Read Online The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock - Free Book Online Page A

brand-new and the thin pages were a bit damp, tending to stick together. But I found all I wanted to know. The order had grown up as some sort of loose community of hermits on the flanks of Mount Carmel. They might be originally pre-Christian, but Abraham, the prophet Elijah and Mary Magdalene all gave them spiritual guidance. Driven from the flames of Mount Carmel by one of Islam’s sudden and passing puritanical waves, they were forced to find patrons amongst Europe’s nobles. Slowly they grew reconciled to the loss of the Middle East as European fiefdoms. They came to London in the first quarter or so of the thirteenth century and had lived there according to their own laws since 1241. Anti-Semitic Henry III, with his reputation for piety, but unable to distinguish a Jew from a Mussulman, had welcomed a great many Christian refugees during his reign. And sure enough there had been an abbey on the site near Fleet Street for centuries and Alsacia (or Alsatia) had been built on the monks’ land. According to the Britannica, London historians generally agreed that, under the charter of King Henry III, the Carmelites were granted their grounds and priory on land bounded by the old ‘Flete’ River to the east, the Temple to the west, Fleet Street to the north and on the south by the Thames. Their cemetery abutted the river.
    Sometime after 1800 the friars and their abbot had been moved to St Joseph’s, Bunhill Fields. They left some dissenting brothers behind, probably due to a schism involving the Jesuits or the Jacobites or the Jacobins or someone. Those monks had apparently been seduced from the paths of righteousness by inhaling an evil miasma coming from beneath the original abbey’s foundations. Clearly the various arguments in the church were all about ordinary politics. My own political viewpoint was based on the writings of Prince Peter Kropotkin, the mutualist Uncle Fred admired.
    Next morning, I looked through the collection of miscellaneous prewar boys’ weeklies I still picked up whenever I came across them. The other fanzine I did, Book Collectors News, was mainly for story-paper collectors. I remembered an issue of Claude Duval from the 1900s which mentioned some sort of thieves’ quarter near Fleet Street. I only had two issues and I found them easily. Claude Duval weekly, Issue 6, Price One Penny, The Armed Men of Alsacia, 10 January 1903, with a fine blue-and-red cover by ‘R.H.’. The Masked Cavalier himself! Claude on horseback in all his cavalier finery leaping over a massed pile of barrels while his enemies, corrupt but pinch-lip’d Roundhead redcoats, shoot and slash at him without apparent harm to the laughing highwayman who defiantly doffs his splendidly feathered hat and passes effortlessly over the barricade. A great story, part of a continuing serial, printed in eight-point type, which most adults could only read with a magnifying glass, but from long practice was perfectly legible to me! Claude was in Newgate, awaiting execution, having posed as Lord Wilde, the king’s confidante, in order to let the real lord escape. I began to read it during breakfast until my mother stopped me. It was bad manners to read at the table. I started to tell her of the Sanctuary. In The Armed Men of Alsacia the quarter seemed to occupy a lot more space than the one I had visited. But she wasn’t really listening. She talked about some problems my Auntie Molly was having with her suppliers and the rotten little Court kids coming over to nick stuff off the stall, thinking she was born yesterday.
    Before I left for work, I lied to my mum. I said we had a heavy press day, putting together a special issue. I planned to revisit Alsacia. I had promised to meet the abbot for tea but more importantly I hoped for another glimpse of that beautiful, spirited girl who’d ridden into an innyard calling for an ostler! Now my best guess was that she worked for Bertram