public alehouse fronting the road. This macadam road, the only one on the island, had been paved by German prisoners of war. The post office was in back, where the postman, who was also the volunteer constable, and something of a local hero as well, kept his bicycle.
Sark was not just an island in the Channel, it was also apparently an island in the stream of history, stubbornly unchanging. It was the last feudal government in Europe. The seigneur held it as a fief directly from the Crown, and the island landowners held their parcels from him in return for their ceremonial vows of service, duly and properly sworn. The parliament of the isle, called the Chief Pleas, consisted of the Seigneur, the Seneschal, the forty Tenants and the twelve Deputies.
The fiefdom had passed through many hands since the first seigneur. In the nineteenth century, the island had been mortgaged to a privateer named John Allaire in order to keep the mines in operation. The fiefdom was sold thereafter to a family called Collings, whose descendants were the ancestors of the Hathaways.
During World War II, the island, along with the other Channel Islands, was occupied by the Nazis, and ruled by one Kommandant Major Albrecht Lanz in the name of the Third Reich.
In the autumn of 1990, an unemployed nuclear scientist named Andre Gardes, armed with a single semi-automatic weapon, posted notices all around the island proclaiming himself to be the rightful seigneur, and announced his intended invasion, which was scheduled to take place the next day. He arrived as promised in the morning, seated himself in the tiny brick building housing the Court of the Chief Pleas, and declared himself the conqueror of the island.
His reign lasted less than a day: when Dr. Gardes was sitting on a bench after lunch, changing the gun’s magazine, Perrée, the volunteer constable, complimented him on his choice of gun and convinced Gardes to remove the magazine and let him admire the weapon. When Dr. Gardes, nuclear scientist, did so, Constable Perrée confiscated the firearm and punched the would-be conqueror in the nose. The weapon now sat in the island’s small museum next to old naval bric-a-brack.
By ancient law, the Seigneur of the Island was the only one allowed to keep an unspayed hound, or keep pigeons. All the flotsam and jetsam thrown up by the sea to the beach belonged to him.
In the twenty-first century, Sark was designated by the International Dark Sky Astronomy Association as the first Dark Sky Island in the world, which is to say that Sark was so devoid of any urban light pollution that naked-eye astronomy was possible there.
There was only one ship that regularly made port; she traveled to the island of Guernsey twice a day, on the morning and evening tide, and she did not sail at night.
No automobiles nor motorcycles were permitted on the road and horsepaths, all of which were unlit.
The Unlit House
When he finally saw the house for the first time, dark and tall by the light of the dying day, he was so overtaken by the feeling of lost memory, that, for a moment, he did not hear what the green-eyed girl was telling him.
The architecture was a strange eclectic collection, built over many periods, a graceful jumble that adhered to no coherent plan.
Midmost was a tall circular stone building beneath a squat dome, the remnant of the Priory of Saint Magloire of Dol, built by sixth-century monks. The bottom floor was stone, and the upper stories, built in a later era, were thick wood panels fantastically carved, pierced with small arched windows set with stained glass.
To the east sprang a curving wing built in the seventeenth century, the main hall and living quarters, roofed in slate, with a servant’s dorm attached at an angle. The main hall was of dark stone and had a distinctly military look to it, with narrow archers’ slits for windows on the bottom story, but broader windows above that were framed by decorative patterns of thick gray
Glenna Vance, Tom Lacalamita