by Sarah Rayne
Walking back to Cliff House, Nell West trapped, Maeve was aware of a deep satisfaction. It had been an extreme measure to take, but she had not been able to see any other way. She could not allow the woman to delve into the past and the tower’s history, and she could not allow her to know about Andrew.
Andrew.
Over the years, Maeve had rationed herself to the times she read Andrew’s journal, because she was afraid of his words becoming too familiar and starting to become meaningless or even boring. She could not have borne that. But today, with the sea creeping towards the bell tower, she would enter his world for a couple of hours.
She let herself into the house, locking the door behind her as she always did. She had never once forgotten to lock doors and windows, not in all those years she had lived here.
All the years. It was more than forty-five years since she had found the recording of ‘Thaisa’s Song’. Forty-five years since she had found Andrew’s journal. It was nearly as long as that since she had finally read the whole of it, and had found out why he was facing death.
She remembered it, because it had been the day that two men came to see Aunt Eifa. That in itself had been remarkable, because no one ever came to Cliff House. Aunt Eifa did not allow it. ‘What do they want, poking and prying?’ she would say if someone knocked on the door. Or, if Maeve asked whether she could have schoolfriends to tea, Aunt Eifa would reply that they did not want strangers snooping into their lives. Better to keep the house to themselves, she always said, and a look so strange and so almost-frightening came into her eyes when she said this that after a while Maeve stopped asking.
But on this day two men were in the house when she got home from school. They smiled at Maeve, and Aunt Eifa told her to go up to her room to do her homework. But she did not close the sitting-room door, and Maeve sat down on the stairs where she could hear almost everything that was said. She knew you should not listen to other people’s conversations, but this might be important.
The two men were here because Cliff House – the house that had belonged to Aunt Eifa all her life – was becoming unsafe. They said so several times.
‘It’s coastal erosion,’ said one of them, and papers were rustled at this point. ‘You can see for yourself,’ said the same man. ‘Here on the map, and again here.’
‘And in these photographs,’ said the other man, and there was more rustling.
‘And we have analyses of material taken from the cliff face – soil and chalk and lime.’
They wanted Aunt Eifa – they called her Miss Eynon, of course – to sell Cliff House and move out. The council or something would buy it, and a fair price would be paid – Maeve did not follow this part very clearly. But, said the men, Miss Eynon would not be out of pocket, and she and her niece could buy a cottage or a bungalow further inland. A nice, neat little place with a small garden, and all of it much easier to manage than this sprawling old house.
Aunt Eifa said, very sharply indeed, that she did not want a nice little bungalow or a neat cottage, no matter how convenient or easy.
‘And now please leave,’ she said. ‘Don’t bother me again or I shall call the police.’
She would not, of course, Maeve knew that, but it sounded quite threatening, and the men must have thought so, too, because they got up immediately.
But as they were going along the hall, the older one said, ‘It will have to happen in the end, Miss Eynon. Parts of this stretch of the cliff are becoming very unsafe. The sea will take this house – it’s taken several buildings already. Did you ever hear of a place called Glaum Manor?’
‘I remember Glaum Manor very well,’ said Aunt Eifa. ‘They tore it down when I was a girl. They said the foundations had been eroded.’
‘They did indeed tear it down. And now St Benedict’s Monastery is going, as well. Did you know that?’
‘The monastery’s an historic building,’ said Aunt Eifa, at once. ‘Nobody tears down historic buildings. And where are the monks to go, I should like to know?’
‘It might be historic, but it’s gone far beyond restoration,’ said the man, ‘and it certainly doesn’t qualify to be a listed building or a candidate for the National Trust, not the state it’s in and the position it’s in. It’ll slide into the sea if it’s left there.’
‘The bulldozers are going in next month,’ said the other man. ‘As for the monks, there are only two left, and one’s nearly a hundred and the other’s ninety-seven. They’re going into a St Benedict’s nursing home, and perfectly happy to do so. Sign of the times, Miss Eynon. We’ll wish you good-day, but you have our phone number if you want to talk to us again.’
Aunt Eifa gave what sounded like a snort of annoyance, and saw the men to the front door.
She told Maeve what had happened over supper that evening. Maeve listened carefully, pretending not to know any of it. She asked if they would have to move from Cliff House.
‘No, we won’t. Not ever. No one can make us.’
‘Don’t you want a smaller house with less work?’ asked Maeve a bit timidly, because Aunt Eifa was always bemoaning the amount of work that had to be done and what a drudge it all was, and grumbling about crumbling brickwork and leaking lead pipes.
‘It’s nothing to do with work,’ said Aunt Eifa. ‘Family property brings other things as well as bricks and mortar. Things are handed down.’
For a moment her eyes had the sudden fixed look that Maeve always found scary, and her face seemed to freeze, like the surface of a stone. Then she frowned and made an impatient gesture with one hand, as if pushing something away, and told Maeve, quite sharply, to fetch the pudding unless it was to be burned to a crisp in the oven.
‘As for that tale about the monastery being demolished, I daresay those men were simply spinning a story.’
The men had not been spinning a story at all. The demolishing of St Benedict’s Monastery took place that summer and caused quite a flurry of excitement in Rede Abbas. People declared they had been saying for years that the place was unsafe – you would have thought, wouldn’t you, that the Church could have done something about it before it started to tumble into the sea. Still, the English Channel had a good deal to answer for – at least this part of it did. And never mind demolishing the monastery, wasn’t it high time the old bell tower on the cliff edge was demolished? That really was something that would topple into the sea one night, and a good riddance as well, nasty ugly old place.
Maeve’s school had lessons and a slide show about the monastery’s history. The teachers, pleased at the opportunity to teach the children a little local history mingled with the wider history of England’s complicated religious reformation, set essays on it. The children were all to write something about the monastery’s history, they said. Details about the Order that had lived there for hundreds of years, and even about the much earlier monastery that had long since vanished. They could include illustrations if they wanted. Modern photographs of how the monastery looked today and older ones of its past, or even sketches or lithographs if they could find any. It would be a good exercise in research, and an interesting project.
Maeve, sitting at her desk, thought: I could write about Andrew. Things about the monastery in his time, things about the monks who he knew. She thought that would be interesting; the teachers would say she had done well. Aunt Eifa might even say so, too.
But to do so meant she would have to read the rest of Andrew’s journal.
It was frightening but it was also exciting to steal out of bed late that night and take the box from the bottom of the wardrobe. As she reached into the box for the journal, her hand brushed against the tape of ‘Thaisa’s Song’.
One day I’ll play that recording again, thought Maeve, and with this in her mind, she opened Andrew’s journal.
SIXTEEN
‘I do not think there is more than an hour of life left to me,’ Andrew had written. ‘It’s growing darker by the minute, and it’s difficult to see the page to write this.�
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His writing had become untidy and sprawling, the letters badly formed and hard to read. Maeve hated this – she did not want Andrew to be untidy or dishevelled; she wanted him to be serene and clever and brave, right up to his death.
‘The sea is rushing in fast,’ he wrote. ‘I can hear it lashing against the rocks and soon – oh God, very soon – it will reach these cliffs, and the tower will become submerged. I can still hear the voices singing “Thaisa’s Song”, but I have no idea if it’s real or part of my madness.
‘It’s a madness that began before I was imprisoned here, though.’
The page stopped there, and at first Maeve thought it was the final entry. But, no, it was all right – he had started another page. Was he about to write why he had been imprisoned in the ancient tower and left there to drown? Left with something nailed beneath the floor, said her mind, and she turned back to that entry.
‘If I start to think about what’s underneath those lengths of timber nailed over the floor, I shall surely succumb to real madness,’ Andrew had written. Immediately after that, he had put, ‘The thought of what lies beneath the floor is enough to send the sanest man into madness.’
Maeve hesitated. She did not want to find out that Andrew had done something terrible that had caused him to be shut inside the tower – that he had killed somebody, even. Apart from anything else, she could not put that in an essay.
‘We got safely away from Rede Abbas that night, and somehow we followed Father Abbot’s hasty directions,’ wrote Andrew, and Maeve frowned, because this, surely, was the first time he had referred to leaving Rede Abbas, or making any kind of journey. She pulled the bedclothes more warmly around her, and read on.
A small sum of money had been given to me for the journey.
‘We cannot give you much,’ Father Abbot said, ‘because we do not have much. But it should suffice.’
It did suffice, but only just. We were able to pay for a night’s modest lodging, and we bought food, which we ate as we went along. Most of the journey was by the public stage, which was uncomfortable and crowded, but cost only a few pence and took us across vast stretches of roads. Twice we were taken up by amiable farmers on their way to market, most of them in dogcarts or drays.
And after three days – or was it longer? – we reached the outskirts of the City of Oxford.
My companion was bewildered – never having seen such a large place, the noise and the crowded streets and squares were frightening. Carriages spun past us, and groups of people walked to and from their homes, or to shops or places of work or study. They were laughing and talking, sometimes arguing – all of them absorbed in their lives.
The city drew me at once – the golden stones, the glinting river, the scholars and poets and rebels who thronged the streets and the coffee houses and taverns. I stood on the outskirts looking at it all, and I thought: surely this is where I belong. This is the place to which I should have fled all those months ago. Because there are places in the world – soul places, I have heard them called – which the mind recognizes and to which the body and the spirit are irresistibly drawn. They beckon. For me, Oxford was one of those beckoning places.
Quire Court was the heart and the core of that beckoning.
I don’t know what I had expected to find in Quire Court. The streets around it were lamplit and narrow – there were enticing doors into shops and taverns and coffee houses, but we walked past them and went determinedly to our destination. People gave us barely a second glance, for which I was grateful. We were travel-stained and weary, but Oxford has seen far worse and far stranger. I was wearing plain, ordinary clothes – ‘Not precisely a disguise,’ Brother Ranulf had said when we left, ‘and I do not think anyone will follow you. But it would be as well not to draw people’s attention to either of you.’
None of the monks had seen Quire Court, and Father Abbot had only been able to tell me that it was a straggle of buildings near the city’s centre.
‘But whatever it is, I hope it will provide sanctuary for you, Andrew.’
At first it did indeed do so.
Sanctuary. It conjures up timeless images. Safe, bastioned places. Churches and ancient religious houses, where the beleaguered or hunted – or even the merely mad – might find a haven.
Even this place where I lie now, this cold dank tower with the sea creeping towards it – even that might once have been a place of safety. Not now, though. The light is fading and I can smell the strong salty tang of the sea. And the crashing of the waves is much louder. Not long now. Oh God, let me face it bravely. But who will know if I don’t? Who would know if I scream and fight at the end?
I’m having difficulty in writing this, but I shall continue to do so, for it feels like a last link to the world I will soon leave.
The first sight of Quire Court was by the light of flaring lanterns in the early evening. Warm shadows lay across the stones, multi-coloured and harlequin-patterned, and we stood under an old stone archway at the entrance. I think neither of us wanted to be the first to step through that archway. I have no idea what my companion was thinking, but I had the strong feeling that we were about to enter a different world and that, if we walked forward now, we should be in a place that might be safe and good.
How wrong I was! How naïf and trusting.
The buildings were arranged in what was almost an oblong – there were six or eight of them, mostly with jutting bow windows and small squares of garden. Two houses had signs proclaiming one to be a printing business, the other a jeweller’s and silversmith’s. The rest appeared to be private houses, with lights burning in the windows. Through the uncurtained ones were homely scenes – people reading or writing. In two of the windows an evening meal was being set out. You forget, when you enter a religious house, about the ordinary family things. Knives and forks being set out on a table, a man reading a newspaper, a woman setting down a dish of food.
There was a moment when I – when both of us – felt excluded from those scenes of normality and warmth; then it was as if something held out welcoming hands, and we walked through the arch.’
The writing broke off, but Maeve, turning to the next page with care, saw that it resumed, but that it was different – stronger – and that the ink was a different colour.
‘I have with me,’ wrote Andrew, ‘the diary I kept during those few nights in Quire Court. It seemed to me vital to preserve the notes of what I found there, and the pages have remained with me. I cannot transcribe them here in this appalling place – the light is too poor and I do not think there is much time left, for the sea is lashing in loudly and relentlessly. So I am putting my Quire Court diary here in these pages. I would like to think this account will be found and read – that some day my story and Theodora’s will be known.
‘The pages tell part of Thaisa’s story as well, of course, and her story is woven with ours. I cannot know, though, what Thaisa’s fate eventually was. I wish I did know.’
This was the point at which the ink and the writing changed so strongly. Maeve turned over carefully and continued to read.
Father Abbot had said that one of the buildings in the Court was not occupied, and it was to this building we were going.
‘The gentleman who owns the printer’s business – a Mr Ernest Thread – has the keys and will direct you to the right house,’ he had told us.
Mr Thread – who resembled an anxious but friendly caterpillar – did indeed have the keys, and on my producing Father Abbot’s letter of authority, handed them over. If there was anything we required, we were please to let him know, and in the meantime he would let us have a jug of milk and some bread and cheese along with half of a cold pie that his wife had left out, for he could see we were travel-stained and weary, and likely hungry, too.
At first I found that house quiet and welcoming. The rooms had a few pieces of furniture, which made it unexpectedly comfortable, and there were curtains at the windows, and rugs on the floor. There were even bookshelves,
with books which someone had forgotten, or had not bothered, to take away. When I foraged at the back of the building, I found a small supply of chopped logs, with which I made a fire in the largest downstairs room.
‘We have warmth and light and a roof over our heads,’ I said, smiling across the room. ‘What more do we need?’
‘Are we safe?’
Her words struck a harsh note, but I said, ‘Yes, we’re safe, Theodora. I won’t let anything happen to you.’
It’s a vicious irony to remember I said that to her, and yet tonight I’m here, and she …
I can’t write it.
Instead I’ll go on describing that first night. How we ate Mrs Thread’s kindly given food, then washed the supper dishes in a small scullery, how we banked down the fire for safety, then made our way to the two makeshift beds we had set out upstairs.
Two beds, you’ll note. And two rooms.
But I lay wakeful for a long time, and panic crept up on me – not suddenly, but slowly and insidiously. I had brought my fey, strange girl all this way to keep her safe, and I had no idea whether we could be safe. Not then, not ever.
That was when I heard the scrabbling sounds.
At first I thought Theodora had woken and was exploring the house, making sure no one lurked in the court below. But when I lit a candle and went into her room, she was deeply asleep. Her hair was tumbled over the cushion she had for a pillow, and there was a faint sheen of moisture on her eyelids, and I wanted to lie down next to her so much that I had to go out of the room. (I did go out. I’d like that to be known.)