“I’ll get them,” volunteered Dave, and went off through the crowd to the bar, where Ellie Crouch and her nineteen-year-old daughter, christened Zenobia but Nobbie to her friends, dispensed home-brewed and presided over the scene like a couple of knowing blonde cherubs, deceptively guileless of eye.
“If you’m going by names,” pursued Saul, warming almost into song, “it’s the Macsen you want to think about, my lads. You know who Macsen was? He was the same person as Maximus, King of the Britons, back in the fifth century. And if you don’t believe me, go and look for yourselves at the inscription on the Pillar of Eliseg, up north there by Valle Crucis, and there you’ll see it in Latin…”
“Are you telling us you can read Latin?” demanded the youngest reporter dubiously.
“Course I can’t, nor never needed to, and if I could, I couldn’t make out the letters on that stone, but there’s those who have, and turned it into English for you and me both. Look it up in the libraries! ‘Maximus the King,’ it says, ‘who slew the King of the Romans… ’ Macsen Wledig, the Welsh called him. And do you know who the King of the Romans was, the one he slew? He was the Emperor Constans, that’s who, and uncle to King Arthur himself. And ever since Macsen Wledig was Prince of Powis there’ve been Macsens in Middlehope.”
“How do you know?” objected the young reporter boldly. “Are there still records of all this? After all that length of time?”
“There’s better than written records. There’s the records that have come down by word of mouth from father to son and mother to daughter. Why, my old granny could have recited you the pedigree of every family in this village nearly back to Adam, just like in the Bible. The women… the women were the keepers of the traditions ever, since time started. Now that’s all gone. Progress we’ve got, and it’s cost us everything else we had, whether we wanted it or not…”
“He’s beginning to ramble,” Dinah said softly. “Hadn’t you better give him a shove back on to the rails?”
Someone else, however, did that in Hugh’s place, and very effectively. The last of the photographers sat on a high stool at the end of the bar, a big, hearty man just running slightly to flesh, with a shock of untidy straw-coloured hair and inquisitive eyes. He hadn’t been priming Saul, he hadn’t been doing much talking, but it was plain that he had missed nothing.
“What about this door?” he said. “If it was originally one door of the church, how did it get into their house in the first place?”
Saul trimmed his sails nimbly, got halfway through an unplanned sentence, decided to revise it, and created a mild diversion by peering meaningfully into his empty pint-pot. One of his two interlocutors took the hint and filled it again.
“It got there because they took it, along with a few other things, when the monastery here was closed down under Henry Eight, that’s how. A very nice bit of carving it is, you can see that, and made locally, so the experts say, and there’s bits inside the old part o’ the church by the same hand. Closed down, the monastery was, and the brothers turned out on to the road. The abbey church was looted and abandoned for a while, and then it was took over for the parish church and repaired again. And the Macsen-Martels sided with the commission, they did, and they got the abbot’s lodging to live in, and that’s how the door came to be there.”
“And what,” the photographer wanted to know, “put it into their heads to give it back now? Nobody knew about it. Nobody was asking for it. Nobody was in any position to ask for it. Are you telling me they suddenly went to the trouble and expense of having the thing cleaned and restored, after all this time, just in a fit of belated honesty? It doesn’t make sense.”
They all turned to look at him more carefully, for the tone of his questioning was curiously more purposeful than that of his colleagues. Dave came back with the drinks, and put Dinah’s half-pint into her hand. Hugh levelled black eyes above the rim of his pint-pot. “Who is he?” he asked softly. “Not a Comerbourne man, I know them all.”
“Brummagem, I think. Some freelance.” Dave was uninterested; he didn’t question other people’s declared motives for what they did.
“Don’t,” warned Saul unexpectedly, his voice receding hollowly into a cavern of senile solemnity, “don’t ask me about that! There’s reasons for wanting to have things—like a good cellar door when you’re setting up house and there’s one standing handy—and reasons for wanting not to have things any longer when they begin to turn malignant towards them that took them out of their right place. Don’t forget ’tis a church door. Better for everybody, maybe, to put it back where it was afore, and have the bishop say the good words over it that it might be glad to hear. Mind, I’m not saying it is so, I’ve only said it might be so. I haven’t even said it would be effective, have I? Just that there’s no harm in trying.” And he shook his grey head as though he foresaw the failure of this belated attempt at exorcism of something unnamed and undefined. “Did you know what sort of monastery we had up here at the finish?” he asked mildly. “There were only four o’ the brothers left to take to the roads, and a beggarly sort of place they kept here. Hospitality for the stranger, my eye! There were strangers slept here overnight that never got where they were going. It was a long way for any bishop to come, to see for himself what was going on. And then, bishops are as fond of sleeping safe as the next man. No, I wouldn’t say Mottisham Abbey had a particularly holy reputation in its last days. Even the church, they say, saw some very odd goings-on before the finish.”
“Are you saying,” demanded the photographer bluntly, “that there’s something uncanny about that door?”
“I’m saying nothing, except that it’s better to be safe than sorry,” mumbled Saul darkly, “and back in the church is the best place for a door the like of that one. Don’t you get too inquisitive, my lad, about things that’s best let alone.”
“But what went on in the church?” the youngest reporter pressed avidly. “Do you mean black masses, and things like that?”
“Tisn’t for me to say. There were tales… there were tales…” The veiled eye and withdrawn manner implied that he had heard them all at firsthand, but didn’t propose to share them.
“Oh, go on!” urged Willie the Twig, fixing Hugh across the smoky room with an innocent grey stare. “Tell ’em about the family curse. Tell ’em what happens in every third generation, ever since the Dissolution…”
“Young man,” said Saul weightily, playing for time while he readjusted to this uninvited assistance, “there’s some things better not spoke of…”
“Why?” asked Hugh with interest. “It won’t just go away, whether you speak about it or not, everybody knows it happens.”
“Every third generation,” prompted Willie the Twig gently.
“Ever since the last abbot was thrown out to beg, and put a curse on the usurpers for all time…” confirmed Hugh. Dinah dug her elbow sharply into his ribs, but he only smothered a small convulsion of laughter in what was left of his beer, and looked round to claim Dave’s empty pint-pot. “You, Dinah? No? Here you are, Nobbie, love, same again!”
Saul’s stony eye fixed him balefully. Hugh suppressed his charming smile and gazed back in monumental and brazen innocence.
“But what does happen every third generation?” the youngest reporter insisted.
“Every third generation,” Saul said with vengeful deliberation, and his voice sank into the cellar like the demon king disappearing down a stage trap, “the second son is born a witless idiot.”