"We get a fair number of visitors in the summer," he said, "people staying at Par, or they come over from Fowey. But you must be an enthusiast, hanging about the churchyard in the rain." I made a supreme effort to pull myself together. "In point of fact," I said, surprised to find that I could even speak, "it was not really the church itself or the graves that interested me. Someone told me there had been a Priory here in former days."
"Ah, yes, the Priory," he said. "That's been gone a long time, no trace of it left, unfortunately. The buildings all fell in after the dissolution of the monasteries in 1538. Some say the site was where Newhouse Farm is now, just below us in the valley, and others that it occupied the present churchyard itself south of the porch, but nobody really knows."
He led me to the north transept and showed me the tombstone of the last Prior, who had been buried before the altar in 1538, and pointed out the pulpit and some pew-ends, and all that was left of the original rood screen. Nothing of what I observed bore any resemblance to the small church I had so lately seen, with the grille in the wall dividing it from the Priory chapel; nor, as I stood here now beside the vicar, could I reconstruct from memory anything of an older transept, an older aisle.
"Everything's changed," I said.
"Changed?" he repeated, puzzled. "Oh, no doubt. The church was largely restored in 1880, possibly not altogether successfully. Are you disappointed?"
"No," I assured him hastily, "not at all. It's only that… Well, as I was saying, my interest goes back to very early days, long before the dissolution of the monasteries."
"I understand." He smiled in sympathy. "I've often wondered myself what it all looked like in former times, with the Priory close by. It was a French house, you know, attached to the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Sergius and Bacchus in Angers, and I believe most of the monks were French. I wish I could tell you more about it, but I've only been here a few years, and I'm afrald I'm no historian."
"Neither am I," I told him, and we retraced our steps towards the porch.
"Do you know anything", I asked, "about the lords of the manor in early times?"
He paused to switch off the lights. "Only what I have read in the Parochial History," he sald. "The manor is mentioned in Domesday as Tiwardrai — the House on the Strand — and it belonged to the great family of Cardinham until the last heiress Isolda sold it to the Champernounes, in the thirteenth century, and when they died out it passed to other hands."
"Isolda?"
"Yes, Isolda de Cardinham. She married someone called William Ferrers of Bere in Devon, but I'm afraid I don't remember the details. You would find out more about it in the Saint Austell public library than from me. He smiled again, and we passed through the door to the churchyard. Are you staying in the neighbourhood or passing through?" he asked.
"Staying. Professor Lane has lent me his house for the summer."
"Kilmarth? I know it, of course, but I've never been inside. I don't think Professor Lane gets down very often, and he doesn't come to church."
"No," I replied, "probably not."
"Well," he said, as we parted at the gate, "if you feel like coming, either to a service or just to wander around, it will be nice to see you."
We shook hands, and I walked up the road to where I had parked the car. I wondered whether I had been impossibly rude. I had not even thanked him for his courtesy, or introduced myself. Doubtless he considered me just another summer visitor, more boorish than usual, and a crank into the bargain. I got into the car, lit a cigarette, and sat there to collect my thoughts. The fact that there had been no physical reaction to the drug whatsoever was an astonishing relief. Not a suspicion of dizziness or nausea, and my limbs did not ache as they had done the day before, nor was I sweating.
I wound down the car window and looked up the street, then back again to the church. None of it fitted. The green where the people had so lately crowded must have covered all the present area, and beyond it too, where the modern road turned uphill. The Priory yard, where the bishop's equipage nearly came to grief would have been in that hollow below the gents hairdresser, boundering the east wall of the churchyard, and the Priory itself according to one theory mentioned by the vicar, filled the entire space that the southern portion of the churchyard held today. I closed my eyes. I saw the entrance, the quadrangle, the long narrow building forming kitchens and refectory, monks dormitory, chapter-house, where the reception had been held, and the Prior's chamber above. Then I opened them again, but the pieces did not fit, and the church tower threw my jigsaw puzzle out of balance. It was no good — nothing tallied save the lie of the land.
I threw away my cigarette, started the car, and took the road past the church. A curious feeling of elation came to me as I swept downhill past the valley stream, and so to the low-lying, straggling shops of Par. Not ten minutes since the whole of this had been under water, the sloping Priory lands lapped by the sea. Sand-banks had bordered the wide sweep of the estuary where those bungalows stood now, and houses and shops were all blue channel with a running tide. I stopped the car by the chemists and bought some tooth-paste, the feeling of elation increasing as the girl wrapped it up. It seemed to me that she was without substance, the shop as well, and the two other people standing there, and I felt myself smiling furtively because of this, with an urge to say, You none of you exist. All this is under water.
I stood outside the shop, and it had stopped raining. The heavy pall that had been overhead all day had broken at last into a patchwork sky, squares of blue alternating with wisps of smoky cloud. Too soon to go back home. Too early to ring Magnus. One thing I had proved, if nothing else: this time there had been no telepathy between us. He might have had some intuition of my movements the preceding afternoon, but not today. The laboratory in Kilmarth was not a bogey-hole conjuring up ghosts, any more than the porch in Saint Andrew's church had been filled with phantoms. Magnus must be right in his assumption that some primary chemical process was reversible, the drug inducing this change; and conditions were such that the senses, reacting to the situation as a secondary effect, swung into action, capturing the past. I had not awakened from some nostalgic dream when the vicar tapped me on the shoulder, but had passed from one living reality to another. Could time be all-dimensional — yesterday, today, tomorrow running concurrently in ceaseless repetition? Perhaps it needed only a change of ingredient, a different enzyme, to show the future, myself a bald-headed buffer in New York with the boys grown-up and married, and Vita dead. The thought was disconcerting. I would rather concern myself with the Champernounes, the Carminowes, and Isolda. No telepathic communication here: Magnus had mentioned none of them, but the vicar had, and only after I had seen them as living persons. Then I decided what to do: I would drive to Saint Austell and see if there was some volume in the public library that would give proof of their identity.
The library was perched above the town, and I parked the car and went inside. The girl at the desk was helpful. She advised me to go upstairs to the reference library, and search for pedigrees in a book called The Visitations of Cornwall.
I took the fat volume from the shelves and settled myse]f at one of the tables. First glance in alphabetical order was disappointing. No Bodrugans and no Champernounes. No Carminowes either. And no Cardinhams. I turned to the beginning once again, and then, with quickening interest, realised that I must have muddled the pages the first time, for I came upon the Carminowes of Carminowe. I let my eye travel down the page, and there Sir John was, married to a Joanna into the bargain — he must have found the similarity of name of wife and mistress confusing. He had a great brood of children, and one of his grandsons, Miles, had inherited Boconnoc. Bococcoc… Bockenod… a change in the spelling, but this was my Sir John without a doubt.