by Sarah Rayne
‘I trust you to do this, Maeve.
‘And even after these tests have been performed and death is definite, please arrange cremation rather than burial. I would rather that than being put alive in the grave.
‘You are a good girl, and I trust you.
‘Your loving Aunt Eifa.’
Maeve had wanted desperately to put her aunt’s letter down to insanity – to believe that the family taint Aunt Eifa had referred to was not this catalepsy thing, but quite simply madness.
She thought she might have done so but for one thing. The baby the long-ago Thaisa had borne. The child Andrew had found in Quire Court, and who he had written about in his journal from that part of his life.
‘It lay on its back,’ he had written, ‘the head straight, as if the eyes had been staring upwards … The hands and also the feet were raised in grotesque supplication … The child had not been dead when it was put into the grave …’
Not dead when put into the grave. And, three weeks earlier, Aunt Eifa’s coffin had been lowered into the grave, and the soil sprinkled over it, and the grass turfs replaced.
If Eifa had been buried alive it was worlds and light years away from playing a piece of music in the hope that a second stroke would snuff out her life. It was monstrous, a nightmare, not to be thought of. Except that Maeve knew she would think of it; she knew it would haunt her for the rest of her life. Because it would be her fault.
She would give the will to the solicitor, but she would burn the letter, and she would go through Cliff House, from cellar to attic, and she would burn every scrap and every fragment of paper or photograph or document that might lead anyone to delve into the history of her family. She would burn the recording of ‘Thaisa’s Song’, as well. It must never be played, ever again, because that, too, could revive memories, suspicions. It could waken forgotten curiosity.
When she had dealt with all that, she would do what her aunt had done. She would shut out the world and she would bar the doors of the house to everyone, and she would live her life without anyone knowing what had happened.
It would have been all right. Seated in the music room, the memories all about her, Maeve knew it would have been all right if it had not been for the revival of the medieval Revels – if it had not been for the search for ‘Thaisa’s Song’. And if Nell West and Dr Flint had not come to Rede Abbas.
The bell was no longer sounding – the clamour that Eifa Eynon had heard all those years ago as she prized open her mother’s coffin had stopped. Did that mean those two had been rescued? Yes, of course it did. It could not be very long before people came to Cliff House to question Maeve.
I can’t bear it, she thought again. She went out of the music room, and walked slowly round the house, looking into all the rooms, feeling the ghosts and the memories reaching out to her, feeling the tragedies and sadnesses pressing in.
Eifa, and Eifa’s mother, whom Maeve had never known. Maeve’s own mother, who had been here, and found ‘Thaisa’s Song’. She had not destroyed it after all – in the end she had not been able to sever the fragile link to her mother and to Andrew, so the tape was still in her wardrobe. Was it still playable after so many years?
There were things that must be done – done now and quickly. Memories to be destroyed. Clues to be burned. After that …
She worked quickly and efficiently. She did not think she missed anything. Then she sat down at her aunt’s desk and reached for pen and notepaper. A very brief note was all that was needed.
As she laid down her pen, she thought Andrew was in the room with her, watching to make sure she got everything right.
TWENTY-THREE
‘She took an overdose,’ said the police inspector to Michael and Nell in the comfortable, reassuring coffee room of The Swan, much later that night. ‘She was lying on her bed when we finally got into Cliff House. We haven’t got forensic reports yet, of course, so we don’t know exactly what she took. There’s no note, but the obvious explanation is that she was so horrified at having trapped you both in the bell tower – at realizing you had escaped and she was likely to be arrested – that she took her own life.’
‘How immensely sad,’ said Nell, softly.
‘It would have been sadder if you and Dr Flint hadn’t got out,’ said the inspector.
‘That’s true. And,’ said Michael, ‘we’re immensely grateful to your men for responding to that wretched bell. Could you tell them that? It’s a brilliant rescue service you’ve got here.’
‘All part of the job, Dr Flint.’
‘I shouldn’t think I’ll ever forget climbing out through the bell chamber into that helicopter,’ said Nell.
The inspector smiled. ‘I shouldn’t think Rede Abbas will ever forget hearing that bell sounding, Mrs West. You’ll go down in local legend.’
Michael said, ‘I suppose Maeve Eynon was mad? Because there was no possible motive for her to imprison either of us in there.’
‘We don’t know what she was, or what her motive might have been,’ said the inspector. ‘Most likely we never will. There’ll be a post mortem and an inquest, of course, and we might know a bit more by then. But myself, I think she was severely unbalanced. And she’d lived in that old house by herself ever since she was a girl. No friends, no work, no companionship.’
‘That’s the saddest part,’ said Nell.
‘Oh, yes. But enough to send anyone off the rails, I’d have thought.’ He got up to go. ‘It’s very late, and you’ll be wanting to get some rest after your ordeal, so I’ll say goodnight. Are you able to stay on for the inquest? We’ve got your statements, but it might be useful if you were on hand.’
‘We should get back to Oxford tomorrow,’ said Michael. ‘But if you think we’ll be wanted, we could come back for the inquest.’ He looked questioningly at Nell, who nodded.
‘I’ll let you know when it will be – probably a couple of weeks. One curious thing, though,’ said the inspector. ‘After we got you out, and after we found out what had happened, we went up to Cliff House, as you know. It was well after eight o’clock, and the Dusklight Concert had started an hour earlier – in fact it was almost ending. And the curious thing was that when we found Miss Eynon, she seemed to have been burning a number of things. Mostly papers and some old books, but there was also one of those old cassette tapes. You remember them? They gave place to CDs, of course, but they were very popular twenty or thirty years ago.’
‘Yes, certainly.’
‘The actual tape hadn’t burned entirely,’ he said. ‘It had partly melted, but there was a small label next to it with the wording just about readable.’
Nell said, ‘Was it by any chance “Thaisa’s Song”?’
‘Yes, it was, although how you know that—’
‘A lucky guess,’ she said. ‘It’s the music the festival people were trying to find for tonight, isn’t it?’
‘So I’m told. Gerald Orchard turned half Rede Abbas upside-down, and the choir were routed from their beds at crack of dawn today,’ said the inspector. ‘But from the times we’ve got, it looks as if Maeve Eynon was burning that tape just as the choir were singing “Thaisa’s Song”. She took the overdose immediately afterwards. The song would still be going on. Coincidence, I daresay, but even so, it’s odd, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Nell. ‘Yes, it’s very odd.’
‘I daresay there’ve been odder things, though,’ said the inspector. ‘I’ll bid you both goodnight.’
Later, in their room, Michael said, ‘Would you like to have heard “Thaisa’s Song” at the concert?’
‘Not really. In fact I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to hear it. I have,’ said Nell, thoughtfully, ‘got quite a lot to tell you about “Thaisa’s Song”.’
‘I’ve got a few things to tell you about Quire Court,’ said Michael. He paused, then said, ‘Neither of us has mentioned the remains of that body we saw inside the stone figure yet, have we? I don’t suppose we’ll ever know who it was. But we
haven’t talked about it.’
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
Michael considered for a moment. He was lying on the bed after taking his second, very hot, shower since they had reached The Swan. Nell thought they might both be slightly obsessive about showering for the next few days; it was as if the smell and the feel of the bell tower would never leave them.
‘I don’t think I could dredge up the mental energy to talk about stone figures at the moment,’ said Michael. ‘All I want to do is crash out here, and sleep for about a week.’ He raised himself on one elbow and looked at her. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, thoughtfully, ‘if you’re going to be crashing out next to me, sleep could perhaps be delayed. For half an hour or so …?’
‘Or even a bit longer than that …?’
‘Well, yes. In fact, certainly yes.’
‘And,’ said Nell, coming over to the bed, ‘we don’t have to set off at break of dawn tomorrow, do we?’
Michael grinned and held out his hand to her.
They drove back to Oxford, resolutely not discussing what had happened while Beth was with them.
Beth, who only knew that her mother and Michael had been delayed and missed the Dusklight Concert, which she said had been lavish, was delightedly recounting all the things she had seen, and what people had said, and how brilliant it had all been.
‘I’d really like to go back,’ she said. ‘Did you say you had to anyway, Mum?’
‘Either Michael or I might have to in a few days’ time, but it would only be a quick visit. It might even be there and back the same day.’
‘Oh, OK.’ Beth appeared to accept this, then said, ‘Are we going back through that same bit of Oxford again? Where we saw that old house?’
‘I shouldn’t think so. We only took those side roads to escape the snarl-up of rush-hour traffic. Why?’
‘Um, I just thought I’d like to see the house again.’ Beth seemed about to say something else, then caught her mother’s eye in the driving mirror, and subsided into the absorbing pastime of texting everyone who had been at the Rede Abbas hostel.
Michael had been reading the notes Nell had made that morning about Andrew’s journal. As he finished them, Nell pulled in to a motorway service station for a late lunch, and when Beth went up to the counter to collect a pudding, Michael said quietly, ‘What do we make of all that “buried alive” stuff you found in Andrew’s journal? Andrew wrote about Adolphus Glaum and Theodora’s mother being found still alive. Your notes on that part were pretty comprehensive. How much credence do we give it?’
‘Some,’ said Nell. ‘There might have been a form of catalepsy; it might even have been an inherited condition, although I don’t know if it’s something that can be inherited – that’s a grim thought, isn’t it?’
‘Was there a link between the Glaums and the Eynons?’
‘There could have been. The Glaums sounded quite roistering. Bastard children and droit du seigneur all over the place, I shouldn’t wonder. And catalepsy certainly used to fool doctors into certifying death. I don’t think it could happen now. Or, if it does,’ said Nell, with a shiver, ‘I don’t think anyone knows about it. It’s certainly fuelled at least a dozen gothic tales, though, hasn’t it?’
Michael said, ‘Dumas’s ill-starred Abbé Faria and George Eliot’s Silas Marner. And all the way to the farcical end of the scale – Charles Dickens’ Mrs Snagsby in Bleak House being carried upstairs like a grand piano.’
‘Not to mention full-frontal modern-day horror splattering its gore across Blu-ray and Multiplex,’ said Nell, gravely. She looked across at the food queue. Beth had reached the front, and Nell said, ‘I hesitate to drag you into the present, but I wonder how well Jack Hurst’s got on with the shops.’
‘So do I.’ Later tonight – or even tomorrow, when there was a bit more distance between them and the tower – Michael was going to tell Nell about finding that fragile little body. He had tried to imagine how she would react, and he had a worrying suspicion that she might be all right about working there during the day, with people coming and going, and the ordinary, daytime sounds of the Court itself, but that she might feel differently about being there at night – about actually living and sleeping in the building.
‘I should think the worst’s done by now,’ he said. ‘Didn’t Jack say you might be able to move into the new flat in about a week?’
‘Yes, but builders tend to be purveyors of false promises. We’ll probably be greeted by utter chaos.’
‘One thing we will be greeted with is some research results from Owen,’ said Michael, who had been checking his phone for messages. ‘There’s a very exuberant email from him here, saying he’s deciphered quite a bit of the diary I found in the storeroom.
‘The equivalent of the Chaucer manuscript in the baked bean carton?’
‘Yes. Owen still thinks it’s genuine, but he’s going to talk to Brant next week. He’s managed to decipher several sections of it, though, and – oh, this sounds really good – he says he’s plundered the Bodleian, although we hadn’t better ask how he got in there outside their normal hours—’
‘If he’s found Brother Cuthwin I don’t care if he’s committed blackmail and felony in every library in Oxford,’ said Nell.
‘He has found Brother Cuthwin!’ said Michael, in delight. ‘He says he’s unearthed an interpretation or translation made by a nineteenth-century monk – might that be your Andrew?’
‘More likely Brother Egbert,’ said Nell.
‘Oh yes, the scholarly monk. Anyway, Owen says he’s only got about a tenth of the diary, but he’s put that alongside the Cuthwin papers, and he thinks there’s enough for a fair résumé of the on-goings at Rede Abbas in the sixteenth century.’
‘Intriguing.’
‘And he says can he come to supper as soon as possible to relate his discovery?’
‘Assuming there’s light and heat at Quire Court, he can come for whatever meal he likes,’ said Nell, as Beth came happily back with a huge plate of chocolate fudge cake. ‘I can’t wait to hear about Brother Cuthwin.’
Quire Court, when they reached it, was not engulfed in Nell’s prophesied chaos. The two shops had a pleasing air of being ready to take furniture, and there were clean scents of new paint and timber everywhere.
‘Looking good,’ said Nell, standing in what was now the large showroom. ‘In fact, looking pretty terrific. It’s much more spacious than I was visualizing.’ She ran her hands over the smooth walls and peered into the display alcoves. ‘I can’t wait to get the stuff out of my house and properly set out.’
‘It’s utterly good,’ said Beth, who was pattering round the rooms with pleased curiosity. ‘Is my bedroom ready, d’you s’pose? Not that I want to sleep in it while it’s all like this, but still.’
‘I’m going to sprint upstairs to look,’ said Nell. ‘You two stay here.’ She thought Michael made an instinctive move to come with her, but she said, ‘I’ll only be a moment,’ and he nodded as if he understood, and said something about checking the storerooms where Jack Hurst had been working over the weekend.
Nell had not acknowledged, even to herself, that she was nervous of the attic where she had found Theodora’s fear-driven note.
‘If anyone finds this, please pray for me, for it will mean the dead bell has sounded and I have suffered Thaisa’s fate … ’
The attic room was quiet and untroubled. The scribbled message was gone, of course – Jack Hurst and his sidekicks had obliterated it with new plaster and timber beams and struts. Nell placed the flat of her hand experimentally on the section of wall where Theodora had written that message, but there was no impression that anything sad or frightened lingered. This was a relief; Nell had already decided Beth could not sleep in here if anything felt wrong. But she did not think Theodora’s ghost had ever lingered here. And yet what about the flickering lights, and the sounds – the rhythmic slap of wet mortar against brick; the blurred figure that seemed to move across
the shop, and then to vanish? And the faint singing – had that really been ‘Thaisa’s Song’, or had it come from beyond Quire Court anyway?
Probably she would never know what had happened to Theodora and Andrew, thought Nell, and went back downstairs to where Michael was saying something about the old storeroom not being quite finished, and the door had better remain closed because the floor was still up.
‘I have to say,’ said Owen Bracegirdle, the following evening, ‘that when you two stumble on a mystery, you do so in spectacular fashion.’ He brandished a sheaf of notes at them.
‘Cuthwin,’ said Nell, smiling.
‘Cuthwin, indeed. And,’ said Owen, ‘reading him felt remarkably like uncharted territory, because I suspect no one has read him for a hundred years – if, that is, anyone has read him at all since he found his way into the Bodleian.’ He shuffled his notes. ‘The transcribing seems to have been the life’s work of a nineteenth-century monk at Rede Abbas monastery.’
‘Brother Egbert,’ said Nell. ‘I found some references to him in the local library.’
‘He seems to have made a scholarly and diligent transcription,’ said Owen, judiciously. ‘I think he tweaked a fair bit of the actual phrasing and words used, so although it’s a bit Victorian-sounding, it’s nicely clear, and we can put it alongside the journal Michael found in the shop – you do know about that by now, I suppose, Nell?’
‘The child’s grave? Yes, Michael told me earlier.’
‘Ah. Are you all right about it?’
‘Not yet, but I will be eventually,’ said Nell, who was not in fact entirely sure about this.
‘It’s all very sad, but don’t forget it was a long time ago—’
‘And in the dark backward and abysm of time,’ murmured Michael, looking across at Nell. ‘Owen, are you going to read your notes aloud?’
‘If that’s agreeable. And from what I’ve deciphered so far, all I can say is I’m afraid it’s all likely to be true. It was a brutal age,’ he said. ‘It isn’t dated, by the way, but Brother Egbert seems to have assigned the early mid-1500s to it.’
