Fenella, having deposited her passengers at the front of the gabled Tudor house, drove to the hill fort and had her lonely picnic on the side farthest from the village, well away from the burnt grass where the bonfire had been lit and where the hermaphrodite skeleton had been buried. After lunch she drove aimlessly around until it was time to pick up Nicholas at the school gate. There he told her that he had to be back by six to take prep, in place of a colleague who had been taken to hospital with a suspect appendix. They drove to Croyton, where Nicholas knew of a place for tea which was unlikely to be infested by his schoolboys, and at table Fenella told him of the meeting with her great-aunt and the singular episode of the man in the tree. On the way back she stopped for petrol at the garage where they had repaired her car. The proprietor himself attended to her and, on impulse, she asked him whether he knew where the Shurrocks had gone.
‘I’m staying there again,’ she said, ‘but the place has been opened up a good deal, and there are new people managing it and an entirely new staff.’
‘Jem Shurrock gone?’ said the man. ‘First I’ve heard of it. Got the offer of something better, I suppose. Wasn’t much of a place, what I saw of it when I went over to look at your bus. Going all right again, is she?’
‘Oh, yes, thank you. Didn’t you know Mr Shurrock, then, before he called on you about my car? I had the impression that you and he were acquainted.’
‘Oh, he had his own bus serviced here and called in for petrol and that, but I’d never been to the pub before,’ said the man.
‘But you seemed to know all about the Mayering.’
‘Only by hearsay, and not from Jem Shurrock. There we are, then. I’ve put you in two quid’s worth. We do it that way now, ’stead of four gallons. It’s easier reckoned up.’
‘You know,’ said Nicholas, on their way back to his school, ‘I shouldn’t broadcast it that you know too much about the Mayering. You might let out something you’re not supposed to know.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘Well, you seem to have seen things the village might not want you to see, that’s all. As for your great-aunt’s flippant remark about skeletons, well, there are some very queer customs carried out in villages up and down the land, you know. I could tell you some tales as the result of my own researches, things you’d scarcely believe even if a bishop told you about them. Not for nothing did the sea-wolves leave their barbaric imprint all over the eastern counties, and their ghosts to bedevil the spots where they raped and burnt and robbed.’
‘Well! What a note to leave me on!’ said Fenella. ‘Enough to give a nervous person nightmare.’
‘You are not my idea of a nervous person, so you jolly well stay out of trouble,’ said Nicholas, ‘if only to please your husband.’
In the middle of the night Fenella woke, shivering and sweating. She got out of bed and walked about the room to make certain of shaking off sleep and the terrible nightmare it had brought her. What she had actually been dreaming about she scarcely knew. There was nothing tangible, so far as she could remember, nothing but senseless, unnamed, atavistic terror. It was a long time before she could nerve herself to go back to bed. When she did, she remained awake for more than an hour, but when she did sleep there were no more bad dreams.
In the morning she woke with the impression that her terrors had had something to do with the signs of the zodiac and with the crypt from which the bones had been removed by the masked and gowned mummers.
‘I’d better reassure myself,’ she thought. ‘I know there aren’t any more skeletons down there – well, not a whole one, anyway, not even a skull. And what’s so frightening about a skeleton, anyway?’
After breakfast she returned to her room, changed her shoes and put on a coat, then, making certain that the coast was clear, she went to the entrance hall, which could not be seen from the reception desk, and took the long corridor to the door of the room in which she had slept on her previous visit. The door was open and she glanced in, but the small chamber was no longer furnished as a temporary bedroom. It was empty except for some rolls of wallpaper, an array of paint-pots, a long trestle table and a couple of step-ladders.
She walked to the head of the stone stair and felt her way down its spiral. There was the same dim lighting from the same cobwebbed window when she reached the foot of the stair, and there was the same trapdoor between the stair and the outer door. The trapdoor was closed, but she raised it without too much difficulty, and there again was the ladder. Fenella had not forgotten her torch. She had it in her coat pocket while she descended the ladder, and as soon as she felt both feet on firm ground she turned her back on the ladder, fished out the torch and switched it on.
Laid out neatly on the floor of the crypt were five skeletons. There were no hermaphrodites among them. So far as her limited knowledge could advise her, two were male, three female, and all, so far as she could tell, were complete.
Some previously forgotten fragment of her nightmare came back to Fenella’s mind, although she tried to keep it out. It had been concerned, she remembered, in some horrible fashion with Jem Shurrock and his wife, and with the gipsy Sukie. She remembered nothing in her dream about Clytie or Bob, the odd-job young
