Newt kept finding his eye drawn to it.
"It was built by an ancestor of mine," said Anathema, putting the coffee cups down on the table. "Sir Joshua Device. You may have heard of him? He invented the little rocking thing that made it possible to build accurate clocks cheaply? They named it after him."
"The Joshua?" said Newt guardedly.
"The device."
In the last half hour Newt had heard some pretty unbelievable stuff and was close to believing it, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
"The device is named after a real person?" he said.
"Oh, yes. Fine old Lancashire name. From the French, I believe.
be telling me next you've never heard of Sir Humphrey Gadget—"
"Oh, now come on—"
"—who devised a gadget that made it possible to pump out flooded mineshafts. Or Pietr Gizmo? Or Cyrus T. Doodad, America's foremost black inventor? Thomas Edison said that the only other contemporary practical scientists he admired were Cyrus T. Doodad and Ella Reader Widget. And—"
She looked at Newt's blank expression.
"I did my Ph.D. on them," she said. "The people who invented things so simple and universally useful that everyone forgot that they'd ever actually needed to be invented. Sugar?"
"Er—"
"You normally have two," said Anathema sweetly.
Newt stared back at the card she'd handed him.
She'd seemed to think it would explain everything.
It didn't.
It had a ruled line down the middle. On the left-hand side was a short piece of what seemed to be poetry, in black ink. On the right-hand side, in red ink this time, were comments and annotations. The effect was as follows:
Newt's hand went automatically to his pocket. His cigarette lighter had gone.
"What's this mean?" he said hoarsely.
"Have you ever heard of Agnes Nutter?" said Anathema.
"No," said Newt, taking a desperate defense in sarcasm. "You're going to tell me she invented mad people, I suppose."
"Another fine old Lancashire name," said Anathema coldly. "If you don't believe, read up on the witch trials of the early seventeenth century. She was an ancestress of mine. As a matter of fact, one of your ancestors burned her alive. Or tried to."
Newt listened in fascinated horror to the story of Agnes Nutter's death.
"Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit-Adultery Pulsifer?" he said, when she'd finished.
"That sort of name was quite common in those days," said Anathema. "Apparently there were ten children and they were a very religious family. There was Covetousness Pulsifer, False-Witness Pulsifer—"
"I think I understand," said Newt. "Gosh. I thought Shadwell said he'd heard the name before. It must be in the Army records. I suppose if I'd gone around being called Adultery Pulsifer I'd want to hurt as many people as possible."
"I think he just didn't like women very much."
"Thanks for taking it so well," said Newt. "I mean, he must have been an ancestor. There aren't many Pulsifers. Maybe… that's why I sort of met up with the Witchfinder Army? Could be Fate," he said hopefully.
She shook her head. "No," she said. "No such thing."
"Anyway, witchfinding isn't like it was in those days. I don't even think old Shadwell's ever done more than kick over Doris Stokes's dustbins."
"Between you and me, Agnes was a bit of a difficult character," said Anathema, vaguely. "She had no middle gears."
Newt waved the bit of paper.
"But what's it got to do with this?" he said.
"She wrote it. Well, the original. It's No. 3819 of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, first published 1655."
Newt stared at the prophecy again. His mouth opened and shut.
"She knew I'd crash my car?" he said.
"Yes. No. Probably not. It's hard to say. You see, Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold."
ost psychic abilities are caused by a simple lack of temporal focus, and the mind of Agnes Nutter was so far adrift in Time that she was considered pretty mad even by the standards of seventeenth-century Lancashire, where mad prophetesses were a growth industry.
But she was a treat to listen to, everyone agreed.
She used to go on about curing illnesses by using a sort of mold, and the importance of washing your hands so that the tiny little animals who caused diseases would be washed away, when every sensible person knew that a good stink was the only defense against the demons of ill health. She advocated running at a sort of gentle bouncing trot as an aid to living longer, which was extremely suspicious and first put the Witchfinders onto her, and stressed the importance of fiber in diet, although here she was clearly ahead of her time since most people were less bothered about the fiber in their diet than the gravel. And she wouldn't cure warts.
"Itt is alle in youre Minde," she'd say, "fogett about Itte, ane it wine goe Away."
It was obvious that Agnes had a line to the Future, but it was an unusually narrow and specific line. In other words, almost totally useless.
"How do you mean?" said Newt.
"She managed to come up with the kind of predictions that you can only understand after the thing has happened," said Anathema. "Like 'Do Notte Buye Betamacks.' That was a prediction for 1972."
"You mean she predicted videotape recorders?"
"No! She just picked up one little fragment of information," said Anathema. "That's the point. Most of the time she comes up with such an oblique reference that you can't work it out until it's gone past, and then it all slots into place. And she didn't know what was going to be important or not, so it's all a bit hit and miss. Her prediction for November 22, 1963, was about a house falling down in King's Lynn."
"Oh?" Newt looked politely blank.
"President Kennedy was assassinated," said Anathema helpfully. "But Dallas didn't exist then, you see. Whereas King's Lynn was quite important."
"Oh."
"She was generally very good if her descendants were involved."
"Oh?"
"And she wouldn't know anything about the internal combustion engine. To her they were just funny chariots. Even my mother thought it referred to an Emperor's carriage overturning. You see, it's not enough to know what the future is—You have to know what it means. Agnes was like someone looking at a huge picture down a tiny little tube. She wrote down what seemed like good advice based on what she understood of the tiny little glimpses.
"Sometimes you can be lucky," Anathema went on. "My greatgrandfather worked out about the stock market crash of 1929, for example, two days before it actually happened. Made a fortune. You could say we're professional descendants."
She looked sharply at Newt. "You see, what no one ever realized until about two hundred years ago that The Nice and Accurate Prophecies was Agnes's idea of a family heirloom. Many of the prophecies relate to her descendants and their well-being. She was sort of trying to look after us after she'd gone. That's the reason for the King's Lynn prophecy, we think. My father was visiting there at the time, so from Agnes's point of view, while he was unlikely to be struck by stray rounds from Dallas, there was a good chance he might be hit by a brick."