“You know nothing of Paul,” he said. “His name is Paul Llewellyn—for we observe Sanson’s laws no longer. He was to have mated Elizabeth.”
“Married?”
“Yes, married, before the Cold Solstice. His grandfather was my father’s steward at Dolgelly. Our families remained in touch through all the civil turmoil, and he is the last of his, as Elizabeth is the last of mine. He was given the name Paul, the father retaining the family name, which was to alternate in each generation, as is the custom nowadays. That law of Sanson’s must be one of the first to go. It aimed, of course, to destroy the vestiges of the family that remained.
“Paul was a Grade 1 defective, and we felt sure that Elizabeth would come under the same classification, so that they would be free to mate. They were waiting for the lists to be published, but Elizabeth had not been ascribed when the last list went up, and meanwhile Paul was sent to the defectives’ shops. Arnold, did you ever hear of the doctrine called Apostolic Succession?”
“Of course, David.”
“That the functions of the priesthood are transmitted by the laying on of hands? The English Church possessed the tradition, and it has never been lost, though most of our people attach, I am afraid, some magical idea to the ancient rite. Our bishop is a poor, illiterate old man, a machinist by trade, but Bonham laid his hands on him before he was burned in Westminster Hall. Bishop Alfred was to have blessed the union. A week before Fruit Equinox, Paul was taken in the bishop’s home by Sanson’s spies. Both were condemned to life imprisonment in the defectives’ shops as Christians. Both escaped among the last batch of fugitives. Elizabeth hopes to meet Paul tonight.”
“And I hope so, with all my heart,” I answered.
The cage stopped at the door and Jones came in.
“We can go now. The last of the scoutplanes has gone,” he said.
We went up to the roof. Deep night was over and about us. The phosphorescent fronts of the glow-painted buildings gave London the aspect of long lines of parallel and intersecting palisades of ghostly light; but the glow paint illumined nothing, and the deep canyons of the streets were of velvety blackness. The white circle of the fortress wall surrounded us. Outside the region of the glow, London was an indistinguishable blurred shadow, save where the searchlights from the departing scoutplanes illumined it. They hovered in a long line above the city, their position only discernible from the white searchrays that emanated from them as they swept the city below. Slowly they made their way into the southern distance.