Sentence The First

Sentence The First

Down at the bottom of a deep, dark, dank and dismal dungeon passageway, Professor Daphne Dumbiedykes - formerly one of Miss Brodie's legendary "Golden Girls" and now holder of the emeritus chair in Late-Early Mediaevalism at St Sebastian's College - scrambled down through the rusty frame of a collapsed trapdoor and dropped into a foul and evil-smelling oubliette, some 50 metres below Edinburgh's cobbled High Street and caught her breath; for, in the shadows cast by her guttering stub of a tallow candle she could make out the scrawled epithets of those tortured souls whose last days of life were spent here and, in the furthest, deepest, darkest, dankest and most dismal corner of the cell she spotted a crumpled ball of fabric - once spotless and white, now begrimed by mucous, faeces and the scamperings of a thousand generations of rats - which she gently took hold of and unfolded to see that it was indeed the wimple of Sister Evadne Eglantine, after whom Daohne's own dear mother had been named, and just as averred in the statements given under duress by the other two Benedictine nuns who had survived their incarceration with Sister Evadne, it truly had been turned into an opisthograph for, as they had testified, the dying Sister had written, in ink distilled from her own blood and tears, on both sides of the fabric lines which, though smudged and often indistinct and in parts the lines on each side co-mingled and distressed, yet even after seven and more centuries, in words that resonated with the Professor, her own unique recipe for a Tincture of Asafedita with directions for its preparation and application for the relief of asthma; the very condition which Sister Evadne had herself borne so stoically, and, yes, there too was a delicate drawing of the plant itself - familiar to Daphne from her own much-thumbed copy of Culpeper Complete Herbal, and this last brought a catch to the Professor's breath, a tickling at the back of her memory, and a rising of the hairs on her nape - for she suddenly realised the full implicatioms of this discovery and its confirmation of an incident in Scotland's bloody past which could well wreak havoc for so many in this very present day - Triumph or Disaster, but which would it be?