The Printer's Devil Read Free Page A

came after E, T, and A as fourth commonest letter? Try O, Alan thought, and got:
    TAPE THE MANE OU THE NATFH AMW OOOO DRT
    Which was nearer to making sense, it seemed. And yet, far from solution.
    ‘Bugger this,’ thought Alan, and stared morosely down the garden. In the background, Luciano Pavarotti was lamenting the loss of Otello’s peace of mind. ‘Ora e per sempre addio, sante memorie, addio sublimi incanti del pensier, ’ he sang. ‘Now and forever farewell, sacred memories, farewell, sublime enchantments of the mind...’ As always, it raised the small hairs at the back of Alan’s neck.
    Then something occurred to him, like a lightbulb over Goofy’s head:
    AB C D E then F G H Z YX W V ... U T S
    It was a backward substitution! Quickly he scribbled out the rest of the alphabet, and came up with: TAKE THE NAME OF THE MAGUS AND FOLLOW IT And what the hell was that supposed to mean? he asked himself.
    The name of the magus. Roger Southwell. Alan laughed suddenly. The answer had sprung off the page, a clue by a seventeenth century cruciverbalist:
    South. Well.
    He’d bet a hundred pounds that there was, or had been, a well in the grounds of Fenstanton Abbey - and he recalled, with a shudder, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas.
    As to what was in the Fenstanton well - ‘Well,’ thought Alan, ‘only one way to find out.’
    ‘...Facilis descensus Averno:
    Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
    Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
    Hoc opus, hic labor est.’
    (It’s easy to go down into the Underworld; dark Dis’s door stands open night and day; but retracing one’s steps and finding a way back into the upper air, that’s a job, that’s a problem.)
    Virgil, The A neid
    ‘Roger Southwell’s Fenstanton Abbey, like William Beckford’s Fonthill a century later, was a folly on a grand scale - an exercise so extravagant as to assume nightmare proportions.
    ‘While Beckford’s folly may be viewed as a gesture of revenge against society, Southwell’s is less easy to categorise. Some commentators have seen it as a gesture of defiance against the established Church, that in building an “Abbey” complete with tower (and bells, if contemporary accounts are to be believed, although who the founder was, and what became of them, is unknown to this writer) Southwell was thumbing his nose at the authorities who had excommunicated him. How he escaped the scaffold is a mystery - the last recorded execution for witchcraft took place in 1685 and Southwell died in 1697 - because he apparently made no secret of his activities.
    ‘The Abbey was begun probably in 1657 and building continued for at least ten years; but whether it was actually complete at the time of Southwell’s death is debatable.
    ‘Its tower, in any case, did not survive its creator very long: a 1701 report refers to it as “ruined” and the few references to the Abbey during the eighteenth century culminate in its description by George Wyatt as “the derelict remains of Robert (sic) Southwell’s Abbey” in his Counties of 1802.’
    Kim Sotheran read this item carefully, trying to align it with Alan’s bizarre tale of tombs and codes and putative buried treasure.
    Looking up from the book, she smiled at Alan’s expression.
    ‘So what do you think is down the well?’
    Alan shrugged. ‘Southwell’s book, perhaps. His grimoire. Can you imagine? What a find!’
    Kim raised one eyebrow, a favourite quirk of hers which Alan found irresistible. If she had doubts, she hid them well.
    ‘I want to shoot this,’ she said. ‘I want the tomb and the folly, and the well. I’ll do it on thirty-five mill’ and we can back it up with your new toy.’ She meant the video camera. ‘Someone’ll take it, even if you don’t find anything - ‘
    ‘Less of the “you”, if you don’t mind.’
    ‘Well, all right, we then. Does it matter? But listen - why Roger Southwell? I’ve heard of John Dee and Roger Bacon and Michael Scot, but not him. The