by Tom Holland
Rebecca’s face betrayed not a flicker of surprise. ‘For the keys?’ she asked.
Melrose leaned back in his chair. ‘The same as you. She wanted to find the memoirs of Lord Byron hidden in the crypt.’
Still Rebecca’s face seemed passionless. ‘And you gave them to her?’ she asked.
‘I had no choice.’
‘Because she was a Ruthven?’
Melrose nodded.
‘And yet now you want to try to stop me?’
‘No, Miss Carville, it is not a matter of trying. I will stop you. I will not give you the keys.’ Melrose stared into Rebecca’s narrowing eyes. He looked away, rising to his feet, crossing to a window and the darkness out beyond. ‘She vanished,’ he said at last, not turning round. ‘A few days after I gave her the keys. The police never found her. There was never anything, of course, to link her disappearance with Lord Ruthven, but I remembered all he had said, and what I had glimpsed in his face. I didn’t tell the police - afraid of seeming ridiculous, you understand - but with you, Miss Carville, I am prepared to risk seeming comical.’ He turned round to face her again. ‘Go away. It’s getting late. I’m afraid our meeting has come to an end.’
Rebecca didn’t move. Then slowly, she smoothed her hair back from her face. ‘The keys are mine,’ she said unblinkingly.
Melrose raised his arms in anger and frustration. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? Can’t you understand?’ He slumped into his chair. ‘Miss Carville, please, don’t be difficult. Just go, before I have to ring for you to be taken away.’
Rebecca shook her head gently. Melrose sighed, and reached across his desk to press an intercom. As he did so, Rebecca took a second sheaf of papers from her bag. She pushed them across the desk. Melrose glanced at them, then froze. He took up the first page and began to skim down it, glassily, as though unable, or unwilling, to read it through. He muttered something, then pushed the papers away from him. He sighed and for a long time said nothing more. At last, he shook his head and sighed a second time. ‘So, she was your mother, then?’
Rebecca nodded. ‘She kept her maiden name. I took my father’s.’
Melrose breathed in deeply. ‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘I wanted to know what you thought.’
‘Well, you know. Keep away from Fairfax Street.’
Rebecca smiled. ‘You’re not serious,’ she said, then laughed. ‘You can’t be.’
‘Would it make any difference if I say again that I am?’
‘No. None at all.’
Melrose stared at her, then nodded. ‘Very well, then,’ he said. ‘If you insist, I’ll have the keys brought to you.’ He pressed a button. There was no response. ‘Must be later than I’d realised,’ he muttered, rising to his feet. ‘If you’ll excuse me, Miss Carville.’ Rebecca watched him as he left his office, and the doors glided shut. She began to gather her papers together. Her certificates she slipped back into her bag; the bundle of letters she kept on her lap. She fiddled with them; then, as she heard the doors behind her opening again, she laid her slim fingers on the edge of the desk.
‘Here,’ said Melrose, holding out three keys on a large brass ring.
‘Thank you,’ said Rebecca. She waited to be given them, but the lawyer, as he stood by her, still kept the keys clutched tightly in his hand.
‘Please,’ said Rebecca. ‘Give them to me, Mr Melrose.’
Melrose made no answer at first. He stared into Rebecca’s face, long and hard, then he reached for the bundle of letters on her lap. ‘These,’ he said, holding them up, ‘the mysterious letters - they were your mother’s originally?’
‘I believe so.’
‘What do you mean, believe?’
Rebecca shrugged. ‘I was approached by a bookseller. He had been sold them. Apparently, it was well known that they had once been my mother’s.’
‘And so then he came to you?’
Rebecca nodded.
‘Very honest of him.’
‘Maybe. I paid.’
‘But how had he got them? And how had your mother lost the letters in the first place?’
Rebecca shrugged. ‘I think the bookseller had received them from a private collector. Beyond that, he didn’t know. I didn’t press.’
‘Weren’t you interested?’
‘They must have been stolen, I suppose.’
‘What? After your mother - disappeared?’
Rebecca glanced up at him. Her eyes glittered. ‘Possibly,’ she said.
‘Yes.’ Melrose paused. ‘Possibly.’ He studied the letters again. ‘They are genuine?’ he asked, looking back down at them.
‘I think so.’
‘But you can’t be sure?’
Rebecca shrugged. ‘I’m not qualified to say.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’d assumed . . .’
‘I am an Orientalist, Mr Melrose - it was my mother who was the Byron scholar. I’ve always read Byron, out of respect for her memory, but I have no claims to be an expert.’
‘I see. My mistake.’ Melrose stared at the letters again. ‘And so I suppose - this respect for your mother’s memory - is that why you’re so eager to track down the memoirs?’
Rebecca smiled faintly. ‘It would be fitting, don’t you think? I never knew my mother, you see, Mr Melrose. But I feel - what I’m doing - she would approve of it, yes.’
‘Even though the search may well have killed her?’
Rebecca’s brow darkened. ‘Do you really think that, Mr Melrose?’
He nodded. ‘Yes, I do.’
Rebecca looked away. She stared into the darkness of the night beyond the windows. ‘Then at least I would know what had happened to her,’ she said, almost to herself.
Melrose made no answer. Instead, he dropped the letters back into Rebecca’s lap. Still, though, he didn’t give her the keys.
Rebecca held out her hand. Melrose stared at it thoughtfully. ‘And so all along,’ he said softly, ‘you were a Ruthven. All along.’
Rebecca shrugged. ‘I can’t help my blood.’
‘No.’ Melrose laughed. ‘Of course you can’t.’ He paused. ‘Isn’t there a Ruthven Curse?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ Rebecca narrowed her eyes as she looked up at him. ‘There’s supposed to be.’
‘How does it work?’
‘I don’t know. The usual way, I guess.’
‘What? Ruthven after Ruthven - generation after generation - all felled by some mysterious power? Isn’t that the legend?’
Rebecca ignored the question. She shrugged again. ‘Lots of aristocratic families can lay claim to a curse. It’s nothing. A sign of breeding, if you like.’
‘Exactly.’
Rebecca frowned again. ‘What do you mean?’
Melrose laughed again. ‘Why, that it’s all in the blood, of course. All in the blood!’ He spluttered and choked, then continued to laugh.
‘You’re right,’ said Rebecca, rising to her feet, ‘for a lawyer, you are too imaginative.’ She held out her hand. ‘Mr Melrose - give me the keys.’
Melrose stopped laughing. He clutched the keys in his palm. ‘You are quite sure?’ he asked.
‘Quite sure.’
Melrose gazed deep into her eyes, then his shoulders slumped, and he leaned against the desk. He held out the keys.
Rebecca took them. She slipped them into her pocket.
‘When will you go?’ Melrose asked.
‘I don’t know. Sometime soon, I expect.’
Melrose nodded slowly, as though to himself. He returned to his chair. He watched as Rebecca crossed the office to the doors.
‘Miss Carville!’
Rebecca turned.
‘Don’t go.’
Rebecca stared at the lawyer. ‘I must,’ she said at last.
‘For your mother’s sake? But it is for your mother’s sake that I’m asking you not to go!’
Rebecca made no answer. She looked away. The doors slid open. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Melrose,’ she said
, turning back round. ‘Goodnight.’
Melrose stared after her with defeated eyes. ‘Goodnight,’ he said. ‘Goodnight.’ And then the doors slid shut, and Rebecca was on her own. She hurried towards a waiting lift. Behind her, the doors of the office stayed closed.
In the foyer, a bored security guard watched her as she left. Rebecca walked quickly through the doors, and then on down the street. It was good to be outside. She paused, and breathed in deeply. The wind was strong and the air cold, but after the closeness of the office, she welcomed the night, feeling, as she began to hurry down the street again, as weightless and storm-swept as an autumn leaf. Ahead, she could hear traffic - Bond Street, a gash in the darkness of people and lights. Rebecca crossed it, then turned back to the silence of empty mews. Mayfair seemed deserted. The high, forbidding street fronts were virtually untouched by lights. Once a car passed, but otherwise there was nothing, and the silence filled Rebecca with a strange, fevered joy. She kept the keys in her palm, a talisman, to quicken the rhythm of blood through her heart.
By Bolton Street, she came to a halt. She realised she was shaking. She leaned against a wall. Her excitement suddenly frightened her. She remembered the lawyer’s strange words. ‘Drawn,’ he had said, describing her mother. She remembered how he had appealed to her, despairingly, not to visit Fairfax Street. Rebecca glanced behind her. The road she was on had been the haunt of dandies once, where fortunes had been lost, lives ruined, gambled away with the curl of a lip. Lord Byron had come here. Byron. Suddenly, the fever in her blood seemed to sing, with ecstasy and a quite unexpected shock of fear. There seemed no reason for it, nothing she could put into words, and yet, as she stood there in the shadowed silence, she realised that she was terrified. But of what? She tried to identify the cause. She had just been thinking of something. Byron. Yes, that was it - Byron. And there it was - the same fear again. Rebecca shuddered, and suddenly knew, with absolute clarity, that she would not, as she had originally planned to do, enter the chapel that night. She could not even take a step towards it, so paralysed was she, and exhilarated, by a terror she could feel as a dense mist of red, enveloping her, sucking out her will, absorbing her. She struggled to break free. She turned. There was traffic moving on Piccadilly. She began to walk towards the sound of it, then to run.
‘Rebecca!’
She froze.
‘Rebecca!’
She spun round. Sheets of paper, caught by the wind, were fluttering across an empty street.
‘Who’s there?’ Rebecca called.
Nothing. She tilted her head. She couldn’t hear the traffic now. There was only the screaming of the wind, and a signboard rattling at the end of the street. Rebecca walked down towards it. ‘Who’s there?’ she called out again. The wind moaned as though in answer, and then suddenly, just faintly, Rebecca thought she heard laughter. It hissed, rising and falling with the wind. Rebecca ran towards it, down a further street, so dark now that she could barely see ahead. There was a noise, a tin kicked, clattering over tarmac. Rebecca glanced round, just in time to see, or so she thought, a flitting silhouette of black, but even as she stepped towards it, it was gone, melted so totally that she wondered if she had seen anything at all. There had seemed something strange about the figure, something wrong, but also familiar. Where had she seen such a person before? Rebecca shook her head. No, there had been nothing. It was hardly surprising, she thought, the wind was so strong that the shadows were playing tricks on her.
She felt breath on her neck. Rebecca could smell it as she spun round, acrid, chemical, prickling her nostrils, but even as she turned and held out her arms to ward off the attacker, she could see that there was nothing there to fend away. ‘Who are you?’ she called out into the darkness, angry now. ‘Who’s there?’ Laughter hissed on the wind again, and then there was the sound of footsteps, hurrying away down a narrow lane, and Rebecca began to run, chasing after them, her heels echoing, her blood thumping like a drum in her ears. So deep it pulsed, she felt quite distracted by the sound. She told herself, ignore it, listen for the footsteps. They were still ahead of her, down a very narrow lane now, and then suddenly they were gone, faded on the air, and Rebecca stopped, to recapture her bearings and her breath. She looked around. As she did so, the clouds overhead became ragged and frayed, and were then scattered altogether on a gusting shriek of wind. Moonlight, death-pale, stained the street. Rebecca looked up.
Above her loomed a mansion-front. Its grandeur seemed quite out of proportion to the alley, otherwise narrow and blank, in which Rebecca found herself. In the moonlight, the stone of the mansion was cast maggot-white; its windows were pools of darkness, sockets in a skull; the impression given by the whole was that of something quite abandoned by time, a shiver of the past conjured up by the moon. The wind began to scream again. Rebecca watched as the light faded, then was lost. The mansion, though, remained, revealed now as something more than just an illusion of the moon, but Rebecca was not surprised; she had known full well that it was real; she had called at these mansion gates before.
She did not bother this time, however, to climb the steps and knock at the door. Instead, she began to walk down the mansion-front, past the railings that speared up from the pavement, guarding the mansion from the passer-by. Rebecca could smell the acid again, just faint on the wind, but bitter as before. She began to run. There were footsteps behind her. She glanced round, but there was nothing, and she felt the terror return, descending on her like a poisonous cloud, choking her throat, burning her blood. She stumbled, and staggered forwards. She fell against the railings. Her fingers clutched at a tangle of chains. She lifted them up. There was a single padlock. It barred the way to the chapel of St Jude’s.
Rebecca shook out the keys. She fitted one into the padlock. It scraped rustily, and didn’t turn. Behind her, the footsteps come to a halt. Rebecca didn’t look round. Instead, in a wave so intense that it was almost sweet, terror coursed through her veins, and she had to steady herself against the gate, as fear possessed her, fear and strange delight. Her hands shaking, she tried a second key. Again it scratched against rust, but this time there was movement, and the lock began to shift. Rebecca forced it; the lock opened; the length of chain slithered to the ground. Rebecca pushed at the gate. Painfully, it creaked ajar.
Now Rebecca turned. The acrid smell had faded; she was quite alone. Rebecca smiled. She could feel her terror sweet in her stomach, lightening her thighs. She stroked back her hair so that it flew in the wind, and smoothed down her coat. The wind had blown the gate shut again. Rebecca pushed at it, then walked on through towards the chapel door.
It was approached down a flight of steps, mossy and cracked. The door itself, like the railing gate, was locked. Rebecca felt for her keys again. As gentle as the fall of a dying breeze, her terror arced and was gone. She remembered Melrose again, his fear, his warnings to avoid St Jude’s. Rebecca shook her head. ‘No,’ she whispered to herself, ‘no, I am myself again.’ Inside were the memoirs of Lord Byron, for which her mother had searched so long, soon to be hers, held in her hands. What had ever possessed her to think that she could wait? She shook her head again and turned the key.
Inside the chapel, the darkness was pitch. Rebecca cursed herself for not having brought a torch. Feeling her way along the wall, she reached some shelves. She ran her finger along them. There were matches, and then, on the shelf below, a candle box. She took one of the candles and lit it. Then she turned to see what the chapel contained.
It was almost bare. There was a single cross at the end of the room. It had been carved and painted in the Byzantine manner. It represented Cain, sentenced by the Angel of the Lord. Waiting below them, more vivid than both, was Lucifer. Rebecca peered at the cross. She was struck by the representation of Cain. His face was beautiful, but twisted in the most terrible agony, not from the mark that had been burned onto his brow, but from some deeper pain, some terrible loss. From his lips came a single trickle of red.
Rebecca turn
ed. Her footsteps echoed as she crossed the bare floor. At the far end of the chapel, she could see a tomb, built into the floor, marked by an ancient pillar of stone. Rebecca kneeled down to see if there were inscriptions on the tomb, but there was nothing to read, just a strip of faded brass. She glanced up at the headstone; the candle flickered in her grip, and shadows danced over faint patterns and marks. Rebecca held the candle up closer. There was a turban, carved into the top of the stone, and then lower down, scarcely legible, what seemed like words. Rebecca peered at them. To her surprise, she saw that the script was Arabic. She translated the words; verses from the Koran, mourning the dead. Rebecca stood up and shook her head in puzzlement. A Muslim grave in a Christian church? No wonder it was never used for worship. She kneeled down by the tomb again. She pressed it. Nothing. There was a gust of wind and her candle flickered out.
As she lit it again, she saw, in the spurt of the match’s flame, a rug stretched out behind the tomb. It was beautiful - Turkish, Rebecca guessed - and like the headstone, clearly very old. She pulled it back, tenderly at first, and then, with a sudden thrill of excitement, frantically. Below it was a wooden hatchway, padlocked and hinged. Rebecca pushed the carpet away, then fitted the third and final key. It turned. Rebecca tugged the padlock off, then breathed in deeply. She heaved at the hatchway. Slowly, it lifted. With a burst of strength that she hadn’t known she possessed, Rebecca raised the hatchway up until it toppled and fell with an echoing thud onto the flagstones behind. She stared at the opening she had uncovered. There were two steps, then nothing beyond them but a yawning blank. Reaching for more candles, Rebecca slipped them into her pocket, and took a careful first step. Suddenly, she breathed in. The fear had returned, in every corpuscle of her blood, lightening her until she thought that she would float; and the fear was as sensual and lovely as any pleasure she had known. The terror possessed her and summoned her. Obeying its call she began to walk down the steps, and the opening to the chapel was soon just a glimmer, then was gone.
