the name of a German bishop some unknown artist had caricatured in bronze in the fourteenth century.
Her son was like her, but not yet mummified. Tall, thin, with long, narrow bones and a long, narrow face, withdrawn, distrustful, austere. An uncomfortable family, Bunty thought, watching them disappear under the vicar’s trees, but too faded now to discomfort the populace of Mottisham overmuch.
They were gone, it was over. The sergeant flapped a huge white hand in a final salute, and withdrew to his duty, waving the VW on towards home. Bunty turned to stare into the porch as they passed by, and try to catch a glimpse of the door that had brought press photographers and scholars into the wild territory of Middlehope. Old trees crowded close, darkening the cavity of the porch. She caught a faint flash of pale, pure colour, old wood restored to the light from under the patina of centuries of dirt and neglect; but that was all.
“Sorry!” said George. “Did you want to stop and have a look at it? I couldn’t hold up the procession, but we can pull round into the pub yard if you like, and walk back.”
“No, never mind.” Bunty settled back in her seat, her thoughts returning pleasurably to the prospect of getting home and getting the Aga lit and the house warmed. “I don’t suppose there’s anything so remarkable about it. Nothing to fetch us back for another look.”
Whatever minor fate had been jolted by George’s assessment of the Middlehope crime potential, and Moon’s acceptance of it, must also have recorded, and with the same malice, this complacent comment—probably under the category of famous last words!
There were still three reporters and one press photographer left over from the jamboree when Hugh Macsen- Martel and Dinah and Dave Cressett entered the public bar of “The Sitting Duck” that evening. Saul Trimble, trading on his antediluvian appearance as usual, had already lured two of the visitors into his corner, one on either side, and was furnishing them with a few impromptu fragments of folk-history in return for the pints with which, alternately, they furnished him. He had left out his false teeth for the occasion, which added twenty years to his appearance, and put on his old leather-elbowed jacket and a muffler instead of his usual smart Sunday rig. By good luck the bar itself still looked every inch the antiquated country pub for which it was cast, since Sam Crouch, who owned it, was too mean to spend money on modernising it, and had no need to worry about competition. There were two other pubs within reach, but both were tied, while “The Sitting Duck” was not merely a free house, but a home-brewed house into the bargain, one of only three left in the entire county. So the public bar was still all quarries and high-backed settles, furnished with bright red pew cushions, and every evening the place was full. This Sunday evening it was perhaps even a little fuller than usual. The newsmen, strangers from the town, were fair game, and there was the afternoon’s show to talk about.
Saul was in full cry when Hugh’s party entered. He was using his folk-lore voice, half singing Welsh, half quavering, superstitious old age, and all the regulars were there to egg him on. William Swayne, alias Willie the Twig, the forestry officer from the plantations beyond the Hallowmount, had driven down in the Land-Rover, Eli Platt had closed his by-pass fruit and flower stands early, and come in from the market-garden on the fringe of Comerbourne, Joe Lyon, smelling warmly of his own sheep, steamed gently by the fire with a pint of home-brewed in one hand. It may even have been the beer, rather than the company, that had caused the strangers to prolong their visit into licensing hours.
“Normans?” Saul was saying with tremulous disdain. “Normans, is it? The Normans were mere incomers here, and never got a toehold, not in Middlehope, not for hundreds of years. The few that got in by marrying here, them we tolerated if they minded their step, the rest—out! Normans, indeed!”
“I was going by the name,” said the oldest reporter reasonably.
“Martel? Oh, ah, that’s Norman, that is. The Martel got in with one o’ these marriages I was telling you about. In Henry One, that was, there was no sons to the family, and the heiress, she took up with this Martel, who was an earl’s man from Comerbourne, but had fallen out with his master. Let him alone, they did, when he had the clans of Middlehope behind him, they wanted no extra trouble up on this border. Been Macsen-Martels ever since, they have, right enough, but they’d been here many a hundred years before that—ah, right back to King Arthur and the Romans afore him…”
“This,” said Hugh in Dinah’s ear, as he found her a chair in the bow window, “is going to be good.” He caught Saul’s impervious blue eye, bright beneath a deliberately ruffled eyebrow, and winked. Saul looked through him stonily into the far distances of inspiration.
“I’ll get them,” volunteered Dave, and went off through the crowd to the bar, where Ellie Crouch and her nineteen-year-old daughter, christened Zenobia but Nobbie to her friends, dispensed home-brewed and presided over the scene like a couple of knowing blonde cherubs, deceptively guileless of eye.
“If you’m going by names,” pursued Saul, warming almost into song, “it’s the Macsen you want to think about, my lads. You know who Macsen was? He was the same person as Maximus, King of the Britons, back in the fifth century. And if you don’t believe me, go and look for yourselves at the inscription on the Pillar of Eliseg, up north there by Valle Crucis, and there you’ll see it in Latin…”
“Are you telling us you can read Latin?” demanded the youngest reporter dubiously.
“Course I can’t, nor never needed to, and if I could, I couldn’t make out the letters on that stone, but there’s those who have, and turned it into English for you and me both. Look it up in the libraries! ‘Maximus the King,’ it says, ‘who slew the King of the Romans… ’ Macsen Wledig, the Welsh called him. And do you know who the King of the Romans was, the one he slew? He was the Emperor Constans, that’s who, and uncle to King Arthur himself. And ever since Macsen Wledig was Prince of Powis there’ve been Macsens in Middlehope.”
“How do you know?” objected the young reporter boldly. “Are there still records of all this? After all that length of time?”
“There’s better than written records. There’s the records that have come down by word of mouth from father to son and mother to daughter. Why, my old granny could have recited you the pedigree of every family in this village nearly back to Adam, just like in the Bible. The women… the women were the keepers of the traditions ever, since time started. Now that’s all gone. Progress we’ve got, and it’s cost us everything else we had, whether we wanted it or not…”
“He’s beginning to ramble,” Dinah said softly. “Hadn’t you better give him a shove back on to the rails?”
Someone else, however, did that in Hugh’s place, and very effectively. The last of the photographers sat on a high stool at the end of the bar, a big, hearty man just running slightly to flesh, with a shock of untidy straw- coloured hair and inquisitive eyes. He hadn’t been priming Saul, he hadn’t been doing much talking, but it was plain that he had missed nothing.
“What about this door?” he said. “If it was originally one door of the church, how did it get into their house in the first place?”
Saul trimmed his sails nimbly, got halfway through an unplanned sentence, decided to revise it, and created a
