The Knocker on Death's Door

mild diversion by peering meaningfully into his empty pint-pot. One of his two interlocutors took the hint and filled it again.

“It got there because they took it, along with a few other things, when the monastery here was closed down under Henry Eight, that’s how. A very nice bit of carving it is, you can see that, and made locally, so the experts say, and there’s bits inside the old part o’ the church by the same hand. Closed down, the monastery was, and the brothers turned out on to the road. The abbey church was looted and abandoned for a while, and then it was took over for the parish church and repaired again. And the Macsen-Martels sided with the commission, they did, and they got the abbot’s lodging to live in, and that’s how the door came to be there.”

“And what,” the photographer wanted to know, “put it into their heads to give it back now? Nobody knew about it. Nobody was asking for it. Nobody was in any position to ask for it. Are you telling me they suddenly went to the trouble and expense of having the thing cleaned and restored, after all this time, just in a fit of belated honesty? It doesn’t make sense.”

They all turned to look at him more carefully, for the tone of his questioning was curiously more purposeful than that of his colleagues. Dave came back with the drinks, and put Dinah’s half-pint into her hand. Hugh levelled black eyes above the rim of his pint-pot. “Who is he?” he asked softly. “Not a Comerbourne man, I know them all.”

“Brummagem, I think. Some freelance.” Dave was uninterested; he didn’t question other people’s declared motives for what they did.

“Don’t,” warned Saul unexpectedly, his voice receding hollowly into a cavern of senile solemnity, “don’t ask me about that! There’s reasons for wanting to have things—like a good cellar door when you’re setting up house and there’s one standing handy—and reasons for wanting not to have things any longer when they begin to turn malignant towards them that took them out of their right place. Don’t forget ’tis a church door. Better for everybody, maybe, to put it back where it was afore, and have the bishop say the good words over it that it might be glad to hear. Mind, I’m not saying it is so, I’ve only said it might be so. I haven’t even said it would be effective, have I? Just that there’s no harm in trying.” And he shook his grey head as though he foresaw the failure of this belated attempt at exorcism of something unnamed and undefined. “Did you know what sort of monastery we had up here at the finish?” he asked mildly. “There were only four o’ the brothers left to take to the roads, and a beggarly sort of place they kept here. Hospitality for the stranger, my eye! There were strangers slept here overnight that never got where they were going. It was a long way for any bishop to come, to see for himself what was going on. And then, bishops are as fond of sleeping safe as the next man. No, I wouldn’t say Mottisham Abbey had a particularly holy reputation in its last days. Even the church, they say, saw some very odd goings-on before the finish.”

“Are you saying,” demanded the photographer bluntly, “that there’s something uncanny about that door?”

“I’m saying nothing, except that it’s better to be safe than sorry,” mumbled Saul darkly, “and back in the church is the best place for a door the like of that one. Don’t you get too inquisitive, my lad, about things that’s best let alone.”

“But what went on in the church?” the youngest reporter pressed avidly. “Do you mean black masses, and things like that?”

“Tisn’t for me to say. There were tales… there were tales…” The veiled eye and withdrawn manner implied that he had heard them all at firsthand, but didn’t propose to share them.

“Oh, go on!” urged Willie the Twig, fixing Hugh across the smoky room with an innocent grey stare. “Tell ’em about the family curse. Tell ’em what happens in every third generation, ever since the Dissolution…”

“Young man,” said Saul weightily, playing for time while he readjusted to this uninvited assistance, “there’s some things better not spoke of…”

“Why?” asked Hugh with interest. “It won’t just go away, whether you speak about it or not, everybody knows it happens.”

“Every third generation,” prompted Willie the Twig gently.

“Ever since the last abbot was thrown out to beg, and put a curse on the usurpers for all time…” confirmed Hugh. Dinah dug her elbow sharply into his ribs, but he only smothered a small convulsion of laughter in what was left of his beer, and looked round to claim Dave’s empty pint-pot. “You, Dinah? No? Here you are, Nobbie, love, same again!”

Saul’s stony eye fixed him balefully. Hugh suppressed his charming smile and gazed back in monumental and brazen innocence.

“But what does happen every third generation?” the youngest reporter insisted.

“Every third generation,” Saul said with vengeful deliberation, and his voice sank into the cellar like the demon king disappearing down a stage trap, “the second son is born a witless idiot.”

“Or a degenerate monster,” Hugh added helpfully.

“Go on, you’re having us on!” protested the reporter.

“You think so? You didn’t see the second son at the service this afternoon, did you?”

“You devil!” whispered Dinah.

Hugh didn’t even trouble to warn her to silence; he knew she disapproved, or at the very best withheld her approval, but he also knew she wouldn’t do anything to spoil the game, if it amused him.

“I didn’t even know there was another son,” admitted the oldest reporter, and looked round the assembled and now oddly quiet company for confirmation. Heads nodded and voices murmured; there was another son.

“Oh, yes, he exists, all right,” Hugh said sombrely, handing along the refilled pint-pot to Dave, and passing a pound note back to Nobbie at the bar. He made a brief, impressive pause, and the interested onlookers obligingly provided him with absolute silence, which he knew exactly when to break. “I’ve seen himl” he said in a sepulchral whisper; and that was all.

In the electric hush that followed, Nobbie’s sense of mischief got the better of her. She looked round the circle of intense faces, the natives and the strangers, and then deliberately smacked down a handful of silver and coppers on the bar.

“Your change, Mr. Macsen-Martel!”