It was now virtually dark, thanks to the massive clouds that had rolled in from the sea, but occasional breaks fleetingly allowed moonlight to strike through. During one of these John saw a figure, almost invisible in black, standing still about two hundred paces away.
Then the light vanished, but a second later a flash of lightning lit up the whole scene and confirmed that it was Gilbert de Bosco, his arms upraised to the heavens.
‘It’s not safe,’ wailed the vicar, who now also stood on the wall, with de Alençon behind him on the top of the stairway. ‘He could fall, especially in his condition!’
‘Maybe that’s what he intends!’ said the archdeacon, gravely.
Suddenly, the clouds parted again and full moonlight fell on them. They saw that Gilbert had his face upturned, as well as his arms. He reminded de Wolfe of a church wall painting he had once seen, of some Old Testament prophet communing with God on a mountain in Sinai.
‘We must get to him before he falls or jumps!’ he snapped, starting to step along the walkway, which had low castellations on the outer side. It was narrow, dark and wet, so he moved carefully. The light brightened slightly as a wisp of cloud moved away, and he looked up. The orb above was an almost perfect circle — it was the night of the full moon.
‘De Bosco, keep still, man. I’m coming to get you,’ he yelled. Behind him, the archdeacon called out that he was following and John turned momentarily towards him. That probably saved his life and certainly his eyesight, as an explosion like the end of the world erupted near by, with a flash that would have seared his eyeballs if he had been looking ahead. A blast of air hurled him to the stones and only a crenellation on the outer side of the wall stopped him from being pitched over into Southernhay.
There was a sulphurous smell as the rain miraculously stopped and an eerie silence enveloped them.
‘Oh, good Christ, he’s gone,’ cried the vicar tremulously, pointing along the wall, where now nothing could be seen except a wreath of smoke ascending from a patch of fused sandstone where de Bosco had been standing.
John, shaken but unharmed, ran along the wall and looked down. There was nothing on the outer side but on a patch of waste ground at the foot of the wall on the city side, he saw an inert body.
They ran back to the steps, hammered down it and then along to where the canon lay. The coroner pushed the others aside and looked at Gilbert. His clothing had been rent into strip-like rags, singed and smoking and there was a fern-like pattern of pink lines across the skin of his exposed chest and belly, typical of other lightning strikes he had seen abroad.
The man’s mouth and eyes were wide open, as if he were staring and shrieking at the full moon above. John looked up at the wall from which he had been thrown and saw smoke still wisping up from the stones. Maybe it was the shock of almost being struck himself, but just as he had imagined when the roof of the Bush fell in he thought that, just for a split second, the smoke formed itself in the moonlight into an image of a bearded face.