The Magus - John Fowles [61]
cicadas rasped in the surrounding pines, the heat hammered down outside the cool arches. All the time we talked of the undersea world. For him it was like a gigantic acrostic, an alchemist's shop where each object had a mysterious value, an inner history that had to be deduced, unravelled, guessed at. He made natural history sound and feel like something central and poetic; not an activity for Scout masters and a butt for _Punch_ jokes. The meal ended, and he stood up. He was going upstairs for his siesta. We would meet again at tea. "What will you do?" I opened the old copy of _Time_ magazine I had beside me. Carefully inside lay his seventeenth-century pamphlet. "You have not read it yet?" He seemed surprised. "I intend to now." "Good. It is rare." He raised his hand and went in. I crossed the gravel and started idly off through the trees to the east. The ground rose slightly then dipped; after a hundred yards or so a shallow outcrop of rocks hid the house. Before me lay a deep gulley choked with oleanders and thorny scrub, which descended precipitously down to the private beach. I sat back against a pine trunk and became lost in the pamphlet. It contained the posthumous confessions and letters and prayers of a Robert Foulkes, vicar of Stanton Lacy in Shropshire. Although a scholar, and married with two sons, in 1677 he had got a young girl with child, and then murdered the child; for which he was condemned to death. He wrote the fine muscular pre-Dryden English of the mid-seventeenth century. He had _mounted to the top of impiety_, even though he had known that _the minister is the people's Looking-glass_. _Crush the cockatrice_ he groaned from his death cell. _I am dead in law_--but of the girl he denied that he had _attempted to vitiate her at Nine years old_; for _upon the word of a dying man, both her Eyes did see, and her Hands did act in all that was done_. The pamphlet was some forty pages long, and it took me half an hour to read. I skipped the prayers, but it was as Conchis had said, far more real than any historical novel--more moving, more evocative, more human. I lay back and stared up through the intricate branches into the sky. It seemed strange, to have that old pamphlet by me, that tiny piece of a long-past England that had found its way to this Greek island, these pine trees, this pagan earth. I closed my eyes and watched the sheets of warm colour that came as I relaxed or increased the tension of the lids. Then I slept. When I woke, I looked at my watch without raising my head. Forty minutes had passed. After a few minutes more of dozing I sat up. He was there, standing in the dark ink-green shadow under a dense carob tree seventy or eighty yards away on the other side of the gulley, at the same level as myself. I leapt to my feet, not knowing whether to call out, to applaud, to be frightened, to laugh, too astounded to do anything but stand and stare. The man was costumed completely in black, in a high-crowned hat, a cloak, a kind of skirted dress, black stockings. He had long hair, a square collar of white lace at the neck, and two white bands. Black shoes with pewter buckles. He stood there in the shadows, posed, a Rembrandt, disturbingly authentic and yet enormously out of place--a heavy, solemn man with a reddish face. Robert Foulkes. I looked round, half expecting to see Conchis somewhere behind me. But there was no one. I looked back at the figure, which had not moved, which continued to stare at me from the shade through the sunlight over the gulley. And then another figure appeared from behind the carob. It was a whitefaced girl of about fourteen or fifteen, in a long dark brown dress. I could make out a sort of closefitting purple cap on the back of her head. Her hair was long. She came beside him, and she also stared at me. She was much shorter than he was, barely to his ribs. We must have stood, the three of us, staring at each other for nearly half a minute. Then I raised my arm, with a smile on my face. There was no response. I moved ten yards or so forward, out into the sunlight, as far