"Late fourteenth century at a guess." Fimberry squeezed past the table and stabbed an index finger at the far wall. "Now you see the tiles? They were covered with layers of whitewash but I sc.r.a.ped it off. No doubt they were used to patch the mortar by some long-forgotten builder. Almost certainly they came originally from the floor. This tile's nearly complete-look, it's the arms of the See of Rosington. That one is probably a scallop sh.e.l.l, the pilgrim badge of the shrine of St. James of Compostela. Isn't it interesting?" He turned back to Rory and Lydia in the doorway of the Ossuary. "The past seems so close to us here, so close that one can actually touch it. Quite literally in this case." Smiling, he leaned across the little room and ran the middle finger of his right hand over the putative scallop sh.e.l.l. "Don't you feel it sometimes, Mrs. Langstone? The touch of the past?"

"Mr. Fimberry," Lydia said suddenly. "What's that in the corner?"

"What?"

"Down there." She pointed. "On the floor between the table and the wall."

The shadow of a table leg ran across something pale and jagged half-covered by a rag. A trick of the light, Lydia thought; it can't be anything else. Rory stirred beside her. She heard him sucking in his breath.

A trick of the light?

21.

SOMETIMES you think it's a game to him. He has luck on his side too. Even Jacko was his ally in the end. You can't trust anyone.

Friday, 18 April 1930 Jacko bit his mistress last night when I tried to make him jump down from the sofa. Not hard, but even so I was VERY cross. I shut him in the scullery. Unfortunately he howled so much that Joseph let him out. I did not come down for breakfast today but stayed in my room. At lunch, Joseph said he had talked to Rebecca this morning and she had told him that there was another reason why she needed to hand in her notice. Her sister has been very ill with influenza, and so has her little boy, Rebecca's nephew, and Rebecca wants to be able to spend more time looking after them during their convalescence. They live on the other side of the village, quite a distance from here. Joseph has decided not to insist on her working out her month's notice. He has told her she may leave after supper tomorrow, and he will run her over to her sister's in the car. He thought it would be kinder to her and her family, and also better for us in the long run because servants are never very satisfactory when they are working out their notice, and it will be better for us to find her successor sooner rather than later. He will pay her up to the end of the week. I put the best face on it I could. I was tempted to remind him that it is usually the mistress of the house who has the management of the indoor servants. But it didn't seem quite the right moment. What is done is done.

After this, you know there will be no more daffodils from her sweet Joey. All that's over and done with now. Rebecca will soon be gone. Poor, foolish Amy doesn't count.

"You don't mind, do you?"

"The thing is, there's a lot we need to talk about."

"Yes, yes." Rory closed the cover of the typewriter. "I know. But I haven't much time. I have to go out in three quarters of an hour."

"Why do you suddenly want to practice your shorthand?"

"Julian Dawlish-Fenella's friend-he knows the editor of Berkeley's."

"The weekly?"

"I'm doing a piece on spec for them about tomorrow's meeting."

"That's marvelous."

"If they use it." He rubbed his eyes. "I can't stop thinking about it. d.a.m.n it, it could make all the difference. It's the first sniff of real work I've had, work that could lead somewhere, since I came back to England. That's why I was keen to see the undercroft, to get an idea of the layout."

"Of course. Poor Mr. Fimberry."

A trick of the light.

"Beggars belief, doesn't it? I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw that goat's skull under the table in the Ossuary. Why didn't he just leave it in the dustbin? Why put it in the Ossuary? And why did he want to show it to Father Bertram?"

"Because he thinks it might be the devil," Lydia said. "That's my theory. So it's safer on consecrated ground until Father Bertram can see it. There's a sort of logic to it."

"Mad as a hatter, in my opinion."

"He's ill," Lydia said, thinking of Colonel Alforde. No more war. "You can't blame him for that."

Rory glanced at his wrist.w.a.tch. "Would you mind if we start? I promised to meet Dawlish for a drink, and I haven't used my shorthand for months, not properly. And it's like speaking a language, you see. If you don't use it for a while you have to get your ear in again."

"Does it matter what I talk about?"

He shook his head. "I've got it all worked out. I think it will be best to start with something completely unseen, completely unexpected. And then try something political from the paper-something with the same sort of vocabulary as they're likely to be using tomorrow. Afterward I'll try and read it back to you." He smiled at her. "Are you sure you don't mind? I know it's an awful lot to ask."

"It's all right. We've had supper-there's nothing else I need to do." That was untrue. If you didn't have servants, Lydia had discovered, there was always something you needed to do. "I'll just talk away, then. Are you ready?"

He picked up his newly sharpened pencil and turned over a page in his shorthand pad. "Fire away, Lydia-oh d.a.m.n. Sorry. Mrs. Langstone, I mean."

"It doesn't matter. You can call me Lydia if you want."

"As long as you call me Rory. Right, Lydia. I'm as ready as I ever will be."

"I talked to Mrs. Renton," Lydia began, her cheeks a little pinker than before. "I showed her the skirt and the note. She used to do sewing for Miss Penhow. Mr. Serridge introduced them. She even made some clothes for her." Lydia watched Rory's pencil traveling across the paper. "Then Miss Penhow moved to the country, and she lost touch." She paused again. "As a matter of fact I went to Rawling yesterday."

The point of the pencil snapped. "What were you doing in Rawling, for G.o.d's sake?"

"My G.o.dfather used to live there. His wife had to go down for a funeral. I went with her."

Rory pushed the pad away from him, abandoning the shorthand. "I don't understand. I don't even begin to understand."

She smiled at him. "It's much less complicated than it seems."

"Just a whacking great big coincidence. Yet another."

"Not really. Serridge only bought Morthams Farm because my father sold it to him. My father only owned it because he was left it by old Mrs. Alforde. My G.o.dfather is another Alforde-so he's a sort of cousin by marriage to my father. That's why he's my G.o.dfather-he and Father used to know each other long before I was on the scene. The Alfordes know my mother too-they came to my wedding, actually. My mother asked Mrs. Alforde to talk to me. To try to persuade me to go back to Marcus."

Rory looked consideringly at her. "And did she?"

"Yes and no." The color rose in her cheeks. "She tried but she didn't succeed." She rushed on, stumbling a little over her words. "My mother and father met at Rawling. In a way the Alfordes connect everything, you see. Mrs. Narton worked at the Hall when they were there. And so did Rebecca at the Vicarage."

"You met her?"

"When we had lunch with Mr. Gladwyn. It didn't end there, either. I went to have a look at that little barn you mentioned, the one with the skulls. Robbie shut me in. He thought I was trying to steal his skulls."

He whistled. "As the goat's skull was stolen?"

"According to Rebecca, he's convinced Narton took it."

"When?"

"Probably a few days before he died."

"I saw him on Sat.u.r.day," Rory said. "He could have posted it then. So Robbie thought you were another skull thief? How did you get out?"

"I banged on the door. Mr. Serridge rescued me in the end."

"Serridge? What was he up to? Was he following you?"

Lydia shivered. "I'm not sure. He was very strange-in one way he was as nice as pie to me. But he was also rather terrifying. I'm sure he's up to something. And there was another thing-I found something else on the shelf with the skulls, a cigar box. Rebecca told me that when she worked at Morthams Farm, Miss Penhow kept her diary in it. She thinks Miss Penhow was hiding it from Serridge."

"When did you manage to talk to Rebecca?"

"Afterward, at the Vicarage. I felt rather sorry for her. I imagine Robbie's hers, don't you?"

"What? Why do you think that?" Rory felt, as he often did when talking to his sisters, that where relationships were concerned they were equipped with a form of perception that he lacked. "I thought he was her nephew."

"He may be, I suppose. But she dotes on him. It's far more likely he was Rebecca's little accident, and her sister unofficially adopted him."

"Anything else?" he asked with a trace of sarcasm in his voice. "Or have you pulled the last rabbit out of the hat for the time being?"

"There's the heart this morning," she said, smiling back at him.

"I know about that. Serridge and Byrne were having a row about it when I went out this morning. Howlett came and calmed them down."

"It was nasty," she said soberly.

"Sorry," he said perfunctorily. "I've got a couple of sc.r.a.ps of information of my own," he went on. "Nothing to compare with yours but better than nothing. I saw a photograph of Miss Penhow at Fenella's. She looked quite pretty, but Fenella said she was older than she looked."

"According to Rebecca, she spent a lot of time and effort trying to make herself look youthful. It was rather pathetic, actually-she was trying to make herself attractive to Serridge, and he only had an eye for the girls."

Rory looked at his watch again. "I'd better go. Are you coming tomorrow?"

"No," she said. "My husband will be there. Not to mention my future brother-in-law."

Rory saw her out of the flat. At the head of the stairs he said, "By the way, talking of photographs, you remember the one Rebecca showed me?" He lowered his voice. "Amy Narton in the altogether on Serridge's bike? There was a little dog in it. There was also a dog in that photograph of Miss Penhow. It could have been the same one. Yesterday I was standing outside by the pub and someone went by on a bicycle. Nipper was there. And that was when it clicked: the dog in both photos looks just like Nipper."

Fenella was a b.i.t.c.h. In fact, she was a b.l.o.o.d.y b.i.t.c.h. And if one were to be absolutely precise about it, as Virginia Woolf would no doubt wish one to be, Fenella was a b.l.o.o.d.y, calculating b.i.t.c.h.

Lydia huddled over the fire in the big cold sitting room of her father's flat with A Room of One's Own open but unread on the arm of her chair. It was a short book but was proving very hard to finish.

She was pleased for Rory-of course she was: she hadn't seen him so happy and excited since she had met him. But she couldn't help suspecting that Fenella had an ulterior motive. Perhaps she was one of those women who are const.i.tutionally incapable of releasing old lovers: they want to retain the advantages of the relationship without the romantic drawbacks. Fenella was keeping Rory dangling and she was probably doing the same with the unfortunate but well-connected Julian Dawlish.

She had to face facts, Lydia told herself: one reason she felt unsettled was that if Rory became a regular contributor to magazines like Berkeley's, he would no longer have to live at Bleeding Heart Square. The only things that connected them were the accident of their being under the same roof and this disturbing business about Miss Penhow. And it was all so humiliating too-she really didn't want to be so interested in an unemployed journalist who had been to a grammar school and had holes in his socks. She wasn't in love with him-it was simply a morbid fascination that had nothing to do with Rory but everything to do with Marcus.

If she didn't soon find a more effective distraction than Virginia Woolf, she would drown in her own thoughts. There was no one to talk to-she was alone in the house; even Mrs. Renton's room was in darkness. She could hardly swagger into the saloon bar of the Crozier and order a large whisky. Without warning, she had an acute sense of her own isolation and, before she knew what was happening, she felt tears in her eyes.

But she was d.a.m.ned if she was going to wallow in self-pity. She looked around the room, for distraction, for anything that would take her away from her own emotions. Her eyes fell on her father's old writing box, which was still on the shelf on the left of the fireplace. Fimberry had disturbed her when she was looking at it before.

She put the box on the dining-room table and removed the lid with its broken hinges. Inside was the jumble of dried-up inks, stubs of sealing wax, rusty nibs and paper clips, broken pencils and sc.r.a.ps of paper. There was the sheet of foolscap with the list of names-the same name: P. M. Penhow, written over and over again-as if someone had been practicing it. On the smaller sheet of paper were the words I expect you are surprised to hear. She turned over this second sheet and discovered that there was something else on the back, written faintly in pencil at the top of the page. It was not in the same handwriting but in the clumsy, rather childish version of copperplate that they used to teach in board schools.

and so tell the padre you're sorry for all the upset, that you met an old pal, a sailor who you were going to marry, and you went off and married him, and now you're making a new life in America. We want him to break the news to all and sundry because you're ashamed. A lot depends on this, old man. You won't let me down.

There was no signature. The last page of a letter to America? She had wanted a distraction and now she had found one, she wished she hadn't. She fetched her handbag from her bedroom and emptied its contents onto the table.

An astonishing amount of rubbish had acc.u.mulated since she had left Frogmore Place. There were more paper clips, an old matchbox with no matches in it, three bus tickets, a silver three-penny piece, a partly used lipstick that she had forgotten she had owned and at least half a cigarette's worth of tobacco flakes. Finally she found, crumpled into a ball, the note that Serridge had given her with Shires' address and the time of her first appointment with him. She smoothed it out and laid it side by side with the penciled notes from the writing box.

The first was in ink and very short; the second was in pencil and not much longer. The handwriting wasn't very distinctive, in any case-hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, must have been taught to write like that. All she could say with any certainty was that they might have been written by the same person. And that the person might have been Joseph Serridge.

A sense of urgency gripped her. She folded the two sheets of paper and tucked them into her handbag. She piled her own belongings on top of them, and felt happier when they were out of sight and the handbag was closed. She shoveled the rest of the items back in the box and returned it to its shelf.

But closing the handbag and putting the box away didn't obliterate what she had seen: Miss Penhow's name, written over and over again, and that fragment of-what? A letter? An instruction? A lot depends on this, old man. You won't let me down.

Like falling dominoes, the thoughts led from one to the next, as if they had been queuing ever since she came here, waiting for this moment. Sc.r.a.ps of Mrs. Alforde's conversation rose up from her memory like unwanted ghosts: "making pen-and-ink sketches of the chimney pieces that Gerry's uncle put in the drawing room and the library"; "forged several checks, falsified the accounts and embezzled the mess funds."

And then there was her father returning from America where Miss Penhow's letter had come from. Now he was living without visible means of support in Miss Penhow's house. Except it was no longer Miss Penhow's house; it was now apparently owned by Joseph Serridge.

"d.a.m.n the man," she said aloud. How could her father have been so stupid? If he had forged a letter from Miss Penhow on Serridge's behalf, that must mean one of two things: either Serridge knew that Miss Penhow was dead and he was trying to cover up the fact, or he had no idea where she was and was trying to avoid being accused of her disappearance. Either way, her father was an accessory to whatever Serridge had done, and something was very wrong.

The front door banged. Lydia's pulse began to race. There were heavy and uneven footsteps on the stairs, followed by a tap on the door. When she opened it, she was almost relieved to find Malcolm Fimberry on the landing. At least he wasn't Serridge.

"Mrs. Langstone, good evening. I'm glad to catch you in." It was a cold night but the sweat was running down his face. "I wanted to apologize."

"There's nothing to apologize for."

"Oh but there is." He came up to her and laid his hand on her arm. "I cannot forgive myself for not warning you about the skull."

"It really doesn't matter at all." Lydia brushed his hand away from her arm, casually as though it were a fly. "After all, I'd seen it before."

"Yes, but it must have been such a shock." He snuffled and swallowed noisily. "However, it was such a pleasure to see you there this afternoon. I wonder-would you allow me to show you the chapel itself?"

"Thank you. But I'm-"

"What about tomorrow afternoon? I shall still have the keys after the meeting's over, you see. That would make everything much more convenient."

"I don't think I can manage that."

"Oh, but Mrs. Langstone, it really-"

He stopped as they both heard the rattle of the front door again, followed by a confused fumbling in the hall and the sound of Serridge saying wearily, "G.o.d d.a.m.n it." As soon as he heard his landlord's voice, Fimberry backed rapidly away from Lydia as though he had suddenly realized that she was the bearer of an infectious disease.

There were dragging footsteps in the hall below. Lydia came out of the room and went to the head of the stairs. Serridge was at the bottom, supporting her father.

"Evening, Mrs. Langstone," he said in a flat voice. "I'm afraid the Captain's had one over the eight." He caught sight of Fimberry behind her. "Fimberry, come down and lend a hand, will you? It'll be easier with two of us."

Lydia went into her father's bedroom and straightened the bed-clothes. The two men manhandled him upstairs. He was conscious, quite cheerful and rather sleepy.

"On the bed?" Serridge said.

"Yes, please." Lydia edged away from him. "Is he all right?"

"He'll live." Serridge nudged the bedroom door fully open. "Best thing for him now is sleep. If we hold him up, would you pull his coat off?"