Ken Follett - A Column of Fire

He dragged her backwards, her arms flailing, her heels dragging along the stone floor. She repeated her trick of going limp. However, this time it did not work, only making it easier for him to pull her. He reached the corner.

He put one foot on the top of the wall and tried to drag her over. The wall was pierced at floor level by drain holes for rainwater, and she managed to get her hand into one and grab the edge. He kicked her arm and she lost her grip.

He managed to pull her until she was half over the edge. She was face down and staring at the drop, screaming in mortal terror. He released her collar and tried to grab her ankles so that he could tip her over. He got hold of one ankle but could not grasp the other. He lifted her foot as high as he could. She was almost over now, clinging to the top of the wall with both hands.

He grasped one arm and pulled her hand off the wall. She tipped over, but grabbed his wrist at the last minute. He almost went over the side with her, but her strength failed her and she released him.

For a moment he teetered, windmilling his arms; then he was able to step back to safety.

She overbalanced in the other direction and tilted, with nightmare slowness, off the parapet. He watched, with a mixture of triumph and horror, as she fell slowly through the air, turning over and over, her screams a faint cry in the wind.

He heard the thud as she hit the roof of the choir. She bounced, and came down again with her head at a queer angle, and he guessed her neck was broken. She rolled limply down the slope of the roof and off the edge, struck the top of a flying buttress, fell to the lean-to roof of the north aisle, tumbled off its edge, and at last came to rest, a lifeless bundle, in the graveyard.

There was no one in the graveyard. Rollo looked in the opposite direction; he saw nothing but rooftops. Nobody had seen the fight.

He stepped through the low doorway, closed the door behind him, and went down the steep spiral staircase as fast as he could. He stumbled twice and almost fell, but he had to hurry.

Reaching the bottom he stopped and listened at the door. He could hear nothing. He opened the door a crack. He heard no voices, no footsteps. He peeped out. The cathedral seemed empty.

He stepped into the transept and closed the door behind him.

He hurried along the south aisle, raising the hood of his cloak. He reached the west end of the church and cracked the door open. There were people in the market square but no one was looking his way. He stepped outside. Without pausing he walked south, past the entrance to the indoor market, deliberately not looking around him: he did not want to meet anyone’s eye.

He turned around the back of the bishop’s palace and made his way to the main street.

It crossed his mind to leave town instantly and never come back. But several people knew he was here, and that he was planning to leave in the morning with a group of travellers; so if he now left precipitately, it would be sure to throw suspicion on him. The town watch might even send horsemen to catch up with him and bring him back. He would do better to remain and act innocent.

He turned towards the market square.

The play had ended and the crowd was coming out of the Bell courtyard. He spotted Richard Grimes, a prosperous Kingsbridge builder who sat on the borough council. ‘Good afternoon, alderman,’ he said politely. Grimes would remember that he had seen Rollo coming up the main street from the direction of the riverside, apparently having been nowhere near the cathedral.

Grimes was surprised to see him after so many years, and was about to start a conversation, when they both heard cries of shock and dismay coming from the graveyard. Grimes went in the direction of the hubbub, and Rollo followed.

A crowd was gathering around the body. Sylvie lay with arms and legs visibly broken, and one side of her head a horrible mass of blood. Someone knelt beside her and felt for a heartbeat, but it was obvious that she was dead. Alderman Grimes pushed through the press of people and said: ‘That’s Sylvie Willard. How did this happen?’

‘She fell from the roof.’ The speaker was Susan White, an old flame of Rollo’s, once a pretty girl with a heart-shaped face, now a grey-haired matron in her fifties.

Grimes asked her: ‘Did you see her fall?’

Rollo tensed. He had been sure no one was watching. But if Susan had glanced up she would probably have recognized him.

Susan said: ‘No, I didn’t see, but it’s obvious, isn’t it?’

The crowd parted, and Ned Willard appeared.

He stared at the body on the ground for an instant, then roared like a wounded bull: ‘No!’ He fell to his knees beside Sylvie. Gently, he lifted her head, and saw that part of her face was pulp. He began to weep then, still saying ‘No, no,’ but quietly, between sobs that came from deep inside.

Grimes looked around. ‘Did anyone see her fall?’

Rollo got ready to make a run for it. But no one spoke. The murder had not been witnessed.

He had got away with it.

Margery stood at Sylvie’s graveside as the coffin was lowered into the ground. The day was still and cold, with a feeble winter sun breaking through clouds intermittently, but Margery felt as if she were in a tornado.

Margery was heartbroken for Ned. He was weeping into a handkerchief, unable to speak. Barney stood on his right, Alfo on his left. Margery knew Ned, and she knew that he had loved Sylvie with all his being. He had lost his soulmate.

No one knew why Sylvie had chosen to climb the tower. Margery knew that her brother Rollo had been in town that day, and it crossed her mind that he might be able to answer the question, but he had left the day after Sylvie’s death. Margery had casually asked several people whether they had seen Rollo before he left, and three of them had said something like: ‘Yes, at the play, he was standing near me.’ Ned said that Sylvie had always wanted to see the view from the tower, and perhaps she had disliked the play and had chosen that moment to fulfil her wish; and, on balance, Margery thought that was the likeliest explanation.

Margery’s sorrow for Ned was made even more agonizing by this knowledge: that the tragedy might, in the end, bring her what she had craved for the last thirty years. She felt deeply ashamed of the thought, but she could not blind herself to the fact that Ned was now a single man, and free to marry her.

But even if that happened, would it end her torment? She would have a secret that she could not reveal to Ned. If she betrayed Rollo she would be condemning her sons. Would she keep the secret, and deceive the man she loved? Or would she see her children hanged?

As the prayers were said over the broken body of Sylvie, Margery asked God never to force her to choose.

It was an amputation. I would never get back the part of me that vanished when Sylvie died. I knew the feeling of a man who tries to walk having lost a leg. I would never shake off the sense that something should be there, where the missing limb had always been. There was a hole in my life, a great gaping cavity that could never be filled.

But the dead live on in our imaginations. I think that’s the true meaning of ghosts. Sylvie was gone from this earth, but I saw her every day in my mind. I heard her, too. She would warn me against an untrustworthy colleague, mock me when I admired the shape of a young woman, laugh with me at a pompous alderman, and cry over the illness of a child.

In time the hurricane of grief and rage abated, and I was possessed by a calm, sad resignation. Margery came back into my life like an old friend returned from overseas. That summer she came to London and moved into Shiring House in the Strand, and soon I was seeing her every day. I learned the meaning of the word ‘bittersweet’, the acid taste of loss and the honey of hope in one bright fruit. We saw plays, we rode horses in the Westminster fields, we took river trips and picnicked in Richmond. And we made love — sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes at night; occasionally all three.