Bleeding Heart Square

door opened.

‘Very well. But mind the steps, Mrs Langstone, they can be treacherous. Just a moment — I’ll turn on the lights.’

A line of bare light bulbs came to life, revealing the stark outlines of a long, low whitewashed room bisected on its east-west axis by a row of wooden posts.

‘Victorian,’ Fimberry said dismissively. ‘The interior had to be almost entirely refurbished when the Church bought St Tumwulf’s in the eighteen seventies.’

Lydia looked around. Rows of chairs and benches had been set out. Near the door were tables holding crockery and urns. At the east end, five high-backed chairs stood behind a table on a low platform.

‘It looks as if the Inquisition will soon be in session,’ Rory said.

‘Sir Rex and his people made the arrangements. Well, there’s not much to see here. Shall we move on to the Ossuary?’

‘Does Father Bertram let the undercroft to anyone who asks?’

‘Oh no.’ Fimberry looked shocked. ‘That wouldn’t be appropriate. One couldn’t have atheists here, for example, or communists or people of that sort.’

‘But Fascists are all right?’

‘Father Bertram was actually presented to Signor Mussolini when he last visited Rome. He was most impressed. One can’t deny Il Duce gets results.’

‘I thought the Pope didn’t like him much,’ Rory said. ‘Mussolini, I mean, not Father Bertram.’ Lydia punched him lightly on the arm in an attempt to shut him up.

‘Father Bertram says that the Holy Father and the Italian government have had one or two differences but they will soon be sorted out. After all, Mussolini’s a son of the Church.’

Fimberry shooed them back to the cloister and led them to another, much smaller sunken doorway set in the wall just before the flight of steps leading up to the chapel itself. He took out a bunch of keys from his raincoat pocket, unlocked the door and pulled it open. He switched on another light.

‘Here we are. Come and stand by me, Mrs Langstone, and you’ll be able to see properly. This is a good time to come because the chairs are usually stored in here. We’re directly under the ante-chapel.’

The high, windowless room was long and thin. It smelled mysteriously of cats. In the far corner was a heavy table with bulbous legs.

‘They say that this is where the bodies of the faithful lay before they were secretly interred beneath the undercroft. Do look at the ceiling: the rib vaulting is original.’

‘How nice,’ Lydia said, feeling she should contribute something to the conversation. ‘Is it very old?’

‘Late fourteenth century at a guess.’ Fimberry squeezed past the table and stabbed an index finger at the far wall. ‘Now you see the tiles? They were covered with layers of whitewash but I scraped it off. No doubt they were used to patch the mortar by some long-forgotten builder. Almost certainly they came originally from the floor. This tile’s nearly complete — look, it’s the arms of the See of Rosington. That one is probably a scallop shell, the pilgrim badge of the shrine of St James of Compostela. Isn’t it interesting?’ He turned back to Rory and Lydia in the doorway of the Ossuary. ‘The past seems so close to us here, so close that one can actually touch it. Quite literally in this case.’ Smiling, he leant across the little room and ran the middle finger of his right hand over the putative scallop shell. ‘Don’t you feel it sometimes, Mrs Langstone? The touch of the past?’

‘Mr Fimberry,’ Lydia said suddenly. ‘What’s that in the corner?’

‘What?’

‘Down there.’ She pointed. ‘On the floor between the table and the wall.’

The shadow of a table leg ran across something pale and jagged half-covered by a rag. A trickof the light, Lydia thought; it can’t be anything else. Rory stirred beside her. She heard him sucking in his breath.

A trickof the light?

21

Sometimes you think it’s a game to him. He has luck on his side too. Even Jacko was his ally in the end. You can’t trust anyone.

Friday, 18 April 1930

Jacko bit his mistress last night when I tried to make him jump down from the sofa. Not hard, but even so I was VERY cross. I shut him in the scullery. Unfortunately he howled so much that Joseph let him out.

I did not come down for breakfast today but stayed in my room. At lunch, Joseph said he had talked to Rebecca this morning and she had told him that there was another reason why she needed to hand in her notice. Her sister has been very ill with influenza, and so has her little boy, Rebecca’s nephew, and Rebecca wants to be able to spend more time looking after them during their convalescence. They live on the other side of the village, quite a distance from here.

Joseph has decided not to insist on her working out her month’s notice. He has told her she may leave after supper tomorrow, and he will run her over to her sister’s in the car. He thought it would be kinder to her and her family, and also better for us in the long run because servants are never very satisfactory when they are working out their notice, and it will be better for us to find her successor sooner rather than later. He will pay her up to the end of the week.

I put the best face on it I could. I was tempted to remind him that it is usually the mistress of the house who has the management of the indoor servants. But it didn’t seem quite the right moment. What is done is done.

After this, you know there will be no more daffodils from her sweet Joey. All that’s over and done with now. Rebecca will soon be gone. Poor, foolish Amy doesn’t count.

‘You don’t mind, do you?’

‘The thing is, there’s a lot we need to talk about.’

‘Yes, yes.’ Rory closed the cover of the typewriter. ‘I know. But I haven’t much time. I have to go out in three quarters of an hour.’

‘Why do you suddenly want to practise your shorthand?’

‘Julian Dawlish — Fenella’s friend — he knows the editor of Berkeley’s.’

‘The weekly?’

‘I’m doing a piece on spec for them about tomorrow’s meeting.’

‘That’s marvellous.’

‘If they use it.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. Damn it, it could make all the difference. It’s the first sniff of real work I’ve had, work that could lead somewhere, since I came back to England. That’s why I was keen to see the undercroft, to get an idea of the layout.’

‘Of course. Poor Mr Fimberry.’

A trick of the light.

‘Beggars belief, doesn’t it? I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that goat’s skull under the table in the Ossuary. Why didn’t he just leave it in the dustbin? Why put it in the Ossuary? And why did he want to show it to Father Bertram?’

‘Because he thinks it might be the devil,’ Lydia said. ‘That’s my theory. So it’s safer on consecrated ground until Father Bertram can see it. There’s a sort of logic to it.’

‘Mad as a hatter, in my opinion.’

‘He’s ill,’ Lydia said, thinking of Colonel Alforde. No more war. ‘You can’t blame him for that.’