‘I–I shall come over — to you. Bring you back — one by one.’
He was hatless, his hair unbrushed. He wore his overcoat, which hung open, revealing a dressing gown and striped pyjamas.
‘Don’t move,’ he repeated yet again. ‘Please. Please.’
He edged onto the passageway and staggered slowly towards us. ‘Don’t move,’ he muttered. ‘Don’t move.’
‘Look,’ Faraday said loudly and urgently. ‘Look—’
Mr Ratcliffe’s head jerked to the right. His body twisted after it. He fell heavily against the railing. There was a moment when nothing happened, when everything simply stopped moving. Then the railing gave way.
The lantern clattered to the floor of the passage. The candle guttered but the flame lasted another second or two.
Time enough and more for Mr Ratcliffe to fall into the darkness.
14
Faraday wouldn’t move. He sat down on the bottom step and started to cry. I left him to it. I crawled across the arcade — it seemed safer that way. I found the lantern. The glass was broken but the candle was still there.
Once I was safely at the other end of the walkway, I lit the stub, which was still warm. It took me several minutes because my hands were shaking so much, and I wasted two more matches, including the last one.
When the candle was alight, I called out, ‘Sir? Sir? Can you hear me?’ I knew it was stupid but I did it all the same. ‘Sir? Are you all right?’
‘He won’t hear,’ Faraday said. ‘He can’t hear.’
I looked back at him. He was still sitting on the bottom step.
‘Come across,’ I said.
‘I can’t. I’ll fall. My legs are shaking. My head hurts.’
‘You’ve got to. Come on, Rabbit. I’ll come over and fetch you.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t. I won’t let you. You’ll make me fall.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘You can’t make me.’
I didn’t want to leave Faraday behind, for my sake as much as his. But I had to find out what had happened to Mr Ratcliffe. I had to fetch help.
I went down the spiral staircase. It was relatively easy going after what had gone before, for the steps were wide and shallow. I forced myself not to hurry.
At the bottom, I cupped the flame with my free hand and moved slowly towards the west door. Mr Ratcliffe lay, a darker shadow than the rest, about a yard away from it. He was on his back. The overcoat had spread around him like a pair of black wings.
I put the candle carefully on the ground beside him. ‘Sir,’ I said. ‘Sir — please wake up.’
I knew he was dead. I had known all along. But I touched him. It seemed important to do that, a sign of respect, of sorrow. I felt the stubble on his cheek. I tried to put his overcoat over him: to keep him warm, perhaps, or to make him decent.
I looked up, into the darkness. ‘Faraday? Can you hear me?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m going for help. Just stay where you are.’
I picked up the lantern. There was a savage draught by the door and the candle had no glass to protect it. The flame died as if a pair of fingers had snuffed it.
‘I say…’ Faraday’s voice drifted down to me. ‘I can hear it again. The music.’
I have no idea how long it took me to escape from the Cathedral. I wandered in the dark, in the belly of the stone beast. More by luck than good judgement I found the south nave aisle. I knew I was there because I could feel the shape of the memorial tablets that lined its wall.
From then it was simply a matter of working my way up to the choir vestry. I went through the vestry and tugged open the door to the south porch.
There was a little light here, for one of the College lampposts was fifty yards away on the road to the Porta. I walked through the porch. I glanced to my left. Trails of ragged footprints marched across the grass. That was how Mr Ratcliffe had known we were in the Cathedral.
Something touched my leg below the knee.
I looked down. A cat walked briskly but without haste through the archway of the porch and slipped through the bars of the gate leading to the Deanery garden.
Was it Mordred? It seems far-fetched to think it might have been. But cats are strange animals, and he was a stranger cat than most. I remember that touch on my ankle as we were climbing the first staircase of the tower.
I fled through the College to the Veals’ house. I have a vivid memory of hammering on their door, of screaming and crying, until Mr Veal came down in his dressing gown, carrying a poker.
Later I remember hot, sweet tea in the kitchen. Mr Veal wasn’t there then — I suppose he must have gone to the Cathedral. But Mrs Veal bustled about in a dressing gown, with a cap on her head. It was she who saw that my hands were bloody, and so was the sleeve of my coat.
But that can’t be right, I thought. My hands can’t be bloody now. They were bloody before this, after the ratting at Angel Farm.
I think the doctor came. I think I was given a sleeping draught and put to bed in a little room beside the Veals’ bedroom.
There’s not much more to tell. I spent the next few days at the Veals’ house. I slept and ate a great deal. I answered questions, often the same ones, over and over again. The Veals asked the questions first. Then the headmaster, a remote figure who had never condescended to speak to me before, then the doctor again. Then two police officers, one after the other, and a man in a suit with a gold watch chain, who I think was perhaps a solicitor.
I didn’t ask about Faraday but the headmaster told me anyway. Mr Veal had brought him down from the tower. He was running a high fever and he had been taken to the cottage hospital.
His illness, I heard later, was diagnosed as brain fever, a convenient term in those days that covered a multitude of conditions. I don’t know what a doctor would have called it now. Faraday recovered, I heard later, and his guardian sent him abroad to convalesce in one of the German spa towns.
My aunt was still in hospital herself, though she was well enough to return home by the middle of January. There must have been frenzied discussions about what on earth to do with me in the meantime. In the end the school persuaded the vicar of my aunt’s village to take me in until she was able to cope with me again.
Mr Ratcliffe, I presume, was buried, and his house was given to strangers. I don’t know what happened to Mordred.
In one way, everything turned out well — at least for me. I didn’t have to go back to school. The vicar and his family were kind; and all my Christmas presents were waiting for me there.
Better still, when my aunt came home and I moved back to live with her, she decided I could have a puppy. I called him Rusty, not Stanley. For a month or two I had lessons with the vicar for four mornings a week. Then my aunt sent me as a dayboy to the grammar school in the nearest town. I was quite happy there, once I had grown used to it, though I never made any close friends.
So you might say that in the end I had everything I wanted. But somehow it turned out to be not quite what I wanted after all.
I never went back. What would have been the point? My parents came home a year later. When we met again, they didn’t talk about what happened and nor did I, though once, years later, my mother made some reference to my stay at the vicarage — ‘after you were ill.’
But I wasn’t ill. It was Faraday who was ill, not me.
I never saw Faraday again, though there was a time in the 1920s when I wished I could have talked to him about all this: he would have been the one person who might have understood, who might have known more. But Faraday went missing in action at the Third Battle of Ypres in September 1917. His body was never found.