The Unburied (43 page)

‘I’m sure there is much more to be learnt from it.’

He smiled: ‘I hope we might discuss the arrangements for its publication tomorrow.’

I bowed my head without speaking.

‘Goodbye, Dr Courtine,’ Mrs Locard said.

‘Thank you so much for this evening,’ I replied.

As she took my hand, she said with a smile: ‘I don’t suppose you will come to Thurchester in the near future, Dr Courtine?’

‘Now that there will be no trial, I think it highly improbable. But I hope I might have the pleasure of receiving you and Dr Locard in Cambridge one day.’

‘I would like that very much. Robert visits Cambridge occasionally and might be persuaded to take me.’

Her husband said: ‘I will see you out, Courtine.’

‘I do very much hope that things go well with you, Dr Courtine,’ she said in a low voice as he passed into the hall.

‘I have profited greatly from our conversation,’ I said. ‘I will always remember it.’

At the front-door Dr Locard took my hand and, holding onto it, said: ‘I look forward to learning of your decision.’

‘One way or another, you will know it tomorrow without fail.’

He released my hand and I plunged into the darkness of the Close.

Friday Night

So Fickling was out of work after all. I felt no sense of triumph, even though it was a consequence of my actions. Anyway, it was very probable that he would not be in want of money. The decision about that was, strangely, also in my hands. I had no need to feel guilty over what had happened to him, for I understood at last how he had lured me to the town with the promise of reconciliation, only in order to make use of me. He had not expected that I would meet Dr Locard and learn anything of the politics of the Chapter because he had assumed I would be spending my time on Woodbury Downs.

I thought about what Mrs Locard had said. The possibility of marrying if I were free to do so had occurred to me once or twice and I had thought several times of the widow of a colleague – a woman some ten or fifteen years younger than myself – whose husband had died a year ago leaving her with two small children. She was a kind, sweet-natured woman and I believed she liked me. It would be difficult on my emoluments to take on so much responsibility. Although the salary of a professor would make it possible, I knew that I would have no chance of the Chair if the manuscript were given to Scuttard to edit. By one means or another, Dr Locard would ensure that I lost even the credit for having found it.

I paused beside the Old Gatehouse, just where the wall of the garden behind Gambrill’s house must have been. I could see the tall, black figure of Canon Burgoyne standing here as he had done night after night all those years ago brooding on the ‘secret offence’ which led to his death. I knew now that he had no interest in the Mason. It was not his murder of Robert Limbrick that he was threatening to reveal, if he even knew of it. No, it was a dark, loathsome offence that he himself had committed – or had desired to commit – that he was trying to find the courage to denounce. I remembered the words of his sermon:
He alone knows how he has wandered out of his way into the foul and strange path that leads to the sty of pestilential filth.

Burgoyne must have been in torment during those weeks and days, steeling himself to escape the wicked course he was embarked upon. He had discovered how close you are to hating the person you love because of the power your love gives to the beloved.

For many years I had been enslaved like that. Now I realized that I was free. My feelings about my wife had become a habit, an outer shell whose inside had gradually withered without my realizing it. I had idealized and sentimentalized her, partly to save myself the trouble of starting a new life. Mrs Locard had helped me to see that, but what had made me certain was that remark of Fickling’s which he had intended to wound me. By repeating my wife’s cruel words – that she only married me to get away from her mother – he had made me aware of her small-mindedness. I had built her up in my imagination but now I knew she was smaller and more mean-minded than I had remembered. The ghost had been laid.

The hardest thing now would be to admit that I had been childish and sentimental by writing to my wife telling her she could have a divorce. And then to start a new chapter in my life. Burgoyne had taken a different means to get free. In his case it was not so much the beloved person that he hated as the very fact of that love – which he knew was shameful and repugnant.
He alone ... knows what darkness he nourishes in the privy mansions of his being.
For two weeks he had forced himself to speak of it in public, though in veiled terms. His conscience demanded no less. On the next day he was committed to revealing the whole truth before the assembled townspeople. Unless there was some other way of escape. And then he saw a solution. During the storm in the middle of that night, he came here to the Old Gatehouse which housed the college and entered with his key. The key he had been given by the Precentor so that he could come and go at night – as I assume he had done many times before.

He had crept up the stairs unheard amid the crashing thunder and lashing rain, and for a moment – just a few minutes or even a few seconds – he had believed that he could set himself free by a single decisive act. Gambrill had shown him how a roof might be made to collapse, and under cover of the storm he was able to make use of that knowledge. He had committed a deed more terrible than any he had committed before, although to his anguished conscience it had seemed a lesser offence. And what had he done after that?

I would retrace his steps and in doing so try to imagine what must have passed through his mind. It occurred to me how much Dr Locard would despise this way of proceeding. What would I see if I were able to go back to that night and hide myself in the Cathedral? I entered the darkened building – unlocked because the workmen were still labouring to repair the damage they had inflicted. There they were, just as I had seen them on my first night, although now in a different place: hacking at the bowels of the ancient construction with a couple of lanterns to light them. Old Gazzard was, as always, hovering in the shadows and showed no surprise – and, equally, no pleasure – at seeing me.

I greeted him and asked without prevarication: ‘Do you remember how I came here late on Wednesday night and found you with the workmen trying to find the source of the smell?’ He nodded. ‘Did anyone else come here that night? I mean, very much later, at about two o’clock?’

He frowned. ‘Why, yes. That Mr Slattery. He had heard somehow about the trouble here and he came to ask how it would affect the organ. The foreman told him it would have to be shut down for several weeks. He didn’t look none too pleased.’

I thanked him. He had merely confirmed what I had guessed: having heard from Fickling my piece of news about the calamity in the Cathedral, Slattery had been anxious to know if he would be able to perform on the organ on Friday afternoon – the original date of the tea-party – because that had been intended to provide him with an alibi. Because of what he had learnt from the foreman, the conspirators had decided that night at his house in Orchard Street to bring forward the conspiracy to the following day.

When the old verger was not watching, I picked up one of the lanterns that was standing on a tomb and went to the tower door. I had a theory about what I would find up there which I was anxious to put to the proof. I tried one of the keys which I had taken from Dr Locard, picking them up as if in mistake for my own keys which I had left in their place. It occurred to me that I was becoming an accomplished thief: the photographs, the keys and now the lantern. The second key engaged and turned. I had expected that for there would have been no reason to have changed the lock in the last couple of centuries.

Burgoyne had come here on that thrice fatal night still wearing
the outward garb of sanctimony
and had used this very key to pass through this door. (From Dr Locard’s explanation of how the canons substituted for each other, I had realized that when Burgoyne had borrowed the keys to the College, the key to the tower was also on the chain since the Sacrist’s duties had devolved to the Precentor during his illness.)

I went a little way up the narrow stairs. On my right was a locked door which I knew led to the organ-loft, I had guessed that Slattery used it while his usual way out was blocked and that that was how he had left the Cathedral unobserved by myself on Thursday morning. I had taken him for a supernatural apparition. I smiled at my own credulousness.

I went on again round the twisting stair. I tried to imagine Burgoyne’s feelings as he ascended the tower that night. The storm was raging – tiles crashing, thunder roaring and the wind howling like a demented bassoon. And he was in turmoil. He had just crossed a line that divided him decisively from his past, from other people, from everything he had known in his life. Killing the boy had not saved him but damned him and he must have realized that within a few minutes of the murder. He knew he was damned – literally damned. I had seen that knowledge in another face in the last few days, and I understood what it meant for someone who accepted completely the reality of salvation and perdition.

Now I was at the top of the stairs at the summit of the tower just beneath the spire. I rounded the last turn and there it was – just as I had expected: a big wooden wheel more than twice the height of a man, now a skeletal ruin with struts and spokes missing. It had been here so long that everybody had forgotten what it was. But I knew: it was a treadwheel-windlass built to the clasp-arm design with two felloe-rims. A man walked inside it and by turning it transferred to the windlass axle running through it enough force to raise nearly two tons.

It was built here while the Cathedral was being constructed and its function was to raise materials to this level. Gambrill had used it to repair the spire in secret, using funds which he would later be accused of having embezzled for his own profit. After his master’s death, Limbrick had his own reasons for letting people believe that Gambrill had been guilty of embezzlement. Or, to be more accurate I thought bitterly, malversation.

I had worked out what must have happened using the evidence of the inscription and the Chancery record: Gambrill had been using the treadwheel-windlass on the day many years before when he had lost an eye. He was being lowered with a heavy load while the elder Limbrick was inside the treadwheel, ‘walking’ the load down as the rope slowly unwound. (As the inscription had put it:
All things revolve and Man who is born to Labour revolves with them.
) About fifteen feet above the ground the rope had parted and the load fell so that the windlass wound back at great speed, making the treadwheel spin very fast and killing the man inside it. And so he had been, in the words of the inscription,
shattered into pieces.
Gambrill himself had fallen and been seriously injured – more seriously than he had anticipated, for I was sure that he had cut the rope.

Dr Locard was wrong. The inscription was not put up by the canons to denounce the Burgoyne family for the murder of their dean, but by the younger Limbrick to make it clear that Gambrill had murdered his father and had been punished for it.

I peered down through the rafters to the top of the vault, just as Burgoyne had done that night. In his time there had been gaps in the brickwork wide enough for the loads of material to pass through. Or a man’s body. Burgoyne had announced the previous Sunday that in one week he himself would make manifest the sinner in that very place. His body would plunge through the vault and be found a hundred and twenty feet below at the foot of the chancel steps. Just as he had himself predicted:
Yet shall his wickedness be laid bare before the eyes of men. Yea, even in the dark places shall his sins be blazoned forth.

I turned to peer out through the louvres, leaning on the ledge. The huge bells loomed above me. On this quiet night, the town was sleeping peacefully below me, its higgledy-piggledy roofs and gables resembling the dark waves of a frozen sea. At my feet was the maze of little streets around the Cathedral, then the river with the moonlight glinting on it, and the hill up which I had hastened in terror only two nights before. I smiled to think of my superstitious fears on that occasion. There was no evil power abroad in the universe. People did wicked things because, as Mrs Locard had said, their own unhappiness led them to find a bitter pleasure in the pain of others.

I would write to my wife’s lawyers telling them I would do all that was in my power to expedite the divorce. Fickling was right. I had made it only too easy for her to betray me. In this moment I understood what Mrs Locard had been implying. Some of the blame for what had happened was mine. And yet ‘blame’ did not seem to be the right word for I felt no guilt. Rather, I was now able to take responsibility for what I had done or failed to do.

I had taken another decision and a much easier one. The bargain that Dr Locard had offered me that evening had tempted me. If nothing else, that had had the effect of bringing home to me that my contempt for worldly success was in some degree an affectation.

That night nearly two hundred and forty years ago, Burgoyne had been standing exactly where I was now – perhaps trying to find the courage to hurl himself down – when Gambrill came quietly up the stairs behind him. Did anything pass between them? Did Burgoyne confess to killing the boy, Gambrill’s nephew? Did Burgoyne realize that the other man was about to kill him? If so, did he welcome it since it would forestall his own suicide?

However that might be, Gambrill strangled him. And then he lowered what he believed was the lifeless corpse to the ground, walking it down using the treadwheel-windlass.

I descended the steps of the tower, locked the door at the bottom and walked across to the Burgoyne memorial. Once he had got the body to the ground Gambrill had, for some reason, stripped off the Canon’s outer garments. Then he had put his hated enemy in the space high up in the wall made ready for the slab.