Gethsemane Hall

by David Annandale

  Pertwee had pushed ahead a couple of steps and was gazing at the Hall and its grounds with baby-wide eyes. Her breaths were deep and big, as if she could suck the scene into her lungs. “This is so beautiful,” she said. Meacham agreed. “Can’t you feel the peace?” Meacham differed. Pertwee wouldn’t give it up. “Just like its namesake,” she said.

  Meacham saw Hudson stiffen. Interesting, she thought. The subject of religion came up, and Hudson, of all people, reacted as if an unforgivable social breach had been committed. Why was that? Then she saw the way he was watching Gray: wary, braced.

  Gray didn’t disappoint. “You mean the peace of the garden where Jesus asked God to let him off the hook? Where he was scared witless? Where he was quote in agony, unquote? Where his sweat was ...” Dramatic pause. He turned to Hudson. “How does it go, Patrick?”

  Visible reluctance before the answer. “‘His sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.’”

  “As it were,” Gray repeated, sour fun on his face. “And yes, where Judas delivered the kiss. Is that what you feel, Ms. Pertwee? The peace of betrayal?”

  Pertwee reddened but held her ground. “None of what you said has turned the Garden of Gethsemane into an unholy place. It is still revered.”

  “That’s sweet,” Gray said. He spoke the words without irony, without condemnation. Because of that, even Meacham felt the burn. Pertwee swallowed hard and assembled a brave face. Meacham watched the joy return to her eyes as she gazed on the hall. The girl bounced back quickly. Her belief system was solid. She was going to be a headache.

  “How old is the house?” Sturghill asked.

  “The oldest sections are over six hundred and fifty years old,” Gray said. “There have been additions and changes constantly. The most recent were commissioned by my aunt.”

  Meacham said, “Your gardens look very well-tended. I thought no one had been living here.”

  “There’s a firm in Axminster. My family has dealt with them since the fifties. They look after things.”

  “No one local can do it?” She was surprised a gardening service hadn’t set itself up nearby.

  “It’s not that they can’t. There’s a very good landscaping company here. They prefer not to work here.”

  “The locals don’t like your house, I take it.”

  “It’s more complicated than that. They don’t want to spend time here because they really do want to spend time here.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I do.” His expression as he looked at the house was an indecipherable mix of love, longing, and fear.

  “Then why do you stay?”

  “Because I’ve given in,” he answered, and started walking again.

  He led them around to the gatehouse tower. A narrow stone bridge crossed the moat. They passed through the tower’s arch and into the cobbled courtyard. A disused fountain stood in the centre. Against the south wall, Meacham saw an enormous dog house. It had half-timbered sides and an orange tiled roof. It looked like a chunk of gable that had been detached from the roof of the house. Meacham pointed to it. “For Cerberus?” she asked.

  “It’s from the 1870s,” Gray answered. “Built for Falstaff.”

  “Who was?”

  “A Saint-Bernard and Rottweiler cross.”

  “Must have been very effective at keeping the barbarians from the gate,” Crawford commented.

  “The house has never really had problems with attackers.”

  “Why not?” Meacham asked.

  “Its location, mainly. It’s very isolated.”

  “It isn’t very far from town.”

  “True,” said Gray, “but Hawkesfield Road is recent history, by the Hall’s standards, and the drive even more so. The house is hidden by the forest, which is still pretty thick, so imagine it five or six centuries ago. There’s at least one story of a raiding party that targeted the Hall but became lost in the woods.”

  A doorway in the courtyard led to the outer hall. “This used to be the buttery,” Gray explained. “There was an entrance to the Great Hall from the courtyard, but that made for a very drafty eating experience. My family finally had the idea of walling up that doorway and using this as the way into the Great Hall. Only took them five hundred years to come up with that innovation.” The room was very spare. There was a wooden bench in one corner, and beside it a Chinese vase with a few dead stalks of bamboo. A painting of George III hung on the wall opposite the entrance. It was going dark and waxy with sunlight and grit.

  The Great Hall had a high, vaulted ceiling. The upper half of the space was light, wooden timbers arching over white walls. Very dark oak panelling sucked away light in the lower half. In the centre of the room, placed lengthwise, was an oak table, massive enough to pass for a dolmen. It looked small in a room that had been designed for several tables of its size. A heraldic frieze circled the room at the top of the panelling, just above Meacham’s eye level. Coats of arms were surrounded by gryphons, lions, giant wolves, and dragons. Lots of dragons. There were two tapestries, one above the door as they entered, the other on the opposite wall. The nearest was the most badly faded of the two. A woman stood in the centre of a forest clearing, a Latin speech bubble emerging from her mouth. She was surrounded by a kneeling crowd. Meacham kept thinking there were other figures in the trees, but every time she looked more closely, she saw nothing but twining vines and hanging fruit. “Saint Rose the Evangelist,” Hudson said. “The local patron saint.”

  “She lived on this site,” Pertwee said.

  “Or so the story goes,” Gray said, deflating her.

  “Are you saying she didn’t?” Corderman demanded.

  “I’m just waiting for something more definite than tradition to make the case,” Gray answered.

  Meacham had no difficulty identifying the subject of the other tapestry. She’d seen plenty of encounters between Saint George and the dragon. Much of this work had faded, too, but the reptile’s colours and definition were still very strong. George and his horse were fading into nothing. The horse was rearing in front of the monster, and George’s lance was pointing at the ground instead of at the dragon. The stance looked awkward, like an accident waiting to happen. The lady stood behind the dragon, gazing at George with what struck Meacham as complete disinterest. Then she noticed that the woman wasn’t chained. The dragon, bigger than in most other representations she’d seen, was looming over George with a knowing look. The portrayal seemed to be coming from some parallel universe, where the knight was a patsy about to be roasted.

  The northwest doorway brought them to the staircase hall and another change in style. The fireplace and panelling in the Great Hall, Gray explained, were Elizabethan. The staircase was Jacobean. A grotesque, snarling face stared back at Meacham from the newel post. Its features bore the anger of a defeated enemy. Gray started up the stairs. “I’ll show you your rooms,” he said.

  “What’s through there?” Corderman asked. He was standing by the hall’s other doorway, peering into gloom.

  “The crypt,” Gray said. He didn’t come back down the stairs.

  “Can we check it out?” Corderman was shifting from foot to foot, drawn by Gothic stone, seduced even more by the evocative name of the room.

  Gray hesitated, then shrugged. “Of course,” he said. He followed as they entered the crypt, but Meacham saw him hang back by the entrance.

  The room was ancient emptiness. Meacham couldn’t see the interest beyond the obvious ghost story atmosphere. Then Pertwee squealed. “There’s a cold spot!” she said, as if it were the bestest Christmas ever. She was standing beneath the central keystone, spreading her arms in ecstasy. She was also shivering. “Really strong,” she murmured. Christmas and birthday combined. She shot an accusing look at Gray. “Didn’t you know this was here?” Gray shrugged again. He was watching Pertwee intently, as if expecting her to combust. “Why didn’t you tell us?” she demanded.

  “I think,” Crawford said, �
��that he’s letting us gather our own first impressions of the Hall.”

  “Free of suggestion,” Sturghill put in.

  “I’m not imagining this,” Pertwee said. She moved aside. “Go ahead, you try.”

  Crawford stepped forward. He froze, his eyes startled wide. Pertwee’s smile was told-you-so. Christmas and birthday and summer vacation all in one. Crawford jumped back, stared at the spot he’d been standing. He reached forward. He snatched his hand back, bitten, then tried again. He kept his hand out this time. Meacham watched him work to reacquire his composure, recapture the scientist and tamp down the freaked-out caveman. “Very striking,” he said.

  “Well?” Pertwee asked. “Explain that away.”

  “I’m not drawing any conclusions until I’ve examined the phenomenon properly. You won’t mind if I don’t completely ditch the scientific method? Ta, darling.”

  Pertwee reddened, embarrassed and annoyed, eyes to the floor. Meacham thought the ghost hunter’s anger was aimed as much at herself as at Crawford. No shortcuts if you want to be taken seriously, honey, she thought. Then she waded into the spot herself, while she was still feeling snarky.

  It was like opening a door to January. There was no transition. The air around Meacham went from room temperature to numbing in an eye-blink switch. The cold sucked at her, trying to pull her down through the floor. Her heart stopped, then sprinted loud and hard. The rules of her universe were broken. She wanted to run. She made herself stay put. Environmental conditions, she reminded herself. You don’t know what’s going on, so you want to howl and pray to the dragon not to eat the sun. She was used to being out of the loop. Her years at the Agency had taught her this was a normal state of affairs. No matter how much you thought you knew, there was always a whole new realm of magical and incomprehensible manoeuvring going on above you. And the wizards were always just as stupid and venal and human as everybody else. They just had better intel and leverage. She fought down the urge to exclaim. She said, “Pretty weird,” and that was good enough. She let someone else try the ride.

  Gray was frowning. “You’re all just experiencing cold?” he asked.

  Sturghill, checking things out, yelped and laughed and nodded.

  “Nothing else?”

  Heads shaking. What more was he expecting? Meacham wondered.

  “What did you experience?” Pertwee asked.

  Gray didn’t answer. He turned and headed back up the stairs again. They followed, and he brought them to the Old Chapel. “While you’re at it,” he said, and he gestured for them to enter. His face was unreadable.

  Corderman scampered forward, first one in, no rotten egg. He stopped with a jerk and a yelp. He pumped his fist. “Found it!” he yelled, victor of the scavenger hunt.

  Give the boy a balloon, Meacham thought. But he was right. There was another cold spot here. Even knowing what to expect, it was still a shock when she touched it. It didn’t seem as cold as the one in the crypt. She said so.

  “You’re right,” Pertwee said, too excited to worry about agreeing with the CIA bogeywoman. She looked around the room, measuring the spot’s distance from the outside wall. “Isn’t it directly above the one downstairs?” she asked. When Gray nodded, she said, “Have you explored any deeper?”

  “There’s a basement?” Meacham asked, surprised.

  “No,” said Gray.

  “There are caverns,” Pertwee declared.

  Gray rolled his eyes. “That’s folklore.”

  “What,” Meacham demanded, “are you two talking about?”

  “Saint Rose lived on this site,” Pertwee explained, “but not in this house. It wasn’t built yet. There was a grotto on the grounds, and it led to a network of caves big enough to live in. She worked and ate and slept there. The caves became a pilgrimage site. People would come —”

  “— from miles around to hear her preach,” Gray finished, adding a sing-song rhythm to the cliché. “The saintly hermit in a cave. Can you imagine anything more picturesque? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there are no underground shrines here.”

  “You can’t prove that,” Pertwee said.

  “I don’t have to prove a negative. I think I would know if such a thing existed.”

  “Have you ever looked? Haven’t you ever noticed any architectural anomalies?”

  “No,” Gray said, but Meacham thought he hesitated for a fraction of a second. “Now if you’re done playing, I’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping.”

  There were four bedrooms linked to each other off the Old Chapel, and a fifth that had a door opening onto the staircase. Gray scooped up some clothing as they passed through the small corner room. “Someone else can stay here,” he said. “I’ll be on the other side of this floor.” The two larger spaces, the one furthest from the chapel and the one off the staircase, were solar bedrooms, with much bigger windows, and had doors onto a shared bathroom. Pertwee and Corderman took the room near the stairs. It was, Gray said, called the Sunset Room. Its oriel window faced west. Hudson took the room beside the chapel, Crawford the corner, with Sturghill next to him. That gave Meacham the other solar bedroom. This was the Garden Room. Its north-facing window looked out over the grounds. “Luxury,” Meacham said and meant it. But the real luxury was in that view. The furniture was old, valuable, and stiff as an upper lip. The couch was overstuffed, the chairs hardbacked and forbidding. There was the stale smell of disuse and old dust. The fabric was slightly oily to the touch. The room was a still life to the garden’s exuberance of green. Standing at the window, Meacham saw Gray make his way up the drive. A few minutes later, he reappeared, followed by a small van. He’d sent for their luggage. Well, Meacham thought. Here we are, and here we stay.

  Hudson had to cut through Meacham’s room to reach the New Chapel. He knocked on her door, poked his head in, and smiled an apology as she waved him through. She was unpacking her suitcase. Hudson saw a profusion of papers already spreading out on the Victorian tables. She had a collection of utilitarian suits laid out on the bed. There weren’t many, and they could mix and match with each other. She struck Hudson as someone who approached dressing with the same dispassionate efficiency she would bring to intelligence work. “Settling in all right?” he asked.

  She skipped the pleasantry. “What did you think of the cold spot?”

  “I don’t know.” He didn’t.

  “A bit disturbing, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Still think there’s no such thing as ghosts?”

  “I don’t understand the cold spot. That doesn’t mean it’s supernatural. I don’t pretend to understand the internal combustion engine, either, but I don’t think cars are powered by black magic.”

  “True.” She went back to her unpacking.

  Interesting, Hudson thought as he left the room. He’d been prepared to dislike Meacham. He’d had the occasional run-in with the CIA in Africa. The encounters had been brief, tangential to the agendas of both parties, and nothing he cared to repeat. He had been bothered not just by their means, but by their rock-of-ages commitment to an unquestioned end. Crossing paths with the agents was a clash of religions. At least, he told himself, he had the decency to wrestle with doubts now and then. Meacham was different. Maybe the few of her colleagues he’d met were exceptions, but there was no fervour in her. Her jaundiced openness about who she was and why she was here was refreshing. He even liked her sardonic fatalism. What impressed him the most was a more open mind than he had expected. She didn’t hide that she was here as the force of debunking, and that Crawford was her big gun. But she was asking questions without, he felt, already knowing the answers. She was looking around with her eyes open. So there, he thought. Proof that no one is beyond redemption. There was comfort in that.

  He stopped in the New Chapel and knelt at the altar. The pews and pulpit here were beautiful, ornate, and looked much older than they were. Though they were more Victorian aping of the antique, they were now venerable in their own right. They wer
e not, however, the original pieces from the Old Chapel. Hudson wondered what had been done with those. He found that he didn’t care. He was glad that this was the space devoted to worship now, and not the other room. He believed what he’d said to Meacham, but the cold spot still bothered him. It would until there was an explanation. On this front, he was Crawford’s big backer. He wanted the rationalist explanation. He wanted the spooky loose end snipped, then shut up in a box. There was no point pretending he could pray in a chapel with that freezing distraction waiting for him to stumble back into it.

  He shut his eyes and prayed. He prayed a lot for Gray. He very consciously did not wait for answers or inspirations. That kind of waiting wouldn’t do his peace of mind any good. When he was done, he stood up and bowed to the cross on the altar. He turned to go, but the cross held his attention. It looked too cold and inert. He was struck by the emptiness of the chapel. It seemed as if its sanctity was as phony as the antiquity of the pulpits. All just for show. The cross was suddenly a widget in a useless shape.

  He shook his head, trying to tear himself from suffocating cobwebs of doubt. He left the chapel, crossed another staircase landing, and entered the drawing room. This was one of the lighter spaces in the house. The furniture was more recent, submitting to the last century’s demands for comfort. There were more Chinese vases here, small ones in alcoves of the ornate Jacobean mantelpieces. The wallpaper also was Chinese. Light streamed in north- and west-facing windows. Movement on the ceiling drew Hudson’s eye. Reflections from the moat rippled over the plaster in a sinuous movement of shadow and light.

  Gray was sitting in an armchair beside the west window. He was watching the reflections too. “Hypnotic,” Hudson offered.

  It took a moment for Gray to react and lower his eyes. It seemed to take another second before he registered who Hudson was. Then he nodded.

  “I think you had a lot of fun with that press conference.” Hudson took a seat facing Gray’s at the window.