Spider Light(12)

‘There isn’t a monastery in the world that would have you,’ said Bryony at once, and he grinned and said, ‘Nor there is, thanks be to God. Are we having supper soon?’

‘Yes. Why? Are you going out later?’

‘I am.’

It would be better not to ask where he was going, so Bryony did not. It might be poaching or it might be a lady. He was about as trustworthy as a sleeping wolf, Cormac Sullivan but Bryony did not really mind. She loved him better than anyone in the entire world, and what was even better, she liked him. The two things did not necessarily go together.

So she just said, ‘Don’t get caught, will you?’ and he smiled his guileless smile and said he would not.





CHAPTER FIVE




There was no cut and dried textbook treatment for coping with ghosts, even if you believed in them, which Antonia did not.

Richard was dead; Don Robards had certainly died more than five years ago, and the presence of Paganini’s music in Quire House had been merely a coincidence. Yes, but there had been that car–the same as the car Don used to drive–that followed her yesterday. Had that just been another coincidence? Antonia supposed it was possible.

What about that dark pocket of fear inside Charity Cottage itself? It was still there, like a bruise you avoided touching, but how much of it was due to Antonia’s own state of mind? Could it conceivably be connected to the cottage’s past? Sensitivity to an atmosphere was not an unknown phenomenom. It was something a surprising number of psychiatrists would cautiously admit existed. Antonia was not quite admitting it now, but she was open to persuasion. She thought she was no more and no less receptive than anyone else, but a number of times, trying to reach deeply disturbed patients, she had been able to feel very distinctly the muddy tangle of their confusion and unhappiness. Like poking a stick into a stagnant pool and feeling the silt stir before you actually saw it reach the surface.

So did the silt sometimes stir in Charity Cottage? Had something violent and tragic once happened here and left a lasting imprint?

On balance, ghosts and the imprints of old emotions might be easier to cope with than delusions. Routing ghosts was not a question of reciting some Macbeth-like incantation or waving garlic and crucifixes around. The solution, quite simply, was to systematically crowd the wretched creatures out. To immerse your mind so thoroughly in something else that there was no room left for spooks and no energy to spare for noticing their presence.

A project. A programme of work, a quest, a venture.

There were a few possibilities for this, but it was Amberwood and Twygrist that came strongly into her mind. Amberwood and the people who had lived and worked here. The Twygrist miller, whoever he had been, and Thomasina Forrester with that off-centre stare and uncompromising jaw, and the quirky little post of Clock-Winder of Amberwood. And this cottage.

She retrieved the leaflets about Quire House, and spread them out on the table. It looked as if Godfrey Toy might have had a hand in their compiling; they were neatly written, with little potted histories of some of the people who had lived in the house.

Thomasina Forrester appeared to have been something of a personality in Amberwood. She had administered the Quire estate and been involved in various charitable activities. Antonia supposed these would have been ladies’ committees for fund-raising events or sick-visiting, and turned over a page to see what Thomasina had got up to.

It had not been organizing charity concerts or sick-visiting at all. Thomasina Forrester had been a trustee of something called the Forrester Benevolent Trust–Antonia thought there was a disagreeable air of patronage about the name–whose purpose appeared to be the providing of comforts to inmates of the local lunatic asylum. The asylum itself had been called Latchkill and, according to the leaflet, it had been a dark byword for miles around.

Latchkill. It was a harsh, ugly word. Latchkill–the place where all the locks had been killed. Was that what the name was meant to imply? Do not risk coming here: this is the place where doors cannot be opened because there are no keys. Once you are in here, it is very difficult indeed to get out again.

The words scraped against Antonia’s mind, taking her back to another place where latches had been killed. A place where some of the females preferred their own sex and practised their own initiation rituals when the wardens were not around.

But she had survived it. She had even survived the night she was beaten up in the showers, when four of the women subjected her to rape. She had known, of course, that women could and did rape other women–she had had two girls as patients who had been the victims of female rape. But listening to a distraught patient describing the act was no preparation for the experience itself–for the glitter in the attackers’ eyes, or the smell of cheap soap in the shower stalls and the body scents of the women bending over her, or the feeling of their hands…


Afterwards she had pushed the memory down to the very deepest level of her mind, and it had stayed there until the word Latchkill touched a raw nerve, and a pair of skewed eyes looking out of a framed drawing brought back the fear and humiliation of that night. You never entirely erased any memory, but it was odd that the sketch of the long-dead Thomasina Forrester should have dredged up that particular one.



Godfrey had been inclined to discount Miss Weston as a possible new friend, so it was a nice surprise when she turned up just after eleven o’clock next morning, and asked if he knew of any sources she could explore to find out more about the Forrester family. She did not know exactly what she was looking for, she said, just general things: background, how they had made their money, why they had come to Quire House, what descendants there might still be in the area, Twygrist and its place in the scheme of things–it seemed to be bound up with the Forresters, what with the memorial clock and so on. No, there was no especial reason for her interest, she said, but the leaflets Dr Toy had given her had been interesting, and she would like to read up about local history and local personalities while she was here. Nothing very scholarly, only a bit of relaxation.