‘I know. I just… maybe I should talk to her on my own. Maybe it’s the best chance I’ll get.’
‘As a psychic?’ He laughed.
‘Something like that.’ She pushed down the door handle and the door sprang against her hand, and she was grateful he hadn’t locked them in. ‘And, yes,’ she said, ‘for future reference, I have got a boyfriend.’
‘Well, he’s a lucky twat,’ Jon Scole said bitterly, not moving from the window. ‘Hey…’
‘What?’
‘You wanna watch yourself, Mary. She likes women, too.’
‘But not priests, apparently,’ Merrily said. ‘If it gets difficult, I can always flash the cross.’
There were still a few people around as Merrily walked quickly up through the centre of the town towards the Buttercross: the inevitable sad drunk, the inevitable couple-in-a-shop-doorway and, more curiously, two women with one small boy trotting ahead of them, a good six hours after his bedtime. All the untold stories of night streets.
At the Buttercross, she slipped like a cat into the tightness of Church Street, narrow as a garden path, with its pub and its bijou shops and galleries, most windows dark now. Behind this street — seamed by alleyways, made intimate by moonlight and scary by shadows — was the church of St Laurence with its great tower, the axle through the wheel of the town.
She stood at the main entrance, looking directly up at the Beacon of the Marches, taller by far than the castle keep. The tower, with its lantern windows, seemed to be racing away from her, a lift shaft into heaven, and she thought about the Palmers’ Guild, convinced it was pressing the right buttons. Medieval Christianity: two steps up from magic.
The night was soft and close here, the air still sweet with woodsmoke from dying fires in deserted hearths, and the sky was olive green, lightly stroked with orange in the north.
She stood listening for a couple of minutes, almost convinced that if there was anything abusive or violent occurring anywhere in Ludlow she’d be able to hear it, because this was the nerve centre. Never had a cluster of buildings felt more like some kind of living organism, and she wondered if Belladonna, of whom there was no sign at all, was standing somewhere, just like this, letting it heal her.
Or perhaps she’d simply run all the way home.
Merrily walked past the body of the church into what she thought was College Street, old walls closing in — was this the college where the chaplains appointed by the Palmers’ Guild had lived? Turning a dark corner, now, and emerging into what could only be The Linney, the narrow lane that followed the castle wall to the river, the backstairs from the country to the heart of the town.
She walked quietly down the centre of the lane, which would be just about wide enough for one car if you were daring enough to risk it. Terraces and stone cottages were wedged either side, most of them unlit, backing onto the darkness of the castle’s curtain wall to the left and the edge of the hill to the right, a gap between houses revealing the countryside below salted with tiny lights.
Feeling as if she was balancing on Ludlow’s curving spine, she stopped and listened again. No movement, and no obvious place of concealment in the narrows of The Linney. There was a sign announcing a new restaurant, and someone had stuck a white paper flyer on it that read,
After the last house, a path to the left… surely the path that burrowed among the castle foundations, the path she’d taken with Jon Scole to the yew tree where Marion fell, where Jemima Pegler fell with the heroin raging through her veins.
Here, the ground softened underfoot and the texture of the night seemed to have altered, the shapes of trees morphing into matt shadows and the woodsmoke aroma becoming the raw stench of damp earth.
And the castle was a hard form, a stronghold again, the land falling invisibly away to the right of the track, through the trees and into darkening fenced fields, sports clubs, and the river and the woodland around The Weir House.
And Merrily knew, then, that it was too quiet.
There should be wildlife-rustlings, foxes prowling, badgers scrabbling, night birds, and… and there wasn’t anything.
She stopped.
Sometimes on still evenings, before a church clock chimed somewhere, you would be aware of a pause in the atmosphere itself — a soft, hollowed-out moment, all movement suspended. And then a vibration, like a shiver, as if the air knew what was coming. When you spent days and nights hanging around churches, it became a familiar phenomenon. It seemed like part of the mechanism, and maybe it was — some ancient acoustic collusion between night and clocks.
Usually it was clocks. In a town like Ludlow, on a night like this, it ought to have been clocks.
She reached up and felt for the ridge of the tiny cross under the fleece and the T-shirt, pressing it into the cleft between her breasts, and heard a voice, hollow with pain.
Might have been just an owl inside the castle grounds. Or, a moment later, two distinct species of owl in sequence: the breathless fluting of the woodland tawny overtaken by an ethereal screech — barn owl. That was all, that was—
As she was plunging into pockets for the cigarettes and the Zippo, it started up again, bloating into something swollen and visceral that wasn’t like any kind of owl but definitely like a woman.
Then a harsh, white shriek.
‘TAKE ME!’
The castle wall was caught by a blade of moonlight.
‘TURN ME!’
Merrily stood looking up, frozen. The jagged windows of the Hanging Tower were holes in mouldy cheese,
‘TAKE ME, TURN ME… TEACH ME…
‘PLOUGH ME, PLY ME, PLEACH ME!’
The words seemed to be crawling up the wall.
‘TAKE ME, RAKE ME…’
She knew it, of course. It was from
When it stopped, the air was alive again, as if the night was frayed and abraded.
And from below the Hanging Tower, the same voice, only different. Soft and breathy, ethereal.
A stifled sob. In the distance, Merrily heard a car horn, the furry rumble of an aeroplane. And then there was coughing and the voice came back, husky and earthen and bitter.
And then rising, fainter and frailer but spiralling up again like pale light.
