ANDREW TAYLOR
Fireside Gothic

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Copyright © Andrew Taylor 2016

Cover design by Dominic Forbes © HarperColl‌insPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover photographs © Alamy: front cover Aurora Photos (cat), Sergio Azenha (steps)

Andrew Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical fact, are the work of the author’s imagination.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008171230

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008179731

Version: 2017-09-01

Dedication

For AKR, without whom …

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Broken Voices

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

The Leper House

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

The Scratch

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Author’s note

This is the first time these three stories have appeared in print, and the first time they have been collected together. They were originally commissioned separately as Kindle Single ebooks and written over several years.

With the benefit of hindsight, however, it’s obvious that the stories share common themes. Perhaps fate intended them to bring them together all along.

BROKEN VOICES

1

Was there a ghost? Was there, in a manner of speaking, a murder?

Ask me these questions and I cannot answer a simple yes or no. I did not know at the time and now, more than forty years later, I am even less able to answer them. Perhaps an easier question is this: what exactly do I remember about Faraday and me in the few days we were together? Those years before the war seem so remote now. The First World War, that is, the one that was meant to end them all.

He and I didn’t know each other long, not properly – four or five days, perhaps. And nights, of course. I suppose there must be records – a report in the local newspaper, surely, and a police file. Perhaps letters from Faraday’s guardian. There must also have been correspondence between the school and my parents, but I found no trace of it after my mother died. We never spoke of it when she was alive, not directly, and my father wasn’t able to speak about anything after they brought him back from France in 1915.

So – all I can really rely on is my memory. But memory may, paradoxically, make matters worse. It is not a passive record of what happens, though it may misleadingly give that impression. It plays an active role too, selecting and shaping the past. Memory speculates about itself; it ruminates and dreams, edits and deletes: over time, the fruits of these processes become the memories themselves and the entire process begins again.

So what does that make Faraday’s fugitive notes? Or the man I saw in the arcade? Or even Mordred?

To take a minor example. I must have seen the view from the train as we went back to school over and over again. But in memory it is always winter, though I must often have seen it at other times of the year. All the different journeys have elided into one which, strictly speaking, never really happened at all.

The train comes north across the Fens. It’s afternoon but the light is already fading rapidly from the endless bowl of the sky. The land is nearly as featureless – a plain of black mud stretching as far as the eyes can see. I stare out of the window, trying to find something to look at – a windmill, a hedge, a tree, a farm. Sometimes there is even a Fenlander. We used to call them Boggos.

I do not want to be on this train. Nor do I want to arrive at school. But there is no help in it: that’s what I remember most of all, that the desolation outside the window mirrored the desolation within me.

That was nonsense, of course. They call it the Pathetic Fallacy, the belief that one can attach human emotions and thoughts to inanimate objects, even landscapes. I know that because Mr Ratcliffe explained it to Faraday and me. It may be a fallacy but sometimes fallacies have their own sort of truth.

When I look out of the window into the darkening world, I am looking for the two towers and dreading to find them. The sight of them means that the journey is coming to its end. One tower is taller than the other, and they are joined by the long, high-backed ridge of the nave.

The Fens diminish everything – people, buildings, trees. Everything except the Cathedral, which deals with the Fens on its own terms.

Most old English cathedrals have a school attached to them, often a King’s School set up by Henry VIII at the Reformation. Ours was of no great size – perhaps a hundred pupils, some dayboys and some boarders, aged between nine and nineteen. Within the school was another school – technically, I believe a separate foundation: this was the Choir School, whose purpose was to educate the boys who sang in the Cathedral choir.

The Choir School was very small – twelve or fifteen boys. It was ruled by the Master of Music, Dr Atkinson, who was also the Cathedral organist. For much of the time, the Choir School boys mingled with the rest of us – they attended the same lessons and played the same games. But they were a race apart, nonetheless. They were liable to vanish unexpectedly to attend practice or perform their duties at one service or another. Their choir duties took precedence over everything else, even examinations. They had privileges and responsibilities that set them apart. They rarely talked of these except among themselves, and then in terms that were largely incomprehensible to outsiders, which added to the air of mystery that attached to them.

Faraday was a choirboy. He was thirteen years old. Before all this happened, I knew very little more about him, though we had attended the same school for years. I knew that he was supposed to be good at rugger. I knew he was the head of the Choir School, which meant that at services he wore a medallion engraved with the Cathedral’s badge over his surplice, hanging from a ribbon around his neck. But I was more than a year older. He was in the form below mine and he lived in a different house. Our lives did not overlap.

The other thing that everyone knew about Faraday was that he had an exceptionally beautiful voice. Ours was the sort of school where you had to be good at sport, or work or music if you were to have a tolerable life. Faraday was good at everything, but especially good at singing.

I suppose I should also mention that I did not much like Faraday.

My parents were in India. They went there the week before my seventh birthday, leaving me in England. The climate was healthier for children, they said, and besides the schools were so much better. It was what many parents did in their situation: it was considered quite normal and in the best interests of the child. Perhaps it was. But I wished they had taken me with them. I still wish it.

During school holidays, I stayed with my aunt, the widowed sister of my father. My aunt was a kind woman. But she didn’t know what to do with me and I didn’t know what to do with her. She and my parents decided to send me to the King’s School because it was only thirty miles from her house and it had the reputation of being a sound Christian establishment.

The school was a spartan place whose routine revolved around the Cathedral, even for those who were not in the choir. There was a good deal of bullying. Education of a sort was hammered into us. I made the best of it. What else was there to do?

I received regular letters from Quetta or Srinagar or New Delhi, written in my mother’s careful, upright hand. Every year or so, my parents would come home on leave. I looked forward to these visits with anxiety and delight, as I dare say they did. Seeing my parents was always painful because they were not as they had been, and nor was I: we had become strangers to one another. We tried to make the most of it, but then they would be off again and whatever fragile intimacy we had achieved would trickle away, leaving behind more misleading memories. Still, I longed to see them. Hope always triumphed over experience.

The last time they came home, I was twelve. My father tried without success to teach me to fish; he wanted me to share his passion. My mother took me shopping with her and showed me off to her friends, who remained unimpressed. We went up to London for matinées at the theatre.

On one of these outings we had tea at the Charing Cross Hotel. I don’t remember much about it except for one thing my mother said.

‘You used to be such a chatterbox when you were little.’ She smiled at me. ‘Where did all the words go?’

My parents were coming home again. They would be here by mid-December in plenty of time for Christmas. My mother wrote that my father was planning to buy a motor car. If he did, they would drive over at the end of term and collect me.

The thought of my parents turning up at school in a motor car added a new element to my anticipation. At that time cars were uncommon, especially in the Fens. I imagined my parents driving up in an enormous, gleaming equipage worthy of Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows and sweeping me away before the whole school. Like a fool, I boasted to my friends of this triumph to come, which was tempting fate.

I did not have long to enjoy it. In my mother’s next letter she wrote that they had been obliged to change their plans. They would not be able to come home this year after all.

‘It’s nothing to worry about, darling,’ she wrote, ‘but I’ve been a little under the weather lately, and the doctor says it would be better to leave it until next year. Daddy and I are so disappointed, though we know you will have a wonderful time at Christmas with Auntie Mary. And next year, we shall try to come home for longer.’

I know the reason now. My mother had just discovered she was pregnant. Of course, neither she nor my father ever talked about it to me, but it was easy enough to work out when my sister was born the following May.

Fifteen years is a long gap to leave between children. Perhaps my parents found it hard to conceive another child. Perhaps my sister was an accident. Not that it matters now. But it is strange to think that, if my sister had never existed, none of this would have happened and I would have been quite a different person now. And as for Faraday …

‘Try not to mind too much, darling,’ my mother’s letter ended. ‘With fondest love.’

Nevertheless, I looked forward to Christmas. If nothing else it meant getting away from school and going to a warm house where there were four meals a day and I was never left hungry for long. My aunt knew little about boys but she knew a great deal about creature comforts. The vicar’s son would be home from school, which meant that for at least part of the time I would have someone to go about with. And there would be presents – and perhaps more generous ones this year because my parents would feel I deserved consolation.

Two days before the end of term, Mr Treadwell, my housemaster, sent a boy to fetch me. He was a small, harassed man, a bachelor, who didn’t care for boys or anything else except geology, which was his passion.

‘There’s been a difficulty,’ he said, staring at the fire; he never looked at you if he could help it. ‘I’m sorry to say that your aunt is unwell.’

He paused. I did not dare interrupt him with a question. My housemaster believed boys should hold their tongues unless asked to speak. He had a vicious temper, too – we never knew how far he would go when roused.

‘She’s in hospital, in fact. Pneumonia, I’m afraid.’ He was still staring at the fire, but I saw the tip of his tongue emerge, lizard-like, from between his lips. ‘We must remember her in our prayers. Must we not?’

I recognized my cue. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘We must hope for a full recovery,’ he went on. ‘Not a good time of year to be ill. But still.’

‘What about Christmas, sir?’ I blurted out.

My housemaster turned his head and glared at me. But he must have remembered the circumstances, for when he spoke his voice was almost gentle.

‘You will have to stay at school,’ he said. ‘I have arranged for you to lodge with Mr Ratcliffe. It will be best for all concerned.’

2

Christmas that year fell on a Wednesday. ‘Wednesday’s Child is full of woe,’ shrieked one small boy over and over again as he ran round the playground, until one of the bullies of the Fifth Form pushed him over and made him cry instead.

The school broke up two days earlier, on Monday. It was strange to watch the familiar routines unfolding and not be part of them: the station fly taking boys to the railway station by relays; the steady stream of parents, always a matter of enormous sociological interest; the boys queueing to shake hands with Mr Treadwell.

At that stage I was not the only one to stay – two other boys at Treadwell’s did not leave with the rest on Monday. For an hour or two, we revelled in undisputed possession of the few amenities the house afforded – the billiards table with torn baize, for example, and the two armchairs that leaked horsehair by the common room fire. There was a sense of holiday so we talked loudly and laughed a great deal to show what fun we were having.

On Christmas Eve, however, these boys left as well, collected one by one by their parents. Mr Treadwell’s suitcases stood in the hall. He shook hands with Matron, who was going to her married sister in Huntingdon, and tipped the maids.

Finally, only Mr Treadwell and I were left. He looked at his watch. ‘The taxi will be here soon. I’ll take you over to Mr Ratcliffe’s now.’

My trunk, packed and corded, was staying at Treadwell’s with my tuckbox. But I had been given a small suitcase, in which Matron had put those things she thought I would need, and I had a satchel containing a few personal possessions. I followed Treadwell into the College, which was the name given to the Cathedral close.

The College was, and for all I know still is, a world apart with its own laws and customs. Every evening at 7 p.m., the great gates were closed, and the place turned in on itself for the night. Its boundaries were those of the mediaeval monastery, as were many of its buildings where the Cathedral dignitaries lived and where the houses and classrooms of the school were.

Mr Ratcliffe lived at one end of what had been the Sacrist’s Lodging. He was a bachelor who had taught at the school for many years and who now lived in semi-retirement in a grace-and-favour house granted to him by the Dean and Chapter. He was still active, though he must have been in his early seventies, and regularly attended school functions and sometimes took classes when masters were away or ill. Unlike many of his former colleagues on the staff, he was not a clergyman.

‘It is most kind of Mr Ratcliffe to invite you to stay,’ Mr Treadwell told me on my way over. ‘You must try not to disturb him too much.’

‘How long will I be there, sir?’

‘It depends on your aunt’s health. I’ve asked her doctor to write to Mr Ratcliffe and he will pass on the news to you. If she’s well enough, she may want you home after Christmas.’ He must have seen my face for he hurried on, ‘But I advise you not to raise your hopes too high. Pneumonia is a very serious illness. Very serious indeed.’

‘Will she … will she die?’

‘God willing, no. But pneumonia can be fatal. You must pray for her.’

The Sacrist’s Lodging had been built against the northern boundary wall of the monastery. Most of the doors and windows faced inwards. If you looked out, you saw the Cathedral blocking out the earth and sky.

Mr Ratcliffe answered Mr Treadwell’s knock. He was a tall man, quite bald apart from two tufts of white hair above his ears. He generally wore knickerbockers and a tweed jacket, stiff with age, with leather elbow patches.

He was very brisk and businesslike on that first meeting – I felt that my plight deserved a little more sympathy than he gave it. He showed me over the house, with Mr Treadwell hovering behind us and making the occasional clucking sound designed to express approval and gratitude.

The tour didn’t take long. Downstairs, at the front, there was a sitting room dominated by a grand piano which occupied almost half the floor space. The air was stuffy with pipe smoke, which filled the air with a fine, blue-grey fog. There were books everywhere. They were shelved in the orthodox manner along the walls. They stood in piles under the piano and on the piano. They lined the mantelpiece and colonized the shadowy corners.

A tortoiseshell cat was asleep on one of the chairs. It opened one eye, looked at us, and shut it again.

‘That’s Mordred,’ Mr Ratcliffe said, looking directly at me for the first time. ‘I’d be careful with him, if I were you.’

‘Mordred?’ Mr Treadwell said. ‘An unusual name for a cat.’

‘In Le Morte d’Arthur,’ Mr Ratcliffe said, ‘Mordred betrays his uncle the King. Not a nice man. I regret to say that Mordred is not nice either, hence the name.’

‘In that case, I’m surprised you keep him.’

‘I’ve had him since he was very young. I must make the best of him now, just as he must make the best of me.’

Apart from the sitting room, the other rooms downstairs were a kitchen and dining room, dark little rooms with small windows, heavily barred, overlooking the bustle of the High Street.

‘One washes here,’ Mr Ratcliffe said, gesturing towards the kitchen sink. ‘I am afraid there’s no bathroom. The lavatory is outside in the yard. If I need a bath, my neighbours kindly let me use theirs. I have had a word with them, and they have no objection to extending their hospitality to you. Of course, I try not to trouble them very often if I can possibly help it.’

‘Splendid!’ Mr Treadwell said.

Upstairs there were only two rooms. The door of the one at the front remained closed – ‘My bedroom,’ Mr Ratcliffe explained, with an odd, apologetic twitch of his face.

The one at the back was mine. Like the kitchen and dining room below, it overlooked the High Street. It was low-ceilinged with two beds and a quantity of dark furniture designed for less cramped quarters. The window was small and barred, like the ones downstairs. It faced north and let in very little daylight. The air smelled damp.

Mr Treadwell poked his head into the gloom. ‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘Splendid.’ He withdrew and clattered downstairs.

‘I – er – I hope you’ll be comfortable.’ Mr Ratcliffe glanced round the room. ‘Mrs Thing made up the bed on the left. She must have thought you would be more comfortable there.’

‘Who’s Mrs Thing, sir?’ I asked, and my voice emerged as a loud croak.

‘The woman who does – she comes in three times a week to clean. And so on.’ He frowned, as if trying to recall what she did do. ‘I stay out of her way myself.’

‘Is she really called Mrs Thing?’

Mr Ratcliffe appeared to give the matter serious consideration. ‘Well, no. Or not that I know of. But I can never remember her name. Indeed, I cannot be sure that I ever knew it. So I call her Mrs Thing instead.’

We went back downstairs. Mr Treadwell was waiting in the hall and frowning at his watch.

‘I haven’t mentioned your meals,’ he said. ‘Mr Ratcliffe makes his own arrangements. But you will find bread and milk in the kitchen, I understand.’

‘And tea,’ Mr Ratcliffe put in. ‘And butter and jam. Help yourself.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Ratcliffe.’ Treadwell turned back to me. ‘You will take your lunch and tea at Mr Veal’s house. You know where that is? Beside the Porta.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The Porta was the great gateway at the far end of the College. Mr Veal was the head verger of the Cathedral, a tyrant who waged an endless war against the boys of the King’s School.

‘I am sure Mrs Veal will look after you.’ Mr Treadwell retreated towards the door. ‘It only remains for me to wish you both a very happy Christmas. Goodbye – I must rush.’

With that, Mr Treadwell was gone. The door slammed behind him. I never saw him again, as it happens, a circumstance I do not regret. Not in itself.

Mr Ratcliffe led the way into the sitting room, saying over his shoulder, ‘A train, no doubt. They wait for no man, do they?’

I followed him into the room and stared about me. I dare say I looked a little forlorn.

‘You could read a book, I suppose,’ he suggested. ‘That’s what I generally do. Or perhaps you would like to unpack. You mustn’t mind me – just as you please.’

I was standing near the chair on which Mordred lay. The first I knew of this was when I felt an acute pain in the back of my left hand. I cried out. When I looked down, the cat had folded its forelegs and was staring up at me with amber eyes, flecked with green. There were two spots of blood on my hand. I sucked them away.

‘Mordred!’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘I do apologize.’

Freedom is an unsatisfactory thing. I had longed for the end of term, to the end of the chafing restrictions of school. But when I had freedom, I did not know what to do with it.

Mr Ratcliffe set no boundaries whatsoever on my conduct. In this he was perhaps wiser than I realized at the time. But he made it clear – wordlessly, and with the utmost courtesy – that he and Mordred had their own lives, their own routines, and that he did not wish me to disturb them if at all possible.

On that first day, I went into the town during the afternoon. During term time, we boys were not allowed to leave a College except when specifically authorized – to walk to the playing field, for example, or to visit the home of a dayboy, or to go to one of the few shops that the school authorities had licensed us to patronize. We were allowed to go shopping only on Saturday afternoons, and only in pairs.

So – to ramble the streets at will on Christmas Eve, to go into shops on a whim: it should have been glorious. Instead it was cold and boring. The hurrying people making last-minute purchases emphasized my own isolation. Everywhere I looked there were signs of excitement, of anticipation, of secular pleasures to come. I had a strong suspicion that Mr Ratcliffe would not celebrate Christmas at all, except perhaps by going to church more often than usual.

I tried to buy a packet of cigarettes in a tobacconist’s, but the man knew I was at the King’s School by my cap and refused to serve me. I had a cup of tea and an iced bun in a café, where mothers and daughters stared at me with, I thought, both curiosity and pity.

In the end, there was nothing for it but to go back to the College, to Mr Ratcliffe’s. At the Sacrist’s Lodging, his door was unlocked. I hung up my coat and cap and went into the sitting room.

Mr Ratcliffe wasn’t there. But a boy was sitting in Mordred’s chair, with Mordred on his lap. He had a long thin head, and his ears stood out from his skull. His front teeth were prominent and slightly crooked.

The cat was purring. They both looked at me.

‘Hello,’ said the boy. ‘I’m Faraday.’

3

That was the start of my acquaintance with Faraday. It’s strange that such a brief relationship should have had such a profound effect on both of us. He was very thin – all skin and bone – but there was nothing remarkable in that. The school food was appalling and few of us grew fat on it. Some people called him ‘Rabbit’ because of his teeth.

The front door opened. Mr Ratcliffe came into the house. ‘Ah – there you are. I see you’ve met Faraday. But perhaps you two are already friends?’

I shook my head. Faraday continued stroking the cat.

‘As you see, he has already established a friendship with Mordred. How long it will last is another matter.’ Mr Ratcliffe sat down and began to ream his pipe. ‘Mrs Thing is making up the other bed.’

‘He’s staying here?’ I said. ‘But—’

‘I’m not in the choir any more,’ Faraday interrupted. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

I noticed two things: that Faraday’s face had gone very red, and that his voice started on a high pitch but descended rapidly into a croak.

‘Yes,’ Mr Ratcliffe said, tapping his pipe on the hearth to remove the last of the dottle. ‘Poor chap. Faraday’s voice has broken. Pity it should happen just before Christmas, but there it is. Dr Atkinson decided it would be better not to take a chance: so here he is.’

Even then I knew there must be more to it than this. The brisk jollity of Mr Ratcliffe’s voice told me that, and so did Faraday’s face. Even if Faraday’s voice had reached the point where it could not be trusted, they could have let him stay with them, let him walk with the choir on Christmas morning with his badge of honour around his neck.

Faraday looked up. ‘They chucked me out,’ he said. ‘It’s not fair.’

At the time I pitied only myself. Now I realize that all of us in that house deserved pity for one reason or another.

Faraday’s voice had betrayed him. His greatest ally had become the traitor within. He had lost not just his place in the choir but also his sense of who he was. Mr Ratcliffe must have loathed the necessity to share his house with two boys, disturbing his quiet routines and upsetting his cat. It didn’t occur to me until much later that he was probably very poor. He must have received some money from the school for housing us. Perhaps he had felt in no position to refuse. After all, he was old and alone; he lived a grace-and-favour life in a grace-and-favour house.

Faraday and I went to the verger’s house at six in the evening, where Mrs Veal gave us Welsh rarebit, blancmange and a glass of milk. We ate in the Veals’ parlour, a stiff little room smelling of polish and soot. On the mantelpiece was a mynah bird, stuffed and attached to a twig, encased in a glass dome.

On that occasion we saw only Mrs Veal, apart from near the end of the meal when Mr Veal came in from the Cathedral, still in his verger’s cassock; he wished us good evening in a gruff voice and opened the door of a wall cupboard. I glimpsed two rows of hooks within, holding keys of various sizes.

‘Enjoy your supper,’ he told us, and went into the kitchen, where we heard him talking to his wife.

Faraday rose from his chair, crossed the room to the cupboard and opened the door.

‘Dozens of keys,’ he whispered. ‘And all with labels. It’s the keys for everywhere.’

I pretended not to be interested. ‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘Or he’ll catch you.’

That night I heard Faraday crying.

I remember in my first term at school I would lie in bed, listening for other boys crying and stuffing my handkerchief in my own mouth in an attempt to muffle my tears. There were about twenty of us huddled under thin blankets in a high-ceilinged dormitory, the windows wide open winter or summer. Sometimes one of the older boys would round on one of the weeping children.

‘Bloody blubber,’ he would whisper, and the rest of us would repeat the words over and over again, like an incantation, lest we be accused of blubbing as well. Little savages.

But that had been years ago. I wasn’t a kid any more and nor was Faraday.

‘Faraday?’ I murmured.

There was instant silence.

‘Are you crying?’

‘I’ve got a cold.’

It was the usual excuse, transparently false.

‘What is it?’ I said. And waited.

‘Everything. Bloody everything.’

We lay there without speaking. The room was not quite dark – the curtains were thin and the light from a High Street lamp leaked into the room.

‘But it’s my bloody voice really,’ he went on. ‘Everything would have been all right if it hadn’t been for that.’

‘That’s rot,’ I said, with the loftiness of fourteen to thirteen. ‘Everyone’s voice has to break sometime, unless you’re a girl. You don’t want to be a girl, do you?’

This was an attempt at comfort but it seemed only to make Faraday start crying again.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You can’t just blub.’

‘You don’t understand. I was going to sing the Christmas anthem. There’s a solo, you see, and it’s usually the head chorister that does it, and the Bishop gives him a special present afterwards. Some money.’

‘How much?’ I said.

‘Five pounds.’

I whistled. ‘For a bit of singing? That’s stupid.’

‘No, it’s not.’ Faraday’s voice rose in volume and, suddenly, in pitch. ‘It’s a tradition. They’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. Some old bishop left money in his will for it. And now Hampson will do it instead.’

‘Don’t talk so loud. The Rat will hear you.’

‘It’s lovely, too,’ Faraday whispered.

Lovely was not a word we used much. ‘What is?’

‘The anthem. It’s for Christmas Day. It’s called “Jubilate Deo”, and we only sing it on Christmas morning.’

Rejoice to God. Both of us had enough Latin to translate that.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘It’s beastly to lose five quid. But is it that bad? I mean, it was never yours in the first place.’

Faraday started crying again. I was spending Christmas with a cry-baby. I curled myself into a ball to conserve heat and thought how perfectly miserable everything was. Or rather, how perfectly miserable I was. Boys are selfish little brutes. While I was wallowing in self-pity, however, my curiosity was still stirring.

‘Look here,’ I said, ‘I can see it’s a shame your voice is broken and all that. But why are you like this about it? And why are you here?’

The snuffling continued. It was getting on my nerves.

‘Why aren’t you still at the Choir House? Or why didn’t Dr Atkinson send you home to your people?’

‘My parents are dead,’ Faraday said, and the waterworks increased in force.

That jolted me out of my own misery. I knew what it was to miss your parents, you see, and even I could imagine how infinitely worse it would be if you could never, ever see them again. Or not until after you died and went to heaven, assuming heaven was real, which in those days I still considered to be a sporting possibility.

‘So where do you go in the holidays?’

‘To my guardian’s, in Wales. But this year he’s had to go away. So I was going to stay with the Atkinsons until he comes back.’

This deepened the mystery. ‘Then why aren’t you there now?’

‘It’s because of Hampson Minor. Bloody Hampson.’

‘Yes, you said – he’ll get the five quid because he’s going to sing the anthem, and I suppose he’s the new head of the choir, too.’

Faraday’s bed creaked. ‘It’s not that. He had a postal order from his uncle. Ten bob.’

I whistled softly in the darkness. Not in the same league as the Bishop’s five pounds, but still pretty decent. I wished my aunt would give me ten shillings sometimes.

‘He was swanking about it all the time. The postal order and being head of the choir and the Bishop’s money. He just went on and on and everyone was sucking up to him. He said he was going to buy a big cake from Fowler’s for everyone. I just wanted to kick him. You know what he’s like.’

I only knew Hampson Minor by sight. He was a fat, pink-faced boy with small delicate features and prominent lips. When he sang, he made his lips into a perfect O.

‘He left the postal order on the floor. It must have fallen – it was with his exercise book. So I – I picked it up and put it in my pocket.’

‘You stole it?’

‘No,’ Faraday wailed. ‘I was just going to keep it for a bit, until he found he had lost it, and then give it back. To teach him a lesson. That’s all. Honestly.’

I didn’t know whether he was telling the truth. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now.

‘But he told Dr Atkinson it was gone, and Dr Atkinson made us all empty our pockets and open our boxes.’ Faraday paused for a long moment. ‘And they found it.’

I didn’t know what to say. Stealing was a sackable offence at the King’s School.

‘I was going to give it back, I swear it. I didn’t know he’d tell old Atky straight away. The rotten sneak.’

‘What will happen?’ The scale of the offence awed me. ‘Will they chuck you out?’

‘I don’t know,’ Faraday whimpered. ‘I just don’t know. And even if they let me stay, everyone will know. So that’ll be almost as bad. And then there’s Hampson’s brother. I’d be in the senior school.’

I was beginning to take a warped pleasure in having a ringside seat to the tragedy which was unfolding on such a grand scale. Faraday, the golden boy, had lost his singing voice, his five pounds and his pre-eminent role as head choirboy. He was now faced with a hideous pair of alternatives: if he was expelled from school he faced a lifetime of shame and whatever punishment his guardian cared to mete out; if he was allowed to stay, his remaining years at the school would be made a living hell, particularly by Hampson Major, a gorilla of a boy who played second row forward in the First XV, and who had a well-deserved reputation for brutality verging on sadism. He was bad enough as a casual tyrant over anyone smaller than himself. He would be a figure of nightmare if he chose to persecute you seriously.

‘God,’ I said as the full horror of Faraday’s situation hit me. ‘You poor bloody kid.’

He was crying again, softly, continuously, a sort of moaning and sobbing that at last moved me to pity, and even to a desire to help.

‘Look here, Rabbit,’ I said. It was the first time I called him by his nickname. ‘Perhaps it won’t be as bad as you think.’

The crying stopped. I heard Faraday’s ragged breathing.

A sense of power filled me. He believed I might be able to help, and that almost made me believe it too.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘We’ll think of something. I promise.’

4

For every child, I think, there must be a day when Christmas loses its magic. By ‘magic’ I don’t mean an unquestioning belief in Father Christmas or a foolish attachment to improbable ideas about reindeer and chimneys and so on. Nor does the magic I mean reside in the religious connotations of the day, though of course, for many people, the one cannot be separated from the other and Christmas is always the birthday of Jesus. I envy them.

The magic has more to do with a sense that this is a special day, when nothing is allowed to go wrong. When you are given presents, good food and a licence to enjoy luxuries and activities that lie beyond the reach of most of us for 364 days of the year. When people are kind to each other and there is a sense of holiday.

The illusion is strongest in infancy, and most of us lose it gradually during childhood. But we cling to it, we fool ourselves, as long as possible. In the end there has to come a day when we are forced finally to acknowledge the truth: that Christmas is a day like any other, potentially neither better nor worse, but actually almost always worse because it trails in its wake the ghosts of its lost magic.

For me it was that Christmas at Sacrist’s Lodging: that’s when at last I accepted that a Christmas Day could be as miserable as any other.

The morning began when we went downstairs to find Mr Ratcliffe making tea in the kitchen. On the mat by the back door were the hind legs and tail of a mouse; Mordred had already celebrated Christmas in his own special way.

We wished each other happy Christmas. Mr Ratcliffe was wearing an ancient suit, once a uniform black but now shiny and even green in places, in honour of the day.

He gave us cups of strong, sweet tea, with very little milk in it.

‘I thought we would go to Matins and then the Eucharist afterwards,’ he said. ‘I don’t usually eat before taking communion, if I can avoid it. It seems rude somehow.’

‘What about Christmas dinner, sir?’ I asked in alarm.

‘Mrs Veal will have something for you at lunchtime, I’m sure. Don’t worry about that. I’ll have mine at the Deanery.’ He hesitated, and I guessed that he had remembered the Dean also entertained to lunch those members of the choir who had not left immediately after the morning services. ‘We’ll meet again in the evening, I expect, when you are back from the Veals’.’

Mordred sauntered into the room and picked up the remains of the mouse. He wandered into the hall.

‘I’ll let him outside, shall I?’ Faraday said in a rush.

He dashed after the cat. I heard him fumbling with the front door with clumsy urgency, as though trying to escape.

I suppose that was what we all wanted – Faraday, myself and even, perhaps, poor Mr Ratcliffe: to escape.

There was no snow that Christmas.

It was very cold. The grass around the Cathedral was a hard, sparkling white, and frost clung to the leafless branches of trees and bushes. The flagged paths were treacherous – any moisture had turned to ice overnight.

Mr Ratcliffe strode slowly along, his stick tapping the pavement. ‘Beautiful,’ he said over his shoulder to Faraday and me, trailing behind him. ‘Quite beautiful.’

The College was crowded with groups of people making their way to church. On Christmas morning, the Cathedral had one of its largest congregations of the year, even though the King’s School wasn’t there to swell its ranks.

We sat in the presbytery, the rows of seats on either side near the high altar, to the east of the choir stalls. Above us were the pipes of the organ and the wooden cabin of the organ loft, clinging like a growth to one bay of the choir aisle.

I don’t remember much about the services except that they seemed to go on for ever and that I seriously thought I might faint or even die from hunger. It must have been hell for poor Faraday to see the choir processing through the chancel gates, filing in two by two, and peeling off into their stalls in the choir.

Hampson Minor led them in, with the head boy’s medal resting on his surplice. He looked larger and pinker than before, as if his promotion had inflated him a little further than nature had done already. His eyes darted about the chancel. I guessed he was looking for Faraday. As he turned to lead his file into the choir stalls, he found us. For a fraction of a second he paused. Beside me, Faraday stiffened like a threatened animal.

The moment was gone. The choir flowed smoothly into the stalls and the service began.

I had attended many services in the Cathedral – the school used it as its chapel – but I had never been there on Christmas Day. The Bishop was there enthroned, a gaudy, overstuffed doll with his mitre and crozier. Each seat was full.

I concentrated on not fainting from starvation; on standing, sitting and kneeling; on mouthing the hymns in a soundless but visually convincing way, a skill I had perfected in my first term; and, most of all, on thinking about what Mrs Veal might provide for our Christmas dinner.

But I did notice when the choir sang the anthem, the ‘Jubilate Deo’. The first part was sung by Hampson Minor alone: I could see him, his mouth an O of surprise, his face pinker than ever with the effort. Then, one by one, the rest of the choir joined in, and then the organ thundered into life and they all made a dreadful racket until it was time for us to kneel down and pray again.

Faraday leaned towards me undercover of shuffling as the entire congregation was sinking to its knees.

‘He muffed it, the silly ass,’ he muttered. ‘The end of bar sixteen. He couldn’t hold the E flat.’

For the first time, I saw Faraday smile.

Mrs Veal had bought us Christmas cards, and I felt guilty that we had not thought to do the same for our hosts. Mr Veal carved the beef and the ham. We ate late – Mr Veal had plenty to keep him busy after a service – but Mrs Veal took pity on us and gave us a preliminary helping of Yorkshire pudding and gravy.

In his capacity as head verger, Mr Veal was a figure who inspired fear and mockery in equal parts. Now, however, Faraday and I saw the domestic Veal, his dignity put aside with his verger’s gown. In private, with a good meal inside him, a glass of port in one hand and his pipe in the other, he revealed himself as almost genial. I remember he told us a story about one canon who grew so fat that it was only with difficulty that he could squeeze into his stall; in the end they had to make a special chair for him. He laughed so hard that his face became purple.

The Christmas dinner was the only time that I saw Faraday looking really happy. The Veals were kindly people: they gave us food, warmth and a welcome. Perhaps there was a little Christmas magic after all.

‘A lot of queer stories about the Cathedral,’ said Mr Veal on his third glass of port. ‘And I could tell you a few, if I had a mind to. Have you heard about the bells?’

‘But there aren’t any,’ Faraday said. ‘Not in the Cathedral. Only the clock chimes.’

‘Ah. Not now. But there were bells, once upon a time.’

‘Get along with you, George,’ said Mrs Veal. ‘Save it for later. I need to clear the table and these boys need to get back or Mr Ratcliffe will be wondering where they are.’

‘He knows about it, all right,’ Mr Veal says.

‘Who does, dear?’

‘Mr Ratcliffe. He knows about the stories.’

5

In the evening of Christmas Day, we made mugs of cocoa together and sat around the fire in the sitting room at the Sacrist’s Lodging. Like Mr Veal, Mr Ratcliffe had drunk a few glasses of wine with his dinner and was unusually expansive.

Mordred condescended to join us. He sat on the chair nearest the fire, head erect, with his back to us. It was Mordred who started Mr Ratcliffe on ghosts.

‘I am afraid he’s a little stand-offish today. You wouldn’t think it, but he doesn’t like being left alone in the house. We abandoned him for most of the day and now he’s sulking.’

‘He doesn’t look as if he’d notice if he was alone or not.’ My scratches still rankled. ‘I don’t think he likes people.’

‘You may be right,’ Mr Ratcliffe said, patting his pockets for his oilskin tobacco pouch. ‘But he finds us convenient, and not just for food and warmth. Perhaps we help to ward off the ghosts.’

‘Ghosts?’ Faraday said. ‘What ghosts?’ In those three words his voice modulated from a rumble to a squeak.

‘Do you know any stories about them, sir?’ I said. ‘Will you tell us one?’

‘Mordred used to see the ghost next door,’ Mr Ratcliffe said, nodding towards the party wall that divided this part of the Sacrist’s Lodging from the other. ‘He was just a kitten then, and he didn’t know what to make of it. In fact, that’s why he lives with me. He kept coming over here to get away from the ghost, and in the end the Precentor said I might as well keep him.’

‘Have you seen it, sir?’ I asked. By this stage of my life I had my doubts about the existence of God but I was more than willing to keep an open mind about ghosts.

‘Yes, several times over the years.’ Mr Ratcliffe had given up on his pockets. Still talking, he rose from his chair and eventually discovered the pouch wedged between the seat and the arm. ‘Of course I didn’t realize it was a ghost at first.’

‘What did it look like?’ Faraday said.

‘Like a cat.’

‘A cat?’

‘Yes, a little grey cat. One used to see it in the corner of the big room upstairs occasionally. Quite harmless. It’s probably still there, for all I know. It comes and goes.’

‘What did it do?’ I said.

‘Nothing very much. It just sat there. Sometimes you saw it moving across the room. You always glimpsed it out of the corner of your eye, if you know what I mean. But Mordred was different – he saw it directly. He behaved as if it was another cat, arching his back and so on. But then it simply terrified him, and he wouldn’t stay in the same house. So he moved here, next door. But it was odd, really – the grey cat never seemed to notice his existence at all.’

‘Perhaps it thought Mordred was the ghost,’ Faraday suggested with a giggle. ‘Perhaps he was trying to pretend Mordred wasn’t there.’

Mr Ratcliffe struck a match and paused, considering the remark, the flame flickering over the bowl of the pipe.

‘Anything is possible, I suppose,’ he said at last, and sucked the flame deep into the pipe. ‘We may haunt ghosts as much as the other way round.’

‘Or they may not even know we’re there,’ I put in, feeling that Faraday was having too much of the limelight.

‘Some of the time they certainly know we’re there.’ The light was dim and Mr Ratcliffe’s features disintegrated in a cloud of smoke. ‘Or some of them do. That was undoubtedly the case with the blue lady. She always behaved very cordially to me. On the other hand, one should not generalize from the particular.’ He must have seen our expressions, for he added hastily, ‘I mean that one ghost who behaves like that does not necessarily mean that they all do.’

‘Please, sir,’ Faraday said, sounding like a little boy, ‘who is the blue lady?’

‘She is at the Deanery,’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘I used to go there a good deal when I was younger.’ He glanced at the piano that dominated the room. ‘Not in this Dean’s time, or even the one before. There was a lady – the Dean’s daughter, as it happens – who played the violin and wanted an accompanist.’

‘Was she the blue lady?’ I asked.

‘She was entirely flesh and blood.’ Mr Ratcliffe gave a cough. He turned away from us and blew his nose. ‘But I often went up to the Deanery drawing room in those days, and I sometimes met the blue lady on the stairs.’

‘How did you know she was a ghost, sir? Could she have been someone staying there?’

‘Oh no. She wore a dress with panniers under the skirt. Eighteenth century, I imagine. Besides, I encountered her on one occasion when I was with Miss … with the Dean’s daughter, and she didn’t see her.’

Faraday leaned forward, his head resting on his hands. ‘What happened, sir? Did she speak? Did you?’

‘No,’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘We hadn’t been introduced, you see. So I bowed – and she bobbed a small curtsy. It was always like that – I must have seen her three or four times. The last time I glanced back and she was looking up at me. I thought she might be going to say something. But she didn’t.’

‘Did you ask the Dean about her?’ I said.

Mr Ratcliffe shook his head. ‘It would not have been wise. But I did ask his daughter if the Deanery was said to be haunted, and she said no, but that her mother had been obliged to dismiss a housemaid who was making up silly stories to frighten the other servants. Stories about a lady in an old-fashioned dress.’

Faraday’s mouth had fallen open in amazement. He looked more like a rabbit than ever.

‘It all seems so pointless, sir,’ I said. ‘The cat – the blue lady.’

‘Why does it have to have a point?’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘Which is to say, a purpose that we in our present situation are able to understand. It’s true that in some cases one can speculate about that. In other words, there may be a possible factual basis that might underlie a ghostly phenomenon.’

‘He means there is a real story to explain the ghost,’ I told Faraday, as much to display my superior understanding as to enlighten his ignorance.

‘One or two of our own ghosts come into that category. Take Mr Goldsworthy, for example. On the other hand, the real story may not explain the ghost – it may be the other way round: that the ghost is our way of trying to explain something puzzling or disturbing that actually occurred. Something we somehow create ourselves.’

Mr Ratcliffe paused. He peered through his pipe smoke at Faraday and me. He had been a schoolmaster all his life and he knew boys.

‘It is getting late,’ he said. ‘You two should go to bed.’

‘But, sir,’ Faraday said. ‘What about Mr Goldsworthy?’

Mr Ratcliffe smiled at him. ‘I’ll tell you about him tomorrow evening.’

‘Oh, sir.’ Faraday sounded about nine years old. I scowled at him, though I was as keen to hear about Mr Goldsworthy as he was.

We said our good nights. Mr Ratcliffe stayed by the fire, smoking and reading. I went outside to use the lavatory while Faraday carried the cups into the kitchen and stacked them in the sink.

It was colder than ever outside. The air chilled my throat and tingled in my nose. Above the black ridge of the Cathedral was the arch of the sky, where the stars gleamed white and silver and pale blue: they seemed to vibrate with the cold, shivering in heaven.

Afterwards, I went upstairs. Faraday went outside in his turn. By the time he came upstairs, I was already in bed and reading my book, a novel called Beric the Briton by G. A. Henty. I ignored him while he undressed. I heard his bedsprings creak as he climbed into bed and the sharp intake of breath as the cold, slightly damp sheets touched his skin.

‘I say,’ Faraday said. ‘Can I ask you something?’

I lowered the book. ‘What?’

He was lying on his side, curled up with his knees nearly at his chin. All I could see of him was his face. He looked more rabbit-like than ever.

‘Did you hear it outside? The – the singing, or whatever it was?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘It was when I came out of the bog,’ he said.

‘Perhaps the Rat was having a sing-song,’ I said. ‘He got drunk on the Dean’s wine. It was obvious, the way he was going on this evening.’

‘It wasn’t him, honestly – it came from outside, from over there.’

Faraday’s hand emerged from under the covers and pointed to the right of our beds: towards the College, towards the Cathedral.

‘Someone coming home from a party,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t like that.’ He was frowning. ‘It was just four notes, very high-pitched and far away.’

Very quietly, Faraday sang them to me: La-la-la-la. The third la was longer than the others. His voice behaved itself for once, and the notes sounded pure and true. As far as I could tell.

‘You sure you didn’t hear it?’

‘Of course I’m sure. Go to sleep.’

He sang the notes again, even more quietly. ‘It’s in a major key, I think. Starts on an F sharp, perhaps?’

‘Shut up, will you?’

I reached up and turned off the gas at the bracket on the wall.

‘Whatever it is,’ he said to the darkness, ‘it’s meant to be happy but it’s going to be a sad tune.’

I lay awake listening to the sounds of the night, wondering whether Faraday would start crying again. He hadn’t mentioned the business with the postal order during the day but it must always have been there, squatting in the forefront of his mind like a toad and waiting for its moment to spring. His plight made mine seem trivial by comparison, which I suppose was another reason I didn’t like him very much.

Faraday’s breathing slowed and fell into a regular rhythm. I heard Mr Ratcliffe locking up and coming up the stairs. The Cathedral clock tolled the hours and the quarters. The clock was in the west tower, not the shorter central tower. It had a modest chime for such a large church, like a big man with a small, high voice. We boys called it ‘Little Willy’.

The silence deepened. Once, as I was dropping off to sleep, I thought I heard again, at the very edge of my range of hearing, the four high notes that Faraday had sung to me. La-la-la-la.

6

For most of Boxing Day, we were left to our own devices. Mr Ratcliffe went out after breakfast to call on a former servant at the King’s School who now lived in one of the almshouses attached to the parish church. He would go directly on from there to have lunch with an old friend in a village a mile away from the town. He did not expect to be back until evening.

Time passed slowly for us. We were in a sort of limbo, neither at home nor at school. Faraday and I kept together because we had no one else to be with and nothing else to do.

In the morning we stayed at the Sacrist’s Lodging, reading under the disdainful gaze of Mordred. I finished Beric the Briton and looked along Mr Ratcliffe’s shelves for something else to read. Most of his books were about boring things like music or architecture. There was some poetry, equally boring, and the sort of books we had at school, like Shakespeare. In the end I had to settle for Oliver Twist.

Faraday irritated me more than usual. He couldn’t stay still for a moment. He moved around the room, fiddling with the ornaments and looking at the pictures, most of which were engravings of old buildings.

He sat down on the stool and raised the lid of the grand piano.

‘Do you play?’ I said.

‘Yes.’ He pulled back his cuffs and spread his fingers over the keyboard. A ripple of notes burst into the room.

Naturally he played the piano, I thought: bloody Faraday could do everything and do it well.

‘God!’ he said in quite a different voice. ‘It’s awful.’

‘What is?’

‘The piano. Can’t you hear? It’s awfully out of tune. I bet it’s warped.’

‘Good,’ I said, returning to page two of Oliver Twist. ‘At least that’ll stop you playing it.’

Whether the piano was in tune or not was all the same to me. I have never understood music and its power to affect some people so profoundly.

He closed the lid with a bang.

Faraday and I couldn’t afford to quarrel, or not for long. We needed each other too much. We went into the town, though the shops were closed, and walked the long way round to the Veals’ house beside the Porta.

Mrs Veal welcomed us like a pair of prodigal sons – she had grown used to us now, I suppose, and saw us for what we were: a pair of lost children who needed feeding up. She gave us cold beef and cold ham, and as much mashed potato as we could cram into ourselves. Then came apple pie, followed by cups of tea so densely packed with sugar and cream you could almost stand your spoon up in it.

For the first time we saw Mr Veal in his shirtsleeves. He was in a jovial mood, with a glass or two of beer beside him. This time was a sort of holiday to him, he explained. For the Cathedral’s rhythms built up to the great feasts of the church, like Christmas; but after these climaxes there came lulls. The daily round of services continued, but on a reduced basis. The choir was on holiday so the Cathedral was mute. Dr Atkinson had gone away, leaving what little had to be done in the hands of the deputy organist. Many of the canons had gone out of residence and even the Dean was visiting his son in London.

Mr Veal had his own deputies, and he allowed these assistant vergers more responsibility at these times, and himself more leisure.

‘Mind you,’ he said, leaning forward and tapping the table for emphasis, ‘you can’t give them too much responsibility. They’re not ready for it. So I do my rounds, like always. I keep the keys.’

He nodded towards the table at the window. There was a big tray on it, and Mr Veal had laid out on it the keys that usually hung on the back of the cupboard door, together with a black notebook.

‘Funny how keys wander,’ he said. ‘I make sure none of them have strayed. Redo the labels and check them off in my book. You can’t afford to sleep on this job. There’s a lot goes on here that most folk never realize.’

Neither of us said anything. It wasn’t just the heaviness of the meal that kept us silent. In my case, at least, it was also the sense that I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of the day. Food was, as always in my schooldays, a temporary distraction.

Perhaps Mr Veal sensed something of this. ‘There’s ratting up at Mr Witney’s.’

I looked up. ‘In his big barn?’

‘Yes – all afternoon till the light goes.’

‘We could go,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t mind, would he?’

‘More the merrier. More than enough rats to go round.’

‘Ratting?’ Faraday said. ‘I’ve never done that.’

‘It’s ripping fun,’ I said.

‘There are some sticks in my shed if you want them,’ Mr Veal said. ‘Always best to take your own. You want one the right weight, don’t you?’

Faraday was reluctant but he wasn’t proof against my enthusiasm and Mr Veal’s gentle encouragement. We found a couple of sticks and walked through the Porta. Angel Farm was across the green, beyond the theological college.

‘Do we – do we actually hit them? The rats, I mean?’

‘Of course we do.’ I whacked the grass with my stick. ‘But you have to be quick. Or the dogs get them first.’

‘You’ve been ratting before?’

‘Loads of times.’ I had been ratting only once, in fact, with the vicar’s son at home. ‘It’s awfully good sport – you’ll see.’

We turned into the muddy drove to the farm. They had already started – I could hear the shouting and the excited barking. To tell the truth, I was a little nervous.

‘Better put your cap in your pocket,’ I said, taking mine off. ‘You might lose it otherwise.’

My real reason was that our caps advertised the fact that we were King’s School boys. The school was not universally popular in the town, and there was no point in courting trouble. Not that I was seriously worried. Mr Witney was a tenant of the Dean and Chapter, and the school subleased their playing field from him; he would keep an eye out for us.

Men and boys were milling around the yard. The barn doors were open, revealing a space large enough to take a laden wagon. Dogs were everywhere, small ones mainly, terriers and the like.

‘That’s like mine at home,’ I said, pointing at a mongrel with a lot of spaniel in him. ‘He’s awfully bright – understands almost everything I say.’

This was a lie, as I did not have a dog. But I had pretended I had one for years. My aunt wouldn’t let me have a real dog. It would bring mud into the house and, besides, who would look after it in term time? So I had a dog in my mind instead. The precise breed varied (he was often a mongrel) but his name was always Stanley, after a dog my father had owned when he was a boy. The dog’s other permanent attributes included his almost human intelligence and his unswerving loyalty to me.

Mr Witney was concentrating his operations both inside and outside the barn. The building was very old, perhaps mediaeval in origin, and constructed of soft, crumbling sandstone. The target areas lay along the base of one of the immensely thick gable walls, both inside and out. Two or three men on each side were attacking the ground with spades, iron rods and pickaxes, breaking up the compacted earth. A score or so of men and boys gathered around the diggers, all of them armed with sticks. Dogs of all shapes and sizes scurried about everyone’s legs, tails high in excitement.

Faraday and I sidled into the outskirts of the larger crowd, the one outside the barn. Nobody seemed to notice us. They were all staring at the diggers. Some of the dogs, careless of danger, were diving into the loosened soil and burrowing like maniacs with their front paws.

One of the dogs was already so far into the ground that only his hind legs and tail were visible. Suddenly he pulled himself out of the hole with a wriggling rat clamped between his jaws. He shook his prey in the air, and two other dogs instantly converged on him. One of them leapt up and grabbed the rat by its head. A tug of war ensued, each animal trying to wrest the rat from the other until the rat resolved the matter by dividing itself into two unequal parts.

I heard a sound beside me and glanced at Faraday. His face had gone white, the fleeing blood leaving a cluster of freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose and his cheeks.

‘Come on,’ I cried. ‘It’s—’

Another rat broke cover and darted to and fro among the sticks and stamping feet and snarling dogs. It saw an opening and shot towards the open field beyond. It was making for the gap between Faraday and me. People were shouting. I swung the stick down and felt the jar as it hit the ground, the impact running up my hands and arms.

‘Well hit, young ’un!’ shouted Mr Witney. ‘That’s the way.’

I looked down and saw to my surprise a little mass of bloodied fur, still squirming feebly.

‘Oh God,’ Faraday said.

A sort of frenzy seized me, a bloodlust. I ran berserk among the men and boys and the dogs and the rats. I held my stick in both hands and pounded it down, again and again. One of the dogs attached itself to me. How many rats did I kill or help to kill that day? Half a dozen, perhaps more?

Mr Witney put a stop to the ratting only when the light was beginning to fade.

It felt as if we had only been at the farm for five minutes but it must have been at least an hour and a half. The dog rubbed itself against my leg. It was a mangy little animal, a mongrel, with a piece of rope for a collar and a half-healed wound on its side.

‘Well done, boy,’ Mr Witney said. ‘So you learn more than Latin and Greek at that school of yours.’

I bent down and scratched the dog between his ears. ‘Good boy, Stanley,’ I murmured. ‘Good boy.’ Just for a moment I was blindingly happy, dizzy with joy.

Faraday nudged my arm. ‘Can we go back now? Please?’

I looked at his pale face and his big teeth, ghostly in the fading light, and all at once the joy evaporated.

‘There’s blood on you,’ he said. ‘There’s blood everywhere.’

He was right. My hands were streaked with blood from the dog’s muzzle and the handle of my stick. The corpses of rats lay everywhere, some complete, others in fragments. The dogs’ interest in them diminished sharply once they stopped moving.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Please.’

I glanced over my shoulder, hoping for a wave from Mr Witney or a nod of farewell from one of my comrades in the battle. But no one was looking at me. No one paid any attention when we left the yard and walked down the muddy lane towards the green.

For a few moments, for an hour even, I had been part of a group; I had played a useful part; I had been, in some small way, valued for what I did. That was all gone. Now I came to my senses and discovered that part of my collar had come adrift from my shirt and the tip of it was nudging my left ear. My overcoat was splashed with mud and cowpats, as well as blood. I had lost my cap. And I was alone once more with Faraday.

‘They were talking about me,’ he said in a voice that wobbled. ‘Mr Nicholls was there. He knows.’

‘Who’s Nicholls?’

‘He is a lay clerk. A tenor.’ For a moment there was a hint of superiority in Faraday’s voice. ‘Not very good, though he thinks he is.’

The lay clerks were the basses and the tenors of the Cathedral choir. They were grown-ups. Many of them had been at the Choir School when they were young, and they still lived in the town.

‘What does it matter if he recognized you?’

‘You don’t understand.’ Faraday was always accusing me of that, and quite rightly. ‘Mr Nicholls was pointing me out and whispering about me. They know.’

‘I expect it was about your voice breaking and not being in the choir any more.’

‘No. You should have seen their faces. They’d heard about … about the other thing.’

He meant the postal order. If Mr Nicholls knew about it, the story could no longer be confined to the Choir School and a handful of trusted outsiders like Mr Ratcliffe. It would be all over the place in a day or two, in the College and in the town.

‘I can’t bear it,’ Faraday said.

I glanced at him and saw a tear rolling down his cheek.

‘We’ll go back to the Rat’s now,’ I said. ‘We can make tea. If there’s bread, perhaps we can have toast. He’s got a toasting fork in the fireplace.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, blowing his nose. ‘Thank you.’

7

Poor little devil. I was sorry for Rabbit. I wanted to help, as long as doing so wouldn’t inconvenience me too much. The question is: did trying to help make matters worse?

It was starting to rain. In order to get back to the Sacrist’s Lodging as swiftly as possible, I took us back through the Cathedral, which was not only shorter than going through the College or through the town but also, at that time of day, lessened the chance that we should meet anyone who knew either of us.

My suggestion wasn’t entirely altruistic: if a boy from King’s was found outside the College without his cap, it automatically earned him a beating. It was possible that the rule did not apply in the holidays, but I didn’t want to put it to the test. Besides, I was starving, Mrs Veal’s lunch a distant memory, and the idea of food was powerfully attractive.

Most people in the College used the Cathedral for shortcuts, and so did many townspeople. There were three doors open to the public – the west door under the great tower, the south door, which led through the ruins of the cloisters to the College, and the north door, from which a path led both to the High Street and to the Sacrist’s Lodging. Using the Cathedral also meant you kept dry. It was considered bad form to hurry, however.

We walked through the porch and pushed open the wicket in the west doors. It was dark, much darker, inside the Cathedral than it was outside. The lamps had not yet been lit, apart from one or two at the east end, beyond the choir screen.

The emptiness of the place enfolded us like a shroud. The air was cold and smelled faintly of earth, incense and candles.

Ahead and to the left, in the north aisle, was one of the great stoves, each surmounted by a black crown, that were supposed to keep the building warm. There was a faint but clearly audible chink as the coke shifted in its iron belly.

‘I’m freezing,’ Faraday said.

He walked over to the stove and held his hands to it.

‘Hurry up,’ I said. ‘I’m starving.’

‘Just a minute. I’m so cold.’

I joined him by the stove. If you stood about three inches away from it, you could actually feel the warmth of it on your skin. It wasn’t so much that the stoves weren’t occasionally hot: it was more that the Cathedral was eternally cold.

Faraday glanced at me. ‘There’s blood on your hands,’ he said. ‘And on your sleeve.’ His voice lurched into a croak. ‘It’s everywhere.’

‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter. I can wash it off. What’s water for?’

I turned my head to avoid seeing his white face and rabbit teeth. My eyes drifted away. It’s a funny thing about buildings, how they take control of you and guide your eyes along their own lines, towards their own ends. In the Cathedral, the rhythm of columns and arches, diminishing in height as the layers climbed to the roof, made you look upwards and upwards. Towards heaven, the school chaplain once told us in a sermon. Or to the roof. Not that it matters in this case: the point is I looked up into the west tower.

Its west wall rises sheer, a cliff of stone pierced with openings: first the doors, then a great window which doesn’t let in much light because of the stained glass. Then, higher still, bands of Norman arcading line the inside of the tower. The first set has a walkway that runs behind it. The next one, further up, is blind, its arches and pillars flattened against the tower wall behind. Above that still, 120 feet above the ground, is the painted tower ceiling, above which the tower rises, higher and higher, stage by stage, to the lantern that perches on top.

Sometimes one of the younger masters would take a party of boys up to the top as a treat. You went up a spiral staircase in the south-west corner, crossed the width of the tower by the walkway behind the lower arcade, climbed another set of stairs, and then another, until your legs felt twice as heavy as usual. Finally, you came to a wooden door that led on to the leads, more than two hundred feet from the ground.

Up there was another world, full of light, where a wind was always blowing. You felt weightless, as if floating in a balloon. Far below were the streets of the town and tiny, foreshortened people scurrying through the maze of their lives, oblivious of the watchers above. Beyond the town stretched the Fens as far as the eye could see, their flatness dotted with the occasional church tower or tree or house, which served to emphasize the monotony rather than relieve it; and at the circular horizon, the sky and the earth became one in a blue haze; and it no longer mattered which was which.

I had been up to the top of the west tower only once, about six months earlier before the end of the summer term. It had been a bright, clear day. There was a story, the master said, that a day like this you could see almost every church in the diocese from here. I tried to count the churches I could see. But I soon gave up and thought instead about Jesus in the wilderness, and how the devil took him up to a high place and tempted him.

If I had been Jesus, I would have struck a deal with the devil. In return for my soul, I wanted not to be at school; I wanted to live at home with my parents; and I wanted to have a dog called Stanley.

I remembered all that as I stood by the stove with my bloody hands. I was still thinking about it when I saw the man. He was walking from left to right, quite slowly, along the walkway behind the lower arcade, perhaps ninety feet above our heads. The light was so poor I couldn’t see him clearly. When he passed behind one of the pillars he seemed to dissolve and then reconstitute himself on the other side.

‘Can you hear it?’ Faraday said.

Irritated, I glanced at him. ‘What?’

‘Those notes.’

‘Shut up, Rabbit.’

I looked back at the arcade. The man wasn’t there any more. It was conceivable he had put on a bit of speed and reached the archway at the northern end. Or he might have stopped behind a pillar. Or, and perhaps this was most likely of all, he hadn’t been there in the first place. The Cathedral at dusk was full of indistinct shapes that shifted as you tried to look at them.

Faraday nudged me. ‘There it is again.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The four notes I heard last night. Remember?’ He hummed them, and they meant nothing to me. ‘It’s like the start of something.’

‘You’re potty,’ I said. ‘Come on, I want some toast.’

There was an odd sequel to this a few hours later, when we were having our evening meal at the Veals’.

While we ate, Mr Veal was in the parlour with us. He had begun to relax in our company, as we had in his.

‘This place would fall apart at the seams without the Dean and me,’ he said with obvious satisfaction. ‘Some of these clerical gents would forget who their own mothers were. Heads in the clouds. And your masters aren’t much better.’

I told him about the glorious ratting we had had at Angel Farm.

‘So you missed the rain this afternoon?’ he asked, for the minutiae of the weather’s fluctuations fascinated him, as they did most grown-ups.

‘Just about. It was beginning to spit as we were going back to Mr Ratcliffe’s, so we cut up through the Cathedral.’

‘We’ll have worse tonight,’ he said. ‘Mrs Veal feels it in her bones. Her bones are never wrong.’

‘I saw someone up the west tower,’ I said.

‘Up the west tower?’ Mr Veal shook his head. ‘Not at this time of year.’

‘Well, I thought I saw someone.’ I shrugged. ‘But it was already getting dark. I could’ve been wrong.’

‘No one was up there today,’ Mr Veal said. ‘There wouldn’t be. You can take it as Gospel, young man. Not without me knowing.’

8

That evening Mr Ratcliffe made cocoa again. The three of us – four, if you counted Mordred – sat close to the fire.

The weather had changed during the afternoon. It was still cold, but clouds had rolled in from the south-west, bringing with it a wind that blew in gusts of varying strengths with lulls between them. The wind carried raindrops with it, and the promise of more to come. It rattled doors and windows in their frames. It sounded in the wide chimney.

It was Faraday who reminded Mr Ratcliffe about his promise.

‘Please, sir – you said you’d tell us about Mr Goldsworthy.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes, sir. You said there was a real story about the ghost.’

‘Real? To be perfectly truthful, Faraday, I can’t be absolutely sure which parts of the story are real and which are not. I don’t think anyone can after all this time.’

‘When did he live, sir?’ I asked.

‘Nearly two hundred years ago. He was the Master of Music, one of Dr Atkinson’s predecessors. He was a composer, too. You remember the anthem we have on Christmas Day? The “Jubilate Deo”? He wrote that.’

Faraday’s face was in shadow. But he shifted in his seat as if someone had touched him. It was the anthem that Hampson Minor had sung in Faraday’s place.

‘He died as a result of a fall,’ Mr Ratcliffe went on, ‘and he’s buried in the north choir aisle. There’s a tablet to him on the wall more or less opposite the organ loft.’

‘But – why is he a ghost?’ I said. Into my mind slipped an image of Dr Atkinson, who was small, red-faced and irascible, draped in a sheet and rattling chains like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

‘If he is,’ said Mr Ratcliffe. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it?’

‘Has anyone seen him, sir?’ Faraday asked, leaning forward. ‘They must have done. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have said he was a ghost last night.’

‘You must be patient.’ Mr Ratcliffe began the elaborate ritual of cleaning, filling and lighting his pipe. ‘Did you know that the Cathedral once had a ring of eight bells? One of our canons, Dr Bradshaw, wrote a standard treatise on the subject in the 1670s. Campanologia Explicata. There were eight bells, and they hung in the west tower. You know, I am sure, that our church bells are rung according to a series of mathematical permutations.’ He looked up at us and took pity on our ignorance. ‘It’s like a pattern of numbers. Each bell has a number and it rings according to its place in the pattern.’

By now Mr Ratcliffe was crumbling flake tobacco into the palm of one hand. He fell silent, concentrating on rubbing the strands into a loose, evenly distributed mixture.

‘Bells don’t last for ever, you know. Our bells had to be taken down in the eighteenth century. They needed to be recast. This was done, at considerable expense. There was to be a service of dedication when the new ring of bells was rung for the first time. The Dean and Chapter asked Mr Goldsworthy to compose a special anthem to mark the occasion, to be based on Psalm one hundred and fifty. “Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet: praise Him upon the lute and harp”.’

Mordred, who had been slumbering on Mr Ratcliffe’s lap, jumped to the ground. He stretched himself out with luxurious abandon on the hearthrug.

‘They say that Mr Goldsworthy was an ambitious man,’ Mr Ratcliffe went on. ‘And a troubled one. The Dean had a piece of patronage in his gift, the Deputy Surveyorship of the Fabric, a position that came with an income of two hundred pounds a year for the holder, and entailed no obligations apart from a few ceremonial duties. Mr Goldsworthy thought there was no reason why the post should not go to himself as to the next man. And the Dean gave him to understand that it might well be his, if his new anthem was a particularly fine piece of work that brought renown on the Cathedral. And, no doubt, on the Dean.’

As Mr Ratcliffe was speaking, Mordred rose to his feet. He stared at the three of us in turn and, to my surprise, came towards me and rubbed his furry body against me. I felt the vibration of his purring against my legs. Flattered by his attention, I bent down and stroked him.

‘The problem was,’ Mr Ratcliffe continued, ‘Mr Goldsworthy found that for once his inspiration failed him. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. His career was at a crossroads. If he failed in the commission, he would earn the Dean’s disfavour. To make matters worse, I believe there was a lady in the case, and Mr Goldsworthy could not afford to marry without a larger income.’

The cat unsheathed the claws of his right paw and ran them into my calf. I squealed with pain and shock.

‘Mordred!’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘I’m so sorry – he can be such an unmannerly animal. Perhaps one of you would put him outside.’

Mordred frustrated this design by going to ground under the grand piano, sheltered by the wall on one side and a pile of books on the other.

‘What did he do then?’ Faraday said. ‘Did he compose the anthem in the end?’

‘That’s the strange part of it. It is said that he did. He told his friends that he had succeeded at the very last moment. He said the piece would be his masterpiece. The newly cast bells had already been hung in the tower. He found that if he went up into the tower himself, into the ringing chamber with pen and paper, the music came to him as if borne on the wind. But then came disaster.’

‘He died?’ I said, half hopefully, half fearfully.

Mr Ratcliffe held up a hand. ‘Be patient, young man. No, the first thing to happen was that cracks were discovered in the tower, when the workmen were hanging the new bells. You see, the west tower was built in the Middle Ages. It simply wasn’t designed for a ring of bells. It’s not the weight of them, you know. It’s the vibration they cause when they are rung. The Cathedral Surveyor told the Dean and Chapter that there could be no question of ringing the new ones.’

‘Which is why there aren’t any bells now,’ I said.

‘Yes – because they could well bring the tower crashing about everyone’s ears. The Surveyor said that the new bells must come down, and the tower had to be strengthened as soon as possible, and braced with iron ties. The Dean raged against this – his reputation, his judgement, was at stake. But he was forced to give way in the end. So there was no longer a need for an anthem to celebrate the new bells, and no longer any purpose on wasting a perfectly good piece of patronage on the Master of Music.’

‘What happened to it?’ Faraday asked. ‘The anthem, I mean.’

The anthem, I noticed, not the man: the Rabbit’s as mad as a hatter; and I smiled at my own joke.

Mr Ratcliffe lit his pipe and tossed the match into the fire. ‘No one knows for sure. Perhaps it was never written or perhaps it was destroyed. But the sad part is what happened to Mr Goldsworthy. The story was that he had left the manuscript in the west tower, where he had been working on it. One winter evening, he went up to retrieve it. But he was not aware that the workmen had already begun to remove the new bells from the tower. There are hatches in the floors at the various levels, to allow the bells to be lowered down from the belfry to the floor of the tower. By some mishap, the workmen had left open the hatch at the lowest stage, which is the ringing chamber just above the painted ceiling. There was very little light up there and poor Goldsworthy must have stumbled in the dark.’

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