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woman, she had helped a poor fisher boy whose hand had been mangled in a winch. Her erstwhile companion, Robert Purbeck, son of Lord Purbeck, had then driven her home to his castle, which dominated the pass called Corfe Gate. After a brief courtship, Margaret found herself in Robert’s bed, but when she awoke, Robert had been called away on the King’s business. As she rode away from the massive walls, she spied an old man sitting amid the ruing pillars. This representative of the Old Ones, the Fairies, told her that the Church has a purpose and a place in this world that must be fulfilled, and it should not therefore be despised: “The great Dance finishes, another will begin.” And then he vanished. She returned home to find her uncle dying. Now she sits reminiscing. After Jesse’s death, Lord Robert comes for her, flogging his horse to a frenzy. One life ends, another begins.
    “The White Boat,” the fifth measure, was published a year after the main sequence of stories, and was not included in the British edition of Pavane , perhaps because its tone and texture differs markedly from its five companion pieces. Becky, a young peasant girl, lives on the coast not far from the point where Brother John had met his untimely end. One day she sees a white boat sneak into the harbor, unload some cargo, and then move off. This pattern continues for several weeks, off and on. Finally the girl, driven away by her father’s brutality at home, sneaks aboard the craft, and is taken by it to France, where a cargo is loaded and the men paid. They are obviously smuggling some secret goods into England. When she pries open a case, she finds a heretic device, a manufactured object not sanctioned by the Church; she hides one under her clothing, and takes it with her when she leaves. She shows it to her priest; he calls in the government troops to intercept the boat on its next pass. But Becky has second thoughts, and grabs the lanyard of a waiting cannon, setting it off prematurely. The white boat, now warned, turns away from the coast, laughing at the hapless guns of the enemy.
    The sixth and final tale, “Corfe Gate,” was actually the first written. Eleanor Purbeck, daughter and heir of Lord Robert Purbeck and Lady Margaret Strange, both now deceased, and granddaughter and sole heir of Timothy Strange, Jesse’s sole remaining brother and head of Strange and Sons, has succeeded temporarily to Lordship of Corfe Gate on her father’s accidental death; pending her marriage, when she will lose her independence, she rules the great castle standing astride the pass into Dorset. Shortly after her accession, Pope John XL levies new taxes on an already strained economy, and Eleanor declines to pay: her people, she says, will starve if she hands over the grain. A rakish knight is sent against her, but she meets him at the portcullis, and when he threatens Eleanor and her people, she herself ignites the cannon that kills a score of Papal soldiers. Soon the castle is invested, and the countryside is in arms. Sir John Falconer, Seneschal to Eleanor and her late father, is one of the Old Ones, the Fairies, a nonhuman race which has been helping man from before recorded history.
    In the end King Charles returns to his lands and appears before the Castle, and Eleanor surrenders it to her Lord; Corfe Gate is dismantled, and Eleanor retires to obscurity, later being assassinated in her old age by the King’s agents. In a brief “Coda,” Sir John Falconer ties together the loose ends of the story: the Church deliberately slowed technological progress until man’s racial maturity had advanced to the point where atomic power would not result in mass destruction. There had been an earlier rise of mankind, an earlier Renaissance, an earlier Armada, and a civilization which had ended in flames. Only the Popes and the Old Ones knew the whole story. The siege of Purbeck had been the Church’s last gasp: within ten years, Charles had gained sufficient