The Chalice (73 page)

      
'Just someone Violet could trust. She needed a custodian for
Meadwell. She was only fifty-six when she died. Leukaemia. She'd known it was
coming. Maybe years before, you know what these people are like. I doubt if it
worried her. Death was just a station between trains. That was what she told
Pixhill.'

      
Just saying it, hearing himself, Powys felt aglow with the certainty
of it all. Confirmation now in every response from Pennard, every change in
expression, every involuntary gesture.

      
'What changed?'

      
Pennard didn't reply. He reached for the whisky before remembering
the bottle wasn't there anymore.

      
'Why did you give up the fight to get Meadwell back?' Powys
said.

      
'Legal costs.'

      
'No.'

      
'No. Of course not.' Pennard stood up. 'What's your angle on
all this, Powys? What do you hope to get out of it? Book? Bloody bestseller?'

      
Powys shook his head. 'I'll be honest. I was going to tell you
I'd publish the whole thing if you didn't play ball.'

      
'And now?'

      
'It's too heavy. Until just now I don't think I entirely believed
it.' He leaned back at last on the stiff sofa. 'I don't want to threaten you.
It would be the wrong thing to do. I won't write about it.'

      
Pennard looked at him for a long time. 'I'm inclined to believe
you.'

      
'Then tell me what changed.'

      
'Why do you think I should?'

      
'Because I think it's something to do with Diane,' Powys said.
'Who, according to the late chairman of the Pixhill Trust, is in, and I quote,
danger of a most extreme and everlasting
nature.
And she's disappeared.'

      
Lord Pennard collapsed into his chair. He suddenly looked much
older.

TEN

Save Them from Themselves

'It was Archer, wasn't it?'

      
She kept opening her eyes but they wouldn't focus. She saw the
blobs of faces around her in the gloom, but their pictures fled as she tried to
identity them, flitting from one to another, very quickly. She thought she saw
the Pilgrims; Rozzie and Mort and Viper and Gwyn. She must be hallucinating,
dredging memories from the sludge of her subconscious. But in the end she could
concentrate on only one thought.

      
'It was ... Archer. Archer pushed her downstairs. Archer killed
her.'

      
Capturing the certainty before sleep reached out for her.

'I've never met him,' Powys
said reasonably. 'Never even seen him. Got no reason to think ill of him. Hell,
I'm not even very political.'

      
Working on information now that he hadn't found in Pixhill
papers. Piecing together what he'd gleaned from Juanita and particularly from
Verity. Verity who pattered about the streets and chatted innocuously,
sometimes inanely. And heard things…

      
'Is this gossip?' Lord Pennard seemed stunned, 'is this talked
about?'

      
'I don't honestly think it is. It just ... suggests itself. Maybe
... maybe it suggested itself to you.'

      
'How can I discuss this with you? I've never even seen you
before tonight. Certainly never heard of you. You lied to get in here; how do I
know you're not lying now?'

      
Powys said nothing. Pennard had his head in his hands.
      
He'd found another bottle of
whisky,

      
'My wife died after falling downstairs. She'd been to the
nursery. Liked to spend time there. Been redecorated, refurnished in pink. She had
her bed moved into the next room. Said she knew it was going to be a girl
because ... a
wise woman
had told
her. My wife believed in such nonsense. She'd sit in the nursery alone and read
for hours, as though the fact of the pink paint could influence matters at that
stage.'

      
He drank some whisky. His face no longer smooth and polished
but blotched with tension.

      
'Closed that part of the house now. Don't heat it, don't light
it. Let it damn well rot. If it falls down, it falls down.'
      
'Were you in the house at the
time?'
      
'I was in here. Didn't like her in
her maudlin, nursery moping mood. One of the maids - still had maids then - came
to tell me. They'd found my wife at the bottom of the stairs. Semi-conscious.
Called the doctor. And the Belvedere, the private clinic. Sent a midwife with
an assistant. Bugger-all use they were.'
      
'How near to time was she?'

      
'Seven months. Baby came out, but the damned placenta wouldn't.
Because of the fall. Place was like the inside of an abattoir.'

      
He choked back something and became annoyed with himself and
pushed all the bloodsports magazines to the floor.

      
Powys said, 'Someone told me Archer and his mother didn't get
on.'
      
'Who told you?'
      
'Does it matter?'

      
'No. It's true. This ... Dark Chalice business. This blasted
woman ... this Fortune ... Firth biddy ... spent a lot of time, apparently, with
my mother while my father was away at his… clinic. Whatever she told her, my
mother evidently passed on to Helen - my wife. One Christmas, few glasses of
wine, told the boy about the legend of the Chalice. My wife was furious.
Insisted it was up to the women of the family to exercise constant vigilance to
counter any attempt arising from "male avarice or poverty'', as she put
it, to "unbind'' the thing. Archer, of course, was immediately enchanted.
We'll get it back. Father, won't we?
Damn
it, if he hadn't learned about it from me, someone else would have told him.
Sooner or later.'

      
'Was that why your wife was so determined to have a girl?
Because the women ... ?'

      
'Doubtless. Archer was ten at the time. Don't think she was
ever close to him again. Almost afraid of him. And, of course, he played up to
that. I remember he once walked in while we were having dinner. Solemnly
carrying a chalice with a candle burning in it. Said he'd found it buried in
the grounds. Helen had hysterics. Turned out some boy had stolen the thing from
St John's. I think Archer paid him. It was smoothed over.'

      
The sleet had stopped. It was very quiet in the gunroom.

      
After a while. Lord Pennard said, 'Had the sheets burned. And
the mattress. And then the fucking bed. Chopped up and burned. Sat in the
library window, all the lights out. Watching the bed blazing in the walled
garden.'

      
Powys thought, nearly twenty-eight years ago, Pennard would have
been around his own age. Never imagined he'd be feeling so sorry for the guy.

      
'Rankin did the burning. Been with us about a year. Soaked
everything with paraffin. Lit up most of the lawn. When the fire burned low,
Rankin went away. Then Archer came out.'

      
Pennard pushed his whisky away.

      
'Had enough. Can't get drink any more. Can't get merry. Yes.
Archer came out. Arms full of toys and baby bedding from the nursery. Pink
teddy bear. I remember the pink teddy bear. With a bow. Archer burned them all.
He was grinning. The baby was born. I couldn't look at her. She had blood on
her. So I sat in the library in the dark and watched Archer burn all the toys.
Saw his grinning face in the firelight.'

      
Lord Pennard began to weep.

After much frantic struggling,
Juanita managed to get the shop door open and she threw herself out into the
street, blue coat under her arm.

      
Into the empty town, moving in a staccato, sporadic fashion.
Stubbornly doing 'normal' things, taking in images of ordinariness. She walked
across the zebra-crossing to the post office. Looked into the phone box, an
old-fashioned red one but the coinbox and phone were modern. A stand-up
sandwich board said:

LPS, TAPES,

CDS, ROOKS
BOUGHT, SOLD

On the other side, a
sticker had been slapped across the board:

Put Glastonbury First

- TAME THE TOR.

      
It was cold, but the sleet had stopped, leaving a thin glaze
of slush on the pavement; few feet tonight to trample it away. The sky was
clear again, almost starlit. There could be a hard frost, icy roads.

      
Alone on High Street, Juanita felt utterly wretched, but she couldn't
go back. Couldn't live with those pictures. Couldn't take them down or hide
them away, that would be the final rejection for Jim.

      
She struggled into her coat and stood for a while outside the delicatessen
near the crossing. She felt agitated. Her body twitching, itching. Her hands
ached abominably. She
felt used and betrayed. As if her body had been strengthened just sufficiently
to support the mind-twisting terror which began with the painting altering,
recreating itself in her head, an unseasonal fly from the attic mutating
obscenely into a symbolic black bus.

      
There were no roads at all in that picture, no hazy ley lines.
Somehow her mind had created them as an opening for the horrid black bus which
came out of the shadow-Tor and tunnelled into her brain.

      
A black bus was not a real hippy bus. Hippies had rainbow
buses.

      
The Pilgrims, though, they were different. Gwyn ap Nudd, lord
of darkness, his sickle raised. The Pilgrims laughing because they knew the Tor
had betrayed Jim and Juanita. The hill of dreams where she'd sat all night and
drunk cheap wine and watched for the good aliens, the mystic hill which Jim had
painted reflecting the last light... had reversed dramatically into the
negative image of itself, thus becoming a dark hill, and spewed out the black bus
of death.

      
And the good, hopeful hippies who danced like butterflies and
wished people love had given way to twisted, embittered hippies, children of
the Dark Chalice.

      
She felt the whole town twisting and turning and tightening
around her like the grey snake-hair of the black priestess, Ceridwen.

      
Who had Diane.

      
'Diane!' Juanita screamed. 'Where are you? Answer me!'
      
Nobody answered her. Alone on the
cold wet street, she sobbed and scuttled away, a Verity in the making.

There were questions he
didn't have to ask any more, like why Lord Pennard had abandoned attempts to
get Meadwell back.

      
Why he'd placed his daughter in the care of strict,
old-fashioned nannies who would take no nonsense. Who could be relied upon to
keep her away from Archer.

      
Why he'd sent her away to school after school. Why he wanted
her to marry a man in distant Yorkshire.

      
'You could never be sure, could you? Whether it was real or
the whole thing was fantasy. Whether Archer had actually pushed his mother downstairs
and might one day do something similar to Diane. You were just trying to keep them
apart as long as it was in your power to do so.'

      
'He's my only son.' When Pennard looked up, his face had hardened
again. 'My heir. The next Viscount Pennard. And before that he'll be the MP for
Mendip South. It's coming right again, Powys. We're selling the land for the road.
The future's sound. We never needed the chalice.'

      
'That's what Archer thinks too, is it?'
      
'Get out. Go on.' Pennard turned
away. 'We never had this conversation. I've never seen you in my life. Just get
out of my house.'

      
'Do you know where your daughter is now? Have you any idea?'
      
'Get out!'

      
'Don't you think it might be a good idea to report her
missing? To the police? They'd listen to you. They'd pull out the stops.'

      
Pennard didn't reply. He didn't move. He was like marble.

      
Powys found his own way out down a shabby, leather-smelling
passageway, frugally lit.
      
Rankin was waiting for him at the
front door.
      
'Get what you wanted?'
      
'More or less, thanks.'