'Pure legend.'
'It's all legend. But legends are often more persistent than facts.'
'Only if you permit it,' said Pennard. 'Get to the point.'
'OK. Fact: Glastonbury Abbey was very rich and powerful and built out of the very cradle of Christianity, and Henry VIII had to crush it. Fact: Abbot Whiting was a hard man to nail because he was an unassuming kind of guy who tried to help the poor and was consequently very well liked. Sir Henry's hit man, Cromwell, had to find a way of fitting Whiting up. Fact in the end they found writings in Whiting's chambers criticising the king's latest divorce. Also a gold chalice. From the abbey. Which he was accused of stealing.
Lord Pennard appeared uninterested and drank some whisky.
'Pixhill seems to think this chalice was later awarded – along with a few hundred acres of land and a farmhouse known as Meadwell – to the man who agreed to plant it. A Benedictine monk at the Abbey called Edmund Ffitch. Spelt F F Y C H E. Who happily dumped his calling, moved into Meadwell… and founded a famous dynasty. Fact?'
Pennard grunted. 'Inasmuch as Meadwell was our first home.'
'The legend, of course, is that when Whiting was hanged and then beheaded on the Tor, Ffitch collected his blood in that same chalice In deliberate parody of Joseph of Arimathea catching Christ's blood, from that famous spear-wound on the cross, in what became the Holy Grail. Thereby founding another tradition.'
'As you say…' Pennard leaned back in his chair, stretched out his legs, chin on his chest. 'Legend. Little-known one, too. So little-known it was probably invented by Pixhill to bolster his own fantasy of himself as a crusader. Sad little man.'
'You did have a family chalice, though, didn't you?'
'I wouldn't know.' He sounded very bored. Or trying to sound bored. 'Certainly not in my time.'
'And in your time…' Powys was beginning to despair of denting the armour. '… That is, since the War, the family hasn't exactly prospered, has it? Investments collapsing. Bad seasons in the vineyards. Land having to be sold. Couldn't help noticing as I came in that you're down to using sixty-watt bulbs where you need hundreds.'
'You're an idiot, Powys.'
'Perhaps the family has always associated its good fortune with possession of the Chalice. lose the Chalice, money starts to go down the toilet.'
'Powys, if your illustrious ancestor'd been able to make up stories as good as this he might even've profited from his scribblings. Drink up, man.'
He advanced on Powys with the bottle of Grouse.
'Of course there was a down side.' Powys looked up at him. 'Meadwell became somewhat… spiritually tainted? Hard to live in?'
'Always a miserable hole. Don't cover your glass, it's discourteous. Either drink with me or get out.'
Reluctantly, Powys accepted another inch of Scotch. 'So this place was built. Comparatively small at first but massively expanded after the industrial revolution. By the outbreak of the First World War, the family was very wealthy. Which brings us to the previous Viscount Pennard. Your father, Roger Ffitch. Bit of a lad, Roger. A bit cocky. Not being discourteous here, am I?'
'My father', Pennard said, no hint of a smile, 'would have pulled your head off quite a few minutes ago.'
'Did you admire him?'
'He was an obstinate man. Immensely brave. Would've received the VC after the Somme if he hadn't shafted the wrong General's daughter, but that's by the by. Since you ask, I did not admire him. He was a chancer. A gambler.'
'And not only with money?'
'No,' Pennard said soberly. 'Not only with money.'
'With his soul, in fact,' Powys said. 'Such as it was.'
Juanita dressed slowly, painfully and impractically. She still couldn't bear jeans, tight or otherwise, against her thighs. Her thickest skirt was black velvet, calf-length; she dragged it on, thumbs through the loops, then wriggled into a sloppy lemon sweater, the softest thing she had, and it still felt like staff cardboard. Her skin was starting to feel moist again, her head an oven.
In the kitchen, she turned on the cold tap with her wrists, put her head under the jet. The water hurt, so cold it burned.
Matthew had left a glass of water with a straw. A note to say there was a light salad (which she could manage to eat) in the fridge (which she could manage to open).
Blinking, horrified, at the clock, she thought, Powys!
Nearly nine o'clock. Hours since he'd gone to Verity's. A long time since Matthew had delivered the message that Powys was 'doing his best'.
Whatever that meant.
And no word from Diane. Time to call the police? Time to call Pennard?
Christ's sake, stay cool.
Sick joke.
She went down to the shop. No messages on the answering machine. She rolled the phone from its rest, slipped out the Meadwell number with the tip of a thumb. Bent over the receiver, heard the number ring and ring and ring, no answer, no answer, oh no.
She staggered back upstairs to the living room. He'll be back. He will be back. A little surprised at how much she needed him to be back.
Him. Not just somebody to be with her, to open things and switch things on. Him. Joe Powys, burned-out earth-mysteries writer, another jaded Grail-seeker.
She eased herself into the sofa, her arms spread along its spine. Opposite her, Jim's depiction of the mystical roads converging on the Tor as beams of dying sun, which lit the fields but not the Tor – a black silhouette, a hill or shadow.
The picture's surface glistened and glowed tonight, as though the paint was wet again, as though the ghost of Jim Battle was breathing on it.
She didn't like that thought. Made her want to look away, but the colours burned out of the canvas, the sweat on her face felt as slick and rich as linseed oil. There was a sour tang of turps. She blinked; water filmed her eyes, colours smeared.
Then there was a small movement on the picture. Could be a fly from the attic. Could be a spider. Crawling along one of the red sunbeams Following the line exactly, towards the Tor.
Nothing there. It was the fever,
The room tilted; she saw the fly on the move again.
Except it wasn't a fly any more It was a small, black bus, swaying and rattling down the black road from the Tor, a noxious Dinky toy stinking of burning oil and diesel, smoke puffing around it, feeding the blossoming shadows in the room.
A thin scream ribboned between Juanita's lips as the carpet hardened under her feet like stone. Like tarmac.
She arose from the sofa, edged towards the door of the sitting room.
Keeping her mouth tight shut, refusing to let the scream out. Corrosive fumes stinging her nose and it wasn't just smoke and oil, there was a harsh, acrid animal stench, a tomcat smell a hundred times more pungent, and the bus was coming at her, spewing feral breath from the torn-scab radiator between its heartless yellow headlights.
Juanita burst out of the room, tugging the door shut behind her, shutting it all in there, and she carried on tugging and wrenching long after the catch had clicked into place.
Becoming gradually aware – almost with a sense of awe – that she was using her lurid, pink, patched-up Frankenstein hands. The right hand gripping the door handle, the left hand around the right hand, all melded together in a pulsing lump of crippled flesh.
Fused to the handle as Jim had been fused to his easels.
She felt no pain at all as she fell to her knees on the landing, unable to breathe, lungs full of black smoke, head full of burning and those other images she suppressed even in her dreams: the explosion of the sunset window, Jim's blackened, dead grin, his boiling eyes behind the twisted bars in her arms, her own hands torched in the night. Blue fire from sizzling fat.
The ash tree. The dangling hat.
And then the pain. As wild and brutal as crucifixion nails through both palms. And the breath pumped out of her in hiccuping yelps as one hand came free and prised the other from the handle, finger by finger.