Popes and Phantoms

The Year 1499 GREAT EXPECTATIONS: I save a dynasty, dabble in racial politics and have my portrait painted.’

‘Wotcha, stony-face! What’s the problem?’

Admiral Slovo turned his chilly gaze to see a crop-headed docker.

‘Cheer up mate, it might never ’appen,’ said another.

For Slovo ‘it’ had already happened. He had been ordered forth from his sunshine, books and comforts, out into the wild North and the company of barbarians with bad teeth and manners. ‘It’ was personified by the human slab who had mocked him, a person now the merest impulse away from stiletto-time.

‘Slovo, ho!’ shouted a mildly more cultivated voice, breaking the spell.

The Admiral swivelled round to find himself hailed from the far end of the quay by a small group of horsemen. The one thing he really hated was having his name bellowed out in public – a deplorable breach of security, enough to set nerve endings ablaze. It was a bad end to a bad trip.

Their obvious leader, a red-faced military type, trotted up to within polite talking distance, only now taking the trouble to wipe some odd white-ish foam from his spade-beard.

‘Slovo?’ he barked again. ‘The Roman? Is that you?’ His Latin was as bad as his manners.

‘I am he,’ said the Admiral quietly.

‘Sorry we’re late: been waiting long?’

‘A matter of a few hours, three or four at the most. There has been opportunity to study Pevensey’s Roman Castilia and its surrounding hovels. The rain was almost refreshing.’

The military man nodded absently. ‘Still, you had your baggage to sit on, eh?’ He pointed to Slovo’s sea-chest. ‘And good old England to look at. Only we got delayed on the road, see.’

‘The English beer, it is so good and irresistible,’ offered the second prominent horseman – as clearly an alien as the others were obviously English. ‘We had to stop and indulge.’

The old soldier gave his plump companion a blackish look. ‘Yes, well … anyway,’ he said, ‘this is de Peubla, Spanish Ambassador sort of chap; as to me, I’m Daubeny – Giles – Baron. The rest are your escort. Are you fit?’

‘Reasonably so,’ answered Slovo. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I mean are you ready to go? We’re paying you by the hour I understand.’

‘Few things would give me greater pleasure than departure from here, my Lord.’

‘Well, you’re easily pleased then,’ said Daubeny. ‘We’ve brought a horse, so jump up and say farewell to Pevensey Port.’

Admiral Slovo mounted up, earning his first plus points in the Englishmen’s eyes by his ease of doing so. He looked round at the rain-damp little houses, the ruinous castle, and dull, copper sea, suppressing a shudder as he did so. ‘Farewell, this side of the grave, please God,’ he muttered.

But from his new prominence on the war-horse, Slovo caught sight of the surrounding and sombre marshy levels, and suddenly English domestic architecture possessed newfound attractions.

‘What of my sea-chest?’ he asked briskly for fear his opinion of the view be sought.

‘Oh, it’ll be sent on I expect,’ said Daubeny airily. ‘The dock artificers will deal with the matter.’

Slovo looked dubiously at the swarming dock workers and in a valuable Stoic spiritual exercise forced himself to bid farewell to his possessions.

‘Best hoof forward then, Roman,’ said Daubeny, leaning close. ‘There’s no time to lose.’

‘No, indeed,’ confirmed the Spanish Ambassador, shaking his head sadly. ‘King Henry can’t afford to mislay another army.’

‘A whole bloody army, boy,’ said the King to Slovo. ‘Vanished off the face of the Earth, so it did! By my leg of St George, it can’t go on!’

The Admiral had heard of this most prized of the King’s possessions and treated the oath with appropriate gravity.

‘Ahem!’ coughed De Peubla. ‘Your Majesty …’

King Henry VII and Admiral Slovo returned their attention to the little tot who had been dancing before them. Now disregarded by dint of their serious talk, she had stopped and was tottering on the precipice of tears. Henry, though slight of build, proved he could shift when he wanted and was instantly up and away across the table like a nobleman offered a crown.

‘There, there,’ he hissed, crouching down to the little girl. ‘Never you mind the silly big-people and their problems. There’s nice dancing it was, wasn’t it lads?’

A ragged chorus of oh yes and absolutely sprang from the assembled aristocracy and courtiers.

‘Off you go to your mumsy,’ suggested the King of England, ‘whilst we are so daft and preoccupied. And here’s a shiny farthing for you.’

The three-year-old, now on the up-stroke of her emotional see-saw, took the gift with a smile and retreated from the room, face front as she had been taught.

‘It’s funny,’ said Henry to Slovo as he returned to his seat by the slower but more dignified route. ‘I don’t mind the odd execution, not if it’s strictly necessary, it’s hurting people’s feelings I don’t like.’

‘Quite so,’ agreed the Admiral politely, recognizing that Kings must be allowed their eccentricities.

‘It’s in my pockets my feelings are, you see,’ Henry went on. ‘Not the best place for them to be, the Church would say – but rather there than in my pride or lustful impulses like some I know, that’s what I say.’

‘Indeed,’ answered Slovo.

‘And it’s in my pocket I’m being hurt, boy!’ said Henry, with real feeling. ‘Taxes, dues, levies, they’re all being lost – along with the taxmen in some cases.’

‘And now an army,’ offered the Admiral.

‘Ah yes. Ruinous expense: prepaid mercenaries, German landsknechtes, Venetian stradiots and English bowmen, all with my – their – advance wages in their nasty little purses. Horses, cannons, silk banners, all gone! Disgraceful, I tell you it is!’

Admiral Slovo covertly studied Henry’s jewel-encrusted doublet and reflected that times were not perhaps as bad as all that. Most impressively, the King didn’t miss a thing.

‘Oh yes,’ he said, patting the brooches and emblems covering his chest, ‘there’s still enough for the occasional treat. I risked my head for this country and if I should like a bit of shine and sparkle about my person, why shouldn’t I indulge myself? I deserve it!’

Slovo’s taste in princely attire ran more to the plain black of the fighting Borgias but he had long ago embraced the endless variety of mankind. He smiled and nodded tolerantly.

Meanwhile, his shot-across-the-bows delivered, Henry lapsed back into his previous lilt. ‘I’m an easy-going sort of King,’ he said, leaning back and surveying the window-view of the Tower through narrowed eyes, ‘just what this land needs. There’s been too much Civil War. A little is good for getting rid of bad blood but too much breeds poverty and other such nastiness. The English need a spot of peace and prosperity and I’m the boyo to give it ’em. It’s true I’m a Celt but I’m a desiccated Celt and that’s an important difference. All the nonsense has been wrung out of me by life. That means I can pass for English – at a distance – and makes me tolerable to them: for they’re a dry bunch of bastards, Admiral, I tell you that in confidence.’

‘Dry’ was not the term that would have surged into Slovo’s mind to describe the jolly-brutal, cudgel-wielding race he’d encountered en route from Pevensey Port to the Tower of London. From his fastidious perspective, the whole culture needed at least another five hundred years of development and suffering before polite judgement could be passed.

‘Mind you,’ Henry pressed on, ‘for bowmen and pragmatic traders, you couldn’t want for better – and there’s precious little tax to be had out of a Kingdom of poets. No, England’s what I always wanted and it’s what I got.’

‘The ancient prophecies, Your Majesty,’ mused de Peubla from beside them. ‘It was all the preordained will of God.’

Henry grunted dismissively. ‘Didn’t seem that way when the clothyard was flying down at Bosworth, boy,’ he said grimly, ‘and that big bastard Richard was hacking his way ever closer. “The Armes Prydain” sounded pretty damn thin then, I can tell you – not many!’

‘A versified Celtic vision, Admiral,’ explained de Peubla helpfully, ‘predicting the union of the scattered Celtic peoples to defeat their Saxon enemy.’

‘“The warriors will scatter the foreigners as far as Durham …”’ recited Henry. ‘“For the English there will be no returning … The Welsh will arise in a mighty fellowship … The English race will be called warriors no more …” and so on and on. A load of old bardic guff, if you ask me. It’s the same as all the King Arthur stuff …’

‘Ah yes,’ interrupted Admiral Slovo – who had only a passing, say, one-night-stand, relationship with modern literature, ‘your lost King and his Holy groin …’

‘Er … yes, in a manner of speaking,’ confirmed Henry, only momentarily disconcerted. ‘Well, I’ll use all this, you see; like I named my first born Arthur just to get the Cymru vote, but don’t expect me to believe in it, man – that or the “Prydain”. It’s for footsoldiers only, like all this national-consciousness business.’

Slovo signalled his agreement. This was getting pleasantly cynical.

‘I mean, you’ll hear it recited five times a day,’ Henry went on, ‘from the tribe of Cymru and Cornish nobles who have somehow ensconced themselves at court in my victorious wake. And all because their mother’s cousin’s friend lifted a blade on my behalf – or would have done if it hadn’t been so rainy that day. Ah! I’ve not much time for them, Admiral; they rub me up the wrong way, so they do. Besides, I know the English are mostly either ambitious or a bit slow, but if these idiots taunt them too much they’ll wake up! There’s six times as many of them as there are of us, even if every man-jack Celt combined – and who ever heard of that? We’d all get our throats slit that day and no mistake. No, as to these boasting Welsh boyos, I’ll disabuse them of their great expectations before too long, you wait and see.’

Admiral Slovo smiled in concurrence.

King Henry returned the favour with an appraising glance. ‘Come with me,’ he said eventually, as if some inner debate had been resolved. ‘I’ll show you what this is really all about.’

Admiral Slovo allowed himself to be guided around the table and to the nearby window.

‘There!’ said Henry triumphantly, indicating the courtyard bustle below. ‘The Tower of London! It has a ring to it, don’t you think? It means something in the counsels of the mighty. Now, that could not be said of, for instance, the “Tower of Llandaff” or the “Tower of Bangor”, could it?’

‘Perhaps not,’ replied Slovo meaninglessly, whilst actually occupying his mind with thoughts of his wife and where she might have fled.

‘It’s like a bull’s-eye, Admiral,’ Henry explained. ‘The very precious centre of a target that any man might care to hit. This is where it starts from – power and control. Now, in the ordinary course of events one would deal with outer rings of the dartboard as and when convenient. But what do I find? I find that someone or something is extending these zones by stealing parts of my sovereign realm and pushing back in towards the very centre, look you. That is why I’ve called you from your Roman employ – and paid His Holiness a pretty penny for the privilege too, I might add.’

‘I shall not see a coin of it, I assure you, Your Majesty,’ said Slovo, fearful of association with the Borgia Pope’s rapacious ways.

‘No doubt, more fool you,’ replied Henry, closely supervising the off-loading of a haycart for signs of wasteful practices. ‘Still, you’d think I’d get a discount, loyal son of the Church and all that.’

‘I couldn’t say, Your Highness,’ said Admiral Slovo, miles away. ‘I have no knowledge of the world of commerce.’

Henry looked on the Admiral as he would one afflicted. ‘Oh, I am sorry to hear that,’ he said. Then, he swiftly retreated from compassion and resumed business as normal. ‘Just sort it out, will you, Admiral,’ he said briskly. ‘Leave tomorrow and get things back to normal. What I have I hold, that’s the name of the game, and what I hold I intend to pass on – intact – to my two fine sons.’

Slovo nodded, ‘They are handsome-looking youths.’

‘What d’you mean?’ snapped Henry, suddenly all sharp-edged suspicion. ‘How would you know? Arthur, Prince of Wales, is at his court in the Marches and young Henry is with him.’

‘Then who,’ said Slovo calmly, ‘are the two golden youths below who have been smiling up at us all this while? They surely know you, and such familiarity I attributed only to Princes …’

In fact, their smiles seemed more akin to triumphant smirks to Slovo’s mind but this had only reinforced his guess as to their princely origins.

Henry went to look in the direction indicated but corrected himself just in time. His bejewelled hand flew up to cover horror-struck eyes. ‘Come away from the window, Admiral,’ he said in an anguished voice. ‘And leave this very night; not tomorrow, do you hear? This very night! And just get things back to bloody normal, will you boy? Please?’

‘You weren’t to know,’ said Daubeny. ‘His Majesty doesn’t encourage discussion of the subject.’

‘Although, of course,’ said de Peubla delicately, ‘he has nothing to answer for in respect of … that matter.’

Slovo’s sight of the two ‘Princes’, where none should have been, had caused a disproportionate fuss. There was the matter, he gathered, of previous young claimants to the throne meeting untimely ends – the merest commonplace of court life in his own native land. Here, though, it was a touchy subject and the parade ground for troubled consciences. Blame had been successfully attributed to some dead King and it was evidently bad form to revive the issue. Slovo had swiftly taken the hint and pleaded poor eyesight, the deceptive evening sun and so on. Nobody believed him but the gesture was regally appreciated.

‘Well, this is where we broke ’em,’ said Daubeny. ‘What more do you want to know?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ replied Admiral Slovo with brutal honesty. ‘I’m awaiting inspiration.’

‘Could be a long wait then, mon-sewer Ite-eye,’ said the baron resignedly and reached into his saddle bag for his ever-faithful flask of fire-water.

Stretching to his full height in the stirrups, Slovo surveyed the battlefield. Since it was, for the most part, the Celtic peoples that were seceding willy-nilly through King Henry’s fingers, it had seemed sensible to visit the scene of their most recent trial of strength. Here, a mere two years before, Henry had methodically massacred an insurgent Cornish army. Today however, Blackheath, Kent, appeared to have nothing further to teach the curious other than, by dint of the burial-pit mound, the old perennial that rebellion is folly.

‘It got a bit tasty down there by the bridge,’ pointed Daubeny with a shaky gauntlet. ‘A fair few of my lads got turned into pincushions. Mind you, after that, as I recall, it was all pretty straightforward.’

‘They had no cavalry, no cannon, no armour,’ said de Peubla in a knowing voice. ‘It was like harvesting wheat so I am told.’

This struck Admiral Slovo as frightfully unnecessary. In the Italy of his youth, before the grim incursion of the French, tens of thousands of well-paid mercenaries could strive in battle all day long at the cost of a mere handful of deaths per side. The dispute was still settled but with so much less waste.

‘And it is the same “Cornshire” that most frequently departs from King Henry’s realm, is it not?’ he asked.

De Peubla nodded. ‘Along with Powys, Elmet, Cumbria and other such long-gone entities.’

‘And ones we’d never even heard of,’ laughed Daubeny. ‘The army we lost was in Norfolk – or somewhere called logres as it briefly became. Not a man jack has come out yet and don’t suppose any will: all been eaten by now I shouldn’t wonder!’

‘I have never read of the Celts as displaying cannibalistic traits,’ said de Peubla, clearly racking extensive mental files. ‘There was once the distinctive cult of the severed head, it is true but—’

‘Oh shut up, you Iberian ponce!’ barked Daubeny, and de Peubla obediently did so.

‘It’s like this,’ said the Baron to Slovo, his patience likewise strained to the limit. ‘Bits and bobs of the place keep drifting in and out of bloody history. You can never be sure when you send out the taxman or a travelling-assize, they won’t come up against a “Free Kernow” or resurgent “Elmet”. Then they either disappear, never to emerge, or, the natives being more confident than they’ve any right to be, they get driven off with a barbed yard of arrow in their backside.’ He paused to take another reviving swig. ‘Then, shortly after, even a few hours in some cases, everything’s back to normal and the nice, peaceful inhabitants don’t understand what the hell you’re on about when you question them – hot pokers or no. So, you can’t take reprisals against innocent people (well, you can – but His Majesty forbids it), else you’d have a real rebellion and for no good reason either.’

‘How interesting,’ judged Slovo, musing that in their rough equal division of initial territorial advantage, all battlefields looked much the same.

‘Indeed so,’ agreed de Peubla, bobbing up and down on his pack-horse with the intellectual excitement of it all. ‘If it wasn’t for the urgent problem it presents, and the needs for such secrecy as can be mustered, oh how I wish I could investigate these glimpses of other worlds!’

For the first and last time, Admiral Slovo and Daubeny saw eye to eye and their glacial glances froze de Peubla to silence. His enthusiasms, his bourgeois origin, Slovo could forgive; his doctorates in Civil and Common Law commanded respect (or caution). Even the irregularity of his Spanish salary and consequent impoverishment might have been points to solicit sympathy. It was common knowledge that de Peubla was obliged to lodge in a London inn of low repute and that the timing of his visits to Court were prompted by a simple desire to eat.

All this was enough to make even dry-hearted King Henry like the little fellow – in fact their friendship had grown to be quite genuine by regal standards. But not so Admiral Slovo and Daubeny. To the Baron, he was a foreigner: enough said. To the Admiral, well, his Stoic ethics could not accept the man’s conversion to Christianity. If someone was granted the surpassing gift of Judaic birth, he believed they should accept that life would be painful and stick to their guns. Humanistic thought, quite the rage in certain circles at that time (and ever since), did not play a large part in Admiral Slovo’s life.

‘Well, that’s it,’ said Daubeny, already bored. ‘Not much to see, is there? All the deaders and body-bits were gathered up and the local proles doubtless gleaned all else away. Learn anything?’

‘No,’ said Slovo without inflection.

‘Better if you’d seen the battle,’ added the Baron glumly.

‘Unhappily, I was otherwise engaged,’ the Admiral replied, his conversation in free fall as he pondered. ‘The Duke of Gandia, Juan Borgia, was murdered that day.’

‘Not Cesare’s brother?’ whispered de Peubla, as though the Beast of the Romagna himself might be eavesdropping.

‘The same; their joint father, His Holiness, Pope Alexander, requested that I investigate the murder and so …’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ interrupted Daubeny, spluttering his way out of a long pull at his flask, ‘I fully understand why you couldn’t grace my battle with your presence. And I do wish you’d keep that “m” word to a minimum – particularly in the context of the Princes?’

‘Your forgiveness,’ asked Slovo insincerely.

‘Not that we’ve anything to hide, mind,’ added Daubeny, now more than a little tipsy. ‘It’s just that we don’t want the evil eye put on our own two jewels in the crown.’

‘Arthur and Henry, oh yes,’ smiled de Peubla, moving charitably in to rescue the Baron from his self-made quick-sand. Daubeny remained appropriately quiet and still as it was done. ‘Two fine prospects for the English nation to gaze upon and wish long life to. Even the most fleeting thought of harm to them is painful.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Slovo, apparently with great seriousness.

‘Arthur’s the one they make all the fuss about,’ bellowed Daubeny. ‘Prince of Wales and Lord of the Marches. Got his own little Court he has and a name calculated to get the British all expectant. If you were to ask me, well, there’s more chance of finding a book in his hand than a sword – or anything else interesting and rounded.’

‘A reference to horse-flesh, doubtless,’ commented de Peubla primly.

‘Whatever!’ laughed the Baron. ‘Tall and serious, that’s what he is. Very interested in chivalry – ha! Give me Prince Henry any day: a real little Englishman: rosy-cheeked, stocky little chap and already very sound on the Celts. Hates anything to do with poetry and prophecy!’

Daubeny sadly observed his flask was now empty and, with the uncanny facility Admiral Slovo had already noted in the rough-as-coal-bunkers nobility of this land, sobriety instantly returned when he next spoke.

‘Still, it’s all in God’s hands. We shall see what we shall see.’

It was seeing what they saw as they turned the horses for home, the new and marvellously changed prospect of London now spread out, that halted them in their tracks.

‘Sod this,’ said Daubeny quite calmly. ‘I’m not going down there. Where’s London?’

De Peubla did not answer, being too busy fixing the scene in his mind as a solace for the disappointed old age he fully expected.

‘London is still there,’ answered Slovo, waving his black glove towards the transmogrified metropolis below. ‘But no longer, I suspect, known by that name. What would you hazard, Ambassador?’

De Peubla rocked his head from side to side in a charmingly hybrid Hebrew/Iberian gesture. ‘I do not speak any of the British tongues, Admiral,’ he replied. ‘Londres perhaps? Londinium possibly?’

Slovo noted that Sir Giles Daubeny was dumbfounded, but then the poor man had just lost his Capital City. He turned to smile on him. ‘Some foreign name like that, I expect,’ he agreed with de Peubla.

‘It may not have lasted long,’ said de Peubla as they trotted along slowly, ‘but I am most glad to have seen it.’

‘Speak for yourself, Hispaniol!’ growled Daubeny. ‘I like my severed heads in their proper places – on battlefields or adorning spikes at the King’s order; not all over a City Wall dangling on chains with bells on ’em! What sort of a welcome do you call that?’

‘An instructive one?’ suggested Admiral Slovo, gamely entering into the spirit of things.

‘It’s that all right,’ replied Daubeny with a bitter laugh. ‘Likewise all the idols and symbols – all those curls and swirls – not a blasted straight line or plain picture to be seen: fair made me nauseous it did! Oh yes, it spoke pretty clear to me: Saxons not welcome! Praise God that it faded!’

‘Just so,’ agreed Slovo (though actually his indifference knew no bounds). ‘And none that we questioned were aware of their brief transformation. One can only surmise therefore that some twist in the skeins of fate permitted us a glance of what might have been …’

‘Hmmph!’ snapped the Baron.

‘Or what might be,’ continued the Admiral implacably.

‘Enough!’ said Daubeny, chopping the air with his metal-clad gauntlet. ‘It is not going to be. You heard His Majesty’s words – sort things out – so get sorting. That’s what we’re meant to be about, isn’t it? Why else would I allow you to drag me down to this god-forsaken tail-end of nowhere?’

‘Why indeed?’ answered Slovo politely. ‘Cornshire is, I agree, impermissibly barren and stark. Why, I wonder, do people persist in living amidst such extremes of Nature?’

‘Habit?’ postulated de Peubla, endeavouring to be charitable.

‘Some such strong force,’ agreed Admiral Slovo. ‘And I do apologize to you both for so exposing you to the very outer fringes of the World. It is merely that I somehow sense that we are tracking the mischievous shift-phenomenon to its lair.’

‘Good,’ sighed Daubeny. ‘So let’s kill it and go!’

‘Would it were so simple,’ murmured Slovo, schooled in a more ancient culture and thus aware that murder was but the beginnings of politics.

The little party with its most curious of missions should have been acting in all urgency. Each day brought a fresh dispatch from King Henry, urging them on by news of further outrages. The North had been raided and there had even been an insolent proclamation received from ‘Free Surrey’ (Libertas Suthrege, if you please!), and His Majesty had estates there. Henry’s Celtic powers of fancy and invention were being fast exhausted by the explanations he was having to concoct. Dark hints were dropped in his letters about Slovo’s fee and the current state of the Royal coffers.

However, the Admiral would not be rushed. ‘We do not have enough time to hurry,’ he grandly explained in a reply to the King – thus causing a Regal headache and a spoilt banquet. To Henry’s considerable but unspoken distress, Slovo was methodically tracing the zig-zag of his thoughts across the shifting map of barbarian England: there had been musings in St Albans, a glimpse of devastation where Winchester should be and ‘Dumnonian’ resurgence at the Gates of Cirencester. Each time he and his group, plus escort of soldiery, arrived just that instant too late to experience for themselves immersion in the ‘shift’. It could not however escape a mind so subtle as Slovo’s that each encounter was closer and closer, and that their steps were drawn inexorably west. Only too able to empathize with spiders, he recognized a web when he saw one.

The Celtic land of Cornwall had seemed a good place, just sufficiently off-centre, from which to pluck the cobweb and see what stirred forth to seize its prey. In purely aesthetic terms, though, Admiral Slovo had to agree with his comrades: he had had better ideas.

‘Take that island, for instance,’ said Daubeny, pointing at St Michael’s Mount across the bay. ‘What good is it? Soil you couldn’t grow weeds in and fortifications fifty years out of date – even in Scotland!’ (This last with particular venom.) ‘And as for … what is it we passed through?’

‘Ludgvan,’ prompted de Peubla, wary of the Baron’s brandy-borne torrents of temper.

‘And as for the … village, if one may so dignify it, of that name,’ Daubeny spluttered on, ‘I’ve pulled down better houses than those. No wonder the poor wretches invaded England in ’97 – anything to see a bit of decent countryside. And another thing—’

The sea breeze across the bay played with the Admiral’s fashionable basin-cut hair as he tuned out the rant-frequency to hear more subtle whispers – from both within and without.

On the presently submerged causeway to the Mount, the two young Princes were clearly visible, more solid, though unearthly still, than ever before. At that distance even Slovo’s sea-trained eyes could not be sure but he nevertheless felt certain that they were smiling at him – as before. The water broke over their feet in ways it should not, the wind did not disturb their golden locks. Mere additions to the scene for Admiral Slovo’s benefit, they looked at him, a distant matchstick figure, and he likewise looked at them.

‘Do you see something, Admiral?’ asked de Peubla, who under his assumed clumsiness was as watchful as a cat.

‘Nothing that has not been my constant companion on this journey, Ambassador,’ came the unhelpful reply. But, in fact, sudden enlightenment dawned like a storm-laden day over Slovo, a revelation sufficiently dark to make him smile.

When he raised his eyes again, the fort on St Michael’s Mount was no longer obsolete or quaint. Storey upon storey, crammed with cannon, rose into the sky above a tessellation of the very latest Dutch-Italian style fieldworks.

Even Daubeny could see that this was no longer a place to be laughed at, its black and white flag of St Piran not a subject for mockery. Only the suspected smiles adorning the Princes on the drowned causeway remained as before, though perhaps a little broader now, to Slovo’s favoured eyes.

Enquiring at the church in Ludgvan, at the Admiral’s request, they were welcomed to ‘Free Kernow’ in most uncertain English by a priest called Borlase. When the foreigners’ business was confidently demanded, Admiral Slovo casually killed him at the presbytery door with a stiletto.

‘I needed to see if my theory was correct,’ protested the Admiral to his shocked companions later.

‘They ask me to investigate something,’ said Admiral Slovo, ‘to “sort it out”, and then cavil at my methods!’

‘I agree,’ sympathized his fellow countryman. ‘You never know where you are with the English. Mostly they’re as rough as a Turk’s lust and then suddenly they’ve gone all mushy on you.’

‘Precisely,’ said Slovo, warming to this young man and more glad than he could, of course, decently show, to run into such a compatriot. ‘And their sense of humour …!’

‘Nothing but toilets,’ nodded the young man. ‘Yes, I’ve run into that – and even that would amuse them – run, do you see?’

Admiral Slovo had come to Westminster Abbey with the intention of hearing mass and offering up a prayer for his speedy delivery home. At the door, however, his eye had been caught by a lithe figure with a sketch-book and charcoal-stick, whose evident grace and taste in dress proclaimed him a non-native. As it turned out he was a Florentine, but the Admiral could forgive him that for the sake of civilized conversation – and a possible pick-up.

‘Your sketch shows no small talent,’ said Slovo, ‘Master …?’

‘Torrigiano – Pietro Torrigiano. And so it should after all my schooling.’

Admiral Slovo studied the artist from head to foot but received no satisfactory answers to the silent questions he posed. ‘Your style betokens tuition,’ he agreed, ‘but the residual stigmata of humble origin suggest insufficient funds for such luxuries.’

Torrigiano smiled wryly. ‘What I do not owe to God, I owe to the Medicis,’ he conceded, and at the second half of his tribute spat heartily on to a proximate headstone. A passing chantry-priest looked blackly at them but thought better of any other protest. Foreigners were best left to their own damnation.

‘Duke Lorenzo, dubbed “The Magnificent”,’ continued Torrigiano as he sketched furiously, ‘rescued me from my peasant destiny and placed me in his sculpture school. We were taught by Bertoldo, you know, and he was taught by Donatello!’

‘Most impressive,’ commented Slovo (who was actually self-trained to indifference in all matters artistic).

‘It was also Lorenzo who expelled me from both school and Florence and into my present penurious exile. I altered another pupil’s face; we couldn’t both remain, so Lorenzo made a decision as to who showed most potential and …’[6]

‘That is the way of Princes,’ said Slovo, trying and failing to offer consolation. ‘Difficult choices.’

‘Difficult to live with possibly,’ answered Torrigiano with a mite less respect and tact than he should have shown to an elder and better; the very cockiness that would ensure his death, many years on, in the prisons of the Inquisition in Spain. ‘Mind you, I have made a life of sorts here in this land. The odd commission does arise.’

‘None odder than this, I suspect,’ said Admiral Slovo. ‘Draw me now against the background of the Abbey – or whatever it may be called at present. Use all speed whilst the effect lasts.’

Slovo had been starting to lose interest in his young find and thus looking about, thinking of Kings and Crowns, discovered that the world had changed whilst they talked.

Torrigiano gaped in awe, even as his hand tore madly across the new canvas. ‘Mother of Sorrows!’ he gasped. ‘Where are we?’

‘London,’ replied Admiral Slovo, considerately remaining as still as he could, ‘or some substitute for it. Do not slacken your efforts, Artist, we may not be here long.’

Torrigiano shook his head sadly. ‘This is for a life-time study,’ he said, ‘not a tantalizing browse. Is it still a church?’

Unable to turn and observe properly, Slovo shrugged. ‘Possibly; though not, it seems, a branch of the Christian faith I’ve yet encountered.’

‘The gargoyles,’ enthused Torrigiano, ‘the domes; such a torrent of flowing colour. I could worship here.’

‘But who?’ smiled Slovo at his chilly best. ‘That is the question. Now, be sure and feature my best side …’

‘It’s disgusting,’ said King Henry. ‘Take it away!’

Torrigiano’s face fell at this savage review of his efforts.

‘His Majesty is not alluding to the verisimilitude of your depiction,’ said Admiral Slovo to him. ‘I can vouch for that. It is the effect he finds distressing.’

‘All that bloody ivy and carving,’ confirmed Henry. ‘It makes me heave, so it does. Who would have fashioned Westminster Abbey like that?’

‘No one of, or to, your tastes, that seems certain,’ said de Peubla in a manner intended to be soothing. He got a regal glare for his pains.

‘I can see that,’ said the King. ‘It is not the sort of place in which Kings of England are crowned.’

‘Though maybe Kings of another sort,’ said Daubeny, looking bemusedly at the picture held by Torrigiano.[7] The eye-borne volley of royal ill-will was worse even than that just received by de Peubla.

‘Bit of a cheek, isn’t it?’ the Baron blundered on, unaware of his present disfavour. ‘I mean, kidnapping the centre of the realm like that. It’ll be the Tower next!’

As King Henry’s eyes widened and he was about to say something he would regret, Admiral Slovo stepped into the breach.

‘That is entirely the point,’ he said, with all the brusqueness that etiquette would permit. ‘The process is becoming more frequent, and of wider reach. It was for the proving of this that I conducted my Cornshire experiment about which so much unpleasant fuss has been made …’

‘He was a priest, boyo,’ muttered Henry darkly. ‘You just can’t do that here.’

Slovo waved the protest aside. ‘Not only was the Borlase person dead in his “free Kernow”,’ he went on, speaking slowly, anxious that these mere shallows of trouble be properly traversed prior to the really treacherous deeps in store, ‘but on our “return”, he was also found to be similarly deceased – mysteriously struck down in this, our own, real world.’

‘So?’ snapped Henry, thinking of the gold he’d had to throw at the Lords Spiritual to buy their grumpy peace over that little matter.

‘So,’ answered Slovo, ‘this was a progression. The “real” and the “projected” worlds were becoming interactive. One might even suspect they were in the process of merging. Up to now, Your Majesty, you may have mislaid the odd taxman—’

‘Or army,’ added Daubeny.

‘But,’ continued Slovo, ‘they were lost into fleeting visions, leaving behind no lasting effect. What my much maligned experiment showed was that the two possible worlds were coming together and joining as one. These “alternatives” are maturing into reality. In short, one version will ultimately prevail.’

‘And if people begin to retain memories from the period of crossover,’ said de Peubla, entirely enthused as he caught on and raced ahead, ‘then the spirit of independence and rebellion could blossom with a profuse abundance such as never seen before!’

‘It’d make the Wars of the Roses look like a wench’s kiss,’ said Daubeny, smiling broadly.

‘Yes, yes, yes!’ roared Henry. ‘All this I understand – dammit! Now when are you going to tell what there is to do!’

Suddenly all the bluster evaporated and the King looked on Admiral Slovo with plaintive eyes. ‘I want my version of history to win,’ he added sadly.

‘It can still do so,’ replied Admiral Slovo confidently, signalling that Torrigiano should place his picture strategically in the King’s view. ‘But I warn you, stern measures will be required.’

Henry visibly brightened. ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘I’m no stranger to them. Needs must and all that. Tell me more.’

Admiral Slovo looked at the two Princes standing, invisibly to all bar him, behind King Henry’s throne. They beamed back at him angelically.

‘Then,’ he advised, seeking to minimize his own part in the reckoning to come, ‘might I respectfully refer you to two passages from Holy Scripture: namely Genesis 22 and Luke 10, 37.’

Henry looked puzzled but, in his freshly optimistic mood, was willing to go along with the game. ‘Come on then, Wolsey,’ he called to a loitering cleric, ‘here’s your chance to shine, boy.’

The priest screwed up his face, mentally travelling back to the days when he had learnt his trade. ‘The first,’ he said eventually, much relieved to find the requisite mental cupboards stocked, ‘is the story of Abraham and the abortive sacrifice of his first-born son, Isaac. The second is a quote of Our Lord’s: Go and do thou likewise.’

‘Whaaat!’ shouted Henry, leaping to his feet.

‘A drastic remedy, I agree,’ said Slovo defensively, whilst pondering the correct form for brawling with Kings, ‘and you are not obliged to take my counsel.’

‘I should hope not, Ad-mir-al,’ said Henry, now quiet and deadly.

‘Oh dear,’ gasped de Peubla, full understanding falling on him like a shroud. ‘Oh dear …’

‘I fear, however,’ continued Slovo, conscientiously mindful of a commission accepted, ‘that the gradient of the … slippage is against you. If nothing is done, then very soon some visitor to these shores will find a most radical – and permanent – change. They will assume, I suppose, a rising or some such has taken place and there will be none left to gainsay them. As to where you and yours will be that day, I cannot say.’

‘Nowhere perhaps,’ suggested de Peubla, still in shock.

‘Perhaps,’ nodded the Admiral. ‘A version of events superseded, a history that just didn’t happen.’

Henry went white and scowled. ‘And what brought it all on?’ he asked, quite reasonably in the circumstances. ‘And what’s it got to do with my boy?’

‘Such things have laws entirely their own,’ replied Slovo disarmingly. ‘If forced to explain the phenomenon—’

‘Which you will be, if necessary,’ said Henry, less than gently.

‘… then I postulate the freak convergence of two trends – each separately harmless, but together a mighty tide to overwhelm the sea-walls of normality.’

‘Speak Latin, man!’ spat the King, his Welsh accent ranging wild and free.

‘I speak firstly,’ said Slovo, stoically swallowing the insult, ‘of a thousand years of longing and expectation by a set of emotionally incontinent peoples: sustained by prophecies, engrained by endless defeats, and marvellously revived by your victory at Bosworth. Now, met and enflamed by the choice of name and ceaseless promotion of your first born, the age-old wishes are coming true.’

‘And it’s all my fault, is it?’ asked Henry, his face worryingly impassive.

‘You are your own nemesis, albeit unknowingly,’ Slovo confirmed. ‘You have benefited from, fed and upheld the very alternatives which are superseding you. However, none of this would be so were it not for the second factor, the vital additional force which permits this terrible violence to the way things are.’

‘And what might that be?’ asked Daubeny, looking for a chance to be helpful and pointedly loosening his sword.

‘It is not a matter for promiscuous discussion, I fancy,’ said the Admiral, as quietly as clear diction would permit. ‘Suffice it to say that what I propose, namely the Abraham option minus Jehovah’s intervention, is the cancelling balance to some similar act so horrendous that it has wounded the fabric of the Universe’s propriety. Through this wound, the other gangrene affecting your Kingdom has effected its entry.’

Silence settled on the Tower throne-room as some thought furiously and others just as furiously strove to avoid doing so. The spectral Princes looked, unseen, at King Henry as grim and confident as advancing glaciers.

‘So … if Arthur goes …’ croaked Henry.

‘Some other, equal, act will thus be answered for,’ agreed Slovo, ‘and propitiation is made to the scales of Justice. The decision to act alone should be sufficient: you need not move precipitately. Then, with the deed done, the bubble of your aboriginal races will be burst with their Arthur the Second no longer feeding false hopes. And I would also suggest some judicious oppression.’

‘Annexation? Suppressing the native gobbledey-gook?’ offered Daubeny in joyful tone.

‘Something like that,’ agreed Slovo in a neutral voice. ‘Then I suspect you will have no more trouble from them for some hundreds of years.’

‘By which time we shall be safely in our tombs,’ said Daubeny to the King, as though relating a great stroke of luck.

Once again a humid silence fell. Admiral Slovo presumed Henry was debating as to which he wanted most: his son or his realm. No one else dared speak. It was only then that Slovo realized with a delicious shock that Henry perhaps saw more of the murdered Princes than hitherto suspected.

‘I shall be in my tomb, yes,’ said Henry at last, in a voice of pure lead, ‘but not, I fear, at peace. Do you do tombs, Master Sculptor?’ he asked a dozing and bemused Torrigiano.

‘I can turn my chisel to anything, Sire,’ came the blurted reply in richly mutilated English. ‘I was trained at the—’

‘You’ll do,’ interrupted the King, boring into the foreigner with his eyes. ‘I’ll make you rich and famous, which is the entirety of what men want from life. May the two bring you more happiness than they did me.’

Enraptured and blissfully ignorant, Torrigiano bowed deeply.

Henry almost broke down but recovered and ploughed on. ‘I want it to be in the Westminster Abbey that cruel fate wanted to take away from me,’ he said. ‘Money – ha! Well, that’s no object. Let us see vast amounts of good black marble and granite, anything nice and soundproof.’

‘Why so?’ asked Admiral Slovo, his professional curiosity titillated beyond prudence.

‘Because,’ answered Henry, ‘I suspect I may be screaming through eternity.’

The Princes vanished.[8]