Realm of Darkness

by C F Dunn

  13th October. “Took PK to lunch with A.S. et al. Held her own on Putney debates – drew quite a crowd. Put Vir’s nose out of joint.” Grandpa obviously found this amusing, but I thought it sounded precocious. I racked my memory but found no recollection on which to draw. I had been taken to so many lunches, with so many historians, that they tended to blur. They all seemed like old men – even the women – and this twenty-something-year-old student apparently made little impression. Shortly afterwards, however, Grandpa recorded a day I could never forget: “Introduced PK to the journal.”

  He was sitting in his usual place at his desk by the window of his bedroom, and it was snowing. Early snow, it had taken us all by surprise. I remembered the smell of it in the air mingling with the aromatic tobacco he savoured but rarely smoked.

  “Emma,” he said so quietly that I turned from where I pressed my nose against the cold glass, thinking I had imagined his voice. “Come here. I have something I want to show you.” And he tapped a ragged stack of paper secured with a frayed red ribbon on his desk in front of him. I climbed onto my chair with its cushion so I could reach the desk.

  “‘Verba volant, scripta manent.’” He smiled tolerantly as I fought to translate his wisdom, and failed. “‘Words fly away, writings remain,’ Pipkin. These words are very old. This is part of a transcript of a diary written by a man called Nathaniel Richardson, and he lived not far from here a long time ago. I want to tell you his story, or what I know of it, and the rest will be for you to discover when I am no longer here.” And from that moment on, as he wove the magic of the journal into my eager heart, I became enslaved as surely as he had been.

  “Emma,” he said at last, long after dusk crowded the room and hunger had been forgotten. “I have very little to give you when I die, but I will leave you this.” He laid a wasted hand upon the inked page. “Perhaps you will do what I have failed to do: find the journal, make it your own. The journal holds the key.” He closed his eyes and let out a long, slow exhalation as if he had waited forever to say those words.

  “The key to what, Grandpa?” I asked, visualizing a seventeenth-century man holding out a golden key.

  “The key,” he said again. “Nathaniel holds the key. Mundus vult decipi – the world wants to be deceived, my Pipkin, but not you. Veritas lux mea – the truth is my light. Find what it is he hides, Emma – read between the lines.” He laughed quietly at some private joke, but I was hopelessly lost, and his talk of mortality drove all thought of keys and journals from my mind, until the battered tailor’s box had been placed in my hands on the day we buried him.

  “What key, Grandpa?” I whimpered into the night, cast adrift without him to guide me, hugging the box close until I had cried enough to sleep.

  For years after, I clung to those words. Grandpa wanted me to find the key, and I had kept my promise – I had married him.

  Had he known? Did he suspect?

  Shortly before he died, when I read to him from the journal as his mind wandered between the living and the dead, he looked at me regretfully with faded blue eyes. “What have I done?” he whispered. “Pipkin, forgive me.”

  I held his frail hand between mine and stroked freckled skin as translucent as parchment.

  “Don’t be silly, Grandpa,” I chided gently in all my teenage wisdom, “there’s nothing to forgive.”

  He turned his head away, and in the failing light from the window, a slow tear had gleamed in his hollow cheek. “Forgive me.”

  Sitting on the floor of the study, surrounded by his diaries, I recalled his last words. “Grandpa, what have you done?” I picked up the diary with the smudge of ink across its cover. Reading carefully and with a more open mind, I continued.

  Dining at Kings. A lecture at Oxford. Martinsthorpe. The Old Manor. “JS” for Joan Seaton. Rolling my shoulders to ease them, I focused on references to Martinsthorpe, ignoring all else.

  4th May. “Set Vir on cataloguing all source material at OM” (Old Manor?).

  A few weeks later: 22nd May. “OM. Seaton papers ref: 1643/WL. Vir impatient to trace records of trial at Oak’m.” Then, a week later: “Vir following up WL lead.”

  WL. William Lynes? Did this Vir know the story of William’s betrayal of his brother that Joan Seaton had been so eager to tell me? I read on.

  1st June. “The Glorious First! (That’s what Grandpa used to call my birthday.) Vir traced WL grave. Reburied at some expense within church post-Restoration, poss. 1669 by unknown benefactor.” Now that was interesting on several counts. A frisson of curiosity ran through me.

  5th June. “Went to WL memorial. Curious inscription. S. A. (l. 1,170) Error in dating? Played down relevance, but Vir persistent.”

  On a plain sheet of paper, folded and stuck between the diary’s pages, Grandpa had sketched, with infinitesimal detail, the handsome, unadorned memorial. In fine white marble with black marble columns, it had been embedded in the wall of a church in what once would have been the Lady Chapel, the inscription still clear. After William’s name and his age at death, there appeared to be a quote:

  “These evils I deserve, and more… Justly, yet despair not of his

  final pardon,

  Whose ear is ever open, and his eye Gracious to re-admit the

  suppliant.”

  And beneath, the Lynes coat of arms and the date – 1669. No mention of his execution, or what had led to it, nor evidence who commissioned the monument, or why. Fleetingly, I became lost in the tragedy of it all, then gathered myself. Why was there an error in dating and what did it matter anyway? Grandpa had thought it sufficiently odd to hinder Vir’s curiosity and that was enough to kindle mine. I hopped to my feet and went out to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and clear my head.

  Matthew found me there when he emerged through the pantry door from the Stable, making me jump. “Where’s my pipe and slippers then?” he grinned, swinging me around and putting me back on my feet. “I fail to amuse, it seems.”

  Shaking my head, I grabbed his hand, dragging him towards the study. “I can’t make head or tail of these diaries. I need your help.”

  “Ah,” he said, stepping over the piles of paper spread across the floor. “You’ve been busy. Looking for something?”

  I started examining the books on the study shelves for anything that might help. “Your timing’s perfect. I’m looking for a quote. I don’t recognize it and I wondered whether you mi…” I heard an exclamation behind me.

  “So, he found it!”

  I turned around. Matthew hunkered down and was examining the sketch of the memorial with a curious expression of nostalgia mixed with regret. I should have known. “You had William reburied, didn’t you? So you know what the quote is?” Weaving between the diaries, I knelt next to him.

  Tracing the outline of the stone, he summoned memory from the page. “It’s taken from Milton’s Samson Agonistes. I thought it fitting. I couldn’t leave him where he was, unremembered and as if he’d never existed. It didn’t seem right, despite what he did.”

  “Why did Grandpa think there was an error in the date, and so what if there was?”

  Matthew looked puzzled. “Did he?” Then his face cleared. “Ah, well, that might be because I had William reinterred in 1669.”

  “So?”

  “And Samson Agonistes wasn’t published until a few years later – 1671, I believe. Your grandfather did well to spot the discrepancy; it’s not exactly common knowledge. I didn’t think anyone would notice at the time and I certainly didn’t think I’d still be around to worry about it being discovered now.”

  I chewed my cross, deep in thought. “But he wasn’t the only one. His research student – Vir – noticed, but Grandpa wouldn’t tell him anything more. He seemed to be suspicious of him. I wonder why. What are you looking at me like that for?”

  “You like a conundrum, don’t you?”

  I wrinkled my nose. “I took you on, didn’t I?”

  He laughed. “You did.”

  �
�How come you came into possession of a quote that hadn’t yet been published?”

  For a second I thought he might tell me, but he shook his head, gave a half smile and just said, “It’s a very long story,” before quickly moving on. “So, your grandfather’s student found William and they noted the mismatch between dates, but what did they make of it?”

  We searched the next few pages together, silently reading, heads almost touching: a colleague’s birthday bash, dining in Hall, a lecture published in a periodical and so on, until I found what I wanted. “Vir curious about window. Wants to access primary material. Told him records didn’t survive.” Then later still, “OM a mistake – Vir pushing for information. Visited OM without telling me. Not what he seemed.” Finally, a curt: “Spoke to Davies. Offer terminated.”

  I puffed out my cheeks. Offer. What offer? “Who on earth is Vir?”

  “Vir,” Matthew snorted a laugh until he saw my expression.

  “What’s so funny?” I demanded.

  “My apologies; I’d forgotten Latin is not your strong point. Vir can be translated as ‘man’ or ‘hero’; does that help?”

  I was already leafing through the diary. “Vir was helping Grandpa with his research. He took him to the Old Manor, but Vir became overly curious and something happened. Grandpa took a dislike to him, but he doesn’t say why. Vir. Man. Hero. I can’t see why. An anagram, perhaps? No – that doesn’t work. A play on words? Grandpa was always mucking about with words.”

  Matthew reeled off a list of synonyms. “Man: Gentleman. Fellow. Chap. Bloke. Lad…”

  We looked at each other. “Guy?”

  I forced myself to breathe, but each word hurt. “Tell me it wasn’t Guy. Tell me his being here has nothing to do with you.”

  Matthew’s face said it all. “It could just be chance,” he hedged.

  “But I don’t believe in coincidence.”

  “No.” We observed each other bleakly for what seemed like an age.

  “It would make sense,” I said eventually. “It would fit, but Guy never said he knew Grandpa. He never said he had met me. In all the time I knew him, why didn’t he tell me, Matthew?” I slumped to the floor, shaken, bewildered.

  “I don’t know, but this puts a different light on things.” He glanced at his watch. “Let’s talk to the family before it gets any later. They need to know – especially Ellie, before she says something to him.” He sprang to his feet, but I stayed put, my mind already racing down dark avenues, looking for a glimmer of light.

  “You go; I want to think this through.” He was in the hall when something occurred to me. “Matthew!” I called. He reappeared. “Henry doesn’t know who you really are and if Guy has any knowledge about the Lynes or where you come from, he’ll use it to sow dissension.”

  He didn’t waiver. “Then I’ll just have to make sure that he doesn’t.” And he left before I could ask him what he meant.

  I waited for him in the study. I hadn’t the heart to shut out the dark, and against the unshuttered windows, moth wings beat in a futile attempt to reach the light. Whatever the family decided, I had come to a decision of my own.

  He returned in the early hours. “Well?” I asked, no sooner than he stepped through the door.

  Leaning against the desk, he picked up the ivory letter opener, running a finger down its edge. “As Ellie’s parents, Dan and Jeannie will ask Guy to a family meeting this weekend under the guise of discussing his intentions. Dan managed to persuade Jeannie, although she’s not wild about it. She likes Guy well enough, and believes he loves her daughter. Ellie’s certainly infatuated with him.”

  I couldn’t see this working. “She’s an adult, Matthew. Even if he does agree – which I bet he won’t – Ellie can do what she likes. She doesn’t need her parents’ permission. You might be from another era, but she isn’t. There’s nothing stopping her from raising two fingers and refusing to cooperate. You said yourself she’s infatuated.”

  “She’ll cooperate, Emma, and Guy will agree to a meeting because, if you’re right about him, he’ll want as much contact with the family as he can get. The closer he is, the more information he can gather.”

  It felt as if we were being backed into an impossible situation where there could be only one outcome. I folded my arms against my chest, squeezing the fear and frustration from between my ribs. “And we’re going to give it to him on a plate, is that it? And then what?”

  He raised an eyebrow at the note of irritation. “And then we’ll see,” he said calmly. The clock chimed sweetly, unable to sugar the pill he expected me to swallow. I fumed at the piles of paper still strewn like the aftermath of a bomb across the floor. “Now, it’s late, and you have a conference in the morning; you need your sleep.”

  Conference? I’d forgotten the blasted conference. Who cared anyway?

  “Emma, until we know what Guy is up to, until we know what he wants, life goes on as usual. It’s part of our masquerade. To all intents we are a normal family. Let’s not give him – or anyone else for that matter – any reason to think otherwise. What could he have possibly discovered that would reveal my identity? If he does have any evidence, from your knowledge of him, is he likely to have told anyone else?”

  I shook my head. “Guy would want to keep that sort of information to himself until he could use it to further his career. I didn’t get primary recognition for the work I did for him; he always ensured his name appeared first. It was how things worked.”

  “Good,” he said grimly, “then let’s keep it that way.”

  CHAPTER

  29

  Mad Dog

  The haze which had developed overnight did nothing to alleviate the seething heat of the morning.

  Guy was talking with a group of French academics when I spotted him at the far side of the concourse, holding court.

  “Emma, join us for a coffee. We were just discussing Le Roi et la Croix. I know you’ll have something to say on D’Aubigne’s ridiculous assertion…”

  I wasn’t fooled by his false affability, even if they were. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew him?”

  There was a momentary hesitation before a condescending smile replaced the surprise. “You know Françoise, of course, but have you met Professors Bayard and Leveque?”

  I realized I must seem outrageously rude. I bit my lip and greeted each stiffly before facing him again and he could see I wouldn’t let it drop. He shrugged apologetically.

  “Pardon, ces affaires de coeur. Tout est juste dans l’amour et la guerre, n’est-ce pas?” I knew enough French to get the gist. The exchange of sympathetic looks fuelled my anger and I really didn’t care whether they knew I thought him a conniving bastard or not.

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Guy; love never had anything to do with it. Why did you lie to me? Why didn’t you tell me you knew my grandfather?”

  The French professors drifted away. Guy dropped all pretence. “You pick your times, Emma. Couldn’t it wait?”

  “For what?” I shot back. “Another ten years? It isn’t just something you forgot to mention, is it?” My voice echoed across the crowded concourse.

  He lowered his voice. “Not here; you don’t want the whole world to know.”

  “Why not? I’ve nothing to hide.”

  “Haven’t you?” He needed to add nothing to the shrewd, sharp look he gave me in the eloquent seconds that passed. It told me what I wanted to know and was enough to send a shockwave rattling through me.

  “What do you want, Guy?”

  “Meet me at my hotel…”

  I shook my head emphatically. “No, not there. You can come to the house after the dinner.”

  That sardonic lift to his mouth again. “Don’t you trust me?”

  I raised my eyes and stared directly into his. “When have you ever given me reason to trust you?”

  Purgatory – the only word I could think of to describe the torment I endured throughout the rest of the day. I sat through the series of presentati
ons with what I hoped appeared to be attentive interest but, in reality, mentally scoured every source I knew to see what Guy could have discovered that justified the expression of smug satisfaction he openly wore.

  During the brief interval for lunch, I snatched a few moments to phone Matthew.

  “What time did you arrange to meet?” he asked.

  “After the conference dinner tonight – probably nearly eleven by the time I get home.”

  “Do you want me there?”

  I wanted to shout: “Yes! Don’t leave me alone with him,” but I couldn’t. “No, I have to do this by myself.”

  I visualized him closing his eyes on the other end of the phone before answering. “All right, but I won’t be far if you need me. Don’t let him… keep safe… please.”

  I imagined how hard it was for him to let me go and silently prayed that I had enough strength for the both of us.

  The interminable afternoon drew to a close too soon. I wasn’t ready. Now without my own flat on campus, I went back to Elena’s apartment to change for the conference dinner. The heat of the day lay trapped in the confined space and she had not yet returned. I opened the windows to capture the mountain air, but they remained steadfastly distant, and our brief days of happiness among the slopes seemed so long ago that I struggled to recall them. Something tickled my face. I touched my cheek and to my surprise found it wet. I tried to quench fire in my throat, but bottled-up tears continued to seep for all the wasted years spent in the shadow of this man, for all the joy I had found with Matthew, for his family, and the threat hanging over us.

  When Elena returned in the early evening she found me sitting in the darkening room, alone and brooding. “Are you not going to the dinner?” she asked, switching on the overhead light. I squinted in the glare. “Are you OK?” She came closer. “Have you been crying?”

  Rising to my feet, I tucked the sodden hankies out of sight. “I’m all right. I’ll get changed.”