It hung there for a moment and then went out. Diane caught her breath.
When she was very young she used to go all trembly and run downstairs, and Father snorted impatiently and the nannies said. Nonsense, child, and felt for a temperature.
Nannies.
There was a certain sort of nanny – later known as a governess – which Father expressly sought out. Nannies one and two, both the same, the sort which was supposed to have yellowed and faded from the scene along with crinolines and parasols. The sort which, in the 1960s, still addressed their charges as 'child'. The sort which, as you grew older, you realised should never be consulted about occurrences such as lights around the Tor.
And then there was the Third Nanny.
Her memories of the Third Nanny remained vague and elusive. She remembered laughter; the Third Nanny was the only one of them that ever smiled. And one other thing: she would sit on the edge of the bed but never left a dent in the mattress when she arose.
She knew now what the Third Nanny was.
Diane tensed. Behind the Tor, the whole of the sky was now growing lighter. Like a dawn. But it couldn't be dawn; it was quite early in the night.
The light spread behind the Tor like a pale sheet. It was grey and quietly lustrous, had a sheen like mother-of-pearl. She wondered if Hecate could see it and suspected not.
Diane had certainly never seen a light like this before. The lightballs she'd watched as a child had fascinated her. They were benign, they filled your head with a fizzy glow – like champagne. This light was ominous, like a storm cloud, and it stroked her with dread.
She wanted to turn away. She couldn't. She couldn't even blink.
Two dark columns had appeared either side of the silhouetted tower of St Michael. Rising above the tower into the lightened sky like arms of smoke culminating in shadow-hands, cupped.
And in the cup, a core of intense and hideous darkness.
We are with you this night.
But who was with him, Verity wondered, when they dragged him on his hurdle up the side of the Tor? The mud besmirching him, the bleak November wind in his face bringing water from his eyes so that it would appear he was weeping.
All the accounts said that Abbot Whiting went to his death with dignity and stoicism.
But the very act of hauling him up the steep cone of the hill, the violence of it! And at the summit, under the tower, the waiting nooses – three of them, an obscene parody of the execution, on another hill, of Christ.
The other two 'convicted' monks were Roger lames and John Thorne, treasurer of the Abbey and a skilled carpenter and furniture-maker. All three went quietly to their God. But the humiliation of Abbot Whiting did not end with his hanging.
Took off his head. Soon as they cut his dead body down, they look off the Abbot's head… to be displayed upon the Abbey gate, a trophy, a warning. Final evidence that Roman Catholicism was terminated in Glastonbury, that the Church belonged to the Crown. Imagine the impact of that on a little town in the sixteenth century. It must have felt like Armageddon.
Colonel Pixhill could never go on beyond this point, but Verity knew the Abbot's body had been drawn and quartered, sections of his poor corpse sent for exhibition at Bath, Wells, Ilchester and Bridgwater.
Where did they carry out this butchery? Where did they take the axes or cleavers to the body? Not, surely, on the Tor. More likely indoors… somewhere.
Here? This was the inference, wasn't it. That the Abbot was drawn and jointed in this house.
And if not at this very table, which was insufficiently ancient, then perhaps on another table standing where this one now stood.
There had been a body here. It was here that the Colonel had lain in his coffin, for three days, as stipulated in his will. People had said how brave she was to stay in the house alone with the corpse, but it had been a comfort to her, a period of adjustment, of coming to terms with it.
Verity stared down into the well of shadows around her feet. Why was she doing this to herself, as if she was obliged to unravel every last strand of sadness and horror from the unhappy tapestry? She was unable to suppress the sickening image of the Abbot's body, chopped into crude joints of meat, and her eyes rose inevitably to the lump of red salmon on the plate and saw… that it had gone.
The Abbot's pewter plate was clean.
Verity felt her mouth tighten into a rictus; both hands grabbed at her face like claws, eyes closing as her nails pierced her forehead and cheeks in a sudden, raging fever of fear.
She stayed that way for over a minute, rocking backwards and forwards on the settle, feeling her chest swelling… but she must not scream, must not… moaning feebly through her fingers, not daring to open her eyes, because the membrane of darkness shut in by her eyelids, that at least was her darkness, not Meadwell's.
She should not have to go through this. Her fear was spiked with an anger now at Major Shepherd for being so ill, too ill to realise what it took out of her. It's my duty to receive the Abbot, she'd told Juanita Carey, almost gaily! In truth, it would be upsetting enough for anyone, woman or man, to prepare a meal for a person long dead and then sit down to dine. Alone. With that person's spirit.
Oh, but she was getting old. She'd be with them all soon, the Abbot and the Colonel and Captain Hope her almost-lover who had died of peritonitis in 1959.
Telling herself again that the Abbot was such a kind man, known for his generosity towards the old and the sick, Verity rocked more slowly and became calmer, pulling her hands away from her face, making them relax on her knees under the table, retracting her claws like a cat. Of course the plate was not empty. With the worry and tension of the Abbot's dinner, anyone could be subject to minor hallucinations.
Why, the ancient stone and timbered dining hall was quite normaclass="underline" silent and cold and still. Quite normal.
Until the very moment that Verity opened her eyes. When, as abruptly as if someone had plucked out the snowdrop or flattened it between two clapping hands, the candle went out.
And when the room was fully in darkness, not even the ghost of the flame still discernible, the Abbot's chair creaked. The way that a chair creaks when someone rises from it.
And Verity, alone in the reaching darkness – where it no longer mattered that she Did Not See – gave in at last to the pressure of that long-withheld scream.
ELEVEN
'What the buggering hell's going on here?'
It might have been the erratic candlelight making Jim Battle appear to quiver. Or it might – Juanita couldn't be sure – have been real, Jim trembling not, of course, with fear but with barely suppressed anger at these bloody pagan scroungers taking over his beloved Tor.
What the buggering hell's going on here? Juanita couldn't believe he'd said that. It was just so Jim, but so completely out of context. Standing there defiantly, shoulders back, on the concrete apron at the foot of the St Michael tower, candles all around him: Jim Battle, building society manager turned mystical artist, being a dumpy little hero.
Juanita just hoped the pagan Pilgrims had a sense of humour.
Actually, there weren't as many of them as she'd imagined. Maybe a dozen. People always exaggerated where travellers were concerned. Juanita stayed behind Jim on the fringe of the assembly, a foot on the last step of the path, her nostrils detecting a soiled sweetness in the air – not marijuana.
No music either. Not even the rattle of the wind which normally haunted the summit of the Tor. Jim's outburst had erupted into a yawning vacuum, as if he'd stormed into church in that moment at the end of a prayer before the scuffling begins.
Juanita lightly squeezed his arm, a squeeze supposed to convey the message, Back off, Jim Make an excuse. Walk away, pretend you didn't see anything. You don t have anything to prove. Say you're sorry for interrupting. Just back off.