by Sarah Rayne
The sounds came again. I’d hope I’ve always been as courageous as most men, but I was in a dark, unfamiliar house, with no help at hand save a fragile girl. If there was an intruder …
But I took the candle and went down the stairs. There was a faint glow from the fire we had lit earlier in the evening; its dying radiance mingled with the light from the candle. Shadows danced and gibbered, and once I flinched and threw up a hand because I thought a man had stepped out of the shadows and was coming towards me.
As I peered into the room where we had eaten supper earlier, the scrabbling came again. It was a curious sound, almost rhythmic, although I do know how odd that must sound – I know how odd it looks written down.
I closed the door on the room and went through to the back of the house. As I did so, another sound reached me, and if I had been apprehensive before, now it was as if icy hands closed around my heart. In one of these downstairs rooms, someone was singing ‘Thaisa’s Song’. It was soft and low, and it was slightly different to the way Theodora had sung it, but it was unmistakable and recognizable. I know that is a somewhat contradictory statement, but ‘Thaisa’s Song’ is so extraordinary and so very individual – it’s as if it possesses an essence, a core, that can’t change or be changed, no matter what.
It took several minutes before I could summon up courage to go closer to the sounds, but eventually I did. The shadows came with me, sometimes stalking me, sometimes going ahead of me, all of them distorted to grotesque proportions. In the first room nothing stirred and everywhere was still. But when I went on to the next, the singing came closer.
On the other side of that room was an archway into a kind of inner hall with two more doors. One was closed, but the other was ajar. And standing in that partly open doorway was a figure. It was bowed over, as if examining something on the ground. It gave no indication of having heard me or having seen the candlelight.
The small flame burned up in a faint gust of air, and the indistinct outline was gone. I walked towards the open door. It gave on to what looked like a storeroom. It was dark and cool and there was a stone floor and stone walls, and a thick marble slab, clearly used for keeping meat and perhaps milk cool.
But that small room reeked of sadness and pain – so much so it was like stepping into a deep dark well where light had never penetrated, and never could penetrate. There was such dreadful loneliness in there that my stomach lifted with the force of it, and for a moment I was afraid I might be sick.
And then came another sound, and this was the most terrible of all.
The thin, desperate crying of a child.
It mingled with the music, like blood running into water, and at first I thought the crying was coming from outside the building – that it was some ordinary child crying for some ordinary reason. But I knew it was inside the house, and I knew, as well, that it was in this small stone room with its smothering despair. The early Christian monks feared despair, which they called accidie. St Thomas Aquinas referred to it as the ‘sorrow of the world’.
Whatever name it’s given, despair is a very terrible thing. It’s the abandonment of all hope. It’s the giving up in God – the belief that He can’t help the suffering human soul – that He’s no longer even there.
I have no idea how long I stood in that room, listening to those sounds, hoping something would happen to explain them. I was prepared to believe that the scrabblings had been mice or rats. I was also prepared to accept that my mind, tired and anxious, could have mistaken ordinary noises. Oh God, I would have seized with both hands on a sane, unthreatening explanation. But there was nothing to explain the sounds, and in the end I went up to my own bed.
We bought food in the town the following morning, although we did not dare use too much of Father Abbot’s money.
After we had eaten our midday meal, Theodora took a book into the tiny garden behind the house and curled up in the shadow of an apple tree. I stood looking at her through the window for a moment, seeing how the dappled sunlight fell across her hair, then I went back to that small room.
Even in the middle of the day no light reached it, and I had to fetch an oil lamp. I held its flickering radiance close to every inch of the stone walls. I am not sure what I was looking for – I thought I should know when I saw it, but at first there was nothing.
Then I knelt down and tilted the lamp’s light on to the floor. Several of the stones were out of true with the rest. They made for an unmistakable rectangle in the floor – roughly three feet in length and almost two feet in width. I sat back on my heels, frowning. There could be any number of reasons why the stones of this floor had been taken up then re-laid, but surely anyone laying down stones for a floor would ensure they were even? The more I stared at that oblong, the more unpleasantly suggestive it seemed.
I’d like to think it was scholarly inquisitiveness that drove me in what I did next, but it was not. It was a deep-seated need for reassurance.
In the hour that followed, I entered a world of flickering lamplight and drifting shadows and of mingled singing and sobbing that came and went in distorted fragments. A world where my hands, unused to any labour other than the playing of a musical instrument or the writing down of musical notation, became blistered and sore.
I made use of the implements to hand – a triangle-shaped trowel, a thin-edged chisel, a small clawed tool whose purpose might have been anything at all, but which could be used to dig into stone and, later, earth.
The stones came up with difficulty, but when they did move, they did so with a kind of dry sigh, as if grateful to be torn from their place. Beneath them was hard-packed earth, ordinary and apparently undisturbed, with nothing to suggest why this oblong piece of floor should be so strongly and so symmetrically out of true with the rest.
I scooped the soil away then knelt down, using my hands on clearing the soil, working with care to uncover what lay beneath.
What lay beneath.
It was, as I had known it would be, a tiny, heartbreakingly fragile, heap of bones. A child – no, it was less than a child, it was a babe. It was impossible to know if it had been girl or boy, for the flesh had long since fallen from the bones. It lay on its back, the head straight, as if the eyes had been staring upwards. But there was something I had not expected.
The hands and also the feet were raised in grotesque supplication.
The child had not been dead when it was put into the grave.
The dim small room whirled around me, and my stomach lifted with such nausea and horror that I backed away from the room, and half fell against the door in my desperation to get outside before I was messily sick into the actual grave.
I did get out in time, but it was some moments before I finally stopped retching and gasping, holding on to the small garden wall with one hand, to stop from falling over. Theodora had not noticed or heard; she was still beneath the apple tree, still immersed in her book, smiling occasionally as some pleasing phrase caught her eye.
I went back inside and washed my face and hands at the scullery tap (one of the real amenities of the little house), then forced myself to return to the stone room.
This time I saw more details than I had been able to absorb the first time. I saw that the small hands and feet had fallen back alongside the body, and did not look quite so terrible – so much so that I wondered whether I had imagined that first, shocking sight. But I knew I had not, and that was partly because there were other images jostling for remembrance.
Theodora’s mother in the coffin, one hand raised as if trying to push open the lid.
Adolphus Glaum, fighting his way out of the tomb after it was sealed, falling on to my neck in that dreadful macabre embrace.
And Theodora herself, seated quietly at the piano in Cliff House, and singing the death song of her family. The song I had heard accompanying a child’s crying in this house last night.
The shadows were thickening in Quire Court, and Theodora would soon come looking for me, but I stayed where
I was. It will sound absurd and overly sentimental, but I did not want to leave that small body on its own. There was nothing I could do for the child, not now, but the thought of consigning it back to the silent darkness – of covering it with earth and stone slabs again – twisted a knife in my vitals.
It had to be done, though. I could not let Theodora see or know about it. I would restore the makeshift grave, then tomorrow I would find some way of getting a proper burial for the child. It was something that could make no difference to the child – or could it? Prayer is a strange thing. But it would make a difference to me.
I could not lock the door of the storeroom, but I thought I could wedge it sufficiently firmly so that Theodora would not get in. I would tell her some tale about mice or even rats to keep her out as well. In the meantime, I could at least say a prayer over the makeshift grave. I did so, then bent over to lay my own crucifix on the child’s breast before covering it with the soil once more. It was then I saw the small book lying next to the body.
SEVENTEEN
I assumed the book would be a Bible or a prayer book, but it was neither.
The leather binding was soft and smooth with age and, when I opened it, using extreme care, the glow from the lamp fell across handwritten pages. At the top of the first one was a date – 1538. The writing was spiked and elaborate – a far cry from the script we use nowadays. I am no scholar, but I am not entirely unacquainted with ancient script – I had transposed the work of the Elizabethan music-makers and adapted their lyrics so that nineteenth-century ears could understand them and nineteenth-century voices could sing them. If I concentrated hard I should be able to read this without too much difficulty.
The first pages were blurred, either from age or because something had been spilled on them, I could not tell which. But I found I could make out phrases – occasionally whole sentences – on the later pages.
‘Tonight I wanted to sing my family’s song for company and for reassurance,’ the diarist had written. ‘I did not dare do so, but once I reach Glaum’s Acre I shall do so. No one there will understand the words, just as no one at Rede Abbas does.’
Reading those words, something snapped to attention in my mind.
‘That piece of land in Oxford, and whatever buildings are on it now, once belonged to the Glaum family centuries ago,’ Father Abbot had said, before Theodora and I left St Benedict’s.
It is hardly the act of a gentleman to read the diary of another person, but after that opening sentence I defy anyone not to have read more. And it was over three hundred years old – older than the famous chronicles left by Samuel Pepys.
Also, whoever had written this was long since dead. With the thought, something seemed to brush thin, light fingertips across my face, the sketched-on-air figure I had seen last night shivered on the edge of my vision, and I thought the faint sobbing came again. Then it faded, and I read on.
‘I have always thought Seamus understands about the song. Not all of it, but enough. But then Seamus Flannery has eyes that see into your heart and that read what lies buried there – eyes that would melt your soul … And he has a soft voice that would turn your bones to water so that you would do anything he asked, even though you know – you KNOW – it to be the worst sin ever to lie with a man of God …
‘Seamus could sing my family’s song if he bothered to try. No one else could, though. Dear Brother Cuthwin once tried, but he could not twist his tongue round the words …’
Cuthwin, I thought, coming briefly back to the present. Could that be the same Cuthwin whose lively but fragmented records Brother Egbert had been transcribing with such diligence? In the next line, the diarist wrote, ‘The monks and the people here noted Cuthwin’s failure and it made them uneasy. They whispered to one another of the warning in the Bible – the warning about those who spake with unknown tongues …’
Theodora and I have just finished our supper, and we have talked about something – everything, anything – but I cannot remember any of it, and now I am alone in the room overlooking the Court. I have adjusted the candles and the lamps so that their mingled light falls across the dim pages of the diary buried with the child. There is no longer any question as to whether I should or will read it. It is calling to me with all the seductive insistence of a siren. I intend to transcribe as much of the contents as possible, and copy it into my own journal, which I have to hand, and which I have kept in a rather sporadic fashion since entering St Benedict’s. It may take all night to do so. It may take much longer than that. I do not care how long it takes.
As I write this now, midnight has just chimed from a nearby church. That is a very late hour by the standard of a monk accustomed to early retiring and even earlier rising, but not at all late for someone whose life before entering a monastery had often included drinking and talking with friends into the small hours.
All is quiet and still beyond Quire Court – or is it? A few moments ago I heard faint sounds, and when I looked through the window I thought a dark-clad figure was standing in one of the corners. The head seemed to be turned towards this house, and I experienced a lurch of apprehension. I even went so far as to make sure the doors were both bolted and the windows firmly latched. It was all right, of course. No one could get in. There is no reason for anyone to stand out there watching the house and, in any case, no one knows we are here.
Having read the first few pages of the diary, writing them – which is to say my translation of them – into my own journal becomes easier. I find I can even fill in some of the parts where pages are badly faded or shredded by mice or rats or simply by sheer age.
An immense compulsion is driving me. Perhaps I am afraid that if I do not write it all down in modern parlance, the diary’s contents may vanish like the fairy-dust they probably are.
Quire Court has sunk into a gentle shadowy world of its own. I cannot see the figure that I thought was watching earlier, and the only sounds are the occasional chime of a distant church clock, the soft splutter of the lamp as the oil burns down, and the scratching of my pen.
And within the first few sentences the writer’s name has jumped out at me, and fastened sinuous fingers around my mind and my heart.
Thaisa. Not Theodora’s mother, but another Thaisa. A Thaisa from long ago. From the year 1538. This is her diary.
As this is the first page of my new journal, I am writing carefully and neatly. The journal was given to me by Seamus – one of the few gifts he has ever given me, and I treasure it for that reason. Also, of course, books of any kind are immensely precious and valuable.
So I shall write that I live in the grounds of St Benedict’s Monastery, and that I occupy a strange position here. At least, I imagine it’s strange, but I don’t really know, because I don’t know how other people live.
‘We found you on our doorstep one night, Thaisa,’ Seamus once told me in an emotional moment, as I lay in his bed. He did not have many emotional moments, but there were some, and I treasured them all, storing them carefully in my memory in the way I would lay a precious piece of silk in a drawer with lavender.
‘A tiny scrap of a child you were, huge-eyed and solemn, and rain-drenched from the storm,’ Seamus said. ‘You only knew a word of two of English – I think you only knew a word or two of speech of any kind – and none of us knew where you came from. Myself, though, I would never be surprised to learn you’re from non-human stock – that you’re a changeling left by a race of sea nymphs or water naiads.’ He tilted my head so that he was looking straight into my face. His eyes change colour with the light and his own emotions. ‘Your eyes are narrow and long, and your ears are set a little too high on your head to look entirely human. And your hair—’
‘Has no colour.’ I dislike my hair very much.
‘It’s the colour of the primroses in Musselwhite’s Meadow in the spring.’ He wound a strand of it between his fingers. ‘You were a little ragged elf-child, clutching a silk shawl around your shoulders.’ His voice had slid down in
to the velvety caressing note that felt like a cat’s fur across my skin. He could always spin poetry, Seamus. And I always listened, and I was always lured by it. I expect he knew that and made use of it. I expect he made use of it with a lot of people. I have no idea how many of those people might have been ladies, but I should think quite a number were. I try not to think about it.
‘And the only possession you had was a sheet of music folded inside the shawl with your name written on it,’ he said. ‘I was an impressionable young novice of seventeen on that day, and you did not seem quite human to me.’
I said nothing, wanting him to go on, wanting him to unpeel a little more information about that time, of which I have only the haziest of memories.
‘We gave you into the care of the Widow Eynon who lives on the clifftops,’ Seamus said. ‘But, as you grew up, you kept finding your way back here.’
‘I hated it there.’
‘Wasn’t she kind to you?’
‘Yes, but the clifftop house smelled stale and the Widow Eynon smelled worse than the house. I was afraid I might start to smell the same.’
‘You never would,’ he said. ‘You’re the scent of buttercup meadows and bluebell woods, and warm honey and wine on midsummer’s eve.’
That’s what I mean about him spinning poetry. I used to believe he read, and committed to memory, the writings of the great poets and scholars, so that he could present their words as his own. I know now that he does not. He does not need to.
‘I came back here because the house smelt,’ I said firmly.
‘You came back to learn how to read and write,’ said Seamus, at once. ‘And how to speak and write Silver Age Latin – we’re one of the few monasteries who still have that knowledge. And how to love beauty – literature and paintings and the illuminated tracts and manuscripts of the early Christian fathers.’