Brother Lightfoote's Journal The Recollections of an Eighteenth-Century Gentleman of the Craft November 22nd 1783 Feast of Saint Cecilia Weather: Cold and damp Outlook: Occluded Hail! Bright Cecilia, Hail to Thee! Great Patroness of Us and Harmony

I once danced with a girl who’d    danced with a boy who’d danced with the Prince of Wales. Strange days indeed, but none stranger than a recent one, at the close of which, by candle light, Lightfoote encountered Dark Forces…
    The Festive Season is upon us, seeming to begin earlier every year. The holly and the ivy are put out almost before the harvest is gathered in these days – and what have the holly and ivy got to do with Christmas, one asks. Nothing, one replies, they are but the echoes, or more appropriately the embers of savage, pagan rites that marked the winter solstice. The birth of the Son has neatly superseded the birth of the sun but, in the firelight, strange shapes still flicker on a winter’s night and who knows what phantoms in the shadows lurk? Lightfoote knows.
    I was invited to attend, as a guest, a new-founded Lodge that meets in some picturesque ruin over in Islington. I rarely travel out of town for meetings nowadays. Mrs. Lightfoote deeply resents my coming home very late and very drunk and so I restrict myself to returning fairly late and very drunk. Could a man be more reasonable? I think not!
    I set forth on a cold and blustery evening, the chill wind driving the rain in sheets, and it took me full two hours to reach my destination: a crumbling tower, so overgrown with ivy that it appeared more vegetable than mineral. Within, by the light of guttering candles, and with wind and rain flaying the windows, the brethren performed a solemn ritual of initiation that seemed to include many a noble phrase and gentle gesture long forgotten, or abandoned, by the Craft
    at large. At the conclusion of the proceedings we proceeded to make our way to local hostelry to dine. As we walked I had that strange feeling – we’ve all experienced it – of having passed that way before, even though I knew perfectly well that I hadn’t.
    There aren’t many inns in Islington, but the brethren had found a fine one, owned by a most elegant, elderly lady, Mrs. Frederick. She had doubtless been a great beauty in her youth but now leaned heavily on a stick and walked with difficulty. She had arranged for us a feast fit for a fieldmarshal, meet, indeed, for a marquess! I confess that, having partaken of both spiritual and intellectual sustenance in large measure – drunk deep of the Pierian spring, as it were, in the temple - I was more than ready to set about satisfying the appetite corporeal and laid in to the victuals with a will.
    Was it the lampreys? the lamb’s liver? the pig’s trotters? The partridge? Not the pigeon pie, surely? Could it have been something to do with the combination of the wines? They were individually excellent, all seven of them.
    Our hostess, as if by precognition, had provided my preferred port: Yardy’s ’59! I drank about a bottle and a half which would normally settle the stomach just nicely, but, whatever the cause, around midnight I suddenly found myself feeling rather faint. Not like Lightfoote! Not like Lightfoote at all! I haven’t flunked a feed since I was a college boy and managed to somersault down a spiral staircase at All Souls after three second-helpings of beef with oysters. Even so, I now felt distinctly dizzy and so excused myself and made my way, carefully, down a creaking wooden staircase in search of fresh air. Instead, I found a fresh face.
    I seemed to have been descending for an age when I emerged into an empty ballroom, furnished in antique style and occupied by a pretty little girl of perhaps ten years old. As I stumbled into the room her back was to me but she immediately turned, skipped across the floor and took my hand. ‘There you are!’ she cried, ‘I’ve been waiting for you! Come along!’ She led me to the centre of the floor and suddenly my head was clear, my eye was clear, all was clear. ‘You lead,’ said she, ‘Step off with the left foot,’ and so I did, and music filled the air, and we danced and we danced and we danced. My feet were fleet. I was as nimble as a boy.
    I was shaken awake by Mrs. Frederick who informed me, smiling, that my host was waiting to see me to his carriage. As we rumbled home through the rain, my Brother related the old maid’s story sad. As a girl of ten she had attended a ball with her little beau, in a house that formerly stood on the site of the inn where we had dined. They had danced the night away, to the delight of all present, but the party had ended in catastrophe. Fire had engulfed the house, the little girl had been pulled free but her legs had been terribly burned; her unfortunate friend was utterly consumed. She had never married, never loved again, as though she thought that, one day, her pretty dancing partner might return.
    ‘A tragic tale,’ I murmured, feeling most uncomfortable, ‘When was this?’ ‘Fifty years ago this very night,’ my host explained, ‘About the year that you were born, Lightfoote, was it not?’
    It was…