In researching the history of La Luz, Peyton had discovered records of a Priory dedicated to St Nicholas. Rachel had been right, and she had found her Holy Grail.
Believed to have been founded in 1066 on the arrival of Benedictines to England with the Conqueror, this holy site was not actually mentioned in official records until a charter of 1120, when Henry I granted control of the revenues of the little priory to the Bishop of Tavistock in Devon. The tiny island monastery had thrived until 1351, at which point the diocesan clerk had recorded, what he had termed apiratical attack—this assault forcing the monks to flee back to their larger Benedictine community on the mainland. By 1539, all knowledge of the priory on the island seemed to have disappeared, because during the dissolution of its parent abbey in Tavistock by Henry VIII, there was no record whatsoever of St Nicholas’s existence: possessions, buildings, or the monks themselves. Henry’s Court of Augmentations (and Thomas Cromwell in particular), kept meticulous records, so it was as if the priory had been expunged from living memory. Which was doubly odd, as even Peyton had noted. For the one thing that had made the priory so uniquely valuable, why it had been established in the first place and attracted so many devotees and pilgrims, was because it contained a Christian Memorial Stone. These stones were some of the most precious relics of the faith, up there with slivers of the True Cross or the breast milk of the Virgin Mary, for these smooth, flat slabs were believed to be those that Jesus had walked on when he’d landed with his uncle at St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall. Local rumour had it that, unable to get safely to shore because of a violent storm and with the lives of all the sailors in the little boat in danger, at the boy’s command, these stones had risen from the seabed and had then formed themselves into a safe causeway to bring them all to land. Needless to say, they were highly prized treasures, and the priory of St Nicholas had owned one.
It seemed to Aleksey, reading all this, that it must be more than coincidence that the so-calledpirate raidhad taken place during the penultimate year of the Black Death in England—1351.
If—and he didn’t really believe any of this—ifRachel’s Men of the Light had come ashore in 1351, traumatised, telling their tales of an apocalypse that had struck Europe, perhaps they had also told other stories that made ownership of a stone rumoured to have been walked on by a young Jesus seem fairly insignificant. What if they’d claimed to have actually met the risen Christ—and touchedHim? The simple Benedictine monks, superstitious and fearful, might have fled in the face of such blasphemy.
So, for hundreds of years, the priory appeared in no church records, although it was clearly still there, for the population of St Mary’s and the other islands grew, and rumours of healings and miracles surfaced from time to time. But then they did all over Cornwall, often involving pixies, so this was not particularly noteworthy.
What was more trustworthy was an account written in 1590 by a Spanish nobleman, Don Hugo de Moncada, about his experiences during the aborted invasion of England two years earlier: the fated Spanish Armada of 1588. A hundred and thirty Spanish ships had set sail from Lisbon, but had been routed by Elizabeth I’s superior navy in the English Channel. With a little help from some favourable winds, the entire Armada had been destroyed, some nine thousand Spanish sailors subsequently being washed up around the coasts of Cornwall, Ireland and even Scotland, where they starved to death or were murdered, or occasionally held for ransom if they were wealthy. And hence the story told by Don Hugo. According to him, his ship was wrecked on a reef in Scilly, and he and his surviving men, some forty of them, had swum ashore to a small island where they had discovered a little church run by a religious order. They had been cared for, fed and sheltered. None of the monks could communicate more than a few words to them in any common language, even though many of Don Hugo’s sailors were mercenaries from countries across Europe and Africa and so spoke many lingoes. The only few words they shared were Latin.
Eventually, when his men were strong enough, believing that the Armada could not have been defeated and that therefore England was now theirs, they’d continued their own small part in the invasion by hacking the monks to death and taking their boat. They had, after all, been given indulgences by Pope Sixtus V, and could therefore not commit sin whilst under the banner of this great endeavour. But being men of great faith and honour, they’d given the old men Christian burials in the grounds of their tiny church beside the lake from which the monks had drawn the water to give to the their hapless visitors.
On his death bed, wracked with guilt that he had not been able to do more for his King, Don Hugo had confessed his sins—the principle one being that once they had the boat, he’d given in to his men’s demand that they head straight back to Spain. In his written confession, he called this island La Luz, because as he and his men and their horses had been floundering in the wreck of their ship, they’d seen a light and had swum for it. The monks had lit a beacon on the headland to help any sailors in need, as St Nicholas required of them. These quiet, dignified old monks had called the island a word none of his men could translate, but had pointed to the fire as they said it, so light had seemed as good a guess as any to Don Hugo. Aleksey wondered, with a shiver running down his spine, if they had been trying to saylight of the world.
And so the priory of St Nicholas had ceased to be, but the island’s relationship to the Royal Family was only beginning. Elizabeth had no children, and so there was no Duke of Cornwall during much of her reign, but from then on it had passed from first son to first son, until the current anomaly: the dying, abdicated King Edward VIII had taken his last revenge on the family that had refused to accept his choice of wife. He’d taken the island and gifted it to the queen’s younger son on the day of his christening: to the Duke of York. And so now…
Aleksey rolled over onto his back, grinning. Now it was his.
Ben stirred at the movement and groggily muttered, ‘What time is it?’
‘Time to get up and amuse me.’
‘Stop stealing my best lines. God, I’m starving.’
‘So am I.’ He still enjoyed saying this. It sounded so odd, even to his own ears.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Vital research.’
‘Sure. Come on, let’s go research breakfast.’
It seemed to Aleksey the best idea he’d heard from Ben since he’d been pushed out of the bathroom some hours before.
* * *
Chapter Thirty-Five
The rest of the holiday unfolded like weeks snatched out of real time.
It seemed to Aleksey that rather than getting older, as was inevitable, he had in fact been transported back to a simpler time when he’d been nothing more than an arrogant, wilful, but intensely loving little boy on a Danish beach. Now, he had a whole island and a family of his own, and he no longer had to play a part which had never really suited him anyway. It certainly hadn’t made him happy.
He was drawn to this island—had been from the first time he’d heard about it from Phillipa. This feeling of coming home now cemented by the information he’d had from Peyton.
They’d done some more shopping, hired another boat, a large motor cruiser freed up because the races were over, and had travelled back to the island as a family together.
The first thing Ben did was secure the well. He and Squeezy made a new cover with some timber they’d bought at the chandlers. This they fixed into place with ground anchors hammered into the soil around the hole.
Once this was done, Ben was relatively sanguine about Molly free roaming, as long as she always had at least one person with her.
Aleksey made the swim from Ben’s Bottom around the headland to the hidden harbour in the cliff. It was an easy task for him on a perfect summer’s day. He tried not to imagine Max floating beneath him somewhere, and was relieved when he saw no sign of the body. He reversed the trip they’d taken with Billy up through the lower steps, and finally was able to slide the bolts open on the lighthouse door and allow the family in. Naturally, they’d all headed for the top and had assembled together on the narrow gantry. Molly, held so tightly in Ben’s arms that his fingers on her tiny body left faint bruises visible later that night, waved down to Enid who was smiling cheerfully up at them from her camp chair below. Miles, Aleksey noted with a smile, did not let go of the rail to copy this feat of bravado. But then he didn’t either, and they held on together considering their island.
That night, they assembled a feast and lit a bonfire on PB’s beach, and sat together eating and drinking and telling more stories of their respective adventures. Tim was noticeably quiet, as he’d clearly missed all the fun, until Squeezy reminded him of the house warming and claimed that he was, in fact, the epicentre of the entire Black Death debacle. Tim clearly wasn’t too sure whether this fact should cheer him up or not.
The days merged one into another—picnics, swimming, sunshine, camping out, fishing—they ate when they were hungry and lived the rhythms of nature, rising early with the first light and excessively loud dawn chorus, and turning in when it got dark.
Every morning, even before the sunrise woke Ben, Aleksey slipped out of the house with the dogs and went to the pond. He stripped and swam and lazed in the water, encouraging the dogs to fetch sticks. Neither of them could swim underwater and found his ability to do this extremely concerning. He stayed under, soaking his skin, as long as he could hold his breath. And that was still a very long time.
