The Sibyl in Her Grave

by Sarah Caudwell

  You could say that she and Griselda were both quite lucky, though I wouldn’t advise you to say it to Griselda—she’s simply furious about being in plaster for the next six weeks. But she doesn’t have any permanent injuries and Daphne was more frightened than hurt, so the consequences of the stone throwing weren’t nearly as serious as they might have been.

  Which is why, I suppose, the police clearly aren’t treating it as the crime of the century. They make sympathetic tut-tutting noises about vandalism and juvenile delinquency, but as no one saw who threw the stone they say they haven’t much chance of catching him, and I don’t see signs that they’re losing any sleep over it.

  Well, that’s all very well if one assumes he only meant to break the window, and didn’t realise that Daphne was behind it. It looks to me, though, as if the stone was aimed at her deliberately.

  You see, it can’t have been thrown by someone walking along the lane. Between the lane and the Rectory there’s quite a high brick wall, which one would need a ladder to climb. If one managed to throw a stone over it from ground level it would hit the side of the house well above the top of the window frame. Whoever did it must have climbed up on to the wall of the churchyard, which is made of rough stone and quite easy to climb—I know, I tried it—and from there you can see quite clearly whether there’s anyone in the kitchen. And it certainly wasn’t a child who did it—the stone was far too heavy for a child to throw that distance.

  So personally, I don’t think it’s at all trivial. Daphne could have been killed—and whoever threw it must have known that she could.

  The worst of it is that Daphne also thinks it was deliberate, and is now completely convinced that she’s the victim of some kind of religious persecution. All on account of the Book, of course—the enemies of the Book are the enemies of the Custodian. “If you seek for the knowledge that is hidden from others, they will persecute you as a blasphemer and heretic.” Aunt Isabella always said so.

  And naturally now she’s frightened about what’s going to happen next. It must be horrible for her, having to stay in that big house all on her own—I’m sure she wouldn’t stay there another night if she didn’t have to.

  Maurice has tried to persuade her that no one in Parsons Haver would do anything like this on religious grounds, but she simply doesn’t believe him. “I know what it says in your Book,” she says. “It says thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

  She thinks what people have against her, you see, is that she has the power of prophecy. And now she thinks it’ll be even worse, because both her animal prophecies have come true—for Griselda and for me. I know, of course, that it must be pure coincidence, but one can’t help finding it slightly eerie.

  Please tell Selena that I’ll be delighted to come and advise her about curtains, but with everything that’s happening here it may be several weeks before I can get away to London.

  Yours with much love,

  Reg

  My first thought on the stone-throwing incident was that it could have nothing to do with the man in the black Mercedes. While admittedly showing no great concern for Daphne’s welfare, it could hardly be regarded as a serious attempt on her life: a man determined on her perpetual silence would have chosen some more reliable method.

  My second, however, was that a man who wished to search the Rectory undisturbed, let us say for some incriminating document, might well look about for means to frighten Daphne away.

  Though the hour now seemed to me to be suitable for lunch, none of my friends had as yet arrived in the Corkscrew. I turned to the second letter, evidently written on the previous day and presumably received that morning.

  24 High Street

  Parsons Haver

  West Sussex

  8th September

  Dear Julia,

  Yet another thing I’d like your advice about—you’ll think I’m becoming a perfect nuisance. Not exactly a legal problem—there’s something I’d like to find out and I thought you might know if I could. It’s because of the gravestone.

  You see, Derek Arkwright, the young man I told you about, has become quite a regular visitor down here. He comes down on Friday evening and stays at the Vicarage until Sunday morning. He and Maurice spend Saturday driving round the countryside looking at churches and gardens and Roman pavements and so on.

  And we all like him very much. Maurice in particular, of course, but not only Maurice—I like him, Griselda likes him, even Ricky likes him, though one wouldn’t think that they had much in common.

  Everyone except Daphne, who still has this extraordinary antagonism towards him. Whenever they meet—which we all do our best to avoid happening, but it sometimes does—she practically bristles, like a dog with someone it dislikes, and sits there glowering as if she were trying to put the evil eye on him. It’s really quite embarrassing.

  She goes on saying that he’s a treacherous and dangerous person and whenever he’s here there’s a shadow over Maurice’s name in the Book. That means that he’s going to do Maurice some kind of terrible harm, though exactly what she never manages to specify. The worst she’s been able to think of so far is that he encourages Maurice to drink too much—she makes dark comments on the number of empty wine bottles to be put in the dustbin after Derek’s been staying.

  What she really minds, I dare say, is that when Derek’s here she can’t go running over to the Vicarage to tell Maurice about her great spiritual dilemma. Which in my view is a very good thing—she’s really been spending far too much time there. Some people are getting quite the wrong impression—I’ve been asked more than once whether invitations to Maurice ought to include Daphne. And Mrs. Tyrrell has stopped going there to clean because she thinks Daphne’s doing the housework, and she won’t have Maurice paying her for work he doesn’t need.

  Ricky doesn’t go round there anymore either—he used to drop in quite often. “If you go round to see an old mate for a noggin or two and a chat about the Test Match,” says Ricky, “you don’t want to find bloody Daphne sitting there looking at him like a lovesick cow and behaving as if he was some kind of bloody saint and we all ought to kneel in his presence.”

  You may think, quite rightly, that that isn’t a very nice way of putting it, but I’m afraid I do know what he means—it somehow just doesn’t seem possible to have a normal conversation with Maurice while Daphne’s there, and nowadays she almost always is. He’s too softhearted to send her away, of course, but I’m sure he’s more embarrassed than anyone about it—though I suppose any man, even one as nice as Maurice, can’t help feeling a little bit flattered by such unquestioning devotion.

  I don’t at all mean that she’s in love with him—certainly not in the sense of wanting anything physical. The fact is, I think, that she’s rather frightened of sex—she’s more unattractive physically than anyone could be without actually trying—and part of what she likes about Maurice is that she can feel safe with him without feeling rejected. She has this peculiar idea, you see, that he’s taken some kind of vow of celibacy. She seems to think that’s why he’s never married—”Because for Maurice God would always come first, wouldn’t He?”

  But all the same, it was turning into a rather awkward situation, so I’m inclined to look on Derek as something of a godsend. At least, I would be if it weren’t for the gravestone.

  It’s true that we still don’t know very much about him—not even what he does for a living. Not rough work, certainly—one can tell by his hands. One can’t quite imagine him working in an office, but he can’t be unemployed—his car’s less than two years old and although his clothes are mostly denim they look quite expensive. I suppose he might have a large private income, but he doesn’t have quite the accent I’d associate with that—though young people have such extraordinary accents nowadays that one can never be quite sure.

  When one asks him outright what he does, he just smiles engagingly and says he wants to go on being a man of mystery. I expect it only means that it’s something he
thinks is unglamorous—perhaps he’s a travelling salesman or something like that—and doesn’t want to tell us about. But Daphne, of course, thinks it means he does something shady.

  We don’t know exactly where he lives, either—he says he leads such a nomadic existence that it isn’t worth giving anyone an address or telephone number. He has given Maurice the address of a friend, though, who he says will pass on messages in an emergency, so I don’t think he’s planning to defraud Maurice of his life savings and disappear without trace.

  Which I gather is the sort of thing that Daphne is expecting. She keeps implying, at any rate, that he must have some kind of ulterior motive for coming down here. She doesn’t believe, she says, that he’s a bit interested in stained-glass windows.

  I suppose it’s a little surprising that Derek wants to spend his leisure time with someone so much older than himself, however charming and intelligent. But what ulterior motive could he have? After all, it isn’t as if Maurice were rich—he has what he’s paid by the Church and a modest private income from a family trust. If Derek were some sort of confidence trickster, what on earth could he hope to make out of Maurice that would be worth coming down here every weekend and pretending to be interested in things he isn’t?

  When one says that to Daphne, though, she just beats her little fists on the table, and says, “Oh, you’re all so trusting.”

  Being the fount of all wisdom doesn’t prevent Maurice from also being, in Daphne’s eyes, as credulous and gullible as a four-year-old child. She sometimes talks as if he and I had both spent our entire lives wrapped up in tissue paper and never once had anything to do with anyone the least bit wicked. Which in fact is not the case.

  She also keeps saying that she doesn’t understand what Maurice likes about Derek. Well, if she really doesn’t, then it’s hardly for me to tell her—but she must be even more naive than she accuses me of being.

  Anyway, now Maurice and Derek are going on holiday together. Derek has a friend, apparently, who has a flat in the south of France and has offered him the use of it for the next three weeks or so. He’s invited Maurice to drive down there with him, with plenty of stops on the way to look at cathedrals and eat nice meals, and Maurice, as you’d expect, is enchanted at the idea. And they leave tomorrow.

  Daphne, of course, doesn’t know. Maurice has told her that he’s going on retreat, and allowed her to imagine that this means he’s going to stay in some kind of monastery and spend his time in prayer and meditation.

  I don’t want you to think that I’m worried about it, because I’m not. I’m quite sure everything Daphne says about Derek is complete piffle, and there’s no reason to feel at all worried about Maurice going on holiday with him. Apart from the gravestone.

  You see, I was walking through the churchyard yesterday, and for no particular reason I happened to stop and look at the gravestone of Derek’s great-grandfather—the one he’d been looking for when we first met him, on the day of Isabella’s funeral. It doesn’t take much looking for, actually—it’s quite close to the pathway up to the church door, and the inscription is very clear—Jeremiah Arkwright Died 26 February 1927 Aged 52 Years.

  I found myself thinking it was a little odd that it didn’t say anything about his children. Gravestones don’t always, of course, but usually they do—Dearly Loved Father of Charles and Alice or something like that. Unless, of course, they’re for someone who didn’t have any children.

  But if Jeremiah Arkwright didn’t have any children, then he can’t have had any grandchildren. And in that case, Derek can’t be his great-grandson, can he? And if he isn’t, why should he say he was?

  It’s ridiculous, but I’d somehow feel much happier if I could be sure that Jeremiah Arkwright had at least one son. Do you happen to know of any way of finding out?

  Yours with much love,

  Reg

  “So Julia’s gone chasing off to the Probate Registry,” said Cantrip, taking the chair beside me at the round oak table, “with a view to looking up this Jeremiah Arkwright character and seeing if there were any little Arkwrights. So she probably won’t be here for a bit. And Selena’s still telephoning the builders to try and find out when they’re going to come back and finish. And Ragwort’s just going to go to the bar to buy us a bottle of Nierstein, aren’t you, Ragwort? Which all works out quite nicely, because what you want to hear about is how I got on in Scotland, and they’ve already heard about it.”

  Cantrip’s host in Scotland had been Lord Invercrackett, the father of a young man who had been at Cambridge with Cantrip and the owner of several thousand acres of grouse moor in the beautiful county of Perthshire. He had arranged the shooting party chiefly for the purpose of securing the goodwill of Edgar Albany, in the hope of being offered a nonexecutive directorship of Renfrews’ Bank; nonexecutive directorships, I gather, are nowadays the principal means whereby the impoverished aristocracy may supplement their meagre incomes.

  It followed that the interrogation of Albany was a task of more than usual delicacy.

  “Because at Invercrackett House they do the best breakfast I’ve ever had, with six different kinds of homemade marmalade, so I didn’t want to do anything to stymie the old boy’s directorship and not get asked back. So I had to be jolly subtle.”

  “As I recall,” I said, “your intention was to bring the conversation with Edgar Albany round to a point where you could mention Parsons Haver.”

  “Just sort of casually. Yes, that’s right.”

  “And if, at the mention of the place, he gave a guilty start, you could reasonably conclude that he had recently committed a murder there. It sounded, if I may say so, like a most discreet and subtle strategy.”

  “Yes,” said Cantrip. “Yes, that’s what I thought. …Hilary, have you ever tried bringing a conversation round to a point where you can just sort of casually mention Parsons Haver?”

  I admitted that I had not.

  “I went down to breakfast on the first morning and there was Albany tucking into kidneys and scrambled eggs and reading the Telegraph. So I said ‘Good morning’ and he said ‘Good morning’ and I said ‘Anything interesting in the paper?’ and he said ‘Not much.’ And after that I was a bit stuck. I mean, if I’d wanted to just sort of casually mention somewhere where there was a war or a revolution or a Test Match or something going on, it would have been easy. But saying ‘What’s the latest news from Parsons Haver?’ didn’t seem to make much sense.

  “Still, the party was due to last three days, so I thought I’d still got plenty of time. The trouble was, though, that when you’re actually out on the moors, you’re not really close enough to anyone to have a conversation, so I didn’t get another chance until teatime. But the only thing anyone was talking about at tea was what the shooting was like at Invercrackett compared with what it was like at other places, and it would have sounded a bit silly to start talking about what the shooting was like at Parsons Haver, because so far as I know there isn’t any. And the only thing anyone was talking about at dinner was finance, and if you can think of anything that happens in Parsons Haver that has a special impact on interest rates, I’ll buy the next three bottles.

  “So I decided what I’d better do was think of something interesting to say about Parsons Haver and work out what sort of conversation I could say it in. But I stayed awake for hours trying to think of something interesting about Parsons Haver and I just couldn’t think of anything.”

  “But my dear Cantrip,” said Ragwort, having now returned from his errand at the bar, “there are any number of interesting things to be said about Parsons Haver. It has on several occasions played a significant part in our country’s history, and the Norman tower of St. Ethel’s is described by Pevsner as one of the finest in the country.”

  “Well,” said Cantrip, “if your mate Pevsner had been there, he could have said that, but he wasn’t. The only thing I could think of that I knew about the place was that it was on the way to Brighton. So I decided what I’d
better do was start talking to Albany about how we got from London to Invercrackett, and that could lead on to talking about how you could get from London to other places, and that could lead on to talking about how you got from London to Brighton. And then I could just sort of casually mention that I’d heard one of the best ways was through Parsons Haver.”

  I said that that sounded most ingenious.

  “Well, it would have been, except that I couldn’t get Albany to cooperate. Every time I started talking to him he’d sort of move away and start talking to someone else. The trouble was, you see, his List of People I Want To Be Friends With didn’t exactly have my name at the top. On the first day I’d shot quite a lot more birds than he had and he’d been a bit miffed about it. After that old Invercrackett tipped me the wink to miss a few more, because the whole idea was to put Albany in a good mood.

  “So on the second day I kept my bag down to six brace, which ought to have been safe, but Albany only got five. He started off by missing one or two shots that ought to have been easy and got shirty about it, and the shirtier he got the more he missed. He tried to make out it was his loader’s fault—he kept shouting at the poor chap and calling him a bloody fool—but we could all see it wasn’t. And the upshot was that by the end of the day we still weren’t bosom pals.

  “And that night I had this awful dream, where Albany was actually asking me the best way from London to Brighton, and I knew it was tremendously important to give the right answer and I simply couldn’t remember what it was.

  “By teatime on the third day I’d more or less given up. I wasn’t even trying to chat him up anymore, just wandering round the terrace eating a ham sandwich and admiring the rhododendrons. And then a chap I’d got quite matey with called out to ask me if I’d like a spot of fishing before dinner, and I saw that Albany was standing quite close to him. And quick as a flash, without even thinking about it, I shouted back, ‘Sorry, I’d better stay in, I’m expecting a phone call from someone in Parsons Haver.’ ”