The House on the Strand

  On the succeeding page was his elder brother Sir Oliver Carminowe. By his first wife he had had several children. I glanced along the line and found Isolda his second wife, daughter of one Reynold Ferrers of Bere in Devon, and below, at the bottom of the page, her daughters, Joanna and Margaret. I'd got her--not the vicar's Devon heiress, Isolda Cardinham, but a descendant.

  I pushed the heavy volume aside, and found myself smiling fatuously into the face of a bespectacled man reading the Daily Telegraph, who stared at me suspiciously, then hid his face behind his paper. My lass unparalleled was no figure of the imagination, nor a telepathic process of thought between Magnus and myself. She had lived, though the dates were sketchy: it did not state when she was born or when she died.

  I put the book back on the shelves and walked downstairs and out of the building, the feeling of elation increased by my discovery. Carminowes, Champernounes, Bodrugans, all dead for six hundred years, yet still alive in my other world of time.

  I drove away from St. Austell thinking how much I had accomplished in one afternoon, witnessing a ceremony in a Priory long since crumbled, coupled with Martinmas upon the village green. And all through some wizard's brew concocted by Magnus, leaving no side-effect or aftermath, only a sense of well-being and delight. It was as easy as falling off a cliff. I drove up Polmear hill doing a cool sixty, and it was not until I had turned down the drive to Kilmarth, put away the car and let myself into the house that I thought of the simile again. Falling off a cliff... Was this the side-effect? This sense of exhilaration, that nothing mattered? Yesterday the nausea, the vertigo, because I had broken the rules. Today, moving from one world to another without effort, I was cock-a-hoop.

  I went upstairs to the library and dialed the number of Magnus's flat. He answered immediately.

  "How was it?" he asked.

  "What do you mean, how was it? How was what? It rained all day."

  "Fine in London," he replied. "But forget the weather. How was the second trip?"

  His certainty that I had made the experiment again irritated me. "What makes you think I took a second trip?"

  "One always does."

  "Well, you're right, as it happens. I didn't intend to, but I wanted to prove something."

  "What did you want to prove?"

  "That the experiment was nothing to do with any telepathic communication between us."

  "I could have told you that," he said.

  "Perhaps. But we had both experimented first in Bluebeard's chamber, which might have had an unconscious influence."

  "So..."

  "So, I poured the drops into your drinking-flask--forgive me for making myself at home--drove to the church, and swallowed them in the porch."

  His snort of delight annoyed me even more.

  "What's the matter?" I asked. "Don't tell me you did the same?"

  "Precisely. But not in the porch, dear boy, in the churchyard after dark. The point is, what did you see?"

  I told him, winding up with my encounter with the vicar, the visit to the public library, and the absence, or so I had thought, of any side-effects. He listened to my saga without interruption, as he had done the day before, and when I had concluded he told me to hang on, he was going to pour himself a drink, but he reminded me not to do likewise. The thought of his gin and tonic added fuel to my small flame of irritation.

  "I think you came out of it all very well," he said, "and you seem to have met the flower of the county, which is more than I have ever done, in that time or this."

  "You mean you did not have the same experience?"

  "Quite the contrary. No chapter-house or village green for me. I found myself in the monks' dormitory, a very different kettle of fish."

  "What went on?" I asked.

  "Exactly what you might suppose when a bunch of medieval Frenchmen got together. Use your imagination."

  Now it was my turn to snort. The thought of fastidious Magnus playing peeping Tom among that fusty crowd brought my good humor back again.

  "You know what I think?" I said. "I think we found what we deserved. I got His Grace the Bishop and the County, awaking in me all the forgotten snob appeal of Stonyhurst, and you got the sexy deviations you have denied yourself for thirty years."

  "How do you know I've denied them?"

  "I don't. I give you credit for good behavior."

  "Thanks for the compliment. The point is, none of this can be put down to telepathic communication between us. Agreed?"

  "Agreed."

  "Therefore we saw what we saw through another channel--the horseman, Roger. He was in the chapter-house and on the green with you, and in the dormitory with me. His is the brain that channels the information to us."

  "Yes, but why?"

  "Why? You don't think we are going to discover that in a couple of trips? You have work to do."

  "That's all very well, but it's a bit of a bore having to shadow this chap, or have him shadow me, every time I may decide to make the experiment. I don't find him very sympathetic. Nor do I take to the lady of the manor."

  "The lady of the manor?" He paused a moment, I supposed for reflection. "She's possibly the one I saw on my third trip. Auburn-haired, brown eyes, rather a bitch?"

  "That sounds like her. Joanna Champernoune," I said.

  We both laughed, struck by the folly and the fascination of discussing someone who had been dead for centuries as if we had met her at some party in our own time.

  "She was arguing about manor lands," he said. "I did not follow it. Incidentally, have you noticed how one gets the sense of the conversation without conscious translation from the medieval French they seem to be speaking? That's the link again, between his brain and ours. If we saw it before us in print, old English or Norman-French or Cornish, we shouldn't understand a word."

  "You're right," I said. "It hadn't struck me. Magnus..."

  "Yes?"

  "I'm still a bit bothered about side-effects. What I mean is, thank God I had no nausea or vertigo today, but on the contrary a tremendous sense of elation, and I must have broken the speed-limit several times driving home."

  He did not reply at once, and when he did his tone was guarded. "That's one of the things," he said, "one of the reasons we have to test the drug. It could be addictive."

  "What do you mean exactly, addictive?"

  "What I say. Not just the fascination of the experience itself, which we both know nobody else has tried, but the stimulation to the part of the brain affected. And I've warned you before of the possible physical dangers--being run over, that sort of thing. You must appreciate that part of the brain is shut off when you're under the influence of the drug. The functional part still controls your movements, rather as one can drive with a high percentage of alcohol in the blood and not have an accident, but the danger is always present, and there doesn't appear to be a warning system between one part of the brain and another. There may be. There may not. All this is part of what I have to find out."

  "Yes," I said. "Yes, I see." I felt rather deflated. The sense of exhilaration which I had experienced while driving back had certainly been unusual. "I'd better lay off," I said, "give it a miss, unless the circumstances are absolutely right."

  Again he paused before he answered. "That's up to you," he said. "You must judge for yourself. Any more questions? I'm dining out."

  Any more questions... A dozen, twenty. But I should think of them all when he had rung off. "Yes," I said. "Did you know before you took your first trip that Roger had once lived here in this house?"

  "Absolutely not," he replied. "Mother used to talk about the Bakers of the seventeenth century, and Rashleighs who followed them. We knew nothing about their predecessors, although my father had a vague idea that the foundations went back to the fourteenth century; I don't know who told him."

  "Is that why you converted the old laundry into Bluebeard's chamber?"

  "No, it just seemed a suitable place, and the cloam oven is rather fun. It retains the heat if
you light the fire, and I can keep liquids there at a high temperature while I'm working at something else alongside. Perfect atmosphere. Nothing sinister about it. Don't run away with the idea that this experiment is some sort of a ghost-hunt, dear boy. We're not conjuring spirits from the vasty deep."

  "No, I realize that," I said.

  "To reduce it to its lowest level, if you sit in an armchair watching some old movie on television, the characters don't pop out of the screen to haunt you, although many of the actors are dead. It's not so very different from what you were up to this afternoon. Our guide Roger and his friends were living once, but are well and truly laid today."

  I knew what he meant, but it was not as simple as that. The implications went deeper, and the impact too; the sensation was not so much that of witnessing their world as of taking part in it.

  "I wish," I said, "we knew more about our guide. I daresay I can dig up the others in the St. Austell library--I've found the Carminowes already, as I told you, John, and his brother Oliver, and Oliver's wife Isolda--but a steward called Roger is rather a long shot, and is hardly likely to figure in any pedigree."

  "Probably not, but you can never tell. One of my students has a buddy who works in the Public Record Office and the British Museum, and I've got the business in hand. I haven't told him why I am interested, just that I want a list of taxpayers in the parish of Tywardreath in the fourteenth century. He should be able to find it, I gather, in the Lay Subsidy Roll for 1327, which must be pretty near the period we want. If something turns up I'll let you know. Any news of Vita?"

  "None."

  "Pity you didn't arrange to fly the boys over to her in New York," he said.

  "Too damned expensive. Besides, that would have meant I had to go too."

  "Well, keep them all at bay for as long as you can. Say something has gone wrong with the drains--that will daunt her."

  "Nothing daunts Vita," I told him. "She'd bring some plumbing expert down from the American Embassy."

  "Well, press on before she arrives. And while I think of it, you know the sample marked B in the lab, alongside the A solution you're using?"

  "Yes."

  "Pack it carefully and send it up to me. I want to put it under test."

  "Then you are going to try it out in London?"

  "Not on myself, on a healthy young monkey. He won't see his medieval forebears, but he might get the staggers. Good-bye."

  Magnus had hung up on me again in his usual brusque fashion, leaving me with the inevitable sense of depletion. It was always so, whenever we met and talked, or spent an evening together. First the stimulation, sparks flying and the moments speeding by, then suddenly he would be gone, hailing a taxi and disappearing--not to be seen again for several weeks--while I wandered aimlessly back to my own flat.

  "And how was your Professor?" Vita would ask in the ironic, rather mocking tone she assumed when I had passed an evening in Magnus's company, and emphasis on the "your" which never failed to sting.

  "In the usual form," I would answer. "Full of wild ideas I find amusing."

  "Glad you had fun," was the reaction, but with a biting edge that implied the reverse of pleasure. She told me once, after a somewhat longer session than usual, when I had come home rather high about 2 a.m., that Magnus sapped me, and that when I returned to her I looked like a pricked balloon.

  It was one of our first rows, and I did not know how to deal with it. She wandered around the sitting-room punching cushions and emptying her own ashtrays, while I sat on the sofa looking aggrieved. We went to bed without speaking, but the next morning, to my surprise and relief, she behaved as if nothing had happened, and positively glowed with feminine warmth and charm. Magnus was not mentioned again, but I made a mental note not to dine with him again unless she had a date herself elsewhere.

  Today I did not feel like a pricked balloon when he rang off--the expression was rather offensive, come to think of it, suggesting the fetid air of somebody's breath exploding--merely denuded of stimulation, and a little uneasy too, because why did he suddenly want a test done on the bottle marked B? Did he want to make certain of his findings on the unfortunate monkey before putting me, the human guinea-pig, to a possibly sharper test? There was still sufficient solution in bottle A to keep me going...

  I was brought up sharply in my train of thought. Keep me going? It sounded like an alcoholic preparing for a spree, and I remembered what Magnus had said about the possibilities of the drug being addictive. Perhaps this was another reason for trying it out on the monkey. I had a vision of the creature, bleary-eyed, leaping about his cage and panting for the next injection.

  I felt in my pocket for the flask, and rinsed it out very thoroughly. I did not replace it on the pantry shelf, however, for Mrs. Collins might take it into her head to move it somewhere else, and then if I happened to want it I should have to ask her where it was, which would be a bore. It was too early for supper, but the tray she had laid with ham and salad, fruit and cheese looked tempting, and I decided to carry it into the music-room and have a long evening by the wood fire.

  I took a stack of records at random and piled them one on top of the other on the turntable. But, no matter what sounds filled the music-room, I kept returning to the scenes of this afternoon, the reception in the Priory chapter-house, the stripping of carcasses on the village green, the hooded musician with his double horn wandering among the children and the barking dogs, and above all that lass with braided hair and jeweled fillet who, one afternoon six hundred years ago, had looked so bored until, because of some remark which I could not catch, spoken by a man in another time, she had lifted her head and smiled.

  5

  There was an airmail letter from Vita on my breakfast tray next morning. It was written from her brother's house on Long Island. The heat was terrific, she said, they were in the pool all day, and Joe was taking his family to Newport on the yacht he had chartered mid-week. What a pity we had not known his plans earlier on. I could have flown the boys over and we could all have spent the summer vacation together. As things were, it was too late to change anything. She only hoped the Professor's house would turn out to be a success--and how was it, anyway? Did I want her to bring a lot of food down from London? She was flying from New York on Wednesday, and hoped there would be a letter for her at the flat in London.

  Today was Wednesday. She was due in at London airport around ten o'clock this evening, and she would not find a letter in the flat because I had not expected her until the weekend.

  The thought of Vita arriving in the country within a few hours came as a shock. The days I had thought my own, with complete freedom to plan as I wished, would be upset by telephone calls, demands, questions, the whole paraphernalia of life en famille. Somehow, before the first telephone call came through, I must be ready with a delaying device, some scheme to keep her and the boys in London for at least another few days.

  Magnus had suggested drains. Drains it well might be, but the trouble was that when Vita finally arrived she would naturally start asking Mrs. Collins about it, and Mrs. Collins would stare at her in blank surprise. The rooms not ready? This would reflect on Mrs. Collins, and bode ill for future relations between the two women. Electricity failure? But it hadn't any more than the drains. Nor could I pretend to be ill, for this would bring Vita down immediately to move me, wrapped in blankets, to hospital back in London; she was suspicious of all medical treatment unless it was top grade. Well, I must think of something, if only for Magnus's sake; it would be letting him down if the experiment was brought to an abrupt conclusion after only two attempts to prove success.

  Today was Wednesday. Say experiment on Wednesday, give it a miss on Thursday, then experiment on Friday, a miss on Saturday, experiment on Sunday, and, if Vita was adamant about coming down on Monday, then Monday she must come. This plan allowed for three "trips" (the LSD phraseology was certainly apt) and, providing nothing went wrong and I chose my moment well, did nothing foolish, the side-effects woul
d be nil, just as they had been yesterday, apart from the sense of exhilaration, which I should immediately recognize and accept as a warning. In any event I felt no exhilaration now; Vita's letter was doubtless the cause of the slight despondency that appeared to be my form today.

  Breakfast over, I told Mrs. Collins that my wife was arriving in London tonight, and would probably be coming down with her boys next week, on Monday or Tuesday. She immediately produced a list of groceries and other things which would be needed. This gave me an opportunity to drive down to Par to collect them, and at the same time think out the text of a letter to Vita which she would get the following morning.

  The first person I saw in the grocer's was the vicar of St. Andrew's, who crossed the shop to say good morning. I introduced myself, belatedly, as Richard Young, and told him that I had taken his advice and gone to the county library at St. Austell after leaving the church.

  "You must be a real enthusiast," he smiled. "Did you find what you wanted?"

  "In part," I replied. "The heiress Isolda de Cardinham proved elusive in the book of pedigrees, although I found a descendant, Isolda Carminowe, whose father was a Reynold Ferrers of Bere in Devon."

  "Reynold Ferrers rings a bell," he said. "The son, I believe I'm right in saying, of Sir William Ferrers who married the heiress. Therefore your Isolda would be their granddaughter. I know the heiress sold the manor of Tywardreath to one of the Champernounes in 1269, just before she married William Ferrers, for one hundred pounds. Quite a sum in those days."

  I made a rapid calculation in my head. My Isolda could hardly have been born before 1300. She had not looked more than about twenty-eight at the bishop's reception, which would date that even around 1328.