Doctor Illuminatus Read online

  At the strand of barbed wire, Sebastian stopped and said, “Whatever you see, or hear, remember it is but an image in your head. No harm can befall you for you will be within the protection of the Garden of Eden.” With that, he held up the wire and stepped beneath it.

  Pip followed, Tim taking up the rear. Very cautiously, they moved in single file through the trees. The wind blew hard in the boughs above them, tossing branches about and shedding small twigs that fell upon them as they advanced through the covert. Reaching the clearing, the pathways that Pip had cleared and trimmed stood out before them. In the very center, hanging from a Y-shaped staff stuck in the earth, was an ancient cast-iron lantern. The flame within it glowed a delicate green, flickering as the wind licked at the lamp’s chimney.

  “Why it is green, not orange?” Pip whispered.

  “De Loudéac has added powdered antimony to the oil,” Sebastian explained, keeping his voice low.

  “What is antimony?” Tim asked softly.

  “It is a metal, ruled by fire, which an alchemist called Basil Valentine discovered would act against men of holy inclination. Hence its name, for antimony derives from the Latin, meaning against a monk. Mixing it with the lamp oil makes for a devilish light.”

  With that, Sebastian stepped into the clearing, raising his arms as a priest might before an altar.

  “In nomine patris omnipotentis, domine sancta, eterne deus, tu fecisti coelum et terram,” he intoned, walking towards the lamp, “discedo, defluo, abeo...”

  For a moment, nothing happened; then, from the far side of the clearing, there rose a black shadow darker than the night. It swept towards Sebastian, swirling above him like a miniature tornado. The smell of burning hair filled the wind. Pip felt it snatching at her throat. Tim, at her side, coughed loudly.

  Sebastian did not move. He stood quite still with his arms raised. The narrow base of the black tornado sought him out, pulling at his clothes, which whipped about him.

  “We’ve got to do something!” Pip exclaimed, choking on the stench.

  Sebastian was being lifted from the ground, his feet a good few centimeters above the grass. He was beginning to spin with the force of the whirlwind.

  Side by side, Pip and Tim ran forward, yelling at the tops of their voices. The tornado seemed to waver. The wide top of its funnel bent towards them as a face might upon suddenly seeing them. For a few seconds, it moved in their direction, carrying Sebastian with it. A meter from them, it halted and, with a piercing whistle, it rose rapidly into the air, dissipating as it hit the blast of the storm blowing over the treetops.

  “I am indebted to you,” Sebastian said, dizzy from being spun round and trying to stand upright. “De Loudéac would not have won this petty joust, but that was not his intention. You might say he was flexing his muscles as best he could, to deter me from my mission.”

  “He might have killed you,” Pip said, putting her hand on Sebastian’s shoulder to steady him.

  “No,” Sebastian replied. “He could lift me no higher.”

  “I thought he couldn’t come into this wood,” Tim stated.

  “He may enter,” Sebastian replied, “as he did when Pip was tending the plants, yet he may do little harm here. His powers are much reduced within the precinct of the wood.”

  “What was he doing here?” Pip pondered aloud. Sebastian pointed to the figwort growing close by and said, “Look, you can see where I picked a flower head when we were in this place together. And here, where I took a leaf of valerian. See how this other leaf has been torn? De Loudéac was in this place, seeking to copy my sauvegarde.”

  “What does he want to do that for?” Tim asked. “If he could copy it,” Sebastian said, “he could the better counteract my magic and attack me.” At that point, he laughed. “Yet he is confused. He came here to study which plants I had used but you, Pip, have been here since with your pruning implements. Now, he cannot tell which plants I cut and which you.”

  He walked across to the lantern, opening it. The wind extinguished the flame immediately. No sooner was it out than both the lantern and the staff melted into thin air.

  “We must be gone,” Sebastian announced, “and you must return home, for the dampness will give you the ague unless you warm yourselves.”

  “You’ll catch cold as well,” Pip said, but Sebastian seemed not to hear her and started striding out of the wood.

  Pip and Tim followed him across the field. At the coach house, Sebastian waved to them and entered the building as they returned to the main house. They let themselves in and, resetting the alarm, silently went up to their rooms.

  When Tim reached his bedroom, he found his Delta Airlines flight to Rome within ten minutes of landing but three hundred miles off course. He hit the Esc key and, undressing, started to towel himself dry.

  Why play at being an airline pilot, he thought, when he was living in a real-life equivalent of Tomb Raider?

  Five

  The Shout

  The storm had gone by dawn, leaving the countryside bathed in brilliant summer sunlight. Mrs. Ledger announced at breakfast that she was going to spend the morning investigating Brampton and, as she put it, get her bearings on the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker.

  “Have a good time,” Tim said, tipping his cereal bowl to get the last of the milk and muesli onto his spoon.

  “I’m sure we will,” his mother responded.

  It was a moment before Tim caught the significance of the reply.

  “We?”

  “Yes, ‘we,’ ” said his mother. “You and Pip are coming too. We have to register with the doctor and the dentist.”

  And so, just after nine o’clock, they left Rawne Barton in Mrs. Ledger’s car for the nearby town.

  “How do you like living here?” their mother asked as she negotiated the narrow country lanes, having to pull in to let first a tractor, then a milk-collecting truck squeeze past.

  “It’s cool,” said Tim, noncommittally.

  Both he and Pip knew that when their mother started asking questions like that out of the blue, she was not just making conversation, but was on a mission of discovery.

  “The house is wonderful,” Pip added.

  “Yes, isn’t it?” Mrs. Ledger replied. “Just think of all that has gone on in our own home, right back down through history.”

  And you don’t know the half of it, thought Tim. “And the countryside is beautiful,” Pip remarked. “It certainly is. When I was a little girl, you used to still see fields of wildflowers, but then they died out. Farming methods changed. Nowadays, you only see wildflowers in National Trust places and SSSIs. But our back field, behind the coach house — that’s a wonder to behold.”

  “What’s an SSSI?” Tim asked, hoping to take some control of this seemingly innocuous conversation.

  “A site of special scientific interest,” his mother told him. “A government classification for land that cannot be disturbed — dug up, plowed, built upon, sprayed with chemicals.”

  Halting at a T-junction, Mrs. Ledger waited for a delivery van to pass. The signpost indicated Brampton to the left and Stockwold to the right. She turned left.

  “Your friend Sebastian seems a pleasant boy,” she remarked as the car accelerated.

  So, Tim thought, that was where this camouflaged interrogation was heading.

  “Yes,” Pip said, exchanging a glance with her brother. “He’s really nice. Can we have him to stay over one night?”

  Sharp move, Tim considered. His sister was no fool. Get their mother on the back foot . . .

  “Of course,” Mrs. Ledger said. “Do you ...?” “He is going to go to Bourne End Comprehensive too,” Pip went on, justifying the lie: after all, if Sebastian were to attend any school, that would probably be the one — and he had once gone to a local school. “He’ll be in the same year as us but I don’t know what class.”

  “I think he’s good at science,” Tim chipped in, “so he might be in a top set.”


  “I hope you two will be as well,” their mother retorted. “Is he ...?”

  “And he’s very good at history,” Pip continued. “He knows all about the history of our house, when it was built and everything.”

  “I’m going fishing again this afternoon,” Tim announced, changing the subject to get it away from Sebastian before his mother could respond. “There’s a really neat stretch where the trees overhang the water.”

  They reached the outskirts of Brampton. The sides of the road were so jammed with parked cars, passing traffic was at a crawl. There was a line ten cars long to get into the town parking lot.

  “It’s very busy!” Mrs. Ledger exclaimed, with more than a hint of concern in her words. “I thought this would be a sleepy little place.”

  Tim winked at Pip. She grinned back. Their mother, who always got flustered when driving in traffic, would not be of a mind now to delve further into the mystery of Sebastian.

  As they turned into the high street, the reason for the traffic was explained. It was market day. The street was lined with stalls on the pavements selling anything from cheap clothing to fresh fish, fruit and vegetables, from locally made farmhouse cheeses and second-hand books to a wide variety of bread baked with organic flour. What was throughout the rest of the week a quiet little country town was now a bustling hive of activity: farmers meeting to discuss agricultural matters, housewives chattering as they shopped, stallholders calling out their wares, the occasional tourist wandering about photographing what was to them an old English scene, unchanged for eons.

  With some difficulty, Mrs. Ledger managed to park near the doctor’s office and they went in just in time for their appointment. Dr. Oliver was a young man with incredibly long fingers and, Pip thought, sad eyes. He told them he was a local man, requested that they fill out registration forms and asked if they had any current medical conditions or problems.

  “Only Pip,” Mrs. Ledger started. “She has a small wart on her left thumb. Our last doctor was going to remove it, but then we moved . . .”

  Dr. Oliver took Pip’s hand, looked at the wart and said, “That’s no problem at all. I can take it off in a day or two. Do make an appointment as you go out.”

  Leaving the office, they walked in the direction of the high street.

  “I’m going to look around the market,” Mrs. Ledger announced.

  “We would never have guessed,” Tim said.

  “And I suppose it goes without saying . . . .” their mother began. Then she added, “Be back at the car in an hour.”

  “Time to kill,” Tim said, somewhat despondently. He did not want to hang around the market and there were no shops in the street he wished to visit. Apart from a greengrocer, a butcher, a pharmacy, a mini-mart, a hairdresser, a post office, a hardware store that advertised repairs to lawnmowers and a tea shop called Ye Olde Cream Bunne, there was precious little else.

  “I’ve an idea,” Pip declared. “You coming?”

  Tim shrugged and followed his sister as she set off across the street, weaving through the market stalls, the sauntering throng of shoppers and the slow-moving traffic. At the entrance to an alley quaintly called The Snuck, she paused to get her bearings then made her way down it. At the end, they came out into a small cobbled square in front of the thirteenth-century church. A noticeboard by the ancient lych-gate announced in gold paint:

  The Church of Saint Benedict and the

  Blessed Raymond Lull

  Rector: The Rev. Eric Crane

  Pip pushed open the gate and entered the graveyard. A gravel path led up to the church porch.

  “Tim,” Pip said, “go in the church and have a look at the monuments on the wall and the graves set into the floor.”

  “And look for what?”

  “You’ll know when you see it,” she answered enigmatically and, stepping off the path, began to walk slowly along the first row of ancient headstones.

  Entering the church, Tim worked his way around the building, studying every monument. Those on the walls were mostly dedicated to notable locals who had died since about 1750: there was a sea captain who was lost overboard from an East Indiaman in the South China Sea in 1793 and a Dr. Artemus Drage who, in 1821, had invented a clockwork astrolabe. Most of the gravestones set into the floor of the aisle were worn smooth by the feet of worshippers. The only tomb was set into an alcove in the choir and had upon it an alabaster figure of a man in Elizabethan court dress, a sword at his side and a ruff at his throat. His nose, the toes of his shoes and the fingers of one hand had been chiseled off. A little notice pasted on to a piece of plywood stated that this was the final resting place of Sir Richard Mauncey. The damage to his effigy had been caused by soldiers during the English Civil War.

  Back at the church door, Tim noticed a table bearing a pile of booklets giving the history of the church. They were fifty pence each. He felt in his pocket, dropped his money into the collection box, opened a copy of the pamphlet and started to read. On the fifth line down, it hit him.

  “Bingo!”

  He hurried out of the church to discover Pip standing in the graveyard, halfway along the north wall of the building.

  “You were right!” he called, waving the pamphlet. “Guess what I’ve found!”

  “Me first,” Pip said, as he reached her.

  She pointed to a low gravestone made of a slab of flint and leaning at an angle, from which she had rubbed the lichen. Upon it were inscribed the words: Thomas Rawne Esq. of Rawne Barton. Dec’d the 12th day of May Anno Domini 1440 — Requiescat in pace.

  “Sebastian’s father,” Tim remarked quietly. Then he opened the flimsy guide. “Now listen to this.” He began to read. “ ‘The parish church of Brampton is dedicated to two saints. Saint Benedict, the founder of western monasticism, was the saint who established the Benedictine Rule. At one time, there were over forty thousand monasteries practising his doctrine, the monks calling themselves Benedictines. The famous monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy, much damaged in World War II but now restored, was founded by him. He is the patron saint of farmers and...’” Tim paused for effect, “‘... of those fighting or harmed by witchcraft.’ And that’s not all. Get a load of this. ‘The Blessed Raymond Lull, also known as Doctor Illuminatus, was the first Christian missionary to Islam in the thirteenth century. He was considered to be an alchemist who invented his own Christian interpretations of the alchemical mysteries, and is said to have succeeded in turning lead into gold, using this to finance his missionary work. A small number of his followers, known as Lullists, secretly continued his work after his death.’ ”

  He closed the guide and folded it into his pocket. “Seems like Brampton and the countryside around has been a hotbed of jiggery-pokery for centuries.”

  “And still is,” Pip added.

  Leaving the churchyard, they returned to the main street and set off along the line of stalls, jostling their way through the crowd of shoppers. On the other side of the road, they caught a glimpse of their mother standing at a stall selling fresh meat.

  “Ten pence says it’s chops,” Tim said.

  “Sausages,” Pip rejoined, “and you’re on.”

  At the end of the street was a stall, smaller than the rest, selling secondhand books. Tim stopped in front of the cloth-covered table and began to look at the titles. Towards the front were used paperbacks, tatty copies of bestsellers with lurid covers, or older hardbacks missing their dust jackets. According to which row they were in, each book cost either one or two pounds. Behind them, on a rack of shelves, were larger editions, travel books on Asia, novels in better condition than those below, biographies and assorted nonfiction. On the topmost shelf were several dozen leather-bound books, their bindings cracked and the gold-leaf lettering on their spines faded.

  Tim ran his eye along them, studying the titles — The Gentleman’s Magazine: 1805, Paley’s Natural Theology, The Poetical Works of Lord Hervey and Boswell’s Life of Johnson in six volumes. It was not until he was halfway
along the shelf that a slim volume took his attention. It was bound in red morocco leather with gold tooling and was entitled The Ordinall of Alchimy.

  “Pip,” Tim called out.

  His sister, who was two stalls away looking at arrangements of dried flowers, scented candles and bottles of aromatic oils to add to potpourri, came over to the bookstall.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Look at this,” Tim said, and he reached for the book. An old man appeared from behind the shelves. He wore a grubby checked cloth cap, an old jersey with two buttons missing, a shirt without a collar and baggy corduroy trousers.

  “What d’you want?” he snapped.

  “I’d like to see that book, please,” Tim replied. “Which one?”

  The old man leaned forward, in front of Pip and Tim, to look at the shelves. He smelled foul — of rancid tobacco, sweat, stale beer, unwashed feet and moldy cloth. His face was slack-jowled, grime ingrained in the wrinkles, his eyes almost colorless, watery and weak.

  “That one,” Tim said. “The thin one in the middle, to the left of Poems upon Several Occasions.”

  “Norton’s Ordinall,” the old man sneered. “That’s not for you.”

  “How much is it?” Tim inquired.

  “More than you’ve got. And I’ve told you, it’s not for you.”

  “I’d like to see it, please,” Tim persisted, being as polite as he could.

  “You can’t,” the old man replied tartly.

  “I only want to see it,” Tim said, somewhat belligerently.

  “This isn’t a library,” the old man retorted. “Go away.”

  “You can’t sell many books if you don’t let people look at them,” Tim observed.

  At this, the old man raised his hand. The fingers were bony, the knuckles arthritic, the nails thick and long and the color of horn.

  “Begone, boy,” he muttered threateningly, “or I’ll rip your bloody ears off.”

  Tim and Pip stepped backwards. All around them, shoppers came and went, women carrying baskets or pushing baby buggies, two men carting a heavy arm-chair between them, another lifting a cardboard box full of old postcards into the back of a van.