The sarcasm was lost on the intruders.
‘Take us there now,’ said the blond man.
‘I have to find the key to the mausoleum.’
‘Then you’d better be quick before the little lady here dies of cold.’
The place to start was in the kitchen, in the old pantry, where a key box had been fastened to the wall for generations, and where every key that had ever passed through Woodmancote Hall hung from a hook or nestled among a tangled heap of its brass and iron companions. Ethan worked his way through them systematically. Behind him stood Beauty and the Beast, and with them Sarah. Ethan had insisted that they give her a blanket to cover her, and slippers for her feet, but that was the only concession they would make, and at every moment, it seemed likely they would take it away again.
The key to the family vault was on a hook at one side of the box, apart from the rest. A thin cardboard label in a copperplate hand had obviously hung from it for a very long time. It was a large brass key that had clearly not been used very often. The last but one death had been Gerald’s wife Edith. She had been interred in one of the last vacant spaces, in the expectation that Gerald would join her there in due course. Ethan had been twenty-three when Edith died. He had never known her very well, and for most of that time as a child.
He had been a man at the time of the last interment, a man of thirty weeping uncontrollably, watched by friends and family, helpless to assuage his grief. Struggling against the tears, he had helped shoulder Abi’s coffin to its final destination inside the vault. He had locked the door behind her with his own hand.
‘Let’s get this done,’ he said, and led the way outside.
The snow had stopped falling, but a bitter frost lay in the air and, in the sky above, the moon hovered in silence, as though itself the origin of all this coldness, its white light lying undimmed on the unbroken passages of snow. Sarah thought she would die as the frost crept across her skin. This was the way they had gone the night before, on their way to midnight mass. She had slipped her arm through Ethan’s, feeling great comfort in it. But tonight there was no comfort in anything, no mood of celebration, no dimly remembered holiness. Just this: a killing cold and men who would rape and kill her as they would shoot a racehorse with a broken leg.
The mausoleum was set back at the end of a sloping lawn, beside the willow-bordered expanse of Beecham Water, a large pond that some called a small lake and others dismissed as an outsize puddle. Built from marble in the eighteenth century, the vault held the remains of generations of Usherwoods, husbands and wives, children and grandchildren. The earliest coffins had been removed and reburied in the churchyard at the end of the nineteenth century, to make way for another crop of the dead.
The lock turned reluctantly, aided by sprays of hot water and WD-40 brought for the purpose by Ethan. Beauty held a torch while he worked the lock.
An owl hooted mournfully somewhere close by. Bare willow branches moved against the sky, rattling in the light breeze. Across the surface of the frozen pond, moonlight lay like spilt milk. Suddenly, an animal screamed. There was movement among the trees on the other side of Beecham Water. The lock gave way, and the key turned fully. They were in.
The door swung back with a tearing sound, as if it was about to peel away from its hinges. Ethan made a mental note to have the hinges oiled before they came to need replacing entirely. Beauty shone his torch inside. He said nothing and betrayed nothing of the excitement he felt at this moment.
The bright beam played across a central aisle flanked on both sides by deep niches filled with coffins. Not even the sudden influx of fresh air could dispel the musty odour of death and disuse that hung over the entire vault. Cobwebs festooned the interior, and spiders that had known nothing but darkness all their lives scurried away at the touch of light.
Ethan hesitated at the entrance, knowing how simple it would be for their attackers to kill him and Sarah here and leave their bodies until it was time for the next burial. Beauty shoved him inside, and Lukacs came after, dragging Sarah unwillingly behind.
Despite Beauty’s torch, the tomb seemed a vast place of darkness, darkness that began with the eyes and ended in the very depths of the soul. From the ceiling above there hung banners of tattered spiders’ webs, grown dirty after long, long years without light. Each niche and each coffin bore the name of its occupant, but Ethan preferred not to take note of them. Some of these were people he’d known in his youth and childhood, others bore the names of ancestors of whom he’d heard stories told by his father and grandfather round the fireplace or in his bed late at night. And there, on his right, without need for a nameplate or other sign, lay Abi’s coffin tight inside its niche, its metal ornamentation already rusted, cobwebs weaving their way into the gaps and interstices. He had to fight against the temptation to picture what lay inside.
At the far end, placed on a table and propped against the wall, were several objects whose identity was not at first obvious. They walked down in silence. Ethan heard a sharp intake of breath beside him as Beauty showed emotion for the first time. He heard the man mutter something in a language that was not German. In front of them stood a Roman lance, and at its foot a pottery cup, and what looked like a dome of thorns. The German — for Ethan was by now certain that was his nationality — played the torch beam everywhere, picking out yet more objects: a wooden board with writing in three languages, a short piece of wood, and a piece of fabric, folded several times and rusted with age.
‘Is this everything?’ the German demanded. ‘If there’s anything else and you don’t tell me, you will both die.’
‘This is all I know about. I’ve seen nothing like them anywhere else in the house.’
For several moments, their fate hung by a thread. Ethan knew that if they were to die, it would be now. Then the German nodded. Lukacs stepped forward, still gripping Sarah tightly by one arm, while she fought to cover her half-naked body with the other. Her feet were filthy, and her skin was already grey with cobwebs. She stifled a cry as a large spider scuttled across her right foot. With his free hand, the big man reached inside his coat and brought out a large lump of fabric that opened moments later to become a holdall. He handed Sarah to the German, then placed the relics — the pilum in two halves — into the bag and zipped it tight.
‘I hope you are telling me the truth,’ said Beauty. ‘If not, you will see me again.’
Ethan opened his mouth to protest, but at that moment the German lifted his hand and brought the gun down hard against his skull. Everything went black. Ethan fell in a heap to the floor.
8
The Charnel House
First there was darkness, then he opened his eyes and there was still darkness. His head was aching and spinning, and when he tried to move it, the pain grew instantly more intense and the spinning made him want to throw up. He took a deep breath and lay still. Blinking hurt, and it did nothing to dispel the darkness. He could hear voices, but something told him they were only in his head, echoes from the past, fading, then running back with renewed intensity. It took some time for it to sink in that he must still be in the mausoleum. That was when he realised just how cold he was. He’d no idea how long he’d been lying in that spot, he could barely remember the moment when he’d been struck. Hours might have passed, a whole day. He tried to stand up, but the dizziness took hold of him, and a crashing pain sliced through his skull. He fell back to the floor and lost consciousness again.
When he became lucid for a second time, the darkness was just as intense, the cold was more biting, but the pain in his skull had receded somewhat. His first thought this time was to ask himself what had happened to Sarah.