Fire in the Abyss Read online

  What is this gibberish?

  Family trees! The Past! Who cares?

  It’s a trap* a mire, my head aches, I tremble, outside the storm still blows. My Past is all so faraway and useless—and yes, I do fear to stir it up. And, pathetic, also I fear my languid style cannot appeal to modern taste. I’m caught between the worlds, I don’t belong anywhere! Yes, and I have raised these doubts before! “Just be yourself!” you told me so heartily, Michael. I laughed. “How can I possibly know who ‘myself’ is?” I demanded. “I was legion enough before Vulcan and those Horsfield doctors made it ten times worse! Now I am Humf, and Humfrey, and Sir Humphrey, and King Fool—I know not which, nor which voice should prevail! What style? What voice? What’s the point?” And you shrugged.

  “Simply tell what happened,” you said, “and don’t ramble too much. Remember most folk now are in such a rush they don’t even have time for headlines. Just tell your story as it happened.”

  Just tell my story as it happened!

  Greene, sometimes I fail utterly to understand your modern English irony and cynicism, far less your underlying desires.

  I think you are a good man, but misguided by romantic notions. You don’t have to tell my story! As for myself, I feel no passion for it at all, only fear of what happens if I dig too deep. Yet of course we’ve been through that. I have to face it! I must break out! I’m armoured, rusted. Oh God. A drink would help. We’ve been through that as well. You call it my “weakness.” No wine, no spirits, nothing to make me rave. There’s only a crate of lager in the fridge. Piss-water! In America it’s even worse. What they call beer there is but babe’s puke! I like marijuana well enough, having been introduced to it in California, but there’s none of that here, only lager and tobacco and some Valium pills Ursula pressed on me to help me sleep. Sleep! Well!

  But I digress. You want Fact. You want History. You want inedible dates and objective account!

  So, as I said, for five hundred years the Gilberts had responsibility in the West Country, and for twelve generations our seat was at Compton,.which we got by marriage in the reign of Edward II, that unlucky sodomite buggered to death by a redhot poker in 1327.

  No Gay Lib then.

  Enough! Hold to your course, man!

  In a nutshell. Otho begat Otho begat Otho my father, who married my mother Katherine, daughter of Sir Philip Champemoun of Modbury in Kent. My father broke tradition by moving the family from Compton to Green way by the Dart, a pleasant-enough place where my mother gave birth to Katherine, John, myself, Adrian, and Otis, who died young. In 1547 my father died, in 1549 my mother remarried, to Walter Raleigh of Hayes and Fardell, bearing him Carew, Walter, and Margaret. My mother was a remarkable woman, I say it flatly, and she bred and raised us accordingly, to courage and virtue, and of course my half-brother Sir Walter became the most famous of us, and is so still, his name being used in America to sell tobacco. It is amazing. Walter was born in 1552, some thirteen years my junior. He never lived at Greenway, as some biographers attest, and it is true that many notions ascribed to him originated with myself, and true furthermore that he was always faithful to me, and supported my schemes with his influence at Court. Let historians say what they will! As for the rest of us; sister Katherine married George Raleigh, Walter’s half-brother; while John conscientiously tended the estates all his life, he would never support me, save when my mother made him do so for the family sake, as happened in 1578, when Walter and Carew and myself commanded three of the seven ships in my first Atlantic expedition—that black failure! Not the first, not the last: I have always been accomplished at failure—of the spectacular sort, you understand, like not quite returning safely to the Earth from the Moon, or to England from the Newfoundland. Oh yes, I am well acquainted with failure, and I know I got myself the reputation of a difficult, touchy man. I never got on with John, that stolid countryman; Adrian was my best friend in the immediate family. He too was a soldier, then sailor-adventurer; though in character he was much different to myself, being known throughout England as a great buffoon. If I am a buffoon, it is involuntary, I assure you. Yes, I am Humf now, I know—but once, had you called me that, I’d have seen you out on your arse with a cut lip!

  But times change, now we are all socialists and clapper-dudgeons, beggars born and fiery men, due I think to pressures of population, cruelties of the tyrant Reason and his henchman Industry, and to rise of the Repressed. Now I am Humf. No doubt had I the vote I’d cast it for that most interesting fellow, Mr. Tony Benn.

  Yes, why not?

  I have been through the mill these last seven years. Politics is rarely better than self-interest. But I’ve found it hard to find a wider point of view. My mother would have adapted more bravely, as Tari did. Perhaps the experience women have of men makes them naturally more democratic. I don’t know. At any rate, my mother did not disdain the poor as (I suppose) I did.

  Once in fact in Mary’s reign my mother won fame by going openly to pray with Agnes Prest, a poor woman cast into Exeter jail for her Protestant faith and later burned for it. My mother declared her sympathy and spoke out against the Persecution, winning great respect, thus to risk her life. This happened about October 1555, when I went from Oxford to Hatfield to start service as a page in the household of Princess Elizabeth, who was also in much danger during those mad years.

  Such hurlyburly and confusion to recall! I’m all ahead and behind of myself! Fire, rebellion, persecution, ranting fanatics, lunatics and libertarians. It makes me shudder! It is with us now!

  The storm has dropped. Now I will drop too, and eat.

  3. Compton Castle, & How the Viper Did Not Strike

  Well, last night with my efficient modern dentures I chewed at tasteless frozen stuff, then walked out beneath the moon, and then went straight to bed. But my memory was enflamed: I could not rest. For hours I tossed and turned, beset by whispering phantoms, till I was so frayed I reckoned myself haunted by that entire hellish crew with which my mother’s maids once terrified me—bugaboos, puckles, imps, urchins, hags, sprites, hellwains, firedrakes, bull-beggars, Boneless, Hobgoblin, and Robin Goodfellow himself. Affrighted, down to the kitchen I went, and made tea, and sat by the fire, and tried comforting myself with a tape of the music I knew, played by the lutenist Julian Bream. But that only hurt and confused me worse with a general disorientation: I stopped it and instead turned to what I’d written, read it, and almost fed it to the fire. Somehow I stayed my hand, breathed deep, and back to bed I went. In time I met that uneasy sleep in which you cannot tell if you wake or dream.

  But dreaming I must have been: at one point I saw Tari again, or the shade of her, at the foot of the bed, with a pale glowing light from her by which I could see. Her hair was like white wool, which is how it grew back on her after our escape from Horsfield, where they kept us bald; she was slim and dark as I knew her; but she was dressed in a way I never saw before, in robes of midnight blue, with a homed silver crown on her head, and a silver orb between the horns—the very epitome of her goddess, Isis. She carried a scroll, which she unrolled, and from it read me something (but not with her voice) about remembering, which of course I cannot now remember. Wake up, Humf! I tried speech with her, but of a sudden everything changed: I found myself walking down a long dark passage with my mother, who kept pointing ahead, saying, “The New World lies this way, Humphrey,” so we continued, but there was no end to the passage. And when I looked around she was gone, and I was a boy again, and the passage had become the low dank secret tunnel at Compton which once I feared and loved to explore.

  Then I seemed to be awake, in bed, but cannot have been, for I clearly heard brother Walter’s voice, saying he has spoken with Her Majesty, and that she is willing at last to grant me and my heirs forever letters-patent and Rights of Governorship in the New World. But when I sat up in stupid false elation, looking for the source of the voice, it changed straightaway to another that I knew, that chilled me, though I only ever heard it once, when I was el
even:

  “Was I not right?” it cackled, “Did I not speak truth?”

  It was the voice of that cunning man at Eton Fair who read my palm, who told me my sign and fate! When I heard this I truly awoke, in a sweat, to the echo of my fearful shout!

  Now it is day. I have been up for hours. I have walked for miles. Yes, old man. You spoke truth. You dogged me all my life and even now the prediction’s come to pass you won’t let me alone.

  Well, today I am going to exorcise and banish you!

  But first things first. I must find a pattern of telling, or this hundred-head will overwhelm me; the tale’ll have more heads than legs, all braining each other. There is an order. Old man, you told me my destiny near Mayday of 1550, but what you told me I knew already, though sleepily, through the dark senses.

  I met destiny soon after my father died in the early summer of 1547. His will directed Adrian and myself to the guardianship of our Uncle, Philip Penkewell, a sombre man, whose house wasn’t far from Compton and the Castle. Even then the Castle was my favourite place inland. “Cold and out-of-date,” said my father when I asked why we no longer lived there, and I suppose it was. But I loved it. The walls were strong and foursquare, fortified after an earlier style, with portcullis and bartizans and four stout towers, ivied, and standing up amid a clearing in the woods. Even then the clearing was becoming overgrown through my father’s abandonment and preference for the gentler modern life at Greenway. It was my mother who took me there first, I think, when I was very young: there is no time I cannot remember it. I explored it and dreamed in it as often as I could; its brooding air influenced me as much to the past as the mariners’ tales of Golden Ships and the New World tended me to the future, and in later life I considered myself “Gilbert of Compton,” though in fact my father willed Compton to John, as well as Greenway, and I got Hansford, where I rarely went. It is the spirit of the thing: John owned Compton but cared more for his turnips, while my heart was always there—and more than my heart.

  The day I found I had destiny was the fourth Sunday after Pentecost in the year my father wasted and died. It was some weeks after Adrian and I had been delivered to Uncle Philip. One morning I awoke knowing I must go the Castle, alone, secretly, not telling Uncle in case he refused me. I had not been since before my father died, now the need was strong, like a starving man’s need for food. So, after Matins, I slipped into the woods, taking lantern and tinder, for I meant to explore the underground passage, and bread and cheese filched from the kitchen. I went with beating heart, expecting fuss when I got back, but soon I forgot all that as I went deeper into the dells. The day was very hot and heavy, thunderous high summer, the woods so drowsy and rich-smelling that soon my anxious pace became a yawning lazy amble. After a time I came on a ferny bee-droning glade, full of wild roses. I lay down in the cool mossy shade of a fallen oak and fell deep asleep.

  Some strange tremor stirred me. I awoke. I felt alarm, but could not tell what caused it until, blinking, I looked down the length of me—and what I saw had me yelling and jumping away so fast I bashed my head on a branch and knocked myself half-silly.

  The viper slithered away just as quick, and doubtless just as shocked, for in my own sleep it had come and coiled up against my body-warmth, most contentedly—until my shout, my convulsion! And it had not bit me! I stood up shuddering and shaky, my head ringing.

  But yes, he has bit me! Came the cold thought as hammering of heart subsided. He has marked me, for he did not bite me to death! By not biting me he is my friend, which is fatal, for the Serpent is the Enemy of God, and that means now I am too, because in Genesis III the Lord says that…

  I was precocious, yet this logical approach died suddenly as I noticed something new in me. Amid all the fright and excitement my boyish loins had awakened. It was another shock, for there had never been such a stirring before. I did not quite understand, so felt, and found my throbbing club. It was not so much, but seemed enormous to me, and I was amazed, fearful, and delighted. Yes, I knew what it was, we were not hidden about the body and its doings, it was before the Puritans infected our minds with their sackcloth hygiene. I’d seen men and women hump, as I’d seen them shit and piss and eat and drink and fight and work and sleep and play. Yes, and of course we brothers had played the games, Who can raise their Peter Pan, the Little Man, and so on. Whoever human did not?

  But I didn’t know what to do. There I stood in the grass, doubly shocked and aroused, one snake by other, body on fire and throbbing with life, every sense acute, Christian doubt too refined and pale to survive, for the drowsy bees were part of my body-hum, they seemed to be part of the song my virgin cock was trying to crow. And I was bees, winging on the scent of the roses to alight and drink at the summer cups—then very suddenly, with intensest vision, I was in beds, in a bed in particular that smelled of roses all summer long, Annie Penruddock’s bed. She was a Keltic lass, maid of my mother’s, who wetnursed me for a time, and after that for years I liked to creep into her bed on dark nights. “Frightened by the Grumpit again, are we? Come to play with Annie’s poosie, have we?” She gathered fresh wild rose and strewed the petals between her sheets, yes, I liked it there, playing with her poosie, until Mother quite suddenly found fault over something else, a minor thing, and amid great explosion of tears and bawling sent Annie packing back to Cornwall. Yes, Mother knew, and hated it, though she never said why, or mentioned it again at all. But she could not send Annie packing from my memory, and in the glade I stood there, then I lay down in Annie’s bed, all a-throb with longing, with new emotions bursting up, wanting something I couldn’t define—in her, with her, beyond her—I saw a sun set in the fiery ocean—there was a great surge into intolerable brightness and night together, and Annie’s voice, like a shower of many-coloured roses: “Hide your soul in a secret place known only to you. It is what my folk do, so that we don’t forget Mother when Father’s unwell.”

  So I came for the first time, and went to hide my soul. I did this with strange ceremony, dreamily, gravely, at a certain place not far from the Castle, and still in a dream I gave thanks to the serpent for sparing me.

  Then the thunder broke, and so did the spell. All the way back through the woods I pelted, terrified in the downpour, certain the Lightning of God’s Wrath would strike me dead, which it did not, but yes, I was thrashed and questioned—not for the last time!—and no, I said nothing of any of it, nothing of the viper, nor of Eros, nor pagan commitment, far less my sense of being marked by the Devil. I’d lost lantern and tinder, I’d found something I could not tell anyone. It was an initiation, awakening of sense of destiny, and I could never forget it, however much I buried myself in Latin.

  Michael, I was never just a simple Protestant sailor.

  Perhaps now you see why I was in such fuss of temper when we went to Compton two weeks ago.

  You tried to understand my agitation, until you lost your own calm, but you could not fully grasp it any more than I could explain it. The truth is I feared to meet my ancient buried soul. I feared it might enter me then leap out of my eyes and drop me dead, as part of me says I deserve. I think it is Guilt, that I did not drown with my crew, that the Serpent did not kill me. But never mind it. Guilt is murky and impenetrable, which is why it is Guilt: if it were clear, people would gladly rid themselves of it.

  Or would they?

  Michael, it is my business where I hid my soul. Look to your own. I say there is Public Man, and Private Man. Are Secrets always such evil things? Must we shine light in the soul’s every comer? The soul must have her dark side too, for light to shine at all. Without Dark there is no Light—so let the Darkness be! It fertilises! It brings rest, and it cannot be scalpelled by Scientific Investigation, for it is protean, evasive, this-and-that; if you try laser-light on it then it’ll blight you with nightmare and sore misunderstanding! So let it be!

  Michael, it is nine months since I stumbled through your door, not knowing you, and you a historian of my times.

&nb
sp; Karma, they’d call it in California. Synchronicity.

  What do you call it, Michael? Do you disagree if I say these events are somehow directed? Being a humanist, no doubt you’d not commit yourself—but I can see in your heart. You know that I am your Fate. You know I didn’t ask for it, you might even deny it—but your inner humours resent it. From nowhere I appeared to plague you with doubt and upset your comfortable life. In return you have taxed me most heavily in your drive to prove me a Genuine Historical Relic. You have thrown me to graphologists, linguists, hypnotists, anthropologists, and doctors. You took me to Eton, where I played my turn for the College Historian, telling how it was under Udall, and he was amazed. You took me to Cardiff to be “regressed” to my “past lives,” and to general astonishment it turned out not only have I been Sir Humphrey, but also a Mayan astronomer, an Egyptian priestess, an American rum-smuggling pilot, etc. Well, I told you about the Circle at Horsfield, but that you cannot believe. Then we went to the Regis Clinic in London, for analysis of every part of my body. They clipped my toes and hair and skin and blood and my brain as well. They had me drink radioactive barium to trace me deep, and then by analysis of clippings declared I’m a marvel of “minimum contamination by modern global-industrial environment.” They determined that the levels of lead, DDT, sulphur, radioactivity, etc., in my natural body are so low as, by their measurements, to prove that I can be no more than seven years old! Precisely!

  “From a cellular point of view,” said that doctor called Johns, hiding his amazement, “You shouldn’t be alive at all.”