Merrily looked up into the denseness of the yew tree which was said to have grown on the spot where the body of Marion de la Bruyère had come to rest. The tree threw a circle of darkness. It was probably hundreds of years old, its leathery trunk knobbed and warted and suggestive, here and there, of twisted faces. Behind it was the dizzying sheerness of cliff… wall… tower… sky. About a dozen black window spaces had been punched in the tower walls, irregular, like holes in cheese.
‘This girl Jemima came out of one of them,’ Jon Scole said. ‘Didn’t look too bad, according to what people say. I’ll have to use her, eventually. She’ll become part of the myth. You think that’s tasteless?’
‘It’s what you do,’ Merrily said.
Walking down from The Linney – very steep, too narrow for cars, old houses on one side built up against the castle walls – he’d told Merrily about his efforts to get some kind of relationship going with Bell Pepper, whose Weir House was below them, hidden in the bristle of pines above the river.
Seeing the look on her face, he’d gone backing off, hands up, tangled blond hair bobbing, chains jangling.
‘Whoa! No, not that kind of relationship. When I’m with her, I’m dead careful to make sure we don’t accidentally, like, touch. No blue sparks.’
‘Blue sparks?’
‘Apart from us being not exactly contemporaries, Mary, it would probably ruin any chance of a business arrangement.’
He was probably right to be cautious. It was unlikely, for instance, that Callum Corey would be lured back to The Weir House, no matter how much money was on the table.
‘What kind of business arrangement did you have in mind?’
‘Dunno, really. But if I can’t make a few quid out of her, who can?’
‘You selling her albums in the shop?’
‘Sore point, Mary. I started selling the albums – Nightshades, very moody cover – and then Doug Lackland, George’s elder son, he drops in one afternoon for a discreet word.’ Jon did the accent. ‘ “Now, we don’t want to underline that she’s livin’ here, do we, Jonathan?” CDs quietly disappear. Dougie bought the lot. No skin off my nose, but it’s not on, is it?’
They’d followed the rising stone wall to the walkway below the castle along which, Jon said, demure Edwardian ladies with parasols had once paraded. As distinct from a volatile Viking in a motorbike jacket and a scruffy little vicar in jeans, a well-worn fleece and tinted glasses.
‘See where that shelf of rock projects?’ he said now. ‘Back of Jemmie’s head hit that with some force, so that were a bit messy, you know, but her face wasn’t damaged. That’s what they say. It’s kind of a – what would you say? – an elemental way to go.’
‘People say you’re dead before you hit the ground,’ Merrily said dully. ‘Or maybe that’s when the parachute doesn’t open.’ She looked up. ‘It doesn’t seem far enough for that.’
The clouds, empurpled by Merrily’s glasses, were foaming now, with not-quite-rain. She walked up to a jagged crevice in the bottom of the rock face or the castle foundations. It was like the beginnings of a cave, or a recess where a statue should be placed – a natural shrine. Someone had left a small posy of flowers in there: anemones.
‘Would’ve smashed every bone in her body,’ Jon Scole said.
‘I thought you said—?’
‘No, I’m thinking Marion now. Would’ve been all rock down here then. I ’spect it’s worn away a lot in eight centuries. And she most likely came from the top.’
‘It’s a very violent way to go,’ Merrily said. ‘A tumult of emotion there. A feeling of betrayal, sure, but she’d also just killed the man she’d loved. Absolute desolation.’
‘You talk like Robbie,’ Jon said.
‘What?’
‘Robbie… the way he’d talk you through it. This little stunted kid in a woolly hat under a lantern in the dark. He didn’t use big words like “desolation” but he’d tell you about all these enemy soldiers swarming up the rope ladder, swords and knives coming out. The guards and retainers not expecting it, having their throats cut. Stone stairs all slippery with blood. Marion running up ahead of them, wi’ blood all over her nightdress and her hands soaked from hacking to death, as you say, the man she loved. And I remember, Robbie said she was sick. He said she had to stop on the stairs to be sick. I mean, that’s not in the story, is it?’
‘Rings true, though. If you imagine all the adrenalin and the extreme violence. The heavy action going on all around, with the enemy pouring in. Everything happening so fast, and her own frenzied reaction when she worked out what she’d let happen. And then she looks back for a moment, realizes what she’s just done to Arnold de Lisle, and her stomach…’
Jon Scole smiled. ‘You want a part-time job?’
A twig snapped under Merrily’s shoe, and she spun round.
‘You’re even scaring yourself,’ Jon said.
‘Was he that vivid about all the ghost stories? Robbie?’
‘Fair to say that were probably his best.’
‘Because if it wasn’t an accident and he killed himself because he couldn’t bear to leave his beloved Ludlow, why did he jump off the wrong tower? Why didn’t he jump off Marion’s tower?’
Jon blew out his lips. ‘Got me there. I mean, I remember he used to say we couldn’t really be sure of anything, because a lot of the castle were built afterwards – after Marion died, that is, which was back in the reign of Henry II or somewhere around there. So it would’ve all looked different, then, anyway.’
‘But Marion didn’t throw herself off the keep. That’s a certainty, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a longer drop, though. You can go right to the top. You’d be more sure of a result.’ Jon Scole walked over to the ancient yew, fingered its swarthy, resinous skin. ‘If this old bugger could talk.’ He grinned. ‘Maybe it can. A lot of mysticism around yew trees.’
‘So I’ve heard.’
‘All about immortality, Mary. Yews go on for ever. Some of them are two thousand years old. They’ve always got them in churchyards, and sometimes they’re older than the church.’
‘I don’t think that’s my kind of immortality,’ Merrily said. ‘Rooted in one spot, for ever and ever.’
‘That would depend on the spot,’ the woman said.
It was hard to say how long she’d been standing there, on the edge of the path, her back to the river and the hills and the forestry. She wasn’t wearing a cape, just one of those ankle-length Barbour stockman’s coats, in dark blue, fastened to the top, the storm-flap half covering her chin.
Merrily thought, How quiet she looks, how demure, how genteel.
‘Actually, I understood that yew trees did well in churchyards because they thrived on corpses,’ the woman said.
28
Tonguing the Yew
IT WAS STRANGE, the fame thing. You told yourself that you would never be overawed by people just because you’d seen them on TV or they were in the Cabinet or the Royal Family. Experience had told you that movie stars and government ministers were often narrow and paranoid, and that power not only corrupted, it reduced.
But it was different with someone who had been famous in the days when you’d been impressed by celebrity and notoriety. There was some part of you that wasn’t going to let go of that, and the old shiver went through Merrily.
‘Historians say the sacred tree of the Druids was the oak.’ That voice of dark green glass. ‘But the Druids wouldn’t have got it that wrong.’