A Shadow on the Wall Page 7

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  I had scarcely finished this tedious task when I heard a sound behind me. Turning, I saw Atherton and Lethaby approaching from the choir. Atherton seemed grave, but there lay perched on Lethaby’s face the most sanctimonious of smiles.

  “I see you have found the wicked abbot’s tomb,” he said, smirking all the while like some species of monkey newly arrived from Madagascar.

  “Why do you call him that?” I asked.

  He shrugged and smirked again, a monkey still, but very tame and well-mannered, bred not for a circus but a gentleman’s shoulder.

  “I’ve heard the locals call him that,” he said. “The tomb has an evil reputation hereabouts. The Reverend Atherton had no end of trouble finding men willing to work on it. And now, of course . . . Well, it’s too bad. I don’t imagine we’ll ever finish the repair now. I shall have to bring men in from outside to close it up again.”

  “You imply the abbot himself has something of a reputation.”

  He nodded.

  “So I understand. It’s not a matter I’ve ever enquired into. No doubt there are local historians who could further enlighten you. Jowett in March, for example—I’m told he has made a study of ecclesiastical institutions in that period. All I know for certain is that the abbey would not have William’s body for burial, hence his rather unusual interment here. There are some who say he had dealings with the devil, though I think that somewhat far-fetched.”

  “Indeed,” I said. Atherton caught my eye. “Far-fetched” was a word he himself might have used the morning before; but not now.

  Lethaby took a half-hunter from his pocket and glanced at it.

  “It’s almost time for our service to start,” he said. “If you gentlemen will excuse me, there are one or two preparations I need to make.”

  He vanished in the direction of the vestry, leaving us together in the abominable silence of the chancel.

  “Come,” I said. “This is no place to stay.”

  We turned and headed back towards the choir. As we did so, I heard a sound behind me, repeated two or three times: the sound of scratching against stone. I looked round, but there was nothing there that I could see.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I was at that time still engaged in writing my study of the Albigensians of Ariège and Languedoc, a work with which I had been occupied for several years, and which was now nearing completion. [Subsequently published as The Cathar Heresy and the Albigensian Crusades, London, The Canterbury Press, 1894. Among reviews, see Hippolyte du Puigandeau, Revue des Études Historiques, LXI, pp. 347-52; A. De Groot, Mededeelingen der koninklijke akademie van wetenschappen, afd. Letterkunde, 26, serie A, no. 2, pp. 74-77.] My accident and the various incidents of the Christmas vacation had been severe distractions from my work, and I was growing uneasy by the speed with which the deadline for the book was approaching. The start of Lent term and the resumption of my tutorial and professional responsibilities ate yet more deeply into my free time, and for the next few months I kept pretty much to my rooms.

  I did not seek out Atherton, nor he me. We met once or twice at university functions, but neither spoke of the events that had brought us so close in the vacation; I sensed that he wished to regard the entire episode as a closed book. He had not been back to Thornham St Stephen, nor did he appear to have kept in touch with Lethaby.

  For my own part, I had no wish to return to the village. I did, however, have misgivings about leaving matters as they stood, and in late January I wrote to a churchman of my acquaintance—his name and place of residence need not be recorded in these pages—and asked him to take what steps he reasonably could to settle what had been disturbed. He replied some months later, saying he had spoken with friends at Ely cathedral, and that certain prayers had been said at Thornham St Stephen before William de Lindesey’s tomb had been resealed. I wrote him a letter of thanks, made a contribution to a charitable fund over which he has charge, and fervently hoped the matter was closed.

  I spent that summer in the south of France, mainly in the dèpartement of Ariège, the medieval Comte de Foix, roughly corresponding to the diocese of Pamiers. I had been visiting the region for several years, investigating the Cathar villages of the northern Pyrenees between Toulouse and the Spanish border, in order to gather materials for my book, and I wanted to make some final researches in local archives before sending the completed manuscript to press. My leg had healed tolerably well by then, and I was able to get about with only a little difficulty, aided by a stout stick I bought from a local shepherd. The work went well, and, for reasons that I shall explain, I did not return to Cambridge until late September.

  Among the letters waiting for me at the porter’s lodge was one from Atherton. He apologised for having been so little in touch since our return from Thornham St Stephen, and reiterated his gratitude for my intervention.

  “I regret, however,” he went on, “that matters have not rested as we left them. I do not speak of Thornham St Stephen, but of my brother. He was, as you know, buried in the cathedral churchyard at my mother’s insistence, though near my father, not in the same grave. We had a headstone erected as soon as the grave settled, a fine slab of Purbeck marble. And we thought my brother was at rest.

  “It seems now that he was not. My mother has seen him night after night in her dreams, and twice now waking. My dear Asquith, you must understand that my mother is a woman of not inconsiderable sense, not readily given to fanciful thoughts. I have never known her to speak of ghosts or spirits, she quite ridicules the Spiritualists, she has no time for table-rapping. But she has seen my brother.

  “I have seen him too, of that I am certain. It was some weeks after his burial, and I was in my college rooms, washing before dinner. I looked up at the mirror to comb my whiskers, and as I did so I saw my brother’s figure reflected, as though he was standing at the back of the room by the bookcase, watching me silently. When I turned, he was not there, but I know I saw him. He looked pale and tired, as though hounded by something.

  “My mother knows nothing of the events at the rectory. I have said not a word to her, nor do I intend to. It would be needlessly cruel. Nevertheless, she says my brother is not at peace and asks me to do whatever I think needful to restore him to sleep.

  “You know more of these matters than I can ever hope to learn, and you have a degree of experience I cannot possibly rival. Will you at least meet my mother and determine for yourself what measure of truth there may be in all this? And will you, for my brother’s sake, come with me to the cathedral churchyard at Ely? There is something there that I think you should see.”

  I did not reply to Atherton at once. This was not a matter I could afford to be further involved in. My deadline was pressing hard, my name had been proposed and accepted for membership on one or two important academic committees, and the sudden illness of one of my colleagues meant that my teaching duties for Michaelmas term would be more onerous than usual.

  I had, above all, a single, overriding reason for not wishing to be drawn more deeply into so perilous a business. While in France, I had stayed at the home of René Seillière, a local historian of some eminence, with whom I had corresponded regularly for several years. René and I had developed a close friendship, in part through our correspondence, and more recently when I had stayed with him and his wife during my visits to the Pyrenees.

  The Seillières lived sixty miles south of Toulouse, in the small village of St Barthélemy, where René combined the job of schoolmaster with that of receveur des postes. I had always found his company congenial and his erudition beyond reproach, and I looked forward to my visit with very real enthusiasm, touched with some sadness, for I knew that my future researches were likely to keep me within the confines of England.

  On my arrival, I found René in lower spirits than was customary, and his wife similarly afflicted. On enquiring after the cause of their distress,
I was told that their only daughter, Simone, had been suddenly widowed several months earlier and left to fend for herself with a young child, a boy of seven named Bertrand. Mother and child had been living with the Seillières since shortly after her husband’s death, and, while the old couple rejoiced in their daughter’s company and the bright spirits of their grandson, they were dismayed to find Simone still disconsolate and, it seemed, unable to come to terms with her new situation. She had been married only eight years, and was herself now only twenty-six years of age. Since her marriage eight years earlier, she had been living in the hilltop town of St Bertrand-de-Comminges, where her husband, Marcellin, had worked as a veterinary surgeon.

  The first evening, at dinner, I met Simone for the first time. I had not really been prepared for what I saw. Perhaps I had imagined a widow in black weeds, older than her years, a little bent and gaunt with grief. Or a younger version of her mother, rather plump and inoffensive, a motherly woman disinclined to speech. But Simone was none of those, that I could see at once. She was pale, certainly—almost extravagantly so, and thin too; but it seemed to me that she must always have been pale and always thin, that these were not the products of grief so much as nature. And her face was quite beyond belief, with dark, moist eyes that absorbed me all night in admiration.

  True, she spoke very little, but not, I sensed, because she had nothing to say or thought her opinions not worth airing, but because something had died a little in her and would not easily be reborn.

  It was proposed that Simone should accompany me on my peregrinations about the countryside, partly because she would be an excellent guide, and partly—so my good friend René confided to me—because it was felt the occupation might help take her a little out of herself. And so it was that we spent most days in one another’s company, when work at home was not too pressing, or Bertrand too demanding.

  I did not think, when first we set out together, that I would fall in love with her, but I did. And for over a month I concealed my feelings, for I could not imagine she would ever reciprocate the passion of a dry stick of a man like me, nearly twice her age, a man who had spent all his life among books and manuscripts. It was enough for me that we got on so well, that we were so entirely satisfied in one another’s company. We would talk as we wandered down the goat tracks and faint paths that connected one village to the next, or share our thoughts over a glass of wine as we prepared to set off home at the end of the day. So great, indeed, was my pleasure in her being there, and my dejection whenever she was not, that I failed to see that she was slowly changing in her manner towards me, as much as I towards her.

  There was perhaps a week remaining to the date of my proposed departure, for I planned to return to Paris at the end of August in order to prosecute certain vital enquiries in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Simone and I had gone together to Montaillou, a small place whose entire population had been arrested and charged with heresy in 1308 by Geoffroy d’Ablis, the Inquisitor of Carcassonne, and again ten years and more later under the Inquisition of Jacques Fournier, then Bishop of Pamiers. [This is the same Fournier who was made a cardinal in 1327 and elected Pope of Avignon in 1334 under the name Benedict XII. He was a lifelong opponent of heresy, counting among his opponents such illustrious names as Giacomo dei Fiori, Meister Eckhart and Occam.] Something of the mood of the old heresy hunts still lingers in the place, for it is sombre and on guard against the outside world, and I did not feel myself altogether welcome there.

  Simone was quiet all that day, and as we made our way back she would not reply to my remarks and questions with more than a “yes” or “no.” I asked her in the end what was the matter. She merely stopped and shook her head at first, then looked at me and said she was oppressed by the thought of my leaving. A younger man, or one more experienced in dealing with women, might have sensed at once what was wrong, or guessed it long before that. I simply told her I too was sad to be going, and we started on our way again. But she was still taciturn, and at last I stopped again and asked her why it should trouble her so much, for I had surely become an intolerable burden to her family, and a great nuisance to her, with my incessant excursions into the most remote parts of the mountains.

  I had meant all this in jest, but Simone took it to heart and shook her head and protested. Moments later, she was in my arms, blurting out her secret to me, red-faced and trembling. I was stunned and unable to move or speak for fear I might shatter the beauty of that moment. But I held her tightly, as if she were a puff of smoke that might drift away, and when I looked down at her, I told her what was in my own heart, holding back nothing.

  Well, I shall not draw this out. We were engaged that same evening, and no one less surprised than her father and mother, who said they had suspected something of the sort long before Simone or I had grown aware of how things stood. As a result, I stayed a fortnight longer in St Barthélemy than I had planned, though now it was to spend time with Simone in the house, to talk with her and get to know her and little Bertrand.

  Her parents thought that, anxious though we were to be married, the wedding should not take place until a full twelvemonth had elapsed from the date of Simone’s husband’s death, and to this plan we reluctantly gave our consent. I could not much longer put off my journey to Paris, for my work there was pressing and my time severely limited. We therefore concluded that I should leave alone and, my labours once completed, make my way back to Cambridge, there to await Simone’s arrival, accompanied by her mother, Albertine, and Bertrand.

  So it was that Atherton’s letter reached me at a far from suitable time. I expected my fiancée any day, and the thought of being occupied in such a dark business at the time of her arrival filled me with the greatest distaste.

  Before I had time to reply to him, however, a letter reached me from René, saying that Bertrand had been taken ill with a slight fever, and that Simone’s departure must be postponed until he was fully recovered and fit to travel. That letter was followed in the very next post by another from Simone herself, in which she poured out such loving sentiments that I almost blessed the delay that had been the occasion of her writing them.

  At all events, I was much cast down by this news, though not as yet disposed to return anything but an unfavourable response to Atherton’s appeal. The next day, however, brought a second letter in his hand, in which his urgings were not merely renewed, but given added force by the news that his mother had fallen seriously ill and was not expected to survive above three or four days.

  “Please hurry,” he wrote, “for she begs you to come. Her condition is perilous, but her mind lucid and her wishes perfectly clear, namely that she must at all costs consult you in this matter before she dies. Indeed, I think her fear of death has become very great, and she will not be easy in her mind until she has spoken with you and received certain assurances. I must remain with her, but I urge you to make all possible haste.” I confess I still hesitated for a couple of hours, torn between my reluctance to have any more to do with Atherton’s fiend and my sense of duty to a man who had never harmed me in any way. In the end, my conscience goaded me so severely that I went to the post office and sent a telegram to Atherton, asking him to meet me off the next train. I remembered how I had set aside Atherton’s last appeal, and with what consequences. This time I should at least be on hand to offer his dying mother whatever solace I had to give.

  Mrs Atherton lived at Abbeystead, the house to which she had retired on her husband’s death some eight years earlier. It was situated at some distance from Wilburton, a village a few miles south of Ely. The house itself is on Wilburton Fen, between the Catch-Water Drain and the Old West River. There is a branch line of the Norfolk Railway running there from Ely once or twice a day. I informed Atherton that I would take the 3.10 train to Ely and make my way to Wilburton on a train that left shortly after four.

  To my surprise, he was waiting for me at Ely with a dogcart.

  “I’m very glad to see you,” he said.

 
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” I replied. I smiled and shook his hand as I jumped up, though I could not wholly echo his sentiments. I liked the man well enough, but he awakened in me such unwelcome associations that, in all honesty, I should have preferred to see as little of him as possible.

  “Mother knows you’re coming,” he said. “But her strength has been somewhat low all day. Dr Hastings says she must rest a little. She may receive you this evening if her sleep restores her sufficiently.”

  “I’m content to wait.”

  “Well,” he said, flicking the whip lightly as we moved away, “it is perhaps fortunate. We can make excellent use of the time. I told you there was something I wished to show you here at Ely. That’s why I decided to meet you here instead of Wilburton. With your permission, I’d like to take you there now. It will be better if you have seen it for yourself before you meet my mother.”

  “Won’t you tell me what it is?”

  He shook his head and clucked gently to the horse.

  “I’d rather you reached your own conclusions,” he said. “We don’t have far to go.”

  * * *

  In a couple of minutes we had reached the cathedral, its vast bulk unmissable above every rooftop. A shaft of light from the setting sun caught the octagon as we approached, then as quickly shuffled back behind a cloud. Autumn was thick in the air, a cool breeze had come in uninterrupted from the sea, and the first leaves had started to fall. Somewhere, a bonfire was burning, imprinting the evening air with woodsmoke.

  Atherton tied up the dogcart and led me to the churchyard. It was growing dark, but he had come prepared with a lantern. In the fading light, we made our way between the graves until we came at last to his brother’s tombstone, a low marble stone set at the foot of a yew tree, and not far from the wall of the cathedral. I bent down and read the inscription.

  Rev. Edward Atherton M.A., D.D.

  10 March 1832-3 January 1883