Standing straight out in front of him, thick and menacing, was a medieval
lance twelve feet long.
THE ARABIC JEW, OR JEWISH Arab, who owned the entire Middle East at the turn of the century passed his early life exactly as had his English forebears for six hundred and fifty years.
At the family estate in southern England he was taught to care for flowers, especially roses. His parents died while he was young and his aunts and uncles moved into the manor to raise him. In due time he would receive his title and become the twenty-ninth Plantagenet Strongbow to bear it, merely one more Duke of Dorset.
For it seemed that destiny had found a resting place among the Strongbows. At one time, thought to be about 1170, one of their line had helped subdue eastern Ireland and been given a title because of it. Since then the family had lapsed into patterns. Confusion had been lost or forgotten. Instead there was repetition and order.
The oldest son in each generation always married on the day he assumed his majority and became the new lord. His wife matched him in wealth and shared his concern for flowers. Children appeared at regular intervals until five or six had been born, more or less equally divided between males and females. By that time the duke and his duchess were thirty, or nearly thirty, and both abruptly died by accident.
The accidents were routinely silly. After drinking an excess of mead late at night they might fall asleep and fall into the fireplace. Or they might doze off in a trout stream and drown in a foot of water.
Following the flight of a butterfly after breakfast, they would wander off a parapet. Or they would absentmindedly swallow a mutton joint whole, causing suffocation. Or a mild sexual diversion such as dressing up in medieval armor would lead to fatal hemorrhaging in the pelvic region.
In any case both husband and wife died at the same time, at about the age of thirty, and it was then the duty of the deceased lord’s younger brothers and sisters to return to the manor to rear their five or six nieces and nephews.
It was a family custom that these younger brothers and sisters never married, but being close in age they had no difficulty resettling in the manor of their childhood and enjoying one another’s company. At the beginning of the Christmas season they gathered together in the large banquet hall for twelve days of festivities that had come to be called the family game, a traditional sport in which the hall was cleared of furniture and opposing teams were formed with the goal of running a satin pillow from one end of the hall to the other.
During the first hour of play each day intensive grappling was permitted. But thereafter a firm grip on the genitals of an opposing player was sufficient to stop the advance of the pillow and bring on a new scrimmage for its possession.
Under these conditions, despite their wealth and genuine concern for flowers, it was unlikely the Dukes of Dorset would ever have distinguished themselves in the world even if they had lived beyond the age of thirty, and in fact none ever did.
From the end of the twelfth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century, successive Plantagenet Strongbows grew up with a sound knowledge of roses and a vague memory of their parents, learned the family game by watching their aunts and uncles, passed into manhood and sired an heir and a new brood of aunts and uncles before succumbing to another silly accident, thereby perpetuating a random family scheme which was their sole contribution to God and man and England.
Until in 1819, the year of Queen Victoria’s birth, a different sort of infant was born in the Dorset manor, different either because of a mutation in genes or because of the terrible disease he suffered at the age of eleven. In any case this slight boy would one day end six hundred and fifty years of placid Strongbow routine by becoming the most awesome explorer his country ever produced.
And coincidently the most scandalous scholar of his era. For whereas other famous theoreticians of the nineteenth century formulated vast, but separate, concepts of the mind and body and society, Strongbow insisted on dealing with all three.
That is, with sex in its entirety.
Not sex as necessity or diversion or in the role of precursor and memory, not even sex as an immediate cause or a vague effect. And certainly not in terms of natural history or inevitable law.
Sex neither as habit nor suggestion but simply sex by itself, unplanned and chaotic and concomitant with nothing, beyond all hope of conspiracy, previously indistinguishable and now seen in infinity.
Sex as practiced. Sex as it was.
At the time, an inconceivable proposition.
In addition to the family game in Strongbow Hall there was also a family mystery. In a manor so old it was only to be expected that some arcane relationship must exist between the structure and its inhabitants, its source secret, probably a hidden sliding panel that opened onto dark passageways leading down into the past.
In fact the huge manor was said to include in its foundations the ruins of a major medieval monastery, unnamed, thought to have been desecrated when its monks were discovered practicing certain unmentionable acts. And close beside those ruins were the ruins of an underground Arthurian chamber, vaulted and impregnable, which had also been desecrated when its knights were discovered practicing other unmentionable acts.
Even deeper in the ground, according to legend, there were the ruins of a spacious sulphur bath only fitfully dormant, built during the age of the Romans.
Next to these baths was a small but impressive sacrificial circle of stones from the even more distant era of the druids.
While lastly, surrounding all these subterranean relics, was an immense erratic design of upright monoliths, astronomical in nature, erected in antiquity by a mighty people.
No one had ever discovered the secret passageways that led to these buried remnants beneath the manor, even though they had always been hunted. For centuries Strongbow aunts and uncles, on rainy afternoons, had armed themselves with torches and organized search parties to try to find them.
Of course minor discoveries had been made. In any given decade a group might come across a cozy unused tower cubicle heaped with furry rugs or a small snug cellar hideaway just big enough for three people.
But the family mystery remained. Tradition claimed the secret sliding panel might well be found in the dark library of the manor, yet strangely Strongbow aunts and uncles never led their search parties there. When a rainy afternoon came they invariably went in other directions.
Thus the aunts and uncles who became the overseers of the manor early in the nineteenth century might have sensed irrevocable changes afoot when they saw the eldest of their wards, the future lord, spending his afternoons in the deserted library.
The awful truth became clear when the boy was eleven, on the winter night set aside each year for the family’s heritage to be recounted by the older generation to the younger. On that night everyone gathered in front of the great fireplace after dinner, the aunts and uncles with their snifters of brandy, sitting solemnly in large chairs, the boys and girls absolutely still on cushions on the floor. Outside the wind howled. Inside the little children stared wide-eyed at the crackling logs as the ancient lore of the place was recounted.
A shadowy medieval monastery, began an aunt or an uncle. Hooded figures thrusting yellow tapers aloft. Chants in archaic syllables, incense and bats, rites at the foot of a black altar.
Underground chambers from the age of King Arthur, whispered another. Masked knights riding through the mists in eternal pursuit of invisible combat.
Roman legions fresh from the land of the pharaohs, hinted a third. Barbaric foreign gods and pagan battle standards. Luxurious baths wreathed in steam behind the walls of sumptuous palaces.
Druidical rituals, suggested a fourth. Naked priests painted blue clinging to mistletoe, a single towering oak in a lost grove, apparitions in the gloom on the moors. From the deeper recesses of the forest, eerie birdlike cries.
And long before that, whispered another, massive stones placed on the plains in a mystical pattern. The stones so gigantic no ordinary people could have transported them. Who were these unknown people and what was the purpose of their abstract designs? Yes truly we must ponder these enigmas for they are the secrets of our ancestors, to be recalled tonight as so often over the centuries.
Indeed, murmured an uncle. So it has always been and so it must be. These undying marvels are hidden in the ancient library of our manor, reared by the first Duke of Dorset, and there lies the secret within all of us, the impenetrable Strong-bow Mystery.
A rustle passed around the fireplace. The children shivered and huddled closer together as the wind whined. No one dared think of the maze of lost passageways spiraling down into the earth beneath them.
A thin voice broke the silence, the voice of the future lord.
No.
Sitting erect, farther from the fire than anyone else, the boy gazed gravely at the heavy swords suspended above the mantle.
No, he repeated, that’s not quite correct. In the last year I’ve read all the books in the library and there’s nothing like that there. The first Plantagenet Strongbow was a simple man who went to Ireland and had the usual success slaughtering unarmed peasants, then retired here to polish his armor and do some farming. The early books he collected were about armor, later there were a few dealing with barn-yard matters. So it seems the family mystery is simply that no one has ever read a book from the family library.
The disease that felled him the following day was meningitis, which killed his younger brothers and sisters. Thus there would be no aunts and uncles in the next generation and a comfortable routine dating from the reign of Henry II was suddenly shattered.
In its place lay a sickly wasted boy, dying, who made up his mind to do what no Strongbow had ever done, to enter confusion and not let destiny rest. His first decision was to live and as a result he became totally deaf. His second decision was to become the world’s leading authority on plants, since at that early age he wasn’t fond of people.
Before the attack of meningitis his height had been average. But the revelations that came with the approach of death, and his subsequent bargaining with fate, brought other changes. By the time he was fourteen he would be well over six feet tall, and by the age of sixteen he would have reached his full height of seven feet and seven inches.
Naturally his aunts and uncles were utterly bewildered by these strange events in his twelfth year, yet they tried to go on living as the Strongbows had always lived. Therefore while he lay recovering in bed, it being the Christmas season, they gathered in the great banquet hall for the customary pillow match. And although fearful and disturbed they bravely carried on as usual, resolutely polishing family tradition just as the first duke had once polished his armor.
While the furniture was being cleared away they picked their teams and playfully jostled one another, smiling and nodding and politely guffawing and lightly patting a bottom or two, patiently forming queues and just as patiently reforming them a moment later, stolidly standing one behind the other as they commented on the rain and tittered hopelessly in agreement.
The hour closed to a few minutes before midnight on Christmas Eve, what should have been the beginning of twelve companionable days of nuzzling and scrimmaging. But when the playing field was cleared, precisely when the satin pillow was ceremoniously placed in the middle of the floor and the fun was ready to begin, a dreadful silence swept through the hall.
They turned. In the doorway stood their gaunt nephew, already an inch or two taller than they remembered him. Standing straight out in front of him, thick and menacing, was a medieval lance twelve feet long.
The boy went directly to the middle of the room, skewered the satin pillow and hurled it into the fireplace, where it burst and blazed briefly. Then in words alternately booming and inaudible, for he hadn’t yet learned to modulate his voice without hearing it, he announced they were all dismissed from his house and lands forever. Any aunt or uncle found on the premises when the clock struck midnight, he shouted, would receive the same punishment as the pillow.
There were shrieks and a rush to the door as the future Duke of Dorset, twenty-ninth in his line, calmly ordered the furniture returned to its place and assumed control of his life.
Young Strongbow’s first act was to make an inventory of the artifacts in the manor. With his botanist’s interest in cataloguing he wanted to know exactly what he had inherited, so with a ledger in one hand and a pen in the other he went from room to room noting everything.
What he found appalled him. The manor was an immense mausoleum containing no less than five hundred thousand separate objects acquired by his family in the course of six hundred and fifty years of doing nothing.
There and then he decided never to encumber his life with material goods, which was the real reason, not vanity, that when the time came for him to disappear into the desert at the age of twenty-one, he did so carrying only his magnifying glass and portable sundial.
But such extreme simplicity was for the future. Now he had to master his profession. Methodically he sealed off the rest of the manor and moved into the central hall, which he equipped as a long botanical laboratory. Here he lived austerely for six years, at the age of sixteen writing to the Rector of Trinity College stating that he was prepared to take up residence at Cambridge to receive a degree in botany.
The letter was brief, attached to it was a summary of his qualifications.
Fluent ability in Early and Middle Persian, hieroglyphics and cuneiform and Aramaic, classical and modern Arabic, the usual knowledge of Greek and Hebrew and Latin and the European tongues, Hindi where relevant and all sciences where necessary for his work.
Lastly, as an example of some research already undertaken, he enclosed a short monograph on the ferns to be found on his estate. The Rector of Trinity had the paper examined by an expert, who declared it the most definitive study on ferns ever written in Britain. The monograph was published by the Royal Society as a special bulletin and thus Strongbow’s name, one day to be synonymous with rank depravity, made its first quiet appearance in print.
Almost at once three sensational incidents made Strong-bow a legend at Cambridge. The first occurred on Halloween, the second over a two-week period prior to the Christmas holiday, the third on the night of the winter solstice.
The Halloween incident was a fistfight with the most vicious brawlers in the university. After drinking quantities of stout these notorious young men had adjourned to an alley to pummel each other in the autumn moonlight. A crowd gathered and bets were taken while the sweating fighters stripped to the waist.
The alley was narrow. Strongbow happened to enter it just as the brawlers went into a crouch. Having spent a long day in the countryside collecting specimens, the wild flowers he now carried in his hand, he was too exhausted to turn back. Politely he asked the mass of fighters to stand aside and let him pass. There was a brief silence in the alley, then a round of raucous laughter. Strongbow’s bouquet of flowers was knocked to the ground.
Wearily he knelt in the moonlight and retrieved his specimens from the chinks in the cobblestones. When he had them all he moved forward, flowers in one hand and the other arm flailing.
Because of his extraordinary reach not a blow fell on him. In seconds a dozen men lay crumpled on the pavement, all with broken bones and several with concussions. The stunned onlookers pressed against the walls as Strongbow carefully dusted off his flowers, rearranged his bouquet and continued down the alley to his rooms.
The second incident involved England’s national fencing tournament, which was to be held at Cambridge that year. Although unknown as a fencer Strongbow applied to enter the preliminaries to the tournament, a kind of exhibition for amateurs, on the basis of letters of recommendation from two Italian masters with international reputations. When asked which event he wished to enter he said all three, foil and épée and sabre as well.
The proposal would have been ridiculous even if he had studied privately under two masters. But in the end he was allowed to enter all three classes because the letters from Italians, as he pointed out, failed to mention which event was his specialty.
Actually none of them was, nor had he ever studied under the two Italians or anyone else. A year earlier, aware that his rapid growth might render him awkward, he had decided to improve his balance. Fencing seemed as useful as any exercise for that, so he read the classical manuals on fencing and dueled with himself in front of a mirror an hour each day.
The time came for him to go up to Cambridge. While passing through London he learned that two famous Italian masters were in the city instructing members of the royal family. Curious about several techniques he was using that didn’t seem to be in any of the manuals, he offered the Italians a large sum of money to pass some judgment on his moves.
An hour was duly arranged. The masters watched him do his exercises in front of a mirror and wrote the letters of praise he carried on to Cambridge.
But secretly the two men were less enthusiastic than alarmed by what they had witnessed. Both realized Strongbow’s unorthodox style of fighting was revolutionary and perhaps unbeatable. Therefore they canceled their engagements and left London that same night to return home in the hope of eventually mastering his techniques themselves.
At Cambridge, meanwhile, the national tournament opened early in December. Refusing to wear a mask because he wasn’t used to one and refusing to reveal his methods, Strongbow won straight matches in the foil and épée and sabre and advanced from the preliminaries into the main competition. There he continued to fight maskless and continued to win with as much ease as ever.
At the end of two busy weeks he had reached the finals in all three events, itself an unprecedented accomplishment. The finals were meant to occupy most of a weekend but Strongbow insisted they be held one after another. All together they took less then fifteen minutes. In that fierce span of time Strongbow consecutively disarmed his three masked opponents while himself receiving only one slight prod in the neck. Furthermore, two of the champions he defeated had dislocated wrists by the end of their matches.
In less than fifteen minutes Strongbow had proved himself the greatest swordsman in English history.
Having done so, he never entered a fencing contest again. The cause for this was assumed to be his extreme arrogance, already unbearable to many. But the truth was simply that Strongbow had stopped growing. He no longer needed a special exercise and had given up the tiresome practice of parrying with himself in front of a mirror.
He never lost his style as a swordsman, however, and decades later it was still distinct enough to betray his true identity, as nearly happened in a tiny oasis in Arabia more than forty years after he left Cambridge.
Strongbow was then over sixty and living as the poorest sort of bedouin. The oasis was on the haj route from Damascus and one day Strongbow had to move quickly to turn aside a murderer’s sword, which he did, causing the murderer to wound himself. Then he squatted on the ground and began to bind the man’s wound.
Traveling in the caravan that year was Numa Numantius, the German erotic scholar and defender of homosexuality, who happened to witness the performance and was astounded by it. At once he led his Arab dragoman over to Strongbow.
Who are you really? asked the German, his interpreter repeating the words in Arabic. Strongbow replied meekly in an ignorant bedouin dialect that he was what he appeared to be, a starving man of the desert whose only cloak was the arm of Allah.
Numantius, the leading Latinist of the day and an exceedingly gentle man, said he knew for a fact only two European fencing masters had ever been able to execute that particular technique, both Italians now dead, and that although no one else in the Levant might be able to recognize the wizardry it implied, he certainly was. For emphasis he even gave the maneuver its official Latin designation. The interpreter repeated all this to Strongbow, who merely shrugged and went on binding the wound. Numantius was growing more curious.
But master, whispered the interpreter, how can such a one be expected to answer? Look at his filth and his rags. He’s a wretch and a dog and that was a lucky blow, nothing more. Surely there can be no learning of any kind in such a brute.
But there is, said Numantius. How it can be I don’t know and it’s making me dizzy just to think of it. So please tell him if he swears by his God he has never heard of these two Italians, I’ll give him a Maria Theresa crown.
The words were repeated in Arabic and a large crowd gathered. The money offered was a fortune in the desert and there was no way a poor bedouin could be expected to refuse it. But Strongbow had never sworn falsely in his life. Thus there was a more lengthy exchange between him and the interpreter.
What does he say? asked Numantius in awe. Does he swear?
No, he doesn’t swear. In fact he says he once knew these two men in his youth.
What?
Yes, in a dream. In this dream he went to a large city from a large estate he owned. In that large city he hired these two men to watch him use a sword, and that was when they learned the secret of this particular maneuver as well as others. And he adds that since it was truly his secret in the beginning, what you saw him do here a few minutes ago was original and real, whereas what you saw those two Europeans do years ago was imitation and unreal. And all this he says in a language so barbaric it is almost impossible to understand him.
Numantius staggered.
Original and real? Imitation and unreal? What gibberish is this? What madness?
Just that, whispered the interpreter hurriedly as he and the frightened crowd fell back. Now quickly, master, we must leave. His eyes, don’t you see it?
And indeed Strongbow’s eyes were rolling in his head, his head was swaying on his shoulders and his whole body had begun to shake uncontrollably. He was sending himself into a dervish trance, a trick he had learned long ago when he first came to the desert and the impenetrability of his disguises might have been in danger. As he knew, no Arab would remain close to a dervish suddenly possessed by spirits.
The crowd withdrew muttering charms and a dazed Numantius retreated with them fearing he might be a victim of brain fever, rejoining the caravan and leaving behind the only opportunity there would ever be to discover what had really happened to the young Duke of Dorset after his shockingly obscene disappearance in Cairo on the eve of Queen Victoria’s twenty-first birthday.
But it was the third incident at Cambridge that was most significant to Strongbow in the end because it involved the Secret Seven, or the Immortals as they were also known.
This undergraduate society had been founded in 1327 to mourn the passing of Edward II after a hot poker had been thrust up the king’s anus. Through legacies the society had gradually grown in wealth until its endowments surpassed those of any other private institution in Britain. It supported numerous orphanages and hospitals and commissioned portraits of its members for the National Gallery.
The protection it provided its members was absolute and perpetual. If a member happened to die in a remote corner of the Empire his body was immediately pickled in the finest cognac and brought home at the society’s expense.
Among its alumni were kings and prime ministers, scores of bishops and battalions of admirals and generals, as well as many country gentlemen who had never been known for anything other than certain eccentric dealings with their valets. The alumni of the Secret Seven, in short, constituted the richest and most influential old-boy network in the land.
Of all the masturbation societies in the public schools and universities of England, none could match its enduring prestige.
As indicated by its name, only seven undergraduates were members at any one time, their term running from midnight on a winter solstice to midnight on the following winter solstice, when a new group of seven was chosen. During their year as members the reigning Seven, other than engaging in masturbation, spent their time discussing the merits of their potential successors.
The Christmas holidays began well before election night but all Cambridge undergraduates in Britain, by secret agreement according to tradition, sneaked back to their university rooms by devious routes on the day of the winter solstice. There every gate and door was left unlocked and no one stirred in the wild hope of a miracle. The Seven were known to begin their visits at eleven o’clock at night under cover of darkness and end an hour later, the last man chosen being the most illustrious of the new group and its future leader.
Thus Strongbow, who hadn’t bothered to interrupt his research with the Christmas holidays, was sitting in his rooms one winter night perusing a botanical treatise in Arabic when seven loud knocks struck his door. The handle then turned but nothing happened. Strongbow’s door was locked. He had just emerged from a bath and, still warm, hadn’t bothered to dress yet.
Of course he didn’t hear the knocks but he did notice the handle turning ineffectually. He went over to investigate and immediately seven young men filed into the room and drew themselves up in a row. They didn’t seem surprised by his nakedness but the leader of the group spoke his classical Greek in a confused tone of voice.
Your door was locked.
That’s right.
But it’s midnight on the winter solstice.
Correct. And so?
But don’t you know what happens on this special night?
I know we have more night than any other night, but who are you anyway? Amateur astronomers?
You mean you don’t know who we are?
No.
The Secret Seven, announced the leader in a hushed voice.
My God man, thundered Strongbow, I can see you’re seven but what’s your infernal secret?
You mean you’ve never even heard of us?
No.
But we’re the most ancient and honored secret society in England.
Well what’s your secret? What kind of a society is it?
A masturbation society, said the leader with dignity.
Strongbow roared with laughter.
Masturbation? Is that all? What’s so secret about that? And why in God’s name are we speaking Greek?
You are elected, intoned the seven young men in unison.
I am? To what?
Our society. The Seven Immortals.
Immortal you say? Because you masturbate?
The Seven were stunned. There had never been any question of explaining their society to anyone, let alone justifying its purpose. They stood in line speechless. Strongbow smiled.
The Seven Sages of Greece, are you? How often do you meet to exchange your wisdom?
Two evenings a week.
Not enough, said Strongbow. Am I to confine myself to masturbating only two evenings a week? Ridiculous.
No one’s confined. That’s just when we meet formally.
But why be formal about it at all? A ludicrous notion.
The leader began talking about charity and fraternity. He even mentioned kings and archbishops and famous statesmen who had been members of the society, but all these impressive names Strongbow waved aside with a long sweep of his arm.
Listen, o wise men. Masturbation is certainly relaxing, but why have a society for it and one that is secret at that? Nonsense. Pure farce.
You don’t mean you’re refusing election, stammered the leader.
Of course that’s what I mean. What an absurdity.
But no one has refused election in five hundred years.
Distinctly odd. Now I’ve cooled down from my bath and I think I should dress and get along with my duties. The chapter I’m reading has to do with Solanum nigrum, probably known to you as deadly nightshade, composed in Cordoba in 756, learned but not quite right. Shall I explain the irregularities to you? We’ll have to switch from Greek to Arabic but of course you can carry on with your usual activities.
The door opened. The seven young men slinked away into the longest night of 1836. Midnight had come and gone and in refusing to accept immortality Strongbow had insufferably effronted over three hundred of the most powerful Englishmen of his day, not to mention the memories of another three thousand dead heroes of his race, an insult that would be well remembered nearly half a century later when he published his monumental thirty-three-volume study entitled Levantine Sex.
Nor was it merely his intellectual ferocity, his savage fighting skills or his insolent disregard for tradition that caused him to be viewed as dangerous at Cambridge. There was also his unfathomable manner.
For of course no one realized Strongbow was deaf and that he could only understand others by reading their lips. Therefore anyone outside his field of vision was ignored as if nonexistent, just as any event occurring behind his back was ignored as if nonexistent.
There was the disturbing occasion in the spring, for example, when a heavy downpour caused half the botanical laboratory at Cambridge to collapse at dawn. The laboratory was thought to be empty but the thunderous crash was so great the entire university rushed to the spot within minutes.
What they saw standing on what had once been the third floor, the precipice only a few inches behind his feet, was Strongbow bent over a microscope studying the lines of a new spring leaf, oblivious to the destruction that had jolted everyone from their beds.
Strongbow’s concentration, in sum, was frighteningly aloof and apart. Because of his unnatural height he bore only a distorted resemblance to a man and the only voices he seemed to hear were those of plants. In other eras he might have been burned at the stake as the Antichrist, and undoubtedly it was only because his nineteenth-century world was so rational that he was merely regarded as exceptionally perverse, maniacal and un-English.
But significantly, it was this very rationality that Strong-bow would one day assault with such devastating results.
His career at Cambridge culminated in an episode both brilliant and typical, yet so extravagant it was considered intolerable by many, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and possibly the new monarch then awaiting her coronation, Queen Victoria.
Strongbow stood for his tripos examinations at the end of one year rather than the customary three, and his achievement was such that he had to be awarded a triple first, the only time that ever happened in an English university. As a parting gift to English scholarship he proceeded to announce he had discovered a new species of rose on the banks of the Cam.
Even if proposed quietly the discovery would have been shocking. In a land devoted to roses it seemed unthinkable that six centuries of British scholars could have gone punting on the Cam and entirely overlooked a species.
But the proposal wasn’t made quietly. Instead Strongbow noisily nailed it to the chapel door one Sunday morning just as the service ended and the faculty began to appear.
The uproar throughout the nation was immediate. An official board of experts was convened, to be chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who would cast a deciding vote should that ultimate resort to fair play become necessary.
Strongbow’s evidence, arranged in ninety-five theses, was removed from the chapel door and studied in full by the board. The Latin was impeccable and to their dismay they found there was nothing to consider or vote on. The discovery was genuine. There was simply no way to assign the rose to any of the existing species.
And as its discoverer Strongbow had the inalienable right to name it.
The archbishop led a select delegation to Strongbow’s rooms. After congratulating him warmly the archbishop eased into a persuasive discourse. A new rose had been found for England, a new monarch was soon to be crowned from the House of Hanover. How magnanimous it was of God, working through a brilliant young scholar and nobleman, to bless the land and Her Britannic Majesty at this time, in this manner.
While the archbishop spoke Strongbow remained bent over his workbench examining a blade of grass with his enormous magnifying glass. When the archbishop finished Strongbow straightened to his full height, still holding the glass in place, and stared down at the delegation.
Behind the powerful lens of the magnifying glass his unblinking eye was two inches wide.
During his year at Cambridge Strongbow’s disgust with his family’s history had fully matured. He could no longer abide the memory of the silly accidents that had killed twenty-eight successive Dukes of Dorset, the silly aunts and uncles who had been returning to the manor for centuries to raise its orphans, the silly family mystery which was just another name for illiteracy, above all the silly sexuality that had gone by the name of the family game.
At the same time he had grown increasingly contemptuous toward England, which he found too small and prim and petty for his needs. And being still young, he preferred to believe his country was more to blame that his family for six hundred and fifty years of Strongbow silliness.
So his enormous eye rested on the archbishop and his speech was short.
Your Grace has made reference to the House of Hanover, Germans who arrived here some five hundred and forty years after my own dukedom was established. It is certainly true the Plantagenet Strongbows did nothing for England in six and a half centuries, but at least they had the decency to do it on English soil. Therefore we will honor that soil and Victoria of Hanover by naming this discovery the rosa exultata plantagenetiana. Thank you for coming, and thank you for recognizing the inevitable existence of this rare flower.
Nothing more was said on either side of the workbench. The huge eye continued to hover near the ceiling as the shrunken delegates crept out the door.
Strongbow immediately disappeared from England, his first journeys allusive and unrecorded. From time to time a detailed monograph on the flora of western Sudan or eastern Persia appeared in some European capital, posted from Damascus or Tunis and privately printed according to his instructions.
And at least once a year a dozen new species of desert flowers would be described, the discoveries invariably genuine. So although he continued to be feared and disliked even when far from home, the English botanical community had no choice but to admire his accumulated research.
Yet in fact Strongbow was spending very little time on botany. Instead, unexpectedly, he had turned his vast powers of concentration to the study of sex, an endeavor that eventually would bring about the fall of the British Empire.
But that was of no concern to Strongbow. What was important to him was the startling discovery he made in a Sinai cave after only a few years in the Middle East, that the lost original of the Bible actually existed, a secret he would share with only one other man in his century.
With that discovery began Strongbow’s forty-year search for the Sinai Bible and his lifelong speculations about what the mysterious lost original might contain, of all his legacies to the twentieth century the one that would most intrigue and baffle his sole child and heir, the idealistic boy one day to become a gunrunner named Stern.