‘Don’t tell me,’ said Fenella, wearily, ‘that it is because of the Mayering!’
‘Oh, so you knows about it, do you?’
‘No, I don’t know about it. All I know is that I’ve heard of nothing else ever since I’ve been here. What’s so mysterious about it, anyway?’
‘Oh, well, seeing you don’t know, I better not tell you. Missus told me to remind you to batten fast that there door. There won’t be coffee tonight and us haven’t got no sherry wine to spare, so I’ve brought along a half-bottle of the best light Will that do ee?’
‘Oh, yes, I suppose so, but what about a glass?’
‘All bespoke. We’re open.’ She put down the tray on the bed, produced a half-pint bottle of beer from the sagging pocket of her overall, opened it, dumped it on the floor and departed. Fenella, who had no intention of remaining immured in the bedroom, found her way back to the bathroom, rinsed out the tall mug which she had found on her wash-hand stand and which appeared to do duty as a tooth-glass, returned to the bedroom and sat on the bed to eat her meal. When she had finished it she put the tray outside the door and went to the window. Sunset was still an hour and a half away. In the village street there were now a few passers-by. Most of them were men. They were making, she supposed, for the inn, whose entrance, judging by the length of the corridor she had traversed, was some distance further up the street from her present quarters. She decided to go for a stroll in order to pass some of the time. On the way back, she thought, she might as well abstract The Swiss Family Robinson from the lounge in order to have something to read before she went to sleep.
She took the key from the inside of the door, locked up from the outside and, finding herself in the dark, remembered the electric light which Mrs Shurrock had switched on. She found it and lighted the short flight of stairs outside the bedroom door. Then she noticed that they turned on themselves, so that the flight continued downwards.
CHAPTER THREE
Chance Encounter
‘ “Then may I go with you, my pretty maid?
May I go with you, my pretty maid?”
“You must do as you please, kind sir,” she said,
“Sir,” she said, “sir,” she said,
“You must do as you please, kind sir,” she said.’
Folk Song (slightly altered)
It occurred to Fenella that the staircase might lead to an exit from the house which would absolve her from being obliged to walk through one of the bars to reach the street, as the main entrance to the inn had been blocked off.
The steps proved to be of stone and they wound somewhat dizzily around a central pillar. Fenella remembered that Mrs Shurrock had mentioned a priest’s room. This stair, then, might once have been a way down from a parvise into the church. Childish enough to be pleased with the narrow, winding stairs, but feeling her way with a cautious hand on the newel post as the first turn of the spiral took her out of the orbit of the electric light, Fenella ventured downwards.
As she had anticipated, the staircase was quite short, for the priest’s room would have been built, in all probability, above the south porch of the church. She came out into a dimly-lighted space which smelt of mouldering hay. She looked hopefully about her, but there was no sign of a Norman pillar or of anything else by which the place might be recognised as part of the nave of an early ecclesiastical building. There was, however, a door which, she assumed, opened on to the street.
She decided to try it and was advancing across the wooden flooring when she saw the iron ring of the trapdoor. Remembering that she was in what might have been the nave or possibly the chancel of an early church, she realised that the trapdoor must open on to a way down to the crypt.
Steps and cellars had always fascinated Fenella. In the dim but sufficient light she bent down and took a firm grip on the iron ring. It was smooth, very cold and entirely free from rust, a factor which somewhat surprised her. What surprised her still more was that the trapdoor did not stick when she raised it. Finding it heavy, however, she let it fall away and her heart jumped apprehensively at the noise it made as it crashed back on to the floor, narrowly missing her feet as she leapt out of the way.
She remembered that she must be a long way from the habitable rooms of the inn and that the staff were so busy with their preparations that it was unlikely that any extraneous noise would perturb them, so she steadied herself and stepped to the side of the hole which the opening in the floor now disclosed.
‘If only I had an electric torch!’ she thought. She could see that a stout ladder reached almost to the top of the hole and she was strongly tempted to take the chance of climbing down into the crypt, but the darkness below restrained her. She actually tested the first couple of rungs, arguing that it might be lighter at the foot of the ladder; that there must be some form of ventilation, and that this probably meant a window, or at least some sort of opening on to the outer air which would ease the absolute blackness. However, she failed to convince herself, and scrambled back to the surface.
Here, having closed the trapdoor again with a louder bang than she intended, she began a tentative exploration of the church, if that was what it had been. If Sukie could be believed, (and she was unlikely to have made up such a tale unless there was a tradition in the village about it), a Norman or
