Broken Voices (Kindle Single) (6 page)

‘Can you hear
it?’ Faraday said.

Irritated, I
glanced at him. ‘What?’

‘Those notes.’

‘Shut up,
Rabbit.’

I looked back
at the arcade. The man wasn’t there anymore. It was conceivable he had put on a
bit of speed and reached the archway at the northern end. Or he might have
stopped behind a pillar. Or, and perhaps this was most likely of all, he hadn’t
been there in the first place. The Cathedral at dusk was full of indistinct
shapes that shifted as you tried to look at them.

Faraday nudged
me. ‘There it is again.’

‘What are you
talking about?’

‘The four notes
I heard last night. Remember?’ He hummed them, and they meant nothing to me.
‘It’s like the start of something.’

‘You’re barmy,’
I said. ‘Come on, I want some toast.’

There was an odd sequel to this a few
hours later, when we were having our evening meal at the Veals’.

While we ate,
Mr Veal was in the parlour with us. He had begun to relax in our company, as we
had in his.

‘This place
would fall apart at the seams without the Dean and me,’ he said with obvious
satisfaction. ‘Some of these clerical gents would forget who their own mothers
were. Heads in the clouds. And your masters aren’t much better.’

I told him
about the glorious ratting we had had at Angel Farm.

‘So you missed
the rain this afternoon?’ he asked, for the minutiae of the weather’s
fluctuations fascinated him, as they did most grown-ups.

‘Just about. It
was beginning to spit as we were going back to Mr Ratcliffe’s so we cut up
through the Cathedral.’

‘We’ll have
worse tonight,’ he said. ‘Mrs Veal feels it in her bones. Her bones are never
wrong.’

‘I saw someone
up the west tower,’ I said.

‘Up the west
tower?’ Mr Veal shook his head. ‘Not at this time of year.’

‘Well, I
thought I saw someone.’ I shrugged. ‘But it was already getting dark. I
could’ve been wrong.’

‘No one was up
there,’ Mr Veal said. ‘There wouldn’t be. You can take it as Gospel, young man.
Not without me knowing.’

That evening Mr Ratcliffe made cocoa
again. The three of us — four if you counted Mordred — sat close to the fire.

The weather had
changed during the afternoon. It was still cold, but clouds had rolled in from
the south-west, bringing with it a wind that blew in gusts of varying strengths
with lulls between them. The wind carried raindrops with it, with the promise
of more to come. It rattled doors and windows in their frames. It sounded in
the wide chimney.

It was Faraday
who reminded Mr Ratcliffe about his promise.

‘Please, sir — you
said you’d tell us about Mr Goldsworthy.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes, sir. You
said there was a real story about the ghost.’

‘Real? To be
perfectly truthful, Faraday, I can’t be absolutely sure which parts of the
story are real and which are not. I don’t think anyone can after all this
time.’

‘When did he
live, sir?’ I asked.

‘Nearly two
hundred years ago. He was the Master of the Music, one of Dr Atkinson’s
predecessors. He was a composer, too. You remember the anthem we have on
Christmas Day? The Jubilate Deo? He wrote that.’

Faraday’s face
was in shadow. But he shifted in his seat as if someone had touched him. It was
the anthem that Hampson Minor had sung in Faraday’s place.

‘He died as a
result of a fall,’ Mr Ratcliffe went on, ‘and he’s buried in the north choir
aisle. There’s a tablet to him on the wall more or less opposite the organ
loft.’

‘But why is he a ghost?’ I said. Into my mind slipped an image of Dr
Atkinson, who was small, red-faced and irascible, draped in a sheet and
rattling chains like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

‘If he is,’
said Mr Ratcliffe. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it?’

‘Has anyone
seen him, sir?’ Faraday asked, leaning forward. ‘They must have done.
Otherwise, you wouldn’t have said he was a ghost last night.’

‘You must be
patient.’ Mr Ratcliffe began the elaborate ritual of cleaning, filling and
lighting his pipe. ‘Did you know that the Cathedral once had a ring of eight
bells? One of our canons, Dr Bradshaw, wrote a standard treatise on the subject
in the sixteen-seventies.
Campanologia Explicata
. There were eight bells, and they hung in the
west tower. You know, I am sure, that our church bells are rung according to a
series of mathematical permutations.’ He looked up at us and took pity on our
ignorance. ‘It’s like a pattern of numbers. Each bell has a number and it rings
according to its place in the pattern.’

By now Mr
Ratcliffe was crumbling flake tobacco into the palm of one hand. He fell
silent, concentrating on rubbing the strands into a loose, evenly distributed
mixture.

‘Bells don’t
last for ever, you know. Our bells had to be taken down in the eighteenth
century. They needed to be recast. This was done, at considerable expense.
There was to be a service of dedication when the new ring of bells was rung for
the first time. The Dean and Chapter asked Mr Goldsworthy to compose a special
anthem to mark the occasion, to be based on Psalm a hundred and fifty. “Praise
him in the sound of the trumpet: praise him upon the lute and harp”.’

Mordred, who
had been slumbering on Mr Ratcliffe’s lap, jumped to the ground. He stretched
himself out with luxurious abandon on the hearthrug.

‘They say that
Mr Goldsworthy was an ambitious man,’ Mr Ratcliffe went on. ‘And a troubled one.
The Dean had a piece of patronage in his gift, the Deputy Surveyorship of the
Fabric, a position that came with an income of two hundred pounds a year for
the holder, and entailed no obligations apart from a few ceremonial duties. Mr
Goldsworthy thought there was no reason why the post should not go to himself
as to the next man. And the Dean gave him to understand that it might well be
his, if his new anthem was a particularly fine piece of work that brought
renown on the Cathedral. And, no doubt, on the Dean.’

As Mr Ratcliffe
was speaking, Mordred rose to his feet. He stared at the three of us in turn
and, to my surprise, came towards me and rubbed his furry body against my legs.
I felt the vibration of his purring against my legs. Flattered by his attention,
I bent down and stroked him.

‘The problem
was,’ Mr Ratcliffe continued, ‘Mr Goldsworthy found that for once his
inspiration failed him. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. His career
was at a crossroads. If he failed in the commission he would earn the Dean’s
disfavour. To make matters worse, I believe there was a lady in the case: and
Mr Goldsworthy could not afford to marry without a larger income.’

The cat
unsheathed the claws of his right paw and ran them into my calf. I squealed
with pain and shock.

‘Mordred!’ Mr
Ratcliffe said. ‘I’m so sorry — he can be such an unmannerly animal. Perhaps
one of you would put him outside.’

Mordred
frustrated this design by going to ground under the grand piano, sheltered by
the wall on one side and a pile of books on the other.

‘What did you
do then?’ Faraday said. ‘Did he compose the anthem in the end?’

‘That’s the
strange part of part of it. It is said that he did. He told his friends that he
had succeeded at last, and at the very last moment. He said it would be his
masterpiece. The newly-cast bells had already been hung in the tower. He found
that if he went up into the tower himself, into the ringing chamber with pen
and paper, the music came to him as if borne on the wind. But then came
disaster.’

‘He died?’ I
said, half hopefully, half fearfully.

Mr Ratcliffe
held up a hand. ‘Hold your horses, young man. No, the first thing to happen was
that cracks were discovered in the tower, when the workmen were hanging the new
bells. You see, the west tower was built in the Middle Ages. The tower simply
wasn’t designed for a ring of bells. It’s not the weight of them, you know.
It’s the vibration they cause when they are rung. The Cathedral Surveyor told
the Dean and Chapter that there could be no question of ringing the new ones.’

‘Which is why
there aren’t any bells now,’ I said.

 ‘Yes — because
they could well bring the tower crashing about everyone’s ears. The Surveyor
said that the new bells must come down, and the tower had to be strengthened as
soon as possible, and braced with iron ties. The Dean raged against this — his
reputation, his judgement, was at stake. But he was forced to give way in the
end. So there was no longer a need for an anthem to celebrate the new bells,
and no longer any purpose on wasting a perfectly good piece of patronage on the
Master of the Music.’

‘What happened
to it?’ Faraday asked. ‘The anthem, I mean.’

The anthem, I
noticed, not the man: the Rabbit’s as mad as a hatter; and I smiled at my own
joke.

Mr Ratcliffe
lit his pipe and tossed the match into the fire. ‘No one knows for sure.
Perhaps it was never written or perhaps it was destroyed. But the sad part is
what happened to Mr Goldsworthy. The story was that he had left the manuscript
in the west tower, where he had been working on it. One winter evening, he went
up to retrieve it. But he was not aware that the workmen had already begun to
remove the new bells from the tower. There are hatches in the floors at the
various levels, to allow the bells to be lowered down from the belfry to the
floor of the tower. By some mishap, the workmen had left open the hatch at the
lowest stage, which is the ringing chamber just above the painted ceiling.
There was very little light up there and poor Goldsworthy must have stumbled in
the dark.’

The room was no
longer cosy, despite the cups of cocoa and Mr Ratcliffe’s tired, gentle voice.
I glanced at him, sitting back in his chair. The old man looked back at me and,
for an instant, by some trick of the firelight, I saw Mordred’s eyes staring at
me. Amber, flecked with green. But the cat was still lurking under the grand
piano.

‘He fell?’
Faraday said, his voice awed.

‘More than a hundred
feet on to the floor of the tower.’ Mr Ratcliffe had returned to normal. ‘The
poor fellow must have been killed outright.’

It occurred to
me that five or six hours earlier I must have walked across the very spot where
Mr Goldsworthy’s body had lain.

‘It was an
accident, of course,’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘That’s what they decided. There was
nothing to show it had been suicide, after all, and a verdict of accidental
death meant that he could have a Christian burial.’

‘Someone must
have looked for the anthem,’ Faraday said.

I wondered why
Rabbit was so concerned about a bit of music. What did it matter, after all,
beside the fact of a man’s death? But then I have never been able to understand
the value that people place on music. It’s nothing but a series of sounds,
sounds without meaning.

‘They searched
his pockets. It wasn’t there, though they did find a pen and a portable
inkwell. They looked among his papers. They looked in the tower, as well. But
they didn’t find any trace of it. The anthem had vanished, if it had ever
existed.’

‘Perhaps it
hadn’t,’ I said.

‘The lady who
was engaged to Mr Goldsworthy had actually seen the manuscript. He had played
her some of the melodies. She said it was a thing of a ravishing beauty, that
it would draw the heart out of an angel. But I suppose in the circumstances she
would be inclined to have a high opinion of the piece.’

Mr Ratcliffe
rose stiffly from his chair and knocked out his pipe. He looked down at us in
our chairs.

‘It’s long past
time for you boys to be in bed.’

‘But, sir,’ I
protested. ‘What about the ghost?’ I could not help thinking of the person I
had glimpsed in the west tower this afternoon. ‘Do people see him? Does he
haunt the tower?’

‘Poor
Goldsworthy?’ Mr Ratcliffe shook his head. ‘Not as far as I know. No, it’s his
music that people hear. Or they say they do. Fragments of melody, just a few
notes.’ He waved his pipe in the direction of the Cathedral. ‘It’s as if the
anthem was broken into many pieces in the fall. And all the notes it contained
were thrown up into the air. They are still there. Looking for each other.
Trying to come together again.’

The next day, Saturday, 27 December, was
grey and blustery, with showers of rain that attacked from unexpected angles
and worked their way through the crevices of one’s clothing to the naked skin
beneath.

I explained my
problem about the lost cap to Mr Ratcliffe. He considered the matter gravely
and gave it as his opinion that it would not be considered a beatable offence
if I were caught outside the College without a school cap during the holidays.
If I had any trouble, I was to refer the complainant to himself.

But I could not
go out without a hat. That would not be seemly or indeed good for my health. He
lent me one of his own, a battered, shapeless thing of tweed, with a trout fly
fixed to the band. It was too large for my head and rested loosely on my ears.
But it kept me decent, according to the standards of those days, and it kept me
dry. It smelled powerfully of mothballs, with a hint of stale tobacco.

In the morning,
Faraday and I went into the town. He waited outside while I tried my luck with
three tobacconists in turn. The first two refused to serve me but in the third,
a little shop in an alley between the High Street and Market Street, I struck
lucky. The proprietor had left the establishment in the temporary charge of his
elderly mother, who was very short-sighted. I put on my gruffest voice when I
asked for ten Woodbine cigarettes — unlike Faraday’s, my voice had settled down
to a sort of croak after the ups and downs of the previous year. That and Mr
Ratcliffe’s hat seemed to allay any suspicions the woman might have had.