Doctor Illuminatus by Martin Booth Read Free Book Online

placed packets of cereal on the table with a jug of milk. They helped themselves to bowls of cornflakes, sitting side by side at the table.
    “I understand from Pip that you used to live here, Sebastian?”
    “Yes, but when I was younger,” Sebastian admitted between mouthfuls of cereal.
    “Was Mr. Rawne your father?” she asked, with apparent innocence.
    “He was.”
    Pip looked at Tim. This was their mother’s way: pose seemingly innocuous questions until she could entrap you, then move in for the kill.
    “I have heard he was in his eighties,” Mrs. Ledger said. “Surely he wasn’t your father!”
    “No,” Sebastian answered. “He who lived here was my uncle. My father left the house long before and my uncle lived here thereafter with my aunt. But she died a long time ago.”
    “Your uncle?” she replied, clearly doubting the statement. “Surely not your father’s brother?”
    Sebastian shook his head and said, “He was actually a distant relative of my father’s. I only called him uncle when I was with him.”
    “And tell me, where do your parents live now?” Sebastian, not in the least fazed by this inquisition, replied, “My mother has passed on.”
    “Oh! I am so dreadfully sorry,” Mrs. Ledger said, taken aback by Sebastian’s forthrightness.
    She was about to go on with her probing when she was interrupted by a buzzing sound coming from the alarm-system panel on the wall by the fridge.
    “That’s the carpet fitters,” Mrs. Ledger said. “Now you three eat up and run along. Don’t get underfoot. I’ll be busy all morning.”
    “That was close!” Tim whispered, as his mother left the room. “She was out to trip you up.”
    “I am aware of this,” Sebastian remarked. “It is a mother’s way with strangers.”
    When their breakfast was over, they left the house, Sebastian suggesting that they walk down towards the river. It was a perfect summer’s day, the sky blue and dotted with fair-weather clouds, the shade of the trees deep and close. Where the grass was long, tiny aqua-marine butterflies no bigger than a fingernail flitted between the stems. Here and there, unseen grasshoppers sawed and chirruped.
    Reaching the first of the massive oaks, Sebastian paused and said quietly, “This tree was planted by my father. In 1430, the day after my birth.”
    “Do you remember your father?” Pip asked. “Indeed,” Sebastian replied, “I was ten years of age when I saw him die.”
    “What!” Tim exclaimed. “What do you mean?” “It was here,” Sebastian said, halting halfway between the oak and a towering beech tree. “On this spot. I will show you.”
    He bent to the ground where a mole had turned over the earth, and started to dig with his fingers. After excavating a hole only a few centimeters deep, he picked up a handful of soil. It was moist and dark gray, filled with little chips of what looked like black gravel.
    “This is charcoal,” he explained. “This field is wet because of the river and so the charcoal has been preserved.” He brushed the earth from his fingers. “It was here, in the month of May in the year of Our Lord 1440, that my father was burned at the stake, accused of witchcraft.”
    “That’s awful,” Pip said, feeling the tears well up in her eyes, fighting them back and swallowing the lump forming in her throat.
    “My father had powerful enemies,” Sebastian continued calmly. “They did not want him to use his skills on behalf of the king, whom they feared. They came one night and arrested him. There was a trial held, in the chamber that you now call your living room. My father, who was seated before the fireplace, was resigned to his fate. He knew that they would find him guilty.”
    “Wasn’t there anyone to speak up for him? A friend or a lawyer or something?” Tim said.
    Sebastian smiled faintly. “That was not the way it was,” he replied. “Once my father was arrested, they sought to keep away. They, too, were afraid.”
    “Were