Whistles of Silver

Extract

’ On the contrary part there was no warlike Musicke in the Spanish Gallies, but onely their whistles of silver.’—Hakluyt's ‘Voyages.’

At four o’clock on a June morning of the year 1624 the sister and niece of Master Isaak Fettiplace, Parson of Kintonbury Parva in the County of Dorset, came down to put the Parson’s study to rights while the Parson was still a-bed. The elder woman opened the casement and a warm mist lapped in from the sea, whose purling waves, visible at the base of eroded chalk-cliffs, foretold a tropical day. Her daughter, with a bundle of kindling in her apron, approached the hearth. Contrary to his custom, the Parson had demanded a fire on his return from London the night before, and had sat up late by it. The women, wakeful and a trifle anxious, had heard him move up to his bed-chamber hours after midnight. Now the embers must be swept up and the pyre between the heavy steel dogs re-laid.

‘He hath burnt his journal!’ —the cry came from the niece, on her knees before the hearth.

‘He hath burnt his journal?’ —it was the incredulous riposte of the mother, wheeled round to face the scene of catastrophe.

Flake upon flake of burnt paper, steel-grey like the ‘debris of a wasps’-nest, mingled with, where they did not cover, the brands of the extinct fire. A binding of pig-skin, wrenched off before the rest of the folio met its fate, lay under the Parson’s table.