The Second Sleep

by Robert Harris

  He splashed water over his face to revive himself. In the chest of drawers he found an old wide leather belt, which he fastened around his waist and used to hitch up his cassock so that he could move more freely. He carried his boots downstairs to avoid making a noise. At the last minute he remembered the pocket telescope in the study. He wrote a note to Agnes and left it on the kitchen table, explaining that he had gone for a long walk, that he would not be back for some hours, but that she was not to worry, and that he had taken the liberty of helping himself to some bread and cheese. He wrapped his provisions in a cloth and tied it to his belt, put on his boots, took a hickory walking stick from beside the back door and let himself out of the front.

  The day was fresh, the village just beginning to stir. He nodded affably to a shepherd and a milkmaid as he passed them, but ducked his head to avoid conversation. He crossed the river and left the cottages behind. A brown pall of smoke hung over the fields close to The Piggeries. At the crossroads, the big wooden doors of the blacksmith’s forge had been folded open, but the fire wasn’t lit and he was relieved to see no sign of Gann or his apprentice.

  He started up the lane towards Durston Court just as the sun broke over the trees. When he reached the gateposts with their curious melted stone figures, he slowed his pace. He was strongly tempted to call upon Sarah Durston. But the hour was unsociable, and after the events of the previous night he hardly knew what he would say to her. He pressed on up the hill.

  The track became steeper and narrower. The hedges grew higher, turned into trees, and before long he found himself climbing a footpath through woodland. The sound of a stream nearby reminded him he was thirsty. He scrambled down the bank, cupped his hands in the cold water and drank, then sat on a mossy fallen tree trunk and ate his bread and cheese. Wild flowers grew all around him – anemones, bluebells, irises – and there was an extraordinary profusion of butterflies – red admirals and holly blues, and others, purple and primrose-coloured, he could not identify.

  The sight of so much wildlife and the sensation of food in his stomach helped restore his spirits (which were not, in truth, as robust as his decisive action might have suggested). According to his map, the lane should have continued for another half-mile until it curved round to the west and brought him to the tower. It might have been like that twenty years ago, or whenever it was that Shadwell and Quycke had visited the area, but it was not so now. Nature had reclaimed the place. There was nothing for it but to climb. Sooner or later he was bound to reach the crest, he reasoned; then he could work his way along it.

  He set off again. The silence of the woods was disturbed by the chatter of parakeets; the marshy ground sang with the noise of the springs that bubbled up everywhere. He jumped the shallow streams. The hem of his cassock became damp and heavy. He started to sweat. When he looked over his shoulder, it was hard to pick out the path as it twisted between the trees. One could quickly become lost. He imagined Lacy following the same route barely more than a week ago, his tall, thin frame moving swift and oblivious towards its fate. An unpleasant picture to entertain in such an isolated spot. He tried to put it out of his mind.

  A little higher up, a clearing at last afforded a view of the surrounding hills. Sheep were grazing on the slope leading up to the forest edge. He took out the telescope, extended it and scanned the treeline. Immediately his eye was caught by movement: a figure – possibly a man, a shepherd maybe – on the periphery of the wood. He lost him almost as soon as he’d found him. He adjusted the focus slightly, tracked a few degrees to his right and glimpsed a flash of something greyish white, motionless behind the trees, too big to be human. The tower? He lowered the telescope, wiped his eye and looked again. A structure of some sort, no question of it. He collapsed the spyglass and resumed his climb, but quicker now, eager to get it done.

  He emerged from the trees on to the lower part of the slope, glad to be out in the open, where the ground was firmer and the light was clear. The sheep glanced up from their grazing as he approached and waited until he had almost reached them before scattering in panic when he came closer, their hooves drumming over the cropped grass. A pair of skylarks soared vertically hundreds of feet into the air and hovered, singing in alarm.

  He paused to catch his breath, turned and looked back, and was immediately startled. A vast panorama had crept up behind him, as in a game of grandmother’s footsteps, a view that took in the hills on the other side of the valley, and beyond them the empty moorland stretching to the horizon. There was a small smudge of human settlement in the centre of the plain, and when he trained his telescope upon it, he was just able to make out the spire of a church, no larger than a thumb-tack – Axford presumably.

  When he turned his back again and resumed climbing, he felt peculiarly exposed. The view seemed to be watching him. Ahead, the tower was now half-visible behind the trees. But the route to it had become treacherous. Parts of the slope had given way, creating deep brown slashes of raw earth. He had an odd sense of instability underfoot, as if the firm downland might suddenly start to slide and send him tumbling in an avalanche of turf and soil and stones.

  It was a relief to reach the solidity of the big trees and to feel their tuberous roots poking beneath his feet. He picked his way between them until he reached the clearing, in the centre of which stood the tower. Close to, its massiveness was humbling, like one of the great megaliths of Stonehenge – ‘isolated, melancholy, mute’, as Shadwell had written; the monument of a pagan civilisation, its purpose in their ancient rituals lost in time. Various species of vines and ivy had crept up from the forest floor to cover three quarters of it, which accounted for why it was so hard to detect from a distance.

  He craned his neck to peer up at the top of it, shielding his eyes against the sun. He walked around it. He laid his hands upon it and felt its cold power. Here and there past generations of visitors had attempted to carve their initials, but whatever tools they had used had not been adequate for the task. They had merely scratched the concrete, and it was only possible to make out the occasional letter and numeral. In several places close to the ground he noted scorch marks. Fires had been lit against it. There were small holes in a regular line at roughly waist height, very old and weathered. He pulled back some of the ivy to make a closer examination. He poked his fingers into them. He remembered the rusted weapon in the colonel’s collection, and it occurred to him that they were bullet holes. The thought made him pull his hand away and step back.

  He made another circuit of the clearing. The wood was silent. No birdsong. All he could hear was the rustling of the wind in the tops of the trees. Now that he was starting to get his bearings, he could see that the tower was built on a flat area of ground, a kind of natural platform perhaps two hundred yards across and more or less the same in depth. Beyond this the land began to rise again, forming the arms and back of a natural chair. It was easy to see how the place had got its name. If one imagined it without trees, one could easily picture some great ogre sitting here, in this natural hollow, and staring out across the valley towards the distant moorland.

  He scanned the wall of trees and wondered whereabouts Lacy had suffered his fall. Cautiously he began to climb the steep incline directly behind the tower. It bulged in places like a giant’s forehead, overhanging the slope beneath. The ground was as Hancock had described it, soft after the winter rains. He could hear water running but could not see it. He prodded the ground in front of him with his stick before he took each step. Huge exotic ferns were growing in the damp earth. Weird fungus growths, some purple, some dead white, extruded from the trees, and where branches had fallen they were covered with emerald-green moss. In several places there had been mudslides, like the one that had closed the road out of the village. He could tell they were recent because of the lack of vegetation. There was a strong smell of fresh cold earth, such as he had only encountered before when crossing a newly ploughed field, or standing beside a fresh grave.

  He dug his stick into
the exposed earth, reluctant to go much further, and his gaze was caught by something pale lying in the soil. He bent to examine it, worked it free with his hand, held it up to clean the mud off it and cried aloud in horror when he realised he was poking his thumb into the eye socket of a human skull. In an involuntary reflex of revulsion, he flung it away and stood shaking for a few moments. It was only when he nerved himself to look for it again that he saw the other remains: arm bones and leg bones, a ribcage and more skulls; he was not afterwards sure how many – three or four, perhaps – but enough for him to realise he was standing in some kind of burial site, and he turned and ran, stumbling in his panic, tripping and falling and hauling himself out of the clinging earth in his desire to get away.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Friday 12th April: in which Fairfax returns to Axford

  IT WAS TEN o’clock by the time Fairfax reached the sanctuary of the village, barely four hours after he had set off. Never had he been more grateful to see a dreary muddy street, or the mundane normality of women spinning on their front steps. His descent of the hill had given him a chance to compose himself, and none who saw him that morning, striding with his stick across the bridge, would have guessed at the turmoil in his mind. He told himself that it was not uncommon to find human bones in England, that skeletons could last a thousand years, that they turned up in the fields at ploughing time, or in gardens, or when ditches were being dug – usually singly or in family groups, occasionally in the mass pits into which they must have been dumped in the chaos immediately after the Apocalypse. But he had never himself stumbled across a body, and the conjunction of the skulls, the tower, the remoteness of the spot and its association with Lacy’s death created a feeling of foreboding he could not shake off. He was sure he would remember the sensation of his thumb running around the sharp edge of that eye socket for as long as he lived.

  As he neared the parsonage, he saw there was a horse tethered to the fence. Someone must be visiting who owned a fine grey mare. He was sufficiently disinclined for company to consider altering his direction and waiting inside the church until whoever it was had gone. But curiosity as well as a determination to maintain a calm appearance kept him walking, and he went directly through the gate and over the threshold into the house.

  Sitting in the parlour, dressed in a black riding habit, was Sarah Durston, a leather saddlebag on the floor beside her. She rose as he came in.

  ‘Lady Durston!’ She was the last person he had expected to see.

  ‘Mr Fairfax.’ She offered him her hand. ‘I hope you don’t mind my calling uninvited. Agnes was not sure when you would return.’

  ‘I have not kept you waiting long, I hope.’

  ‘An hour or so. It’s no matter.’

  ‘An hour! Can I at least provide you with some refreshment?’

  ‘Agnes has already made the offer, thank you.’ She lifted her bag on to the table. ‘Forgive me, but I have not come to take tea, and time is pressing.’ She opened the bag and handed him a sheet of paper. ‘Jenny brought this back from town yesterday afternoon but didn’t show it me till breakfast. Look there, at the bottom.’

  It was a handbill, crudely printed, smudged, with tiny letters out of register, entirely devoted to advertisements – for livestock, agricultural tools, seedlings and suchlike – and public notices: a group of travelling players was offering a performance of The Mystery of the Passion at the Corn Exchange, a fair was coming to the common land, a public execution was fixed for one o’clock that afternoon: ‘Jack Porlock, tomb robber’.

  ‘Has the hanging some connection with Lacy’s death?’

  ‘Not the hanging.’ She leaned across impatiently and put her finger on a couple of skewed lines that seemed to have been added at the last moment. ‘That.’

  Dr Nicholas Shadwell, the Celebrated Scholar, will be Honoured to offer His Famous Public Lecture on ‘The Heresy of the Ancient World’ at the Corn Exchange on Friday 12th April at 2 o’clock. Admission 10 shillings at the door, or apply to O. Quycke, Esq., c/o The Swan Inn.

  ‘Such flyers are given out in Axford each Thursday afternoon. Now surely that is proof that you were right – it was Shadwell at Father Lacy’s burial. He not only lives, he is in the locality!

  Fairfax read the notice through again. ‘I’m amazed he should be so brazen as to announce a public lecture. Why run such a risk, even if he does disguise his obsession as a denunciation?’

  ‘A risk for him – but for us an opportunity.’ She delved back into her bag and carefully lifted out an object wrapped in a shawl. She loosened the cloth and set down on the table one of the cylinders from her husband’s collection. It was the most intricate of them all – a foot long, the thickness of a man’s arm, tapered at either end and containing within it a tightly coiled glass tube in the shape of a spring.

  He looked at her uneasily. ‘Is it wise to carry that around?’

  ‘I mean to take it to Shadwell and ask his opinion.’

  ‘But what if you are stopped? Captain Hancock said the sheriffs are mighty strict in Axford.’

  ‘That’s most unlikely – it’s never happened to me yet. And what better chance to find out what it is? We can be in town by two, with ease.’ He registered that ‘we’. She noticed his expression. ‘Something is amiss?’

  ‘I have visited the Devil’s Chair.’

  ‘And so? What of it?’

  ‘I saw human remains there – three or four skeletons. Exposed by the storm, most like.’

  ‘But that’s only to be expected. Where artefacts lie, most times are graves.’ She shrugged and smiled at him. ‘Oh dear, Father Fairfax – is a priest of all folk to be afraid of a few old bones?’

  ‘They make me cautious, I will admit.’

  ‘You sound like a villager talking: “Oh, the place is full of devils!”’ She started to rewrap the cylinder. ‘Well I shall go and see him, and go alone if needs be.’

  ‘No, no, I shall come,’ he said quickly. The prospect of an afternoon in her company was alluring in itself, whatever the risk. ‘Naturally I shall come.’

  Upstairs, he changed back into his own cassock, newly laundered by Mrs Budd. He washed the soil from his hands and examined his face in the mirror. Gone was the pallor of the chapter house. His skin was burned by the spring sun. He looked more farmer than cleric. He made an attempt to smooth down his hair and shape his beard with his wet hands. After a few moments of indecision, he once again slipped the volume of The Proceedings and Papers of the Society of Antiquaries into the pocket of his undershirt. There might be an opportunity to discuss it with Shadwell.

  The housekeeper was waiting for him in the passage as he clattered down the stairs.

  ‘I am riding to Axford, Mrs Budd. Don’t trouble Rose to fetch my horse – I’ll saddle her myself.’

  He looked in the parlour for Sarah Durston, but she wasn’t there. He saw her through the window, waiting for him in the road: already mounted, sharp in profile, impatient for the hunt.

  Their appearance on horseback together, riding through the village side by side, provoked a stir of interest. Heads turned to follow their progress. A pair of women washing clothes in the river stopped what they were doing and whispered to one another. As they passed the forge, Gann looked up from his anvil, and when Fairfax glanced back over his shoulder, he saw that the blacksmith had come out to stand at the side of the road and gawp at them.

  Lady Durston turned to see what he was looking at. She smiled and settled back down in her saddle. ‘I fear I am ruining your reputation, Father Fairfax. The village will talk of nothing else for days.’

  ‘I cannot believe that.’

  ‘Oh, it’s true, no question of it. As I said – they think I’m a witch.’

  ‘You also said that was a joke.’

  ‘Indeed, but there’s truth in jokes. They’re superstitious folk. They’ll think I’ve cast a spell on you.’

  ‘And on Captain Hancock?’ he couldn’t stop himself asking.


  ‘Him too.’

  They continued for a while without speaking. He felt he should make some reference to what had happened. ‘I gather I must offer my congratulations.’

  ‘Thank you. And yet your tone suggests disapproval.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘“Judge not, that ye be not judged” – is that not what the good Lord teaches us?’

  ‘Among other things.’

  She seemed to find his reply very droll, and repeated it to herself, her chin pressed into her neck, in a solemn, deep, pompous voice that he presumed was meant to be a parody of his: ‘Among other things …’

  The road led them up the side of the valley. They came to the place where the land had slipped on Wednesday afternoon and prevented his departure. The track was now clear. The rocks and earth had been dumped onto the lower slope to the left; the bulging land to the right was restrained by a timber palisade. Fairfax said, ‘It was good of Captain Hancock to open the way out of the village.’

  ‘It was not entirely done out of goodness – he needs the road to ply his business. And it suits him to use his power to perform a public service from time to time. It maintains his dominance. He is quite the king of our little country.’

  ‘Come now, Lady Durston!’ He was almost beginning to feel sorry for Hancock. ‘There must be something to be said in his favour. After all, you have agreed to marry him.’

  ‘Yes, sir, there is plenty. He is kind, after his own fashion. He has courage. And I believe he is a man of honour.’

  ‘And he loves you.’