The Chalice

TEN

'It was Archer, wasn't it?'

She kept opening her eyes but they wouldn't focus. She saw the blobs of faces around her in the gloom, but their pictures fled as she tried to identity them, flitting from one to another, very quickly. She thought she saw the Pilgrims; Rozzie and Mort and Viper and Gwyn. She must be hallucinating, dredging memories from the sludge of her subconscious. But in the end she could concentrate on only one thought.

'It was… Archer. Archer pushed her downstairs. Archer killed her.'

Capturing the certainty before sleep reached out for her.

'I've never met him,' Powys said reasonably. 'Never even seen him. Got no reason to think ill of him. Hell, I'm not even very political.'

Working on information now that he hadn't found in Pixhill papers. Piecing together what he'd gleaned from Juanita and particularly from Verity. Verity who pattered about the streets and chatted innocuously, sometimes inanely. And heard things…

'Is this gossip?' Lord Pennard seemed stunned, 'is this talked about?'

'I don't honestly think it is. It just… suggests itself. Maybe… maybe it suggested itself to you.'

'How can I discuss this with you? I've never even seen you before tonight. Certainly never heard of you. You lied to get in here; how do I know you're not lying now?'

Powys said nothing. Pennard had his head in his hands.

He'd found another bottle of whisky,

'My wife died after falling downstairs. She'd been to the nursery. Liked to spend time there. Been redecorated, refurnished in pink. She had her bed moved into the next room. Said she knew it was going to be a girl because… a wise woman had told her. My wife believed in such nonsense. She'd sit in the nursery alone and read for hours, as though the fact of the pink paint could influence matters at that stage.'

He drank some whisky. His face no longer smooth and polished but blotched with tension.

'Closed that part of the house now. Don't heat it, don't light it. Let it damn well rot. If it falls down, it falls down.'

'Were you in the house at the time?'

'I was in here. Didn't like her in her maudlin, nursery moping mood. One of the maids – still had maids then – came to tell me. They'd found my wife at the bottom of the stairs. Semi-conscious. Called the doctor. And the Belvedere, the private clinic. Sent a midwife with an assistant. Bugger-all use they were.'

'How near to time was she?'

'Seven months. Baby came out, but the damned placenta wouldn't. Because of the fall. Place was like the inside of an abattoir.'

He choked back something and became annoyed with himself and pushed all the bloodsports magazines to the floor.

Powys said, 'Someone told me Archer and his mother didn't get on.'

'Who told you?'

'Does it matter?'

'No. It's true. This… Dark Chalice business. This blasted woman… this Fortune… Firth biddy… spent a lot of time, apparently, with my mother while my father was away at his… clinic. Whatever she told her, my mother evidently passed on to Helen – my wife. One Christmas, few glasses of wine, told the boy about the legend of the Chalice. My wife was furious. Insisted it was up to the women of the family to exercise constant vigilance to counter any attempt arising from "male avarice or poverty'', as she put it, to "unbind'' the thing. Archer, of course, was immediately enchanted. We'll get it back. Father, won't we? Damn it, if he hadn't learned about it from me, someone else would have told him. Sooner or later.'

'Was that why your wife was so determined to have a girl? Because the women…?'

'Doubtless. Archer was ten at the time. Don't think she was ever close to him again. Almost afraid of him. And, of course, he played up to that. I remember he once walked in while we were having dinner. Solemnly carrying a chalice with a candle burning in it. Said he'd found it buried in the grounds. Helen had hysterics. Turned out some boy had stolen the thing from St John's. I think Archer paid him. It was smoothed over.'

The sleet had stopped. It was very quiet in the gunroom.

After a while. Lord Pennard said, 'Had the sheets burned. And the mattress. And then the fucking bed. Chopped up and burned. Sat in the library window, all the lights out. Watching the bed blazing in the walled garden.'

Powys thought, nearly twenty-eight years ago, Pennard would have been around his own age. Never imagined he'd be feeling so sorry for the guy.

'Rankin did the burning. Been with us about a year. Soaked everything with paraffin. Lit up most of the lawn. When the fire burned low, Rankin went away. Then Archer came out.'

Pennard pushed his whisky away.

'Had enough. Can't get drink any more. Can't get merry. Yes. Archer came out. Arms full of toys and baby bedding from the nursery. Pink teddy bear. I remember the pink teddy bear. With a bow. Archer burned them all. He was grinning. The baby was born. I couldn't look at her. She had blood on her. So I sat in the library in the dark and watched Archer burn all the toys. Saw his grinning face in the firelight.'

Lord Pennard began to weep.

After much frantic struggling, Juanita managed to get the shop door open and she threw herself out into the street, blue coat under her arm.

Into the empty town, moving in a staccato, sporadic fashion. Stubbornly doing 'normal' things, taking in images of ordinariness. She walked across the zebra-crossing to the post office. Looked into the phone box, an old-fashioned red one but the coinbox and phone were modern. A stand-up sandwich board said:

LPS, TAPES, CDS, ROOKS BOUGHT, SOLD

On the other side, a sticker had been slapped across the board:

Put Glastonbury First

– TAME THE TOR.

It was cold, but the sleet had stopped, leaving a thin glaze of slush on the pavement; few feet tonight to trample it away. The sky was clear again, almost starlit. There could be a hard frost, icy roads.

Alone on High Street, Juanita felt utterly wretched, but she couldn't go back. Couldn't live with those pictures. Couldn't take them down or hide them away, that would be the final rejection for Jim.

She struggled into her coat and stood for a while outside the delicatessen near the crossing. She felt agitated. Her body twitching, itching. Her hands ached abominably. She felt used and betrayed. As if her body had been strengthened just sufficiently to support the mind-twisting terror which began with the painting altering, recreating itself in her head, an unseasonal fly from the attic mutating obscenely into a symbolic black bus.

There were no roads at all in that picture, no hazy ley lines. Somehow her mind had created them as an opening for the horrid black bus which came out of the shadow-Tor and tunnelled into her brain.

A black bus was not a real hippy bus. Hippies had rainbow buses.

The Pilgrims, though, they were different. Gwyn ap Nudd, lord of darkness, his sickle raised. The Pilgrims laughing because they knew the Tor had betrayed Jim and Juanita. The hill of dreams where she'd sat all night and drunk cheap wine and watched for the good aliens, the mystic hill which Jim had painted reflecting the last light… had reversed dramatically into the negative image of itself, thus becoming a dark hill, and spewed out the black bus of death.

And the good, hopeful hippies who danced like butterflies and wished people love had given way to twisted, embittered hippies, children of the Dark Chalice.

She felt the whole town twisting and turning and tightening around her like the grey snake-hair of the black priestess, Ceridwen.

Who had Diane.

'Diane!' Juanita screamed. 'Where are you? Answer me!'

Nobody answered her. Alone on the cold wet street, she sobbed and scuttled away, a Verity in the making.

There were questions he didn't have to ask any more, like why Lord Pennard had abandoned attempts to get Meadwell back.

Why he'd placed his daughter in the care of strict, old-fashioned nannies who would take no nonsense. Who could be relied upon to keep her away from Archer.

Why he'd sent her away to school after school. Why he wanted her to marry a man in distant Yorkshire.

'You could never be sure, could you? Whether it was real or the whole thing was fantasy. Whether Archer had actually pushed his mother downstairs and might one day do something similar to Diane. You were just trying to keep them apart as long as it was in your power to do so.'

'He's my only son.' When Pennard looked up, his face had hardened again. 'My heir. The next Viscount Pennard. And before that he'll be the MP for Mendip South. It's coming right again, Powys. We're selling the land for the road. The future's sound. We never needed the chalice.'

'That's what Archer thinks too, is it?'

'Get out. Go on.' Pennard turned away. 'We never had this conversation. I've never seen you in my life. Just get out of my house.'

'Do you know where your daughter is now? Have you any idea?'

'Get out!'

'Don't you think it might be a good idea to report her missing? To the police? They'd listen to you. They'd pull out the stops.'

Pennard didn't reply. He didn't move. He was like marble.

Powys found his own way out down a shabby, leather-smelling passageway, frugally lit.

Rankin was waiting for him at the front door.

'Get what you wanted?'

'More or less, thanks.'

'I was listening,' Rankin said. 'Other side of the door.'

'What?'

'The aristocracy.' Rankin shook his head. 'Sometimes they can be very naive. Quite often we have to save them from themselves.'

He was half a head taller than Powys, held himself very straight. His face was without expression.

'Because we need them, you see. They're our backbone. You might not think much of him and his kind, Mr Poe-is, but they've made this country what it is. They deserve our protection.'

'Most people have to protect themselves,' Powys said nervously.

'I can't let you spread this around,' Rankin said, very matter-of-fact. 'You know that. I had my son break into your car, take it round the back of the house for tonight. We've killed your dog, sorry about that. Sorry about all of this, but I take my job seriously and that man in there and what he stands for is worth ten of you and all the pathetic sods down in that town, with their medallions and their dowsing sticks. You understand that, don't you, sir? All I'm saying, this is nothing personal.'

Rankin held open the door.

'After you,' he said.