Prelude to Eternity. Brian Stableford
of following the customary route to Italy, however, they had decided to design their own itinerary, which would take them to even remoter cradles of civilization: to Greece, to Egypt, and finally to Crete, where they had spent a full year exploring the ruins of Knossos, the ancient capital in the vicinity of Makro Teikho, whose recently-excavated remains had become a playground for the assiduous antiquarians of England and the German States. It was there that they had met the present Earl of Langstrade, who had then been known as “young Harry Langstrade” to distinguish him from his father—who had only recently become “Old Harry Langstrade of Langstrade” instead of mere “Old Harry Langstrade”—and who had not yet met his wife-to-be, Emily Hale.
According to the gossip, it was the Grand Tour that had completed the opposition between the two traveling companions, perfecting its universality. It had been the three years of their “educational odyssey” that had extended Hope’s innate optimism into a wholehearted philosophy of progress, and Escott’s natural pessimism into quasi-apocalyptic gloom. It had also stretched Hope’s Whig sympathies into near-radical enthusiasm for political reform and Utopian—or, as he preferred to call it, Euchronian—social planning, while elaborating Escott’s Toryism into a near-mystical appreciation of the lost glories of the past. It had even been their years in and around the Mediterranean, so it was said, that had made Hope so plump and Escott so thin, because the former had thrived on native diets they had encountered there, whereas the latter had never been able to reconcile his stomach to their unfamiliarity.
Some people professed surprised that the two men had remained friends once they had returned to England to enjoy life as consummate amateurs, but they had always represented themselves as inevitable dialectical elements of a greater unity, like the north and south poles of a magnet. Now that he was able to listen to them holding forth at close range, as it were, Michael was able to appreciate the truth of that judgment. Had only one of them been present, his ideas would have been mere philosophical pontifications, overblown and essentially tedious, but because they were together, their contrasted ideas obtained a kind of vibrancy from a cut-and-thrust combat that was almost akin to music in its rhythm and resonance. Instead of being tedious, they seemed alive and electric, spitting sparks at one another like the various kinds of apparatus that had been built and exhibited to demonstrate the telegraphic principle.
For the moment, however, Michael was glad that the duty the two men had sought to impose upon him by means of their invitation was not particularly burdensome. Although he continued to lend a reverent ear to the erratic course of their flamboyant dispute, the painter soon allowed his attention to wander. His eyes strayed to the window, while his mind relaxed into a pleasant reverie, the principal image of which was Cecilia Langstrade’s lovely face. How he longed to paint her cornflower-blue eyes and silky blonde hair! How he longed, in fact, to reach a far greater intimacy with that face than mere paint could ever permit!
Michael did not have the faintest idea what the probability was that he would ever achieve that kind of intimacy. That Cecilia liked him a great deal he had no doubt, but they had only met on formal social occasions, surrounded by crowds, and the letters they had exchanged had so far been rather tentative in their affectionate tone. He was very hopeful that the weekend house-party at Langstrade Hall would give him more than one opportunity to speak to her in private, far more confidentially than the formality of a letter would allow, and he was also very hopeful that such circumstances would confirm and enhance her manifest regard for him—but the small steps he might be able to take between a Thursday evening and a Tuesday morning were a long way short of the social ground that he would eventually have to cover if their relationship were to mature.
In theory, differences in social status were far less important nowadays than they had been in his late father’s day—and if Mr. Hope could be believed, the erosion of that importance could only accelerate in future—but the fact remained that the Langstrades were now fully-fledged members of the aristocracy, while the Laurels were not. Horatio Laurel’s highly distinguished naval career had won him sufficient social status to launch Michael into Society—in which circles a painter had to move if he were to have any chance of making a living—but could not give him “quality”. The Langstrades’ elevation to the aristocracy had, by contrast, provided the family with an inalienable certificate of quality, and the fact that it was recent inevitably served to make the present Earl even more conscious of that status than he would have been had he been the thirty-second instead of the second. The fact that the first Earl had insisted on regarding the entitlement as a re-elevation rather than a simple promotion, and as a long-belated recognition of an ancient due, was a further complication. Michael had no idea how the second Earl might react to the possibility of acquiring a mere painter as a son-in-law, even if Cecilia could be completely won over to the prospect.
The first Earl of Langstrade had been appointed to the peerage at the behest of the Academy, for his contributions to industry. He had been one of the pioneers of mechanization in textile manufacture even before the advent of steam engines, and had become famous in political circles for his stout resistance to Richard Arkwright’s monopolistic maneuvers—a resistance that had become known as the Second War of the Roses, even though Arkwright’s enterprise was based in Derbyshire rather than Lancashire. The first Earl had, however, always been insistent that his family had been aristocrats long before the Norman Conquest or the “Saxon Tyranny” that had preceded it. He claimed to be a direct descendant of Celtic Longstrides, who had fought for centuries to keep the Viking invaders of his beloved dales at bay before being trapped between two implacable forces in the series of contests that had divided England between Norse and Germanic invaders.
Indeed, Old Harry’s antiquarian fantasies had extended far beyond that, asserting that the settlers in Britain who had become the Celts had been the descendants of Cretans who had escaped the catastrophic destruction of the Minoan civilization in the volcanic upheaval that had been responsible for the mythical Deluge, and that the Longstrides were the descendants of the greatest of all the ancient world’s engineers: Dedalus. In Old Harry’s contention, the revolution he had helped to bring about in the textile industry had been an extrapolation of family tradition, the modern mechanical loom being merely “a recapitulation of the Labyrinthine principle”.
The only item of “evidence” supporting the first Earl’s insistence on linking the Langstrades and the probably-imaginary Longstrides with Dedalus was a diagram of a maze inscribed on a piece of parchment that had been found in the ruins of Cribden Abbey, which had once occupied the site on which Langstrade Hall now stood. Just as the old hall had replaced the Abbey, Old Harry had insisted, the Abbey had replaced a pagan place of worship, whose central feature must have been the maze described on the parchment. Although the first Earl had been able to confirm, during his sojourn in the ruins of Knossos, that the design on the parchment bore no significant resemblance to the design of the actual Cretan Labyrinth, parts of which had now been excavated, he had merely concluded that the Cretan Labyrinth had been Dedalus’ first draft, and that the engineer had spent the time in which he had been imprisoned in his own construction by the tyrant Minos dreaming of the new design that he had carried away to England when the volcanic eruption set him free.
The second Earl had inherited his father’s eccentricity along with his wealth, and had thought it his filial duty to complete the grand plans that the first Earl had made, perhaps more in hope than expectation. Michael knew that he ought to be grateful for that, given that it was the expression of Lord Langstrade’s whim that had generated his commission to paint “Harold Longstride’s Keep”, but he couldn’t help feeling slightly uneasy about it. The instructions he had received were detailed, and there seemed to be an awful possibility that his picture would somehow fail to meet the Earl’s expectations. He had been told that he must establish the perspective of the Keep very carefully, taking in both the immediate background of the wall of the reconstructed Maze and the more distant background of Bancroft Scar, positioning a symbolic yew tree within the field of view with the utmost care.
According to what Old Harry had passed off as a family legend, scrupulously handed down over the generations, the mighty Harold Longstride had once emerged from behind a yew tree to surprise and confront Emund Snurlson, the leader of a host of Viking marauders, on a late summer’s day corresponding to the modern August seventeenth, in the year that would now be reckoned as 822 A.D. In consequence