The Pendragon Legend Read Free Page A

rose a pile of another ten. On my neighbour’s desk there was still not a single one, and his discomfort was visibly growing. Finally, with an air of decision, he turned towards me:
    “Excuse me … what do you do, to get them to bring you all those books?”
    “I simply fill in the title and catalogue number on a slip, and put it in one of the baskets on the circular counter.”
    “That’s interesting. Did you say catalogue number? What’s that?”
    “Every book here has one.”
    “And how do you find it?”
    “You look in the catalogues. Those big black volumes over there.”
    “And what sort of books do people here read?”
    “Whatever they like. Whatever they’re working on.”
    “You, for example, what are you working on?”
    “Family history, at the moment.”
    “Family history: that’s wonderful. So … if I wanted to study family history, what would I have to do, then?”
    “Please, would you mind speaking as quietly as you can—the superintendent is staring at us. It depends on what sort of family you want to study.”
    “Hm. Well, actually, none. I’ve had nothing but trouble from mine since I was little.”
    “So what does interest you?” I asked, sympathetically.
    “Me? Rock climbing, most of all.”
    “Fine. Then I’ll order you a book that really should appeal to you. If you would just write your name on this slip.”
    He wrote, in a large, childish hand: George Maloney. I requested Kipling’s Kim for him, and my new acquaintance buried himself in it, with great apparent interest. For some while I was left in peace.
    Everything I read about the Pendragons was lent a mysterious perspective by the tales Fred Walker had told me, by the telephone call, and by the Earl’s character and imposing presence. By now James I was on the throne, and studying the natural history of demons. Previously scholars had pursued the noble and the beautiful , but now they were starting to turn to the world of the occult, in search of the Ultimate Wisdom.
    Asaph Christian, the sixth Earl, was not a courtier like the fifth. He wrote no sonnets, did not fall in love or leave fifteen illegitimate children, or even a legitimate one, and after him the title passed to his younger brother’s son.
    Asaph spent his youth in Germany, in the cities of the old South, where the houses stooped menacingly over the narrow streets, and the scholars worked all night in their long, narrow bedrooms whose cobwebbed corners were never pierced by candlelight . Amongst alembics, phials and weirdly-shaped furnaces, the Earl pursued the Magnum Arcanum , the Great Mystery, the Philosopher’s Stone. He was a member of the secret brotherhood of Rosicrucians, about whom their contemporaries knew so little and therefore gossiped all the more. They were alchemists and doctors of magic, the last great practitioners of the occult. It was through Asaph that the cross with the symbolic rose in each of its corners was added to the family coat of arms.
    On his return to Wales, Pendragon Castle became an active laboratory of witchcraft. Processions of visitors, in coaches with darkened windows, came from far and wide. Heretics arrived, fleeing from the bonfire. Ancient shepherds brought the accumulated lore of their people down from the mountains. They were joined by bent-backed Jewish doctors, driven from royal courts for seeming to know more than is permitted to man. And they say that here too, in disguise, came the King of Scotland and England, the demon-haunted James, to probe his host’s secrets in nightly conference. Here the first English Rosicrucians initiatedtheir believers, and Pendragon Castle became the second home of Robert Fludd, the greatest student of Paracelsus the Mage.
    This was the Fludd through whom I had befriended the Earl. Truly speaking, I owed the invitation to him. At this stage I had no idea that all this ancient material, and all these names that had meant so little to me—Pendragon Castle, Asaph Pendragon—would