Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine Read online

  “That,” the story-teller continued, emphatically, “was only the first time I saw the ghosts. Nine years ago, in 1813, the event was repeated, almost exactly. This time, again from the window of the Yellow Room, I was able to count the lights—there were eight—and was able to discern that they were ghostly lanterns, held aloft by shadowy hands, moving in strange spirals around a region at the further end of the lawn. Again, Jefferies, having arrived at the spot after their disappearance, declared that they must have been fireflies—but this time, Millicent, Harry and I had got much closer before the lanterns winked out, and none of us was in any doubt that they really were ghostly lanterns. That was when Harry—Old Harry, that is, not the present Earl, who was left to sleep, much to his annoyance—guessed that the apparition must be taking place on the anniversary of Harold Longstride’s combat with Emund Snurlson, and that the ghosts must be converging on the yew tree in the shadow of which the crucial fight to the death had taken place.

  “The third time I saw the apparition, seven years ago, it was clearer still. This time, I was able to make out the silhouettes of the human figures carrying the lanterns. They were, alas, not pale and shiny, as ghosts are often said to be, but dark and fugitive. I am certain nevertheless that they constituted two groups of four, the second group seemingly tracking the first along their strangely convoluted spiral route—although both groups broke up before the second caught up with the first, and they were in complete disarray by the time they disappeared again.”

  Escott, despairing of being able to get a word in edgeways, caught Michael’s eye and raised his eyebrows expressively, unnoticed by the story-teller.

  “I saw the apparition one more, three years ago,” Lady Phythian continued, as unstoppable as the Sir Richard Trevithick, which was now traveling through the northern hinterlands of Hertfordshire at full steam, “but, much to my disappointment, instead of becoming clearer once again, it had returned to its former vagueness. Mr. Hope and Mr. Escott have never seen the phantom lanterns, even though they have been guests on the anniversary, but they always sleep in the Rose Room and the Lilac Room, both of which face south, and on the one year that they consented to wait up all night in case the ghost put in an appearance—four years ago, if I remember rightly—the phenomenon did not appear. They doubtless believe that I imagined the whole thing, and that it is partly because of my overheated imagination that the present Lord Langstrade insisted on completing his father’s plans for the Maze and the Keep, but I know full well that what Millicent, Harry and I saw was not natural, and that it really was connected to the Maze.”

  Signor Monticarlo looked puzzled, but was too polite to interrupt; he merely exchanged a glance with his daughter, who smiled at him tenderly. Lady Phythian took the hint, though, and elaborated her explanation.

  “In addition to hearing tales of the ghost,” she said, “I had long grown used to seeing the document on which the Langstrade Maze is designed. Whether it really is a copy of a design originally made by Dedalus of Knossos I have no idea, but I am certain in my own mind that there is something mysterious and magical about it. I feel it whenever I look at the diagram, in the same way that I often used to feel the presence of the Langstrade ghosts when sitting on the lawn where the Maze now stands, even in broad daylight. I have felt it even more strongly while exploring the maze itself, during the years when its hedges were not as intimidating as they are now.

  “At any rate, the ghosts whose lanterns I saw were definitely walking the maze, even though construction of the present Maze had not yet begun when I first saw the apparition. They were heading from the periphery to the center: the location where the Keep and the yew tree now stand proud once again, in commemoration of the glorious summer of 822 A.D., when Harold Longstride defeated Emund Snurlson in single combat and blocked the progress of the Viking invasion—the renewals of which he succeeded in keeping at bay for the rest of his life, although his descendants could not, in the end, resist the incursions of Eric Bloodaxe.”

  Lady Phythian nodded her head as she drew to her conclusion, as if to imply that what she had said was more than sufficient to confound the most determined skeptic who ever drew breath.

  “With all due respect, Lady Phythian,” Quentin Hope said again, just as insincerely as the first time, “and without wishing to endorse the unreasonably stubborn skepticism of my friend Mr. Escott, I wonder whether we might be confusing causes and effects slightly. You claim that the ghosts, in appearing to simulate the movements of someone walking the Maze that Lord Langstrade subsequently constructed on their stamping-ground, were reproducing some past event or ritual—but I can’t help suspecting that your seeing the ghosts, and your interpretation of their movements, might well have been partially responsible for the first Earl’s decision to site the Maze there, and the second Earl’s decision to complete his father’s plan. After all, there was no previous connection, even in rumor, between the ghosts and the diagram, was there? They were two entirely separate components of the first Earl’s imagined family history.”

  “I am by no means the only person to have seen the Langstrade ghosts move in that peculiar fashion,” Lady Phythian said, stiffly. “I was not the first observer to connect the pattern with the Maze, but once the connection had been pointed out, I was able to see with my own eyes, and feel with my own heart, that it was true. The present Lord Langstrade has seen the phantom lanterns for himself, and so have his wife Emily and his daughter Cecilia. They have all confirmed that the lanterns’ movements do correspond, very precisely, to the pattern of the Dedalus design.”

  “That tends to be the way with ghost sightings in Britain,” Escott put in, as if to inform Signor Monticarlo of a relevant item of folkloristic analysis. “Each seer reproduces what previous seers have seen, although each one also tends to elaborate the pattern a little further. There is a kind of feedback process, by which the reported illusions not only sustain one another but collaborate in their own elaboration and sophistication. That’s what Hope would call the fundamental psychognosis of the phenomenon—the phenomenon of ghost-seeing, that is, not the supposedly supernatural phenomenon itself.”

  Signor Monticarlo was manifestly mystified, the terms of this speech having far exceeded the competence of his English but he nodded anyway and said: “Si.”

  “There was no illusion involved,” Lady Phythian insisted, her voice becoming frosty in spite of the sultriness of the carriage, whose atmosphere was becoming rather oppressive. “What I saw was quite real.”

  Michael judged that the built-up tension was in need of relaxation. “Unlike Signor Monticarlo and his daughter,” he said, “I’m vaguely familiar with the legends surrounding Langstrade Hall, but I really ought to obtain a fuller and more accurate account of them before I take on the task of painting the Keep. Would you be kind enough, Lady Phythian, to explain to us in a little more detail what you mean by the Dedalus design?”

  “The original representation of the maze,” Lady Phythian said, apparently glad to be able to say something that could not call her honesty or perspicacity into question, “or, at least, the oldest surviving representation, is a piece of parchment that now hangs over the mantelpiece in the large drawing-room, carefully framed and protected by glass. The old Hall was built in the ruins of a Cistercian abbey that had been built in the thirteenth century and destroyed during Henry VIII’s abolition of the monasteries. The abbey had been reputed to have custody of several holy relics and a number of scriptural documents. The relics had all been stolen, along with their reliquaries, and the documents removed—with one exception, which had been hidden in a niche in the old crypt. When the crypt was converted into a cellar during the building of the old Hall, that surviving parchment was unearthed.”

  The dowager hesitated briefly, presumably because she was about to move back into the realm of rumor and fancy, but soon took the plunge. “The diagram on the parchment was thought at
first to be a sketch for one of the mazes that decorate the floors of so many Gothic churches, but the diggers working on the new Hall’s foundations also found evidence of a stone maze that far antedated the Abbey and must have been prehistoric. There were not enough stones left to allow the design or precise extent of the prehistoric maze to be calculated, but there was sufficient similarity to encourage the conclusion that the design antedated the Abbey too. The parchment itself must be Medieval, but what it represents is apparently much older than the thirteenth century—or, indeed, the ninth.

  “The former Lord Langstrade came to believe that the design depicted in the document was a representation of a maze designed to fulfill some magical or mystical purpose, connected to the first settlement of the valley by refugees from Minoan Crete, including the great engineer Dedalus, whose escape from imprisonment before the catastrophe that destroyed Knossos is plaintively symbolized in the myth of his manufacture of wings and the subsequent death of Icarus. I believe that Harry once considered recreating the Maze in the same local sandstone of which the Keep at its center was to be—and is—constructed, but the cost of construction would have been prohibitive, so his son contented himself with hawthorn hedges. The central hexagonal space is some fifty yards across in the actual version, and the distance between the two outer hedges is almost twice that; the total length of all the hedges is, I believe, more than a mile.”

  “Why did Lord Langstrade build the Maze around the Keep?” Michael asked, helpfully. “Does he imagine that Harold Longstride built his own Keep within a maze that was still present in his own day, or merely that he was aware that a maze had once existed there?”

  “Harold Longstride would presumably have been aware that there had once been a stone maze on the site where he built his Keep,” Lady Phythian opined, cautiously, “even if it had been broken up long before his own era. Legend would have told him as much.”

  “In respectful recognition of his own legendary status, no doubt,” Escott murmured, so softly that Michael was not sure that anyone but he had heard the remark.

  Carmela Monticarlo spoke in English for the first time, to say: “I hope that I shall see the ghost. I should like to see a ghost.”

  “Unfortunately, my dear young lady,” said Escott, in his normal voice, “you might have to go into the Maze to do that, since the hedges have now grown so tall as to cut off the view from the first-floor, where I have stood by a window more than once by night, in the hope of catching a glimpse of phantom lights—in vain, alas.”

  “I look forward to seeing the design,” Michael said, thoughtfully. “Indeed, I shall need to consult it very carefully, since I shall have to get to the heart of the Maze in order to set up my easel there.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Escott, with a mischievous sideways glance at Hope. “I’m sure that Miss Cecilia will be only too pleased to guide you, as she has previously consented to guide Hope and myself—not only into the heart of the maze, but out again, when you need release.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SIGNOR MONTICARLO AND THE CAPRICCI ENIGMATI

  When the educational discussion of ghosts and the Langstrade Maze had concluded, Hope and Escott resumed their debate about progress almost seamlessly, as if the change of subject had been as good as a rest, giving them time to recharge their argumentative Voltaic piles.

  Hope argued that any reasonable man ought to accept that technological and social progress were inextricably linked, marching forward in step, and cited as proof the fact that England, which had been in the forefront of technological progress for more than two centuries, had also maintained its position in the vanguard of social progress, having been the first major European nation to dispose of its monarchy. Indeed, he went further than that, arguing that the Glorious Revolution of 1642 could not have been wholly successful had it not been for the previous scientific and technological advances made by the members of John Dee’s secret college, nor maintained in their absence.

  The emergence of the ruling triumvirate comprising the First Sea Lord, the President of the Academy and the Leader of the Commons was, Hope contended, entirely dependent on the technological advantages that Dee had been able to donate to the Navy and the transformation of the esoteric college into a publicly accountable and meritocratic Academy. Without such balancing factors in place, he suggested, Oliver Cromwell might easily have made himself king, or might have been deposed by a Restoration, rather than paving the way for True Democracy.

  Escott, by contrast, maintained that the Revolution, whose gloriousness he begged leave to doubt, had been based in religion rather than politics, and that its true parents had been Protestantism and Puritanism. He did admit that John Dee had played a crucial role in laying its groundwork, but as a protestant rather than a mathematician. According to him, democracy had no advantages over monarchy, because the essential function of government—the extortion of the many for the benefit of the few—remained exactly the same, and always would. Technology, in this view, was merely an aspect of the instrumentality of this extortion; although it seemed to be improving continually, as the power and cleverness of machines advanced, all that really changed was the intricacy of methods of political exploitation, which were bound eventually to reach a genuinely revolutionary breaking-point.

  Even if England’s apparent stranglehold on naval traffic—the Empire of the Oceans—were genuinely unbreakable, Escott claimed, the seeds of the nation’s destruction had already been sown in its native soil, where the First Sea Lord was nowadays no more than a figurehead. The only way the nation could be saved and perpetuated, in his view, was by a reversion to Medieval values and a system of craftsmen’s guilds, supported by a rigid imperial hierarchy.

  Michael listened to all this intellectualizing rather diffidently, not caring much which of the two philosophical combatants might be right, if either of them were. It all seemed rather abstract to him, totally irrelevant to his personal concerns and problems—although he felt slightly ashamed of himself for thinking so, given that it made him seem a trifle small-minded. His eyes continually drifted to the window, in search of the peaceful green landscapes of rural England. Somewhat to his annoyance, though, his gaze was continually trapped by the telegraph poles that flitted past the fast-moving window with metronomic regularity—an effect that was curiously mesmeric.

  Michael had only been subjected to intense mesmeric treatment once, at the age of thirteen, when his mother had summoned a Mesmerist in a desperate attempt to prevent him scarring himself by scratching the spots of a pox. The treatment had worked, after a fashion—he had, at least, avoided serious scarring—but the Mesmerist had pronounced him a difficult subject and recommended that he stick to Paracelsian therapies in future. He did not fall into a trance now, but he was annoyed by the fact that the poles, working in collaboration with their fellow symbol of the triumphs of modern technology, the Sir Richard Trevithick, seemed to be exerting a more tangible force on his resistant consciousness than the doctor had. Eventually, he had to redirect his gaze into the carriage again, settling it briefly on Signor Monticarlo because he feared catching the eye of the smiling Carmela.

  Signor Monticarlo, who had been twiddling his moustache absent-mindedly, shifted uncomfortably when Michael looked directly at him, and attempted to join in with Hope and Escott’s debate, albeit rather tentatively. He offered the polite suggestion that art often flourished under tyranny, offering the Italian city states of the Renaissance as his primary examples. This opinion was hotly denied by both Hope and Escott, who both lamented what the Roman Empire had done to the intellectual legacy of the democratic Athenians, and proclaimed that the genius of men like John Milton and Jonathan Swift could never have thrived in England under a monarchy, in which political situation both men would undoubtedly have been summarily dispatched to the gallows.

  In the meantime, Carmela Monticarlo continued smiling—particu
larly, it seemed to Michael, at him, to whose presence she seemed to have warmed, gradually but considerably, if only because the two mature Englishmen seemed so disagreeable.

  In an attempt to calm things down, and also to deflect Carmela’s attention, Michael asked Signor Monticarlo what he intended to play during the recital arranged for the following night.

  “Because I am compelled to set aside my usual program,” the violinist said, picking his words carefully, “I shall try something new—something no one has ever attempted before. Have you, by any chance, heard of my compatriot, Niccolò Paganini?”

  “I’ve heard the name,” Michael admitted.

  “I can’t understand why he’s so famous,” Lady Phythian put in, obligingly. “I heard him play once, but I didn’t like it at all. The scales and arpeggios were far too rapid, and his violin was out of tune. He’s overrated, in my opinion.”

  If the dowager expected this dismissal to delight Signor Monticarlo, she was mistaken. “Paganini is a genius,” the violinist stated, flatly. “I cannot match him. He has extraordinarily long fingers, so he can play notes that no one else can. I cannot hope to emulate him, but I share his interest in scordatura, and I shall try to make a more modest demonstration of its virtues.”

  “Scordatura involves unorthodox tunings of the violin,” supplied Hope, ever eager to show off his erudition.

  “Si,” said Signor Monticarlo, curtly, evidently no more delighted to be interrupted while telling his story than Lady Phythian had been while telling hers. “Paganini’s Capriccio in A minor, which no one else can play, is based on one of the Rosary Sonatas of the Bohemian composer Heinrich von Biber. There are fifteen in all, each one employing a different tuning of the violin. Five celebrate the joyful mysteries, five the sorrowful mysteries, and a further six pieces—five sonatas and a passacaglia—celebrate the glorious mysteries. Paganini’s A-minor capriccio is based on von Biber’s A-minor sonata, celebrating The Coronation of the Virgin Mary as the Queen of Heaven.”