Celestial Chess by Thomas Bontly

Author:Thomas Bontly [Bontly, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780998706597
Publisher: Bruin Books, LLC
Published: 2019-11-19T07:00:00+00:00

Oh damned star, oh fiendish light!

Where yesternight was but a well,

A blackish hole where hope could dwell—

Now the heavens blanch with fright,

And hope and faith have lost to hell.

It was raining again by morning, but the professor, Stephany and I wedged ourselves into the Volkswagen and set out for Creypool, a bucolic hamlet several miles inland and sheltered by a range of low hills. The abbey stood on a bit of high ground between the village and the fens. Only the foundations, a few jagged pieces of wall and several precarious arches were left to claim the protection of the National Trust, but the surrounding gardens were well kept. Within a perfectly symmetrical confluence of grassy plots, graveled paths and freshly turned flower beds, we found an ancient sundial. Its eroded and moss-stained stone spoke eloquently of the passage of centuries.

Trevor-Finch turned up his collar against the drizzle and, pipe clenched between his teeth, looked upon the debris of a rival tradition. “The Puritans, good swine, tore the place down,” he said. “Too bad; it might have done for a hospital or a school. Until the Trust took it over, it was nothing but a sheep pasture—though my father did some excavating and poking about here in his time.”

We roamed the broken stonework with its occasional seams of concrete and patches of brick. I inspected the remnants of the abbey’s chapel, library and dining hall. Farther on, we encountered a maze of individual cells, most no larger than a good-sized broom closet. They were open to the wind and rain, and weeds sprouted among their paving stones, but they would have been dark and secretive once. I reflected that it must have been in one of these tiny cells that Geoffrey Gervaise worked over the lines of his extraordinary poem. Good and evil, faith and despair, being and nothingness—the great cosmic drama, miniaturized and made to perform its ageless pantomime in a cell barely six feet long and four feet wide. It occurred to me that our modern philosophers had not been the first to discover the miracle of relativity.

Trevor-Finch wandered off to look at something and Stephany and I found ourselves alone. She took my hand and drew me back into the shadow of a precarious archway.

“Isn’t this a romantic spot?” she asked. “It’s like something out of Byron or Shelley—so melancholy, yet so serene and ageless.”

We were agonizingly close in a well of cold, wet stones, with massive blocks poised directly above our heads. There were raindrops like tears on Stephany’s lashes, a slight flush on her China-doll cheeks. A lock of hair clung wetly to her slender neck, and there was something touchingly submissive about the way she huddled close to me in the little niche we had found.

“Stephany, is there some mystery connected with Abbotswold? Something your father doesn’t want me to know about?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Last night at dinner, when you mentioned an ‘evil spell,’ your father seemed momentarily upset. And yesterday, when I talked to your grandmother—’’

“Grandmama knows all the family stories,” she said.

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