The Tenth Scholar

Jonathan Lake slept once again amidst the currents of life.  He dreamed of his beautiful wife, the Lady Mary.  He felt anew the raw heartache of his tragic loss of her.  His lips longed for her sweet mouth but she was no longer there.  His arms reached out for her lying beside him to draw her close in his embrace but found only emptiness.  He could still feel the pain of the terrible stake that had so suddenly and viciously been driven into his heart by circumstances of which he was little aware at the time.

Startling awake among the ruins of his kirk, Jonathan peered eastward and realized the coming dawn was all but upon him.  He felt the weakness grasp him as never before.  He stirred and attempted to flex his aching body, a result from his night in the cool damp air.

“I must soon find shelter and more...nourishment.”  Jonathan looked about before attempting to rise.  He sensed others nearby but didn’t feel any particular threats from them.

Standing, he absently reached into his coat pocket pulling out a small leather purse that had caused him even further discomfort as he lay among the stones.  He considered it a moment, fingering it open as he attempted to recall just what it was.  His mind cleared a bit and he shook his head on remembering.

“Why, it is the coins intended for the vicar’s poor box,” he realized, withdrawing them.  Looking down at the few coins, he laughed bitterly.  “And is this now the sum of it, like fading memories of delights past?  Golden delights were ye when made but, oh memories, what of thee now?” he cried.  “The total wealth of Baron Jonathan Lake withered to this pitiful lot; this wee pouch of Geordies.  Oh, my little friends...none, yea none, have you anything on me.  Are these all that are––or will be?”

He felt about his neck and found the gold chain and the large wolf canine tooth given to him as a lad by his grandfather.  It had always been special to him and it symbolized all of the tales the man had shared of his earlier days.  Later, when Jonathan first met the ‘Olde Ones’ of the Grampians, it had been his key to acceptance among them for their periodic jaunts.

Dizzily stepping away from the kirk ruins, he drew a deep breath and looking back, he quipped dryly, “‘And the people shouted with a great shout, that the walls fell down.’  Who then commanded the walls of this edifice to be rendered unsunder?  Who has seen fit to bring down God’s own house?”

His mind burned with a thousand questions, as memories of the past flooded in.  “What now became of that most loathsome Vicar Polidori...?”

“And indeed, what of last evening and the strange locomotive carriage that made such a racket and bore such brilliant lanterns...?”

“Could it be that...my dear, dear God?”  Jonathan forced himself to come to grips with the realization that a great deal of time must have passed.  It was as if time itself had been suddenly compressed and distorted but this time not of acute romantic delights but rather from a period of deep sleep.  There was no other rational explanation of what he’d seen the evening before.

“Ten years?  Nay, twenty perhaps...or more have passed!  But how could I be yet alive?”

A deep foreboding settled upon Jonathan Lake.  “Was I truly the very evil which Vicar Polidori sought to destroy?  How could he have known of me?  Or rather, could he have known and I be so blind not to see that he knew, and so very stupid for not learning of his plot?”