‘This morning, as my keeper brought me victuals no dog would swallow, I heard them bleed Moll Keene. Before they drowned her shrieks with hymns she cried that they were putting leeches to her eyes. I think Ben Clay is half lunatic himself. Certes they would never have allowed him to prosecute such tortures in Bedlam, but since he came into his father’s inheritance and erected Nazareth Hill Refuge he is lord of all within his walls. His brother Joseph may declare himself a surgeon with impunity, while Clay’s wife Liza is responsible for the filth in which we are kept and on which we are fed, through the funnel if need be or for her delight. I pray God that they will not be able to conceal so much from the Commissioner.’
Amy closed her eyes and opened them again, which failed to stop the flickering of her vision. The writing in the margins appeared to be performing feeble leaps, trying to regain her attention by raising itself higher than the printed text. She was no longer sure she comprehended all that she was transcribing, but it seemed more important to write it while she could. Across the hall her father was talking, presumably on the phone, though he sounded as though he was muttering to himself. She turned the flimsy page, on which the pencilled scrawl was terminated by a cross whose four bars were equal.
‘Moll Keene is blind, and Alice can no longer reach the window, her hands and feet being mortified by rusty manacles and fetters. This I know and more, because Alice has been true to her vow that I should hear her. In the night her whisper comes to me between the bricks, for none of our tormentors to hear. Clay blames her and her sister most grievously, she whispers, not merely for keeping old beliefs alive but for the state of every lunatic in his private-madhouse. He dreaded Moll’s eyes, and Alice fears her own may be subjected to his mercies. On occasion he has burned her and her sister with torches, declaring these to be a foretaste of hellfire. Yet I sense that Alice awaits some deliverance, and what could this be save the Commissioner’s visit?’
Amy’s gaze skipped past the cross to the next words. The events about which she was reading had occurred centuries ago, yet her heart sank as though her innards had turned to quicksand—as though the events were happening, or about to happen, to her.
‘God help us, all is lost. The Commissioner has made his visit. It was my design to convince him first of my sanity before recounting the horrors which are our lot, but every proof I gave him of the soundness of my mind he dismissed as my delusion. At the last my words eluded my control. Mayhap I have no words to call my own, but only those I learned from the books my father would read aloud to us until I grew incapable of restraining my arguments against the falsehoods called natural law, that system which maintains that God created lunatics for his own purposes and hence that they deserve their plight. Alas, my parents! They have vowed never to visit me until I am cured, but why should Clay declare me so and relinquish his fee? After the visit Clay stalked through his domain to inform us that the Commissioner cannot withdraw the licence, no matter what conditions or mistreatment may have been apparent, but is confined to displaying a report in the Royal College of Physicians, a world away in London. Clay’s triumphant shouts were audible in Partington, and from my window I saw folk grin at them as they do at our pleas and screams.’
The cross which ended this passage appeared to be flying apart, and Amy closed her eyes as its fragments stirred. Only the aches which the pencil and her thumbnail embedded in her forefinger made her look again and, however shakily, write.
‘The visit has increased Clay’s fiendishness an hundredfold, and Alice no longer has a tongue; yet still I hear her whisper to me in the night. He has promised her that she will suffer the great fire by Candlemas, and raves of purifying every woman in his charge. Howbeit Alice and her disciples seem almost to encourage and to welcome their fate. Clay thought to raise their prison and their tomb close to their sacred place, not knowing that he built upon the place itself, just as the monastery was built to crush it. This is their hill of celebration and renewal, Alice whispers, and there is a power in death not to be found in life. Yet how may I believe such stuff, or even trust that I am hearing it in truth? Has she or my treatment turned my brain? Why must I drudge at scribbling so? Does that not prove me wrongheaded? I should deface these pages no more, but seek solace in them.’
Amy turned the page, which felt barely substantial to her awkward fingers. Contradicting the previous sentence, the scrawl continued, so large now that each margin could contain only a single line of writing. It was preceded by a cross whose upper bar was significantly longer than the lower.
‘Candlemas is come, and with it fire. I hear those scream who have the means to scream, and smell their burning. Clay must mean to put it to me, believing me tainted by the old beliefs, for I am fettered. Should I have heeded Alice’s exhortation to discover the old powers within myself? I can find it in me to be comforted by the antics of her pet Perkin, the cat with the face of a Keene. I shall write until Clay comes to me, that someone may read of his monstrous handling of the wretches in his charge. Then Perkin will bear away—’
A capital letter showed that the writer had interrupted herself.
‘The fire is at my door. At least Clay cannot delight in my death, for the flames have proved greater than he. The Clays have gone up like chaff on a bonfire, and now the inferno consumes his refuge. Did Alice and the others find the power to turn the flames on our tormentors? May the fumes stop my breath before I burn!’
The writer had made a last mark on the opposite page, which bore the opening verses of Matthew. It was a defiantly inverted cross, drawn so savagely that the pencil had ripped deep into the succeeding pages, and so broad in its outlines that the vertical bar could have been used as a niche for the pencil itself. No pencil was there, however. Perhaps, thought Amy, it had been dislodged when the writer had flung the Bible out of her window, if she had. She hardly knew what she was thinking. She dropped the pad on the quilt and placed pencil and Bible on top, and lifted her head. The headache which had been awaiting that moment exploded at once.
She stood up very gingerly and wobbled to her door, from which she wavered across the hall to fetch her forgotten bag. When she managed to locate the pills Beth Griffin had prescribed for her, she found just two in the stubby plastic tube. They would have to suffice until the morning. It was past midnight, and at some point her father had gone to his room. She sucked the minute herbal tablets as she groped her way to the bathroom, and swallowed them before brushing her teeth. All she wanted now was to close her eyes; there wasn’t even room in her head for fear. Nevertheless she took time to lodge the pencil in the niche inside the Bible, and stored the Bible and her pad beneath her pillow. Then she switched off the light and let her eyelids add to the darkness, which welcomed her like an old friend and led her into the last untroubled night’s sleep of her life.
16 - The past decides
While Amy pored over her Bible Oswald spoke into the phone, but soon discovered he had no more calls to make. ‘If there’s anything further I can do for you, Mrs Kay,’ he found himself saying before long, ‘anything whatsoever you can bring to mind. Your home or your car or your children or your old age. You can never be too safe. If you’re absolutely sure there’s nothing…’ He already knew there was: not so much as a voice in his ear, or even a dialling tone now that he’d switched off the receiver to shut up the mechanical exhortation to replace the handset and try again. All he could hear apart from himself was a series of monotonously shrill electrical noises not unlike an incomprehensible message in Morse, and he no longer knew why he was pretending to carry on a conversation, nor why he’d invented that name to address. ‘Miss Key is more the way of it,’ he muttered as his grimace tried to form itself into a grin.
He had no reason to be amused, and his cleverness only distressed him. Cleverness wasn’t needed here, hard cold thinking was. He shoved the receiver into its housing and made himself sit down again. However much he wanted to storm into Amy’s room, there was no point until he was certain how to dea
l with her and her behaviour.
He’d found the evidence after she’d attempted to persuade him to let her stay in Sheffield overnight. Her call had betrayed that she wasn’t as resigned to living in Nazarill as she wanted him to think. While awaiting her return he’d looked into her room in case it contained anything that might suggest a way to reach her, and at once he had seen the Bible next to the bed—indeed, it had been the sole item on which he’d been able to focus amid all the untidiness. But when he had turned to the first verses he’d groaned and cried out to God.
She’d filled the margins with nonsense in a scrawl that hardly even resembled her handwriting. He’d been able to distinguish the occasional word: friends, captors, books, father—more than enough to show him that far worse was wrong with her than he’d had the courage to admit. He had been ready to confront her with her unholy scribbling as soon as she came home, and had it been a further lack of courage which had impelled him to make the book appear untouched after he’d admitted her to Nazarill? Now she must be scribbling in the secrecy of her room, a vision from which his thoughts retreated in search of occasions when he should have known all was not right with her. Almost at once his memories halted as though Nazarill had reined them in. It had been here she’d first upset her mother.
She ought to have known he wouldn’t drop her through the window. He had only been lifting her up so that she could see, the way fathers always lifted up their children, and she would have known she was safe if she had been a normal child. Instead she’d behaved as if he hadn’t rescued her. He saw the truth now. His child secretly enjoyed believing in the things she purported to fear.
Even if he’d realised at the time he mightn’t have told Heather, who had already been distressed enough. ‘She’ll be all right, won’t she?’ she’d kept trying to reassure herself after they had seen Amy off to sleep. ‘Do you think we’ll need to take her to the doctor?’ That had been less a question than a plea, which she’d repeated as though guilt was forcing it out of her mouth. The situation hadn’t been her fault, he thought fiercely, but perhaps she had continued to blame herself despite all his efforts to comfort her; perhaps in the darkest depths of herself she’d concluded that, given her heredity, she should never have had a child. Suppose it had been her concern for Amy that had distracted her on the night of the murderous fog? There was no question that if it hadn’t been for Amy he would have been with Heather at the end.
Perhaps it was unfair to hold a child of that age responsible, but he certainly felt justified in doing so at the age she was now. She wasn’t even acting it; she was behaving like a small destructive child. She mightn’t be so ready to destroy the reputation of their home if she spent more time in it, which would at least place out of her reach some of the temptations to do God only knew what damage to her mind. That mind was his responsibility, and he had to save it while there was time, if it wasn’t already too late.
‘It mustn’t be,’ he said aloud. ‘Please, I’ll do anything. Just show me what has to be done.’ He heard his voice reach out, and felt as though the very rooms around him yearned to answer him—almost all the rooms. The thought of the mess in Amy’s bedroom made his skin feel as grubby and infested as a dusty cobweb in a dark corner, sensations which seemed designed to distract him from praying, so that he flung himself out of his chair, muttering ‘Get away.’ Rubbing his hands and arms and torso hard enough to hurt them, he gave Amy’s abandoned bag a conspiratorial glance before hurrying into his bedroom.
He closed the door and without switching on the light fell heavily to his knees by the bed. He clasped his aching knuckles with his aching fingers and squeezed his eyes shut until they throbbed, but Amy or his fears for her seemed to be preventing him from praying. Eventually he managed by concentrating on key words which, like handholds, helped him through the fraught dark. Father. Heaven. Kingdom. Will be done. Trespass against us. Temptation. Evil. ‘Amen,’ he said, and began again at once.
Each time the word came round it felt stronger in his mouth, more of an acceptance of the course on which he was set. When his commitment was absolutely secure, incapable of being reversed or modified for any reason, he rose from his bruised knees and hobbled to the bathroom to cleanse himself inside and out. ‘You can never be too clean,’ he said, sharing a grin with himself in the mirror. Then he remembered Amy’s room, and saw his face stiffen, pressing his lips together an instant before he felt them meet. He tugged the cord and stared at the glazed picture of himself in the dark. When it had communicated all its implacability to him he went back to his room. He changed into his pyjamas, whose stripes always put him in mind of both a convict and a businessman, and having slipped the keys under the pillow, climbed into bed.
He was by no means asleep, although his thoughts had at least begun to melt into a doze, when he heard Amy emerge from her room. Even when he realised she was going to the bathroom, he couldn’t relax. He made himself listen until she finished, then he strained his ears to reassure himself that she hadn’t simply closed her bedroom door as a preamble to wandering the apartment. Thank God, she was safely shut in. Sooner or later there would no doubt have to be a confrontation, but he was glad that wasn’t now, before he’d a chance to sleep. He was able to soothe himself into slumber with the knowledge that she wouldn’t be going anywhere, not when the mortise-lock of the door to the outer corridor was locked with the key on the ring he’d taken from her bag and was keeping safe beneath his pillow.
17 - A public disgrace
The instant Amy opened her eyes she was fully awake. She remembered everything she had deciphered, and now she understood. She had to tell someone, not yet her father—someone who wouldn’t take so much persuading. She raised her hand to where she knew the light-cord was, and closed her fist around the plastic knob, and pulled. The illumination brought all the chaos of her room to life, a sight which for the present seemed irrelevant, and revived the threat of last night’s headache. As she sat up and kicked off the tangled quilt, the whole of the inside of her skull felt like the back of her eyes. Beth would give her more tablets, but first she needed to talk. She rubbed her cold feet, then let her hands attend to each other as she padded from one patch of uncluttered carpet to the next. She eased the door open and came face to face with her father.
He was sitting on a dining-chair in the doorway of his bedroom. His hands were clasped in his lap, but as he saw her his fingers rose from gripping his knuckles and stretched in her direction like the tendrils of a plant with animal ambitions. Several repetitions of a momentary smile which appeared to express or at least to pretend surprise hoisted the corners of his lips and let them drop. His gaze was far steadier so resigned it might as well have been blank. ‘This is not like you,’ he said.
Amy sidled within reach of the plaque which held the phone. ‘What?’
‘Up before noon of a Saturday. Was your sleep troubled?’
‘It was fine. How about yours?’ Amy retorted, because he looked as though he had been dressed for hours in the business clothes he was wearing. An untouched mug of coffee squatted beside him, its surface muddy with scum. His eyes grew almost as blank as that before he said ‘The sleep of the just.’
She couldn’t tell whether he was referring to his own or making a less straightforward comment about hers. She was reaching for the phone when he said ‘May I ask what you are planning?’
She might have said to use the phone, but she couldn’t help reacting. ‘To get older and buy a car and live in my own flat when I go to university.’
‘Attempt to confine yourself to the next few minutes.’
‘Phone Rob.’
‘You don’t consider that you might be disturbing him.’
‘If he isn’t up he’ll get up for me,’ Amy said, her eyes on the day beyond the window. Weak though it was, the external light felt like a promise of release from Nazarill. ‘It isn’t that early,’ she told her father, and freeing the receiver, tapped Rob’s number.
Two pairs of
rings and the first syllable of the third were enough to bring her a response. ‘Hello?’
‘Rob?’
‘He isn’t about just yet. In fact, I heard him very definitely going back to sleep. Is that Amy?’
‘Hi, Mr Hayward. Could you tell Rob—’
‘This is his mother.’
‘Sorry. Mrs Hayward. Tell him I’ll be round in a bit.’
‘If he ever joins the living I will.’
Amy had said as much as she could have to Rob within earshot of her father. She housed the receiver and turned to find her father watching her as though he hadn’t even blinked. ‘Problem?’ she demanded.
‘They sound somewhat of an odd couple to me.’
‘How would you know? You’ve never met them.’ Amy was readying herself for an argument when she saw that would only delay her. For a moment she had a nervous impression that Nazarill had manufactured it for just such a reason. ‘Whither now?’ her father said.
‘Over to Beth’s.’
‘To what end?’
‘The usual.’ His questions had begun to close in on her, and she was heading for the outer corridor until she became more aware of her state. ‘You didn’t think I was going dressed like this,’ she said.
‘I had to wonder.’
He sounded so grim she was sorry she’d bothered to joke. She dodged into her room to grab a handful of clothes for carrying to the bathroom, where she pulled off the T-shirt she wore in bed and doused herself in a quick shower before dressing herself. As she unbolted the door she was suddenly nervous of finding her father outside, but he was still sitting where she’d last seen him, his gaze waiting for her. She slung the wadded T-shirt onto her bed and closed the door. ‘I won’t take my keys,’ she said.
The House On Nazareth Hill Page 27
