Sacrament

'It was demolished.'

'That I saw.'

'Marjorie Donnelly had it done. Her father was the man who was murdered. I remember.' 'She had to fight tooth and nail to get it done. There was some Heritage Committee said it was of historical interest. Eventually she hired a dozen slaughterhouse men from Halifax, at least this is what I heard, it might not be true, but I heard they came with sledgehammers in the middle of the night and they did so much damage the place had to be levelled for safety concerns.'

'Good for her.'

'Don't mention it, please.'

'I won't.'

'I'm making Sherwood sound worse than he is,' she said, digging for her key in her purse. 'Most of the time he's fine. Just once in a while something strikes him the wrong way, and he gets so down in the dumps I think he's never going to snap out of it.' She'd found the key, and now unlocked the door, calling for Sherwood as she stepped inside. There was no reply. Will followed her in, while she went to look for him upstairs. 'He must have gone out walking,' she said, coming back downstairs. 'He does that a lot.'

They talked for the next hour or so over cold chicken, tomatoes and home-made chutney, the conversation ranging ever more widely as it progressed. Frannie's ebullience and sheer good nature charmed Will thoroughly: she had become an eloquent and deeply compassionate woman. More than ever, as she related her history, he sensed a regret that she'd not been able to move out of this house and find a life for herself, apart from Sherwood and his problems. But that regret was never explicit, and she would have been upset, he guessed, if she'd thought he'd recognized it in her. She was doing her Christian duty caring for Sherwood: no more nor less. If it indeed was a test, as she'd said at the gate, then she was passing it with flying colours.

Not all the talk was of events in Burnt Yarley, however. She ferreted after the details of Will's life and loves with no little gusto, and though he was at first reticent, her sheer persistence won him over. He gave her, in a somewhat bowdlerized version, an account of his emotional adventures, interlaced with a potted history of his career: Drew and Patrick and the Castro, books, bears and Balthazar.

'Do you remember how you were always wanting to run away?' she said to him. 'The first day we met, that's what you said you were going to do. And you did.'

'It took me a while.'

'The point is, you went,' she said, eyes shining. 'We all have dreams when we're children, but most of us give up on them. But you didn't. You went to see the world, the way you said you would.'

'Do you get away at all?'

'Not really. Sherwood hates to travel; it makes him nervous. We've been down to Oxford a couple of times, and we pop over to Skipton to see Mum in the hospice, but he's much happier when he's here in the village.'

'And what about you?'

'I'm happier when he's happiest,' she said simply.

'And you never talk about what happened?'

'Very, very seldom. But it's always there, isn't it? I suppose it always will be.' She lowered her voice, as though the walls would report the conversation to Sherwood if they heard it. 'I still have dreams about the Courthouse,' she said. 'They're more vivid than any other dream I have. Sometimes I'm there on my own, and I'm looking for his journal. Just going from room to room, knowing he's coming back, and I've got to be quick.' The expression on his face must have been the perfect mirror of his thoughts at that moment, because she said: 'It is just a dream, isn't it?'

'No,' he said softly. 'I don't think it is.'

She put her hand to her mouth. 'Oh Lord...' she breathed.

'It isn't your problem,' he said. 'You two can stay out of it and be perfectly

'Is he here?'

'Yes.'

'You're sure?'

'Yes.'

'How do you know?'

'He's the reason Hugo's in hospital. Steep beat him senseless.'

'But why?'

'He wanted to get a message to me. He wanted me back here, to finish what we started.'

'He's got his bloody journal,' Frannie said. 'What more does he want?' 'Separation,' Will said. 'From what?'

'From me.'

'I don't understand.'

'It's hard to explain. We're connected, him and me. I know it sounds ludicrous when we're sitting here talking and drinking tea, but he never quite let go of me.' Then more quietly: 'And maybe I never quite let go of him.'

'Is that why you went to the Courthouse? To find him?'

'Yes.'

'Lord, Will. He could kill you.'

'I think we're too close for that,' he said.

Frannie took a little time to absorb this remark. 'Too close?' she said. 'If he touches me, he may end up seeing more than he wants to see.'

'There's always Rosa to do the harm for him.'

'True,' he said. This was an option he hadn't really considered, but of course it was perfectly plausible. Rosa had proved her skills as a murderer half a mile from here; if Steep wanted to keep his distance from Will he could simply set the woman on Will's neck and be done with him that way.

'Rosa made quite an impression on Sherwood, you know,' Frannie went on. 'He had nightmares about her for years after. I never got him to talk about what happened, but she made her mark.'

'And you?' Will said.

'What about me?'

'I've had Steep. Sherwood had Rosa.'

'Oh ... well, I had the journal to obsess over.'

'And did you?'

She nodded, looking through him, as though in her mind's eye she was picturing the thing she'd lost. 'I never solved it, and that bothered me for years. Did you ever see what it contained?'

'No.'

'It was beautiful.'

'Really?'

'Oh yes,' she said, breathing with admiration. 'He'd made all these drawings of animals. Perfect they were. And on the opposite page to the drawing-' she was miming the act of opening the book now, staring down at its contents '-there was line after line of writing.'

'What did it say?'

'It wasn't in English. It wasn't in any language I've ever been able to find. It wasn't Greek, it wasn't Sanskrit, it wasn't hieroglyphics. I copied a few of the characters down, but I never deciphered any of it.'

'Maybe it was nonsense. Something he'd just made up.'

'No,' she said, 'it was a language.'

'How do you know?'

'Because I found it in one other place.'

' Where?'

'Well, it was strange. About six years ago, just after Dad died, I started to take night-classes in Halifax, just to get out of the rut I was in. I took courses in French and Italian, of all things. I think because of the journal really; I was still looking for a way to decipher it, deep down. Anyway I met this chap there, and we got on quite well. He was in his fifties, and very attentive I suppose you'd say, and we'd talk for hours after the classes. His name was Nicholas. His great passion was the eighteenth century, which I've never really had any interest in, but he invited me to his house, which was extraordinary. Like stepping back in time two hundred and fifty years. Lamps, wallpaper, pictures, everything, was, you know, of the period. I suppose he was a little crazy, but in a very gentle kind of way. He used to say he'd been born in the wrong century.' She laughed at the folly of all of this. 'Anyway, I went to his house three or four times and I was browsing in his library - he had a collection of books and pamphlets and magazines, all about the seventeen hundreds - and I found this little book with a picture in it, and there in the picture were some of the hieroglyphics from Steep's journal.' 'With an explanation?'

'Not really,' she said, the brightness in her voice dulling. 'It was frustrating really. He gave me the book as a gift. He'd got it in a job lot from an auction and he didn't care for the pictures very much, so he said to take it.' 'Do you still have it?'

'Yes. It's upstairs.'

'I'd like to see it.'

'I'm warning you, it's very disappointing,' she said, getting up from the table. 'I pored over it for hours.' She headed on into the hall. 'But I ended up wishing I'd never seen the bloody thing. I won't be a minute.' She headed up the stairs, leaving Will to wander through to the livingroom. Unlike the kitchen, which was newly painted, the room might have been left as a shrine to the departed parents. The furniture was plain, eschewing any hint of hedonism; the plant-life (geraniums on the windowsill, potted hyacinths on the table) well-tended; the designs of hearth-rug, wallpaper and curtains a calamity of fuss and mismatched colour. On the mantelpiece, to either side of the solid clock, were framed photographs of the whole family, smiling out from a distant summer. Tucked into the frame of one, a yellowed prayer card. On it, two verses: