Duval tore down the screen to reveal the young man’s arms tied to the spars of the great wooden crucifix, his legs supported by a short plank. The officer’s anguished, tear-stained face was slumped on his chest, while the blood on the wounded forehead had congealed into an ugly brown lump. His chest displayed a series of small injuries as though bits of flesh had been scooped out with a razor-sharp spoon. Blood oozed from the wounds on to his shirt, which had been wrapped around his waist like a loin-cloth.
Marda did not faint. To the contrary, steel entered her soul. Adrenaline surged through her body and the exhaustion and pain vanished. She could see by the heaving of her brother’s chest that he was still alive.
Marda screamed at Duval, “Let him down! Let him down, you fucking bastard.”
“No, I cannot do that. You must see him die, Christine.” In his frenzy Duval’s voice had moved up an octave.
“First I must hammer in the nails, but it will be swift. Not like the crucifixion of our Lord. I shall break his legs and then it will be over quickly.”
Marda, screaming at him to stop, tried to wrench herself out of her handcuffs. She had lost much weight, but she could not slide her wrist out of the restraints. Her eyes bulged as the priest produced a claw hammer and long nails from a Gladstone bag.
Her eyes fell upon a large white candle, one of the three arrayed like an altar decoration near the base of the cross. She could just reach the nearest one, while Duval was busying himself standing on a stool to reach up and force the nails into her brother’s outstretched palms. Mark pulled up his head from his chest and stared in abject horror at Duval for a brief second before lapsing back into a stupor.
Marda had reached out to the candle with her free hand, and pulled it upright towards her. Without hesitation she poured the hot wax on to her manacled wrist. With massive control, she suppressed the scream of pain that rose within her. She tugged hard and the lubricated wrist slipped out of the metal restraint.
A primeval imperative took command of her as she leapt, like a crazed she-wolf, at the surprised priest, knocking him off the stool with the force of her attack. She tore at his eyes and his hair as he attempted to back off, utterly confused. Then she kneed him very forcefully in the groin, and he went down groaning. With her fists she lashed out again at the big man, and then, with her bare heel, gave him a stupendous kick in the crotch for good measure. She heard the wrenching of tissue.
The priest cried for her mercy, but she could not see anything but fire nor hear anything but a loud drumming. Again and again she pummelled him while he curled into a ball and cried in pain. She stepped over him, grabbed the hammer and rained his body with blows; from her unknown reserve of hate and anger, she found the strength to beat him almost senseless.
She turned quickly to her brother and, standing on the stool, used the V-shaped claw at the other end of the hammer head to lever the ropes off his wrists and over his hands. Taking his weight on herself, she half-fell and half-staggered to the floor. She hugged him for a few seconds before dragging him into her cell and manoeuvring his groaning body on to the bench. She poured water into his mouth, slowly at first, then more to help rehydrate him. That done, she rushed into the corridor to check on Duval.
He was gone. The cellar door, she knew, would be locked. Much stronger than she realised, he must have crawled up the stairs. Perhaps she should have ignored her instincts and gone for help, but she could not leave Mark hanging on the cross. She had no time now to consider her future; all that mattered was the immediate safety of her brother. After washing his wounds, she did her best to bandage them with strips of her bedding.
“Oh God, let him live,” she shouted.
Duval had crawled into his bathroom and run a deep, steaming bath to help ease the pain in his limbs and the searing agony in his groin. Then he staggered into the kitchen and poured himself some brandy. Taking a generous slug, he limped slowly into the hall, where he noticed a large brown envelope protruding through the letterbox. He tugged it out and glanced at the cover. It said, “By hand from Irvine M. Gould.” He moved painfully back to the bathroom to turn off the taps.
He eased his aching body into the bath and began to compose himself, to think himself out of his conundrum: I’ll leave that pair down there for a while. Let them starve. He’ll be dead soon and she’ll be too shocked to resist. I’ll have to kill her; she deserves it for betraying me. How could I have ever thought that she was sincere? The ungrateful bitch. How could she have turned on me, after all that I’ve done for her? I’ll bury them both and get away from this place. Nobody knows they are here. Nobody’s come looking for the brother.
The brandy and hot water relaxed him a little, and the pain began to subside. He was sore, especially around the groin; the bruising would be bad, but there were no broken bones. He was taken aback by her hidden strength; obviously he had fed her too well.
He soaked himself and pondered on his future away from Shere. Wallowing in the comfort of the bath for a long time, he felt the water grow cold and let some of it out, then re-ran water from the hot tap. As he waited for the half-empty bath to refill he leaned out to reach the envelope on the chair beside the bath.
Curious, he opened it. It contained about thirty sheets of paper. The first page was entitled “The French Adventures of the Anchoress of Shere: Research Findings of the Saint Sardos Archives by Professor Irvine M. Gould.”
The water was getting a little too hot. Putting Gould’s essay back on the chair, Duval bent forward and turned on the cold tap, balancing the force of the two jets to give himself a pleasant temperature.
With wet hands, he picked up the papers again. His first reaction was that the essay was typical American fantasy. “France?” he said venomously under his breath. “It’s not possible.”
He started to read very quickly, sickened and enthralled at the same time. After perusing a few more pages, his throat became constricted and dry. He grabbed a towel and stepped dripping out of the bath. Clutching the offending document, now damp in his hands, he closed the bathroom door and limped back to the kitchen. In his state of double shock, from the beating and Gould’s literary stab in his back, he did not notice that he had left the taps running.
Naked, except for the towel, he slumped into the rocker near the wood-burning stove. Although he rarely drank spirits, he swallowed his second double brandy in one gulp and turned back to the beginning of Gould’s version of the life of the Anchoress of Shere. He read it carefully through to the end while drinking another brandy. He read it again. Disbelief and scorn turned to enraged despair as Gould piled up the documentary evidence, the irrefutable records. The American’s research had been rigorous, with little conjecture. Gould had apparently proven that the anchoress had not chosen to return to the enclosure. He even suggested, quite convincingly, that the entombment had been forced on her-Christine had witnessed a murder involving a cleric in Vachery Manor, and the Church had connived at her enclosure to shut her up. She was compelled to undertake a vow of silence and enclosure, or her father would be exiled. As an extra inducement, her family was bought off with money and a small parcel of land. Poor Christine was no more than a victim of a conspiracy. She was never a visionary. Such was Gould’s interpretation from the evidence of the French archives. It made a mockery of Duval’s life work, and vindicated Gould’s remark that he would make the priest eat his words. Duval’s whole world collapsed around him.
Bobby came up and licked his hand, but the priest pushed the animal away. He opened the door of the wood stove, ready to project the offending article into the fire, but at the last moment hesitated and instead forced himself to read it again, much more slowly this time, stopping only to throw on a few dirty clothes that were piled on a kitchen chair.
Then he started to read it yet again, as though utter concentration on the text could transform its content. This time, after he had finished the first page, he started to chew at the end of the A4 sheet and then to bite it. “This is C-R-A-P,” he said bitterly, instinctively conforming to his habit of spelling out expletives. Then, with a manic laugh, he said, “And I’ll make it into C-R-A-P, too.”
Eventually, he masticated the whole page into a pulp that he swallowed. After another long swig of the brandy, from the bottle this time, he did the same with the second page. Then the third. On the fifth page, he started to choke. He tried to retch, but could not, because the sticky pulp had jammed in his windpipe. He coughed and retched, but it would not budge. He tried to reach into his throat with his fingers. Struggling for air, his eyes felt as if they would explode, but he could not scream. He retched again and then nearly collapsed, but he stretched out to the door, desperate for fresh air. He managed to stagger blindly into the garden. In his frenzy to breathe, and without any light, he fell headlong into the large hole he had dug; a grave not designed for its own creator. Duval’s collie stood guard on the edge of the hole, whining to the moon.
In the cellar Marda did everything she could to help her brother. She gave him water and tried to make him take some of the food she had held back from her own meagre supplies. He was unable to eat anything, but the water helped to ease the parched agony in his throat.
In a while his eyes opened and he moaned, and she tried to soothe him: “Help will come soon. Hold on, Mark.”
His eyes closed again. She made sure that he was covered by her blankets before going into the corridor to check the cellar door. It was locked, but she had light and the freedom to roam in the corridor. Some freedom, she thought.
Then she noticed that water was running into the corridor from the vents near the staircase. Soon an inch or so covered the floor of the corridor. It seemed to be a natural reservoir for wherever the water was coming from, on the other side of the vent. She stood on the stool to try to block the vent with the curtain material which Duval had used to veil his diabolical attempt to crucify her brother, but the force of the water made all her attempts useless. Then it hit her: My God, he’s going to drown us!
Time had become elastic for Marda. For a few seconds it seemed interminable, but then it became shockingly brief as she measured her lifespan in hours. The monster had taken Mark’s watch: she estimated that probably twenty-four hours had passed since Duval’s escape, but in her state of emotional distress she could have been wildly inaccurate. Her brother, though, was still alive; she cradled him in her arms to give him extra warmth, but the water was rising in her cell. It seemed to be rising more rapidly, as though, perhaps, the pressure of the escaping water had damaged other water pipes in the house. The water was cold. And it was now about eighteen inches deep. Soon it would flow over the bench, and she did not want her brother to suffer any more.
Eventually, with the very last reserves of strength, she dragged him to the stairs that led to the trapdoor. It was uncomfortable, but it was the highest point in the cellar. Somehow she managed to pull him to the top steps, where she held him, breathing erratically but swathed in blankets, like two marooned sailors together on a tiny raft.
Very soon, or so it seemed to Marda, the water was about four feet deep in a cellar transformed into a large underground cistern. Bizarrely, she recalled the poem that Churchill had quoted during the darkest days of the Second World War, the words her father had so loved to repeat.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking
Seem here no painful inch to gain
Far back through creeks and inlets making
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
It seemed a sick joke now.
Soon the water would reach the top of the stairs. She could not believe that after all they had gone through they would die by drowning, in the middle of winter in landlocked Shere; especially in a cellar where she had so often been short of water to drink. She tried with every ounce of her being to push up the trapdoor, but she knew it was double locked. She couldn’t understand why Duval had decided to kill them by drowning. Marda wondered whether he had recovered from the extremes of his mania and so perhaps did not want to murder them with his own hands. But why damage one’s own house? She could not see the logic, but logic was a stupid thing to expect from a homicidal madman.
Before the flood fused the cellar lights, she saw the pages of the final chapter of Duval’s crazy book floating in the corridor. She tasted again the dread of his anger.
As they huddled in the cold darkness waiting for death, Marda kept telling her brother how much she loved him. Every now and then he groaned in response to words he could no longer hear properly.
She would not die alone, as she had feared for so long, but that would have been preferable to making her brother die with her. Mark would have been alive and well in Germany if he had not searched for her. It was her fault, she told herself. Why had they both been deserted by the world, she wondered? She thought of Christ’s final words on the Cross. With all his faith, even He had felt forsaken.
Three days before, Professor Gould had dutifully phoned Germany, but was told that Captain Stewart was still in England. Delayed flights or something, he said to himself. He phoned two days later and got the same answer.
Now worried, he left his lodgings and walked across the square, past the war memorial and through the lych-gate. As he traversed the graveyard, Gould marvelled again at the instant changeability of the British weather: within seconds an overcast sky was sundered by a desperate winter sun, and yet despite the brief sunshine a stiff breeze arose. At its crescendo the wind’s piping in the trees prompted the erratic shadows to launch into a jig, focusing a rustic son et lumiere on the western porch of the ancient building. This was almost a divine invitation into the sanctuary of St. James’s church. For the umpteenth time the professor peered into what remained of Christine’s cell. As he looked into the black hole that was the quatrefoil, he wondered if he had been rather slow, too lost in the Middle Ages to realise what was happening around him in the present day. He resolved immediately to visit the police station, where he was told that the car belonging to Mark Stewart had been found abandoned.
He said little to the police, but he did not return to the White Horse, despite a storm that chased away the interlude of sun. Clutching his umbrella against the wind and lashing rain, he walked to the old rectory. He had just a few days left in England, and he had his excuse to see Duval, to discover the priest’s reactions to his “French” article, and ask whether Mark had visited again.
Finally and slowly, the professor realised that Duval, Marda and her brother were fusing into a related tragedy. His brilliant mind, like many of his kind, had missed the obvious, but he was still not sure. As he rang and rang the bell, the whining of the dog inside the house reinforced his concern. The clergyman’s car was in the drive-if Duval had gone out on foot for an extended period, he would probably have taken the dog.
“Where the heck is Duval?” he said to himself.
Gould went around the back of the house and found the kitchen door very slightly ajar. He knocked, waited and knocked again.
“Father Duval…Michael…Are you there?”
No reply.
He waited for two minutes.
Minutes that meant life and death in the cellar below. By pressing her head against the inside of the trapdoor, Marda could keep her nose above water, but it was far more difficult to keep Mark’s slumped head in the same position.
Professor Gould waited another thirty seconds.
Then he did a very un-English thing: he walked into the kitchen.
It was deserted except for the dog, who gave him a very cursory greeting then dashed outside. In the gloom of the late winter afternoon, Gould could see a strange mess of paper on the kitchen table. Pages from his article lay strewn on the floor.
He called out quietly, and then noticed that the floor of the kitchen was wet-a part of the floor in the corner was under an inch or so of water. The movement of the water had pushed a rug to one side. He saw a trapdoor and a sense of foreboding welled up inside him.
Obviously there had been some accident. He should go for the police, for Gould was the most law-abiding of men.
He shouted, “Father Duval!”
He heard a muffled response-somewhere. Then a banging from beneath the kitchen. He pulled the sodden rug aside from the trapdoor and strained at the bolts. Because of the suction of the water that had drained through, he had great difficulty in lifting it.
When he did, two startled eyes peered out of the gloom.
No sound came from the mouth below the eyes; eyes which showed the horror that silenced the tongue.
“Marda Stewart?”
A faint “yes” came from the lips.
“Give me your hand,” he said gently.
“No, get my brother out of here first,” she whispered, struggling to find the strength to speak. “He’s still alive… just.”
Gould carefully helped them both out of the tomb.