Fireside Gothic

by Andrew Taylor

  I told him about the glorious ratting we had had at Angel Farm.

  ‘So you missed the rain this afternoon?’ he asked, for the minutiae of the weather’s fluctuations fascinated him, as they did most grown-ups.

  ‘Just about. It was beginning to spit as we were going back to Mr Ratcliffe’s, so we cut up through the Cathedral.’

  ‘We’ll have worse tonight,’ he said. ‘Mrs Veal feels it in her bones. Her bones are never wrong.’

  ‘I saw someone up the west tower,’ I said.

  ‘Up the west tower?’ Mr Veal shook his head. ‘Not at this time of year.’

  ‘Well, I thought I saw someone.’ I shrugged. ‘But it was already getting dark. I could’ve been wrong.’

  ‘No one was up there today,’ Mr Veal said. ‘There wouldn’t be. You can take it as Gospel, young man. Not without me knowing.’

  8

  That evening Mr Ratcliffe made cocoa again. The three of us – four, if you counted Mordred – sat close to the fire.

  The weather had changed during the afternoon. It was still cold, but clouds had rolled in from the south-west, bringing with it a wind that blew in gusts of varying strengths with lulls between them. The wind carried raindrops with it, and the promise of more to come. It rattled doors and windows in their frames. It sounded in the wide chimney.

  It was Faraday who reminded Mr Ratcliffe about his promise.

  ‘Please, sir – you said you’d tell us about Mr Goldsworthy.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes, sir. You said there was a real story about the ghost.’

  ‘Real? To be perfectly truthful, Faraday, I can’t be absolutely sure which parts of the story are real and which are not. I don’t think anyone can after all this time.’

  ‘When did he live, sir?’ I asked.

  ‘Nearly two hundred years ago. He was the Master of Music, one of Dr Atkinson’s predecessors. He was a composer, too. You remember the anthem we have on Christmas Day? The “Jubilate Deo”? He wrote that.’

  Faraday’s face was in shadow. But he shifted in his seat as if someone had touched him. It was the anthem that Hampson Minor had sung in Faraday’s place.

  ‘He died as a result of a fall,’ Mr Ratcliffe went on, ‘and he’s buried in the north choir aisle. There’s a tablet to him on the wall more or less opposite the organ loft.’

  ‘But – why is he a ghost?’ I said. Into my mind slipped an image of Dr Atkinson, who was small, red-faced and irascible, draped in a sheet and rattling chains like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

  ‘If he is,’ said Mr Ratcliffe. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it?’

  ‘Has anyone seen him, sir?’ Faraday asked, leaning forward. ‘They must have done. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have said he was a ghost last night.’

  ‘You must be patient.’ Mr Ratcliffe began the elaborate ritual of cleaning, filling and lighting his pipe. ‘Did you know that the Cathedral once had a ring of eight bells? One of our canons, Dr Bradshaw, wrote a standard treatise on the subject in the 1670s. Campanologia Explicata. There were eight bells, and they hung in the west tower. You know, I am sure, that our church bells are rung according to a series of mathematical permutations.’ He looked up at us and took pity on our ignorance. ‘It’s like a pattern of numbers. Each bell has a number and it rings according to its place in the pattern.’

  By now Mr Ratcliffe was crumbling flake tobacco into the palm of one hand. He fell silent, concentrating on rubbing the strands into a loose, evenly distributed mixture.

  ‘Bells don’t last for ever, you know. Our bells had to be taken down in the eighteenth century. They needed to be recast. This was done, at considerable expense. There was to be a service of dedication when the new ring of bells was rung for the first time. The Dean and Chapter asked Mr Goldsworthy to compose a special anthem to mark the occasion, to be based on Psalm one hundred and fifty. “Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet: praise Him upon the lute and harp”.’

  Mordred, who had been slumbering on Mr Ratcliffe’s lap, jumped to the ground. He stretched himself out with luxurious abandon on the hearthrug.

  ‘They say that Mr Goldsworthy was an ambitious man,’ Mr Ratcliffe went on. ‘And a troubled one. The Dean had a piece of patronage in his gift, the Deputy Surveyorship of the Fabric, a position that came with an income of two hundred pounds a year for the holder, and entailed no obligations apart from a few ceremonial duties. Mr Goldsworthy thought there was no reason why the post should not go to himself as to the next man. And the Dean gave him to understand that it might well be his, if his new anthem was a particularly fine piece of work that brought renown on the Cathedral. And, no doubt, on the Dean.’

  As Mr Ratcliffe was speaking, Mordred rose to his feet. He stared at the three of us in turn and, to my surprise, came towards me and rubbed his furry body against me. I felt the vibration of his purring against my legs. Flattered by his attention, I bent down and stroked him.

  ‘The problem was,’ Mr Ratcliffe continued, ‘Mr Goldsworthy found that for once his inspiration failed him. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. His career was at a crossroads. If he failed in the commission, he would earn the Dean’s disfavour. To make matters worse, I believe there was a lady in the case, and Mr Goldsworthy could not afford to marry without a larger income.’

  The cat unsheathed the claws of his right paw and ran them into my calf. I squealed with pain and shock.

  ‘Mordred!’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘I’m so sorry – he can be such an unmannerly animal. Perhaps one of you would put him outside.’

  Mordred frustrated this design by going to ground under the grand piano, sheltered by the wall on one side and a pile of books on the other.

  ‘What did he do then?’ Faraday said. ‘Did he compose the anthem in the end?’

  ‘That’s the strange part of it. It is said that he did. He told his friends that he had succeeded at the very last moment. He said the piece would be his masterpiece. The newly cast bells had already been hung in the tower. He found that if he went up into the tower himself, into the ringing chamber with pen and paper, the music came to him as if borne on the wind. But then came disaster.’

  ‘He died?’ I said, half hopefully, half fearfully.

  Mr Ratcliffe held up a hand. ‘Be patient, young man. No, the first thing to happen was that cracks were discovered in the tower, when the workmen were hanging the new bells. You see, the west tower was built in the Middle Ages. It simply wasn’t designed for a ring of bells. It’s not the weight of them, you know. It’s the vibration they cause when they are rung. The Cathedral Surveyor told the Dean and Chapter that there could be no question of ringing the new ones.’

  ‘Which is why there aren’t any bells now,’ I said.

  ‘Yes – because they could well bring the tower crashing about everyone’s ears. The Surveyor said that the new bells must come down, and the tower had to be strengthened as soon as possible, and braced with iron ties. The Dean raged against this – his reputation, his judgement, was at stake. But he was forced to give way in the end. So there was no longer a need for an anthem to celebrate the new bells, and no longer any purpose on wasting a perfectly good piece of patronage on the Master of Music.’

  ‘What happened to it?’ Faraday asked. ‘The anthem, I mean.’

  The anthem, I noticed, not the man: the Rabbit’s as mad as a hatter; and I smiled at my own joke.

  Mr Ratcliffe lit his pipe and tossed the match into the fire. ‘No one knows for sure. Perhaps it was never written or perhaps it was destroyed. But the sad part is what happened to Mr Goldsworthy. The story was that he had left the manuscript in the west tower, where he had been working on it. One winter evening, he went up to retrieve it. But he was not aware that the workmen had already begun to remove the new bells from the tower. There are hatches in the floors at the various levels, to allow the bells to be lowered down from the belfry to the floor of the tower. By some mishap, the workmen had left open the hatch at the lowest stage
, which is the ringing chamber just above the painted ceiling. There was very little light up there and poor Goldsworthy must have stumbled in the dark.’

  The room was no longer cosy, despite the cups of cocoa and Mr Ratcliffe’s tired, gentle voice. I glanced at him, sitting back in his chair. The old man looked back at me and, for an instant, by some trick of the firelight, he had Mordred’s eyes in his face. Amber, flecked with green. But the cat was still lurking under the grand piano.

  ‘He fell?’ Faraday said, his voice awed.

  ‘More than a hundred feet on to the floor of the tower.’ Mr Ratcliffe had returned to normal. ‘The poor fellow was killed outright.’

  It occurred to me that five or six hours earlier I must have walked across the very spot where Mr Goldsworthy’s body had lain.

  ‘It was an accident, of course,’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘That’s what they decided. There was nothing to show it had been suicide, after all, and a verdict of accidental death meant that he could have a Christian burial.’

  ‘Did someone look for the anthem?’ Faraday asked.

  I wondered why Rabbit was so concerned about a bit of music. What did it matter, after all, beside the fact of a man’s death? But then I have never been able to understand the value that people place on music. It’s nothing but a series of sounds, sounds without meaning.

  ‘They searched his pockets. It wasn’t there, though they did find a pen and a portable inkwell. They looked among his papers. They looked in the tower, as well. But they didn’t find any trace of it. The anthem had vanished, if it had ever existed.’

  ‘Perhaps it hadn’t,’ I said.

  ‘The lady who was engaged to Mr Goldsworthy said that he had played her some of the melodies. She said it was a thing of ravishing beauty, that it would draw the heart out of an angel. But I suppose in the circumstances she would be inclined to have a high opinion of the piece.’

  Mr Ratcliffe rose stiffly from his chair and knocked out his pipe. He looked down at us in our chairs.

  ‘It’s long past time for you boys to be in bed.’

  ‘But, sir,’ I protested. ‘What about the ghost?’ I could not help thinking of the person I had glimpsed in the west tower this afternoon. ‘Do people see him? Does he haunt the tower?’

  ‘Poor Goldsworthy?’ Mr Ratcliffe shook his head. ‘Not as far as I know. No, it’s his music that people hear. Or they say they do. Fragments of melody, just a few notes.’ He waved his pipe in the direction of the Cathedral. ‘It’s as if the anthem was broken into many pieces in the fall. And all the notes it contained were thrown up into the air. They are still there. Looking for each other. Trying to come together again.’

  9

  The next day, Friday, 27 December, was grey and blustery, with showers of rain that attacked from unexpected angles and worked their way through the crevices of one’s clothing to the naked skin beneath.

  I explained my problem about the lost cap to Mr Ratcliffe. He considered the matter gravely and gave it as his opinion that it would not be a beatable offence if I were caught outside the College without a school cap during the holidays. If I had any trouble, I was to refer the complainant to himself.

  But I could not go out without a hat. That would not be seemly or indeed good for my health. He lent me one of his own, a battered, shapeless thing of tweed, with a trout fly fixed to the band. It was too large for my head and rested loosely on my ears. But it kept me decent, according to the standards of those days, and it kept me dry. It smelled powerfully of mothballs, with a hint of stale tobacco.

  In the morning, Faraday and I went into town. He waited outside while I tried my luck with three tobacconists in turn. The first two refused to serve me but in the third, a little shop in an alley between the High Street and Market Street, I struck lucky. The proprietor had left the establishment in the temporary charge of his elderly mother, who was very shortsighted. I put on my gruffest voice when I asked for ten Woodbine cigarettes – unlike Faraday’s, my voice had settled down to a sort of croak after the ups and downs of the previous year. That and Mr Ratcliffe’s hat seemed to allay any suspicions the woman might have had.

  Once outside, I showed Faraday my booty. He reacted with gratifying horror.

  ‘If you’re caught, they’ll chuck you out,’ he whispered.

  ‘What does it matter?’ I said grandly. ‘I don’t care.’

  He glanced at me under the brim of his cap and I felt reproved by the misery in his eyes. By buying cigarettes I was merely toying with the risk of expulsion. It was improbable I would be caught smoking and doubly improbable that I would be expelled for doing it, particularly in the school holidays. But Faraday almost certainly faced expulsion already: and if by any chance he was allowed to stay at school, the alternative he faced was almost worse – years of persecution. In either case, I pictured the shame of the stolen postal order pursuing him through his blighted adult life until his miserable death.

  In the meadows between the Cathedral and the river, there stood a steep, heavily wooded hill, which had once formed part of a castle made of earth and wood. It was as safe as anywhere to smoke. I scrambled up it, with Faraday trailing after me because he had nothing better to do and my company was better than his own.

  At the top was a clearing of rough grass with a rotting summerhouse that stank of foxes. I stood on the remains of the verandah in front of it and smoked two Woodbines in swift succession. I tried my best to give the impression that I was enjoying an exquisite pleasure but in truth the cigarettes made me feel rather sick.

  Meanwhile Faraday moved restlessly about the clearing. As I was smoking the second cigarette, he came back to my side.

  ‘I say,’ he said. ‘You know the anthem? The one that was lost?’

  I squinted through the smoke at him. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It would be marvellous if it was found after all this time. Wouldn’t it?’

  I shrugged. ‘I suppose so. For choirboys and chaps like that.’

  ‘Just because it hasn’t been found, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.’

  My mind filled with a picture of all those lost notes, black blobs with little tails and other attachments, floating in the air like dead leaves in a strong breeze.

  ‘But where?’ I said. ‘I’m sure they looked everywhere.’

  ‘I think it’s in the tower,’ Faraday said. ‘I mean, that’s where he was when he fell. He had his pen and ink with him, remember.’

  ‘Don’t be an ass. They must have searched especially hard up there.’

  ‘But perhaps they didn’t look hard enough. Look – just suppose we looked for it, and we found it. Wouldn’t it be wonderful? They’d make an awfully big fuss. I shouldn’t wonder if they put it in the newspapers. And we’d be – well, we’d be sort of heroes, wouldn’t we?’

  He stared expectantly at me, his mouth open, the rabbit teeth displayed.

  My imagination was beginning to stir, even though the idea had come from Faraday. It would impress everyone at school no end if we found the anthem. I imagined the news filtering through to my aunt, miraculously restored to full health for the purpose, and even to my parents in India. I imagined their delight, their pride.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said.

  ‘But we can’t get up there.’

  ‘I bet we could find a way. I’ve a plan.’

  I was careful to preserve my dignity by not showing too much enthusiasm. ‘There’d be a beastly stink if they catch us.’

  ‘Not if we find it. They wouldn’t mind what we’d done. They’d wipe the slate clean.’

  I understood at last what Faraday meant, what his motive was. He thought that the lost anthem was his chance of salvation, perhaps his only one. If he found it, it would neutralize the disgrace of the postal order; it would make up for his broken voice and for no longer being head of the choir. The school would come back next term to find him a hero. And I would be a hero, too.

  If he found it.

  I dropped the cigarette butt
and ground it into the wet earth with my heel. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘At least it’ll give us something to do.’

  In my heart of hearts, I didn’t believe that Faraday would do anything. It’s easy enough to come up with these schemes but quite another to put them into practice.

  He didn’t mention the idea again for an hour or two. We went to the Veals’ for lunch, our midday dinner. Afterwards I walked up to Angel Farm, followed by the reluctant Faraday, in case Mr Witney had decided on a second day of ratting. But the farmyard was deserted apart from a dog that barked furiously at us and made savage runs towards us to the limit of its chain.

  ‘Let’s go to the Cathedral,’ he suggested.

  I didn’t say anything but we fell into step together and, as we had done the day before, walked through the long street leading from the green to the west door.

  It was much earlier in the afternoon than it had been on our last visit. The Cathedral, even on this grey day, seemed brighter and more welcoming. I took this as a good omen. We stood in the very centre of the space beneath the west tower and looked up at the painted ceiling.

  More than a hundred feet high, Mr Ratcliffe had said.

  ‘You can’t see the trapdoor,’ Faraday said, clearly disappointed.

  I wondered what a fall from that height would do to a man. Would it compress him, ram his legs into his body and his head into his shoulders?

  ‘What’s the painting of?’ I said.

  Faraday stared upwards. ‘I don’t know. It looks like angels playing harps and things.’

  He went over to a short flight of steps in the thickness of the wall, almost invisible because it was in the shadow of one of the great columns that supported the tower. At the top of the steps was a heavy door. This was where the stairs to the tower began.

  I glanced over my shoulder. No one was in sight. I tried the door. It was locked. We stood and looked at it. The door was made of old, scarred oak with great iron hinges. The lock looked more modern, judging by the size of the keyhole, and smaller than I would have expected.