The Second Sleep Page 9

  The blackthorns were in full bloom. A froth of sweet-smelling white blossom washed over him. In the fields beyond the hedges a dozen ewes lay on their sides on the cropped turf, feeding the season’s newborn lambs. He dawdled, beguiled by their soft bleats and the song of the skylarks hovering high overhead, until he recalled Gann’s prediction that if he stayed too long he would never leave the valley, whereupon he forced himself into a brisker pace. After several minutes of gentle climbing, a pair of large stone gateposts appeared ahead on the left, surmounted by what must once have been heraldic creatures – griffins, perhaps, or lions – but reduced by time to formless shapes, like guttered candles.

  The gates were missing. The drive was a track, no better than the lane. Waterlogged potholes, smooth as mirrors, held blue fragments of sky, and curved in a glittering archipelago for a hundred yards until they disappeared behind a pair of ancient cedars. To his right was a dense bed of waist-high nettles and thistles. He assumed it must be where the lodge had once stood. He hunted around for a stick and started hacking away at the tall weeds, beating them down and trampling them underfoot. The crushed stalks and leaves released a sour, pungent odour. He stung his wrist and gave a yelp of pain. The poison was at its strongest in spring.

  He threw away the stick and stood in the little clearing he had created, surrounded by clouds of midges and blue and yellow butterflies and sucked at the hives on the side of his throbbing hand. The foundations of the lodge must lie buried under several feet of topsoil. Apart from a couple of red bricks and a few lumps of concrete, there was nothing left to see. The air was hot, drowsy, still. Whatever had once stood here was long gone. He felt the impossible remoteness of the past and his earlier enthusiasm began to ebb.

  He returned to the drive and picked his way between the puddles, towards the cedars, until the house came into view. He had to stop to let his mind absorb it. The spectacle it presented was not unique: such haunted edifices were common enough in England, usually to be glimpsed from the road – roofless, windowless and burned out, long since looted of anything that might be salvaged for shelter or fuel. Visiting them on a Sunday afternoon was encouraged by the Church as a means of stimulating reflection upon the transience of human glory in comparison to God’s eternal kingdom. Fairfax had himself toured the magnificent gutted facades of Wilton and Longleat in the east, and Holcombe Rogus and Paignton in the west, and marvelled with his fellow sightseers at the civilisation that had produced them and the hubris that had led to their terrible fate. Durston Court, nestling in its own small dell about a quarter of a mile away, was not on the same scale as those ruined palaces, nor was it entirely abandoned, yet the effect was the same. He could see glass in the windows of the nearest gabled wing, and the roof above that section, at least, was intact. But the other three gables looked dangerously close to collapse, and at the far end only a great chimney stack remained, rising like a solitary tower to a height of three storeys. He wondered if he had misunderstood. Lady Durston might own this place; surely she could not possibly live in it?

  He descended through the desolate park, past crumbling centuries-old oaks and a beech tree turned to charcoal by a lightning strike. A stone bridge led over a muddy lake choked by water lilies, with the rotted ribcage of a rowing boat upended in the reeds, and then the drive turned away from the water and swept up over an unkempt lawn, between rhododendrons, to an immense front door. He hammered on it with his fist and waited, and hammered again, and waited longer. Still receiving no reply, he made his way along a terrace of uneven flagstones to the corner of the house, and then along the western flank.

  The shutters of the ground-floor windows were closed, the casements of the upper floors so overgrown with ivy it was impossible to make out all the rooms. The breeze ruffled the ivy and stirred in the ugly trees that had been allowed to encroach close to the terrace, and yet for a moment Fairfax saw the place as it might have been before the Apocalypse – music emanating from the ballroom, lanterns strung around the garden, couples strolling by a lake clear enough to reflect the moon, flying machines drawn up all the way along the drive to carry the guests home, oblivious to the disaster coming.

  At the back of the house was a cobbled courtyard with a stable block in better repair than the house. Women’s underclothes were drying on a washing line. In the far corner was the entrance to a walled garden. And there at last he saw a human figure – a gardener in shirtsleeves and a straw sunhat, bent forward slightly, using a scythe to cut a swathe through the weeds.

  Fairfax walked across the cobbles and called out a greeting: ‘Good afternoon!’ But the figure was too absorbed to hear him, and it wasn’t until he had entered the garden and was within a few paces that his presence was detected, at which point the gardener swung round in alarm and flourished the scythe blade at his throat. Fairfax recognised Sarah Durston at the same instant she recognised him.

  ‘Mr Fairfax!’ She lowered the scythe.

  ‘Lady Durston.’ He remembered to take off his hat. ‘I’m sorry to have startled you.’

  She was dressed in a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the tails tucked into a pair of heavy brown breeches, which were in turn tucked into a pair of old black riding boots. She was flushed from her exertions. Her face, her throat, her arms and even her shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, were wet with perspiration. She is a Ceres, thought Fairfax – who was prone to these flights of poetic fancy – a goddess of fertility.

  ‘And you must forgive me for being startled,’ she replied, ‘but we are quite out of the way here, and wary of strangers.’ She removed her straw hat. Her damp red hair was tied up at the back but had been plastered flat at the front and sides by the pressure of the brim. She used the hat to fan her face. ‘This is a surprise, Mr Fairfax. I had thought you lost to us by now, and back among the smart folk of Exeter.’

  ‘A mud fall bottled up the road.’

  She ceased her fanning and studied him. ‘Is the way not cleared?’

  ‘I believe it is now, yes.’

  ‘And yet you have not left? What brings you here?’

  ‘There is a certain matter I wish to discuss, if it is convenient.’

  ‘A matter concerning …?’

  ‘Your house.’

  She frowned. ‘What business is my house of yours?’

  ‘It bears upon the death of Father Lacy.’

  She stared at him a little longer. Perhaps it was his imagining, but there seemed to him a trace of reluctance on her part to continue the conversation. She fanned herself some more. ‘I swear I am as cooked by the sun today as I was drowned by the rain yesterday. How odd our weather is these days. Was it always so, do you suppose?’ She replaced her hat. ‘I cannot imagine what might tie the Court and poor Father Lacy, but I am ready to learn it. Come. We shall take some refreshment indoors.’

  It was more a command than an invitation. She shouldered her scythe and led him out of the garden. The house’s rear elevation loomed ahead. But instead of crossing the cobbled courtyard, she turned aside towards the stable block. Setting down her scythe beside the nearest door, she indicated that he should go inside.

  For the second time since entering her property, he was brought up short by the sight that met him. The space must once have been big enough to stable half a dozen horses, but the stalls and tack hooks and fodder racks had been removed and it had been turned into a sitting room – or salon, rather – using furniture presumably salvaged from the main house. A large, faded and elaborately patterned Persian rug covered the floor. Upon this stood a pair of gilt antique chairs upholstered in threadbare yellow silk, a two-seater sofa of matching fabric, and a low and rather ugly table with a glass top bearing a vase of daffodils. Three of the walls were hung with tapestries. The whitewash of the fourth was almost entirely obscured by paintings of elaborately costumed ladies, mustachioed soldiers in red uniforms, and a view of Durston Court and its parkland with children and hunting dogs in the foreground. The whole was lit by a golden blade o
f dusty sunshine thrusting down from a skylight.

  Fairfax took off his hat and gazed around him. He felt as if he had been carried back in time to a more genteel age, entirely unlike anything he had seen before, even in the bishop’s palace. ‘What an extraordinary room!’

  ‘When my husband died, I decided this would make a more comfortable home for a widow than that great tumbling tomb of a house.’ Lady Durston dropped into one of the armchairs and unfastened her hair, then threw back her head and shook it. Red tresses tumbled over her shoulders. ‘Sit down, Mr Fairfax. What refreshment can I offer you? Lemonade, or tea – or ale, perhaps?’

  He thought this might have been a sly reference to his behaviour the previous night, but then he remembered that mercifully she had left before he started dancing. ‘Lemonade, thank you.’

  He settled himself on the edge of the sofa. She picked up a small silver bell from the table and rang it. Almost at once, a young woman in a black dress appeared at the doorway. ‘Abigail, bring us lemonade.’

  After the maid had withdrawn, Lady Durston began working off her riding boots, kicking repeatedly at either heel to loosen them, then crossing her legs and tugging the leather casings free of her feet. She placed the boots carefully beside her chair and massaged her toes, which were clad, Fairfax observed with fascination, in slightly soiled white silk stockings. She glanced at him and he looked away.

  ‘My manners are doubtless rougher than they should be. We are only women here, and have become unused to polite society – or society of any sort, come to that.’

  ‘Only women?’ The notion shocked him. ‘Is that safe?’

  ‘Oh yes, quite safe. Abigail acts as maid, Jenny cooks, Mary aids me out of doors. I have my husband’s old musket. If heavy work requires a man, we hire him. The villagers leave us quite alone. I suspect they think us witches.’

  ‘Surely not!’

  ‘I am joking, Mr Fairfax. In future perhaps I should ring the bell to warn you when I am not to be taken seriously?’

  He was spared the need to reply by the return of Abigail carrying a tray. Lady Durston moved the vase to make space for it. After the maid had gone she poured two glasses of lemonade from a curious metal jug with a lid and a long curving spout. ‘You’ll take honey for sweetness? We grow our lemons under windows taken from the house. We also have three hives. Whatever we don’t use we take to Axford and sell.’ She spooned out some honey and stirred. ‘So we are quite sufficient unto ourselves – a regular little colony of Amazons.’

  She handed him the glass, raised hers to his and drank it down in one. He followed suit. ‘Very well,’ she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand in a way that would have been considered in Exeter most unladylike. ‘What is this about my house?’

  Fairfax set his glass back on the table. Now that it came to it, he was uncertain how to proceed. Away from the parson’s study, the whole affair seemed suddenly both far-fetched and fraught with risk, and nothing in his training had prepared him for such a conversation. Still, he took a breath. ‘I shall give you the facts of the matter as straight as I can. This morning I looked through the old church registers. One, very ancient, records a wedding held some eight hundred years ago – thirty generations’ distance from us by my reckoning, if one can conceive of such a span. At any rate, the bride’s address is set down as Durston Court Lodge.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘So she was a Durston?’

  ‘No, your ladyship, her surname was Morgenstern.’

  ‘Really?’ She gazed at him, very cool, but he detected the tiniest flicker of uneasiness in her eyes. ‘I thought only Durstons had ever lived here.’ She shifted round in her chair and nodded to the portraits. ‘My husband’s family built this place – a fact of so much pride to him, he flat refused to move out, even though the house was barely fit for pigs to live in.’

  ‘The register is quite clear on the point.’

  She gave a slight shrug. ‘Perhaps her father was the gatekeeper.’

  ‘His occupation is given as “professor”.’

  ‘And what was his particular study?’

  ‘I understand it to have been physic – the study of natural phenomena.’

  ‘Is that so?’ She picked up the jug of lemonade, as if to cover his disquiet and offered to refill his glass. He held up his hand in refusal. ‘But a tall tale, surely,’ she continued, pouring some for herself, ‘for why would the child of this professor of physic – and thus presumably the professor himself – live in so quiet a spot as this?’

  ‘My mind ran along a similar course. It is possible they did not live here every day. People then had mechanical means of transport, much quicker than anything we possess. They could even fly. He might have been able to travel here from London in less than a day. In that event, he could have made his work in the city, and retired here for his leisure.’

  ‘Less than a day – imagine! Well then, I suppose one must grant at least its possibility. But what has this to do with Father Lacy?’

  ‘I have found the parsonage to be filled with a great many volumes devoted to the study of the past. Objects also.’

  ‘He made no secret of his interest. What of it?’

  ‘For one thing, they are beyond doubt heretical – although that will be for my lord bishop to determine.’

  ‘What manner of books are they?’

  He hesitated again, then unfastened the collar of his cassock and withdrew the small book he had taken from the old priest’s bedroom. ‘There is one volume in particular that he seems to have been studying just before he died.’ He opened it to the marked passage. ‘In it is printed a letter written by the same Professor Morgenstern. At least I guess he must be the same, for there cannot be many others of that peculiar name.’

  ‘Ah! Now I am quite pulled in to your story. May I see it?’ She held out her hand. Fairfax withdrew slightly. What did he know of her really? Nothing but a handsome face, a ruined house and a certain force of manner. She reached out further. ‘Come, Mr Fairfax. Have some faith in my discretion, or I shall be insulted.’

  ‘Of course. Forgive me.’ He gave it to her. ‘But I would indeed be glad if the matter went no further. I am in an awkward place. I shall have to pretend to the bishop I have never read it.’ Although whether he will believe me, he thought, picturing that steely countenance, is another question.

  He watched her closely as she read – her forehead creased in concentration, her lips moving as they tried to shape themselves around the unfamiliar words. For all his misgivings, he found it a relief to be sharing his discovery. Such information was a heavy burden to carry alone. When she had finished, she let out a long breath, and he was gratified to observe that she seemed to be at least as stirred by Morgenstern’s appeal as he had been. She said, ‘I do believe that that is the most remarkable thing I have ever read.’

  He nodded eagerly. ‘I am left rocked from top to bottom! More than twelve hours have gone by since I first read it, and still I cannot rid it from my mind. It seems so fantastical, I ask myself: can it be genuine?’

  ‘How could anyone invent such a document? No poet ever conjured such a fancy! Why would they?’

  ‘For the purpose of sedition. Because it undermines the authority of the Church and reduces the mysterious workings of Almighty God to various speculations – six possible forms of catastrophe, and so forth. It places humans at the centre of the universe and suggests that His supreme will could be thwarted by mortal foresight. It mentions none of the things the Church teaches. Where is the Beast of the Apocalypse with its seven heads and ten horns? Where is Babylon and the Lake of Fire? The letter is heretical – even diabolical. Merely to possess it is to invite the severest penalty.’

  She stared into the middle distance. ‘Imagine living in those days,’ she mused, ‘feeling oneself sliding into an abyss and yet being powerless to do anything to escape it.’

  ‘Perhaps they did do something.’

  ‘But too late to have an eff
ect. Their world has passed beyond recall.’ She turned back a page. ‘His letter was written in March of their year two thousand and twenty-two. His daughter married when?’

  ‘That same summer.’

  ‘And when did the catastrophe occur?’

  ‘Three years later, in two thousand and twenty-five.’

  ‘In what season? Summer? Winter?’

  ‘The exact month is unknown. The Scriptures point only to the year six hundred three score and six. Although,’ he added tentatively, ‘I could perhaps hazard a view.’

  ‘Do it then.’

  ‘No, I would prefer not.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it is contrary to the Church’s teaching to dwell too closely upon such matters.’ Yet he could not resist it. ‘Very well, if you press me, I would say – judged on the number of burials held in the village in the autumn of that year – it was most probably sometime in the late summer, just before the harvest. People started then to die in the great numbers foretold in the Book of Revelations. Soon after that, the records cease. Whatever it was that happened was sudden and overwhelming.’

  She flicked the pages back and forth. ‘I wonder what became of Dr Shadwell.’

  ‘Dead by now, one would conjecture, given the severity with which the heresy was suppressed. Although I had a notion—’

  He stopped. He was talking too much.

  ‘A notion? What?’

  Reluctantly he continued, ‘It is fanciful, doubtless – but a notion that the man who cried out at the burial might have been him.’

  ‘Perhaps it was.’ She sat back in her chair for half a minute, staring at the open door. She seemed to be trying to make up her mind about something. ‘Can I trust you to be discreet, Mr Fairfax?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, somewhat offended, ‘seeing as I am most certainly trusting you to be the same.’

  ‘Then we shall be bound together in jeopardy.’ She rang for the maid, who appeared with such alacrity that Fairfax wondered if she had been listening at the door. ‘Abigail, bring my shoes, and a lantern.’