Realm of Darkness

by C F Dunn

  With his back to her, she couldn’t see his face dim, but he had formed a strained smile by the time he turned around.

  “That would be most kind.”

  This time, she let him help her as they led the way through the abandoned rooms of the original house, along the passage of the new, to the decorated arch of the church of St Martin’s embedded in the outer wall.

  “Matthew, are you sure?” I asked when we reached the ancient door as Mrs Seaton went ahead into the body of the church.

  He took in the chevron carving curving over the doorway, the worn faces of the saints either side, and the seated figure of Christ in the centre. “It’s what I came for.” He went inside, but I didn’t follow immediately.

  “Come along,” Joan Seaton chirped, popping her head around the door, “and please don’t faint again, Emma – the first time was quite enough, thank you.”

  I smiled wanly and entered the sepulchral gloom. The single lightbulb had blown since I’d last been there. As my eyes adjusted, I found him standing facing the empty space where the altar once resided. Expressionless, only the tension across his shoulders gave him away.

  “This is what you’re after,” Mrs Seaton called to him from the remaining aisle running along the south wall. When he didn’t reply, she said a little querulously, “My dear, the Lynes family monuments are over here…”

  It reminded me of seeing a film where you know what is going to happen next and you’re too frightened to watch but you have to anyway. As if drawn by some compulsion, Matthew walked slowly to where Mrs Seaton stood beneath the high memorial window, and looked up.

  “There, you see – isn’t that you?” she said, pointing to Matthew’s image captured in the radiant colours of the glass. For a ghastly moment I thought she meant it literally and waited for his reaction, but he remained mute. She continued, “Now that I see you here, you look just like twins. Wasn’t he a dish! I know where you get your looks from. I always rather admired him, although I didn’t tell my husband of course, though I’m sure he guessed.” She clapped her hands in delight. “That’s his brother – he died in infancy; and their mother – such a pretty thing. The father always struck me as being a touch dour, but now that I look at him, he has the kindest face. But not the uncle… yes, well, probably the less said about him the better! At least he got what he deserved.” I looked at William Lynes next to his older, sombre, brother – handsome in his way, but history had soured his image as far as I was concerned, and the phrase “handsome is as handsome does” seemed to suit him perfectly. Joan pointed to the window with her cane. “And there are the grandparents – Henry Lynes senior and his wife, Emma D’Eresby. How remarkable,” she trilled happily, “and here you are now, a D’Eresby and a Lynes marrying. You must be related, you know – distantly, of course. How my husband would have loved to have met you, Matthew.” In her budding enthusiasm, she didn’t seem to notice the shroud of silence clinging to him. I wanted her to stop, to cease – to acknowledge his need to be quiet and to be alone. But she’d had months of silence in which to dwell, and she expended every ounce of energy she had stored on reliving his story. “And I’m sure you’ll want to see this,” she said, stepping to one side.

  His eyes dropped to where her hand rested on his parents’ tomb, and the colour drained from his face, the wave of emotion flooding from him becoming so potent it consumed me. I braced myself against it. “Matthew… please,” I choked. Dazed, he looked around and, as realization flashed across his face, he let me go, a release so tangible that I stumbled back against a column, breathless.

  “Take care, my dear, the floor is rather uneven,” Mrs Seaton said, oblivious to Matthew’s turmoil as she circled to face him again, beating the ground with her stick, tack, tack against the cream and red tiles, the knights and their horses eternally ready for battle. “I always thought it such a tragedy how they treated him. By all accounts they regarded him highly until then, but to do this to someone’s memory is simply desecration, quite unforgivable. My husband was very proud that the Seatons never went with the crowd, although it meant trouble for them at the time.” She lightly touched Matthew’s defaced marble form, then looked up at him, faltering as she took in his expression. “Perhaps you would like to be alone. I’ll go and find the picture; there’s no rush.”

  His voice shook as he broke the silence at last. “Did they really hate me so much?”

  I let go of the column. “No, darling, they didn’t. They were frightened – you said so yourself.”

  He stabbed in the direction of his stone image, his shattered face bearing witness to the frenzy of fear in which he had been caught. “Fear did this?”

  “Fear drives people to many things they wouldn’t do otherwise. It’s what they thought you were that they feared – not you, but what you represented…” The look on his face cut me short.

  “Had I known,” he said, “what they thought of me and what my father had to endure until his death… Our own people did this. Christ forgive them because I’m not sure if I can.” He turned his face from me, his fingers gripping the side of the tomb. Nothing I could say or do could ease his hurt. “Emma, please…”

  “I’ll go and help Mrs Seaton,” I said before he needed to, and left him kneeling, head bowed, by his parents’ monument.

  I found Joan struggling to fill the kettle in a kitchen smelling of damp and decay. Pale green gloss paint peeled in patches from the walls and worn lino from the floor. I took the heavy kettle from her and filled it. “What does your son do, Joan?”

  “Roger’s a merchant banker – quite an important one, I believe. We had hoped he would run the estate of course, but he was never very fond of the country and he couldn’t have the bother of it all when my husband died.” She perched on an old wheezy vinyl-topped stool by the stove like a finch. The tap dripped incessantly.

  “Does he visit often?” I asked casually, looking for cups and saucers.

  “You might need to rinse those, my dear.” I tipped a spider out of one; it scuttled under the crack between the sink and the draining board. “He visits when he can, but it is quite a way for him to travel from London, and he doesn’t like to leave the City because he always has a meeting to go to. He works so hard,” she added, but a bit defensively I thought, as if she were trying to convince herself. “He would come more often, but times are difficult for bankers these days, not at all like they were.”

  But not that hard, I thought, crossly scanning the dilapidated kitchen and the thin, frail old woman sitting in it. Definitely not that hard.

  “Your fiancé seemed a little quiet in the church, if you don’t mind me saying so, Emma my dear.”

  “I think he found it more difficult than he expected; it’s quite an emotional journey for him.” Clichéd, but I couldn’t think of a better way of putting it.

  “Families are emotional, aren’t they?” she agreed. “There’s no getting away from them – it’s in the blood, so to speak. Matthew is astonishingly like his forebear, so very handsome, don’t you think? When I was a girl and not yet married a year, my husband spent some time restoring part of the fabric of the church, as it had got into quite a shocking state in his parents’ day. I helped him sometimes – just little jobs, like cleaning the tiles or the brass inscriptions – and I used to imagine the Lynes family stepping down from their memorial window and what I would say to them and especially to him.” She looked out of the window into the stone-walled courtyard, and it seemed to me that she warmed a little at the memory, and her peaked face softened. “It was all such a long time ago,” she said, and I wasn’t sure whether she meant her youth, or his.

  The kettle finally boiled and I made tea under her exacting eye. I carried the bent tray with the rattling cups through to the great hall as she recounted tales from her girlhood as a young bride at the manor. The sun shone in her voice as the years melted away in her words, and I thought how loved Nanna and Ellen had been in their great age, and how this old woman wasn’t, and t
he neglect she accepted when she shouldn’t.

  Matthew joined us sometime later. I looked up anxiously as he came and sat down beside me, and I couldn’t tell whether his smile was to reassure me, or a sign that he had found some peace within himself.

  “Did you find what you came for, my dear?” Joan asked, offering him a cup. “I’m afraid your tea will be rather tepid. Emma will make you a fresh cup, won’t you?” She eased herself with some difficulty into a more comfortable position and Matthew winced.

  “Have you been given anything by your doctor for your pain, Mrs Seaton?”

  “Dear, how clever of you to notice! Dr Crawford said it’s to be expected at my age and paracetamol upsets my stomach, so I just have to put up with it.”

  Matthew’s brow knitted. “You need to keep warm,” he said, pulling a rug from the sofa and folding it over her knees.

  “Roger said he would order some wood at Christmas, but then I had my fall. There’s some left from last year which will see me through to summer.” I imagined her struggling with a few sticks at a time from goodness only knows where she kept the wood pile.

  Matthew must have been thinking along the same lines. “I’ll see to that before we leave. Do you have any heaters of any kind?”

  “Just the one in my bedroom – oh, and another in the solar, which I don’t use any more. But Roger says…”

  “Hang Roger,” Matthew muttered sourly, safely out of earshot and already on his way towards the hall and the stairs to the first floor. I hoped she wouldn’t notice that he knew where to go.

  “Roger is always worried that I won’t have enough to live on,” she explained.

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t want you to be cold,” I said, coming to sit by her and thinking that he probably didn’t care one way or the other as long as she didn’t spend his inheritance.

  Matthew was soon back with an electric heater. “You need to keep this on all the time, night and day, so the room is warm when you come down in the morning. It’s much more efficient that way.” He looked about him, at the high ceilings and tall windows, the stone floors barely covered by threadbare rugs from another century, then at the modest heater giving out an insubstantial heat. “Night and day, Mrs Seaton, without fail – doctor’s orders. I’ll get some wood in before it gets any later.”

  Her hand fluttered to her face as she watched him leave the room, then she turned to me, old again. “It is such a big house to heat. Roger says that I should think about going into something smaller, but I really don’t want to leave.”

  “It’s your home; of course you want to stay for as long as you can.” I remembered how Nanna had felt the same way. “It’s a lovely house, so full of sunshine. I think it’s one of the finest medieval manors I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen loads. I did a research project on them once.”

  She lit with delight. “That’s just what that man said – the finest moated manor in the area, he thought. I was so pleased because it must be difficult to see it through all the dust.” She sighed, looking around her. “He was very attentive and most interested in the history of the area.”

  Matthew came in with a load of logs, and disappeared again.

  “Have you eaten, Joan? Can I make you something?”

  I heated some soup and buttered bread for her. When I brought it in, Matthew had completely filled both sides of the cavernous fireplace with logs, protecting them from sparks with two fire-screens he found somewhere. Joan was telling him about the row of shields carved on the stone surround. “You can see the Seatons quartered with the Lynes coat of arms, and here – with the Harringtons.” I placed the tray on a small table next to her. “Thank you, my dear, but I’ll see you out first; it takes me an age to eat nowadays.”

  She walked us slowly to the door, still chattering away happily. As we stood on the threshold, she cocked her head, looking more like a small bird than ever. “What a couple you make; how pleased your grandparents would have been to see you, Emma, and so proud. They would have loved this young man of yours.” She smiled up at Matthew. That was the best thing she could have said to me. I carefully placed my arms around her thin shoulders and embraced her gently, wishing so much that she had someone to care for her.

  She lifted the jade beads from around her neck and, with hands shaking from the effort, placed them over my head. “There,” her sharp eyes sparkled, “my mother-in-law gave these to me when I married. They are such a lovely green and they look so well against your hair.”

  “Oh, Joan, no really, I couldn’t…”

  “But of course you can – they are for the young and I have no one else to leave them to. Roger never married and I only have some distant cousins and they wouldn’t appreciate them. I believe,” she said, looking up at Matthew, “that you are the closest living relatives the Seaton family now have. How strange, how very peculiar.” She reached up and tentatively touched his face. He smiled and bowed his head.

  “It would be an honour to be so, ma’am.”

  “Emma, my dear,” she said without taking her eyes from him, “it could almost be him, he is so very like.”

  “Yes, he could, couldn’t he,” I said. We left her with the fragrant narcissi glowing in a little patch of late sun as we returned to the car.

  We were both quiet as I drove with a greater degree of caution down the lane and towards the main road home. “Is there nothing we can do to help her? She’s so frail – more so than when I last saw her.”

  “She’s strong enough in herself, but she’s in a fair amount of pain and it would help if that were under control. I’ll phone her doctor and suggest a new type of pain relief that won’t irritate her stomach. I know it’s not ethical to interfere with another doctor’s patient, but…”

  “Ethics didn’t stop you looking after me in your own rooms after Staahl’s attack, if I remember correctly.”

  “There are times,” he replied, “when common sense and humanity take precedence. Anyway, in this case, I’ll say I’m a relative over from the States for a visit, which should explain my lack of protocol. But it shouldn’t be necessary to intervene.” He stared fiercely at the fields beyond the hedge-line. “It makes me so angry, Emma, this attitude to the elderly. It’s as if someone reaches a certain age and then they’re… written off as a mere inconvenience. And when there’s no one to care for them, to protect them…” He lapsed into a brooding silence as we passed the shores of Rutland Water and headed towards Stamford.

  “Is that what happened with your father?”

  Agitated, he bit his knuckle. “No… yes… probably,” he admitted. “Seeing her like that and the house, the church, my parents – at least Nathaniel did what he could to look after my father, but I should have been there; I was his son and it was my duty to look after him, Emma. I failed him.”

  “Did he say that when you went back to visit him?” I slowed as the traffic built up. Cars – with fractious children, and dogs panting in the back – queued to leave the reservoir.

  “No, of course not. He knew as well as I did what would have happened if I’d been caught. It was safer for him as well as for me to stay away, but it doesn’t alter the fact that he needed me.”

  “It was better that than seeing his son accused under the Witchcraft Acts and hanged.” I shuddered. “Much better.”

  “Well, it’s a moot point because I wasn’t.”

  I didn’t think it debatable at all, but he sounded in no mood to discuss it now, and I let the matter drop.

  We were nearing Stamford when I remembered lunch. “I’m starving,” I remarked to no one in particular. I heard a grunted laugh next to me.

  “Then the venison had a lucky escape.”

  And I knew that, whatever his misgivings about his actions in the past, he had concluded there was nothing he could do about them now.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Dining Out

  We didn’t mention it again. Beth and Rob had invited us to their home so that Mum and Dad didn’t hav
e to cook, nor rely on my dubious attempts to sustain them. Now, more than ever, I wished I’d had the patience to learn to cook when young, and when Nanna had been there to teach me.

  My sister lived in a tight stone terrace. They bought the house when they first married and it was too small for a family with three children, but buying the coffee shop had taken up any equity they had earned and they would have to stay put until the business broke even – or broke the bank. In the case of the latter, they might be obliged to move in with our parents, and Rob did everything in his power to prevent that.

  Herded by Beth, we squeezed down the narrow hallway. Rich, meaty smells drifted from the kitchen at the back.

  “Dinner won’t be long – go on through,” Rob hailed us from the kitchen, bottle in one hand and a half-peeled parsnip in the other. We filed into the tiny sitting room area, filling it at once.

  “Darling, where are the children?” Mum asked, joining us on the sofa.

  With Archie’s chewed bunny in one hand, Beth waved in the general direction of the stairs. “Arch is in a straightjacket in his cot and the twins are getting ready for bed. They’ve been promised a DVD if they’re quick, but they couldn’t decide between Dracula and Aliens last time I checked.”

  Dad did his neck thing, looking like a turtle. “I’m not sure if those films are entirely suitable, Elizabeth. If I’m not mistaken they are both rated eighteen.” To be honest, I think we were both surprised he’d heard of them. Beth gave me a sidelong look and I kept a straight face as I considered the children’s choice.

  “I reckon there’s not much to choose between them, Beth. For thrills, perhaps Newt and Ripley trapped in the med lab with the alien just about outdoes Lucy Westenra’s gallons of blood.”