The vicar blinked. In her pew, the dowager, who had read Jane Eyre no less than seven times, shook her head in disbelief. And Muriel, within minutes of her goal, turned furiously on the doctor.
‘You seem to have taken leave of your senses, Dr Lightbody.’ And to the vicar, ‘Pray, proceed.’
‘No, no!’ The doctor was now quite beside himself. ‘You must listen, Miss Hardwicke. You are in danger -terrible danger! There is tainted blood in the Westerholmes!’
‘Nonsense!’ But Muriel’s pansy-blue eyes had dilated in sudden fear. ‘It isn’t true, Rupert?’
‘Of course it isn’t true,’ said Rupert contemptuously.
‘It is true, it is true!’ screamed Lightbody. He pointed with a shaking finger at the earl. ‘Ask him what is hidden in the folly in the woods. Ask him. Miss Hardwicke. Ask him!’
The whispers and murmurs among the congregation were growing to a climax.
‘Ask him,’ yelled Dr Lightbody. ‘And if you don’t believe me, ask him!’ And he swivelled round to point at Mersham’s butler sitting composed and immaculate in the back pew. ‘Go on! Ask Proom!’
The name, with its overtones of high respectability, rang through the church. Mr Morland, who had been about to order the doctor from the church, laid down his prayerbook. And Mr Cyril Proom rose slowly and majestically to his feet.
‘Please come forward, Mr Proom,’ said the vicar. ‘I’m sure there is a perfectly respectable explanation for this gentleman’s remarks.’
Steadily, with his usual measured tread, Mr Proom advanced up the aisle. As he drew level with her pew, the dowager threw him a glance of total puzzlement and he held her eye for a long moment before he moved up to the altar rails and, bending his head respectfully, addressed the vicar.
‘I’m afraid Dr Lightbody is perfectly correct, sir. I felt it advisable to make certain disclosures to him in view of his well-known interest in eugenics. And in any case,’ he said, ‘I am owed several months wages by the family.’
The lie, in its pointless blatancy, momentarily pierced Rupert’s sense of nightmare and he narrowed his eyes.
‘What is in the folly!’ demanded Muriel, who was no longer calm. ‘Tell me at once!’
‘Imbeciles!’ cried Dr Lightbody. ‘I’ve seen them! Dreadful, dribbling imbeciles. And they’re his cousins\ His first cousins. By blood.’
‘It isn’t true! Rupert, tell me it isn’t true!’
‘He won’t tell you - he won’t admit it, he wants your money. But I tell you, I’ve seen them! I saw them last night. He keeps them locked up in that tower and they’re like animals - worse than animals.’
Mr Morland’s bewilderment was total. He’d been vicar of Mersham for twenty years and never heard a whisper of scandal. But could Proom be lying?
‘Is it really so?’ he asked the butler, above the growing uproar in the church.
‘I’m afraid so, sir. The family’s given it about that the folly’s haunted by the ghost of Sir Montague Frayne, so nobody goes near it. But the screams - well, they’re not the screams of ghosts, sir; they’re the screams of his lordship’s relatives.’
Rupert had been listening to this farrago of nonsense in silence. Now he turned and raised enquiring eyes at his mother.
The dowager rose and slipped from her pew. There was the sound of tearing silk as she threw up her arms to embrace her son. Then:
‘Oh, Rupert, darling,’ she exclaimed in tones of theatrical despair, ‘don’t you see? The game’s up!’
----*----*
Proom had been against Myrtle Herring pretending to be a chicken laying an egg. It was bis opinion that people asked to simulate mental derangement always picked on chickens and the routine, wing flapping, squawking performance was invariably hackneyed and unsatisfactory.
Myrtle, however, had convinced him. Myrtle had been in vaudeville and during their run-through in the folly, sitting atop a pile of straw, brought to her frenzied duckings such an extreme of gynaecological anguish rising - as she examined the imagined egg - to such awed and ecstatic triumph, that Proom had been deeply impressed.
He had expected to encounter some difficulty in persuading the Herrings, as he conveyed them by a roundabout route to the back gates of Mersham, to follow his plan. True, they were lucky not to be in prison. Still, they had expected to come to a wedding. Instead, he proposed that they should give a full performance in the folly tower for the benefit of Dr Lightbody, spend the night there (albeit surrounded by oil stoves, mattresses and a hamper of food sent up by Mrs Park) and then - all traces of these comforts having been removed - give a repeat performance should the doctor decide to speak.
No persuasion had been needed. The sight of one hundred pounds in notes with the promise of another three hundred to come should they succeed in convincing Miss Hardwicke that they really were deranged, had stilled all doubts. Not only that, but in setting the deception up they had proved to be cooperative and creative. The scruples that had troubled Proom and Mrs Park, the accusation they had levelled at themselves of appearing to make light of the mentally afflicted, did not trouble the Herrings. Nothing troubled the Herrings faced with four hundred pounds.
Towards the folly, then, in its setting of deep woodland, came the wedding party. Proom was at its head, his expression grave, his bearing deferential. Dr Lightbody followed, the bearer of terrible news, the man who had taken Fate into his own hands and felt the decision pressing on him almost unbearably. Then came Muriel, holding up the train of her dress, still stately but no longer composed, and beside her Rupert, convinced that his grasp on reality had finally slipped away. The dowager, the old Templetons, and Mr Morland, escorted by Tom Byrne, brought up the rear. Everyone else had been persuaded to stay behind.
The padlock on the door yielded to Proom’s fingers, the door creaked back. A smell of damp and decay met them, cobwebs brushed their faces…
‘But this is disgusting,’ said Muriel. ‘What—’
She was arrested by a scream. A truly horrible scream, followed by a burst of cackling laughter.
‘This way, miss,’ said Proom - and led the way up the round, dank stairs to the first of the tower rooms.
The thing that lay on the floor must once have been human, but it did not seem human now. Its face was livid and distorted, it had burrowed into the straw like an animal, its filthy fingers tore and clawed at its ragged clothes.
‘Good heavens!’ Old Lady Templeton was deeply shocked. ‘It can’t be… surely that’s poor dear Melvyn, isn’t it?’
‘Quite so, my lady.’ Proom turned to Miss Hardwicke. ‘This… er, gentleman, is his lordship’s first cousin, Mr Melvyn Herring.’
‘Oh my God!’ Muriel’s poise was shattered at last. She was as pale as her wedding dress. ‘No, I don’t believe it. His first cousin!’
‘Yes, miss. You will see he has the Templeton eyes and - oh, careful, miss.’
For the thing had arched its back, blobs of spittle came from its mouth - and suddenly it sprang.
It was Dr Lightbody who saved Muriel, dragging her back before the demented creature could sink it’s teeth into her hand.
‘He’s been like this for a while, miss, and I’m afraid he’s getting worse.’
‘But there are others,’ cried Dr Lightbody, ‘Dearest Miss Hardwicke, there are others! This monster has been allowed to marry, to beget other tainted beings.’
Proom inclined his head, ‘Dr Lightbody is correct. If you would care to follow me.’
They ascended another dark and curving staircase to the next room. On the floor lay two enormous boys, to all outward appearance, boys of fourteen or fifteen. But they wore nappies, their fingers were in their mouths; one drooled, the other hiccupped…