“Yes, sir.”
“I pray it stays so.”
I have never been back to Thornham St Stephen. Mrs O’Reilly writes to me from time to time, telling me how the village is faring. The new rector has got the choir back together, and they are in finer voice than ever. He is a good man, she says, and dines with Sir Philip only once a year. The new altar is a proper wooden affair, built of oak, and backed by a magnificent East Anglian painted retable found by the rector in the church loft. The wicked abbot’s tomb is still there, but sealed with mortar now. The rector has ordered it festooned with flowers every Easter.
Bertrand sings in the choir at King’s, and his English improves by leaps and bounds. I am writing this for him, so that one day he will understand.
Simone expects our first child in the autumn. She is certain it will be a girl. I am less sure. The nursery is being painted as I write. Simone’s fever broke at about the time I must have been at the altar in St Stephen’s Church, and she recovered rapidly from that moment. Dr Willingham described the change in her condition rather lightly as “bordering on the miraculous.” I merely smiled and said he might be closer to the truth than he thought. He believes I went to Thornham St Stephen to pray, and he is content to let me think my prayers took effect. I shall never tell him or anyone but my wife and children the truth.
I have since examined statues of Knum in both the Fitzwilliam here and the British Museum. They differ in size and colouring one from the other, but all bear a close resemblance to the one that William de Lindesey hid in the altar next to his tomb. James Hallam-Pierce, a Fellow of my college and an expert on the crusades, tells me such an object might have found its way from Egypt to Syria, and thence into the hands of a crusading knight.
I cannot imagine the statue had any power for evil or good in itself. It was an idol, nothing more. But if William and others had invested it with their warped longings and dreams of immortality, then it will have acted as a focus for their every evil thought and deed. It is gone now. Albert Ryman found the fragments of rotten wood scattered about the altar, and burned them unceremoniously at the back of the church. The altar was reconsecrated, and prayers said in the church and throughout the village.
There is a little churchyard not far from Wilburton, where Matthew Atherton is buried next to his mother, her body having been reinterred there after a short spell in the churchyard at Ely. I travel there as often as I can, to lay flowers on his grave and pray that he find rest. How he came to be laid in William de Lindesey’s tomb, and how he died are questions I prefer not to dwell on. The police showed some interest in the matter to begin with, but even they had, in the end, to recognise the impossibility of ever reaching a proper conclusion.
I visited Atherton’s grave last week, on a Sunday afternoon, as I am accustomed to, and found that a headstone had been erected there at last. The sexton told me it had been paid for by a nephew who lives in Peterborough, a man I have never met. It is a fine stone, matching his mother’s beside it. Beneath Atherton’s name and the dates of his birth and death are inscribed the words: “Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge,” and underneath that there is part of a verse of Scripture, from the Book of Job.
He shall return out of darkness.
I have said nothing to Simone about the inscription. After all, the nephew is innocent of the matters I have just related, and his choice of the passage can have had no other motive than the obvious. Nonetheless, I have not slept well since reading it. Yesterday, Mrs Lumley told me there are rats in the attic. She has heard them at night.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonathan Aycliffe was born in Belfast in 1949. He studied English, Persian, Arabic and Islamic studies at the universities of Dublin, Edinburgh and Cambridge, and lectured at the universities of Fez in Morocco and Newcastle upon Tyne. The author of nine full-length ghost stories, he lives in the north of England with his wife. He also writes as Daniel Easterman, under which name he has penned several bestselling thrillers.
A Shadow on the Wall Page 19