A Shadowed Evil Page 27

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t do it just to spite her!’ Isabelle exclaimed angrily.

  ‘No, I’m sure not. And then, when she was newly widowed, with no money and the imminent prospect of losing the roof over her head—’

  ‘Along comes my big-hearted, chivalrous son, who conveniently falls for her, marries her, and sweeps her off to live in a grand and beautiful old house, where she is called upon to do nothing more arduous than work at her needlepoint,’ Isabelle finished for him.

  He didn’t reply. In truth, there was nothing to say. ‘What was she, Josse?’ Isabelle said in an anxious whisper. ‘A witch? An evil spirit in human form?’

  Josse had no answer.

  ‘Cyrille recognized the beggar when he came to the door, of course,’ Helewise said to Josse as finally, with the household and the guests having retired for the night, they sat together beside the dying fire.

  ‘Aye,’ he agreed. He had been thinking the same thing.

  ‘What I took for horror at having a leper so close to the house,’ Helewise went on, ‘was in fact horror of a different sort. She recognized the uncle she had treated so badly, and instinctively she hid her face with her veil, so he wouldn’t know who she was. Only he did.’

  ‘And made up his mind to do what?’ Josse asked. ‘There was obviously some plan in his head, when he let us take him down to the monks at Lewes Priory.’

  ‘Well, for one thing, nobody believed that a leper would ever be coming out again, which would have given him a perfect alibi for – er, for whatever he decided to do.’

  ‘Aye, I worked that out, too,’ Josse agreed.

  She looked at him. ‘You listened to him tell his story, Josse. What do you think? Did he slip out of the priory with the express intention of going back to Southfire Hall to accuse her? To kill her?’ she added in a whisper.

  ‘To accuse her, aye, I’ll believe that,’ he said. ‘As for killing … I just don’t know.’

  ‘I think I do,’ Helewise said after quite a long time. ‘I think he came to seek her out and, by some stroke of fortune – I don’t know if it should be called good or bad fortune – he happened upon her just after the fall. And—’ She stopped.

  ‘And, seeing her lying there, helpless, in the most perilous situation, he decided to walk away,’ he finished for her.

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, Josse, do you think he stood and watched? Do you think he hated her that much?’

  He looked at her for a long moment. The vision she conjured up was indeed frightful, and he could barely conceive of anyone doing something so dreadful to another human being.

  Cyrille de Picus wasn’t human, said a soft voice in his ear.

  Helewise was looking at him expectantly, waiting for an answer. He reached out for her hand, drawing her close. ‘Aye, I think he did,’ he said.

  The Southfire kinswomen stayed for another day and night, then set off for home. Josse and Helewise rode with them as far as Hawkenlye Abbey, where they would halt briefly so that Emma could have a look around the abbey, speak to some of the nuns about their life there and, most importantly, have a formal audience with Abbess Caliste about the possibility of her entry into the community as a postulant.

  Emma emerged from the abbess’s little room at the end of the cloister with shining eyes and a joyful expression.

  Observing her as, walking between her mother and her grandmother she went to fetch her horse and mounted up, Josse said to Helewise, ‘Do you think she’ll enter the community?’

  Helewise turned to him, smiling. ‘We’ll see.’

  By an unspoken conspiracy, all the people touched by Cyrille de Picus’s death resolved to regard it as a sad accident. The forces of law and order were not put on the trail of the beggar; as Josse remarked to Helewise, what would be the point? The man had not been responsible for her fall out of the solar window, and even the wisest in the land could not now say whether, had the water not killed her, she would have survived the devastating damage of the accident.

  Josse wondered what had become of the beggar. Was he still out there, treading his lonely path? The awful thing was, as fair-minded, law-respecting Josse was forced to admit, he had a sneaking sympathy for the poor man. Although he sincerely hoped he would have done his utmost to drag Cyrille to safety as she lay there helpless, the water rising, he found he just couldn’t find it in his heart to condemn the beggar. He confessed the sin, did penance, sincerely apologized for his lack of charity, prayed to God to give him the grace to mourn her as he should. But nothing seemed to work.

  Whatever he tried, he just couldn’t help feeling that, with Cyrille de Picus no longer in it, the world was a better place.

  Helewise told nobody, not even Josse, what Olivar had said to her. Indeed, as the days and the weeks went by, she was increasingly inclined to dismiss it; to put it down to the effects of severe shock on a small child.

  But it wouldn’t quite be dismissed …

  She knew one thing: she had to go back to Southfire Hall one day. It both attracted and scared her, a little, but the attraction outweighed the fear, and she knew she had to return and find out more.

  Not that it was going to be difficult.

  Josse had fallen in love all over again with the house he knew in childhood. The house of my ancestors, he mused, sitting by the fire in the House in the Woods, his thoughts far away. Into his mind flitted an image of the strong, matriarchal women who tended the sacred fire up on the downs and, in the end, commemorated the spot by building the first dwelling there, still inhabited by descendants of the same blood. I need the house, and perhaps it needs me, he thought, although he wasn’t sure what put the idea into his head. I will never leave it so long again without going back.

  Meggie, too, resolved to return to the house on top of the downs. She had grown up knowing all about her inheritance from her mother; nobody had made any secret of it. This, though, this strong call from the ancient home of her forebears on her father’s side, was something totally different. It was powerful and thrilling; she intended to get all the information she could from Josse, and Isabelle too. It’s my place too, she thought with proprietorial pride. It opened its soul to me, and I am accepted.

  Southfire Hall was calm again.

  Evil had come, cleverly disguised, as evil so often is. Now it had gone away again; all vestiges of it had been removed; burned, buried or destroyed.

  The house itself had got rid of the dark cloak made of the strange, clammy fabric, which once a woman had worn to scare a little boy out of his mind. It had been left where she had hidden it, under a pile of stones beneath the north wall of the ancient undercroft. Melt water had loosened some of the old stonework; the house had shifted a little on its deep foundations, and the breach had widened. The water found the weakness, as water always does, and quite soon a little streamlet was flowing through.

  Just before the damage was discovered, and workmen hastily sent for to repair it before more harm was done, the water lapped up to the rolled-up cloak. The water lifted it, spread under and through it, supporting it up so that it floated like some frightening, repellent, dead thing. Slowly it began to move, carried on the weak current; under the wall, on, on, moving faster now as the waters gathered together and picked up pace. Down the long slope to the stream in the valley; borne along by the stream until it emptied into the river that ran through the town. On, on, tumbled and twisted now by the swollen river waters, till, at last, fresh water met salt and the cloak flowed out into the sea.

  And, up there on the top of the downs, Southfire Hall settled back into its habitual tranquillity.

  The spirit of the house was content.

  Footnotes

  Chapter One

  1 See A Dark Night Hidden.

 

 

 
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