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

waited for the traffic lights to change, I asked him, ‘Did your abbey suffer much during the Blitz?’
    We began to cross Fleet Street. ‘Oh, not at all,’ he replied. ‘We were always singularly blessed, you know. The Plague. The Great Fire. It’s believed our covenant protects us.’
    â€˜Somehow Brookgate didn’t get much damage either,’ I said. ‘A few people called that a miracle.’
    As we walked he told me how the Carmelites had originally lived on the slopes of Mount Carmel, near Haifa, mostly inhabiting caves and shacks, before being expelled by zealous Saracens in the thirteenth century. They had no saintly founder like the Dominicans and Franciscans. Other orders sometimes questioned the Carmelites’ religious credentials. Happily, Christian kings wished to show their piety by giving them lands, especially in Britain and France. They had found homes for their order in various parts of Europe, including Amsterdam, Paris, London and Oxford. They were called white friars because of their robes, just as the Dominicans, with their dark habits, who had arrived in London at about the same time, had been called black friars. Both orders had been granted the land under Royal Charter, by devout noblemen.
    With passersby occasionally glancing at us, we continued past the Punch, the Old Bell, the Cheshire Cheese, the Tipperary and all the other many pubs which served the street’s journalists; past the offices of the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Daily Sketch, News Chronicle and half a dozen other national newspapers. It seemed strange that such a pious man should have his home in what was, after all, a pretty impious place. I didn’t notice which side street we turned into. Perhaps Bouverie Street, where that least godly of newspapers, the scandal-mongering News of the World, had its offices, possibly Whitefriars Street. Another side street and then we were crossing a small Georgian square, one of the minor Inns of Court, where lawyers had their chambers. Then Friar Isidore stopped in another old square, an Inn of Court I wasn’t familiar with, and stared at a big, battered oaken gate, one of a pair, bound with huge strips of black iron, on massive hinges. Worn, grimy, weather stained, it seemed as old as time.
    â€˜That must be more ancient than most of the City,’ I said.
    â€˜You can see it?’ He seemed enormously pleased.
    I laughed. ‘Well, of course I can. It’s massive.’
    He stepped forward and pushed hard at the gate, ushering me through.
    I expected to find myself in the courtyard of an old ecclesiastical building. Instead, as the door closed behind me, I saw that I was in a cobbled street, like several you could then still discover in the area. I was struck by an unusual smell, completely different to anything I’d ever experienced and impossible to identify. The smell was at once earthy and sharp, more like a market at full pitch, a mixture of vegetables, fish, fruit, cooked food, spice, malfunctioning lavatories and all different kinds of smoke. On both sides of the narrow alley leaned tall half-timbered houses, their second, even third storeys pitched at crazy angles out above their ground floors. Such houses, too, could still occasionally be found in my part of London. An entire stretch of them stood minutes from where I lived in High Holborn. Others were at the western end of Fleet Street. Most were all rather too tidily preserved. These buildings, however, had a different air to them, at once decrepit and full of vitality, with crooked wooden blinds, some hanging by a single hinge; paint peeling on doors and woodwork; part of the plaster exposed to reveal lathe or brick; creepers, vines crawling up, over and through tiles missing from roofs out of which also jutted crooked stone chimneys gouting sooty clouds into the damp grey air.
    The cobbles were grubby and I was just able to avoid stepping into horse droppings directly