In which the redeemed are gathered from their several dwellings and meet together at a suitable place far distant from the haunts of man
Without warning the curtain over the vestry door was jerked back and a tall, well-built man in a white robe like ours stepped into the room. Both Lizzie and I leaped back and I noticed, with a quick surge of pride, that she had jumped towards me. I quickly stepped in front of her and thrust my hip out to free the hilt of my sword, only to realise that I wasn't wearing one. I hesitated, confused.
The tall man stood still and stared at me. There was a twinkle in his gray eyes and a slight upward curl to his lips.
"Walked into the door?"
I nodded dumbly.
"Thought you were a ghost, eh?"
The upward curl became a definite grin.
I nodded again.
"Let's go outside," the stranger turned and spoke over his shoulder. "We've had one earthquake already and the next one will be stronger."
I finally found my voice.
"How did you get in?"
"Through the door."
"But the door's locked." Lizzie protested. "I tried it myself."
"It isn't locked now." The man glanced back at us. "Come. Quickly. This building is well over a thousand years old and it hasn't been very well maintained of late."
"Why not?" I demanded as we hurried through the door after him. "Haven't my descendants done their duty by the Church?"
"Oh, your family was all right," the stranger replied. "The trouble was that they died out with your son, who met his end while fighting in the Low Countries about twelve years after you yourself died."
So that was why Lizzie hadn't recognised my name! Poor Robert, I mused, he was a good lad but terribly impetuous. It would be just like him to attempt something impossible on the battlefield. Still, it was a man's way to die.
I came back to the present as we walked out through the porch. Lizzie had obviously been saying something to the stranger because I heard her saying "I'm sure my father'll do 'is bit to 'elp out."
The stranger smiled and shook his head.
"He did, believe me. He was very generous. The trouble has been more recent, I'm afraid. It's over a hundred years since he died and for nearly eighty years most people haven't believed in God or religion or anything. In fact, for the last twenty years there have been a maximum of twelve people in this congregation."
"Twelve!" I exclaimed.
"Twelve," the stranger confirmed with a nod. "And most of them came out of habit rather than love for God."
As he spoke we came round the corner of the church and I stopped in surprise. There was a crowd of a hundred or more young people standing there, most of them dressed in the same white robes as Lizzie and I were wearing.
"Here, let me introduce you to the only one who was found worthy."
At the front of the crowd was a woman with white hair and curious glass circles in front of her eyes. She was wearing a skirt of rough material decorated with red and green squares just like the plaids worn by the Scots ambassador I met in 1556. Her hair was all disarrayed and her clothing was dirty and crumpled.
"Mrs Edwards, may I present Sir Ralph Gifford? Sir Ralph, Mrs Sibyl Edwards."
The white-haired woman held out her hand and began to say "How . . ." but at that precise moment the ground shook and heaved beneath us and we were literally thrown into each other's arms. We danced together frantically, trying to keep our balance. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the church tower sway violently and a large stone on the parapet detach itself and fall towards us, rotating slowly as it came.
"Look out!" I yelled and dragged Mrs Edwards away from the church. The stone landed on a large altar-like tombstone and smashed it into a thousand pieces.
Mrs Edwards detached herself from my arms and smoothed her skirt, then reached for the glass circles, which were hanging from a cord around her neck, and placed them on her eyes.
"Do you mind, Sir Ralph!" she exclaimed. "This is no time for me to be dancing in the graveyard with a man in a bedsheet."
"I beg pardon, madam." I made my most courtly bow. "I merely wished to prevent that stone falling on your head."
Mrs Edwards glanced at the shattered stone without interest and then turned back to the tall stranger.
"Who are you? How did you know where I was hiding? Why have you brought me here? Who are all these people?"
"My dear." A young girl of about twenty stepped forward and put her arm around Mrs Edward's waist. "Everything in good time. Sir Ralph undoubtedly saved you from death. The least you can do is thank 'im."
Mrs Edwards glared at her.
"Don't you speak to me like that, young lady. Have a bit of respect for your elders."
The young girl drew herself up.
"Elders indeed? You'm no more'n sixty I reckon. I be eighty-seven."
I stared at her. The way she spoke and drew herself up was exactly like any one of my old aunts, but her smooth, unlined face, the gleam of her long fair hair, the soft, smooth skin of her hands, all proclaimed her youth.
A young man stepped up beside her and put his arm round her waist.
"Now, Elspeth. I told you that you looked all different. You can't expect Mrs Edwards to believe that you're eighty-seven lookin' the way you are."
The young woman blushed. "I'm sorry. I forgot."
I reached out and tapped the young man on the shoulder.
"Excuse me. How old are you?"
He turned to face me. "Seventy-six. I reckon I passed on afore my missus, which is why she's older'n me."
I thought for a moment. "Tell me, friend. Do I look as if I was sixty-three?"
"No, sir. You'm no more'n a young lad o' eighteen or nineteen, I reckon." The man looked me up and down. "Beggin' your pardon, sir, but 'ave you been in a fight?"
Before I could answer another young man, slim and with dark hair, jumped up on a tombstone and clapped his hands loudly.
"My masters, instead of arguing, let us all go away from this building, for another stone might fall at any moment and imperil us all."
At least, that's what I understood him to say, but there was something funny about his speech and thinking about it as we all walked to the further corner of the churchyard I realised that he hadn't spoken English at all, yet somehow I had understood his meaning. I caught up to him and tugged at his white garment.
"Excuse me. What's your name?"
The young man looked around at me and then raised his hand to his forehead. "I'm Earconfryth, maister. I'm one of Lord Fitzwilliam's villeins."
"Are you English?" I queried.
"I don't think so, maister. I'm a Saxon. What's English?"
Now there was a question to ponder on. I had arrived at no definite conclusion when we reached the corner of the churchyard and gathered into a group around the tall man. Mrs Edwards pushed her way towards him, obviously still intent on the answer to her query.
"Who are you?" she demanded but instead of replying the tall man stepped easily backwards onto the churchyard wall - which was about five feet high at that point - and began to speak.
"My friends, I am Melchiel, your guardian angel. You may call me Mel for short." He smiled into our astonished faces. "The Lord has sent me to gather you all together, ready to leave this earth. We shall shortly be joined by another group from the graveyard on the other side of the village . . ."
"There isn't one." Mrs Edwards interrupted. "This is the only graveyard here."
"This is the only modern one, Mrs Edwards." The angel smiled at her as she subsided and then continued addressing us. "When this other group arrives we shall all proceed to the central meeting place for Britain, which is on the plain near Salisbury."
He paused a moment to let his words sink in and then smiled broadly.
"We shall fly there, which will be a new experience to some of you. Please do not panic when you find yourself rising up from the earth. Just remain standing quietly - or you may sit if you wish. Of course, you individually will not be flying; you will simply be transported through the air, so please don't try any acrobatics. The journey will take about two hours."
"Fly? What does he mean, fly?" Mrs Edwards demanded of no-one in particular. "I've never flown before and I don't intend to start now. The idea! At my time of life!"
The tall young man never stopped smiling. "How's your rheumatism, Mrs Edwards?" he asked.
The old lady stopped in mid-flow and automatically put her hand to the small of her back.
"It's . . ."
She stopped and a look of puzzlement crossed over her face.
"Why, I believe it feels much better."
She tried a few tentative movements and then began to bend and twist at the waist so vigorously that the glass circles fell off her face, but she took no notice of them in her excitement.
"In fact, it's all gone! I do believe it's all gone!"
She skipped a couple of steps and then twirled round like a six-year old.
"Sir Ralph! Sir Ralph!" she called. "Come on! Let's dance!"
"Perhaps you can fly after all," the tall man said, but Mrs Edwards was so busy skipping that she didn't hear him.
I never got my dance. Cries of astonishment broke out around me and I looked first at the other people and then in the direction they were gazing, and saw an amazing sight. Coming through the air on about the level of the church tower was another group of seventy or eighty people all dressed in white. There was a second tall young man - another angel, I guessed - a few paces in front, as if he were somehow driving them through the air like a coachman. It was uncanny to see them approach so rapidly without moving their arms or legs at all.
As this second group passed over the roof of the church our angel stepped down from the wall.
"Are you all ready?" he asked. "Let's go."
Immediately my stomach seemed to drop down into my legs as the ground fell away. The next instant we floated over the wall that surrounded the churchyard. I half turned and looked back and was amazed at how small the church looked - and how different when seen from above. I never realised how long the building was in proportion to its width.
Several women screamed and Mrs Edwards seized my right arm at the same moment as Lizzie grabbed my left. I looked down at her - and beyond her to the ground and all but fainted with terror. The ground was shooting past faster than a horse could gallop and there was absolutely nothing between my feet and it. The wind of our progress was whipping my gown around my legs and causing my eyes to water, but curiously enough I seemed able to keep my balance without difficulty. I was even able to brace myself and lean forward into the wind, exactly as if I were standing on solid ground.
"Come on up. It's fun!" a voice exclaimed above me.
I looked up to see that we were just below the second group and indeed, a moment later we reached their level, our speed matching theirs exactly. The first thing I saw as we joined them was a young woman holding a baby of perhaps five or six months. The baby was crowing and laughing with delight and the mother was smiling so broadly it must have hurt her face, yet tears were rolling down her cheeks in a constant stream. Every so often she held the baby away from her so that it chuckled and reached out to her with its arms and then she would clutch the child to her bosom so hard that I wondered it didn't break.
Other people must have noticed her as well, because soon she was at the centre of a circle of women, all amazed to see such frantic joy. Someone must have got some information because Mrs Edwards suddenly tugged on my arm and when I leaned down whispered in my ear, "It's her first child. She lost him when he was just seven months old."
"Was he an only child?" I queried.
"Oh, no." Mrs Edwards breath tickled my ear. "She had ten or twelve all told, but they are grown up. I believe that she is nearly the same age as me."
"Never!" I exclaimed and then could have bitten my tongue off for a tactless ass, but fortunately there was another buzz of excitement that distracted us all.
"Look!" Lizzie exclaimed. "Is that the sea?"
Off on our left was a broad expanse of water, gleaming like burnished copper in the sun. Everything looked unfamiliar from this height, though from the fact that I could see land on the other side of the water I was certain that this was a river rather than the sea. There was a round tower on the farther shore, incredibly tall and slender, that particularly intrigued me.
"Let's have a look at that." I said, just as Mrs Edwards let go of me to join the women around the young mother. Lizzie took my arm and we made our way towards the front of the crowd. I was surprised to find that I could walk quite well; so long as I looked straight ahead my feet gave me the illusion that I was walking on a perfectly smooth floor. If I looked down, of course, the illusion was shattered and each step became a perilous adventure.
We picked our way through the crowd and came up to where the two angels were standing chatting to each other in a language I didn't understand.
"Excuse me, sir." I said to one of them and they both turned to look at me. The first one smiled and raised his eyebrows.
"Yes?"
"Where are we and what is that water?"
The angel beckoned us up to stand beside him, one on each side. He pointed to the river.
"That's the Thames estuary. Just behind us is the city of Southend-on-Sea, which has grown up on the estate of Prittlewell Manor — I think you've both heard of Prittlewell? On the other side of the Thames is, of course, the county of Kent and that large chimney is just outside Rochester — ah, that must be the third earthquake."
As he spoke the round tower suddenly broke apart in the middle. The upper portion seemed to leap in the air and then fall straight down while the lower part shook back and forth and crumbled apart.
"Look over there!" the angel exclaimed and pointed away to the left of Rochester. In one small spot the water of the Thames appeared to be boiling and then a huge spout of water soared silently into the air. Dark objects flew out from the column of water and tumbled slowly back to the river while the main body continued to shoot upwards and spread out so that it looked like a gigantic mushroom. At its peak we were abruptly assailed by a huge blast of rumbling sound louder than any canon shot I had ever heard, louder even than the twenty canon fired when Her Majesty visited Chelmsford.
"What was that?" I gasped.
"That was an ammunition ship that sank about a century ago." the angel said. "It's been threatening to go off for years." He pointed ahead and slightly to the right, to where a huge pall of dust and smoke billowed up into the air. "Now look, there's London as I think you will never have seen it before."
"London!" Lizzie and I spoke simultaneously.
As I remembered it, you rode through miles of market gardens grouped around the tiny hamlets of Soho, Islington, Shoreditch and so on until finally the walls of London rose up out of the plain beside the Thames, dominated by the huge bulk of St Paul's cathedral. Now there wasn't a single garden to be seen, just mile after mile of large houses, each with a tiny patch of greenery in front or behind it. On the whole the streets were wide and straight, most of them looking as if they had been drawn with a ruler. Dotted about the streets were strange coloured boxes with what appeared to be sloping windows front and rear.
"What are those?" I asked, pointing to a huge rectangle of black ground marked with white lines and absolutely littered with these coloured boxes.
"What are what?" the angel replied.
"Those coloured box sort of things."
"Ah, those. Those are a sort of horseless carriage that people travel about in. Horribly dangerous, rushing about the place at sixty or seventy miles an hour."
I felt my brain spinning.
"At sixty miles an hour? You mean a day, don't you?"
"No." The angel shook his head. "An hour. On the motorways they could travel even faster - a hundred or more miles an hour if it was a big car. Ask Mrs Edwards if you don't believe me."
I didn't need to. Just then a large red box with what looked like a ladder on top came careering along a road from the right. Flashes of blue light shone from its top and even from this height we could hear the eerie wailing noise it was making as it travelled. Behind me the buzz of conversation died out as everyone peered down at the speeding vehicle.
"The devil is let loose!" I heard Earconfryth gasp.
"Oh, don't be silly!" Sibyl Edward's voice sounded disgusted. "It's only a fire engine. After that earthquake I'll bet there's a lot of people trapped by fallen houses."
Now that she had mentioned it, I noticed that most of the houses we were passing over did look rather battered. Tiles had fallen from many of the roofs, exposing large areas of white laths. Some seemed to have collapsed altogether, spilling avalanches of bricks across the roads, and in several places I noticed tiny human figures swarming over the ruins of buildings.
"Look, that must be where it's going."
Sibyl Edwards had stepped up beside me and was pointing down at the frantic rescuers. With her other hand she fingered the curious glass circles which she had taken from around her neck.
"Mrs Edwards," the angel said, "What's the number on that green car down there?"
Mrs Edwards half raised the glass circles to her eyes and then lowered them again.
"M 731 JK ..."
She stopped suddenly and looked at the angel.
"Good gracious. I'm reading that at this distance without my specs! I don't need these anymore."
She looked down at the glass circles she was holding and then opened her hand and watched them fall down past her feet, tumbling and turning in the air until they smashed on the roof of one of the houses below.
"What were they?" I asked.
"Glasses. Spectacles. To help me see better." She smiled broadly at me. "I've just realised: I seem to be getting younger every minute."
Ahead of us the Thames began to twist and turn in gigantic loops and I was about to ask the angel if it had always been like that when, at the top of one of the loops, I saw something I thought I recognised - the Tower of London.
"Look! Isn't that the Tower?" I exclaimed.
"Yes," the angel replied, "But look over there. There's something far more important."
I followed his pointing finger and saw a huge square of grey roof surrounded by a jumble of fallen buildings. Tiny figures were swarming around it or running down the streets that led away from it, all except one group dressed in white standing in front of a ruined church. As I watched they all began to move at once, and with astonishment I saw them pass over the top of the grey roof.
"What. . . what. . . what?" I gasped.
"Look behind you," the angel said.
I turned and my astonishment increased. We had started out perhaps two hundred strong: now there was a vast multitude of people gliding through the air behind us. Most of them were young and dressed in the same white robes as I had on, but here and there I saw an older person and all of these were wearing a variety of garments in different colours. A number of these older people were black with frizzy hair and I thought at first that some demons must have joined our company until I saw Mrs Edwards chatting to one of them as if to an old friend.
I looked down again. Far below us was a huge park surrounded by tall buildings but nearer and rising steadily was the company of people I had seen by the gray roofed building. As they drew closer I noticed something different about their robes: whereas Lizzie's and mine were pure white, the robes these people were wearing were trimmed with a red border.
"Who are they? Why have they got red on their garments?" I asked the angel.
His face was solemn as he turned to answer my question.
"Didn't you recognise Smithfield?" he asked. When I shook my head he half smiled. "No, I don't suppose you did. It's changed a lot since your time. That large building was Smithfield market and you know what happened there."
"Bloody Mary!" I exclaimed. "Then those are martyrs?"
"That's right." The angel paused. "Oh, and by the way: it would be better if you didn't refer to Queen Mary as 'Bloody Mary'. She mightn't like it."
"Hmmph!" I snorted. "She'll just have to put up with it then."
"Can you not find it in your heart to forgive her?" the angel asked.
"I'll see her in hell first!" I retorted, thinking of Dick o' Hanbury, my friend from Cambridge days, who was burned at Smithfield by Mary Tudor.
"Actually, you'll see her in heaven first." The angel's voice was calm.
I stared at him in horror.
"Mary Tudor in heaven! After all she did to God's saints? How . . . I mean, why . . ."
"I'm afraid I'm not authorised to answer such questions," the angel replied. "All will doubtless be made plain, but in the meantime, it would be better not to say 'Bloody Mary'. She has a heavy enough load to bear without that."
By now the group of martyrs was nearly on our level and I broke off arguing with the angel while I scanned their faces, looking for old Dick. There were about five hundred of them, so it took some time and I wasn't helped by the fact that all the resurrected dead seemed to be about the same age - late teens or early twenties. Finally I gave up and turned to the angel.
"Can you help me? Which one is Dick o' Hanbury?"
"Dick o' Hanbury?" The angel spoke the name slowly, as if trying to recall something. "I don't think Dick o' Hanbury is among the saved. Just a moment, I'll just make sure."
He turned and called to one of the angels that were leading the group of martyrs. They spoke for a moment in their own language and then he turned back to me.
"No, I'm sorry. Dick o' Hanbury is not among the saved."
"But why not?" I protested. "He was martyred - burned at the stake - by Bloody Mary." I didn't care about the emphasis I gave to the appellation. "He was a good man. Why isn't he here?"
"I'm sorry." The angel patted my shoulder. "I'm not authorised to answer such questions. You'll just have to wait until you have a chance to ask Jesus."
I turned away, hot tears stinging my eyes. Lizzie put her arms about me and held me tight, patting my back as I wept. My mind was in a turmoil. It wasn't fair, I raged inwardly. How could that bloody Mary be saved and poor Dick left out? Was that right? Was that justice? A chilling thought swept over me. Just what sort of a person was this God I had served so joyfully? What sort of a God was He, Who could leave Dick in hell while welcoming Mary Tudor into His kingdom? What, after all, did we know about God?
"There, there. Don't cry."
Lizzie's soothing voice gradually calmed me and eventually I stood up, shook myself free of her and went and sat down a few yards away. The huge sprawl of London was out of sight far behind us and we were flying over a rolling green countryside of fields and hedges. Far off to right and left I saw other companies of people floating through the air and drawing closer to us as we all headed for some point far ahead.