The Knocker On Death’s Door
Ellis Peters
Felse 10
A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0
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Contents
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OTHER INSPECTOR FELSE MYSTERIES PUBLISHED BY THE MYSTERIOUS PRESS
Flight Of A Witch
A Nice Derangement Of Epitaphs
Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Heart
Rainbows End
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Copyright © 1970 by Ellis Peters
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Printed in the United States of America First Mysterious Press Printing: June, 1992
CHAPTER 1
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THE door was of oak, roughly five feet wide by more than seven feet high, with a top in the form of a flattened late-Gothic arch. The timbers from which it had been made, with loving care, some five hundred or more years ago, were nearly six inches thick, and carved on the outer side into crude vertical folds, and with the wear and tear of centuries, and the rigours of recent cleaning to remove the gloss of dirt from accumulated time and the touch of many hands, the colour of the wood had clarified into an exquisite matt brown fading away into pure grey, the colour of subdued light at the onset of evening after a clear day, and the grain to a veining of liquid silver, so that the carved folds were no longer related in any way to anything so solid as linen, but appeared rather as shot silk of a cobweb fineness. In certain lights the door seemed almost translucent, so that you might have tried to walk through it in the belief that it was mere mirage, and no more palpable than mist. Actually it weighed an unconscionable amount, and had elicited fervent curses from the modern workmen who had had the job of moving it. They were accustomed to the gimcrack soft-woods of today, and only one of them had so far forgotten himself as to stroke the silken meshes with a loving and wondering hand, and feel for a moment deprived and born out of time. He was an old man, of course, reared in the trade. The others thought it was simply a quarter of a ton of over-valued junk.
The crowning arch of the door had a carved border of leaves, undercut so deeply that they could almost have been plucked at will, though only by Titans. Beneath this canopy two elongated angels, hieratic and crude and modern now as Modigliani, though certainly years out of date when they were carved, spread large hands and rigid wings over the entering worshipper. Or, of course, butler, depending on the period in question, but reverence was always equally implied.
For the door had hung for centuries on the massive hinges of the wine-cellar in the house known as the Abbey, in the village of Mottisham, in West Midshire. It was now being restored to its ancient place (hypothetically, at least, for the actual evidence was slim and ambiguous) in the south porch of the church of Saint Eata in the above-named village. A very rare dedication indeed, and territorially limited, and if there was a person in the parish who had any very clear idea of who St. Eata was, it certainly was not the vicar, the Reverend Andrew Bright, who was thirty-one, and devoted to Rugby, God (or his extremely simple idea of God), rock-climbing, youth-clubs and his own advancement, in that order. He was himself, however, solid, worthy and real, and knew a real, solid, worthy work of art when he saw one. He had jumped at the offer of the door, and ruthlessly adapted the nineteenth-century south porch, the latest of many renovations to St. Eata’s long-suffering fabric, to accommodate it. With the effect achieved he was more than content. It was a very beautiful, thought-provoking and virtually permanent door. That it had other and more disquieting properties was not yet apparent.
As for the knocker, it was of antique iron, rust-proof practically for ever, of a lovely, crude texture that gave acute tactile pleasure to anyone handling it. The surface was not quite smooth, being very slightly pitted all over, so that it clung to the hand with a live, bracing contact. It was made in the form of a beast’s head, wreathed in leaves that never grew on any tree, as the beast had never roamed in any jungle but that of Apocalypse; and in the wide, generous, patently amiable jaws was proffered, rather than gripped, a large, twisted ring of iron, thick enough to fill the palm.
Through this door the bishop emerged, radiant and serene, beautifully robed and crozier in hand, at the conclusion of the service, with the Reverend Andrew and the living representatives of the Macsen-Martel family at his heels, on his way to the vicarage for tea with muffins, scones and fruit cake, suitable to an English Sunday. Traffic on the B road through the village was halted to allow his procession to make its way across the green with becoming dignity and deliberation, which took some time. The village itself looked on from a discreet distance, tolerantly unsmiling and unfrowning, missing not a trick. Comparatively few of the inhabitants had been among the congregation inside St. Eata’s. Mottisham was a reassuringly normal English village.
Motorists, impatient but resigned, sat back and waited for the magnificently aesthetic old man, less ingenuous than he appeared, to withdraw his train inside the confines of the vicarage grounds, a manoeuvre over which he took his time. Who knows when the arrested mind will open and the light dawn?
Detective Chief Inspector George Felse and his wife Bunty were on their way back from a week-end by the Welsh coast; probably the last of the year, for it was mid-October and the best of the weather was already gone. They had left immediately after lunch, to avoid the normal concerted rush back to the Midlands, only to find that even more people than usual had been visited by the same idea. The trouble with mid-Wales is that the mountains render whole tracts of it impossible for major, or indeed any, roads, and confine the motorist to the few main arteries. The inevitable boring, irritating, nose-to-tail procession home was something George detested, but for many miles could not escape. But towards the Midshire border he swung thankfully off to the right, and took the minor road that threaded the long cleft of Middlehope, between the hills. It was longer, and probably a few of the regular commuters to the Welsh coast had discovered its advantages by now, but even so it was a relief after the main road.