‘Dr Stearne, are you unwell?’ Lady Clevedon said shrilly.
‘He’s gone as white as a sheet,’ exclaimed Dr Jacobs.
‘Ivy, bring water!’ cried Dr Grayson.
Father’s face was the colour of bone, and he was staring fixedly at the Doom. But now it wasn’t Satan’s motto that held his attention. It was something in the bottom right-hand corner that Maud couldn’t see.
‘Maud, don’t just stand there!’ snapped Miss Broadstairs. ‘Help your father!’
‘I’m fine,’ mumbled Father – and vomited on to the flags.
His breath still smelled as he held the gate open for Maud. He must be mortified, she thought with glee.
Oh, it had been a splendid evening, so much to savour! Lady Clevedon gamely pretending that her skirts hadn’t been splashed. Ivy on her knees, mopping up.
Father retired early, but when Maud went upstairs an hour later, she saw a light beneath his door. She guessed he was confiding his thoughts to his notebook. At least she hoped so, although she would have to wait another day or so to find out. He had no reason to go out tomorrow, and she made it a rule never to venture into his dressing-room – where he’d taken to keeping the notebook – unless she was certain that he was out of the house.
Far from minding this delay, she rather enjoyed it. It heightened the anticipation; like reading one of those serialised stories in Cook’s Family Chat. And just as if she were reading a serial, she made a point of never skipping ahead to Father’s last entry. She always picked up from where she’d left off.
This sinner is mine, because of his sin.
What sin could Father possibly have committed that would make him react like that?
It couldn’t be what he’d done to Maman. He considered condemning her for the sake of Baby Rose as no more than his Christian duty, and in no way a sin. Nor did he regard what he regularly did with Ivy as anything but the satisfaction of a lawful appetite.
Suddenly, Maud remembered what Jubal Rede had told her the first time they’d met: ‘He oughter know about sin.’ Jubal had been talking about Father. What had he meant?
Crossing to her window, Maud raised the blind. The frost-spangled fen lay coldly beautiful beneath the rising moon. The Lode gleamed like eelskin. The spindly shadows of the naked willows reached towards the house with bony hands.
Whatever sin Father committed, she promised the fen, I will find out.
She felt alive in all her senses and eager for the hunt.
From the Private Notebook of Edmund Stearne
15th February
Why is this happening? Over the years I’ve seen countless depictions of the Day of Judgement. I’m a mediæval historian for Heaven’s sake! So why at this evening’s unveiling should the Doom have made me ill?
Perhaps Grayson is right, and it wasn’t the Doom; merely an unsavoury savoury (his little joke) and the fumes from those wretched paraffin heaters.
There’s something else too. As I beheld the Doom, I experienced the same waking dream that I did on first reading of Pyett’s sin. The floating hair. And I did distinctly smell meadowsweet. In the middle of winter? I suppose it could have been scent worn by one of the ladies – but what about the hair?
I suppose the Doom is rather out of the ordinary, possessing as it does such a pronounced local flavour. ‘A whiff of the fen’, as someone remarked. Its demons attack their victims with the hooked prongs of eel glaves, and the tiny black imps weighing down the scales have the bulbous eyes of toads. What struck me most forcibly is that the Jaws of Hell, which in other Dooms are those of a fiery dragon or a Leviathan, are here depicted as a monstrous eel.
That in itself probably explains why I felt unwell, conjuring as it does unpleasant memories from my boyhood. Nurse Thrushie locking me in the corner cupboard when I misbehaved. Her endless tales of ‘bad sperrits’. Ferishes, Jack-o’-Lanterns, Black Shuck; all ready to lure you to a miry death if you ventured into the fen. And as I recall, they didn’t only inhabit the fen. Why, there was even supposed to be an ‘evil haunt’ in church.
Yes that must be it, childhood terrors exacerbated by paraffin fumes. I only wish the women hadn’t made such a to-do. Miss B. clucking around me like a hen, Lady Clevedon pretending not to be vexed about her flounces. Maud unfilial and aloof. Only Ivy was any use, although let’s not forget that she has her own motives for helping. The other night when she thought I was asleep, she stole over to the chaise longue and stretched out naked. I saw how she gazed about her with that proprietorial air; how she caressed the velvet chaise, while probing with her tongue the fleshy mound on her upper lip. She became more aroused than she ever is with me. I know what she wants. The little chit fancies herself as mistress of Wake’s End. Good luck to her!
To remind her who’s Master, I took her from behind, coitus more ferarum. I made her bite the pillow. Bene.
Women are all the same. Devious, hypocritical, corrupt. They never admit what it is they really want.
Later
I feel much cleaner, having rung for Ivy and vented copiously. Venting has cleared my mind, and I now perceive what I didn’t before. I haven’t yet mentioned the worst thing about the Doom: that devil in the corner. He is what made me ill. Did I deliberately avoid referring to him, or have I only just realised that he is the root of my unease?
I can see him now. He squats obscenely in a clump of reeds, splaying his hind limbs to expose his parts. His scaly head is lit from behind by the ruddy flames of Hell, but he is in every particular a creature of the swamp. His hide is greenish-black, his claws are webbed, and his features resemble those of a toad. He has just snared a naked sinner with his eel glave, and yet he is leering not at his victim, but at me.
It’s the same eye that I saw in the churchyard on the night I found the Doom. It’s the eye in the grass. And it’s looking at me.
17th February
‘The eye in the grass’ indeed! What nonsense. There’s nothing like a spot of toothache to restore one’s sense of reality. It seems I’ve been grinding my jaws in my sleep and have split a molar; the dentist extracted it this morning. I found the pain a welcome distraction. Henceforth I shall heed old Grayson: plain food, brisk exercise, regular connection. That’s the ticket.
The door to the tower remains locked, which is helping a good deal. At first I was still disagreeably aware of the Doom behind it, and strange as it sounds, I felt watched. But now I scarcely think of it at all.
18th February
I had to speak to Maud about that wretched magpie. While I was at my desk, the creature lit on to the chimneystack, and its infernal clamour echoed so loudly that I could have sworn it was in the room; I was so startled I spilled ink on my work.
Maud had the temerity to assert that it wasn’t her bird but some other magpie, or even a crow. I told her I would not tolerate the creature near the house, and forbade her to feed it. The girl is even plainer when she sulks.
I described the bird’s clamour as ‘infernal’, which puts me in mind of what Thrushie used to say: that if you see a seventh magpie, you’ll see the Devil by and by. Doggerel, yet perhaps with a kernel of truth. Magpies steal and are generally vicious. I won’t have it near the house.
The scar on my hand is troubling me. It has become red and inflamed. I have an idea that I’ve been scratching it in my sleep.
Later
I keep thinking about eyes. That devil in the corner of the Doom. One eye is open, the other half-closed in a lecherous wink.
I fancy I now know why I was so affected by the eye in the grass. Cave, cave, deus videt. Beware, beware, God sees all. The stars were extraordinarily bright on the night they unveiled the Doom. They put me in mind of what our governess used to say: that stars are holes through which God watches what we do. ‘If you’re naughty,’ she told us, ‘God will see. He will throw you into a burning pit where the Devil lives.’
‘Which star is the hole that God looks through?’ Lily wanted to know.
‘All of t
hem,’ said Miss Carter.
‘What, all at the same time?’ Lily said sceptically.
‘All at the same time,’ replied our governess.
My sister badgered her with more questions but I’d heard enough. Ever since then, the night sky has held no beauty for me. I can’t quite rid myself of the belief that above me are millions of eyes.
19th February
Until now, I’ve never noticed how many devils inhabit our church – I mean, its architecture and appointments – nor have I perceived how many of them evoke ‘a whiff of the fen’.
They crouch at the base of the font and cling to the capitals, they positively throng the ceiling. This last came as an unpleasant surprise, for I’d always believed that those little creatures grinning from the corbels were merely grotesques. But during Morning Service it occurred to me that they might be devils.
I’ve just consulted Herbert’s Ecclesiastical Glories of England. I wish I hadn’t. ‘St Guthlaf’s, Wakenhyrst, Suffolk: Gothic arcades that would grace a cathedral are flanked by a spacious nave beneath a superlative hammerbeam roof. Its interlinked beams are supported by arched braces from which float large horizontal wooden angels with outstretched wings, the hems of their gowns brushing corbels crammed with leering demons.’ So there we have it. Our church is full of devils. There are angels, but not as many.
28th February
Maud lacks a woman’s solicitous instincts to a deplorable degree. As my hand was still troubling me, I was forced to ask her twice to bring iodine, and then she made no offer to assist. I had to order her to bathe and bandage the lesion, or she would have left me to do it myself.
She is sulking again because I scolded her about that bird. She still feeds it, though she denies it to my face. I told her I would not tolerate guile. To mark my point, I made her copy the whole of Leviticus twice.
15th March
Slept badly. Another black frost. I could distinctly hear the ice on the Mere: much unearthly grinding and cracking.
My hand remains troublesome. II Corinthians 12:7: ‘There was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me.’ I exaggerate, but it really is rather trying.
17th March
During Morning Service I found myself musing on the common belief that when statues of saints and the like were destroyed in the Reformation, this left our churches unprotected from the forces of evil.
An old wheelwright in Blythburgh once assured me that this explained his church’s famous black mark. He said that when ‘they’ (i.e. the Puritan iconoclasts) painted over St Christopher, they unwittingly let in the Devil in the form of a great black dog. The infernal hound raised a lightning storm and struck two people dead before exiting through the door, leaving behind the well-known scorch mark. It made not a jot of difference to the old fellow when I pointed out that since St Christopher had been whitewashed a good sixteen years before the great storm of 1577, the Devil had certainly taken his time in arriving.
Yesterday I consulted our parish records. It is as I supposed: the Doom and its supporting ‘candlebeam’ were indeed limed over during the Reformation. The records are amusing in their Puritan scorn for graven images, describing the Doom as ‘good onlie to rost a shoulder of mutton, but evill in church’. So where does all this take me? The Doom is a sacred painting, I mustn’t forget that. Even if I believed the nonsense of the common people, its return to St Guthlaf’s in its naked state would surely protect, rather than harm.
Why then do I have such a powerful feeling that this painting has nothing sacred about it? That on the contrary it possesses a quality of the infernal?
I think it must be the primitive vigour of the imagery. The man who painted that Doom believed in Hell as completely as he believed in his own existence. Such conviction is almost enough to make me believe in Hell myself.
21st March
At last the thaw has set in. Icicles dripping from the eaves, water gurgling and trickling in the gutters. I slept badly. I kept fancying I could still hear the ice on the Mere.
22nd March
I begin to understand why Pyett’s was the age of wonders and demons. I begin to grasp how swiftly unreason, like an unclean flood, seeps into the deepest crevices of the mind.
After evensong I remained so long in prayer that when I came to myself, everyone had gone. The church was in darkness except for a candle on the altar and I surmised that the rector, not wishing to disturb me, had quietly departed, telling the sexton to leave me a light.
‘Hulloa?’ I called, in case old Farrow was still about. I received no answer. Clearly the sexton had also gone home. As I rose to do the same, I heard a noise in a distant part of the church. It wasn’t the sound of the latch in the porch, it was nothing so familiar. It was the click of claws on stone.
I shrugged it off as the quirk of an ancient building – but then it came again. It wasn’t a rat, it sounded larger than that; perhaps a stoat? Although there was something almost furtive about it, suggesting a greater intelligence than such creatures possess. I also had the disagreeable impression that whatever it was had emerged from the room in the tower which holds the Doom.
The next moment I knew this to be impossible, for that room remains locked. I considered crossing the nave to make sure; but I’ve never liked being alone in St Guthlaf’s at night – too many shadows – so instead I left by the shortest route, taking the candle from the altar and extinguishing it only at the last moment. I did not look back.
Having left via the vestry, I emerged into the north end of the churchyard. For some reason I remembered that by tradition, this is the area reserved for suicides, stillborns and evil spirits: ‘the Devil’s part,’ as Thrushie used to call it.
The darkness was almost palpable, for the moon had not yet risen and the sky was murky and overcast. A thin mist lay low upon the ground. The headstones jutted through it like teeth. With one hand on the wall of the church, I groped my way along the path. It occurred to me that I was going ‘widdershins’ instead of clockwise, thus earning myself untold bad luck (were I a believer in such things). How Thrushie would have scolded me! And how I wished I didn’t keep recalling her and her nonsense!
As my eyes adjusted to the murk, I saw with relief that I had reached the south end of the churchyard. I made out the dark bulk of the family monument, and the lych-gate beyond. A flicker of movement caught my eye at the corner of my vision and I turned. Nothing there. And yet there had been something, for something had caught my eye.
The night was very still. My breath sounded unpleasantly loud and somewhat uneven. Around me I made out the hunched shapes of yew trees. I’ve never liked them. I read somewhere that this churchyard stands a yard higher than its surroundings because of all the bodies buried here since Saxon times. For a thousand years these yews have fed on human flesh.
All this passed through my mind as I stood listening in the graveyard. The church loomed, deep black against the charcoal sky. It seemed not a place of sanctuary, but the menacing relic of a savage and haunted past.
Then, a few yards to my left, I glimpsed a dark shape slipping behind a headstone. It ran fast and very low to the ground, and it was larger than a stoat, though not large enough to be human. I felt for my clasp-knife, but didn’t take it from my pocket.
From nowhere a wind blew up, wafting a dank smell of rotting vegetation. In the fen beyond the churchyard wall, I heard the brittle rustle of dead reeds. The wind stirred the mist, and I realised that what I’d glimpsed was no creature. My eye had been deceived by shifting ribbons of vapour.
As abruptly as it had arisen, the wind died. The reeds went still. The silence throbbed in my ears. The inhuman silence of the fen.
Again I glimpsed movement. This time I saw it more clearly, if only for an instant: something slipping over the churchyard wall. A moment later I heard a soft splash as the creature entered Harrow Dyke. An otter, then. I found that I’d had been clutching the knife in my pocket. Relinquishing my grip, I withdrew my
hand and wiped my palm on my overcoat.
I reached the house without further incident, and found to my disgust that the smell of decay had worked its way into my clothes. I had Ivy draw a hot bath, and felt immediately better. However, on leaving the bathroom, I chanced to peer through the round window at the end of the passage – and I distinctly saw something swimming across the Lode. It was just above where the Lode meets Harrow Dyke, and it was definitely not floating débris, for it was moving upstream. Towards the house.
It must have been an otter.
Although I did not think that otters had such long fur.
23rd March
There must be something wrong with the drains, for that swampy smell has infiltrated parts of the house, particularly my study. It is giving me a headache.
This afternoon Ivy was late drawing the blinds. I had to ring for her twice, and then I had to tell her to tend the fire. She ought to have noticed without being told. I had returned to my desk and the girl was kneeling at the grate when that wretched magpie clattered on to the roof. The noise echoed so loudly down the chimneybreast that I nearly repeated my accident with the inkwell.
I gave orders that tomorrow Ivy must have the bird destroyed. Still on her knees, she twisted round and grinned. ‘You seem out of sorts, sir. Shall I fetch you some tea, sir?’ I rose from my desk and told her sharply to stay where she was. On her knees.
24th March
Much better. The drains have righted themselves and that fenny stink is gone. Also my hand is much improved, thanks to Ivy and her aunt Biddy Thrussel’s medicinal vinegar. Moreover I can at last work in peace, now that the magpie is destroyed.
Slightly unfortunate circumstances, but that can’t be helped. I’d returned from Ely with Maud, and on entering the library she chanced to see the carcase hanging in the shrubbery. Apparently Ivy had caught the bird in a snare and wrung its neck, but having been called away, she’d neglected to cut it down.
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