Chapter 1

Were there a god in charge of story—I mean one cut to Old Testament specifics, some hybrid of Zeus and Father Christmas—such a creature, such a deity, might be looking down upon a day opening in Oxford, England, a bit past the half-way mark of the nineteenth century.

This part of Oxfordshire being threaded with waterways, such a god might have to make a sweep of His mighty hand to clear off the mists of dawn.

Now, to the human renewing the pact with dailiness, Oxford at matins can seem to congeal through the fogs. A process of accretion through light, the lateral sedimentation of reality. A world emerging, daily, out of nothing, a world that we trust to resemble what we’ve seen previously. We should know better.

To a deity lolling overhead on bolsters of zephyr, however, the city rises as if out of some underground sea, like Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie, that fantasia about the submerged Breton cathedral rising once ever hundred years off the island of Ys. (Yes, Debussy is early twentieth century, but time means nothing to Himself.) Spires and domes like so much barnacled spindrift poke through first. Gradually, as the sun coaxes the damp away, the coving spaces emerge. From above, not only the lanes and high street, but also the hidden places wink into being. Nooks and wells of secret green in college quadrangles scarcely imagined by the farrier on his way to the stable, the fishmonger to his stall.

An underworld, all exposed by light.

Even Jehovah, presuming Jehovah, must find the finicky architecture of his Oxford too attractive to notice the humbler margins of the district. At least at first. Gods have to wake up, too. But this story starts on the northeast side of town. People are rousing in an old rectory, here, and an even older farmhouse, over there. Nighttime is being brushed aside like so much cobweb. The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away.