The Devil in Clevely (Afternoon of an Autocrat) (25 page)

There was also--and she became increasingly aware of it as their progress brought them to the further end--a sense of somebody watching. She attributed this to the statuary. All the figures, even those in the most unusual postures, were extremely lifelike, and as Hadstock caused the light to fall upon one it was rather like being introduced to a person; then the light moved on, darkness engulfed the figure, but it was still there, and watchful. Before their slow progress brought them back to the arched entrance Linda had decided that, as in so many other things, the simple untutored instinct of the servants had been right; there was something frightening about the place, and perhaps Mrs Hart, who when invited to go down and view the wonders had said, 'No, thank you! To my mind anything that's once bin buried is best left buried,' had spoken more truly than she knew.

Outside on the square of pavement Hadstock stopped after Linda had stepped on to the stairs.

'Just a minute, my lady, if you don't mind,' he said, and with his foot cleared a space and looked down, moving the lantern backwards and forward.

'What is it?' Linda asked, her teeth chattering.

'Look,' he said.

Pale stone-coloured squares, and brown ones and some of bright greenish blue, and some of pink and black and terracotta colour were arranged to make a picture--a huge black bull being slaughtered by a slim pale youth wearing a blue loincloth.

'You're cold,' Hadstock said, and held the lantern to light the stairs ahead.

In the open the November night seemed warm as June, and the starlight more than ordinarily friendly. Linda drew a deep steadying breath and said: 'Well, what did you think of it? It isn't a church, is it?'

'Not as we understand it. A place of worship, yes.'

'Heathen?'

'Pre-Christian.' He looked down at the stairway, thoughtfully. 'You should warn Farrow, I think, my lady, that he may stumble across another entrance.'

'Oh. What makes you think so?'

'Bulls were sacrificed there,' Hadstock said, 'and you'd never get a bull, dead or alive, down by those stairs, they're not wide enough.'

Linda allowed herself the shudder she had suppressed.

'I felt something horrid about it. At least tonight I did. I didn't notice it this morning, nor the cold.'

'No. He was a sun-god.'

'Who was?'

'Mithras,' Hadstock said.

Strangely enough, it was not until she had returned to her letter to Richard that it struck Linda as being remarkable that the bailiff should seem so well informed. She had actually written the words 'Hadstock thinks that the place is ..." when she realised that Richard would neither welcome nor believe Hadstock's theories and would, at the same time, be surprised to learn that he had any and that she gave them any credence. At that point she was surprised herself; and, looking back, realised another thing--Hadstock, giving his views and theories about the mysterious underground place, had spoken with more assurance, more ease of manner than usual.

She scored out the last words she had written and, taking a fresh sheet of paper, wrote a hasty note to Mr Avery, the rector, telling him of the find and inviting him to inspect it and give his opinion. Mr Avery, whose antiquarian interests were genuine, though curbed by his slothfulness, was eager to visit any remains already excavated which appeared to bear out his theories about the Roman occupation of Clevely. He was at the Manor soon after breakfast; and Linda, finishing her letter to Richard at midday, was able to say, 'Mr Avery has seen the place and thinks it was, long ago in Roman times, a temple of Mithras.'

She conveyed to Farrow Hadstock's warning about another entrance, and after that digging was done in a gingerly manner since Job Ramsden's experience might at any moment be repeated. Farrow went down and gave the place a more thorough inspection and did find, at the end farthest from the stairway, a great stone slab. 'But do that mark t'other doorway,' he said, 'thass nowt to do with us; that lay right under the house. I only wish this 'un did too.' The delay--for nothing could be done until Squire had had his letter and replied to it--irked Farrow sadly; the days were so short, and getting shorter.

Amos also was worrying about the shortening of the daylight hours. Every day now he set off for Bridge Farm in the morning twilight and laboured away till dinnertime; but the work was slow, and growing slower, because each successive layer of timber had to be lifted higher and was more difficult to hold in place singlehanded while the nails were driven in. He had ingeniously dug a ladder into the ground at one corner so that its staves held the far end of the planks steady while he nailed his end, and that helped; but the staves and the planks were not of equal measure, and sometimes the planks slipped and sometimes the ladder shifted. Several times Amos had been obliged to call upon Shipton to come to his aid, and that had resulted in a really nasty scene with Mrs Shipton.

Mrs Shipton, who never had any time or desire to gossip with anybody and who went to chapel, not to church, had remained ignorant of the notice on the church door until long after it had been taken down. But at the back of the house at Bridge Farm there stood three fine walnut trees and in years when the crop was heavy there were more nuts than Shipton could spare time to collect and market. Shipton, for some reason which no one could name, was always muddled and behind with his ordinary farm work. But collecting walnuts--helped by a few of the youngsters from the Waste--and marketing them in the small quantities which made most profit was just Matt Ashpole's job. So when the nuts were ripe he went along, paid so much a tree into Mrs Shipton's hand, and while his small minions toiled had time to talk about enclosure. And there came that awful moment when Mrs Shipton said: 'Abel, something's going on that ain't right. Why  worn't your name on that there paper? You're an owner; why should you be overlooked? Matt Ashpole say you o'n't get your rights when the Waste's cut up!'

She had the whole story out of him in no time, and she was just as furious as he feared she would be.

Next time Amos loped along to the kitchen door and asked could she tell him where Abel was because he wanted him just to come and lend a hand Mrs Shipton made short work of him.

'Chapel I am, allust hev been and allust shall be,' she said fiercely; 'but there's chapel and chapel, I'd hev you to know. Thass one thing to live righteous and another to live daft I You're daft, Amos Greenway, and you've made Abel daft. That there little bit of meadow was where I allust had my duck pen; that you must hev. Now you must hev Shipton wasting his time. The chapel at Nettleton allust hev been good enough--them that grudge walking a few miles to their worship ain't worth anything to the Lord, nor to me, nor to you. You get along with your rubbish and leave Abel be. If I catch him wasting another minute on that wooden hutch of yours I'll burn it down. I mean that, Amos Greenway.'

Amos believed her. He'd suspected all along that every evidence of Shipton's lukewarmness could be traced to his wife. Nevertheless he started to read her a sermon about putting God and God's business first. Mrs Shipton cut that short.

'We ain't in chapel now,' she said truthfully, and went in and slammed the kitchen door.

So Amos toiled on alone except on Saturdays, when a few earnest souls came along to help him; and as the walls of the little chapel grew, so did the labour of adding to them.

Linda's letter arrived at Richard's London apartments less than an hour after he had left for Angelina's on what his servant guessed would be an all-night session, so he dutifully ran along to Soho Square with it and it was handed to Richard at the card table. He glanced at it, recognised Linda's hand and laid it aside. Some hours later, when play ended and he was about to rise from the table--in a bad mood, for he had lost heavily--he would have left it lying on the consol table on to which he had tossed it but for the intervention of a man against whom he had been playing.

'Sir, you are forgetting your letter.'

Richard glared at him. He was the man whose luck had been as consistently good as his own had been bad. He was also--which obscurely added to his crime--a stranger to Angelina's. Now that he came to think of it, Richard remembered that as they sat down one of the other players had made an introduction, but lack of interest had prevented him from noticing the name sufficiently to retain it. A dim-looking fellow with something vaguely clerical about him, either in his face or his clothing; and the face looked as though it had been carved from suet, with two bits of coal stuck in for eyes...but his luck had been quite phenomenal.

Richard reached for the letter, remarking as he did so: 'You had devilish good luck this evening.'

'I am usually lucky at cards,' the man admitted. 'That is why I play so seldom. One becomes unpopular; also-- and this may surprise you--consistently good luck eventually becomes as tedious as the other kind. But I am preventing you from reading your letter.'

He turned away from Richard and stood sipping the brandy which he had ordered when play ended.

Richard--though he was careful not to become too much intoxicated when at the tables--was no longer clear-headed enough to absorb much of the meaning of Linda's letter. What it conveyed to him was succinctly expressed when a man, on his way out, paused and said casually, 'You'll be here tomorrow, Shelmadine?'

'No. I shall have to go to Suffolk. It's an infernal nuisance. I've some work being done and they've blundered on to something that puts out the plans.'

The other man said, with interest, 'A priest-hole? We came across one when we made our alterations. Cunningly hidden too----'

'Underground, my wife says. Something to do with Mithras, whoever he may be.'

'Never heard of him. Well, get back as soon as you can. Suffolk in November! Ugh!'

'Ugh, indeed,' Richard said. He folded the letter and looked round for the waiter. The stranger had swung round and now said: 'Did I hear you make mention of Mithras?'

'Possibly,' said Richard, watching the waiter's passage across the room.

'If you don't mind my asking--in what connection?'

'Perhaps you would like to read the letter!' Impervious to sarcasm, the man said eagerly: 'Indeed I should. Thank you.'

Richard tossed it to him and then turned his back and strolled over to another table, where play had ceased and last drinks were being ordered. Dropping into a chair, he said to his neighbour: 'Do you know that fellow?' He indicated the man who stood reading the letter.

'Good God, yes! That's Mundford.' He reached out and touched another man on the elbow. 'I say, Errington, Mundford's turned up again. Over there, look.'

'So it is. Funny I hadn't noticed him.'

'He was probably invisible last time you looked!' There was a spurt of laughter, hearty enough, but with just a hint of uneasiness in it, like the laughter with which schoolboys greet a joke from a master of whom they are intimidated.

'Don't draw his attention,' Mr Errington said. 'I owe the brute seventy pounds!'

'His luck tonight was unbelievable,' Richard said.

'Oh. Have you been playing with him? Stripped you, eh? He invariably wins. They say the Devil engaged to stand by his elbow and see that the cards fell right for him.'

'Not to mention endowing him with perpetual youth.'

There was another spurt of the same laughter.

'Well, he was one of Francis Dashwood's merry Medmenham boys,' said Errington. 'And the Hell Fire Club closed down in...let me think ...61 or '62; and he wasn't young then.'

'He certainly wasn't,' said a youngish man on the other side of the table. 'I know,' he explained, 'because my Uncle Borthwick fagged for him at Eton and Uncle B. is seventy-four. Had his birthday last week and, like the damned ass I am, I forgot to offer my felicitations.'

'Alas for your expectations,' Errington said. 'You can't expectate if you don't felicitate. But to return to Mundford, the sight of whom makes me expectorate--he must be hard on eighty; and yet he doesn't look it, does he?'

'So perhaps the rumours are right. He always wins; he does not grow old...'

'He is looking this way. In that embalmed brain the memory of seventy pounds is stirring! I'll wish you good night, gentlemen, fellow gamblers and scoundrels all.'

But it was at Richard that the coal-chip eyes were looking; and as the group around the table hastily broke up, Mundford approached and held out the letter.

'Thank you for allowing me to read it, sir. Most interesting. You do realise, don't you, that if what your local cleric suspects is true, you have there a property of incalculable value.'

Value...a hole in the ground? Ah, but there was something else----

'Oh, all those marble figures, eh?' asked Richard, remembering.

'They doubtless would have some value, antique relics, works of art,' said Mundford smoothly. 'It was of the site itself I was thinking. If it is indeed a Mithraic temple-- as sounds possible--I myself would give you two thousand pounds for the use of it...for one evening.'

Momentarily speechless, Richard gaped at him.

'For the use of it; a little secrecy and possibly some small collaboration on your part. And believe me, Sir Richard, the sum mentioned was not just an attempt to strike a bargain; it was a surety of my sincere interest.'

'Well, if you're interested to that extent you'd better come with me tomorrow and take a look at it.'

'How very kind of you, I am most infinitely obliged to you. There is nothing in the world that I would rather do.'

His voice was calm, but something so avid shone on his face that Richard gave voice to words of unusual sincerity.

'I wish to God,' he said, 'that there was anything in the world that I really wanted to do.'

As he spoke the limitless boredom moved in him like a sickness; the boredom that had driven him from one excess to another, which had set in early and grown great as his interests narrowed and his emotions cooled and one diversion after another failed him.

Mundford said, almost as though speaking to himself, 'There are always new worlds to explore,' and passed on to ask about their place of meeting, their mode of travel on the morrow.