Angel with Two Faces

Chapter Nine

Archie turned the Norton away from the main road, taking a narrow, winding lane which followed the soft undulations of the countryside and enjoying a freedom which he could never find in London. His home county might be famed for its seas, but it was these quiet, inland gems that he most loved her for: the peace of the lake; the rolling hills which formed a backdrop to the village, with Breage Church resting gently on the horizon; the sunrise across the fields on the way to Camborne – all these were ordinary miracles of which he could never tire. He pulled in to a farm gate for a moment and looked out over countryside which was a hundred shades of green, from darkest gorse to pale, sunlit grass. Cornish granite hedges criss-crossed his view, dividing the landscape into small, irregular sections and giving cows and sheep much-needed protection from the wind. To his right, a flock of lapwings rose as one from a ploughed field and he watched as their slow, flapping wing-beats took them leisurely further inland. For work and for pleasure, he had visited some of the finest rural areas that England had to offer, but nothing resonated more intensely with him than scenes such as this – partly, no doubt, because he was born here, but partly because the unrelenting drama of the sea made this mild-tempered, forgiving countryside all the more precious.

He kicked the motorbike into life again and moved off, through the village of St Buryan and steeply down into St Levan, then past the headquarters of the Eastern Telegraph Company and on towards the coast. The Minack Theatre – named after the enormous rock on which it sat – lay just a few miles short of Land’s End and a few feet above the Atlantic, enjoying all the excitement and danger that such a location offered. Archie parked at the makeshift entrance near Minack House and made his way down the steep slope of a cliff. Almost immediately, he had his first glimpse of the white, shell-strewn sands of Porthcurno to the east and, with a few minutes to spare before his two o’clock rehearsal, he paused again to savour the view. The bay was a brilliant blue in the afternoon sunlight, with the majestic cliffs of Porthgwarra and Nanjivey stretching out to the west. As dramatic as the scenery was, though, this wild and lonely cliff was the last place in the world where anyone would expect to find a man-made stage. It must have taken extraordinary imagination and vision even to conceive of the idea, he thought, let alone to make it happen, but Rowena Cade had decided that come hell or high water – and both usually did, at least once a summer – she would have a theatre in her back garden.

As he continued down the cliff, and Miss Cade’s vision became his, he thought again how surprisingly natural the whole thing seemed once you got used to the idea. The stage was a beautiful stretch of greensward, bordered on either side by granite outcrops which formed natural wings, and, along the cliff edge, by recently constructed balustrades and walls with a solid stone throne on a dais as centrepiece. The natural curve of the slope had been carefully tiered and turfed to provide the seating, giving the audience a perfect view of the play of the moment as well as uninterrupted sightlines across some of the finest cliff scenery in Cornwall.

‘Archie! Over here.’ He looked to his right and acknowledged Lettice’s wave. She and Ronnie were both on their knees on the grass, in apparent supplication to the robed figure who stood above them on a stool. It was impossible for him to tell who it was because of the heavy cowl that draped the monk’s face, but it amused him to see his cousins in any sort of pious position, and he couldn’t resist making the most of it.

‘I thought the rest of the world knelt to you as far as theatre was concerned,’ he said mischievously. ‘Surely you’re not losing your touch?’

Ronnie, her mouth full of pins, was unable to offer any of her usual tart retorts, but Lettice smiled good-naturedly. ‘Actually, you’re not as far off as you may think,’ she said. ‘We could do with a bit of divine assistance, as it happens, and I’m never too proud to beg.’

‘I think it’s called praying, dear, when God’s at the other end of the call,’ Ronnie said as she placed the last of the pins in the hem of the habit. ‘Although I’ve never been too sure of the difference.’ She patted the monk’s thigh in a less than sacred fashion. ‘There you go, Brother – all done. Take that off again and we’ll get it sewn up for you. It’s not the place to trip over your skirt.’

The monk removed its hood and Archie was surprised to see that the brother in question was a woman – the costume had made it impossible to tell. He recognised her vaguely as one of the young farmers’ wives from the estate, and she smiled at him shyly before slipping behind one of the rocks to change.

He sat down on the grass next to Lettice and Ronnie and lifted his face to the sun. ‘I’m not looking forward to getting into one of those,’ he said. ‘Don’t monks have a summer wardrobe?’

‘You don’t have a wardrobe at all at the moment,’ said Lettice, unscrewing the top of a thermos flask and pouring three cups of strong-looking tea. ‘That’s what I meant about divine assistance – we haven’t got a costume for you.’

‘I thought you said Nathaniel’s would fit with a few minor adjustments?’

‘It would have done – you’re only slightly broader than him – but he can’t find it anywhere. Says he’s sure he left it in the vestry after the fitting but now it’s nowhere to be seen. It must have been put into the laundry by mistake.’

‘But he’s a curate, for God’s sake,’ Archie said, bewildered. ‘Surely you’re not telling me that he can’t lay his hands on a cassock?’

‘Oh, Archie – don’t be silly,’ said Lettice, a little impatiently. ‘You can’t just wear any old thing – it’s got to fit in with the scheme of the play.’

‘Quite right,’ Ronnie said, tongue in cheek. ‘Just think of what the critics would say – not to mention the Anglican’s Weekly.’ She received a glare of reproach from her sister, and added: ‘Lettice has a point, though. You’re the narrator and you’re on stage all the time, holding the thing together, so you’ve got to look the part.’

‘And we’ve still got time to run you something up from scratch if we get on with it now,’ Lettice said, reminding Archie of the spirit which had taken his cousins to the top of a very slippery profession. ‘When Janet’s hem is done, everyone else will be sorted. You’ll have to do the dress rehearsal in your own clothes, but come up to Minack House when it’s finished and we’ll have something for you. Rowena’s put her work room at our disposal.’

As the girls went off up the cliff, laden with everything they needed to perform the impossible, Archie finished his tea and watched the bustle of activity on stage. Jago Snipe had arrived now and was setting about the unenviable task of unloading scenery from his van at the top of the cliff. He watched as the undertaker carried the simple refectory benches which Archie had seen in his workshop down the narrow path to the stage, putting them in place one by one under Morveth’s direction. He was a strong man, more than used to lifting heavy wood, and he made the shifting of the scenery look easy, but there was a poignancy to his solitary task – a task which he seemed to be pursuing with a fierce concentration, as if it could take his mind off the fact that his son was supposed to be helping him. Where was Christopher, Archie wondered? He had been sincere in his reassurances to Jago the day before: a lot of missing-person cases had come his way in the course of his career and, while some of them had ended in tragedy, many had concluded with nothing more serious than an embarrassed son or daughter returning home, hungry and contrite. From what Archie had seen of him, Christopher was not the sort of boy who had either the courage or the selfishness to stay away for long, but he had been brought up to respect life and death and, if Jacks was to be believed, Archie wasn’t surprised that guilt over his part in the last morning of Harry’s life – as childish and out of character as it had been – would sit heavily on his conscience.

A steady trail of people made its way down the cliff, indicating that the bus laid on by Poltroon’s, the local garage, to transport villagers and estate workers to and from the Minack had completed its first journey. The early arrivals were those involved in the production, either as cast or crew, and Archie was surprised to see that Joseph Caplin and Kestrel Jacks – neither of whom he would have had down as aspiring entertainers – were among the crowd. Clearly William’s powers of persuasion were not confined to family, he thought wryly as he got up to join everyone.

‘You can have half an hour to settle in, and then I want you all back here in your costumes ready to start,’ Morveth was saying, and he was amused to note that she had not lost her touch: most of the villagers – himself included – had been taught by Morveth Wearne at one stage or another, and they filed off now as dutifully as they had ten, twenty or thirty years ago in the playground.

‘This brings back a few memories,’ he said, and she smiled warmly at him.

‘As far as I remember, drama was never your favourite subject, so it’s nice of you to help us out now.’

The ‘us’ wasn’t intentional, he knew, but the idea that he was an outsider doing a favour struck him all the more forcefully for the casual way in which it had been expressed, and he was irrationally irritated by it. ‘It’s the least I can do while I’m at home,’ he said, unable to avoid placing a slight emphasis on the final word, ‘and some would say I’ve chosen drama for a profession.’

Morveth did not flinch at the rebuke, and seemed amused rather than embarrassed by his offence. ‘Then come home more often, Archie,’ she said, with that quiet way of defusing any antagonism which had served her so well in teaching. ‘Hasn’t anyone told you that resting is part of the job?’

Suddenly, he felt like a petulant ten-year-old, inclined to unreasonable tantrums, and could only smile in defeat. ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ he said, ‘but only if you don’t put me through this again. What do you want me to do?’

‘Well, I gather your costume’s still to come, so you’ve got some time while the others get changed. Why don’t you make sure you’re familiar with the stage? You’ll be standing there,’ she continued, pointing to a circle of grass, stage right, which stood about a foot higher than the rest of the performance area, forming a natural platform, ‘and you won’t be going backstage like the others, so you don’t need to worry about all the entrances and exits, but I promised Miss Cade faithfully that everyone would know what was safe and what wasn’t. After last year…’ She tailed off, knowing that the story was legendary enough for her not to have to repeat it. ‘If there’s any time left, have a look through the script – but don’t worry too much. We’ll have long enough to run through it carefully.’

Morveth disappeared to make sure that everyone had found their costumes, and Archie walked over to the rear of the stage. He was familiar with the Minack, having been to the productions which his cousins had taken part in, and he knew what to expect when he looked over the balustrade, but the sudden drop to the rocks below still made his heart stop. About eight feet beneath him, there was a narrow path – accessed by two sets of steps – which ran behind the stage area and which the actors used for most of their entrances and exits. Beyond that path, and with only a fragile-looking wire fence in between, the ground simply fell away into nothingness. He leaned further over and looked down into the zawn, a rift in the cliffs which – at high tide, as it was now – was filled with an angry, churning sea. No wonder the balustrade and pillars had been added, he thought; the stage must be eighty or ninety feet above the rocks, and an actor making a wrong move or getting carried away with his performance faced a perilous fall. Apart from anything else, it wasn’t good for the nerves of an audience to spend the entire performance in fear of an unscripted accident. As he watched, thinking how easy it was to become mesmerised by the motion of the waves, a woman of about forty with a shock of untidy brown hair – already dressed as a pilgrim for one of the crowd scenes – descended the steps to his right and walked quickly along the backstage path, apparently oblivious to the steep drop at her feet. She stopped immediately below him, where a recess directly under the balustrade offered actors a welcome spot of shelter to await their cues, and took out half a dozen lanterns, which she placed at regular intervals along the edge of the path.

‘Billy,’ she called back over her shoulder to a middle-aged man in a flat cap, whose tanned, muscled arms wouldn’t have looked out of place on someone ten years younger, ‘I’ve put the lanterns in place. Check they’re working when you have a minute, will you?’

‘Right-o, Miss Cade,’ the man said, and set about his task immediately.

Archie watched as the pilgrim went back up the cliff, stopping occasionally to pick up a bit of litter or a stray stone and shadowed by a pair of King Charles spaniels. What an extraordinary woman Rowena Cade was, he thought – he looked forward to meeting her later. Now, he still had a few minutes to spare, so he decided to climb up into one of the granite outcrops that formed the wings and see what the view was like from there. He hadn’t got far before he realised that someone else had had the same idea. Nathaniel was sitting with his back against an enormous boulder, out of sight of anyone on stage or in the auditorium, holding the jackdaw costume which should have been Harry’s and which he was now due to wear. Unaware that anyone was watching, the young curate lifted the black silk cowl to his lips and held it there. It was a moment of absolute tenderness, and it told Archie more about Nathaniel’s feelings for Harry than words could ever have done. He realised that he was intruding, but knew also that to turn and leave without being noticed would be difficult. Before he could resolve his dilemma, Nathaniel glanced up and saw him.

‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ Archie said, noticing how tired the curate looked. ‘I’ll go back down and leave you on your own.’ Nathaniel’s face was pale against the dark material and, although he appeared startled at first, he seemed to relax a little when he saw that it was Archie who had discovered his hiding place.

‘No, don’t,’ he said, with a nervous half-smile. ‘I mean, you don’t have to go if you don’t want to. I was just trying to keep out of the way for as long as possible.’ He held up the costume. ‘Quite frankly, I’m dreading this and I don’t know why I ever agreed to go through with it after everything that’s happened. For two pins, I’d make a run for it.’

‘You and me both,’ Archie said. ‘The trouble is, compared with the wrath of Morveth, going through with it is the lesser of two evils.’ Nathaniel smiled again, and this time the nervousness was gone. He had a very attractive face, Archie noticed – open and sensitive, with intelligent sea-blue eyes and a small furrow in his brow which made him look thoughtful rather than sullen. It was the face of a born cleric, he thought, although judging by what he had just witnessed, Nathaniel’s choice of career could hardly have been without conflict.

‘I can barely bring myself to put his costume on,’ the young man admitted as Archie sat down beside him. ‘Not because I’m superstitious – it just doesn’t seem possible that he’s dead. We grew up together on the estate, and he’s the first person I’ve lost who’s always been there. Does that make sense?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Archie said. He offered Nathaniel a cigarette, and lit one for himself. ‘For me, it was my father. My closest friend was killed in the war, and that’s something I don’t think I’ll ever get over, but we’d only known each other since the first year of university. My father – well, that was something else altogether, and you’re right – it’s a very different sort of grief; not necessarily harder or easier, but definitely different.’ He thought for a moment, allowing himself a rare glimpse into the dark days that had followed his father’s death. ‘When someone you love dies, you’re always changed; when you’ve never known life without them, everything you’ve ever been sure of is suddenly snatched away.’

‘Perhaps it’s because it’s the first thing that makes you aware of your own mortality,’ Nathaniel said.

Archie was silent. No one who’d spent time in the trenches had to wait for a parent or a lifelong friend to die to know that his own time would come sooner or later. Nathaniel had missed that realisation by a few years, but, if Archie’s doubts that any lessons had been learned proved justified, the curate would come to understand the paranoia of war all too soon. ‘Harry’s death must have been difficult for you for lots of reasons,’ he said gently.

Nathaniel looked at him sharply, but seemed to realise immediately that there was no point in lying to Archie and, more importantly, no need to try. ‘Yes, not least because in some ways it made things easier,’ he said. ‘Believe me, no one was more shocked than I was when I realised how much I loved Harry – and not just as a friend or a brother. Nothing was the same after that. ‘

It occurred to Archie that, despite his reputation as a bit of a ladies’ man, Harry had never – to his knowledge, at least – had any serious relationship with a woman, and it was rare in this sort of community for a man not to have settled down by his mid-twenties. ‘Did he feel the same way about you?’ he asked.

‘I doubt it, but I don’t know,’ Nathaniel said. ‘I could never have said anything to him. It probably would have disgusted him – and if not, if he did have those feelings, that would have been worse in a way: it would have made life impossible.’

‘Because of your job?’

‘My job, yes, and my family – it took a long time to persuade them that this was right for me.’ He stubbed his cigarette out on the rock, and refused another. ‘In a way, I asked them for a bigger act of faith than anything I’ve ever been tested with – until now, that is. And once they were sure it made me happy, they did everything they could to support me. Can you imagine what sort of sacrifices that involved? They’re not wealthy people – they work hard, and they get by; they didn’t bargain for a son to put through college, but they haven’t wavered once. That’s real love – how could I ever throw it back at them?’

‘Isn’t that the point, though? They do love you, they’re proud of you, and your happiness comes first. They might understand.’

Nathaniel shook his head. ‘Of course they wouldn’t. I don’t, so how can I expect them to? Oh, I don’t mean they’d turn me away like a criminal – but they’d think it was their fault, that if they’d done something differently, I’d have turned out all right. And they have never, ever done anything wrong – this is my guilt, not theirs. That’s another reason why I couldn’t tell Harry – I could never have trusted him to keep quiet about it. Can you imagine the shame of it if anyone found out? If I went to prison, for goodness’ sake?’ He changed his mind about the cigarette, and reached for the packet. ‘And I have got a job to do here,’ he said earnestly. ‘A job that I believe in. I belong here – and everyone on the estate seems to know that. It’s not just my parents – the whole community’s welcomed me into that church. They want a change after all the greed and hypocrisy that Motley’s got away with for so long. They want – they deserve – something real.’ Nathaniel realised instantly what he had said, and looked mortified. ‘I’m so sorry – I forgot he was family.’

‘I wish I could,’ said Archie, who was not in the least bothered by the lack of regard in which his uncle was held. ‘There’s no need to apologise. You know what they say – you can choose your friends…’

‘Anyway, I can’t let them down,’ Nathaniel continued, still embarrassed by his faux pas. ‘The people here trust me, I think, and religion should be about the specific, not the abstract. You have to look after those close to you – your family, your community – and that means having some integrity, not behaving differently when they’re not looking.’

The curate’s passion and sincerity impressed Archie, who had expected his questions to be deflected with the standard scriptural rationalisations, but he was keen to get back to the subject of Harry, and Nathaniel seemed to sense his impatience. ‘Sorry,’ he said again, ‘you didn’t ask for a lesson in pastoral care – but that’s why I didn’t say anything to Harry about how I felt. That, and the fear of losing him as a friend.’

‘You lost him anyway.’ It sounded harsh, but, if he were ever to get to the bottom of Harry’s death, Archie needed to understand his rift with Nathaniel. ‘You were estranged when he died, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, but that was my fault, not his. I couldn’t be around him – it just wasn’t right. And he… well, he started behaving differently towards me.’

‘So he did know how you felt?’ asked Archie again, surprised.

Nathaniel hesitated for a moment. ‘Neither of us ever mentioned it,’ he reiterated, ‘but I think he must have suspected. He kept… well, goading me in a way.’

‘As if he wanted you to say something?’

‘Perhaps. Or perhaps it just amused him.’

If it was the latter, Archie thought, Harry must have had an exceptionally cruel streak. No wonder the curate had made such a mess of the eulogy: it was never easy to face up to flaws in people you wanted to idolise, and he already felt ashamed of his love for Harry; if Harry had proved himself unworthy of it, Nathaniel’s pain – his sense of betrayal – would have been so much worse.

‘I just wanted him to go away, you know,’ Nathaniel admitted. ‘It seems selfish now, but I even prayed for it. Not like this, though,’ he added, fighting back tears. ‘I never wanted it to happen like this.’

‘Did Morwenna know what was going on between you?’ Archie asked, and Nathaniel shook his head. ‘So the other day, after the funeral, when she said she blamed you for Harry’s death – what do you think she meant?’

Nathaniel answered Archie’s question with one of his own. ‘Did she say he killed himself?’

‘Yes, but she couldn’t – or wouldn’t – tell me why. Do you know?’

It seemed a long time before Nathaniel answered. ‘If Morwenna’s right,’ he said eventually, ‘and I hope to God she isn’t – but if Harry did commit suicide, it’ll be because of something I found out about him. Something I couldn’t keep to myself.’ Archie waited, knowing he had no authority to press Nathaniel but hoping that the curate would want to talk. ‘It was Loveday who told me,’ he continued. ‘She didn’t know what she was saying, of course, but it was about the night of the fire – the night their parents died.’

This was not at all what Archie had expected, but he nodded encouragingly at Nathaniel to go on. ‘She told me that she went back downstairs that night, after her parents had gone to bed. She often used to sneak down, apparently. She liked to hide under the table in the sitting room, snuggled up to their dog, and watch the fire die down in the grate. After a while, she heard Harry come downstairs and go into the kitchen. She was worried at first, because the kitchen was under her parents’ room and she didn’t want Harry to get into trouble – they’d been arguing recently, she said, and there’d been a lot of shouting, although they’d tried to hide it from her. She crept to the door and watched her brother moving about in the kitchen.’ He paused, not for dramatic effect but as if he found it hard to believe what he was saying. Archie, who had a horrible idea of what was about to come, realised he was holding his breath. ‘She saw Harry take a piece of paper – a letter of some sort – and set light to it in the kitchen fire. He watched it burn for a few seconds, then walked across the room, still holding it. She couldn’t see what happened after that because the door was half closed, but he came out soon afterwards and shut the door behind him. She said he was crying when he went back upstairs.’

‘So Loveday said that Harry started the fire deliberately, then went back upstairs to die with his parents and his little sister?’ Archie’s tone was incredulous. ‘Did you believe her?’

‘I believe that she saw what she says she saw. She didn’t draw any conclusions from it – Loveday doesn’t analyse things, and she doesn’t make connections between events – things just are what they are. People are either good or bad, and she doesn’t see any of those grey areas that make life so complicated for the rest of us. But she doesn’t lie, either, and she doesn’t exaggerate. So yes, I did believe her, and I reacted in exactly the same way as you.’

‘Has she never told anyone else all this?’

‘Apparently not. She said that no one ever wanted to talk about the fire in front of her – and that’s certainly true. I’ve seen people go quiet the minute she appears. If anyone had taken the trouble to ask, I dare say she’d have told them – but they didn’t. Everyone assumed it was a tragic accident, and even Loveday doesn’t understand what she saw.’

‘But you told Morwenna.’

‘Not straight away. I confronted Harry first – I suppose I hoped he’d explain it somehow, and convince me that Loveday had got it wrong.’

‘But he didn’t?’

‘No. He didn’t admit it, but he didn’t bother denying it either. He just stared at me while I talked – while I shouted – and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so sad. In the end, he simply turned and walked away. That was the last time I saw him. I had to tell Morwenna after that – I was worried about what he might do to Loveday.’

Archie tried – and failed – to reconcile the Harry Pinching he knew with someone who could harm his parents, let alone his little sister. ‘How did Morwenna react?’

‘She was hysterical,’ Nathaniel said. ‘I honestly thought she’d gone out of her mind with shock. First, she screamed at me that it was a pack of lies, then she cursed me for opening old wounds when it could do no good for anyone.’

‘Implying that she knew already?’

Nathaniel shrugged, almost dismissively, and Archie could see how much he wished he could simply brush this conflict of loyalties aside. ‘I don’t know if she knew or simply suspected. She tried to persuade me not to tell anyone else, but I couldn’t do it – it didn’t seem right to keep quiet about something like that if it was true. She threw me out of the house after that.’

‘When was this?’

‘A few days before the accident.’

‘And have you told anyone else?’

‘No – not until now. It didn’t seem right to betray Harry either.’

‘The other day, when Morwenna confronted you – I saw the look on your face when you realised what she meant. The idea of suicide was a shock to you, wasn’t it, even with what you knew about the fire?’

‘Yes, it was,’ he said emphatically, and Archie was sure he was telling the truth.

‘So you accepted that Harry’s death was an accident?’

‘I suppose I thought he might have brought it on himself,’ Nathaniel admitted, ‘but not in the way Morwenna meant. He’d been drinking heavily lately, and getting into a bit of bother here and there. He took up with Joseph Caplin not so long back, and the two of them were hardly ever without a glass in their hand. I used to wonder how Harry managed to stay on his horse – he was in no fit state to ride anywhere. When I heard what had happened, I assumed he’d pushed his luck too far.’

Why hadn’t Morwenna mentioned Harry’s drinking, Archie wondered? He could understand her being loyal to her dead brother’s memory, but did she really prefer to believe that he had taken his own life? And if she was so outraged at Nathaniel’s raking up the past, why risk it becoming public by mentioning the subject of suicide to a policeman? She must have known he’d ask questions – or had he been in London too long? Was her confidence simply that of a friend unburdening herself to someone she thought she could trust? Reconciling her love for her brother with a sense of justice for her parents must seem an impossible task to face alone – no wonder she’d needed to talk. ‘What sort of bother did Harry get into?’ he asked.

‘Oh, the usual stuff – brawling, gambling, and I heard that he’d run up a few debts. He was barred from the Commercial for a while for getting into a fight with some visitors from up country, and he’d fallen out badly with Jago because of something he’d said to Christopher.’

‘That’s all a bit out of character, isn’t it?’ Archie said, frustrated that he seemed to have got only half a story from Jago, too.

‘For the Harry we thought we knew or for the man who burned his parents to death in their beds?’ It was a good point, to which Archie had no answer. ‘It would have been at one time,’ Nathaniel continued, ‘but he’d changed so much. He was always a bit reckless, but he had a gentle side to him, a caring side – and he loved being with people. Lately, it was almost as if he was trying to alienate everyone who was close to him. Perhaps that was what his behaviour with me was about – he knew I’d keep away rather than confront him. The only time I ever saw a glimpse of the old Harry was when he was with Loveday – she seemed to be the only person he could trust. I know I panicked when I found out about the fire, but he was always the sort of big brother that any kid would want.’

Archie remembered Josephine’s suggestion, and how quickly he had dismissed it. Suddenly, he was less sure. ‘Did Harry ever hurt Morwenna?’ he asked.

‘You mean physically? Not to my knowledge.’ He thought for a moment, then added: ‘I’m sure he didn’t – well, as sure as I can be. That’s the trouble with finding out a secret about someone, isn’t it? You start to doubt everything else about them. I know the change in him hurt her, though. Sometimes I’d catch her looking at him as though she couldn’t understand why he was behaving like that, like he’d betrayed her in some way and she didn’t know how to reach him any more. She told Morveth that they’d argued on the night he died – she was very hard on herself about that, apparently, and there was nothing Morveth could say to comfort her.’

‘And what about you?’ Archie asked, conscious of how alone Nathaniel must feel. ‘Who do you have for comfort?’

He took a small, leather-bound book from the top pocket of his shirt, a battered old volume which Archie recognised as the Book of Common Prayer. ‘I’ve always had this,’ he said, trying to smile. ‘It doesn’t do a bad job – at least it didn’t. You know, since I first picked this book up, I’ve never been afraid of anything; now, after Harry’s death, I sleep with a lamp burning every night. Actually, that’s a lie – after what Morwenna said the other day, I hardly sleep at all. All I want to do is forget him, wipe him out of my mind – but he haunts me. I keep thinking about him going into that lake all alone – those waters are so cold, so dark. What sort of despair must he have been in if he really did think that was easier than living? I can’t get that out of my head. I’ve always thought of a loved one’s presence after death as some sort of consolation for their loss, an affirmation that it doesn’t all just end when we die. But this isn’t any comfort – this is hell, and he’s beside me all the time, inviting me in.’

Archie heard a noise behind him and looked up. ‘So this is where my two leading men have got to,’ Morveth said. She spoke lightly but her face was anxious, and Archie wondered how much she had heard. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, standing up in front of Nathaniel to give the young man time to pull himself together. ‘We’ve had a touch of stage fright and we thought if we hid here long enough, you might let us off the hook altogether.’

‘You’ll have to try harder than that, my lad – nothing gets past me. I need my jackdaw to practise his take-off.’

‘His what?’

‘She means the jump off the balustrade into thin air,’ Nathaniel explained, trying to emulate Archie’s easy banter. ‘Don’t worry,’ he continued as he saw the look of horror on Archie’s face. ‘All I have to do is drop down on to the backstage path, but it looks spectacular from where the audience is. It’s the highlight of the play, and there’ll be someone there to make sure I don’t overshoot. We wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t safe. After last year…’ He grinned, and handed his costume to Archie. ‘Look after this a minute. I’ll try it a few times in normal clothes first.’

Nathaniel followed Morveth down on to the stage, leaving Archie holding the habit that Harry should have worn. As he looked down at the black silk, he thought about the strange hold that the dead had over the living: they had buried Harry on Sunday, but he had been by far the most powerful presence of this visit so far. What would have made him set that fire all those years ago? Archie wondered. What was so terrible that he would kill and die for it? More to the point, he thought selfishly, what was he supposed to do about it? Was Nathaniel’s motive for telling him just the lightening of a heavy burden or a plea for more tangible help? Even if Loveday were telling the truth, and Harry was a killer, he couldn’t see what good it would do to open up the case now – perhaps that was what Morveth had meant when she warned him to leave things alone – but it wasn’t in his nature to turn a blind eye. So what was he supposed to be – policeman or friend?

Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t an actor, he thought resentfully as he walked down from the wings and took his place on the platform which Morveth had pointed out. The stage felt suddenly claustrophobic to him, and far too close to the audience for comfort. As he looked up at the steep grass slope, imagining what it would be like later when it was full of people, he wished more than ever that he had never agreed to take part in The Jackdaw of Rheims.