William Marchant looked around the table at the faces flickering in the candlelight. Were they serious? Did they really still believe this stuff?
They weren’t stupid. More than half of them could read, thanks to his secret library. And yet the head of every farming family in the village was sitting around the table, leaning in to hear what the old white witch had to say.
Juliana let her audience wait in silence for a long time before opening her bag and pulling out a fingersized wooden statue of a veiled goddess and placing it deliberately in the centre of the table. It made a loud hollow sound.
William opened his mouth, but quickly shut it again as he caught a sideways look from his mother Elizabeth, sitting at the head of the table. She was reminding him that he had to be careful. He only had a place at the meeting because it was taking place at his home, and what he had to say was far too important to say badly.
He looked around at the faces, and his feelings softened a little. Juliana did know a fair bit, it was true, and she was harmless enough. She had earned respect in the village, despite her son’s job. It was to her that everyone in the village went when they were sick, desperate, or when they feared for the future. Somehow she usually helped them to feel better.
Right now, the whole village was desperate and fearful. If the early seeds they had planted didn’t grow fast and strong, there would be death from starvation in every house.
Perhaps it was not belief that made them listen to her, but lack of anything else in which to put their faith.
The little statue stood in the centre of the table while Juliana explained how the crops would return if only the Great Mother, the Goddess Freya or the Virgin Mary – she seemed to use the names interchangeably – blessed and looked over the crops.
Everyone stared in silence at the tiny figure, while Juliana described in detail how villages in northern France ensured their harvests by a ritual in which they took their goddess statue on a tour of the fields as they sowed them. They danced and sang for the wooden idol, and gave tribute. And in return, the goddess, by whatever name you called her, blessed the fields and the crops grew strong and tall.
In William’s opinion, such superstition was ridiculous, but at the mention of northern France the assembled farmers looked at each other, nodding sagely. Everyone knew that the crops over the Channel were thriving, and everyone wondered why those few short miles of sea made such a difference.
Everyone also knew, although they were far too careful to mention it, that one among them was something of an expert on northern France. And everyone was looking at William now. He cleared his throat. The library and the monster were not his only secrets. It was well known, though rarely discussed, that Elizabeth was able to acquire foreign trinkets for the villagers, and that she would often pay over the odds for sacks of wool, which then strangely disappeared. The villagers assumed that her son somehow managed to evade the coastguard, and make a small living selling smuggled wool to the French, but it was in nobody’s best interest to know for certain where he went when he disappeared for days on end. And absolutely nobody knew what or whom he brought back when he returned.
He swallowed and started to speak. ‘The French crops don’t grow because of magic and spells,’ he said as levelly as he could. ‘They grow because of this.’ He pulled out a small bag, and upended it on the middle of the table. A cascade of beans rattled out, surrounding the little statue and rolling into the curious hands of the villagers.
They were much darker and richer-looking than the seeds the farmers were used to planting, and William watched their brows wrinkle as they assessed them.
‘I was… um… given them by someone who visited France,’ he continued, allowing himself a small smile at what everyone knew was a lie. ‘They’re stronger than the seeds we use here, and they harvest earlier. They also improve the soil for next year’s crops.’
He looked around the room, but nobody spoke. He could tell that he’d lost them. When harvests failed, it seemed most farmers could easily believe their crops had been sabotaged by evil spirits. Trying to persuade them to accept that, in fact, they were planting the wrong kind of seeds seemed wholly impossible.
There was a long silence, and one by one the farmers shifted their gaze back from the seeds to the little statue. William looked at his mother, and she shrugged helplessly.
‘We should put our trust in the power of the Lady,’ said Juliana. The others started to nod.
‘This? This is going to bless our crops?’ The words burst out of William. He picked up the statue in his fingers. ‘This is going to save our village? This little charm is going to feed us?’ He tossed it back onto the table, exasperated.
Juliana smiled. ‘It won’t, of course. The boy’s right.’ She was in control now and she knew it. ‘With this we can bless but a few grains of seed. That’s all.’
‘Then what exactly are you asking of us?’ Elizabeth’s tone was open and friendly, but her question was impossible to dodge.
‘We need a much older, more powerful Lady,’ Juliana said. ‘In France they have a cart. They have used it for centuries. Inside is the image of the Lady and her tributes. They add a sheaf from the last harvest, flowers, some other magic tokens.’ William rolled his eyes. ‘They take her from village to village to bless the crops.’ She looked around the room. ‘When have the French crops failed? Never!’
Juliana was looking only at William now. Her voice was softer. ‘If only there was someone who could trade with the French, purchase a loan of the cart and fetch it back here – just for a week, to bestow her blessings on our fields.’
Surely she was joking. William knew the farmers in France well enough, and there were at least a couple who might sneak the cart out for him and down to the shore if he could promise to get it back in a week or two, but it would take a hefty bribe. It would bankrupt the village – and for what?
William stood up. He had no more than opened his mouth to make it clear what he thought of the old woman’s plan when the door banged open on its hinges and a young man in a green coat appeared in the doorway, cutlass drawn. William sat down immediately and sank back, out of the candlelight.
‘I visit you as a riding officer of His Majesty’s Customs…’ the young man began, addressing the room without looking at anyone in particular.
‘We know who you are, Mathew Allen,’ said Elizabeth. ‘You search our house almost every week, and you always find nothing.’
The man waved his cutlass in a way that was probably supposed to be threatening. William would have laughed at him, but this was not a good time for the customs to call.
‘Well,’ said Allen, ‘somebody is smuggling fleeces out of England. Somebody is selling brandy and tea.’
‘Oh, great crimes indeed,’ said Elizabeth, smiling. William edged into the darkness towards the door.
‘And somebody is bringing French Jacobite traitors into England!’
‘Well, it’s not me,’ replied Elizabeth. ‘Please, feel free to look around.’
‘I will!’ said Allen, poking the air with his cutlass.
‘Put it away, Mathew,’ said Juliana curtly. He wheeled round.
‘Mother?’ He sheathed his cutlass instantly. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘They were just seeking my advice on a farming matter,’ she said. ‘Now do what you have to do and run along.’
‘Right,’ said Allen. William took advantage of the distraction and slipped out of the room.
Behind him, he heard his mother say, ‘The only reason you bother us is because you’re afraid to go after the real smugglers. You know who they are, sure enough. What are they paying you?’
It was true. The organised smugglers basically ran the coastline and the law couldn’t stop them. But they were dangerous people. Mathew Allen was obviously under pressure to show he was doing something, but if he tried to take them on, he’d probably wind up dead. So instead he turned up at William’s house every other week on the off chance of catching them with a couple of sacks of wool.
William would have felt sorry for him on any other day. But not today. Today he just hoped his mother could buy him enough time to get the woman out of the coal shed and up the hill into the tomb.
He could hear Allen crashing about in the bedrooms upstairs as he ducked outside and into the garden. He beckoned the woman out and grabbed her hand, keeping her low as they skirted the edge of the garden and slipped out towards the woods.
Once they were safely under cover of the trees, he stopped and straightened up. In the moonlight, she had a slightly odd-looking face. Pale and sharp. Sculpted down into a slender neck.
He realised he still had hold of her hand, and let go abruptly.
‘They’re searching the house,’ he said. ‘We have to go now.’
‘Thank you. I know this is for you a risk,’ she replied, softly.
This close to France, words and accents merged and mingled across the Channel, but her voice marked her out as having been on a much longer journey before she’d turned up on the Normandy coast, looking for safe passage to England.
‘Life in France is not easy if you carry new ideas,’ she went on. ‘Perhaps it will be better here?’
‘Perhaps.’ William thought about the meeting he had just crept out of. He didn’t think it would be easier at all.
‘But your parliament now can overrule your king, no? You have Mr Isaac Newton. Your church, she cannot do just as she pleases.’ She smiled. ‘The way people think… it is changing.’
‘It’s not quite as simple as that,’ he managed. It was true that the king and queen were invited to rule and more or less told how to do it by parliament nowadays. It was also true that the more people knew how to read, the more resistance there was to mindless unfairness. William felt proud to have played some small part in that himself, but he was all too aware how far his England was from the England those fleeing persecution in France imagined. The secret library was, after all, still secret. ‘Things change slowly,’ he said.
They made their way in silence up to the tomb. William loosened the stone at the top of the door and edged it out just enough to free the top three stones. He had done it so often he could open the tomb in the pitch dark and seal it again invisibly, but all the same he lit two lamps and gave one to his guest, gestured at her to descend and then followed her into the tomb.
When he reached the bottom of the steps, she was simply standing, staring. William deliberately never mentioned the tomb’s occupant to his foreign guests as they passed through. He preferred to wait until they discovered the creature for themselves, and watch their eyes. Hers were bright. Searching. They seemed to pick over the skull, making a journey around the huge eye, and up along the jaw, flicking up to the point of each curved tooth in turn.
‘What is it?’ she whispered eventually.
‘Don’t you have dragons in France?’ he said with a dismissive shrug. Then he added ‘Oh, don’t worry. There aren’t many left now. Most of them have been argued to death by Mr Isaac Newton.’
William smiled back. Then he looked at the skull himself. She – ever since his father had first brought him here as a child, he had thought of the creature as ‘She’ – looked different today. William had always fancied that She had moods. That She watched what went on in her tomb and reacted to its visitors, to their stories and their plans.
When the young rebel with his demands for revolution had passed through, She had seemed to look right through him as though he was not even there. When the frantic preacher-philosopher had arrived, scribbling his notes as he tried to force his God into a set of rational rules, She had seemed almost amused by him. And on the night he learned that his father had been lost at sea, when the whole village bustled through the house, swamping him and his mother with sympathy, he had crept up to the tomb to be alone and found She had changed again. Suddenly closer to him. Part of his father, but somehow now part of him as well.
Today She was brooding as if with a dark thunder. Looking into her eye, William felt he was lost, pitching in a stormy sea.
He blinked and forced his eye back to his guest.
‘But you’re not here for that,’ he said. ‘This is what you want.’ He took the lamp and led her over to the other side of the tomb.
Further back in the room stood shelves containing the books of the secret library. The ancient ones were beautiful, but were seldom read. It was the modern printed volumes, and more especially the thin, paper-bound pamphlets piled on the floor, that made it necessary for the library to stay secret. They were filled with dangerous ideas: treachery, heresy, philosophy, science. Behind the books was the most secret thing of all.
It was a large workbench with a tall, solid wooden frame halfway across it. Embedded within the frame was a heavy rectangular plate which could be lowered by pulling on a metal handle until it pressed hard into the surface of the bench. The entire structure was stained with printer’s ink and beside it piles of fresh, unprinted paper lay waiting.
‘Do you know how to use it?’ William asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ said the woman quietly, running a hand down the side of the printing press as though she was steadying a horse. ‘I know.’
William paused. ‘I can stay and help for a while,’ he said. ‘If you like?’
The process was slow. William sat with the box of letters, each one embossed in reverse on its own metal peg, while the woman, Marie, held the block that would house them. As she called for letters one at a time, he found them in the box and handed them to her so that she could arrange them in neat rows. He knew it could be weeks before the block was ready to print the first copy of her pamphlet, but once it was made she would be able to run off hundreds, even thousands of copies in a day, ready to take with her when she left.
‘Another s,’ she said. He handed it to her. ‘And a c.’
‘It must be dangerous,’ he said, nodding at the block on her lap. ‘This idea.’
Whatever her pamphlet was about, it had resulted in her being hounded out of France and fleeing across the Channel in a boat never meant for the journey.
She looked up from her work. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘It is the most dangerous idea in the world. An i please.’
He handed it to her. ‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘Truth,’ she began, starting to press letters into the block, ‘is like water in your hands. If you leave gaps in your thinking, it just trickles away, and you are left with nothing. You must be rigorous – rigorous in your thinking. In your investigation of the world. Look here.’ She picked up her lamp and placed it on the press. Its flame burned brightly. ‘Suppose I covered the hole in this lamp. What would happen?’
‘It would go out,’ he said.
‘Of course. You know that.’
‘Yes, it’s obvious.’
‘But how do you prove it? How do you make it such a truth that it cannot be disputed?’
‘I cover the hole,’ he said simply, ‘and the lamp goes out.’
‘Ah, but that is not enough,’ Marie said. ‘Then I can argue. I can say perhaps the lamp just ran out of oil. Perhaps there was water in the lamp. Perhaps the wick was at fault. Do you see? The truth – it trickles away like water.’
He opened his mouth to object, and then shut it again. ‘Then how do I prove it?’
She reached over and placed his oil lamp next to hers on the bench. The flames flickered together. ‘This other lamp. It was filled at the same time, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘And it was lit at the same time. I saw that,’ she said. ‘And it is stored in the same place?’
‘Yes.’
‘The wick is from the same rope? The oil from the same source? They are the same size? The same shape? The same craftsman made them in the same workshop?’
‘I bought them together,’ he said.
‘Then they are the same.’
‘Yes, but – ’
She held up her hand to signal his silence, and covered the holes in her lamp with her palm. The flame flickered and died. ‘So now, we have held all other things the same. We have control of every part of our experiment and we have changed just one thing.’ She smiled triumphantly.
‘So?’ said William.
‘So you cannot now blame the wick, yes? You cannot blame the oil or the lamp or suggest it was an older lamp or a newer one, or that the lamp went out because I had somehow treated it differently. You cannot avoid the truth. It does not trickle away. It stays in your hand.’ She sat back in the light of the single flame still burning. ‘That is rigour.’
‘It doesn’t sound very dangerous to me,’ he said.
‘That depends on how it is applied,’ she said darkly. ‘If you can find a truth and not just know it but show it and prove it to be true – no gaps – if you can do that then nobody can argue that you are wrong.’ She paused. ‘Not a judge. Not a king. Not a god. You see now how this is dangerous?’
William nodded. On his back, he felt a hot draft as though the creature in the wall was breathing, but when he turned, he saw it was the first light of the sun shining into the tomb.
Elizabeth was waiting for him when he got home. She was sitting at the head of the table. She might have been there since he’d sneaked out of the room. In front of her, the little idol was standing on the table surrounded by seeds, just as he’d left it.
‘You’re going to have to go to France again and bring back the cart,’ she said.
‘What?’ She didn’t believe this nonsense about the idol, surely.
‘Juliana knows everything.’
‘She thinks she does…’ he started. Then he saw the expression on his mother’s face. She wasn’t talking about blessings and curses.
‘The boat. The tomb. The press. She knows everything.’
‘And me going to France is – what?’ He hesitated. ‘Her price for not telling her son?’
Elizabeth nodded. ‘I don’t believe this blessing will work any more than you do. But we have to hope we’re wrong. We have no choice.’ She stood up. ‘It’ll take about three weeks to collect the money from everyone.’ William could tell she was nearly in tears, but she just smiled tightly and left the room.
He stared down at the collection of objects in the centre of the table. He was full of fury. It was so clear to him. It was the seeds that would save the village, not the idol. He knew it. But he couldn’t prove it. And as he stared, one word kept reappearing in his exhausted mind: rigour.
William had no idea how long he’d slept, but the moment he woke – still sitting at the table – he knew exactly what he had to do.
He grabbed the little idol from the table and a handful of the beans, tipping them into a pouch and tightening the drawstring. Then he went to the kitchen and took three small bowls from the dresser. Finally, he opened the sack containing the paler dried beans they’d managed to keep over from the last meagre harvest for sowing this year, and put a few into another pouch.
When he arrived at the tomb, Marie was curled up on the floor, sleeping next to the few paragraphs she had so far assembled of her pamphlet.
On the wall, the skull was crossed with rays of dusty light. She seemed stiller than usual, as if waiting for something.
‘I need your help,’ he heard himself say in a loud voice. ‘I need to get this exactly right.’ Marie stirred and sat up. William wondered if he had been talking to her, or Her.
Marie listened while he told the story of the last few years. The erratic weather, the failed harvests. The slow creep of desperation among the villagers, and with it the grasping for answers in superstition. It felt good to talk to someone who wasn’t caught up in it. When he told her about last night’s meeting, and its outcome, she understood his idea immediately.
‘We must make everything the same,’ she said. ‘Everything. And just change one factor at a time.’
‘No gaps.’
‘No gaps.’ She smiled.
On the floor just in front of the skull’s huge eye socket, William laid out the three bowls. Each he filled with soil.
‘The same soil?’ she asked.
‘Dug at the same time from the same part of the same garden,’ he replied.
In the first bowl, he placed a sprinkling of the French seeds, which he carefully covered with earth. In the second bowl, he planted seeds from the family’s own store. In the third bowl, he planted the same local seeds, but once they were covered, he took the tiny wooden idol from the pouch and planted it in the bowl beside them, turning its veiled face so that the spirit, or goddess, or whatever she was supposed to be, could look over the seedlings. Together, he and Marie measured out equal amounts of water and poured them into each bowl.
‘There,’ he said. ‘Finished.’
‘No,’ Marie said. ‘This is not good enough.’
William looked at the bowls. Everything was the same for each, surely. ‘What?’
‘Your witch. She said there was dancing, no?’
‘Yes, but that’s just foolishness.’
‘No, no, no!’ Marie shook her finger at him. ‘It does not matter what you think. You must hold your friend to the same standards as your enemy. You must treat your beliefs as if they are as false as those you find foolish… until the experiment is over. Then you will know.’
‘We must dance.’ She held out a hand and he took it. ‘I used to love this song when I was a girl,’ she cried, and started to sing.
And there, under the gaze of the tiny idol and the giant stone eye, they danced. William was faltering and embarrassed at first, but Marie was confident, and as she showed him the steps, he gradually started to move to the rhythm of her voice. Soon, they were both stepping joyfully through the simple dance, spinning around, touching fingertips, stepping away from each other, and then suddenly close, and then away again. Once they stepped past each other, and he held her waist as she turned.
When she finished the song, they sat on the steps and giggled together like children. William felt it had been a long time since he’d laughed like that. Then Marie reached up through the gap in the tomb wall, picked a tiny flower from the overgrown roof of the tomb, and they solemnly placed it into the bowl in front of the little veiled lady.
For a moment, they were both quiet. The dancing. The singing. The solemn ritual. The sacrifice of the flower. It all seemed right somehow. Powerful. As if something warm and strong and good was seeping into the tomb. Perhaps there was something in it after all.
‘Now, remember. Everything the same,’ Marie said. ‘The same sunshine. The same water. Every day. Everything the same. We will see the truth.’
William took the bowls home and placed them beside the sunniest window. All three were aligned to get the same amount of sun as it passed over. Each day, he fed the seeds with a carefully measured portion of water, always from the same source. Always at the same time of day.
Every day, William went to the villagers to collect whatever they had put aside for him to bargain with over the goddess in the cart. Whenever he could, he stole away to sit in the shadow of the stone skull and hand metal letters to his exile, hiding in the secret library.
Within a week, a single green sprout was rising above the soil in the pot containing the wooden idol. It curled upwards, pale, almost white at first, but growing stronger as it reached towards the light. A tiny leaf seemed to grow and unfurl as William watched. The idol was winning.
But by the tenth day, all three pots had sprouted, and by the time all the payments had been collected and the boat had been prepared to leave, the result of the experiment was clear. Two of the pots had modest crops of sprouts. Two or three shoots tentatively probed the air above their soil. But the third – the darker seeds from the French side of the Channel – were exploding. They had almost all germinated, and they brimmed over the top of the bowl, leaves spreading to hide the soil, jostling for the light like hungry chicks.
It was time to present his results. Not to the whole village this time. He spoke to Elizabeth, and she gathered a few farmers that she thought might listen, just before he was ready to leave for France. William had hoped to go up and say goodbye to Marie, to see if he could bring her back anything from her old country, but there was no time. At least he would only be gone for a few days.
The farmers sat quietly and listened while William explained what he had done. They were as suspicious, to begin with, as they had been before. The village was proud of its seeds, and when they sold their crop, it sold well because it had a reputation. A new seed was a big risk. But William spoke slowly and clearly, and when he had finished, he placed the three bowls next to each other on the table.
His audience leaned in. The green shoots told a story no one in the room could afford to ignore. William answered their questions one by one. Yes, they had had the same amount of water. Yes, the soil had been the same soil. Yes, they were planted together.
Elizabeth nodded at her son, almost smiling. It was going well. Then Old Jack, the quietest of the farmers, and the one who’d tended his land for the longest of all of them, slowly sucked his breath through his missing tooth, and nodded at the bowl containing the wooden statue.
Everyone turned to listen. He was no great friend to new ideas, and still dug with the lucky spade his grandfather had used. He was held in great respect by all the other farmers, and he knew the land inside and out. He smacked his lips thoughtfully.
‘Tell me, son.’ He spoke slowly and deliberately. William held his breath. What had he forgotten? What had he overlooked? Old Jack nodded at the idol again. ‘Tell me, did you do the dance?’
William laughed as a wave of relief swept over him. He flushed slightly.
‘Yes, Jack. I did the dance.’
‘In that case, son, I’ll take some of your seeds if you can get ’em.’ He paused and then added sternly, ‘But don’t go getting any ideas. You’ll bring us that statue too. It’ll take more than a bowlful of sprouts to change most of their minds.’