The Chalice (71 page)

      
'And you're prepared to protect us, are you?' Pennard said, gun
in his arms. 'If things get rough?'

      
'Well, we, um, we value your co-operation in this rather
delicate situation.'

      
'Delicate, Powys? What's delicate about it?'

      
'Well, some people seem to think the road will damage not so
much the natural ecology as the, um, spiritual ecology.'

      
If he wasn't careful he'd be talking like Pel Grainger.
      
'In what way?' Pennard, demanded.

      
'Well ... these people consider this particular landscape to
be sacred. More so than anywhere else in Britain.'
      
'Damned idiots, then, aren't they?'

      
'Depends on where you stand.'

      
'I stand on my own land. Powys. Where do you stand?'
      
'We civil servants,' Powys said, 'We
generally stand where we're told to stand.'

      
Lord Pennard shouldered the twelve-bore. Sighted on the
ceiling and then brought the barrel down until its two holes were aimed either
side of the bridge of Powys's nose.

      
'Know what I think, Powys? I think you're a damned liar.'

      
Powys swallowed.

      
'To begin with,' Pennard said, 'I don't for one minute believe
there's such an organisation as the Department of Transport Investigations
Branch.'

      
He moved the gun barrel an inch or two to point at the leather
bench sofa.
      
'Siddown.'

      
His eyes were diamond-hard. Powys sat.
      
'Let's have it, then.'

      
'All right' Powys looked away from the gun. 'I said I was with
the Department of Transport because you wouldn't have seen me if I'd told you
who I really was.'

      
'Which is?'

      
'Oh, I'm just a bloke who writes daft books. And I've been
helping out with the magazine Diane's going to be editing '

      
'Where is my daughter?'

      
'I wondered if you might know.'

      
'I don't.'

      
'You ought to,' Powys said. 'Don't you think?'
      
Pennard was silent, the gun barrel
steady.
      
'Um, do you really need that
thing?'

      
Pennard lowered the twelve-bore, broke it. 'You're right.' He
slipped out both cartridges. 'If the occasion arose, I could tear your head off
with my bare hands.'

      
He hung the gun in the cupboard. Shut the doors and locked it.

      
Powys said, 'This thing you have about tearing people's heads
off. Would that be hereditary by any chance?'

      
Lord Pennard went so stiff and so pale in the cold white lamplight
that Powys thought for a moment that the occasion had arisen.

      
'You're either a brave man,' Pennard said, 'or an extremely
desperate one.'

'And Verity, darling,'
Wanda said on the telephone. 'You'll never guess what's happened.'

      
'No,' said Verity, 'I don't suppose I will.'

      
'Bloody woman always gets the flu at the wrong time. I mean,
could you, would you ...? For Solstice?'

      
Verity glanced at Councillor Woolaston who nodded.

      
'I suppose I am at rather a loose end.'

      
'Splendid. I'll have your room ready. Shall we say one hour?'

      
'I'm not happy about this,' Verity said, replacing the receiver.
The kitchen pipes gurgled with an ominous glee.
      
'You're better out of this,'
Councillor Woolaston said.
      
'It's not my place to be out of
it.'

      
'You've done your time. Verity. You've served him well. Better
than he had any right to demand.'

      
'It never was in his nature to demand. But I was thinking more
of you. You should not be here alone'

      
'I won't be alone,' he said, 'when they come to do the well.'

      
'Councillor Woolaston, I don't think you realise ...'

      
The poor little man looked quite wretched, his eyes deep with
sorrow, his beard almost white. She was sure his beard had not been white the
last time she saw him.

      
'... the depth of ... of evil ... that is in this place. I know
that sounds almost ridiculously melodramatic'

      
The end wall of the kitchen seemed particularly swollen tonight,
like an abscess about to burst.

      
'Oh,' said Councillor Woolaston with a nonchalance which only
betrayed how little he now valued his own life and sanity, 'I think I do. I
think I've known it for a long time, Go on, Verity, man. Wanda don't get her
gin and Horlicks she'll never be up in time tomorrow.'
      
'I'll get my overnight case.'

      
'Don't forget to switch off all the lights,' said the little councillor.

      
Verity felt very afraid for him.

NINE

Contaminant

Lord Pennard uncapped a new
bottle of Famous Grouse.

      
'You'll have a drink.'
      
'No th—'

      
'Wasn't a question, Powys. You will have a drink.'
      
Powys shrugged. Pennard poured him
an inch of Scotch in a thick tumbler and went to sit at his desk with the pile
of hunting and shooting magazines.

      
'So that devious, milksop bastard Pixhill wrote it all down.
If this is blackmail, Powys, I have to tell you we're not a good prospect, the
Ffitches. Haven't been for years.'
      
'Not since the great days of the
Dark Chalice?'
      
'Bunkum.' Pennard gazed into his
Scotch as if pictures might form there. 'Spent half a lifetime telling m'self
that, father was a great believer Always react against our parents, isn't that
the way of it?'

      
'Like Archer's reacted against you?'
      
Outside, the snow had turned back
to rain and sprayed the window, which was protected by metal security blinds.
      
'Powys.' Pennard rolled the name
around his mouth with a slosh of whisky. 'You a descendant of the old hack?'
      
'Maybe.'

      
'Met him a time or two. Thought a good deal of himself. Talked
and bloody talked. But that's the Welsh for you.'

      
'He wasn't Welsh.'

      
'Bugger should have been then.'

      
'That's what he thought too,' Powys said. 'Did he talk much
about the Chalice?'

      
'Not going to let that go, are you? No, he didn't. Learned his
lesson by then. Some chap in town, forget has name, convinced he'd been
portrayed in that damned great book as the villain of the piece. Sued the piss
out of Powys. Made bugger all from that book, in the end. Served him right.'

      
Powys smiled.

      
'Come along,' Pennard said. 'Get this over. Tell me what the
bastard said.'
      
'You want the lot?'
      
'Got all night.'

      
I haven't, Powys thought, worrying about Juanita and Diane and
Verity and everything that might need to be done before dawn.

      
'As far as I can gather,' he said, 'your family seems to trace
its roots in Somerset back to the mid-eighteenth century. At least the first
Viscount Pennard ...'

      
'1765. Roger Ffitch. Like my father.'

      
'But the Ffitches had held land in the area for a long time
before that. Over two hundred years in fact. Basically, since 1539 and the dissolution
of the monasteries. When a certain Ffitch was rewarded for services rendered to
the king.'

      
'Pure legend.'

      
'It's all legend. But legends are often more persistent than
facts.'

      
'Only if you permit it,' said Pennard. 'Get to the point.'

      
'OK. Fact: Glastonbury Abbey was very rich and powerful and
built out of the very cradle of Christianity, and Henry VIII had to crush it. Fact:
Abbot Whiting was a hard man to nail because he was an unassuming kind of guy
who tried to help the poor and was consequently very well liked. Sir Henry's
hit man, Cromwell, had to find a way of fitting Whiting up. Fact in the end
they found writings in Whiting's chambers criticising the king's latest
divorce. Also a gold chalice. From the abbey. Which he was accused of stealing.

      
Lord Pennard appeared uninterested and drank some whisky.

      
'Pixhill seems to think this chalice was later awarded - along
with a few hundred acres of land and a farmhouse known as Meadwell - to the man
who agreed to plant it. A Benedictine monk at the Abbey called Edmund Ffitch.
Spelt F F Y C H E. Who happily dumped his calling, moved into Meadwell... and
founded a famous dynasty. Fact?'

      
Pennard grunted. 'Inasmuch as Meadwell was our first home.'

      
'The legend, of course, is that when Whiting was hanged and
then beheaded on the Tor, Ffitch collected his blood in that same chalice In
deliberate parody of Joseph of Arimathea catching Christ's blood, from that
famous spear-wound on the cross, in what became the Holy Grail. Thereby
founding another tradition.'

      
'As you say ...' Pennard leaned back in his chair, stretched
out his legs, chin on his chest. 'Legend. Little-known one, too. So
little-known it was probably invented by Pixhill to bolster his own fantasy of
himself as a crusader. Sad little man.'

      
'You did have a family chalice, though, didn't you?'
      
'I wouldn't know.' He sounded very
bored. Or trying to sound bored. 'Certainly not in my time.'

      
'And in your time ...' Powys was beginning to despair of denting
the armour. '... That is, since the War, the family hasn't exactly prospered,
has it? Investments collapsing. Bad seasons in the vineyards. Land having to be
sold. Couldn't help noticing as I came in that you're down to using sixty-watt
bulbs where you need hundreds.'
      
'You're an idiot, Powys.'

      
'Perhaps the family has always associated its good fortune with
possession of the Chalice. lose the Chalice, money starts to go down the
toilet.'

      
'Powys, if your illustrious ancestor'd been able to make up
stories as good as this he might even've profited from his scribblings. Drink
up, man.'

      
He advanced on Powys with the bottle of Grouse.

      
'Of course there was a down side.' Powys looked up at him.
'Meadwell became somewhat ... spiritually tainted? Hard to live in?'

      
'Always a miserable hole.
 
Don't cover your glass, it's discourteous. Either drink with me or get
out.'

      
Reluctantly, Powys accepted another inch of Scotch. 'So this
place was built. Comparatively small at first but massively expanded after the
industrial revolution. By the outbreak of the First World War, the family was
very wealthy. Which brings us to the previous Viscount Pennard. Your father,
Roger Ffitch. Bit of a lad, Roger. A bit cocky. Not being discourteous here, am
I?'

      
'My father', Pennard said, no hint of a smile, 'would have
pulled your head off quite a few minutes ago.'

      
'Did you admire him?'

      
'He was an obstinate man. Immensely brave. Would've received
the VC after the Somme if he hadn't shafted the wrong General's daughter, but
that's by the by. Since you
ask, I did not admire him. He was a chancer. A gambler.'

      
'And not only with money?'

      
'No,' Pennard said soberly. 'Not only with money.'
      
'With his soul, in fact,' Powys
said. 'Such as it was.'

Juanita dressed slowly,
painfully and impractically. She still couldn't bear jeans, tight or otherwise,
against her thighs. Her thickest skirt was black velvet, calf-length; she
dragged it on, thumbs through the loops, then wriggled into a sloppy lemon
sweater, the softest thing she had, and it still felt like staff cardboard. Her
skin was starting to feel moist again, her head an oven.