by Sarah Rayne
She began to read again, doing so slowly because she did not want to leave Andrew’s world.
It was bitterly cold for Thaisa Eynon’s funeral next day, and the service and burial took place against iron-grey skies with flurries of stinging sleet.
I led the choir through the music, but I have no idea how it sounded, because I was aware of little other than Theodora sitting quietly in her place. She wore black and her pale hair was tied back, throwing into prominence the slanting cheekbones that gave her such a fey, other-worldly look. There were marks of tears on her face, and there was pain and almost bewilderment in her eyes, and I wanted to grab her to me and smooth away all the grief and loneliness. I did not, of course. I fell into step with Brother Ranulf and Father Abbot and together we walked to the cemetery for the burial service.
It’s an old graveyard, the Rede Abbas one. Ranulf says it is becoming impossibly full, and new land will have to be found before much longer. Someone else murmured that the ground had been so hard and unyielding that the sexton’s men had been unable to break through it, and the coffin would be lowered into a shallower grave than was customary. Hearing that, a terrible thought slid unbidden into my mind. If the grave is shallow, it will be easier for her to get out if she is not dead …
Adolphus Glaum was among the mourners – I had to repress the suspicion that he was there to show how kindly a person he was, and how concerned he was for local people. He wore a solemn expression, and I disliked him all over again. Once I caught him watching Theodora with … with what I can only describe as a lascivious glint. After that I did not just dislike him, I hated him, and that’s a terrible admission for a man of God to make. He suddenly seemed to become aware of my regard and the pious expression reappeared as swiftly as if he had clapped a mask over his features and his feelings. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to put my hands round his thick neck, and say, How dare you look at her in that way?
I did penance later for those violent thoughts about Glaum, but I did not do penance for the scalding thoughts and longings coursing through my mind and my body for Theodora Eynon.
TEN
It’s strange to realize that massive events can be set in motion by the smallest, most ordinary of details. That night – the night of Thaisa Eynon’s funeral – if a pan of stew had not boiled over in the monastery’s kitchens, sending the kitcheners running distractedly around with damp cloths and jugs of water to quench it, our supper would not have been twenty minutes later than normal.
If Brother Wilfrid, Reader for the week, had not chosen a particularly wordy passage from St Thomas Aquinas to accompany our meal, supper would not have been even more delayed. And I should have reached Theodora in time.
It was almost nine o’clock when I finally slipped out by the garden door and walked out to Cliff House. The night was moonless, but as I drew near to Cliff House I could see the light burning in a downstairs room. It drew me, that light, like the magnetic north. ‘Thither is my north and there my needle points.’ And, oh, yes, I do know there’s a very earthy and deeper meaning in that line, and it’s not a meaning any monk with respect for his vows should know. Also, Cliff House lies to the west of the monastery.
There was a rickety gate in front of the house that almost fell off its hinges when I pushed it. It screeched like a soul in torment, but I stepped through on to a broken and uneven path beyond. I think I hoped she would hear my step on the broken path and open the door to me – that she would stretch out her hands as she had done last night. But there was no answer to my knock, although a light burned in one of the windows. After a moment I tried the door. I did not expect it to open, but it did, and I pushed it wide and stepped inside. Beyond was a dim corridor with three or four doors leading off. Everywhere was dark and dingy, and somewhere nearby was the maddening dripping of a tap. Through two of the half-open doors I could see threadbare curtains and chair coverings, and although I know that such things do not matter or count in the greater scheme of things, and that Theodora’s mother might not have had very much money, I wanted nothing more than to pick Theodora up in my arms and take her somewhere safe and warm and comfortable. How I thought that could fit with the Benedictine vow of poverty, I have no idea.
There was no sign of her, but as I looked into a long, gloomy drawing room – it did not look as if anyone had used it for years – I heard sounds from above. From the bedrooms.
You don’t, if you’re a gentleman, go scurrying up to a lady’s bedroom without at least hesitating or calling out. If you’re a Benedictine monk (even not fully professed and received into the Order), you do more than hesitate.
I did hesitate for several moments, then I went towards the stairs. The shadows of Cliff House came out to meet me, and as I went up the stairs they creaked, as if old, juiceless bones were struggling into life. At the top were several windows along a short corridor. They rattled uneasily in their ill-fitting frames, and the tattered remnants of curtains moved like beckoning eldritch fingers.
Then Theodora screamed, and I forgot about being a gentleman and I certainly forgot about being a monk, and ran like a mad thing towards the sounds.
She was in a bedroom at the far end – the door was open, and for the space of six heartbeats I stood there, staring in horrified disgust.
You forget – probably most people never have cause to think about it – how grotesque the act of love can look when viewed by a third person, especially if one of the people involved in it is ugly, thick-set and mean-eyed.
There was no love in what was happening on the bed, though. Adolphus Glaum was straddled over Theodora, one hand imprisoning her two wrists, the other fumbling greedily at the fastenings of his breeches. He pulled open the flap, and fell heavily forward on to the bed, on to Theodora, thrusting her skirts up to her waist, and pushing himself between her legs.
‘You let me do it, you bitch,’ he said, his words thick with horrid greed. ‘Let me do it now, hard and strong, or they’ll all know about your ungodly goings-on in the church last night.’
She was sobbing and trying to fight him off, but Glaum only gripped her more tightly. ‘Struggle away, you hellcat, it only makes it more exciting. Because I saw you in the church – I saw your precious monk as well; the one that pretends to be so saintly and pious and all the time he’s standing like an autumn crocus for you, under his robes. A fine tale all that would make for the monastery, wouldn’t it? Breaking open a coffin – and what did you do with him afterwards? But you’ll find me as vigorous as any cowled monk, my dear.’
‘Vigorous?’ shouted Theodora, her voice full of hatred. ‘You’re not vigorous, you weakling. Didn’t you know they tell in the village that you’re no better than a three-inch fool.’
Even from where I stood, I saw Glaum’s face flood with crimson. He said, ‘Prick teaser,’ almost spitting the words into her face. ‘Submit and you’ll find me generous. But refuse me, Theodora, and it’ll be the worse for you – and for your precious Brother Andrew.’
I bounded forward then, snatching up a candlestick from the dressing table, and bringing it smashing down on Glaum’s head. He gave a grunt of anger and surprise, and then, only momentarily stunned by the blow, rounded on me with a snarl. He was ridiculous – half undressed; the jutting manhood that had been so insistent a moment ago flopping out of his breeches. But he was still threatening, and he was a heavy, muscular man. Seething with such fury he would not find it difficult to overpower me.
Before I could deliver a second blow, which I was certainly prepared to do, Glaum knocked the candlestick from my hand, and lunged towards me, his hands reaching for my neck. I stood my ground, but before he reached me Theodora leapt up from the bed, seized the candlestick and lifted it above her head. I think I called out to her to stop – to leave Glaum to me – but it was already too late.
For a second time the heavy brass crashed against Glaum’s skull, and this time the blow was more telling. His eyes bulged, and his body sagged, as if the bones had been pulled fro
m it. Then he fell heavily on to the floor and lay there motionless.
I went to him at once and bent over him – of course I did. I had no notion of leaving the man to lie untended – as appalling as he was, as deeply as I hated him.
Theodora shrank back against the wall, one hand going to her throat. In a thread of a voice, she said, ‘Have I killed him? Oh God, I didn’t mean to kill him.’
I was feeling for a heartbeat, in the way I had seen Brother Wilfrid, the infirmarian, do with seriously sick patients in the infirmary. There was no trace of any pulse. I said, ‘I don’t know. Have you a small mirror – a looking glass?’
‘Here.’ She handed it to me from the dressing table by the bed, and I held it against Glaum’s lips, praying – genuinely praying – that the surface would become misted, showing that the man still breathed. But again there was nothing.
At last I sat back, my eyes still on Glaum’s prone figure. Theodora waited, and finally I said, ‘I’m not sure, but I’m dreadfully afraid he’s dead.’
‘Oh, Andrew, no … No …’
‘We’ll manage,’ I said, at once. ‘Help me fasten his breeches – we can’t let him be seen like that – then we’ll carry him downstairs. He mustn’t be found in your bedroom.’
‘All right. Yes.’
‘When we’ve got him downstairs,’ I said, ‘I’ll fetch Brother Wilfrid – the infirmarian. Also Brother Ranulf. They’ll know what to do.’
‘Can they be trusted?’
‘I hope so.’
We – that is Ranulf, Wilfrid and I – tried to keep the truth of Glaum’s death a secret. We told his daughters – Miss Gertrude and Miss Margaretta – that their father had been on a mission of comfort to the young, bereaved girl at Cliff House. While there, he had tripped and fallen, hitting his head against a brass fender, we said. Brother Wilfrid, imperilling his soul’s salvation, as he later told me, stated firmly that it was perfectly clear what had happened, and that in his view death would have been instantaneous. The local doctor, given a carefully arranged version of the facts, confirmed this. A shocking accident, he said, firmly. Father Abbot, accepting all he was told, said it was a tragedy and Adolphus Glaum would be a great loss to our little community.
My own presence in Cliff House that night was also kept secret, although Ranulf delivered a severe reproof to me in private, suggested a series of stringent penances I should perform, and advised that at the earliest opportunity I should confess any sins that might be dragging down my soul, and receive full absolution.
I carried out the penances, but I did not confess any of it. God forgive me, I could feel no remorse for the death of the man who had been about to rape Theodora. All I could feel was an increasing wish to protect her.
Despite the subterfuge and the lies and half-lies, there was talk almost immediately – virtually within hours, because Rede Abbas was that kind of tight, enclosed community.
The talk was the corrosive poisonous kind that spins its own false cloth, and winds that cloth stiflingly around people’s minds. As early as the next evening, Theodora was being looked at askance. She and her mother, alone and apart in their dark old house, had ever been strange figures to the local community, and the gossips seized on Glaum’s death at Cliff House, and picked it over, fashioning it to their own beliefs.
And the irony of it all was that they had stripped away the pretence, and peeled back the lies and got down to the truth. Theodora had indeed killed Adolphus Glaum.
Glaum’s funeral took place three days after his death.
I did not want to attend, but Brother Ranulf and Father Abbot were insistent.
‘Andrew,’ said Ranulf, ‘I have lied for you and for that poor child, and I shall go on lying. If you cannot support that lie by being present at the funeral, I wash my hands of you.’
So I went to the service, of which I do not remember a single prayer, and afterwards joined the solemn procession to the graveyard. Prayers were chanted as the coffin was placed on its designated shelf inside the family’s mausoleum; someone had brought candles and a tinderbox, and someone else spent a few moments in lighting the candles and setting them out in the dark interior. The acrid tang of the smoke mingled strangely with the odours of dank stones and of old, dry wood, and the flames flickered across the older coffins with their tarnished brass plates. It was a macabre sight – generations of Glaums, stretching back to the sixteenth century, all of them lying in the sour dimness.
One of the mourners, presumably trying to infuse a note of metaphysical romance to the grim proceedings, commented that the candle flames gave light in the dark of the charnel house, but the two Glaum daughters were not of a metaphysical or a romantic turn of mind, because Miss Gertrude dissolved in a fit of noisy sobbing and Miss Margaretta let out a wail and clutched at the wall to prevent herself from swooning. Both were helped out to the waiting carriage and driven back to Glaum House.
That same night, ignoring Brother Ranulf’s strictures and Father Abbot’s probable apoplexy if ever he found out, I again took the narrow cliff path to Theodora’s house.
I would like to record that I was heedless of the cold night, or of the rain and wind, but of course I heeded it. But what lover ever cared for a drenching or a chill …
Lover. That’s the first time I’ve used that word. Lover. But I was not Theodora’s lover on those nights. She was alone and grief-stricken and the community had turned against her because of Glaum’s death. It was possible that she was in danger from the law because of his death. I wanted only to comfort her. So I obeyed the precepts of a gentleman, and I kept the vows I had made.
They were vows I should never have taken in the first place, of course, and certainly I should never have flung myself into St Benedict’s on that wave of resentful bitterness against the world in general and a lady in particular. (A lady whose name I now have to think hard to recollect in full. Not that I was ever especially fickle, you understand. Well, not much. And not often.)
But I did not break any of my vows, except perhaps the vow of obedience, for the Rule of St Benedict does not permit a monk to go out into the world alone and by night. It certainly does not permit him to walk up to a house in which there is a lady for whom he has the deepest feelings.
Lights burned in the rooms of Cliff House that night, but as I reached for the brass door knocker, I became aware that someone inside the house – presumably Theodora – was playing a piano. This should have been an ordinary thing – a good thing to hear – but it was not, for the music was the strangest I had ever heard. I was partly repulsed, but also fascinated by it, but as the cadences reached silkily into my mind, I wanted to grasp them and write them down so they should never be lost.
I plied the knocker again, but the music continued, so, for the second time, I pushed open the door and entered Cliff House without being invited.
The music was coming from a room at the back of the house. It was a small room, and if it had been warm and if lights had burned there it might even have been cosy. A fire had been laid in the hearth, but it had not been lit, and the only light came from outside – through tall windows open to the night. Pale curtains billowed wildly in and out of them, twisting into reaching, snatching arms, and into pallid, impossibly elongated wraith-creatures, with open mouths stretched in silent cries.
Theodora was seated at the piano, and she was so lost in the music and in the song she was singing that at first she did not realize I was there. The words of her song reached me in fragments, but even those fragments informed me that this was a language I did not know.
Then she turned and stopped playing, and said, ‘Andrew,’ and there was pleasure and welcome in her voice, although there were shadows in her eyes.
‘I came to see how you are,’ I said. ‘You didn’t hear my knock, so I came in anyway. Is that all right?’
‘Of course. Let me light the fire – I hadn’t noticed how cold and dark it had got.’
‘I’ll do it,’ I said, and as I knelt befo
re the grate, I said, ‘What was that you were playing?’
At first I thought she was not going to answer, then she said, ‘It’s a Death Song.’
‘A death song? Do you mean a lament?’
‘No, not a lament. My mother said it came into our family more than three hundred years ago. It was brought by someone they say was a plentyn cael.’
‘You’ll have to translate that’ I said, after a moment.
‘A changeling. The human child is exchanged – the real child stolen away and something else left in its place. Something that isn’t human at all. That’s when the music came to us. Real changelings can never resist music, you see. I don’t believe the story, of course,’ she said, but her eyes were dark and inward looking. ‘The music becomes lost at times – sometimes for a century or more – but it’s always found again. My mother thought it had been destroyed for ever – burned, perhaps. Or perhaps it was drowned, buried fathoms deep … But I found it. Someone always does find it. Two weeks ago I played it. And then my mother died.’
The fire was burning up now. It sent little tongues of warmth and light into the room. I sat down in a deep old chair and looked at her. ‘You made a connection between playing the music and your mother’s death?’
‘The music brings tragedy in its trail,’ she said, evasively.
I suppose most people would find the concept of music holding a power utterly absurd, and of course it is. But there are uneasy tales that cling to some pieces of music. Whoever you are, reading this, have you ever heard of the ‘Lost Lament of the Dewin’? Or of Tartini’s infamous ‘Devil’s Trill’, said to have been given to him in a dream by Satan? And there are the even stranger tales of Niccolò Paganini, whispered by some of his contemporaries to be the son of the devil, and refused burial by the Church for five years after his death.