Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (14 page)

   
'It seems they'd leap into
bed,' Rachel said, 'and draw all the curtains tight. And then blow out their
candle. Having first read a passage from the Bible - you see there's space on
the ledge for a Bible. Because they just
knew
that on the other side of the curtains, the evil spirits would be hovering
en masse.
Cosy, isn't it?'

   
'Claustrophobic' Fay had never
liked four-posters.
   
'However, if you want a
real
scare . . .' Rachel held out a box
of matches,'. . . light the candle and look in the chest.'

   
She stood there holding the
matchbox, not much more than another shadow in the dim, grimy bedchamber, only
a crease of her Barbour at the elbow catching the light. The coat's dull waxen
surface looked right for the period, and Fay had the alarming sensation that
the dingy room was dragging them back into its own dark era. Was Rachel
smiling? Fay couldn't see her face.

   
She found herself accepting the
matchbox.
   
'Go on,' Rachel said. 'Light the
candle.'
   
'OK.' She tried not to sound hesitant,
asking herself. You aren't
nervous
,
are you, Fay?

   
No, she decided. Just bloody
cold. It might have occurred to me to wonder why she was wearing a Barbour on
Midsummer Day. And she might have warned me about the temperature in this
place.

   
She reached beyond the post at
the bedhead and pulled the candle-holder from the recess. Struck a match. Saw
the candle-tray was full of dead flies and bluebottles. Turned it upside down,
but not all of them fell out.

   
Yuk. Fay lit the candle.

   
Shadows bounced.

   
'The chest under the window?'

   
She could see Rachel Wade's
face now, in the candle-light, and it
wasn't
smiling. 'Look,' Rachel said, 'forget it. Come on. I was only joking.'

   
'No you weren't.' Fay smelled
wax, from the candle and from Rachel's coat perhaps. 'I'd better open the
blasted thing before this candle burns away.'

   
Rachel Wade shrugged. Fay
crossed to the window which left only a smear of light across the top of the
chest. Obviously not Elizabethan, this chest; it had black lettering stamped
across its lid and was carelessly bound with green-painted metal strips.

   
Fay lifted the lid and lowered
the candle.

   
She recoiled at once. 'Oh,' she
said.

   
'Sorry.'

   
'What is it?'

   
Its eye-sockets were black and
two upper teeth were thin and curved. A small cobweb hung between them. The
mouth was stretched wide in a fossilized shriek.

   
'It's a cat, isn't it? A
mummified cat?'

   
'Tiddles. Max calls it Tiddles.'

   
'Cute,' Fay said and shuddered.

   
'Not very. It was found in the
rafters. It may have been walled up there alive.'
   
'God.'

   
'Practical geomancy,' Rachel
said. 'The spirit of the cat acts apparently, as a guardian. They found half a
horse behind the kitchen wall. Come on, let's go.

CHAPTER VII

Asleep in his armchair, Canon Alex Peters dreamed he was asleep in his
armchair. Tucked up in a soft blanket of sunbeams, he awoke in time to watch
the wall dissolve.
   
It began with the fireplace. He was aware
that Grace's dreadful see-through clock and the gilt-framed mirror were fading,
while the black, sooty hole of the fireplace itself was getting bigger.

   
Gradually, the hole took over,
becoming darker and wider and then spreading up through the mantelpiece, almost
as far as the ceiling, until the whole chimney breast dissolved into a black
passageway.

   
There formed a filigree of
yellowish light, and then, dimly at first, Grace appeared in the passageway.
Standing there, quite still.

   
'What happened to your
wheelchair?' Alex asked. He was glad, of course, to see her back on her feet.

   
'No you're not,' Grace said.
Her lips did not move when she spoke but her body became brighter, as if the
spider web of lights was inside her, like glowing veins. 'You were glad when I
died, and you'll be glad to know I'm still dead.'

   
'That's not true,' protested
Alex. But you couldn't lie to the dead, and he knew it.

   
Grace turned her back on him
and began to walk away along the passage. Alex struggled to get up, desperate
to explain.
   
But the chair wouldn't let him. He
shouted to the spindly, diminishing figure. 'Grace, look, don't go, give me a
hand, would you?'

   
The chair held him in a
leathery grip.

   
'Grace!' Alex screamed. 'Grace,
don't go! I want to explain!'

   
Just once, Grace glanced back
at him over her shoulder, and there was a pitying smile on her face, with
perhaps a shadow of malice.

Goff did not, of course, have any immediate plans to live in Crybbe
Court itself, Rachel Wade said. Good
God
,
no.
   
Well, perhaps one day. When it was
fully restored.
   
'You mean,' Fay said as they walked
out into the sunlight, restored to what it would've been like if the
Elizabethans had had full central heating and ten-speaker stereos.'

   
'You're getting the general picture,'
Rachel confirmed, and showed her the place where Max actually would be living
within the next week or so.

   
It was an L-shaped stone stable-block
behind the house. It already had been gutted, plumbed and wired and a giant
plate-glass window had been inserted into a solid stone wall to open up a new
and spectacular view of the hills from what would be the living-room.

   
At least, the view
would
have been spectacular if it hadn't
been semi-obscured by a green mound, like an inverted pudding basin or a giant
helmet.

   
'His beloved Tump,' Rachel
said. And there wasn't much affection there, Fay thought, either for the mound
or for Max Goff.

   
'Is it a burial mound or a -
what d'you call it - castle mound . . . motte?'

   
'Probably both. Either way it's
pretty unsightly, like an overgrown spoil-heap. And decidedly creepy by
moonlight. I mean, who wants to stare out at a grave? Whoever built this place
had the right idea, I think, by putting a blank stable wall in front so it
wouldn't frighten the horses.'

   
Fay realized the Court itself
was built in a hollow, and the Tump was on slightly higher ground, so that it
seemed, from here, higher than it actually was. It loomed. The stone wall which
surrounded it had partly fallen down on this side, revealing the mesh of dense
bushes and brambles at the base of the mound.

   
'Poor Mr Kettle,' Fay said,
reminded by the wall.

   
Rachel fingered a strand of pale
hair, the nearest she'd come in Fay's presence, to a nervous gesture. 'The
bitter irony is that Max plans to move that wall. He calls it a nineteenth-century
abomination. Some experts think it's older than that and should be preserved,
but he'll get his way, of course, in the end.'

   
Rachel stepped on a piece of
soft plaster and ground it in the newly boarded floor.

   
'He always does,' she said.

   
It was clear now to Fay that
this was not the same Rachel Wade who, a week ago, had briskly swept her down
the steps of the Cock with vague promises of an interview with Goff
when his plans were in shape. Sure, on that occasion, she'd had a tape recorder
over her shoulder. But even if she'd carried one today, she felt, Rachel's
attitude would not have been markedly different.

   
Something had changed.

   
Fay said cautiously, 'So when
is he going to talk to me? On tape.'

   
'Leave it with me,' Rachel said.
'I'll fix it.' She spread her arms to usher Fay back towards the wooden
framework evidently destined to be a doorway.

   
'I hate having to ask this sort
of question.' Fay stopped at the entrance. 'But he isn't going to be talking to
anyone else, is he, first?'

   
'Not if I can help it. Listen,
we've been walking around this place for the last forty-five minutes and I've
forgotten your name.'

   
'Fay. Fay Morrison.'

   
'Would you like a job, Fay?'

   
'Huh?'

   
'Quite ludicrous salary.
Seductively fast company car. Lots of foreign travel.'

   
Fay stared at her.

   
'Silly expenses,' Rachel said.
'Untold fringe benefits.' She'd turned her back on the big window. From the far
end of the room, the hills had been squeezed out of the picture; the window was
full of Tump.

   
'How long have you been doing
this?' Fay asked. 'As Goff's PA.'

   
'Nearly four years now. I think
I've done rather well on the whole. Although the physical demands are not too
arduous, Max's bisexuality goes in alternating phases. During his DC periods he
can leave you alone for months.'

   
The grey eyes were calm and
candid.

   
'Jesus Christ,' Fay said.

   
'Oh, don't get me wrong - I
don't mind
that
. I almost became an
actress, anyway. And with Max, there's rarely anything terribly tiring. And
never anything particularly
bizarre
.
Well, except for the crystals, and he only ever tried that once. And anyway,
one always has to weigh these things against the benefits. No, it's just . . .'

   
Rachel dug her fists deep into
the pockets of her Barbour until Fay could see the knuckles outlined in the
shiny, waxed fabric.

   
'. . It's just I don't think I
can go through with it
here
,' Rachel said.
'Do you know what I mean?'

Grace Legge came here to
die. Dad came to go slowly loopy, and I came to watch.

   
'Yes,' Fay said bleakly, 'I
know
exactly
what you mean. I'm beginning
to realize how hard it is to get anything positive to take off here.'

   
She'd read somewhere that
nobody could say for certain where the name Crybbe came from. It was obviously
a corruption of the Welsh, and there were two possible derivations:

crib
- the crest of a hill (which seemed topographically unlikely, because
the town was in a valley).

or

crybachu
- to wither.

   
It appeals to him, you know,'
Rachel said. 'The fact that failure is so deeply ingrained here. Brings out the
crusader him. He's going to free the place from centuries of bucolic apathy.'

   
'The first story Offa's Dyke
got me to cover,' Fay remembered, 'was the opening of a new factory on the
industrial estate. Quite a lively little set-up producing chunky coloured sandals
- in fact I'm wearing a pair, see? They were providing eight local jobs and the
Marches Development Board were predicting it'd be twenty before the end of the
year.'

   
'Closed down, didn't it? Was it
last week?'

   
'I'd have ordered another pair
if I'd known,' Fay said.

   
They stared at each other,
almost comically glum, then Rachel tossed back her ash-blonde hair and strode
determinedly through to the room which would soon be a kitchen.

   
'Come on, let's get out of
here, he'll be back soon.' She picked up two tumblers from the draining surface
next to the new sink, and Fay followed her outside, where she dug a bottle
of sparkling wine from the silt in the bottom of an old sheep trough - 'My
private cellar.'

   
And then they collected a
grateful Arnold from the Range Rover and wandered off across the field, down
the valley to the river, where you could sit on the bank fifty yards from the three-arched
bridge and probably not see the Court any more nor even the Tump.