“Re-dedicating our south door. Hadn’t you heard? It’s been hung somewhere in the cellars of the Abbey ever since the dissolution of the monasteries, and now they’ve been clearing up the old place in the hope that the National Trust will take it over, they wanted to put back the things that were pinched, and get everything in order. Done a very nice restoration job on that door, so they tell me.”
The vicar, walking behind his bishop, was half a head shorter and about three times as wide, a burly young man with a round, ingenuous face and muscles befitting a wing three-quarter. A late shaft of sun bounced from his red hair like singed fingers recoiling from a burning bush.
“You’ve got the press on the run,” said George. “I never thought a door could bring in so many cameras!”
“It’s said to be something special, all right. The experts got the word, apparently. The thing’s never been on view before, you see. Nobody writes up the Abbey, not these days.”
“Nor the family?” said George curiously. “I take it that’s the squire following on?”
“Don’t mention that word here, George, we’re allergic to it. Even if they used it at all, it would be about old Thwaites who bought up the Court fifty years ago—and if they used it about him it would have inverted commas round it, and nasty implications. We’re tribal, not feudal. And even the old princes of Powis didn’t venture to show their faces here unless they were invited.”
“The lords of shop and bank are coming, by the look of your housing plans,” said Bunty.
“Let ’em come, they’ll learn. But, yes,” he said, returning to the little procession which had just reached the vicarage gate, “that’s Robert Macsen-Martel and his mother. Don’t see her often these days. He works for Poole, Reed and Poole, in the estate office—talking of historical ironies, though I know we weren’t. Sells expensive little gimcrack houses all round what’s left of his own—and after all, they’ve been there best part of nine centuries. God knows how they stuck it out, they never were wealthy. Probably the best they ever did was out of that dissolution business, when the monks got kicked out. Count for nothing now. Never will again. Never did, for all that much.”
It was an epitaph; and there was something about the two figures now vanishing into the vicarage garden that suggested that even the epitaph was an afterthought, long after the event of dissolution.
The old woman was exceedingly tall and ramrod erect, a residue of desiccated flesh shrunk tightly to attenuated bones, and draped with old-fashioned and shapeless tweeds of no particular colour. Under an ancient felt hat, worn dead straight on lank grey hair drawn into a bun on her neck, the long, narrow, aristocratic face looked out with chill disapproval at the world, as though she had ceased to expect anything good from present or future.
“She looks,” said Bunty thoughtfully, “like that bronze bishop at Augsburg—the one with the bad smell under his nose.”
“Bishop Wolfhart Roth,” said Sergeant Moon understandingly. “Now you come to mention it, so she does.” And it was entirely typical of him that he should be able to haul out of his capacious memory not only the face but even the name of a German bishop some unknown artist had caricatured in bronze in the fourteenth century.
Her son was like her, but not yet mummified. Tall, thin, with long, narrow bones and a long, narrow face, withdrawn, distrustful, austere. An uncomfortable family, Bunty thought, watching them disappear under the vicar’s trees, but too faded now to discomfort the populace of Mottisham overmuch.
They were gone, it was over. The sergeant flapped a huge white hand in a final salute, and withdrew to his duty, waving the VW on towards home. Bunty turned to stare into the porch as they passed by, and try to catch a glimpse of the door that had brought press photographers and scholars into the wild territory of Middlehope. Old trees crowded close, darkening the cavity of the porch. She caught a faint flash of pale, pure colour, old wood restored to the light from under the patina of centuries of dirt and neglect; but that was all.
“Sorry!” said George. “Did you want to stop and have a look at it? I couldn’t hold up the procession, but we can pull round into the pub yard if you like, and walk back.”
“No, never mind.” Bunty settled back in her seat, her thoughts returning pleasurably to the prospect of getting home and getting the Aga lit and the house warmed. “I don’t suppose there’s anything so remarkable about it. Nothing to fetch us back for another look.”
Whatever minor fate had been jolted by George’s assessment of the Middlehope crime potential, and Moon’s acceptance of it, must also have recorded, and with the same malice, this complacent comment—probably under the category of famous last words!
There were still three reporters and one press photographer left over from the jamboree when Hugh Macsen-Martel and Dinah and Dave Cressett entered the public bar of “The Sitting Duck” that evening. Saul Trimble, trading on his antediluvian appearance as usual, had already lured two of the visitors into his corner, one on either side, and was furnishing them with a few impromptu fragments of folk-history in return for the pints with which, alternately, they furnished him. He had left out his false teeth for the occasion, which added twenty years to his appearance, and put on his old leather-elbowed jacket and a muffler instead of his usual smart Sunday rig. By good luck the bar itself still looked every inch the antiquated country pub for which it was cast, since Sam Crouch, who owned it, was too mean to spend money on modernising it, and had no need to worry about competition. There were two other pubs within reach, but both were tied, while “The Sitting Duck” was not merely a free house, but a home-brewed house into the bargain, one of only three left in the entire county. So the public bar was still all quarries and high-backed settles, furnished with bright red pew cushions, and every evening the place was full. This Sunday evening it was perhaps even a little fuller than usual. The newsmen, strangers from the town, were fair game, and there was the afternoon’s show to talk about.
Saul was in full cry when Hugh’s party entered. He was using his folk-lore voice, half singing Welsh, half quavering, superstitious old age, and all the regulars were there to egg him on. William Swayne, alias Willie the Twig, the forestry officer from the plantations beyond the Hallowmount, had driven down in the Land-Rover, Eli Platt had closed his by-pass fruit and flower stands early, and come in from the market-garden on the fringe of Comerbourne, Joe Lyon, smelling warmly of his own sheep, steamed gently by the fire with a pint of home-brewed in one hand. It may even have been the beer, rather than the company, that had caused the strangers to prolong their visit into licensing hours.
“Normans?” Saul was saying with tremulous disdain. “Normans, is it? The Normans were mere incomers here, and never got a toehold, not in Middlehope, not for hundreds of years. The few that got in by marrying here, them we tolerated if they minded their step, the rest—out! Normans, indeed!”
“I was going by the name,” said the oldest reporter reasonably.
“Martel? Oh, ah, that’s Norman, that is. The Martel got in with one o’ these marriages I was telling you about. In Henry One, that was, there was no sons to the family, and the heiress, she took up with this Martel, who was an earl’s man from Comerbourne, but had fallen out with his master. Let him alone, they did, when he had the clans of Middlehope behind him, they wanted no extra trouble up on this border. Been Macsen-Martels ever since, they have, right enough, but they’d been here many a hundred years before that—ah, right back to King Arthur and the Romans afore him…”
“This,” said Hugh in Dinah’s ear, as he found her a chair in the bow window, “is going to be good.” He caught Saul’s impervious blue eye, bright beneath a deliberately ruffled eyebrow, and winked. Saul looked through him stonily into the far distances of inspiration.