fine cathedral, mostly in the Early English and Decorated styles. Rooks cawed among its towers and in the immemorial elms that punctuated the sward of its fine old close.
One cloudless afternoon in the July of that year the great bell of the cathedral began to sound its bass note, summoning the city to the funeral of one of its servants. The Dean was dead. That ancient knell, that call to remembrance and reminder of mortality, would no doubt have seemed to Morchester’s inhabitants no more than a slight eddy in the changeless flow of life and death which washed about its walls. Who could have foreseen that it tolled the commencement of a series of horribly inexplicable events?
In all conscience, the passing of The Very Rev. William Ainsley, Dean of Morchester was greeted with little sadness, and was the occasion, in some quarters, of no small relief. Dean Ainsley had for many years been infirm and fulfilled his decanal duties with a listlessness only just short of rank incompetence. When, on the day of his funeral, the Very Rev. Stephen Coombe, acceded to the position and sat in his stall in the choir, there was much talk of new brooms sweeping clean. Even those who did not find such a metaphor entirely reassuring were compelled to admit that anything was preferable to the disarray of the previous regime.
Dean Coombe was a tall lean man in his forties, heavily whiskered as was the fashion in those days, and of High Church leanings. He was in possession of a wife and a daughter, almost as angular as he was. He was an upright man, but stiff and overbearing; he inspired respect perhaps, but no great affection. Being active and zealous in all his dealings, he very soon began to turn his attention to the fabric of Morchester Cathedral which was indeed in a woeful state of disrepair.
The tenure of Dean Ainsley had been marked by neglect towards the great building he was appointed to maintain, so it was perhaps only just that this legacy of dereliction should be mitigated by his posthumous one. The late Dean had left his entire and considerable fortune to the cathedral, with the provision that a chapel, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, in the north transept should be made as a permanent memorial to him. As the legacy more than amply provided for this, it was resolved, by the dean and chapter, to accept it. There had been murmurings from some of the more low church canons that the building of a Lady Chapel might give rise to accusations of popery, but these were properly dismissed as old fashioned. The Dean was a forceful man and was used to carrying all before him.
An architect was engaged and there needed only a decision to be made over the location of the chapel. The obvious place was an area closest to the crossing and facing east. This would entail the partial destruction of the eastern wall of the north transept, an exercise which would require the relocation of a number of 327 funereal plaques and stones, the most significant of which was a sixteenth century memorial to a Canon of Morchester Cathedral, one Jeremiah Staveley. It was quite an elaborate affair in polished black basalt about seven foot in height overall, set into the wall some three feet above the ground. It consisted in a slab topped with scrollwork, crudely classical in feel with a niche in which was set a painted alabaster image of the Canon, standing upright in his clerical robes with his arms crossed over his chest. The figure was tall and narrow, the bearded face gaunt: a somewhat disconcerting image which looked as if it portrayed the corpse rather than the living being. Beneath this on the polished slab an inscription had been incised, the lettering picked out in white. It read:
JEREMIAH STAVELEY
It was followed by these verses in bold capital letters:
BEHINDE THESE SACRED STONES IN DEATH STAND I
FOR THAT IN LIFE MOST BASELY DID I LIE
IN WORD AND SINNE FORSAKING GOD HIS LAWE,
I DANCED MY SOULE IN SATANN’S VERIE MAWE.
WHEREFORE IN PENANCE I THIS VIGILL KEEPE
ENTOMBED UPRIGHT THUS WHERE I SHOULDE SLEEPE.
WHEN DEAD RISE UP I’LL READYE BE IN PLACE
TO MEET MY JUDGE AND MAKER FACE TO FACE.
STRANGER, REST NOT MY CORSE UNTIL THAT DAYE
LEST I TORMENT THEE WITH MY SORE DISMAYE.
The implication of these lines, that the body of Canon Staveley was actually entombed behind the slab, was borne out by the cathedral records and one of the old vergers whose family had been connected with the cathedral since time immemorial. Dean Coombe was disposed to be rather benevolent towards this worthy whose name was Wilby. The man was a repository of cathedral history and lore and the Dean was content to listen politely to Wilby’s ramblings, but he did not expect his condescension to be rewarded by opposition to his plans.
“Mr Dean,” said Wilby one afternoon, as they stood before the memorial in the north transept. “You don’t want to go a moving of that there stone, begging your pardon, sir.”
“My dear man, why ever not?”
“Don’t it say so plain as brass on that there ’scription? ’Tis ill luck to move the bones of the wicked. So said my granfer, and his before him.”
“And who says this Canon Staveley was a wicked man?”
“Why ’tis well known. There are tales that have passed down about Jeremiah Staveley, which I might blush to tell you, Mr Dean. The poor women of this city were not safe in their beds from him, they say. A harsh man too, to those below him. But he was a fair man of music and when I were a lad in the choir they still sang his setting to the Psalm one hundred and thirty seven. ‘By the waters of Babylon. ’, all nine verses too. With the dashing of children agin the stones and all. Some said he would have fain dinged his choir lads agin the stones, too, when they were singing awry. Certain it was, he spared not the rod among them. And there were tales of meeting at night in the church with a man all in black and a gold treasure that he found under the earth in a field that the black man took him to. But it weren’t no good for him, for soon as he was by way of enjoying his gold, the plague fell on him and he wasted to a wraith of skin and bone, and him as tall and narrow as may be already. And when at last he came to be in extreme, as you say, and within a hand’s breadth of mortality, he summons the Dean, as it might be you, sir, a man with whom he had had some mighty quarrel, and begs him for forgiveness and to be shriven of his many sins. And all his treasure they say he left to the dean and chapter but saying he must be buried upright, to keep him awake, he says. Because in the last days he suffered terribly from dreams and was as mortally afeared of sleep as he was of death. So he begged to be buried upright that he might not sleep till the Last Judgement, even as a dead man. And when the Dean of that time, Dean Cantwell, as I think it was, came out from seeing Canon Staveley in his deathbed, they say the Dean’s face was as white as a linen altar cloth and he spoke not a word to a mortal soul for seven days. This I had from my granfer who had it from his, and it came down in the family with a warning, as my old father used to say. ‘Don’t you touch the Staveley stone, nor go nigh it at night, nor suffer his bones to be moved.’ And that’s what I say to you, begging your pardon, Mr Dean.”
“Well, well, Wilby,” said Dean Coombe who was rather more shaken by this recitation than he cared to admit, “that is indeed a most fascinating legend. Most interesting. I must write some of it down.”
“It weren’t no legend, Mr Dean,” said old Wilby. “I had it from my granfer, and he—”
“Quite so, quite so, my dear man,” said the Dean hurriedly. “Nevertheless, move this old monument we must. But make no mistake, we shall re-site it well, for it is certainly a curiosity, and if there are any human remains behind it we shall lay them to rest with all due respect. Goodness me! What was that noise?”
Both Wilby and Dean Coombe heard it, a sound like a long inhalation of breath, ragged and rattling, somewhat as if the breather — if such there was — was experiencing difficulty in drawing in air. It was magnified and distorted by the cathedral’s echo which was particularly reverberant in that part of the building. Dean Coombe was not a fanciful man but he had been at his father’s deathbed and he knew the sound of a man’s breathing as he nears the end. This sound was uncomfortably like it.
“Dear me,” said the Dean. “I really must have that organ seen to.”
Wilby gave the Dean a quizzical stare, then, bidding him a hurried “Good day, Mr Dean”, he began to shuffle off in the direction of the west door with surprising swiftness. Dean Coombe remained behind standing before the monument. A passer-by was surprised to hear him mutter.
“Hah! You won’t affright me that easy, Master Staveley. We shall see!”
