Four eyebrows shot up in unison across the desk. Surely the man wasn’t going to suggest that Compton was a centre of learning to rival Berlin or Bologna. The Bishop noted the look of disdain on his visitors’ faces and reminded himself of the obligations of Christian charity.
‘It is my belief,’ he went on earnestly, ‘though I would never dare to lay claim to the wisdom you two scholars have brought to my Palace this evening, that the document is a diary, a record, kept by one of the monks when the present cathedral was still a monastery in 1530 or 1540, I am not at all sure of the dates. It would be a most magnificent find if it were true, for we celebrate one thousand years in the life of abbey and cathedral at Easter.’
Even Parslow and Crawford were impressed by the thousand years of history.
‘Professor Crawford?’ said the Bishop hesitantly. ‘Perhaps you would like to give us your opinion.’
The Professor snorted slightly once again. He took off his spectacles and laid them on the desk. ‘Interesting though your speculations are, my dear Bishop,’ he just about managed a smile for Gervase Bentley Moreton, ‘I feel it far too soon to pass any kind of authoritative judgement. There are a number of problems in my view. Even by the standard of Church Latin of the time, the language is very poor. I do not say that renders it inauthentic, but it raises the possibility the strong possibility in my judgement, that it may be either a forgery, or a joke document written to impersonate what the author thought would be the grammar and vocabulary of a country bumpkin.’
Bishop Moreton had rather more respect for country bumpkins that either of his visitors. ‘And what is your view, Mr Parslow?’ He turned to face the man from the British Museum.
‘I would have to say first of all, Bishop,’ Octavius Parslow was tapping his fingers slowly on the desk, ‘that I would wish to take issue with my colleague here about the Latin.’ He bestowed a condescending smile on his fellow scholar. ‘Crude, yes, ungrammatical, yes, but not, I would suggest, the work of a country bumpkin. There are records from one or two of the northern abbeys, Bolton, I believe, and perhaps Fountains, where the phraseology, while obviously not from the senior common rooms of Oxford, is not dissimilar. My reservations centre rather more on the sequence of legislation described in the documents. Surely the Act of Annates was passed before the Act of Succession? Yet here it would appear to be the other way round. There may be some perfectly innocent explanation as to why history seems to have been running in reverse order here in Compton, but for the moment I cannot see it.’
‘I am not at all sure,’ Professor Crawford returned to the fray, ‘that the precise order of the various acts is significant. The fellow is not writing an academic thesis, merely giving his reactions to contemporary events. He could have made a mistake.’
This time it was Octavius Parslow who snorted. ‘I don’t think you will find that statement to be borne out by the historical records at all,’ he said, turning slightly red.
‘Gentlemen, gentlemen.’ Bishop Moreton tried to restore some kind of order. ‘Could I ask you a more specific question about the document. What date would you say it was?’
‘Speaking for myself,’ said Professor Crawford, ‘I could not hazard my academic record or my professional reputation on that question at this juncture.’
‘Mr Parslow?’ said the Bishop.
‘In my view, Bishop, it would be premature to attempt any precision at this stage.’
The Bishop felt himself growing drowsy. He had had a very busy day, with a diocesan meeting that had lasted for a full three hours. He lowered his head as if in concentration, but his eyes were closing. Various phrases penetrated his brain as the battle raged on across his desk. ‘Need to see the whole question in its proper historical context,’ ‘further documentation to be consulted in the Bodleian,’ ‘a question not merely of the Dissolution of the Monasteries but of the wider evolution of Tudor religious policy in its entirety,’ and this from the Oxford Professor Crawford, ‘need to consult widely with colleagues, possibly even in Cambridge,’ ‘detailed textual analysis vital before any proper historical comparisons can be made at all.’
The bells of Isaiah and Ezekiel woke the Bishop at eight o’clock precisely. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘this has been most illuminating. Perhaps we could continue our discussions over dinner.’ As the Bishop led Professor Crawford and Octavius Parslow towards his dining room, he reflected on the idea of time in Compton running backwards. You could leave these two here, he said to himself as he beamed happily at his guests, discussing this document and they’d keep going all the way back to the Dissolution of the Monasteries themselves in 1539. They might be able to keep the academic argument going right back to the foundation of the abbey in 901.
Lord Francis Powerscourt enjoyed being a Bishop to begin with. He wasn’t quite sure precisely what a Bishop of Compton would do when he sat here. Maybe his job was simply to preside over the services, to give his seal of approval to all those Te Deums and Cantate Dominos that would have echoed round the choir down the centuries. Then the pain got worse. He was on the second sleeve of his shirt now and was seriously worried that he would be on his trousers or his waistcoat next. He limped painfully round the cathedral, checking all the doors. He passed the treasury, filled with ancient crosses and chalices and Communion cups. One of the past glories of the minster was in there, a small box said to contain relics of Thomas a Becket. This piece of treasure had brought great wealth to the cathedral in years gone by as pilgrims came from all over England to pay tribute. The money they left had been enough to repair the great crossing when the tower fell down in the fourteenth century. Above him, as he passed the mighty pillars, the jokes of the medieval stone workers were still there, a cobbler mending shoes, someone removing a thorn from his foot, a fox stealing a goose, a spoonbill eating a frog. The circuit of the doors took him over forty minutes. Normally it would have taken less than ten. His leg was still painful. He wasn’t quite sure how much blood he had lost, spots of it marking his progress round the building.
By eleven o’clock Powerscourt was back in the sanctuary, sitting on the steps in front of the high altar. He wondered if he could last through the night without falling asleep. He was, he knew, on the edge of delirium. The pipes on the great organ seemed to dance in front of him. He heard over and over again the muffled thud of the falling masonry. He could see himself diving again and again through the entrance to the choir. The faint noises he had heard from outside earlier on, horses’ hooves on the road, people talking to each other as they walked across Cathedral Green, had died out as Compton retired for the night. Sometimes he thought he detected scurrying noises at the back of the choir as if the cathedral mice had come out to play and sing some anthems of their own.
At twenty past eleven he thought he heard a creak coming from the west front. It was a prolonged creak, followed by a second one. Powerscourt remembered that there were two great locks on the door. The door opened very slowly. The murderer is coming back, Powerscourt said to himself. He’s coming back to finish me off. When he finds no corpse underneath those masonry blocks in the transept he’ll search the entire cathedral. He saw, or thought he saw – he wasn’t very sure what was real and what was delirium any more – a lantern moving slowly up the nave about a hundred and fifty yards away from his position in the sanctuary. Powerscourt was dazzled by the unexpected light after his hours in the darkness. He couldn’t see who was behind it. He looked around desperately at the high altar. He might have declined to remove the cloth to quench his wound but he felt the two heavy silver candlesticks might help to keep him alive. He didn’t think God would object to that. He realized suddenly that while he could see the lantern, the person behind it couldn’t see him. The light wasn’t strong enough to reach all that distance. The footsteps were very loud. Powerscourt was planning an ambush. If he could reach the back of the chantry chapel of Sir Algernon Carew on the far side of the choir, he might be able to knock the murderer out with one great blow from his candlestick. He tiptoed off across the presbytery.