‘Pull it up, then,’ said the crone over my shoulder.
I stooped and heaved on the rope with a force that sent me staggering back, so that both Etheldreda Simpkins and myself ended up in a tangled heap on the dusty floor. Etheldreda swore with a fluency that commanded my admiration. I knew few men, including myself, who could have equalled her vocabulary.
‘You didn’t have t’ pull on it like that,’ she reprimanded me when once she had caught her breath. ‘It do come up easy.’
‘I realize that now,’ I snapped. ‘I didn’t expect it to. I thought it would be difficult to move.’
I picked myself up and helped my companion to her feet. Cautiously she felt herself all over to ensure that nothing was damaged.
‘You can’t be thrown around like that at my age, young master,’ she complained, whistling louder than ever. ‘It ain’t right nor seemly.’
I apologized before again turning my attention to the trapdoor. This now lay inner side up, flat on the floor. I crouched down and examined the enormous iron hinges. They gleamed with oil fairly recently applied and I glanced up at the old woman.
‘The crypt must be in fairly frequent use,’ I said. ‘So what’s it used for?’
She shrugged her thin shoulders. ‘I think the priest do let people store their rubbish down there.’
I nodded. There was a church, St Giles, not far from where I lived in Bristol, where the crypt was similarly rented out by the local incumbent to supplement his starvation wages.
‘If you want t’ ask him,’ Etheldreda went on, ‘he’m about somewhere. We do share him with St Mary Bothaw, St Swithin and St John Wallbrook.’
‘That won’t be necessary.’ I could see a flight of steps descending into the darkness. ‘Where are the candles and tinderbox kept?’
‘You going down, then?’ When I nodded in affirmation, she sniffed. ‘What you do need’s a lantern. It be draughty down there. A candle’ll blow out easy. Stay here. I’ll go and fetch one. My house is just across the street. I won’t be two shakes o’ a lamb’s tail.’
She was as good as her word, moving with a celerity that belied her years. And if she took a little longer than the promised ‘two shakes’ I barely noticed it as I crouched on my haunches staring into the chasm below me, trying to identify the smell which rose from its depths. Must and decay and damp made up the greater part of it, but there was something else; something I could not place and yet was oddly familiar; something that made me strangely uneasy.
I was still puzzling over it, but still without an answer, when Etheldreda returned carrying a lighted lantern which she handed to me.
‘You go first,’ she said.
I was taken aback. ‘You’re coming down with me?’
‘Why not?’ She cackled again, this time full in my left ear, making it sing. ‘Never been down there, so here’s my chance. And with a handsome young fellow like you, as well! Mus’ be my lucky day!’
‘Mind you don’t slip,’ I warned her, holding the lantern higher.
To my surprise, there were at least a dozen steps: the chamber was deep underground. And the old woman was right. It was devoid of any tomb, so the priest allowed his parishioners to use it as a repository for unwanted odds and ends. The feeble rays of my raised lantern showed the same jumble of broken furniture as could be found in St Giles’s crypt. Here and there were more useful items, such as a pile of wooden planks and a stack of undamaged tiles, but in general there was little of value and certainly nothing worth stealing. No thief would find it worth his while to risk the steep descent for such rubbish. And the church itself offered nothing to tempt the light-fingered. The door could be left unlocked with perfect safety.
The noise of running water was louder down here. I noticed that the walls glistened with damp and were patched with mould. The Wallbrook must be very close. The smell, too, was slightly more pungent, but my nose was growing used to it, and after a very few minutes failed to be irritated by it any longer.
‘They do say,’ Etheldreda volunteered, peering about her, ‘that there did used t’ be a Roman what-d’you-call-it hereabouts. Wouldn’t be a church, now would it? Not with them worshipping all them heathen gods.’
‘Temple?’ I suggested
‘That’d be it.’ She whistled again through the gap in her front teeth. ‘Old John Marchant, him what lives in one o’ the end houses, reck’ns it had summat to do with a bull. Sounds a rum do t’ me, but you c’n never tell with them folks from ancient times.’
‘Mithras,’ I said. ‘Your friend reckons that this — or near here — was the site of the Temple of Mithras?’
I knew all about Mithras, the soldier’s god; the god of the Roman legions. His story had been told in one of the forbidden books in the Glastonbury library whose locked clasps had been picked by my fellow novice, Nicholas Fletcher. And having read it, I could see why, in many ways, it was far more disturbing than the lascivious tales of the daughters of Albion and their ilk, and why Brother Hilarion had been far more upset by our reading it than all the rest put together.
A thousand years ago, Mithras had been born in a cave in Persia in midwinter, while shepherds watched nearby and a star shone in the heavens. He was represented with a torch in one hand and a knife in the other, and with the knife he had single-handedly killed a great white bull, cutting its throat so that its shed blood should bring fertility to the earth. And then, after a last meal of bread and wine, he had been taken up to heaven. His name meant ‘friend’ because he was the protector of mankind in this life and guarded him from evil spirits after death.
‘What d’you say he was called?’ Etheldreda’s voice cut into my thoughts and made me jump.
‘Mithras,’ I said, and told her the legend.
She frowned, sucking her bottom lip. ‘Sounds blaspheemious t’ me,’ she opined at length as she puzzled over the familiar elements of the story. ‘Didn’t ought to be taught to young folk like you.’
‘It wasn’t.’ And I regaled her with the circumstances which had attended my first reading of the tale. This amused her greatly and diverted her attention, as I had hoped it would. She was too old to be bothering her head over questions of religious belief. And anyway, such questions were dangerous.
‘There don’t seem t’ be much down here worth looking at,’ she finally remarked. ‘And I’m getting cold. ’T ain’t good for we old ’uns t’ get shivery. I’m going now. You c’n poke about a bit more if you want. You c’n return the lantern when you’m finished. It’s the house opposite the church door.’
I thanked her and lighted her progress up the steps until she disappeared through the trapdoor at the top before returning to my survey of the crypt. At first glance — or, in this case, at a second and third glance — it seemed as though Goody Simpkins was correct; there was nothing more to see than we had already discovered. But my natural stubbornness made me prowl around yet again, the lantern’s pale rays fitfully illuminating the broken or unloved bits of old furniture that had been stored down there: a three-legged stool, a chair with an awkward back, a hideous pot which had probably been someone’s wedding gift and hated on sight. And certainly there was nothing to have tempted Amphillis Hill down there. I decided that the old woman must have peeped into the church before Amphillis arrived.
I held the lantern higher for one last fleeting glance around, and was about to make for the steps when there was a scraping sound followed by the crash of something falling. I swung to my right, my heart beating furiously, the beam from the lantern careering madly up and across the walls and finally coming to rest on a number of wooden planks that had been propped vertically in one corner. One of them must have toppled over — maybe I had accidentally brushed against it — bringing a second one down with it. The noise in that confined space had been deafening, making me jump and my heart hammer in my chest.
Disgusted with myself for being so easily frightened, I put the lantern on the floor and went to lift the fallen planks, propping them once more against the wall. It was as I was positioning the second of the two that I suddenly noticed what seemed to be a latch and realized that I could be looking at a door. It was partially concealed by the wood which had to be removed by anyone wishing to make use of the entrance. I guessed that whoever had closed the door last had been in something of a hurry and had failed to prop one of the planks upright.