope. It lifts off the leafy floor but not by much and the capstan remains unmoving.
“A mightier effort is required, Blitzen, a pity we cannot employ the energy in your tail. Here we go.”
Ensuring my London-cobbled heels are truly dug into the mud, I tense my grip so much, knuckles whiten. I lean back and although these biceps are used to nothing more trying than wielding a quill, I heave ho. To my delight the rope jerks up off the forest floor and tightens. This time the capstan groans as a devilish preface to a quarter-turn. I’m hauled forward against the nearest tree so I let go and tumble in ignominy to the ground.
I remain prone to gather my breath. “By the Lord, Blitzen, I’m sure the serpent became alive for a moment there, and the air is alive. Look at all the insects and motes buzzing and floating about our heads.”
The dog whimpers and curls up.
“Blitzen, you’re shaking, come here, boy, there’s nothing to be frightened of. See those midges depart.” They appear as a dark cloud, becoming fainter until evaporating to nothingness.
Leaves, brown from last autumn, agitate on the ground, like flotsam on a river. They transform from shrivelled paper to glossy green. My neck hairs rise in accord. Intermittent sunlight flickers and the ground agitates as if alive. The April grass shrinks as if Nature itself is in reverse. I admit to being bemused more than concerned, until Blitzen howls.
He’d uncurled, nose in the air with his eyes wide, rolling.
“Poor creature, you’re terrified.” I lift him, give the trembling creature a hug and only then notice his body shrinking, as if it too is becoming younger.
I laugh nervously at the thought that the turn of the capstan has somehow sent time running backwards, after all I’d not changed. Then would I notice a few seasons short? Leaves and dogs would.
“We’d better get back to Miss Napier. See if this wondrous effect is hallucination or real.” I turn but cannot see the way we’d arrived. “Looks like I’ll need a guide dog, my friend.”
I scratch Blitzen under its chin to comfort the hound. It whimpers in gratitude and after licking his master’s hand, scrabbles to get down. I keep hold of the lead, worrying enough about the tremulous goings on around, and the poor animal remains somewhat out of focus. “Come on, lad, find the way we came in.”
Blitzen noses ahead and only then could I see the gap in the trees from which we’d entered. Close up, the trees and lichens agitate as if the Easter earthquake in 1580 has returned. My desk at Grays Inn had trembled and dust precipitated from the ceiling.
Man and dog emerge from the wood, and everywhere is a fog, green mist, swirling with shafts of crepuscular rays dancing from the sun. Magical motes in the air as would be expected from an earthquake.
Blitzen pulls at its lead into the long grass and yelps. Not its usual happy note but a querulous yap. There, near the marker stone, lay Anne trembling yet smiling when the dog licks at her face. Her lips make words but I have to kneel, awkward in creaking boots, to put my good ear close enough.
“Ye didna pull hard enoo... gae back... pull harder.”
Her hair is darker, fewer greys than before. I examine her face. It shimmers as if tiny insects live in her skin. Like my dog, which is now lying down, quivering, shrinking. Is all of Nature transforming, their parts growing backwards?
“Anne, have I performed evil? And why am I exempt from this curse?”
“Ye are the instigator... a proxy for mae father... He’s dying... today... Please go.”
“Of course.” John Napier dying today? How would anyone know that, this far from Edinburgh. Unless it was preordained. He was much interested in the cults, Nostradamus and the Sibylline Oracles. “Are you coming, Blitzen?”
No reaction, so I retrieve the cider once more and allow a few drops onto both sets of lips before draining a few more into my own.
The dog remains curled up as if asleep. All around me is out of focus, except myself. I leave Blitzen with Anne, similarly coiled with eyes shut, and turn to find again the rope but suppose I do naught? Time cannot be in reverse for the sun continues in its stubborn route towards a midday zenith. The few fair-weather clouds drift in no hurry from the west, languidly changing as they are inclined to, some shrink others billow.
I shoulder through the trees, my vision clouded by a green, swirling mist. Anne and Blitzen aren’t going backwards either, just the composition of their bodies. Perhaps their atoms are becoming younger, but why is that a problem? I’d be delighted for my body of fifty-six years to replenish itself. Not that my lived-in wrinkles and distinguished beard and eyebrows aren’t admirable, but the inner self would welcome rejuvenation. Ah, but how would those atoms going back in time, know when to stop? Would life’s atoms return to their ancient origins, back to Adam and Eve’s times? If they didn’t stop there they’d reverse themselves into non-existence. The world would turn to dust. Except for me!
I nibble on a piece of hard cheese while looking back through the trees, indistinct with the quivering of their surfaces. I see a flash of Anne’s red shawl. She and Blitzen are quietly supine, suffering as their atoms become—well, there exists a word for aging but not to my knowledge for the opposite. I place my hand, palm flat on the nearest tree. I jerk it away when ants crawl through my fingers... but none are there. Is this what my dog and Anne experience? Not just on their skin but inside? I’m eager to know if this is a local effect or if the entire world is so afflicted. However, the only certainty is the plight of Anne and Blitzen. What would Anne say if she could? I might ask, ‘Miss Napier, are you more content with your body becoming younger, or not?’
She might reply, ‘Can ye not see, Sir, I am trembling both physically and in fear?’
I might respond with, ‘Wouldn’t you think the agitation is a temporary effect?’
‘Indeed I do, Sir, and I am in mortal fear of the end point. Go, Sir Francis, we implore!’
I must rectify the clockwork capstan.
It’s slower without Blitzen. The lovable cur is always in a hurry. Me too, but my navigation is uncertain in this vibrant, changing arboreal world. Any chance of seeing my footprints evaporates with each second. The air is so dense with emerald leaves, rainbow feathers and motes I have to hold my handkerchief to my mouth. Every aerial fragment knows not its destination, up, down in a vortex but mainly into my face.
Through the animated gloom, I see a shaft of sunlight. Finally, I am in the small glade and although the grass here has its own dance, the rope is revealed with remarkable definition. Beyond it stand the trees through which leads to the capstan. While conscious of the need for expediency I take a moment to toe the silver-braided snake.
I stoop but the rope tingles in my hands. Does it anticipate my actions, an excitement to outweigh my fear? I must progress, grit my teeth, lift the beast to waist height then hand over hand keep it taught through to the trees and beyond. I see the capstan. It glistens, silvery and proud, waiting four centuries for some brave soul to act absurdly like a sailor weighing the world instead of an anchor.
I hesitate still because the situation is double-edged. Damned if I don’t and likely damned if I do. The rope twitches as if urging me on but is it for the sake of Somerset, the planet, or for whatever bizarre entity is the capstan? I have no choice.
As before, I plant my heels in the soft earth, lift my eyes to the heavens and mutter a supplication.
“Please Lord, guide my hand.” In a dark flash, I see Hobb again. He has the name of the Devil. He’s trying to stop me.
I heave.
It sings.
A cloud of harmonics, like the combined voices of Kings and all the choral societies attempt the entire portfolio of Monteverdi’s madrigals at once. It passes through me and past into the trees and beyond leaving me trembling. Fear, yes, and exhilaration manifests in pins and needles starting in my fingers, toes and spreading.
The capstan is spinning, the rope winding around it. Slowly at first, the rope sliding but it accelerates and in fear of my hands being set on fire I release it. I look for Hobb, but only see a blur heading for me. I step out of its way but fall, as is my wont of late.
By the time I elbow then knee myself upright, all is quiet. Once again the landscape has clarity, if only it could be matched by my brain. Hobb disintegrates into a heap of dust then blows away. Through a new gap in the trees I stagger to the capstan in time to witness the rope wound tight. I hold a hand over the cylinder but my fingers are repelled as a bolt at the wrong end of Gilbert’s lodestones.
I hear yapping. Thank you Lord for sparing my hound.
Blitzen finds me before I reach him. Now in focus but I worry he’ll want revenge on the capstan, cock a leg, with awful consequences. Instead, he runs two close orbits around me and heads back towards Anne. I’m eager to see if she’s returned to now, or whether her body merely stopped retrograding to a younger age. This isn’t possible to tell from conversation with a spritely terrier with such a limiting vocabulary. I reach the edge of the wood and to my astonishment find the meadow peppered with unseasonal scarlet poppies, buttercups and there, that same thyme I found in the wood, but now in a riot of purple blossom and with a heady aroma. I salivate with the associated culinary scents of sage, onion and roasts.
I find Anne, supine in the long grass. I fear my hesitancy has killed her but she is merely exhausted. Her smile is weak but genuine.
“Sir, ye were in time. I am still here yet changed. See my brow?” She unnecessarily points at her face and I see two separated red eyebrows.
“Why that is marvellous! And your grey hair—I beg your pardon, but your hair is now a vibrant auburn colour. Your body has become younger? Is that... good?”
“I wish I knew. Any mair of the turning back might’ve kuld me, Sir. Aur bodies are meant to mature, develop—ma faither says—who knows the damage the backing makes?”
It looks as if her skin and hair has reversed ten or more years. What if I stayed my hand another hour. Would she merely be a stain on the grass? And what of others? I look towards the town. Smoke languidly finds its height. Am I the oldest now?
“Tell me, Anne, what did your father intend after pulling on the rope? How did he plan to inform the future capstan operator in four centuries time?”
“He said ye’d ken what to do, being that your Cambridge will surely last that laing?”
I smile at Napier and his wily ways but then I see the field changing, aging. The colours are turning to mud, withering in front of me. My eyes whip back to Anne and she, too, is a wilting flower. I kneel besides her, but she is going. A flash of white beyond her is revealed as Blitzen, quivering, breathing his last. I should have pulled harder the first time and now possess an imperative to see this doesn’t happen again.
LETTICE SHOOK HER HEAD in mock despair. This must have been a fine fantasy for Bacon to conjure to amuse at his soirees.
She checked a few data points:
Her mobile. April 3rd 2017
John Napier: yes, died April 4th 1617 and he’d fathered at least eleven children.
Ops Wood existed and was near a small town, Trudocsill. A coincidence that Ops was a fertility, renewal goddess?
Francis Bacon, if he was the author of the article, was a Member of Parliament for Taunton in 1617, often travelled to Parliament and stayed at Grays Inn. A contemporary of William Gilbert, the father of electricity and magnetism.
Now for the biggee. She searched for unexplained deaths in 1617. Had pulling the rope really killed? She exhaled a long breath after holding it in while she wik’d and googled and found nothing unusual planet-wide. Trodocsill wasn’t so fortunate. It’d become a ghost village overnight. She scrabbled around to find the sparse online parish records for the village and found nothing after 1617. At least the deaths were confined to that small area. Perhaps the diffusion rate of the effect was too slow—half a mile a minute or less.
Everything else checked except the capstan. She’d have to go look in person. Ground truthing.
Goose pimples prickled her arms and up the back of her neck as Lettice played with the notion of seeing if there was such a thing in that wood. She’d try and take Bryant. His idea of a field trip was going to watch the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket.
“NO!”
“Come on, Bryant, we could both use some fresh air and you’re due a day off from entering data all day.”
He poked his vermicelli-laden fork in her direction, a red string of it fell to regroup on his plate. “I’m working my way up in the company. I daren’t take time off. They might replace me.”
She refilled his glass of Merlot. “I’ll go on my own then. All alone, in a strange field, weird wood, the site of disaster exactly four-hundred-years ago and about to be re-enacted tomorrow. It’s risky because I’m pretty, and you think vulnerable, but I’ll be all right.”
BRYANT GRUMBLED AGAIN when they had to park his precious Carrera in a lay-by off the A359. “It’s too quiet, anyone could steal it without being seen.”
Another grump when they had to force open a rusty mesh gate. “Look, it says Ministry of Defence Firing Range. Keep Out.”
Lettice smiled as she squeezed through the gap knowing he’d follow. It looked more like a deserted Second World War airfield with cracked concrete allowing Nature to reinvade than an abandoned seventeenth-century village. However, there were lines of old brick that might have been walls and the remains of a well. She looked down to admire her new Timberland boots, blue jeans and North Face jacket then over to Bryant. She stifled a laugh at his black beanie and his shiny, brown brogues were now grey, his black leather jacket, muddy but at least his jeans met her approval.
He worried at a tear on his sleeve from the gate. “I thought ghost towns only existed in Westerns. What if the army start shelling?”
“They won’t. You saw the gate, no one’s been here for decades. They must know there’s something unusual in Ops Wood.”
Bryant took the lead and headed for the wooded knoll to the south. “Ops doesn’t stand for the Goddess of Renewal, but for Military Operations. Keep a look out for incoming.”
“You might be right, Bryant. It could all be a metaphor. The rope pulling, you know?”
“Exactly, everyone must try harder in life, but now we’re here...”
Lettice stumbled over a crumbling lump of concrete, taking care not to impale herself on a rusty wire protruding from it like an aerial tuning her into the past.
“Careful, honey,” Bryant said as he helped her regain her balance.
“Wow, a gentleman. Have the seventeenth century manners got to you? No, don’t answer, I want to be positive.”
She tried to picture the houses as they were, her mind building up from the foundations, then saw a darker shape near a chimney remains. Hobb?
“Do you think that devil, Hobb was really killed when Bacon was here?”
Bryant harrumphed. “You can’t kill a bogeyman.”
She held his hand as they waded through grass and brambles, around hazel and silver birch, towards the denser, taller trees at the top of the low hill. An old red brick wall met them at shoulder height. She looked back. No one.
The wall was inhabited by ivy and there were several places where fallen trees or living roots had part-demolished the structure allowing easy incursion.
“Bryant, I want to do what Bacon did, and walk around to find that marker.”
He’d found an old sickle and led the way, trail-blazing through the thistles and arboreal obstacles like a jungle explorer. “Whoa, here it is, Lett. Now how does that affect our assumptions that this is complete tosh?”
Her stomach knotted as she picked at moss and pulled ground ivy off the sandstone plinth. Shoulder height and she could see it used to be a square cylinder about forty centimetres wide, but the corners had eroded so much it was nearly round. She could make out letters: W-RL-S END and what might have been an arrow pointing into the wood.
Although pleased that verification of Bacon’s story was here her nerves bunched up so much she could taste bile. Her legs gave way and she leaned on the stone, hoping it wouldn’t topple after so many centuries.
“Bryant, this could mean the whole story isn’t a story but an instruction.”
He waved his sickle at a nuisance bramble. “Surely you don’t think you were fated to receive the unique bit of programming to save the world?”
“No. Yes, I don’t know.” A tear escaped, surprisingly warm on her cheek.
He put his arm around her shoulders and dried her face with his sleeve. “If I had his manners, I’d have carried a handkerchief.”
“Thanks. We’d better go in. Yes?”
Every step Lettice took threatened to twist her ankle and claw at her face but as they gained access, the darkness meant less undergrowth and easier going. Even so, she did trip over a tree root and found herself gazing up at a blue sky through the still leafless twigs of the tree canopy. Her nose twitched at the earthy, but not unpleasant aroma from fungi.
Scrabbling in among rotting wood and leaves her hand found a snake.
“Bryant, I found it! The rope.”
He helped her up and frowned at the cord. “Better not lift it up in case there’s a malfunction. I thought the old chap said the capstan wound it up?”
She toed it. “He did. Presumably, the rope worked its way out over the last four-hundred years. Hey, here’s some more of that herb, thyme. I’ll take some for dinner.”
They followed the rope through the natural, wild wood, noting the absence of fauna, not even squirrels or birds. After ten minutes she saw a glint of silver through the trees. Keen to reach it she took more chances in her steps but couldn’t run for the way underfoot was either soft with leaves and compost or snared with young trees and fallen branches.
She stood by Bryant and examined the intriguing artefact wondering if they had the courage to pull at the rope or possessed the right to do so.
“Lett, we could just walk away. What could possibly go wrong? All we know, if Bacon was right, is that it was disastrous to pull it a little.”
She found herself nodding at that truth. She knelt by the silver-braided rope and hovered her hand over it. “A definite tingling and my hair is lifting, look.”
He smiled at her light brown hair and just then noticed she’d a few purple highlights—they were rising higher than the others. He kept his black beanie firmly jammed on. “Just static.”
She thought aloud. “He was sure, as was Napier—and he was clever enough to invent logarithms—that unless this rope was pulled the world would end, though exactly how they didn’t or couldn’t say.
“Bryant, suppose we don’t pull it and there were more disasters, or the world’s magnetic field fizzled out, or something? Although it hardly seems big enough...”
He peered at it. “Maybe there’s gears inside, deep down. Turbo-assisted. It might have been storing energy for those four centuries, accumulated from the planet or atmosphere. We could make a fort—”
“No, don’t you dare see this as a money-making opportunity. The military would get hold—hang on, they’re already here. D’you think they know about this?”
He looked around and up in the trees. “If they did, do you think they’d have let us near it? I see no cams or wires. The only tracks are ours. I’ll back off from trying to sell it, if only ‘cos the M.O.D. might arrest and vanish us like that village.”
Lettice examined his face and saw no crafty smile. Was that a possibility then? Of course it was. She returned her gaze to the rope. “We have to do it, don’t we? Napier, then Bacon went to considerable trouble to make sure someone found his notes. How clever to realize the archive of his Cambridge alma mater would survive until today and that the fastidiousness of the system would ensure a custodian of the library would be here. What do you think?”
He scratched his hat. “I think that unless I tied you up, you’re going to pull it, no matter what I say.”
She laughed then hands on hips turned a steady look at him. “If it turns out all right, how do we make sure someone else does so in 2417? Perhaps there’s an error margin. I know, I’ll post a permanent note at Trinity to look in the Bacon archive for FB1617-4-4a2 /2017-4-8. I’ll replace his thyme with this new one—it might be significant or lucky. Another note with my solicitor to be passed down to my descendents. Umm, Bryant, perhaps we should have kids.”
SHE DIDN’T WAIT to see his reaction, and worked her hands under the silvered rope. Not easy as it was partly buried and grown over. “Help me lift it and when I count to three—”
They lifted the rope gently just off the ground and let it travel through their hands to twenty metres from the capstan, and faced it.
Lettice gulped, embarrassed at finding herself trembling with excitement. She hoped it wasn’t important that they hadn’t taken into account leap years since 1617. Committed, she couldn’t stop when the shadow of Hobb fell across the rope.
“One...two...PULL!”
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