‘How so?’ queried Admiral Slovo with polite interest at his soldier’s venture into statecraft.
‘Well, consider,’ replied the Englishman, boldly convinced, ‘if every subject disposed of by a Prince, came back to mock his Lord’s decision; if every felon hung returned to flout the Law’s due sentence, what then? Why, Admiral, there would be metaphysical anarchy!’
Admiral Slovo decided he rather liked the sound of that situation and was thus in favour of the two-way grave.
‘Besides,’ Cromwell continued, ‘the one redeeming feature of the woman’s death was in the proof it must have supplied her. Failing to awake to life everlasting she would – if she could – have conceded the explosion of her life-long fancies. Alas, however, she could not – for she was dead and I am right.’
Then de Marinetti gasped and pointed. Admiral Slovo smiled and Cromwell rocketed to his feet, propelling the board and chessmen into the air.
The Prioress was gliding alongside one of the walls, tending and scenting flowers that only she could see. They saw her as through a grey, gauzy film, a figure who flicked in and out of view as she passed open doorways between her world and the real one. The presence of the Admiral and his party was not acknowledged. Eventually, she entered some section of the parallel region not visible to man and disappeared from sight like an extinguished candle-flame.
Callypia de Marinetti sighed deeply and smoothed her hands down her silken gown. ‘I never knew,’ she purred, ‘that fright could be so delicious.’
Thomas Cromwell was less sanguine. He stared after the vision, his face set with barely checked ferocity. ‘I take this as an insult,’ he said quietly.
‘The important thing about a haunting,’ said Admiral Slovo, ‘is to stand still.’
‘Eh?’ snarled Cromwell angrily, wrenching his eyes away from the Prioress’s spectre as she advanced, yet again, along the departed flowerbeds. ‘Still? What d’you mean?’
Slovo fastidiously ignored the lack of respect, putting it down to stress. Over the last two weeks, Cromwell had been positively persecuted by the ghost, both by its frequent appearances – sometimes at most inconvenient and private moments – and by the implications of its presence. He had got it into his head that everyone – even the giggly novices – was laughing at him.
‘I mean,’ explained the Admiral patiently, ‘that we are permitted these visions through portals of communication. As you will observe from the irregularity of our view, they are random and transient. One moment she can be seen, the next she has passed from sight – only to reappear elsewhere. The correlation of dimensions between here and … somewhere else is not precise or predictable. If one were to move about during a manifestation there would be the danger of involuntary penetration into other realms. At such moments, who knows what awful gateways gape a mere hand’s breadth away from us?’
But Thomas Cromwell had been pushed too far to heed wise words. The future Chancellor of England was consulting his subconscious, travelling back down the years and communing with his roots. He was hearing the savage advice of Pagan Saxon ancestors. Even King Ambition was powerless before the winds that blew from those times and regions.
His eyes narrowed and the hands that would one day draft the dissolution of the monasteries and priories of his native land, twitched and curled with fury. ‘Mebbe so,’ he said, to no one in particular, the careful Court-English he was capable of replaced with a thicker, swifter dialect, ‘but I reckon I’m being buggered about! And it’s like this; I be fed up with it!’
He drew the concealed, serrated dagger that Slovo had noted on their first meeting and charged at the intermittent image of the Prioress. Admiral Slovo was intrigued to note the Englishman was still soldier enough to downgrade his anger into serviceable ferocity – and just as interested to see his theory confirmed as Cromwell was swallowed up and vanished from sight.
In her first interaction with the world since leaving it, the Prioress slowly turned to face Admiral Slovo and howled in triumph. It was not a sound that could have been emulated in life, being too octave-ranging for mortal chords. Also, somewhere in the interval of time, her eyes had been turned into fire.
Whatever the provocation, the Admiral was determined to heed his own advice. He held on to the arms of his chair and remained still; where Thomas Cromwell had gone, he did not care to follow.
Accordingly, during the long afternoon that followed, Slovo was captive witness to the hunting and harrying of Cromwell through the Prioress’s new home. No one else entered the ravished garden, warned away by Slovo’s terse commands. Only Numa Droz hovered alertly by the entrance, patiently awaiting the call to rescue his contract-master. Time hung heavy and horrible during the gory process but, as it turned out, there were diversions …
Before the noise of the multi-voiced howl had died away, the Prioress had sped out of sight. A few yards away, another window opened and Slovo saw her hurtling, most unlike an old lady, down some endless corridor. At its end stood Thomas Cromwell.
The two collided in a chaos of flapping black habit and gaudy mercenary’s garb. Cromwell, bone-white but resolute, made a masterly up-and-under killing strike to the sternum region. It went up … and up … and through, meeting no resistance, Cromwell’s whole arm following the blade. He had a moment to stand stupefied, harmlessly transfixing the Prioress. Then she laughed and blinded his right eye with a talon.
Again the vision faded.
And so it went on. A few more times, Cromwell turned to fight, his dagger passing uselessly through the spectre, while he suffered yet more grievous injuries. Thereafter, he relied exclusively on flight.
The Prioress’s private heaven, hell or limbo, whatever it was, seemed full of indeterminate landscapes of white. Admiral Slovo caught glimpses of hills and plains as well as featureless interiors of the same dull hue. Sometimes, Cromwell appeared to have taken refuge within a building and would rest, heaving for breath and bright with blood, against a wall. But soon enough he would be scurrying on, driven by the sound of the Prioress’s keening call.
On other occasions, a great time seemed to have elapsed and he was seen labouring over low foothills or salt-white marshes, fleeing the razor-sharp claws ever close behind. The Prioress’s unearthly exultations echoed all over the drear scenes and seeped out of the portals to echo in her one-time garden. Cold winds also issued forth and streamed back the Admiral’s silver hair, carrying with them the sounds of the hunt and the scent of despair.
In one of the less dramatic interludes, Admiral Slovo found himself thinking of what an Ottoman Bashi-Bazouk once told him (under torture, naturally). In Paradise, he had said, everything forbidden on Earth: wine, boys, a nice portrait on one’s wall, all were permitted. Eternal indulgence was the reward for a life-time of restraint.
For himself, Admiral Slovo considered that total self-control should extend beyond the tomb – Stoicism being an absolute concept – but, for others, he could see the appeal of the idea. To the Prioress, for example, after three-score years and ten of peace and loving kindness, might not a spot of vengeance be most welcome? Surely, in her case, the larder of stockpiled aggression must be more than overflowing. In fact Slovo was slightly disappointed and his decision to distance himself from the world strengthened. If that was the way she acted once the leash was off, what real conviction had attended the virtuous life before? Actually it was rather shocking.
It ended – or the beginning ended – in early evening, by Admiral Slovo’s time. By poor Master Cromwell’s reckoning perhaps whole days or weeks had elapsed.