How to Stop Time(58)

The lesson of history is that ignorance and superstition are things that can rise up, inside almost anyone, at any moment. And what starts as a doubt in a mind can swiftly become an act in the world.

And so our fears grew. One night in the Boar’s Head, a fight started when a group of men turned on one of their members and accused him of devil worship. Another night I got speaking to a butcher who refused to take any pork from a certain farmer, on account that he believed all his pigs were ‘dark spirits’ and their meat could corrupt the soul. He gave no evidence for this but he believed it with a passion, and it caused me to remember the case of a pig in Suffolk that had once stood trial and had been burned at the stake on account of being a demon.

We never went to the Globe to see Macbeth, for obvious reasons, but it was no coincidence that this tale of politics and supernatural malevolence was the most popular and talked-about piece of entertainment at the time. I wonder, now, if Shakespeare would have been so kind to me. And if, in this new environment, he believed the death of Henry Hemmings had been justified. But I also had more specific worries.

There was a man at the end of our street, a smartly dressed man who read aloud emphatically enunciated dialogues from Daemonologie, alongside extracts from the King’s Bible. Also, by the time Marion was four, even our once kindly neighbours, Ezekiel and Holwice, were beginning to give me funny looks. I don’t know if this was because they had noticed I wasn’t ageing, or if it was more that the age difference between Rose and me was starting to look a little wide. She seemed a good decade older than me.

And even though we never saw Manning again, I would hear his name. Once, in the street, a woman I had never seen before came up to me and stuck her finger in my chest.

‘Mr Manning told me about you. He told everyone about you . . . They say you have a child. They should have smothered her at birth, to be safe.’

Another time, while Rose was out alone with Marion she was spat at, for living with the ‘enchanter’.

Marion, now a girl, was aware of such things. She was an intelligent, sensitive child, and seemed to carry a sadness around with her a lot of the time. She cried after that incident. And she would fall very quiet if she heard us talk, however quietly, about our worries.

Slowly, and for her sake, we began to change the way we lived. We deliberately made sure we were never out together. We tried to stop questions when they arose. And we managed it.

Marion, being a girl, and not being nobility, did not go to school. Yet we still thought it important for her to read, to be able to broaden her mind and give her places in her thoughts to hide inside. Reading was a rare skill, in those days, but was one I possessed. And, as I had grown up with a mother who could read (albeit in French) I saw nothing strange in the idea of a girl reading.

She was, it turned out, an extremely gifted and curious reader. We possessed only two books but she adored them. She could read Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene by the age of six, and by the age of eight could quote Michel de Montaigne – I had an English translation of his essays that I had acquired years before at Southwark’s Wednesday market. The book was damaged – the pages unfixed from the spine – and I’d bought it for two pennies. She would see, for instance, her mother touch my hand and say, ‘If there is such a thing as good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.’ Or, on questioning why she looked so sad, she would remark, ‘My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.’

‘That’s Montaigne, isn’t it?’

And she would give the tiniest nod. ‘I quote others only in order the better to express myself,’ she’d say, which was itself, I sensed, another quote.

Then one day she read something else.

You see, she sometimes went outside on her own in the morning to play. And one day she came in, while I was learning a new lute song – ‘I Saw My Lady Weepe’ by John Dowland – and she looked a little like someone had slapped her in the face.

‘What is it, sweetheart?’

She seemed out of breath. It took her a moment. She was frowning at me, with an intensity and seriousness that seemed beyond her age. ‘Are you Satan, Father?’

I laughed. ‘Only in the mornings.’

She wasn’t in joking mood, so I quickly added, ‘No, Marion. What would make you ask such a thing?’

And then she showed me.

Someone had scraped the words ‘Satan Resides Here’ on our door. It was a horrifying thing to see, but more horrifying to know Marion had seen it too.

And when Rose saw it she knew, absolutely, what needed to be done.

‘We need to leave London.’

‘But where would we go?’

That seemed, to Rose, to be a secondary question. She was resolute. ‘We need to start again.’

‘To do what?’

She pointed at the lute leaning beside the door.

‘People’s ears like music in other places.’

I stared at the lute. At the darkness of the small holes amid the twisting decoration of the wood. I imagined, ridiculously, a world inside there. Deep in the shell of the lute. Where some miniature version of ourselves could live, safe and invisible and unharmed.





London, now



I had brought my lute in for year nine. I am holding it, leaning against my desk.