The Printer's Devil (2 page)

‘Saints Overcome Monster, ’
wrote Alan, like a tabloid sub-editor. ‘Gotcha,’ he thought, recalling a favourite headline.

The seventh and final frame showed the saints again - ‘All Saints,’ Alan realised, belatedly recalling the church’s dedication - but now they were binding the creature: not in chains but in garlands, garlands of elder and rowan, oak and ash, and other leaves he could not identify.

‘Green Party ties up the monster, ’
he wrote flippantly.

And that was it; full circle. He was back at the inscription.

‘DY*D 1697 A.D.’

Was this a real legend of Roger Southwell’s death, or a serious allegory of some sort - a warning against meddling with the supernatural? Or simply a conventional caution against avarice?

Wishing for more information, he squinted again at the carved letters. Some strange impulse drew his attention to the base of the panel, and pushing the grass down with his hand, he found a further inscription -a line of deeply graven characters. But they were merely a meaningless jumble of letters. Alan frowned, but wrote them down anyway, then headed for the pub to join the others.

What with another pub visit at the end of the day, then a long drive back, followed by a chicken tikka with some of the other ringers, it was nearly midnight when Alan finally got home. He decided to go straight to bed, since Kim was away on location until mid-week.

Although they had met in a ringing-chamber, she had little time to pursue that hobby these days; which was a pity, as she had always been keener, and better, than Alan. Her being musical had a lot to do with it, he felt, as music is kin to mathematics and mathematicians often make accomplished ringers.

In the morning, after breakfast, he put Verdi’s
Otello
on the stereo and headed for his bookshelves. The first thing he looked up was the village, and here he struck gold at once:

‘Fenstanton: Fenstanton Abbey (ruined). A house built c.1660 for Roger Southwell, reputedly a magician. It stood empty for some years after his death in 1697 and has never been occupied for any length of time; around 1800 it was described as “derelict”. Southwell himself lies buried in an interesting tomb
outside
the churchyard of the redundant church of All Saints, reputedly because he was excommunicated for wizardly activities.’

Confident that further research would yield more information about Southwell, Alan took his notepad from his pocket and looked at what he had written the previous day.

LIBER ARCANI.
Secret book, presumably. Or - book of secrets? He wrote
‘The book of hidden things’.

HICDIVITI
LEGET.
‘Here reads (he reads?)’ What was
‘divitix’7

Putting down his pen, Alan went to hunt for his old Latin dictionary. Eventually he found it in the glory-hole under the stairs, sandwiched between a hymnbook stamped in purple ink
‘Priory Grammar School. Do not remove’
and a 1960 Ford Anglia manual.

‘Here he reads of riches,’
he wrote a moment later, and eventually, with the help of the dictionary, he translated the captions to all the frames.

The others read:
They have set a guardian
(he knew ‘custodia’);
The reward of avarice; The power of God’s holy saints;
and finished with something Alan vaguely thought was a quotation:
‘Auri sacra fames’, accursed hunger for gold.

And now, he thought, what about that strange string of letters? Looking at them anew, Alan was certain they constituted a cipher, but how to break it?

GZNUZNZLPVTOVLFOGUHLSGZDVSMRMVWG

The first thing he noticed now was the frequency of Gs and Zs, one of which must presumably stand for
E,
the commonest letter in the English language.

Alan sighed, stood up, fetched a beer from the fridge, and stared out of the window for a while. There was no easy solution to the code: that was plain. Also, it was Sunday, so libraries were shut. Either he’d have to try and solve it without help, or - wait.

Since waiting was out of the question:

‘Okay,’ said Alan to himself, ‘you’re a bright lad. You’ve been known to ring Stedman Triples. You can’t let a little thing like a code bamboozle you.’

He turned up the stereo, fetched a garden chair from the shed and put it outside in the sun, then settled down with paper and a pen.

Somewhere he’d seen codes grouped into equal numbers of letters - four or five. He added up the letters and found thirty-two, so wrote them down in fours.

GZNU ZNZL PVTO VLFO GUHL SGZD VSMR MVWG They looked more manageable like that, anyway.

All right. There were four Gs, four Zs, and four
Vs
as well, so maybe these stood for
E, T,
and A, the commonest letters in English. He played around with this possibility for a frustrating half-hour, convinced that
Z
stood for
A,
simply because of the juxtaposition:

TANU ANAL PETO ELFO TUHL STAD ESMR MEWT

Something he’d read stirred in his memory then, and he rearranged the letters, taking the first of each group, and then the second, and so on.

TAPE TSEM ANEL UTSE NATF HAMW ULOO LDRT

Now he had to guess. The two
TSE
combinations were almost certainly
THE,
but that didn’t help much. There were two Os together, and Ls round them, and another
L,
which made three. Whatever came after
E, T,
and
A
as fourth commonest letter? Try O, Alan thought, and got:

TAPE THE MANE OU THE NATFH AMW OOOO DRT

Which was nearer to making sense, it seemed. And yet, far from solution.

‘Bugger this,’ thought Alan, and stared morosely down the garden. In the background, Luciano Pavarotti was lamenting the loss of Otello’s peace of mind.
‘Ora e per sempre addio, sante memorie, addio sublimi incanti del pensier, ’
he sang.
‘Now and forever farewell, sacred memories, farewell, sublime enchantments of the mind...’
As always, it raised the small hairs at the back of Alan’s neck.

Then something occurred to him, like a lightbulb over Goofy’s head:

AB C D E then F G H Z YX W V ... U T S

It was a backward substitution! Quickly he scribbled out the rest of the alphabet, and came up with: TAKE THE NAME OF THE MAGUS AND FOLLOW IT And what the hell was that supposed to mean? he asked himself.

The name of the magus. Roger Southwell. Alan laughed suddenly. The answer had sprung off the page, a clue by a seventeenth century cruciverbalist:

South. Well.

He’d bet a hundred pounds that there was, or had been, a well in the grounds of Fenstanton Abbey - and he recalled, with a shudder,
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas.

As to what was in the Fenstanton well -
‘Well,’
thought Alan, ‘only one way to find out.’

‘...Facilis descensus Averno:

Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;

Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,

Hoc opus, hic labor est.’

(It’s easy to go down into the Underworld; dark Dis’s door stands open night and day; but retracing one’s steps and finding a way back into the upper air, that’s a job, that’s a problem.)

Virgil,
The
A
neid

‘Roger Southwell’s Fenstanton Abbey, like William Beckford’s Fonthill a century later, was a folly on a grand scale - an exercise so extravagant as to assume nightmare proportions.

‘While Beckford’s folly may be viewed as a gesture of revenge against society, Southwell’s is less easy to categorise. Some commentators have seen it as a gesture of defiance against the established Church, that in building an “Abbey” complete with tower (and bells, if contemporary accounts are to be believed, although who the founder was, and what became of them, is unknown to this writer) Southwell was thumbing his nose at the authorities who had excommunicated him. How he escaped the scaffold is a mystery - the last recorded execution for witchcraft took place in 1685 and Southwell died in 1697 - because he apparently made no secret of his activities.

‘The Abbey was begun probably in 1657 and building continued for at least ten years; but whether it was actually complete at the time of Southwell’s death is debatable.

‘Its tower, in any case, did not survive its creator very long: a 1701 report refers to it as “ruined” and the few references to the Abbey during the eighteenth century culminate in its description by George Wyatt as “the derelict remains of Robert (sic) Southwell’s Abbey” in his
Counties
of 1802.’

Kim Sotheran read this item carefully, trying to align it with Alan’s bizarre tale of tombs and codes and putative buried treasure.

Looking up from the book, she smiled at Alan’s expression.

‘So what do you think
is
down the well?’

Alan shrugged. ‘Southwell’s book, perhaps. His grimoire. Can you imagine? What a
find!’

Kim raised one eyebrow, a favourite quirk of hers which Alan found irresistible. If she had doubts, she hid them well.

‘I want to shoot this,’ she said. ‘I want the tomb and the folly, and the well. I’ll do it on thirty-five mill’ and we can back it up with your new toy.’ She meant the video camera. ‘Someone’ll take it, even if you don’t find anything - ‘

‘Less of the “you”, if you don’t mind.’

‘Well, all right, we then. Does it matter? But listen - why Roger Southwell? I’ve heard of John Dee and Roger Bacon and Michael Scot, but not him. The twentieth century hasn’t heard of him, but you see his name on a peal-board and it’s like a war-horse hearing a bugle.’

Alan shook his head. ‘I’m not sure why,’ he said. ‘Something... it’ll come back to me.’

Kim rolled her eyes. ‘Oh...kay,’ she responded, opening her diary. ‘This week looks horrendous; I’ve got a provisional booked on Saturday, but I can probably put them off till the week after.’

‘I can’t wait till Saturday!’

‘Well, you’ll have to.’

‘Can’t you manage Monday or Tuesday?’

‘We got to pay the mortgage, mate.’

‘I suppose so,’Alan conceded reluctantly. ‘I’ll just have to slave over a hot word-processor all week, then.’

Despite the forecasters’ pessimistic predictions that the fine weather was about to end, the weekend began in blazing sunshine which almost made Alan regret that the two of them were going to spend a couple of hours inside a car on what might well turn out to be a wild-goose chase.

Kim seemed to have resigned herself to this prospect, for the moment at least.

‘Which car?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yours... at least we can open the lid. Why didn’t you get a convertible?’

‘In
England?
How was I supposed to know the country was going to turn sub-tropical this year?’

‘It’s the greenhouse effect.’

‘Well, I’m all for it. Do you want to take any tapes?’ She stuck her key in the lock of the Audi.

‘No, I expect you’ve got plenty in there,’ said Alan, opening the passenger door and checking. ‘Yup, looks good to me.’

‘Well, if I’m driving, you can do in-flight music.’ Kim slung her jacket in the back and got in while Alan shuffled cassettes. Eventually he chose
Rigoletto
and sat back as the car filled up with Verdi.

‘If you could sing like Pavarotti, I might just fall in love with you,’ said Kim a little later. ‘Why don’t you do some navigating instead?’

‘Navigator to pilot, take the next left,’ Alan obliged.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, the
No Smoking
sign has now been extinguished and you may unfasten your seatbelts,’ intoned Kim, then began to sing along with the tape, in a surprising tenor.

The bells were ringing, unexpectedly, in the redundant church of All Saints, Fenstanton. Sweet and light, their chattering hung in the air, a sound so quintessentially English that it evoked a strange nostalgia for rural idylls which never really existed.

Kim parked, directed by Alan, where he had a week previously. As she turned off the ignition, and with it the music, she sang the next line herself:
‘Quest’e un buffone, Edunpotente e questo.
¹
’
Okay, I hear where the church is. Let’s go see this tomb of yours.’

Alan pulled the video camera in its case from the back seat of the car. Kim had been a photographer for too long to trust machines which did too much, preferring control over exposures and shutter speeds. Even she admitted that Alan’s new toy was fun, however, and enjoyed discomfiting their friends by producing it when they came to dinner. It was usually left to Alan, though. Now he pointed it in the direction of the church, and musical Stedman Doubles poured into it, while Kim took her own equipment from the car.

He pointed out the location of Roger Southwell’s tomb to Kim and went to read the note pinned on the tower door, which read, as he had half-expected,
‘Quarter-peal in progress, please do not disturb’.

It was pleasant to think that these melodious bells were used from time to time, Alan reflected, and turned to follow Kim.

‘Might as well be Adam the bloody gardener,’ she was muttering as he came up to the tomb: she was pulling handfuls of sere grass through the railings. Alan bent to help, tugging at the vegetation, and cursing as his fingers encountered nettles.

‘What’s up?’

‘Been bit by a nettle. Rotten little sod.’

‘Dock-leaves this side.’

Alan tore off some of the sorrel-like leaves and rubbed his smarting hand with the sap, then resumed his task more carefully. When the tomb was cleared Kim spent some time photographing the panels, while Alan attempted to film them, with helpful translations interjected - he did not intend to waste all his hard work with the Latin dictionary.

‘Right,’ said Kim finally. ‘Now where’s Fenstanton Abbey?’

‘According to the map, it’s the other side of those trees.’