Free The Sacred Combe by Thomas Maloney Page A

subjects, with particular strength in astronomy — but all the most important works were present, up to about the nineteen thirties. The doctor seemed to keep most of the post-war collection in his study.
    It was mid-morning when I began on the astronomy shelf. Some of the books dated from the eighteenth century and must have belonged to the elder Hartley himself. In Robert Smith’s A Compleat System of Opticks , published in seventeen thirty-eight, I was thrilled to find, beside the text and on the diagrams, many annotations written in a crabby, indecipherable hand in faded ink. Beside one diagram of light-rays entering a narrow slit and projected on a plane beyond, Hartley (if it were he) had scrawled two exclamation marks — though whether these were meant to express excitement or derision, I could not tell.
    I was about to carry the two volumes to the doctor’s study in case he was interested in these notes, when in the gap on the shelf I noticed a slim volume that had been pushed back out of sight. It was entitled The Dawn of Astronomy: A Study of the Temple Worship and Mythology of the Ancient Egyptians by Norman Lockyer, and was published in eighteen ninety-four. My heart leapt when I encountered what could only be a folded letter tucked into the contents page. I laid down the book and carefully opened the letter.
    It was headed simply ‘ Combe, Tuesday ’, written in a graceful, sloping hand. ‘ Geoff darling ,’ it read, ‘ Can you get here this weekend? Hartless is driving me witless. It will be warm, so bring bathers. On second thoughts, don’t bother. I’m awfully keen to see (and the rest) you .’ It was signed ‘ Stel ’, with a hurried postscript: ‘ Do make it Friday night if you can — it’s a full moon and there is something I must show you at the T .’ The word ‘must’ was underlined.
    The private immediacy of this lover’s plea caught my imagination, and I thought that had I been Geoff I would have moved mountains to satisfy it. I supposed that ‘Hartless’ must be the doctor’s great-uncle Hartley, and took the letter, along with the Opticks , to show him.
    He was standing at his window with a cup of coffee, gazing out across the drive towards the wooded hillside. It was raining. He set the steaming cup on the mantelpiece, took the first volume of the Opticks and leafed through it, nodding: he had already seen it. I began to despair of finding anything that would be new to him, but when I handed him the letter, he frowned and held it for a long time, apparently lost in thought.
    â€˜Very good,’ he said, rather distantly. ‘It’s from my mother to my father, if you hadn’t guessed.’ He laid it carefully on his desk, and then raised one faint eyebrow and smiled. ‘You are thinking that my mother was a rather spirited young woman,’ he said, and I laughed dismissively. ‘It’s certainly what I was thinking,’ he added.
    â€˜What does the postscript mean, do you think?’ I asked. ‘What’s “the T”?’ Temple , I thought suddenly, even as I asked the question. Temple.
    The doctor went to a side table in the corner, poured a second cup of coffee and handed it to me. Then he slowly dragged his work chair around his desk, waving away my offer of help, and positioned it by the fire, which he stirred up with a very long poker that spared him the necessity of bending. He indicated the armchair for me, and we sat down.
    â€˜Stella, my mother, was born here in nineteen hundred,’ he began. ‘Her father had married late in life, and died when she was a young child. She, her elder brother Samuel, and their young mother were utterly devoted to, and dependent on, each other.
    â€˜In nineteen fifteen, Samuel went up to Cambridge as an organ scholar. Two years later he was killed at Arras. A year after that, Catherine, my grandmother, still in her