The Devil's Piper

by Sarah Rayne

  Aloud he said, still speaking in the Latin he had used so long ago, ‘I will do what you ask, Master Lute Maker.’

  Simon said abruptly, ‘Can you do it?’ and Ahasuerus looked at him coldly.

  ‘I can.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You must trust that. First, though, there is a condition.’

  ‘So I assumed,’ said Simon, his expression unreadable, and Ahasuerus said coolly,

  ‘If you trade with the devil, you will find there is always a condition.’ Take it or leave it, said his tone. And all the while, he was aware of a current of amused power ebbing and flowing within his mind, because they were believing him, the fools were cringing before him, they truly believed they had somehow raised the devil . . .

  Just as the devil raised me that afternoon in the Temple, body and mind and soul.

  Simon waved the babbling Cosimo to silence and said, ‘What is the condition?’

  Silence. Then Ahasuerus said, ‘If I am to do what you ask, I must live among you for a short time. And therefore, I must learn a little of your world. Customs and speech and manners.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘To do that, I would ask to spend some time with your lady, Master Lute Maker. Only long enough,’ said Ahasuerus politely, ‘for her to teach me about your people and your ways.’

  ‘Well, I hardly think—’

  ‘A night would be sufficient.’

  ‘A night?’ Cosimo stared stupidly, and Ahasuerus smiled and looked across at Isabella.

  ‘A night with your lady,’ he said softly.

  Chapter Twelve

  Moira came out of the twelfth century and back into the twentieth as if she was walking off a lighted stage set.

  The account was a bit sparse and it was couched in the rather florid style of the seventeenth century, but it had been remarkably easy to see the fearful Cosimo and his dazzling lady, and to visualise Simon holding up a crucifix to dismiss the stranger. Moira thought she would finish reading this tomorrow, because it was getting dark in the library and deciphering the thin spidery writing was beginning to make her head ache. But she would like to know a bit more about it all and she would certainly like to know the outcome. How complete was John Joseph’s transcription? It might be worth asking could she see the original.

  She poured herself another cup of tea from the tray brought earlier by Matthew. There were no casual saucerless mugs with sugar ready stirred in for Abbey guests: the Brothers lived fairly austerely but they had their own code for visitors and the tray held a flowered teapot with matching milk jug and sugar bowl and a plate of freshly baked biscuits. The monks did not have afternoon tea themselves, but they thought people in the outside world did.

  She turned back to the manuscript, thinking she would just make a few final notes, and as she did so, she heard footsteps coming along the corridor outside. For an instant her heart bounded, in case it might be Ciaran – Brother Ciaran – coming to see how she was getting on. If he had time, perhaps they could have a cup of tea together and she could tell him what she had found and discuss Simon’s manuscript with him. She was just framing a welcoming sentence, when the door was pushed open, and her father stood in the doorway.

  ‘I’ve come to take you home, my dear,’ he said.

  Edward had not liked to see his Moire Silk so completely absorbed in something he had no part of and he picked up the transcript of Simon’s journeys, frowning a little, hoping to find it shallow, trivial nonsense that could be indulgently dismissed. He flipped the pages over, picking out a sentence here and there. It was almost as he had thought but it was not quite as trivial as he had hoped. There was a good deal of rubbishy story-telling about the Abbey’s founder and there was some preposterous tale in flowery language about Brother Simon and some Italian woman. Edward was surprised to find such gossip in a monastery library.

  The brief description of the Italian creature – Isabella, was it? – struck an unexpected nerve.

  A thin bedgown, and hair streaming over her shoulders, the colour of molten copper . . . He glanced up to where Moira was seated at the desk, the little electric wall lamp directly above shining on her hair. Lending it the appearance of molten copper . . .

  There had been a moment when Edward had stood in the library doorway, and seen Moira look up, startled, and in that moment it had not been his little girl at all, it had been a stranger looking up with the reflex annoyance of someone disturbed from some deeply interesting task.

  Someone with hair the colour of molten copper . . .

  And then she had smiled and of course it was Moira, dressed neatly in the way Edward himself had advised over breakfast.

  ‘If I were you, I should wear your nice navy skirt and a plain blouse today,’ he had said, and Mary had said to be sure to take a cardigan as well because it would be chilly later on. ‘And it would be better to tie your hair back,’ Edward had added.

  There had been a moment when Moira had looked as if she was going to argue, which had surprised Edward, but then she had smiled and said, Yes, it was as well to be conventional with the monks, and had put on the navy skirt and a white blouse and tied her hair back with a navy ribbon, and Edward had smiled his approval and said, There! Now she was her daddy’s pretty little girl again.

  But as he had stood in the doorway, he had seen that the neatly confined hair had escaped from its ribbon and was tumbling about her shoulders—

  Curling over her small firm breasts—

  And of course, the last thing a respectable father did, the last thing a good Catholic husband did was to look at that spilling silken hair or at the neat white blouse which was in fact a shirt of thin soft lawn, tailored like a man’s dress shirt and unexpectedly seductive. Edward would make sure that Mary told Moira that the blouse did not become her. It was remarkable how uncomfortable it was making him feel. Edward was naturally aware of his Church’s ruling on the harbouring of impure thoughts and he was scrupulous about confessing them, unless it was Father Kane on confession duty, in which case he waited until it was old Father Dougal’s turn, because Dougal was getting a bit deaf and could be counted on to miss most of what you said.

  Mallow, seen by the light of the morning, was as tumbledown as it had looked on Isarel’s arrival.

  He winced as he drew the faded curtains back and felt a stab of pain above one eye – sunlight! Death to a wine-induced headache! – but managed to set a kettle to boil on the Aga which was still warm from last evening. He swallowed two aspirin, giving himself the option of a third, foraged for the bread bought a hundred years ago on the way here, and managed to make toast by propping an old-fashioned toasting fork in front of the Aga. The creamy Irish butter melted into the thick bread, sunlight filtered in from outside and there was a scent of something sweet and nostalgic drifting in from the garden. Insensibly, Isarel’s spirits lifted and although it was probably only the aspirin working, he felt so much better that he got up to pour a second cup of tea and toast another slice of bread. He remembered adding a jar of honey to the provisions and hunted it out. Tea and buttered toast and honey. Very English. It pleased him to be so English out here on the edge of the wild Irish coast. He spread the honey thickly and tilted his chair back to look through the window, thinking hard.

  Clearly his midnight visitor had been in the later stages of madness and equally clearly, Isarel had been mad with him. Had they really walked through the copse to the Abbey with that thing – what was its name? Ahasuerus? – following, and had they really pushed it down into the noisome tomb?

  At one o’clock in the morning, after two bottles of wine, it had been an intriguing tale and a bizarre adventure, but in the cold light of day it was plainly nonsense and it had probably not really happened. Isarel began to wonder whether Ciaran had been a monk at all, and whether his first assumption that he was entertaining an escaped madman might not have been correct.

  But if he was mad last night, then so was I. And the music was there to give the lie to the madness. J
ude’s music. I don’t dare think about it. I certainly don’t dare believe it.

  Isarel got up from the table and put his cup and plate and knife in the sink before starting on a tour of exploration. If Mallow was really falling to pieces it would be as well to find out which bits were likely to drop off first. It would certainly be more to the point than brooding over ancient entombed beings and devil-inspired music. He supposed he would have to walk or drive round to the Abbey later – or maybe Ciaran would come to Mallow – but it could be put off for a few hours yet.

  He made notes as he went, expecting to find it depressing, but in the event not finding it any such thing. Mallow was neglected and battered, but beneath the decay and the dirt the fabric was very good indeed. Isarel was no architect or building surveyor, but even he could see that the damp patches on the walls had been caused by nothing worse than leaking and blocked roof gutters and that although the window frames were rotten, the beautiful sandstone lintels surrounding them were sound. And seen by the morning light the brickwork was lovely: soft mellow red. The mortar had crumbled here and there, but not to any alarming extent. It could be – what did builders call it? – re-pointing, wasn’t it?

  He went back inside and up to the first floor landing where light slanted across the bare floorboards, making the dust motes dance in and out, and where a small secondary stair wound rather precariously up to the attics. This would be the crunch: you could repair or replace window frames and you could renew crumbling mortar, but if roof joists had collapsed you were in severe trouble.

  But the roof was dry and sweet, and the trusses and joists were as solid and as strong as the day Mallow was built. A few tiles were missing and the roofing felt was torn, but he thought it was nothing that a good builder could not put right in an afternoon. Jude, you may have been an evil, faithless bastard and you may have died that shameful death, but your house is the most beautiful thing that has happened to me for a very long time. He stood looking through the little windows of the attic room, seeing the smudge of blue and green to the west that was the wild, beautiful Irish rim. This had been Jude’s bolt-hole, this was where he had come when he wanted to run away from the world, to work, to study a score, to create. Or to be with one of his women.

  There were one or two brief, tantalisingly vague accounts in the many biographies written about Jude, suggesting that he had had a number of mistresses before he married Isarel’s grandmother in Vienna just before the war. Isarel remembered one account by a lady who had stayed here in the Thirties and who related how her host would sit at the head of the polished, mahogany dining table, drinking Chateau Yquem and dining off foie gras and quails by candlelight – ‘Looking like a cross between a devil and a satyr.’ Even if they dined late, Jude often got up at dawn and went down to the music room to pour music – occasionally his own, sometimes other people’s – into the cool daybreak. ‘He had the same remarkable gifts as the maestro, Arthur Nikisch, who in the Eighteen Nineties held his audiences and orchestra both completely spell-bound,’ she had said, thus revealing that she was at least a decade older than she had previously admitted.

  Another one, living as a grande dame in America, an unashamed seventy-something, had related how she used to go to Jude’s apartment in one of the tall old houses in the Augustiner Strasse in Vienna, and how she would sit entranced as he played Schumann and Greig until the air sizzled with vibrancy and the room was bathed in a fiery blaze from the sun setting behind the Cathedral. How there had always been a silver wine cooler containing champagne in the bedroom and silk sheets on the bed. Decadent in only the way that Vienna before the war could be decadent, she was reported as saying. Certainly there had been more than a trace of what her generation had called the ‘cad’ about Jude Weissman. But when he sat down at the piano you ceased to care, because you would have followed him anywhere he cared to invite you.

  Isarel thought that even allowing for the bias of these memories, Jude must have been a killer with the women. If you did not know better you would almost see him as a kind of demi-god, instead of the cold, calculating traitor he had really been.

  All that, he thought, staring through the grimed windowpanes of Mallow’s attics; all those women and all that adulation, and I never once suspected that Jude might have uncovered the Black Chant.

  He frowned, shaking his head to dislodge the blurred shreds of memory and went downstairs again to continue with his list of repairs. Electricity was a priority, of course. What about plumbing? The bathroom was functional although that was about all you could say for it, and at least there was a bathroom and not a grisly little hut at the bottom of the garden. The pipework looked as if it was lead, which was impractical and probably dangerous; the bath was a massive iron affair on clawed feet and the loo was enclosed in a square mahogany box.

  He surveyed the kitchen as the kettle boiled for a mug of coffee. He would like to keep the huge old dresser and the red tiles on the floor would polish up rather attractively. He could have a rag rug on them if such a thing could still be found, and a wooden rocking chair in the corner by the Aga. The Aga was proving unexpectedly efficient now that he had fathomed how it worked and discovered that you had to keep it burning more or less permanently. He thought he might keep it. But an electric hob and a few more cupboards would not hurt and it would be nice to have a fridge and instant hot water. Could he afford central heating? It would probably be economical in the long run, but it might be expensive to install. He drank the coffee and went on with his plans, resolutely ignoring the shofar which lay on the piano where he had put it after returning to Mallow in the early hours of the morning.

  I’m not looking at you, said Isarel to it, silently. I’m not seeing you. In fact I’ve forgotten you’re there.

  He concentrated on exploring the house, clinging to practicalities, and all the while a part of his mind was busy repudiating what had happened in the Abbey’s crypt and overlaying it with other, more believable things. Roof tiles and electrical wiring and woodworm. As the day wore on, he found it possible to relegate Ciaran O’Connor and his eerie story of immortal creatures who crawled up out of coffins to a kind of mental limbo. By the time he had assembled a scratch lunch of bread and tuna fish and tomatoes, with an apple and cheese to round it off, Ahasuerus was beginning to take on the quality of a bad dream. After lunch he drove into Curran Glen and discovered that one small firm could handle building, electrical wiring and plumbing, and that although the premises appeared haphazard and the bright-eyed, bow-legged proprietor was happy-go-lucky, the initial suggestions for the work were surprisingly efficient and unexpectedly imaginative, and the tentatively discussed figures not as high as he had been fearing.

  But as the late-afternoon twilight stole across Mallow’s tangled gardens, he found himself back in the music room. It was absurd to want to play the music again and in view of last night it was probably dangerous, always supposing that last night had existed outside of a dream. It was not beyond possibility that some of his students had laced his toothpaste with LSD or Ecstasy or whatever disgusting drug was currently in fashion.

  Beyond the windows, the lilac and purple dusk was stealing over the tangled gardens, and without warning a fragment of a half-remembered poem – Coleridge? – slid into Isarel’s mind. Something about a man dreaming he had died and gone to Paradise, where he had plucked a rose. Only when he awoke, he found that he was still holding the rose . . . It was a shivery notion, but it was a seductive one, as well.

  Did I travel to the centre of a dream last night? thought Isarel. Only it wasn’t Coleridge’s rose-tinted Paradise, it was a dark and ancient dream, someone else’s nightmare, a drifting flotsam – or do I mean jetsam? – of something primeval and death-ridden.

  Did I bring the rose back with me? He looked at the shofar again and at the sheets of musical notation on the Bluthner’s stand.

  There was only one way to find out. There was only one way to lay the lingering ghost, and that was to deliberately go back into t
he dark rose-scented nightmare.

  The thought: Jude would do it, closed about his mind.

  Isarel sat down at the piano and reached for the shofar.

  Father seemed to think that the brief afternoon’s work in the Abbey library had tired Moira. He walked unnecessarily close as they went down from the Abbey, taking her arm firmly. He would not, of course, have realised that Moira found this embarrassing because of the back of his hand touching her breast; he would be being protective. He was protective as they crossed a rough bit of path, even though Moira was perfectly able to walk over it unaided.

  He asked about her work and said, nonsense, of course he would not think it boring, he wanted to know everything she had done, she was to omit no details. They should discuss it over a cosy supper, and then it must be an early bed. Moira thought of several responses to this, none of which were utterable. She tried not to mind about having her walk spoiled. They were in sight of Mallow House now, and this was the part she had been looking forward to. She could just hear the thin squeak of a bat somewhere overhead, and it was the half-light when you sometimes saw owls swooping across the sky. Lovely. In summer, you heard the dry chirrup of grasshoppers and crickets.

  Father was talking about her afternoon as if it had been a ten-mile marathon for heaven’s sake, and berating himself for not having driven the car up to the Abbey. Moira had felt uncomfortable about the breast-brushing part earlier, but now she began to feel angry.

  Without the least warning, as much a part of the night as the bats and the owls, thin clear music drifted across the air, weaving itself into the magical twilight, so gentle and insidious that you could not be entirely sure whether you were imagining it.

  At her side, Edward drew in a sharp breath and said he did not know what things were coming to when people were thoughtless enough to fling wide their windows and impose their cacophony on half the countryside. Clearly it was coming from Mallow, and equally clearly it was that insolent young man, Jude Weissman’s grandson, who was playing it. Edward would have a few words to say to Isarel West in the morning.