Andrew Taylor - Fireside Gothic

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.’

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?’