Robert Silverberg - Lord of Darkness

And so on and so on: it was my first day, and I knew not England any more, but I was as Moses had said of himself, a stranger in a strange land.

There was another odd thing about my first impression of this new England. It seemed I had entered a smaller and a quieter time than was the one I left. In Elizabeth’s day all was bubbling and excitement, a great upheaving turmoil of life and vigor and earthy outspanning growth: and now, under James, I sensed right at the first that men trod more cautious, and looked often over their shoulders out of timidity, and spoke in less robust voices. Was it an illusion? I think not; for that first impression was confirmed by my succeeding days and weeks. A certain great moment of time has gone by, for England, and is but memory now. It is as though once the world was all fire and crystal, and now it is mere wool and smoke, and dull red sparks in the ashes. And I do regret that I was not here for some of that time of fire and crystal; but, by Jesu, at least I saw its borning and its early ripeness!

As ever, I swiftly accustomed me to my surroundings; and in a day or two, Plymouth seemed quite ordinary to me’again, not much altered from my memories of it, and its houses and lanes and carts and such all having the semblance of a proper town, though not very like the towns in which I had spent the last twenty years. I found me the captain of a fishing-skiff out of Essex who was going homeward, and hired him to take me as far as my village of Leigh, and in that afternoon we put to sea, under a brisk and loving wind. That captain did carry me to my native place without ever once asking me where I had been, nor how long absent: some English lack these curiosities, I suppose.

At last, then, did I step forward into those familiar streets of Leigh, that I had never abandoned hope of seeing again.

My wanderings were over. Even as wily Ulysses was I come home again; but there was a difference, for no faithful Penelope waited me here, nor good son Telemachus, nor trusty dog and herdsmen and the rest. In these lanes and byways of Leigh I was as lonesome as if I were trudging the avenues of ruddy Mars: though I knew this house and that one, and this grassy spot, and that stable, yet was there reflected from those places a sheer chill unknowingness, as if the whole town did say, What man are thou, old stranger, and why have you come upon us?

Yet were there quick amazements for me. My feet did take me along one lane and another, until, like one who drifts in dream, I found me standing before the house of my father, where I was born. There was an old woman, much bowed and shrunken, sweeping out the steps most vigorously with a broom, and when I paused there she looked up, with beady suspecting eyes, at me with my scarred and sun-blackened face, and at the Negro lad gape-mouthed beside me, as though we were both of us apparitions.

I said, “Be this the dwelling of Thomas James Battell?”

“It was, but he is dead these many years, and all his sons as well.”

“That good Thomas is dead, I know right truly,” said I. “But not all of his sons have perished.”

“Nay, and is it so?”

“So it is. For I am Andrew, that went forth from this place in ‘89.”

“Nay! It cannot be!”

“In good sooth, grandmother, so it is, and I am back from the wars in Africa where the Portugals took me, with this blackamoor child as my companion, and a bit of gold in my purse.”

She did squint and scry me this way and that, twisting her head and peering at every angle. And with a shake of her head she declared, “But Andrew was a fine strapping great lad, and you are bowed and bent!”

“Ah,” said I. “He was a man of thirty year when he went from here, which is no lad. And I am one-and-fifty, and time has used me hard. But I am Andrew Battell.”

“Aye, I think you are,” said she a little grudgingly.

“I swear it by my father’s beard!”

“Ah, then, you swear most strongly. Andrew Battell, come home again! So I do perceive, that you be he. But how is it that you are Andrew Battell, as you say, and you know me not?”

“Good my lady,” said I, thinking her to be some domestic of the house that once had been my father’s, “it has been so many years—”

“Indeed. And I did not know you at first, true. Yet you should have known me, since I am less changed by time than you.”

I gave her close scrutiny. Her cheeks were like the map of the world, all lines and notations. I thought of all the old women of Leigh that I could recall, and she was none of them; and then I thought of the younger women, those that might well be seventy or thereabouts now, the mothers of my friends; and then the truth broke through to me, and I was overcome with shame for my folly, that I had searched all about the barn, and had not gone straightaway to the essence of her identity.

“God’s blood! Mother Cecily!”

“Aye, child.” And she laughed and dropped her broom, and gathered me close, and we did embrace. For who was this, if not my father’s wife, that had raised me from a babe, and taught me my first reading, and walked with me by the Thames mouth to give me my early taste of the salt air? Without thinking had I taken it as granted that she was dead, since that so many years had passed; but she had been much my father’s younger, and must now be no more than six-and-sixty, or even less. Why then should she still not live, and in the same house?

When at last I released her, we stood back and looked at each other anew, and she said, “Once I held you at my breast. And now we are two old people together, more like brother and sister than mother and son. Oh, Andrew, Andrew, where have you been, what has befallen you?”

“It would take me twenty year more to tell it all,” said I.

We went within the house. It was all much the smaller with time than I remembered, and darker; yet was it familiar, and beloved. I had me a long look in silence, and stood before the portraits of my father Thomas and my mother Mary Martha, and bowed my head to them as a greeting, the father I had revered and the mother I had never known, and said, “I am come back, and I have done much, and I tell you, the blood of yours in my veins is good substantial blood, for which I am grateful.”

And then I remembered that I had the blood of the Jaqqa Kinguri in my veins as well, by solemn transfusing, and I turned away, confounded and shamed.

To Mother Cecily I poured out questions so fast she could scarce answer them, of this person and that, playfellows and schoolmasters and all, and some were dead and some were gone to London and some, she said, were still to be found in Leigh. Lastly I asked her the question that should have been first, save that I did not have the strength to confront it without long postponement:

“And tell me also, mother, about my betrothed of years ago, Anne Katherine. What became of her, and how did her life unfold, and did she ever speak of me? Where is she now?”

And I waited atremble in the long silence that was my stepmother’s reply to me.

Then at last she said, “Wait here, and have yourself a little ale, and I will return anon.”

So did I sit there in the kitchen of that ancient house, and my heart was racing and my lips were dry, and I did not dare to think, but sat as stiff as a carven statue. Long minutes went by, and the boy Francis wandered off, touching walls and floors in wonder, and putting his lips to the windows, and the like. Then did I hear footsteps on the stairs, and my stepmother came back into the house. And with her was such a miracle that I received it as a thunderbolt.

For she had brought Anne Katherine. And I mean not the wrinkled aged Anne Katherine I might expect to see in this Anno 1610, but the fair and golden maid of long ago, of no more than sixteen or seventeen year, or even younger, with hair like shining silk and bright blue eyes, and about her neck, resting on the sweet plump cushion of her breasts, was the pearl that looked like a blue tear, dangling from a beaded chain, that I had had of my brother Henry an age ago and had given as a gift to her, by way of betokening our betrothal.