‘Yes, certainly I do. The school always had a whole day’s holiday on the squire’s birthday. The Bitton-Bittadons were our benefactors in the days when they could afford it and the custom of honouring the patron has been kept up for decency’s sake and because I think there would be a school riot if it were dropped.’
‘So Sir Bathy’s birthday was….?’
‘March 23rd, almost at the end of the Easter term.’
‘But are you certain?’
‘One doesn’t make a mistake about a whole day’s holiday.’
‘You could not possibly mean April 23rd?’
‘Oh, no. It always came towards the end of the term unless (I suppose, but it hasn’t happened in my time) Easter was incredibly early.’
‘Sir Bathy was born under Aries, then.’
‘Oh, was he? I wouldn’t know. Does it make any difference?’
‘Only that it explains – I should say, rather, that it might explain – why a youth of under twenty years of age has become one of the village elders since Sir Bathy’s death. I suppose Lady Bitton-Bittadon is not one of the members? I know she claims little knowledge of them, but that proves nothing. What do you think?’
‘I’ve no idea. Why do you ask about her being a member?’
‘Only because Fenella mentioned that Pisces was a woman with a cultured voice, and I know of none other in the village.’
‘Oh, she couldn’t be Pisces. We had a half-holiday for her in September. I can’t imagine her frequenting the More to Come, anyway.’
‘No, there is that,’ agreed Dame Beatrice. She was wondering why the lady in question had made a mistake in giving the date of her husband’s birth, and whether it was merely a slip of the tongue or a deliberate lie.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Substitution
‘Awful shape, what art thou? Speak!
Eternity Demand no direr name.
Descend, and follow me down the abyss.’
Percy Bysshe Shelley – Prometheus Unbound
Dame Beatrice refused coffee and left the dining-room to find the superintendent and Callon waiting for her in the entrance hall.
‘Thought you might like to be with us, ma’am, when we take a look at that cellar,’ said the superintendent. ‘This is the way.’
The long corridor, with its ups and downs of short flights of inconsequent and inconvenient stairs took them to the door of the priest’s room and so to the stone spiral which led to the trapdoor. The superintendent had a torch and lighted Dame Beatrice solicitously down the steps, warning her to be careful. The inspector followed. At the foot of the descent Dame Beatrice produced her own torch and the three climbed down the ladder and examined the floor of the crypt.
It was bare and it had been swept. There was no trace of even the most insignificant bone, let alone the five complete skeletons which Fenella had seen. The superintendent, after an astonished silence, said, ‘I suppose Mrs Pardieu couldn’t have had a nightmare or something, ma’am, could she?’
‘No,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘If my great-niece declared that she found five skeletons down here, she did find them. Besides, we know that skeletons disappeared from the Bitton-Bittadon mausoleum.’
‘Somebody got an attack of conscience and put them back, perhaps,’ said Callon.
‘It is more likely that somebody found out that they had been seen and so the zodiac people have hidden them somewhere else,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘It is clear that they are regarded as ritual objects and history provides us with many examples of the lengths to which devotees will go in order to preserve such relics.’
‘But the sort of relics you refer to would have a religious connection, ma’am,’ objected the superintendent.
‘These bones have the oldest religious connection of all,’ responded Dame Beatrice. ‘From what my great-niece has told me, it seems that the ceremony of burying them on the hilltop is a concession made to the gods of fertility.’ She cackled harshly and quoted solemnly,
‘Crops for your blood,
Blood for our good.’
Then she added, ‘Among certain savage tribes the blood was human. We may be thankful that in Seven Wells the victim is a cock and we may hope that it dies instantaneously. The villagers here seem to have inherited various traditions, but, of course, the ancestry of most traditions is mixed and the result, in the village of Seven Wells, as so often happens, is that superstitions and ritual observances, being also of mixed origin, have been altered and (if one may employ the term in default of a more exact one) humanised with the passing of time and the fusion of one culture with another. No doubt the swift slaughter of the cock antecedes the slow slaughter of a young man or girl, and the burial of the skeleton is a bowdlerised and merciful version of the live burial of a human being.’
‘Horrible,’ said Callon, ‘the things people used to get up to.’
‘I had dinner with Mr Pardieu,’ Dame Beatrice went on, ‘and, from what he has told me, it seems certain that Sir Bathy was a member of the zodiac society. His death may have been a ritual killing, although I do not think so. However, that is a factor which we have to bear in mind.’
‘I suppose Mr Pardieu isn’t a member, too?’ said Callon. ‘He’s mixed up with all this folklore stuff, isn’t he?’
‘He told me one thing which interested me very much. He said that the predecessors of the Guardians of the Well were also expected to be the overseers of the interment ceremonies at the hill-fort, but that the two sisters who now hold office refused to be participants in these pagan goings-on, so some years ago the zodiac party accepted responsibility for the burying of the skeletons.’
‘I wonder the two women got away with their objections,’ said Callon, ‘if the village is as superstitious as we’re led to believe.’
‘Their persons and property are probably sacrosanct,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I am inclined to think that they represent tree spirits, and how far back the worship of trees can be traced, I doubt whether anyone can say.
