The Sin Eater(27)
‘Can’t you give me a clue?’
‘I’ve found something about that macabre chess piece Nell had last evening,’ said Owen, and the image of the malevolently sneering chess piece rose up vividly in Michael’s mind. Something seemed to prickle across the back of his neck, and he thought: I don’t want any part of this. I don’t want Nell to have any part of it, either.
But this was absurd, so he said, ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
‘I knew I’d seen that chess king before,’ said Owen, opening the door. ‘And I was right. Sit down, if you can find a space in this muddle.’
Michael did so, and Owen picked up a slightly mildewed book and brandished it.
‘I’d set a group of second years an essay on the background to the birth of Home Rule in Ireland,’ he said. ‘And one of them came up with the fact that the eighth Earl of Kilderry led a group of local men in one of the Fenian Risings against the British. Well, I’d never heard of Kilderry, let alone its having an Earl all to itself, so I was a bit suspicious – they aren’t above making these things up purely for the hell of getting one up on the lecturer. So I looked it up.’
‘And had he made it up?’
‘No, he had not. Don’t you hate it when your students wrong-foot you like that? Although I suppose it doesn’t happen to you; an Elizabethan sonnet is an Elizabethan sonnet for all time. Anyway,’ said Owen briskly and before Michael could argue this intriguing subject, ‘round about 1900 somebody wandered around the west of Ireland, collecting stories for an anthology. I followed the source to its root and unearthed the actual book, and the Earl of Kilderry did exist. The middle to late 1800s it was, and it seems he was a roistering old sinner.’
‘What were his sins?’
‘Drink, women, thieving, every kind of debauchery. Reading between the lines there was probably the odd murder, too. Even allowing for the Irish habit of exaggeration he seems to have lived a very fruity life. There’s a brief biog of him here,’ said Owen, reaching for the book. ‘Listen, I’ll read the opening.
‘“During the middle years of the nineteenth century, the eighth Earl of Kilderry was notorious in Kilderry itself and also the surrounding villages. He was known locally as the Wicked Earl, and maidservants at Kilderry Castle [editor’s note: castle abandoned in the 1880s] would tell how he sent for them to come to his bedchamber, sometimes singly, but more often in twos and threes, where they would be forced to pleasure the Earl in whatever way occurred to him. He was also known to be a devotee of the ancient British tradition of the droit de seigneur, exercising a feudal right to deflower all virgins the night before they went to their marriage bed. Despite being a scion of an old and honourable line—” Sorry about that snobby touch, Michael, I told you this was all written around 1900, so it . . . Where was I?’
‘Scion of an old and honourable line.’
‘Oh yes. “Despite that, the Wicked Earl had misappropriated considerable sums of money, by theft, forgery, and fraud, but it did him little good in the end, for by 1880 Kilderry Castle was a virtual ruin.” One gets,’ said Owen, in parenthesis, ‘a marvellous image of this bawdy old sinner moving from room to room in his tumbledown ancestral home, trying to stay one step ahead of leaking roofs and death watch beetle, absent-mindedly rogering anything that strays in his path as he does so.’
‘That’s the downfall of many a stately home,’ said Michael solemnly.
‘Rogering?’
‘Death watch beetle.’
‘Too true.’ Owen grinned, then recommenced reading. ‘“Perhaps the most curious tale about Gerald Kilderry is told by a former servant of the Kilderry family, who was still living in Kilglenn at the end of the nineteenth century.”’
He broke off and looked at his watch. ‘You’d better read the next part for yourself,’ he said. ‘It’s apparently a first-hand account from a maidservant who was at Kilderry Castle for a number of years – quite good primary source stuff if it’s genuine. I’ve got to get changed before we set off for the bunfight – did you know I’m saying grace at the lunch this year?’
‘How are you saying it?’ asked Michael, taking the book. Oriel College had a tradition at formal Hall of reciting an ancient Latin grace ascribed to Erasmus, and the present Dean was trying to establish his own small sub-tradition by choosing a different member of the college to say grace at his own Christmas lunch. A modest rivalry had grown up to see who could produce the most unusual form; last year had been a Greek Orthodox version which, as somebody pointed out later, was all very well, but had only been comprehensible to the Modern Language scholars.
‘I’ve found a really ancient form that the source swears was used at Hever Castle when Ann Boleyn was a girl,’ said Owen gleefully. ‘And it certainly has an early Tudor ring to it.’
‘That ought to rock them in the aisles.’
‘Yes, and I need to run over it again because I don’t want it to sound forsoothly.’
He vanished into the adjoining bedroom, and Michael sat down by the window and began to read.
NINE
When I was a girl most people went up to the castle into the service of the Kilderry family. I was twelve when I went, and it was when the old Earl, who most people called the Wicked Earl, was there, although I never called him that in case he got to hear of it.