Master of the Moor (12 page)

‘How’s Midge, Leonard?’ said Mrs Naulls in a new, slurred voice.

‘I’m Stephen.’

There seemed to be no more to say. He gave her a red jelly and she managed to eat it without dribbling. He thought of how he had held her throat and shaken her like an animal shakes its victim animal, desiring to break its neck. She had struggled and clawed at his hands to prise off the fingers and gasped out an address to him. His hands slackened and he gave a sort of sob and she said it again, choked it out, an address in Vancouver.

He was ready with his apologies, to go on his knees to her if necessary. Dadda’s temper, Dadda’s violence, that had raged in him, had burned itself out with a fizzle. She had got up with surly resentment, rubbing her neck, straightening her dress and her apron. The back door opened. Arthur Naulls was coming back from what he called his ‘constitutional’. She began getting their tea without a word, she never mentioned it again, never told anyone.

More than half his life ago. He felt that he disliked her no less intensely now than he had done then, yet he came regularly to see her, more regularly than her own children, so that he had a reputation in the family of being ‘good’ to her. Why did he come? Why would he go on coming, to sit by her and feed her with sweets, until she died? Because she was his only link with his mother and that illustrious ancestry? Did he, even now, hope for revelations or some gratuitous
gift? A long-passed-over message from Canada? A tale of Tace?

‘Arthur’s not been in once,’ said Mrs Naulls.

Stephen didn’t feel he could say her husband had been dead eight years. ‘He’s not been too well.’ That in a way was true. But she had forgotten, it seemed, the man and the grievance, and was gazing vaguely at him, clouded blue eyes, mushroom-white cheeks. He kissed her, put another jelly in her mouth, patted her shoulder. As he went she lifted her hand in the way she had done when he came. Going down the stairs, he met his aunt Joan and his aunt Kay coming up, carrying lupins from the Pettitt garden and a bottle of Lucozade.

‘Stephen’s always been good to his grandma,’ said Mrs Pettitt.

‘There was a lot about you in the paper, Stephen,’ said Mrs Bracebridge. ‘It was nice you putting that in about Dad working for Mr Tace.’

She must have thought ‘descendant’ meant ‘ancestor employed by’ or some such thing. The elder Naullses were all more or less illiterate. Conversely, that reminded him. ‘Does anyone ever hear from Peter?’

‘Peter?’

‘My cousin, Peter Naulls.’

‘You’ll have to ask your uncle Leonard about that,’ said Mrs Pettitt. She spoke in the tone of one cautioning a former associate of the Prodigal Son. ‘Nobody condescends to tell us, do they, Kay?’

They went on up, whispering together, tip-toeing. They were the kind of women who behaved in hospital as if they were in church. Stephen got into his car and drove home the long way round via Byss and Loomlade. The rain had stopped and it was warm
and humid, the sky feathered all over with tiny golden clouds. The evening sunlight lay like a gilding over the distant reaches of the moor. Stephen, thinking of his grandmother, remembered those letters he had written while in his teens to Mrs Brenda Evans at Tobermory Park Road, Vancouver, and to which he had received no reply. His grandmother, probably, had given him a false address. What did it matter now? He was sure he no longer cared. He had put away childish things.

Chesney Hall
was a mid-eighteenth-century house with a central portico equal to the whole height of the building. This portico had a double tier of Corinthian columns and windows set in massive dressings of ashlar between which nestled the blue plaque:
Alfred Osborn Tace, Novelist, lived here 1883–1949
. But the public were required to enter by a side door into a garden room from which, it seemed to Stephen, they were almost furtively huddled first to the study, then to the drawing room, lastly to the library, being carefully kept away from those regions private to the South worth family. He began to wish he hadn’t come, though he had felt that now at last the opportunity was offered to him it was impossible to stay away. He recalled stories he had read of dispossessed or unrecognized heirs returning to their ancestral homes as servants
or in guises nearly as humble. That was how he felt.

Southworth was there but not, as he put it to the visitors who entered somewhat cautiously among the cane furniture and potted plants, himself doing the honours. This was the province of a guest in the house, a professor of English at an American university. Southworth could be heard telling the rector of St Michael’s that this friend of his was a world authority on Alfred Osborn Tace. He was a big rangy bearded man in jeans and the kind of full flowing smock worn by nineteenth-century painters. When Stephen came into the study he was holding forth, the centre of a circle of visitors, most of whom had never heard of Tace until the Bleakland series came on television. His words, learned, scholarly, uttered in the harsh accent of the Middle West, issued from out of a luxuriant brownish-greyish-fairish mass; moustache, beard, hair all meeting and intermingling to leave only a few bare centimetres about the nose and between the eyes. The expressions of his listeners were bewildered as he led them on into the drawing room.

To move around like this with the herd Stephen felt an injury to himself as Tace’s grandson. He resented the professor, his learning, his enthusiasm, his seeming indifference to his audience as individual people. Yet he was once or twice on the point of going up to the man, and if it were possible to interrupt his flow of talk, of declaring himself as Tace’s descendant. But the professor, he was sure, would only ask which university he had been to, a question to which he was always sensitive.

Lyn walked about, admiring furnishings, pictures, first editions, but Stephen could only feel more and more aggrieved. It was especially humiliating to have
to take his turn in a queue before he could look at the photographs in their silver frames, Tace with his parents, Tace up at Oxford, Tace with his wife. The drawing room was spacious, the ceiling high, the walls panelled in white and apple green, and set about were those chairs Dadda claimed Whalbys’ had refurbished. Over the marble fireplace was John’s portrait of the novelist, in a glass-fronted cabinet his favourite reading matter, Gibbon, Fielding, Defoe.

It made Stephen’s heart swell, it was almost painful, to think that all this might have been his, that if the law in the 1920s had been what it was today, very probably
would
have been his. Only the other day he had read in the
Echo
about a man who had died without making a will, yet his illegitimate daughter, whose mother at the time of her birth even had a husband living, had nevertheless been allowed to inherit all her father’s property.

Thinking of this, he looked up from a rather bitter scrutiny of Tace with Lady Ottoline Morrell photographed at Garsington, to meet the eyes of a member of the
Echo
’s staff. Harriet Crozier was standing by the grand piano, taking notes on a small pocket pad. She was differently dressed today, wearing blue jeans and a white blouse, but once more her hair was hidden, tied up in the same blue, green and white patterned scarf.

‘I’m trying to get some impressions for a sort of atmosphere story,’ Harriet said. ‘Something to tie in with the TV series.’ Pointing to the photograph of Mrs Tace, she asked rather naïvely, ‘Was that your grandmother?’

‘Good Lord, no.’ Stephen gave her a mysterious smile. ‘Mine is a bar sinister connection, I’m afraid.’ She obviously didn’t understand. ‘The wrong side of the blanket,’ he explained.

She looked confused. He would have said more but for Mrs Newman and Joanne coming up to them. He
scarcely recognized Lyn’s sister. The ballooning shape was the same, enveloped in a tent of flowered cotton, but a crop and short tight curls transformed Joanne’s face.

‘Kev said better safe than sorry.’

When she understood Harriet Crozier let out a nervous shriek of laughter. ‘Maybe you should have it dyed black as well. D’you mind if I write a story about it? I mean about Three Towns girls cutting off their hair and dyeing it. I’m a reporter. It’d make a great story.’

Joanne was huffy at first but presently relented. They all went back to Tace Way. Lyn made tea while Harriet interviewed Joanne and got what she called ‘quotes’ from Mrs Newman.

‘What about you?’ she said to Lyn. ‘Are you going to defy him and keep your hair long?’

Lyn said quietly, ‘Are
you
?’

‘I cover mine up. I don’t go about looking like Alice in Wonderland.’

Although it was hours yet before it would be dark, although the sun was still high in the sky, Stephen walked with Harriet as far as the bus stop. The last of the visitors to the Hall had gone and the professor could be seen walking back towards the house from the road.

‘He’s just had a biography of your grandfather published. I expect you know all about that, though.
Muse of Fire, A Life of Alfred Osborn Tace
by Irving J. Schuyler.’

Stephen hadn’t heard of it but he wasn’t going to say so. ‘I haven’t read it yet.’

‘They sent us a copy at the
Echo
.’ Harriet gave another of her shrill nervous laughs. ‘I don’t know who they thought was going to review
that
. D’you want to read it? I’ll drop it in to you sometime when we’ve done with it.’

For a moment he had thought she was going to ask him to review the book. She didn’t and he was affronted.

He said distantly, ‘I expect I shall get a copy sent to me.’

Was it his imagination that she seemed disappointed? It occurred to him that she liked him, liked him in a way he had never really ‘liked’ a member of the opposite sex. As Kevin or perhaps Ian Stringer might have put it, she ‘fancied’ him. He recoiled from her with a feeling that was part distaste and part fear.

The bus came before they had waited five minutes. He saw it bear her away with relief. It had been an unpleasant day, fraught with humiliation, with intensely irritating, troubled moments. But when he looked back over the past weeks it seemed to him that all his life recently had been like that, the even tenor of his way disturbed, even his marriage, once so smooth and serene, in some indefinable way changed. He could put a date to it, he could fix the point at which this change had begun. It was on the day in April that he had found the body of Marianne Price.

A white gauze of mist, that might have been heat haze or might later turn to rain, hung over Vangmoor next morning. Stephen had got up and come out very early before Lyn was awake. He wore a sweater, an anorak and carried his rucksack in which were the rope, the big new torch, two candles, a saucer and a box of matches. He had also brought with him two bread rolls filled with sliced Gouda cheese. Taking provisions with him onto the moor was something he liked to do, something he and Peter had done daily when they had been searching for Apsley Sough. Stephen sat down and ate his breakfast. He leaned against one of the upright
stones, shaped rather like gravestones, of which there were several in the dale and which had once denoted the ownership of or title to a vein of lead ore. This one was engraved with a K for the Duke of Kelsey.

Between where he was and the shelf of rock that skirted Big Allen, a flat circle of stone paving like the rim of a round pond was embedded in the turf, was now indeed partly overgrown by the turf and heather, and in its grassy centre the dark-wooled sheep were grazing. Peter and he had often wondered what this circle was, had thought it ancient, as old perhaps as the Foinmen themselves. Stephen now knew that it was centuries younger than that, a crushing circle on the rim of which a horse had walked round and round, pulling the heavy stones that crushed the lead ore out of the lighter rock. He began to walk towards the foin, not exactly reluctantly, but feeling pinpricks of trepidation now that the time had come to enter the mine again.

Two derelict coes, mine buildings erected over climbing shafts and in which the miner had kept his tools, lay to the right of him. One of these was a ruin, no more than a heap of stones, but the other, though nearly roofless, still stood. Stephen had been inside the coes before to check how thoroughly the old shafts had been filled in and blocked. He dropped his rucksack on the ground inside the stone hut that was known as the George Crane Coe, and set off with the rope slung over one shoulder, the candles in his pockets, and carrying the torch.

This time he found the entrance to Apsley Sough without difficulty. He anchored the rope to the protruding lip of rock just as he and Peter had done seventeen years before. But this time he found himself to be less single-minded than he had been then. As far as he could remember, in those days he and Peter had
thought of nothing but of getting into the mine, of nothing but the adventure ahead. Now he was hesitating, feeling the warmth of the sun on his face as it permeated the mist, even gazing across the dale to what he had sometimes written of as the finest view on Vangmoor, the prospect of Blathe Foin with Tower Foin rising stark behind it, gazing as if he might never see it again, as if the earth he proposed to enter might swallow him up for ever.

With the rope and his supply of light, though, he was quite safe. He knew that. It even seemed rather silly to have hidden his rucksack, for there was no one anywhere on the moor. He hadn’t seen a soul since leaving Chesney, and then only the milkman and the boy who delivered the papers. The moor had been deserted since the second murder. Apart from man’s vestiges, the remains of surface workings, it was as it must have been before man or the animals came, peaceful, bare and in the morning mist, mysteriously veiled.

He parted the bushes at the opening to the shaft and peered down. Dark, a stony, earthy smell, nothing to be seen. He took the rope in his hands and lowered himself down until his feet found a purchase in the footholes that had been cut haphazardly out of the rock wall. The shaft was about two feet six in diameter, a narrow slanting tube in the roots of the mountain.