‘Holy Grail? You mentioned that before.’
‘I’m searching for the place the few surviving members of the order ended up. We didn’t have the technology in the past to make use of the remains when they were found. Now we do. I do. I want to find the Order of the Light, and I want to find out what made them immune to bubonic plague and, it seems, all other pathogens around at the time.’
‘All other pathogens?’
‘Yes, you see the really odd thing about these corpses is that they have tested to be well over a hundred years old...possibly a lot more. No disease. It may be that they were just more scrupulous in their hygiene for some reason. I often think of baptism and its association with, well, bathing. Who knows if ancient people saw that those who’d been baptised as part of a religious ceremony were healthier and that helped spread the myth that the spiritual aspect of the baptism was what gave you that health? Causation versus correlation.’ She took a sip of wine. ‘Are you a religious man?’
I see dead people and lights from empty lighthouses, so what the fuck do I know?‘No, but I have annoying friends.’
She quirked her lip. ‘Join the club. My name, Rachel—my people come from the Holy Land, and there’s a subset of Jewish people alive today who have a recessive gene that makes them resistant to plague. My grandmother used to explain this by saying that anyone who touchedYeshuaafter his resurrection was imbibed by power. The Bible does say his followers were changed.’
‘But she would not believe in the resurrection, presumably—being Jewish.’
‘Ah, there you’d be wrong.’ She actually admonished him by tapping him on the arm. She was flirting with him. He suddenly wondered if no one had told her. But on the other hand, it had been a strange conversation for a pick-up line. He’d never been chatted up over syphilis, plague, and flea vomit before. ‘Some do—it was God’s trial run for our Messiah yet to come, according to her.’
He found himself tapping his own fork on the table and stopped. ‘Do you know that Jesus is believed to have come to Cornwall?’
She gave him a look that confirmed his recent suspicions. She clearly didn’t realise his boyfriend was sitting across the table from him. ‘Yes, I do. I believe that’s why mymen of the light—those that were left, came here. At the end. He was there at the beginning for them, and they wanted to be near him again at the end…’
Aleksey shook himself. ‘You are talking about 1348, yes? One thousand three hundred years after the crucifixion?’
‘Yes, I know. It’s hard to take in. Look, I’ve lost all credibility in my profession now. I’m seen as a loose cannon, a conspiracy theorist, but maybe, just maybe, these are all just different versions of the same entirely rational truth: that there’s a strain of immunity passed down through a tiny group of consequently very long-lived people who were spiritual and lived pure lives: possibly just washing more. Having less sex? Who knows? There are accounts in the Jewish Bible of a man dying who was nearly a thousand years old. Perhaps these long-lived people joined religious organisations such as the Carthusians, and whenever plagues broke out, they were there, helping with advice on quarantining people, keeping things clean…’
‘And they were tortured and persecuted for this knowledge and for their…purity. Their ability to survive, which would have appeared…supernatural.’
‘Yes.’
‘And some of these bodies have actually been found? These very ancient men? This is fact?’
‘Yes, but nothing was done with them other than verifying their age, and when that was ridiculed by the scientific community, the whole lot was lost. But I’m going to find their final resting place. There may have been up to a hundred of them remaining after the persecutions. They left from France. The Papal Court was in Avignon in France during the years of the Black Death, not where we know it now. They went to it and had a conference with the Pope, that’s recorded history, and then they set sail to Cornwall, which was still almost an independent nation at that time. The Black Prince had only just been named Duke of Cornwall ten years before all this. He was the oldest son of the king, and the tradition still exists to this day, of course.’
‘Yes, I was aware of that. And your Holy Grail is to find this site?’
‘They would have gone to a monastery or priory. So I’m looking for ones that were recorded as being founded before 1300 or so, so knowledge of them would have filtered back to the papal court. It doesn’t help they kept changing names. St Carrok’s in St Winnow, for example. It’s known as St Carroc’s, St Syriac’s, and St Julitta’s and St Caddix’s.’
‘Why does the name matter if the site was always a religious order?’
‘Well, because I believe I have a name. When they left Avignon, they were said to be going to the Priory of St Nicholas.’
Aleksey felt a cool, ghostly finger touch the nape of his neck at the name, and turned to face her. ‘Sometimes I struggle not to believe.’
She nodded gravely. ‘Yes. It’s something I contend with every day, too. I need to make recompense. I made the chimera. I thought we did it to make a vaccine. We tried, but we couldn’t. As I said, the trial results were awful. It just didn’t work. Max feels the same sense of guilt, although he doesn’t…’ She swirled her glass again thoughtfully, then put it back on the table untasted.
‘This company of yours is here? In the UK?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s the only one that’s registered to do Level 4 work. We don’t know where all the Fours in the world are—obviously not, given the number likely in places like Russia or Iran or North Korea—but there’s over twenty in Europe. Some are huge, the big companies producing flu vaccines and the like, but some like Max’s are tiny. You only need the space of a double garage. Maybe not even that.’
‘And…dissemination. How would this chimera be unleashed into the population? A bomb, like you said the Japanese did?’
‘God no. The Japanese cultAum Shinrikyofilled plastic bags with sarin liquid and then they sharpened umbrella tips to puncture the bags as they left them on underground trains. It’s almost funny really—all the technology available and it comes down to a plakky bag and a pointy umbrella. They’d tried aerosol spray a number of times before that, but it’s much harder than you think to do: wind direction, temperature. They rigged up a whole van to spray around the place, driving along the streets. It really wasn’t very effective. They tried like gardeners with those backpacks of weed killer, walking around. If you could actually get it right you wouldn’t need anything bigger than the size of your average deodorant spray. As I said, you only technically need one patient zero, but imagine if you sprayed the one person who didn’t go anywhere or have any friends or anything. No, one can of spray, and you’d be able to infect dozens, possibly hundreds of patient zeros.’
‘So these labs are well out in the country? In case of…accidents?’Please don’t say Dartmoor.
‘No, not really. Most of the ones I’ve been to have been in cities. Ours is here. He and Austin have really struggled to get it on its feet. I don’t think either of them are business men really. It’s not easy to run a private laboratory. There’s no money for research unless you get grants, and then you’re beholden to the people who paid you for the research. I just got sick of the in-fighting and left the day-to-day running of it all to them. I took a different path. What’s the name of that wonderful poem? Two roads diverged in a wood, I took a path less travelled, and that has made all the difference…? I think I’ve lost my faith—in science. And now I have my Holy Grail—I believe I might be able to find a strain of immunity to every known pathogen. Even the ones we create ourselves. Perhaps even to the ultimate one—death. They’re not drilling holes in my head just yet, but Max and Austin are the only scientists left in our community who’ll even speak to me. But this different path of minehasto make that difference the poet spoke of. Or…’
Aleksey thought she looked as if she wanted to draw the finger across her neck once more.
* * *
