‘What shape?’
‘A cyclical one. They believed that there had been four great monarchies or empires, each ruling over a particular age, and that each in its turn had been conquered and overturned by the next. I believe the four were Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, and then Rome.’
‘So where was the fifth monarchy?’
‘Not where,’ Bouchard said. ‘When. The fifth monarchy was the one that was about to dawn. The new king would be Christ, and his reign would last for ever. They backed this theory up with close reference to Biblical texts. There was a very heavy emphasis on the Revelation of St John, which famously gives the number of the beast as 666. Many argued that the year 1666 would be the last year of the earthly calendar. They liked the Book of Daniel, too. In that book, Daniel receives a vision of four great beasts who will have dominion over the Earth, and then, after “a time, and times, and half a time” will be cast down. That will be the signal that the son of man was about to ascend his throne.’
Again, Kennedy heard a definite and scary echo of the Judas tribe’s world view, with its insistence on thousand-year-long cycles and its infatuation with St John. The only extant version of their secret gospel had been encoded in a copy of his.
‘And Toller was part of this group?’
‘A leading figure, along with the likes of John Carew, Vavasor Powell and Robert Blackborne. Blackborne was the first secretary of the admiralty, by the way. Their modern-day successors may be marginal crackpots, but these were solid, serious men, with public stature and political influence.’
‘Okay,’ Kennedy said. ‘Look, I’ve probably taken up more of your time than you can really spare …’
‘I’m happy to help,’ Bouchard said.
She got up from the desk and pushed the typescript in his direction, going for broke. ‘Then could you explain some of these prophecies to me? The proper nouns, at least?’
Bouchard raised his eyebrows. There were a lot of pages. It was a lot to ask.
‘I can perhaps add some annotations,’ he said, without much enthusiasm. ‘Marginal notes. Here and there.’
It was Kennedy’s turn to be surprised. ‘Marginal notes? On the only surviving copy of a lost book?’
‘No. Obviously not. What you’ve been reading is not the only copy. It’s a copy of the copy, which I made so you could take it away with you.’ He raised his hand, forestalling her thanks. ‘Thank John Partridge. He pleaded very eloquently on your behalf. Burn it when you’re done. And don’t, please, tell anyone who gave it to you. We have our reputation to consider.’
Kennedy understood perfectly. She’d had one of those herself, once.
Since there was no second chair, and no room in the narrow cubicle to set one down, Bouchard just sat on the floor and talked her through the prophecies one at a time. Some he just passed on, but on most he had at least a guess to offer — and Kennedy copied in his annotations in the margins or over the actual words of the text.
Münsters Churche was the Überwasserkirche, where a group of religious extremists — Anabaptists — had inaugurated their new government during a short-lived coup.
The faithlesse Soldier was almost certainly Thomas Fairfax, one of Cromwell’s generals who had been a friend to Toller and the Fifth Monarchy movement, but had subsequently withdrawn his support for them and backed out of public life entirely.
Ister was one of many old names for the River Danube.
And so on, through all the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of a very intricate, idiosyncratic book. But Bouchard had nothing to offer Kennedy on the Island that was given for an Island. ‘It could be anywhere. This was a time when all the European powers were annexing territories in the New World as fast as they could be discovered, then fighting endless wars over them, using the native populations as cannon fodder.’ He frowned at the text, as though unwilling to admit that he was stumped. ‘It would have to be referring to something recent enough that it was still talked about in Toller’s day. Then again, he refers to the Münster uprising, and that was decades earlier. It will be hard to pin down.’
Kennedy was only half-listening. Something Bouchard had said had nudged a memory and she was chasing it up on the laptop. The Überwasserkirche. She found the reference and stared at it in mute horror.
And the faithless soldier. A few more clicks brought up a biography of Thomas Fairfax and she knew with a sickening certainty that she was right.
‘The ending of days,’ she muttered.
‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ Bouchard enquired politely.
Kennedy stared at him. ‘What all of this is about. The ending of days. The second coming. Armageddon.’
Bouchard nodded. ‘Yes, that’s the climax of Toller’s prophecies, of course. Christ will descend and destroy the unrighteous. Only the just will remain. All of these other events are merely warnings. Harbingers. They tell us that the beginning of Christ’s kingdom is imminent.’
‘Then He must be on His way,’ Kennedy said. ‘Because most of these things have already happened.’
40
Rush fretted a lot about how he was going to get his stash of illicitly borrowed books out of Ryegate House. But in the end, he just picked his moment and walked out of the staff entrance carrying them in a black plastic bin bag. If he was stopped, he was planning to say he’d found the bag in a corridor and assumed it was rubbish. But he wasn’t stopped.
An hour or so later, and seven miles east in Harlesden, he decanted his haul onto his parents’ kitchen table. His mum and dad were in bed already. His mother would have fallen asleep long ago, on half a temazepam, and his dad would probably be sitting up with a book, listening to classical music on his headphones. Neither had heard him return, which meant he didn’t have to pretend that everything was normal.
He’d chosen the books quickly, and some of them were no use at all. But Toller appeared in the indexes of most of them. And in one, Rush found a commentary of some kind on the mysterious book of prophecies.
It looked pretty promising at first, but it turned out to have nothing to say about the prophecies themselves. It was more interested in the book as a physical object, and in particular the revolutionary use of a process for the book’s few picture plates that anticipated some aspects of lithography.
Rush had no idea what lithography was, so he had no opinion about that. But as he was flicking through the pages he saw another reproduction of the frontispiece: the steep crag, and the town, and the Latin tag. Now he noticed the image had a second caption as well as the one Toller had given it.
It read ‘Gellert Hall, circa 1640’.
His vision was starting to swim. It wasn’t ‘Gellert Hall’, it was ‘Gellert Hill’.
He gave up and closed the book. He’d get up early in the morning and read some more before he went into work. Or maybe he’d pull a sickie and spend the day reading. He was keen to have something solid to show to Kennedy when she got back.
He went into the kitchen, raided his dad’s meagre stash of booze and found a half-bottle of cheap brandy that was mostly full, but when he unscrewed the cap the smell of it made his stomach turn. What he really needed was sleep, but he knew that it would take its own not-so-sweet time coming. Whenever he closed his eyes, he could still see Professor Gassan with his hands clasped around the knife that was sticking out of his chest.