The cowls creaked again and Christopher recalled his previous sensation of being overlooked. Perhaps he had hit on the explanation. If the would-be murderer (for what else could you call someone who aims a great lump of iron ore at a human skull?) had not left the roof at all but had stayed concealed, hiding ... Was maybe still hiding.
He became keenly aware of the yawning space behind his back. Nothing but air. Oxygen, nitrogen and carbonic acid gas, excessively unsupportive. Fit only, when you came to think of it, for falling through. Just when he needed them most, Christopher felt the bones in his legs leak into his bloodstream.
He moved quickly from the edge to the nearest chimney stack. It concealed no one. Nor did the second. Silently, heart bumping, he approached the last. Four lemon barley-sugar twists thick with soot. Soft-footed he began to circle the base. Half way round he had a wild desire to laugh, recognising the action from a score of spooky movies where the comic lead tiptoes round a tree followed by a man in a gorilla suit. But there was no one there. They must have climbed through the skylight, thought Christopher, while I was checking the gutter.
He was turning to go when he noticed something sticking out from the gap between the chimney pots. It looked like the end of a metal rod. He tugged at it, slowly pulling out the whole thing. It was a crowbar.
By the time Christopher had descended from the roof and made his way to May’s room, it was crowded with people. Standing in the doorway he did a quick count. A full house.
He faced a most dramatic scene. Quite painterly in a Victorian narrative sort of way. Like one of those allegorised intimations of mortality showing an aged patriarch breathing his last, surrounded by tearful family and retainers, plus a mopey-looking dog.
May reclined on a chaise longue looking, for her, quite pale. Someone had placed a fringed shawl of peacock-blue silk across her knees. Behind her the Master, white hair fairly sparkling in the sunlight, rested his hand lightly on her forehead. Suhami knelt at her side. Tim squatted on a footstool. Arno hovered, wringing his hands (really wringing them, like pieces of washing). Janet and Trixie, looking with but not quite of the group, stood a little apart.
The Beavers were at the foot of the couch. Heather had brought her guitar and was quietly activating a few rather lachrymose chords. Ken said: ‘We’ve got a lot of healing to do here,’ and touched first his magnetic crystal then the sole of May’s foot with great solemnity.
‘I’m all right,’ said May. ‘Accidents happen. Don’t fuss.’
Heather started thrumming with a little more attack and now broke into a shrill quatrain, making them all jump.
‘O!, zenith ray of cosmic power
Pour forth from thy celestial bower
Bright radiance in a golden shower
Sustaining here our star-born flower.’
Ken stroked his crystal again and looked sternly at everyone, then at the curtain pelmet as if accusing it of concealing vital information. At length he turned back to the recumbent figure and spoke. ‘You are now enfolded deep in Jupiter’s psi-probe and bathed in his miraculous healing influence.’
‘Well I know that.’ May twitched at the silk shawl. ‘We are enfolded in miraculous healing rays at all times whatever the source. Now - I need my rescue remedy and some arnica for bruising. They’re in the little shell box. Would someone please ...’
Arno moved first, saying as he handed it over, ‘Perhaps you’d like some oxymol too, May?’
‘Why not? Honey never hurts. Thank you, Arno.’
Delighted at being under instruction from the queen of his heart, Arno hurried off. He would use the most fragrant honey - wasn’t there some Mount Hymettus left? - and the freshest, lightest vinegar all in a beautiful cup. There must be a beautiful cup somewhere. Should he pick a few flowers? Surely under such circumstances the house rules could be relaxed.
About to turn into the kitchen he halted. The back door was still ajar. Arno stepped over the threshold and stood by the shattered slab and great lump of iron. He looked at the lavender, flattened and snapped off where May had fallen. Seeing how close it must have been, he experienced a terrible quiet thrill of fear. He suddenly envisaged the world without her. Sans colour and warmth, without light, meaning, music ... harmony ...
‘But it didn’t happen,’ he said firmly. May would be extremely cross if she caught him thinking along such soggily pessimistic lines, for she always saw the best in everything. The silver lining, not the cloud. The rainbow, not the rain.
When Arno returned, having found no more elegant container, he bore a hefty mug of oxymol. May was sitting up and looking once more serenely infallible. She had shaken her rescue remedy to indigo and rubbed some on her wrists - scenting the room with a woody fragrance. He stepped forward with his offering and, as the mug was transferred, May’s fingers touched his own. Arno’s freckled cheeks blushed and he hoped no one was looking.
‘I was never in any real danger,’ she was now assuring them all. ‘My guardian angel was present as he always is. Who d’you think placed Christopher so close behind?’
Christopher received several grateful smiles in silence. He was still feeling uneasy about the decision he had taken when on the roof. Once the shock of finding the crowbar had receded he was left with the problem of what to do with the thing. Should he replace it? If he did this the attacker would remain unaware that he was rumbled and, confidence unimpaired, might well soon try again. On the other hand if Christopher removed the crowbar the man would be on his guard and perhaps doubly dangerous. On balance Christopher had decided on the latter course of action. The bar was now wrapped in a blanket and hidden beneath his bed. Later, he planned to remove it to Calypso’s byre.
Conversation had moved from May’s wellbeing to the lump of iron itself and the curious fact of how it came to be up there in the first place. Heather, the only person to have familiarised herself with the chronicles of the Manor House via a booklet in the kitchen drawer, said that it was first mentioned at the time of the Civil War when it was believed to be a large fragment of a Roundhead cannon ball. Later, due no doubt to increased scientific and astronomical knowledge, a meteor fragment was diagnosed. But, whatever its origin, it had been up there withstanding all that nature could throw at it, plus man-made bombardment in World War Two, without shifting an inch. How strange then, concluded Heather, that it should fall today.
A long silence followed this remark. May, angelically protected though she might be, still looked a bit perturbed. Trixie rolled her eyes behind everyone’s back. Ken seemed rather excited by the mystery and Heather guessed he was looking forward to channelling Hilarion’s views on the matter. Tim, sensing the inexplicable, curled up a little more tightly.
The silence lengthened and then, one by one, people turned to the Master. The whole room seemed full of a grave and supplicatory expectancy. He would explain these discordant harmonics, their faces confidently declared. He would know. The Master smiled his oblique smile. He bent for a moment to stroke Tim’s golden head, for the boy had started to tremble, and then he spoke.
‘Many things agitate the vacuum energy-field. The nether stratum of dynamic force is far from stable. Subatomic particles are in constant motion. Never forget - there is no such thing as a still electron.’