Crybbe (AKA Curfew)

by Unknown

  'Bloody minister never even mentioned dowsing,' Ben said.

  It had been a swift, efficient service. No sermon. Nothing too religious, nothing psychic.

  Powys said, 'I don't think Henry would have wanted to be wheeled in under an arch of hazel twigs, do you?'

  'Too modest, Joe. All the bloody same, these dowsers. Look at old Bill over there - he wouldn't do me a book either.'

  Powys smiled. 'Henry left me his papers.'

  'In that case, you can do the book. The Strange Life of Henry Kettle, an official biography by his literary executor. How's that? Come and have a drink, my train back to Paddington's at ten past two.'

  Ben Corby. Plump and balding Yorkshireman, the original New Age hustler. They went to a pub called the Restoration and sat at a window-table overlooking a traffic island with old stone cross on it.

  'Golden Land Two,' said Ben. 'How long? A year?'

  Not the time, Powys thought, to tell him there wasn't going to be a book.

  'Seen Andy lately?' he asked.

  'Great guy, Max,' Ben said. 'Best thing that could've happened to Dolmen. Been burdened for years with the wispy beard brigade, wimps who reckon you can't be enlightened and make money. Give me the white suit and the chequebook any day. The New Age movement's got to seize the world by the balls.'

  'Andy,' Powys said patiently. 'You seen him recently?'

  'Andy? Pain in the arse. He wouldn't write me a book either. He's always been an Elitist twat. Hates the New Age movement, thinks earth mysteries are not for the masses . . . but, there you go, he knows his stuff; I gather he's giving Max good advice.'

  'Maybe he's just using Max.'

  'Everybody uses everybody, Joe. It's a holistic society.'

  'How did Andy get involved?'

  Ben shrugged. I know he was teaching art at one of the local secondary schools. Had a house in the area for years, apparently.'

  That made sense. Had he really thought Andy was living in a run-down woodland cottage with no sanitation?

  But why teaching? Teaching what?

  'Andy's hardly short of cash.'

  'Maybe he hit on hard times,' said Ben. 'Maybe he felt he had a duty to nurture young minds.'

  Young minds. Powys thought of the girl at the stone. And then a man leaned over and tapped him on the shoulder.

  'Excuse me, Mr Powys, could I have a word? Peter Jarman, Mr Kettle's solicitor.'

  Peter Jarman looked about twenty-five; without his glasses he'd have looked about seventeen. He steered Powys into a corner. 'Uncle Henry,' he said. 'We all called him Uncle Henry. My grandfather was his solicitor for about half a century. Did you get my letter?'

  Powys shook his head. 'I've been away.'

  'No problem. I can expand on it a little now. Uncle Henry's daughter, as you may have noticed, hasn't come back from Canada for his funeral. He didn't really expect her to, which, I suspect, is why he's left his house to you.'

  'Bloody hell. He really did that?'

  'Seems she's done quite well for herself, the daughter, over in Canada. And communicated all too rarely with Uncle Henry. He seems to have thought you might value the house more than she would. This is all rather informal, but there are formalities, so if you could make an appointment to come to the office.'

  'Yes,' Powys said faintly. 'Sure.'

  'In the meantime,' said young Mr Jarman, 'if you want to get into the cottage at any time, Mrs Whitney next door is authorised to let you in. Uncle Henry was very specific that you should have access to any of his books or papers at any time.'

  'You told me,' Jocasta Newsome said, suppressing her emotions, but not very well, 'that you hadn't managed to buy much in the West Country, and you proceeded to prove it with that mediocre miniature by Dufort.'

  Hereward nervously fingered his beard. Now that it was almost entirely grey, he'd been considering shaving the thing off. As a statement, it was no longer sufficiently emphatic.

  The black beard of the dark-eyed figure in the picture seemed to mock him.

  'Where did it come from, Hereward?'

  'All right,' he snapped, 'it wasn't from the West. A local artist sold it to me.'

  Jocasta planted her hands on her hips. 'Girl?'

  'Well . . . young woman.'

  'Get rid of it,' Jocasta said, not a request, not a suggestion.

  'Don't be ridiculous.'

  'Take it back. Now.'

  'What the hell's the matter with you? It's a bloody good painting! Worth eight or nine hundred of anybody's money and that's what Max Goff's going to pay!'

  'So if Goff's going to pay the money, what's it doing in our window upsetting everybody?'

  'One man!' He couldn't believe this.

  'The Mayor of this town, Hereward. Who was so distressed he nearly cracked my counter.'

  'But. . Hereward clutched his head, 'he's the Mayor! Not a bloody cultural arbiter! Not some official civic censor! He's just a tin-pot, small-town ... I mean, how dare the old fuck come in here, complaining about a picture which isn't even . . . an erotic nude or ... or something. What's his problem?'

  'He calmed down after slapping the counter,' Jocasta admitted. 'He apologized. He then appealed to me very sincerely - for the future well-being of the town, he said - not to flaunt a picture which appeared to be heralding the return of someone called Black Michael, who was apparently the man who built Crybbe Court and was very unpopular in his day.'

  'He actually said that? In the year nineteen hundred and ninety-three, the first citizen of this town - the most senior elected member of the town council - seriously said that?'

  'Words to that effect. And I agreed. I told him it would be removed immediately from the window and off these premises by tonight. I apologised and told him my husband obviously didn't realise when he purchased it - 'in the West Country' - that it might cause offence.'

  For a moment, Hereward was speechless. When his voice returned, it was hoarse with outraged incredulity.

  'How dare you? How bloody dare you? Black bloody Michael? What is this . . . bilge? I tell you, if this gallery is to have any artistic integrity . . .'

  'Hereward, it's going,' Jocasta said, bored with him. 'I don't like that girl, she's a troublemaker. I don't like her weird paintings, and I want this one out.'

  'Well, I can't help you there,' Hereward said flatly. 'I promised it would stay in the window until tomorrow.'

  Jocasta regarded him as she would something she'd scraped from her shoe. It occurred to him seriously, for the first time, that perhaps he was something she'd like to scrape from her shoe. In which case, the issue of his failed trip to the West, his attempt to recover ground by buying this painting on the artist's eccentric terms, all this would be used to humiliate him again and again.

  She turned her back on him and as she stalked away, Hereward saw her hook the tip of one shoe behind the leg of the wooden easel on which sat the big, dark picture.

  He tried to save it. As he lunged towards the toppling easel, Jocasta half-turned and, seeing his hands clawing out, must have thought they were clawing at her. So she struck first. Hereward felt the nails pierce his cheek, just under his right eye.

  It was instinctive. His left hand came back and he hit her so hard with his open palm that she was thrown off her feet and into a corner of the window, where she lay with her nose bleeding, snorting blood splashes on to her cream silk blouse.

  There was silence.

  A bunch of teenage boys just off the school bus, home early after end-of-term exams, gathered outside the window and grinned in at Jocasta.

  The picture of the unsmiling man with the yellow halo in the doorway of Crybbe Court had fallen neatly and squarely in the centre of the floor and was undamaged. Its darkness flooded the gallery and Hereward Newsome knew his marriage and his plans for a successful and fashionable outlet in Crybbe were both as good as over.

  Assessing his emotions, much later, he would decide he'd been not so much sad as angry and bitter at the way a seedy little tow
n could turn a civilized man into a savage.

  Jocasta didn't get up. She took a tissue from a pocket in the front of her summery skirt and dabbed carefully at her nose.

  Hereward knew there was blood also on his torn cheek. He didn't touch it.

  Outside, the school kids began to drift away. Jocasta had her back against the window, unaware of them.

  Still she made no attempt to get up, only said calmly, voice nasally blocked, as if she had a cold, ' I accepted some drawings from that girl a few days ago. Sale or return. Do you remember them?'

  'I didn't make the connection,' Hereward said quietly.

  'They were drawings of an old man.'

  'I didn't see them.'

  'He was cutting his own throat.'

  'Yes,' Hereward said dully. '. . . What?'

  'The reason I don't want this painting here is that the other night, while you were away, the figure, the likeness of this old man, the old man in the drawings, was seen in our bathroom.'

  Hereward said nothing.

  'Not by me, of course,' his wife assured him. 'But the man I was sleeping with swears it was there.'

  Everything was completely still in The Gallery. Hereward Newsome stunned, aware of a droplet of blood about to fall from his chin. Jocasta Newsome lying quietly in the window, red splashes like rose petals on her cream silk blouse.

  CHAPTER V

  Fay had a whole pile of books and just two short names.

  She was alone in the reading room of the County Library in Llandrindod Wells, nearly thirty rural miles from Crybbe and another world: bright, spacy streets, a spa town.

  Two names: Wort and Dee.

  Fortunately there was an index to the dozens of volumes of transactions of the Radnorshire Society, a huge collection of many decades of articles by mainly amateur scholars, exploring aspects of the social, political and natural history of the most sparsely populated county in southern Britain.

  There were also books on Tudor history and three biographies of John Dee (1527-1608) whose family came from Radnorshire.

  She read of a farmhouse, Nant-y-groes, once the Dee family home, at Pilleth, six miles from Crybbe. But it had, apparently, been demolished and rebuilt and was now unrecognisable as Elizabethan.

  Dee himself had been born in the south-east of England but had always been fascinated by his Welsh border ancestry. The name Dee, it seemed, had probably developed from the Welsh Du meaning black.

  History, Fay discovered, had not been over-generous to this mathematician, astronomer and expert on navigation - perhaps because of his principle role as astrologer to the court of Elizabeth I and his lifelong obsession with magic and spiritualism. Most schoolchildren learned about Walter Raleigh and Francis Bacon, but John Dee hardly figured on the syllabus, despite having carried out major intelligence operations in Europe, on behalf of the Queen, during periods of Spanish hostility.

  Two hours' superficial reading convinced Fay that John Dee was basically sound. He studied 'natural magic' - a search for an intelligence behind nature. But there was no serious evidence, despite many contemporary and subsequent attempts to smear him, of any involvement in black magic.

  Dee wanted to know eternal secrets, the ones he believed no human intelligence could pass on. He sought communion with spirits and 'angels', for which a medium was required.

  Fay read of several professed psychics, who sometimes turned out to be less well-intentioned than he was. People like the very dubious Sir Edward Kelley, who once claimed the spirits had suggested that, in order to realise their full human potential, he and Dee should swap wives.

  Now that, Fay thought, was the kind of scam Guy might try to pull.

  But there was no mention of Dee working with Sir Michael Wort in Radnorshire.

  She skipped over all the weird, impenetrable stuff about Dee's so-called Angelic Conversations and went back to the Radnorshire transactions.

  It emerged that while Dee himself might not have been a medium he clearly was, like Henry Kettle, an expert dowser.

  In 1574, he wrote to Elizabeth's Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley, requesting permission to seek 'hidden treasure' using a method that was scientific rather than magical (nothing psychic), Fay smiled, involving a particular type of rod.

  He was also most interested in folklore and local customs, druidic lore and landscape patterns.

  OK. Speculation time.

  If there were such things as ley-lines, the mounds and stones which defined them must have been far more in evidence in Dee's time.

  If ley-lines had psychic properties, Dee's interest in the remains would have been of a more than antiquarian nature.

  If he'd been in the area in the 1570s he could hardly have failed to run into Wort.

  If Dee felt that Wort had knowledge or psychic abilities he lacked, he might have been inclined to overlook the sheriff's less savoury practices.

  Fay looked up Wort and found only passing references. No mention of hangings. His name was in a chronological list of high sheriffs, and that was all.

  She looked up Trow and found nothing. She looked in the local telephone directories, found several Worts and several Trows, noted down numbers.

  Then she simply looked up Crybbe and found surprisingly little, apart from references to the curfew, with the usual stuff about the legacy of Percy Weale, a mention of the town hall as one of the finest in the area.

  Had Crybbe received so little attention because, for much of its history, it had been in England? Or was it, as she'd intimated to Powys, because local historians weren't too thick on the ground.

  It was almost as though nobody wanted the place to have a history.

  And so Fay emerged from the library with only one significant piece of information.

  It came from a brief mention of Crybbe Court in an article dated 1962 about the few surviving manor houses of Radnorshire. Crybbe Court, which the writer said was in dire need of extensive restoration, had been built in the 1570s by a local landowner, Sir Michael Wort, who later served as High Sheriff of the county and who lived there until his death in the summer of 1593.

  It was precisely four centuries since the hanging of Black Michael.

  'Oh, what the hell,' Colonel Col Croston said. 'Don't see why not.'

  'I'm really very grateful,' Guy told him.

  It was the first piece of genuine co-operation to come his way. Well, from the locals, anyway. Whether you could call this chap a local was highly debatable, but he was the deputy mayor.

  As soon as Guy had found out that the public meeting wasn't, after all, going to be chaired by old Preece, he'd driven off by himself to the deputy's home, a partly renovated Welsh long-house across the river, about a mile out of town on the Ludlow road.

  Col Croston had turned out to be an affable, pale-eyed, sparse-haired, athletic-looking chap in his fifties. He lived quite untidily with a couple of Labradors, who rather resembled him, and a tough-looking little wife who didn't. There was a mechanical digger working on a trench fifty yards or so from the house. Try and ignore the smell,' the Colonel had greeted him breezily. 'Spot of bother with the old septic tank.'

  What the deputy mayor had just agreed was to let Guy shoot a few minutes of videotape in the meeting before it actually started, so there would at least be some pictures of an assembly of townsfolk and councillors. Guy would milk this opportunity for character close-ups of the taciturn, grizzled faces of Old Crybbe.

  His heart lurched. He wished he hadn't thought of grizzled old faces. With bulbous noses and bulging eyes and blood fountains from severed arteries.

  'And . . . er . . . Colonel,' he said hurriedly. 'What I'd also like, if you have no objections, is a little interview with you, possibly before and after, outlining the issues - the town's

  attitudes to becoming a major New Age centre.'

  'Well, I'll do my best, Guy. But I must say, one of the things I was hoping to learn in there tonight is what exactly New Age is. Drink?'

  Thanks, just a small one.
You like it here, Colonel?'

  'Col. Name's Colin. Well, you know, got to settle somewhere. No, it's not a bad place. Once one gets used to their little peculiarities. Like the dogs - used to take these chaps into town of a morning, pick up the paper, that kind of thing. Always well-behaved, never chase anything. But a word or two was said and now I walk them in the other direction. Compromise, you see. Secret of survival in the sticks. I don't mind.'

  'So if I were to ask you how people here feel about Max Goff and . . .'

  'Ho!' said Mrs Croston, passing through, wearing a stained boiler suit.

  'Ruth's not terribly impressed with Mr Goff,' Col said. 'My own feeling is it's no bad thing at all, long as it doesn't get out of hand. You've got to have an economy, and this place has ignored the possibilities of tourism and that kind of business for too long. Agriculture's going down the chute so, on the whole, I think we're quite fortunate to have him.'

  'Will you say that on camera?'

  'Oh . . . why not? Long as it's clear I'm speaking personally, not on behalf of the council.'

  'Super,' Guy said. 'Now what about all these prehistoric stones Goff's sticking in the ground?'

  'Ah well, there've been rumblings there, I have to say. Fine by me, but country folk are incredibly superstitious. Who, after all, got rid of the original stones? Money, however - money does tend to overcome quite a lot, doesn't it? But I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of them started disappearing again.'

  'Interesting,' Guy said. 'So you think there'll be fireworks in there tonight.'

  Col laughed. 'Will there be disagreement? Oh yes. Will there be suspicion, resentment, resistance? Definitely. Fireworks? Well, they'll listen very patiently to what Goff has to say, then they'll ask one or two very polite questions before drifting quietly away into the night. And then, just as quietly, they'll do their best to shaft the blighter. That's how things are done in Crybbe If they don't like you, best to keep the removal van on standby with the engine running.'