eyes scoured the fields between the farm and the village until they found the tiled roof of the little barn.
Narton wondered why he had bothered to come. He scraped his nails into the soft skin of the underside of his wrist until he broke through to the flesh beneath — until, yet again, he made himself bleed. He scratched harder still and moaned with the pain. As he scratched, he allowed his eyes to sweep from side to side across the meadow. The grass was the darkest of greys.
Better now. He licked the blood, warm and salty. The moisture cooled on his skin.
It was all still there, he thought, beneath the field dappled with moonlight and shadows. Everything that had happened, layer upon layer, because nothing ever really went away. Bleeding Heart Square was full of layers too, layers of blood, and so was the barn. Especially the barn.
The meadow was full of shifting shapes. One of the shapes resolved itself into a girl wobbling on a bicycle as she followed the slope of the field towards the farmhouse. He heard her laughter, high and excited, and knew that her attention was not on him or the field or even the bicycle but on another shadow beside her.
‘I’m a bloody fool to stand here,’ Narton said aloud.
His ears were unnaturally sharp. He heard the chink of harness from the farm buildings. A dog began to bark, though whether in the house or the yard he couldn’t tell. The barn would be empty, though.
At that moment an idea drifted into his mind, settled in the silt at the bottom, sprouted, put out roots and flowered. All that in an instant. Sometimes, he thought, all a man has is his folly. No wonder he clings to it.
Lydia cooked Welsh rarebit for supper, following the detailed instructions Mrs Renton had provided. She had bought a bottle of pale ale to add to the cheese topping as it melted in the saucepan but Captain Ingleby-Lewis chanced to find it before she could use it. She cleared two thirds of the great scarred dining table and served the meal on matching plates, one slightly chipped.
It was the first time that she and her father had eaten in a relatively formal way and in the soft light this end of the room looked almost like a normal room in a normal house. Her father complimented her on the rarebit. Though he had been drinking beer steadily since lunchtime, he appeared to have reached an equilibrium that left him, at least for the time being, amiable and reasonably alert.
‘Well, this is cosy, eh?’ he said, lining up fork and knife exactly at half past six on his plate. ‘You’re full of unexpected talents, my dear.’
‘Thank you.’
‘How did you get on at that lawyer fellow’s?’
‘It’s rather boring work.’
‘I can’t imagine how those chaps manage it. Sitting in an office all day and shuffling bits of paper around. It’d drive me mad.’ He stroked his moustache approvingly. ‘Fact is, God didn’t create me to be a desk wallah.’
‘Father, there’s something I wanted to ask you.’
‘Eh? What?’
‘The ones Mr Serridge was sent in the post. There have been two since I’ve been here. Have there been others?’
‘Perhaps,’ Captain Ingleby-Lewis admitted cautiously. ‘Can’t really say.’
‘When did they start?’
‘I don’t know.’ He looked up at the ceiling. ‘A month or two ago?’
‘But why should anyone do that sort of thing?’
Ingleby-Lewis gave way to a fit of coughing. When it had finished, he lit a cigarette. ‘Some crackpot, my dear. The world’s full of them. Take my advice: best thing to do is put it out of your mind.’
‘But it’s not that easy. Is there — is there something about Mr Serridge I should know?’
‘Perfectly decent fellow,’ said Ingleby-Lewis. ‘Known him for years. Not a gentleman, of course, but can’t blame him for that. If you ask me, people talk a lot of rot about that sort of thing. Damn it, I shall have to pop out for some cigarettes.’
At that moment there came a tap on the door.
‘Come in,’ cried Ingleby-Lewis, and struggled to his feet.
The door opened, revealing Malcolm Fimberry on the threshold with a bottle of wine cradled in his arms.
‘I say,’ he squeaked. ‘Sorry to disturb you. I–I thought I might open some wine and I wondered if I could borrow a corkscrew.’
‘Wine, eh?’ Ingleby-Lewis sprang towards him. ‘Nothing simpler, old man. Come and sit down. Lydia, my dear, would you find Mr Fimberry a corkscrew in the kitchen?’
‘If you would like to join me in a glass,’ Fimberry suggested, ‘I’d be more than pleased.’
‘How very kind.’ Ingleby Lewis patted him on the shoulder and removed the bottle from his grasp. ‘Three glasses as well then, please, Lydia. Ah, a Beaujolais, I see. How very wise. You’re quite right of course — solitary drinking is not something one should encourage. Besides, life holds few finer pleasures than a glass of wine with friends.’
When Lydia returned with three unmatched glasses and a corkscrew, she found her father and Mr Fimberry sitting on either side of the fireplace and smoking Mr Fimberry’s cigarettes. Her father took the corkscrew and removed the cork with a skill born of long experience. He poured a stream of wine into the nearest glass.
‘None for me, thank you,’ Lydia said.
‘Nonsense,’ Ingleby-Lewis said. ‘Just a sip. Do you good. Warm you up.’ He turned to Fimberry. ‘My daughter feels the cold, you know. Especially at night.’ He measured a thimbleful into the smallest of the glasses and handed it ceremoniously to Lydia. He gave another glass to Fimberry and the largest one to himself. He raised his own glass to the light. ‘A fine colour. Your good health.’ He swallowed a third of the contents.
‘I hear you have a position at Shires and Trimble in Rosington Place, Mrs Langstone,’ Fimberry said, leaning towards her. ‘That must be interesting. Working for a solicitor, I mean.’
‘It’s early days yet,’ Lydia said grimly.
‘You’re just opposite the chapel, of course. In fact, as far as I can work out from an eighteenth-century plan of the palace, the house where Shires and Trimble are must be built over part of the Almoner’s lodging. Remarkable to think of the people who must have walked about here in their time. Good Queen Bess, Sir Thomas More, Richard the Third, John of Gaunt, all those splendid prelates of the Church. Why, we walk on history in this part of London. And that’s why we need Mr Howlett to guard our gates and keep order. In legal terms, Rosington Place, Bleeding Heart Square and their environs form the Rosington Liberty, and hence in many respects they still fall under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rosington.’
‘Very true,’ Ingleby-Lewis said. ‘A spot more? No?’ He refilled his own glass. ‘You must know the place like the back of your hand.’
Mr Fimberry simpered, his eyes huge behind his pincenez. ‘Oh, there are some fascinating stories associated with it, no doubt about that. After the Reformation, the Catholic dead were sometimes secretly interred beneath the chapel, in the days when the palace was rented to the Spanish ambassador. It is said that the bodies were brought here to Bleeding Heart Square, and then transferred to the chapel in Rosington Palace. They were secretly buried at midnight, to the accompaniment of solemn masses, beneath the under-croft floor.’
‘Extraordinary yarn,’ Ingleby-Lewis said, his eyes straying again towards the bottle.
‘Nobody really knows if the story is true,’ Fimberry went on. ‘There are those who claim that the funeral processions still walk on certain nights of the year, with a line of recusants carrying the corpses from Bleeding Heart Square to Rosington Chapel. Others say they have heard singing from the chapel when it is empty. And some people believe that the bodies lie beneath the square itself. There are many ghosts, you know.’ He glanced sideways at Lydia and gave her a tight-lipped smile. ‘Though I can find no historical trace of the one that people claim to have seen most often.’
‘Ghosts, eh?’ Ingleby-Lewis said. ‘Claptrap, if you ask me. If I ever come across a ghost I’m going to put my arm right through him.’
‘A little more wine, Mrs Langstone?’ Fimberry seized the bottle and gestured towards Lydia’s untouched glass.
‘No, thank you.’
