husband on Courcy Island ought to make her job easier? She should be feeling relieved at a sharing of responsibility. Why then should she see this unexpected arrival as a new and unwelcome complication? Why should she feel for the first time that she was caught in a charade in which she stumbled blindfold, while unseen hands spun her round, pushed and pulled at her, in which an unknown intelligence watched, waited and directed the play?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Breakfast was a long-drawn-out meal to which the members of the house party came singly, ate at leisure and seemed reluctant to finish. The food would have done justice to Herbert Gorringe's Victorian notions of a proper start to the day. As the lids of the silver dishes were raised, the discordant smells of eggs and bacon, sausages, kidneys and haddock filled the breakfast room, stifling appetite. Despite the early promise of another warm day Cordelia sensed that the party was ill at ease and that she wasn't the only one present who was mentally counting the hours to nightfall. There seemed to be an unspoken conspiracy not to upset Clarissa, and when she announced her plan to visit the Church and the crypt the murmur of agreement was suspiciously unanimous. If anyone would have preferred a trip round the island or a solitary walk no one admitted it. Probably they were well aware how precarious was her control before a performance and no one wanted to risk being held responsible if that control broke. As they walked in a group along the arcade, past the theatre and under the shadow of the trees which led to the Church, it seemed to Cordelia that Clarissa was surrounded by the solicitous care afforded to an invalid or – and the thought was disagreeable – to a predestined victim.
Sir George was the one most at ease. When they entered the Church and the rest of the party gazed round with the air of people resolved to find something positive to say, his reaction was immediate and uncompromising. He obviously found its nineteenth-century fusion of religious enthusiasm with medieval romanticism unsympathetic and viewed the richly decorated apse with its mosaic of Christ in glory, the coloured tiles and the polychromatic arches with a prejudiced eye.
'It looks more like a Victorian London Club – or a Turkish bath come to that – than a Church. I'm sorry, Gorringe, but I can't admire it. Who d'you say the architect was?'
'George Frederick Bodley. My great-grandfather had quarrelled with Godwin by the time he came to rebuild the Church. His relationships with his architects were always stormy. I'm sorry you don't like it. The paintings on the reredos are by Lord Leighton, by the way, and the glass is by William Morris's firm who specialized in these lighter hues. Bodley was one of the first architects to use the firm. The east window is considered rather fine.'
'I don't see how anyone could actually pray in the place. Is that the War Memorial?'
'Yes. Put up by my uncle from whom I inherited. It's the only architectural addition he ever made to the island.'
The memorial was a plain stone slab set in the wall to the south of the altar which read:
In memory of the men of Courcy Island who fell on the battlefields of two world wars and whose bones lie in foreign soil.
1914-1918
1939-1945
This at least met with Sir George's approval.
'I like that. Plain and dignified. Wonder who put the wreath there. Been there some time by the look of it.' Ambrose had come up behind them. He said:
'There'll be a fresh one on nth November. Munter makes them from our own laurels and hangs one up each year. His father was killed in the war, in the Navy I think. Anyway, he was drowned. He told me that much.'
Roma asked:
'And do you assist at this charade?'
'No, he hasn't asked me. It's a purely private ceremony. I'm not sure I'm even supposed to know that it happens.' Roma turned away.
'It throws a new light on Munter though. Who would suspect him of that streak of romanticism? But I wouldn't have thought that the memorial was particularly appropriate. His father didn't live or work on the island, did he?'
'Not to my knowledge.'
'And if he drowned, his bones won't be buried in any soil, foreign or otherwise. It all seems rather pointless. But then, Remembrance Day is pointless. No one seems to know any longer what it's supposed to be for.'
Sir George said:
'It's for remembering the good chaps who've gone. Once a year. For two minutes. You wouldn't think that was too much to ask. And why degrade it into a sentimental mass love-in? At our last Parade the padre preached a sermon about the Third World and the World Council of Churches. I could see that some of the older chaps in the Legion were getting restless.'
Roma said:
'I suppose he thought his sermon had something to do with world peace.'
'Armistice Day isn't to do with peace. It's to do with war, and remembering one's dead. A nation that can't remember its dead will soon cease to be worth dying for. And what's so peaceful about the Third World?'
He turned quickly away and for a moment Cordelia thought that his eyes were moist. But then she saw that it was just a trick of the light and was embarrassed at her naivety. He might be remembering his own good chaps and the lost, forgotten and discredited causes for which they had died. But he was remembering without tears. He had seen so many bodies, so many deaths. Could any death now, she wondered, be more to him than a single statistic?
A door in the vestry led down to the crypt. To make their way down narrow stone steps lit by Ambrose's torch was to descend into a different world, a different time. Here alone was there any trace of the original Norman building. The roof was so low that Ivo, the tallest of them, could hardly stand upright, and the squat, heavy pillars strained as if bearing on their capitals the weight of nine centuries. Ambrose put out his hand to a wall switch and the claustrophobic chamber sprang into harsh unflattering light. They saw the skulls at once. One whole wall was patterned with them, a grinning parade of death. They had been ranged on rough oak shelves and were so tightly wedged that Cordelia judged that it would be impossible to separate them except by hacking them apart. Little care had been taken in the arrangement. In some places cement had been poured over them fixing mouth to mouth in the parody of a kiss. In others, the grit of the years had seeped between them binding them into cohesion; blocking the nasal cavities, collecting in the eye sockets and laying over the smooth domes a patina of dust like a shroud. Ambrose said'.
'There's a legend about them of course: there always is. In the seventeenth century the island was held by the de Courcy family; they had, in fact, been here since the fourteen hundreds. The de Courcy at that time was a particularly unpleasant representative of his breed. Someone must have told him about Tiberius' little doings on Capri – I don't suppose he could himself read – and he started to emulate them here. You can imagine the kind of thing; local maidens from the mainland abducted, droit de seigneur exercised on a scale which even the most compliant tenants found unreasonable, mutilated bodies brought in on the tide to the general disapproval of the locals. Speymouth was a small fishing village then. The town only reached any size or importance in the Regency – a sort of West Country Brighton. But the word got around. No one did anything, of course. The story is that the father of one of the abducted girls, whose tortured body floated ashore three weeks later, laid information against him with the local magistrate. De Courcy was subsequently tried at the Assizes but acquitted. One supposes it was managed in the usual way, a venal judge, perjured witnesses, bribed jurymen, a mixture of subservience and fear. And, of course, there was no direct evidence. At the end of the trial the father – he was an immensely powerful man according to the legend – rose up in court and cursed de Courcy and. all his clan in the customary dramatic terms of dead first-born, revolting diseases, the castle falling into ruins, the line extinct. Everyone must have enjoyed that part immensely. And then, in 1665 came the Plague.'
Cordelia thought that Ambrose's pause, if intended for dramatic effect, was unnecessary. The little group ranged round him were gazing at him with the rapt attention of foreign tourists whose guide, for once, is giving value for money. Ambrose went on.
'The Plague raged particularly fiercely on this coast. It was said to have been brought here by a family from Cheapside who had relations in the village and fled here for safety. One by one the local families fell victim. The parson and his family died early and there was no one to say the rites over the dead. Soon there was only one old man willing to bury them. Anarchy reigned. The island felt itself to be safe and de Courcy threatened death to anyone who landed. The story is that a boatload of women and children with one adult male to manage the boat did try. But if they were hoping to arouse de Courcy's compassion they were disappointed. He was behaving perfectly reasonably in this instance, of course. The only way to escape the pestilence was quarantine. It wasn't quite as reasonable to drive holes in the planks in the bottom of the boat before forcing it out to sea so that the human cargo drowned before they could reach shore, but that may be only a gloss on the story. About those
seventeenth-century boat people, I think we ought to give him the benefit of the doubt… And now for the climax.'
Ivo murmured:
'This story has everything but costumes by Motley and incidental music by Menotti.' But Cordelia saw that he was as interested as any of them.
'I don't know whether you know about the bubonic plague, the symptoms I mean. The victims would first have the sensation that they could smell rotting apples. After that came the dreaded pink rash on the forehead. The day came when the father of the murdered girl smelt the smell, saw in his glass the mark of death. It was a summer night but unruly, the sea turbulent. He knew that he hadn't long to live, the Plague killed swiftly. He launched his boat and set sail for the island.
'De Courcy and his private court were at dinner when the door of the great hall opened and he appeared, his great shambling sea-drenched figure, stumbling towards his enemy, eyes blazing. There was a moment when they were all too astounded for action. And in that moment he reached de Courcy, flung his great arms around him and kissed him full on the mouth.'
No one spoke. Cordelia wondered whether they would break into polite applause. The story had been well told and it had, in its simplicity, its terror, its almost symbolic confrontation of innocence with evil, a remarkable power. Ivo said:
'That story would make an opera. You've got the scenario. All you need is a Verdi or a second Benjamin Britten.'
Roma Lisle, gazing at the skulls in fascinated distaste, asked: 'And did the curse come true?'
'Oh yes. De Courcy and all his people here caught the Plague and were wiped out. The line is now extinct. It was four years before anyone came here to bury them. But then a kind of superstitious awe surrounded the island. The landsfolk averted their eyes from it. Fishermen, remembering the old religion, crossed themselves when they sailed in its shadow. The castle crumbled. It remained a ruin until my great-grandfather bought the place in 1864, built himself a castle in the modern style, reclaimed the land, cleared the undergrowth. Only the ruins of the old Church remained standing. De Courcy and his islanders hadn't been buried in the churchyard. The locals hadn't thought that they merited Christian burial. As a result Herbert Gorringe kept turning up the skeletons when planting his pleasure garden. His men collected the skulls and arranged them here, a nice compromise between Christian disposal and tossing them on the bonfire.'
Roma said:
'There's something carved above the top shelf, words and numbers. The carving's a bit crude. It could be a biblical reference.'
'Ah, that's a personal comment by one of the Victorian workmen who thought that the setting up of this row of Yoricks might be an opportunity to point a moral and adorn a tale. No, I shan't identify it for you. Look it up for yourselves.'
