by Syd Moore
He was right, then. No dirt there.
I sighed and pushed back my laptop. My fingertips were tingling. That usually meant something: my intellect often managed to converse with my body way before my conscious mind got wind of it. But mindful of the fact I was online, and wanting to avoid any communication with Hackerman, I closed down the PC and retired to bed. It was just gone ten o’clock but I had to get my beauty sleep.
I would be seeing Felix tomorrow. I wanted to look my best.
Chapter Sixteen
The weekend’s good weather continued into Monday. In fact I might have almost described that day as glorious; I remember the sun being very bright and having a good go at warming the air around Colchester. Which made it not so bad when I got a call from Felix telling me he would be an hour late. His author needed to go over some contractual details and, although he was annoyed that this hadn’t been flagged up earlier, there was really nothing else to be done but take her through the small print.
I didn’t mind that much, instead taking the opportunity to have a wander through the narrow streets of the city centre. Colchester was a kooky kind of place; full of lanes and byways, Tudor homes converted into hairdressers, antique shops in modern shopping malls. I grabbed some lunch in a small café teeming with students fresh back from the summer break, bubbling with enthusiasm and new stories to tell.
With twenty minutes to kill I sauntered down to a place I’d passed near the car park where I’d deposited the car. St Boltoph’s Priory was a towering ruin of arches and windows that, at some point, must have been spectacular. In its centre a smattering of tombs and plaques peeped up between stubby brown grass and earth. Peacefully removed from the buzz of the main roads, a couple of late lunchers were sitting on the benches finishing their treats.
Making my way back up to the castle I nipped into the tourist shop opposite and bought a small handy guide to Colchester, which, the assistant assured me, contained a fair amount of history on the castle. On my way out I paused to check my reflection in the shop window. Not bad for a journo. I didn’t look overdressed for the occasion; slim black jeans and a navy sparkly jumper teamed with a tailored jacket and black boots gave me a professional but louche kind of attitude. Well, that’s what I thought until Felix marched up, a youthful energy to his gait. He bent down and stroked my cheek with his stubble and I felt his lips press against my face firmly. The breeze had picked up the ends of his hair and ruffled them about a bit. He pushed up his fringe and smiled.
There was something about Felix Knight that was really quite magnetic. I gave an approving nod to his out-of-office get-up: chinos, Converse, jacket – all immaculate and probably worth more than a month of my wages.
‘Hello, esteemed author,’ he said, stitching on that easy grin. ‘You’ve got lipstick on your teeth.’
Luckily olive skin hides blushes.
Once I removed the offending cosmetic accident I returned my face to him and shrugged. He dispelled my embarrassment by immediately blustering out apologies for his tardiness, promising to take me for a drink or ‘proper English tea’ after we’d toured the castle. I, of course, assented.
‘But first,’ he said breezily, ‘would you mind if I grabbed a quick bagel or something? I’m famished.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I passed a sandwich bar down the road, near St Botolph’s. Looked okay.’
‘St Botolph’s?’
‘It’s an old church further down. Nice grounds.’
‘Old?’
‘Church looks maybe a couple of hundred years old but the ruins are much older.’
‘Sounds great. I’ll get a sandwich and buy us coffees and we can have a late alfresco lunch. Do you mind?’
‘Not at all.’ The air was still bright, the sun peeping intermittently from behind white clouds. And Felix’s smile was warming. No, I didn’t mind at all.
I waited outside ‘George’s Tuck to Go’ while Felix got his sarnie (salt beef and dill), then we ambled down to the church and wandered around a bit before we hit on a nice bench beneath a tawny sycamore.
I brushed away the fallen leaves and we sat down.
‘Who is St Botolph then?’ Felix asked.
‘Aha,’ I said and took my guidebook out of my bag.
‘You must have been a girl guide,’ said Felix and sent me a roguish grin. ‘Always prepared.’
I looked down at the book. ‘I’m a writer. We’re always pre-prepared.’
He opened his mouth wide as he bit on the sandwich. ‘Uh?’
‘Research,’ I told him, conveniently overlooking the fact I had only bought the book half an hour since. ‘If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.’
‘Very wise,’ he said through a mouthful of beef and wiped his mouth on a serviette.
I looked the place up quickly. ‘Apparently no one knows much about St Botolph. He was alleged to have founded
a monastery around here, blah blah blah.’ I skimmed the
text. ‘Patron saint of travel. Gave his name to Boston in Massachusetts.’
Felix started and looked up sharply. ‘Are you joking?’
For a second his face took on a pinched shrewish look.
‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s what it says here. It’s a bit of a stretch, I’ll give you that – from St Botolph to Boston – but they have similarities: B, T and two “O”s.’
He shook his head, as if shaking out a thought. ‘No, not that. The fact that he’s the patron saint of travel and ended up going from here to Massachusetts.’ He searched my face as his voice trailed off.
I must have looked completely blank because he nodded then simply said, ‘Sorry. It doesn’t matter. I thought you said something else.’
‘Oh right.’ I must have missed something but had no time to reflect as Felix had already moved on, turning his attention to the book on my lap.
‘What’s that?’ He moved a fraction closer and pointed to a picture. There was a dribble of mayonnaise on his chin. I really wanted to lick it away, but managed to restrain myself and transferred my attention to the double-page spread.
There was a sketch of what the building may have looked like in its heyday: a Norman church, surrounded on its northern side by a chapter house, cloister, refectory and dormitories. It must have been quite an impressive sight pre-Reformation. Unfortunately most of the buildings were demolished by Henry VIII in the 1530s. ‘The priory church,’ I read aloud, ‘served the community until the siege of Colchester in 1648. Says here, that the siege happened during the Civil War. Well, in 1648. A year after Hopkins died.’ That man was never far from my thoughts, crouching in the corners of my mind, waiting to rise up at any opportunity. ‘The city,’ I continued, ‘was forced to open its doors to the Royalist army. When the Parliamentarians rocked up a siege ensued. Went on for eleven weeks, and ended with the surrender then execution of the Royalists’ leaders. After the constant bombardment of the Parliamentarian cannons the city was pretty much in ruins. St Botolph’s was particularly badly hit. It says here that local people are still turning up bullets and shrapnel in their walls and gardens.’
Felix nodded. The mayo had disappeared. He was wiping his hands on a paper serviette.
I cupped my coffee in my hand. Here was a curious paragraph, he’d enjoy this. ‘During the siege messages were sent to the Parliamentarians by concealing letters in hollowed-out bones and throwing them over the city wall nearby.’
‘They don’t mean human bones?’
‘Doesn’t say,’ I told him, glad that he was interested. ‘But the place was a graveyard. There were enough around.’
I watched his eyes wander over the scattered shards of tombstones. His eyebrows were wrinkled and he had swapped his smile for a face-scrunch. I expect he was imagining the grave robbing. ‘Pretty gross,’ he said finally.
My own eyes had returned to the book. ‘This is worse: “When Hythe Church was captured, its defenders were taken prisoner. Sir John Lucas’s house was then attacked. Soldiers broke open the
Lucas family tombs in the chapel, cut off the hair from the bodies and wore it in their hats.”’
‘Grosser,’ Felix said and quivered with disgust. I laughed. Despite the reading matter I was feeling light and frivolous. ‘At least they were dead. You can see why the witch hunters came and went without much dissent. The war brutalised people. I guess life at that time must have been absolute hell: soldiers running round seizing what little resources you had, killing, pillaging and raping. Loads of them. Two different sides. Blimey. And all this comes on top of crop failures, famine, zero law and order. You’d have to be totally focused on surviving and looking after your own. Who’d care about a few old women hanged here and there?’
Felix sniffed in the air and tossed his head back. The sunlight touched his crown, picking out golden threads. ‘Puts it in context.’ He sat up brightly and crushed the empty coffee cup in his hand. ‘So, shall we sink into some more history? Is Ms Asquith ready?’
I nodded quickly and stood up. ‘Here,’ I said holding out my hand to him. ‘Give me your rubbish. I’ll put it in that bin over there.’
I honestly don’t know why I did the next thing. I suppose it may have been eagerness to get out and on our way round the castle. Maybe I was showing off to Felix. Whatever, it all backfired.
A semi-circular flowerbed stretched between our bench and the bin. I should have nipped round along the pavement to it but instead I decided to skip over the actual bed. The soil was wetter than I anticipated and, once I’d popped the rubbish in, I spun around and felt my heel slip. Failing to correct my balance I tried to take another step forwards, but was suckered into the muddy part of the bed and fell head first onto the dirt. Fantastic, I thought kneeling there on my hands and knees. Good look.
Felix, being the gentleman he was, wasted no time in coming to my aid. This time even my olive skin didn’t manage to hide my flush.
He gallantly helped me to my feet and brushed me down, avoiding the smattering of mud on my arse. I was in full flow – apologising whilst focusing hard on scraping mud off my jeans, when I heard him say, ‘Good Lord.’
He was crouching over the earth where I had fallen. ‘What is that?’ he said, and poked a cluster of soil.
There was a slick furrow of mud where my boot had slipped. On one side, under the crumbly mass of earth I’d dislodged, something thin, whitish in colour, protruded from the ground. I put my hands on my dirty knees and leant over to inspect it more closely.
It was a small object, no more than three or four inches long, perhaps a quarter of an inch wide, hollow, like a whistle or a pipe.
Felix put his hand out to touch it and looked as if he was about to pick it up when an awful feeling of apprehension came over me.
‘Don’t. Don’t touch it,’ I shouted.
He withdrew his hand sharply and looked up. ‘Why? What is it?’
‘Don’t touch it.’ I moderated my tone. ‘I mean, you shouldn’t touch it. I don’t know what it is. But it might
be –’ the word on the tip of my tongue was ‘evil’. Where had that come from? Bloody ridiculous notion. Thank God I stopped myself in time I thought, and quickly substituted my chosen word for something far less hysterical. ‘Antique,’ I said. ‘Old.’
It was indeed ancient looking and fragile, but that wasn’t my worry. There was something indescribably nasty about the thing. I was sure it was made out of bone and had a feeling that it had once been human. ‘We should get someone official and tell them what we’ve found.’
‘Is it a pipe?’ Felix ignored my warning and stretched out his hand to prod it.
An image of the Witchfinder sucking on its end flashed in front of my eyes. Wasn’t he meant to have smoked? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t actually think clearly at all. In fact, I felt unaccountably wobbly.
A cloud briefly blocked out the sun, as the pipe flipped over to reveal a tiny row of characters on its underside.
‘Wow.’ Felix was fascinated. He picked it up. ‘Ouch,’ he hissed. ‘That’s sharp.’ The smaller, narrow end of the pipe was jagged like a broken tooth. ‘The damn thing cut me.’ Felix held up his hand to show me, a drop of blood bubbling from a thin horizontal slit in his palm. He cursed and pulled his gaze back to the thing in his hand.
‘Look, it’s got writing on it.’ His shirt cuff rubbed lightly against the pipe. The skinny red dribble of his blood smeared over the characters, the contrast lending them clarity. ‘I think it’s Latin. Quis.’
‘That means “who”.’ My grammar school education had its uses.
Felix was peering closer. The letters were minuscule. ‘Qui est iste qui venit.’
My Latin was worse than rusty, more like completely decayed. These days I could just about remember something about Caecilius in the atrium and that was it. But my head nodded almost without me being aware of it moving. ‘Who is it who is coming.’
I don’t know how I knew it but, there, I had said it. Sometimes, I thought to myself, these skills, strengths or talents lie dormant until we need to use them.
I wasn’t wrong.
‘Strange,’ Felix was saying as he got to his feet. I came to the same conclusion. ‘Vicious yet intriguing, don’t you think?’
‘Put it down.’ The sight of it in his fingers made me wince violently. It was an exaggerated reflex that went right through my body and down to the ground.
But he was rapt, spellbound, beyond caution now.
I noticed a vague nausea in my stomach. It started to strengthen, reaching out and up my throat as I watched Felix turn the thing over in his hand. Then, without any warning he lifted it to his lips.
Panic shot through me and I opened my mouth to yell at him to stop. I couldn’t bear the thought of that thing touching his lips, entering his mouth, contaminating his body. But it was too late. A dreadful sound came out of the pipe – high-pitched, faint, and unearthly, like the last rattling breaths of a hundred sacrificed souls. Darkness and earth. Despair, death and sorrow.
A wave of revulsion swept over me. For a moment I thought I was going to vomit.
Felix felt something too, I was sure, for the pipe dropped from his fingers and rolled into the soil. He took a step backwards, shook his head and rubbed his chin. ‘Did you hear that?’ He swallowed.
I got myself together and nodded.
‘Peculiar noise,’ he said. ‘Do you think maybe it was used in rituals? Ceremonies?’ He laughed but it was hollow. For a minute we didn’t speak, just stood there gazing at the thing which had produced that dreadful sound – white bone reddened by blood. A sacrifice. Or a summons.
It felt like the damage had been done.
I edged away from it. ‘I suppose we might as well take it to the castle museum now. As we’re going there.’
Felix shook a hanky out of his jacket and wrapped the pipe, popping it into his breast pocket for safekeeping. I didn’t like the idea of it being so close to his heart. It was like it might infect him. He already looked a little peaky. I think the sound had shocked him.
‘We should definitely let the castle experts deal with it,’ I said.
‘Sure thing,’ he replied and smiled weakly. I tried to return his smile as we headed out of the priory but I couldn’t muster much at all. A terrible feeling of doom had fallen across me. The sun receded behind a cloak of clouds and the daylight had grown dim. A stale mustiness pervaded the air.
Felix swallowed. ‘Come on. It’s exciting isn’t it? Could be the greatest archaeological find of the decade.’
I glowered at the grey flagstones under my feet. I think somehow I knew that now he’d blown on the pipe nothing would be the same.
He called him, you see. And we both felt it. It was cursed. And his blood had whet its appetite.
It had broken the veil.
Though, of course, it didn’t register at the time. It was just a weird thing that had unsettled me. Another weird thing.
We reached the castle and sauntered across the wooden bridge to the vaulted entrance. A
young bloke at the till inspected the pipe and called a female colleague down from an office. They were both interested and asked us to come to the office. I gently declined, guilting Felix into accompany-ing the castle staff by pointing out that I’d already been delayed (by him) and really needed to get stuck into my research. Plus I didn’t want to be near that revolting relic.
Felix didn’t need much persuasion. In fact, as he told the staff how we came across it, his eyes kept darting back to the bone pipe. You could see he was quite taken by the thing.
I was more than happy to leave them to it.
I paid at the entrance then passed under the eyes of a stone sphinx depicted perching on the mangled remains of a human head, hands and bones, and then through into the museum proper.
Colchester Castle was a gloomy structure indeed. Mind you, the place had a huge legacy: once the capital of Roman Britain, many of the displays in the cabinets testified to its early importance. There were ancient vases and plates; some gorgeous necklaces, the like of which might have been replicated and displayed on several D-list celebrities of today; a replica chariot used by the warrior queen, Boudicca or Boadicea, as she was known in my childhood. I don’t know when her name changed but I really preferred the original. Mum had too, telling me that nobody really knew how it was pronounced and I could say it whichever way I wanted. She liked the warrior queen but she thought her story wasn’t all there. ‘History,’ she’d tell me, ‘is a matter of who tells the tale and why.’ I remembered her having a bit of a rant over Tacitus’s account. ‘He was writing years after the events but we take his words as gospel. It’s us who allow time to reduce history to a half truth. It’s only one person’s perspective. You got to watch out for that, Sadie.’ Well, I certainly was. I was here in Colchester Castle wasn’t I? Getting my own perspective on the place. She’d be pleased about that – solid primary research.