Alex Preston - The Revelations

Mouse lit a cigarette and opened the window.

‘Maki’s hard to read. She seems spiritual, to understand the need for faith, but we should keep an eye on her.’

‘What about Philip?’ Marcus asked. ‘Do you think he’ll stay?’

Mouse paused, drew on his cigarette, and spoke.

‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘Partly because I think he’s thought more than anyone else about it. He’s laid the foundations of the revelation. But also, he’s nervous, and those nerves can be helpful, they bring you to that fine point where you just have to let yourself go.’

Marcus saw Lee take a drag on Mouse’s cigarette. Her voice was low and tired.

‘I’m not so sure. I think we might lose him,’ she said.

‘Really?’

‘It seems to me that Philip wants everything that goes with being a Course member, but I don’t know that he wants God. He’s just a bit too eager. And thinking about faith doesn’t do any good without feeling it first.’

Marcus frowned in the rear-view mirror.

‘I’ll have a word with him. We have to make sure we don’t lose anyone else. David is depending on us. If you feel like anyone’s wavering you have to leap on it. It’s not just keeping them here, but making sure they’re fully converted. We need to deliver, to prove to David that we can do this.’

The clouds had begun to break up as they drove through the cut in the Chilterns and the world unravelled itself beneath them. They came off the motorway at Banbury and then they were almost at Lancing Manor, and Marcus felt a surge of pleasure in his stomach.

The Earl had been at school with David and was reported to have financed the Course’s initial sessions, supported the priest as he wrote The Way of the Pilgrim and took his orders. He was on the boards of a host of City corporations, had links to shady business ventures in offshore tax havens, hedge funds that had benefited from the Credit Crisis. He attended most Course sessions and played the organ at St Botolph’s on Sunday mornings. His house was said to be astonishingly grand.

They got lost around Chipping Norton. Abby had been reading the directions but, during the discussion about the new members, she had let the map fall to the floor. After they had negotiated the sandstone wiggle of the town for the third time, Marcus stopped the car outside a truckers’ cafe and looked at the map. Heading back on the main road towards Banbury, they came upon David’s silver Mercedes plodding slowly northwards. Marcus could see the priest leaning forward over his steering wheel as his wife stared out at the passing countryside. Marcus honked and the priest looked in his rear-view mirror and raised his hand. Marcus followed David as he took a right turn and drove along a ridge between two valleys. Marcus watched the priest’s eyes, which whipped back to the pursuing car in the mirror every so often. They made their way through a number of windswept hamlets; a wood appeared on the left. Nightingale slowed, began to indicate, and Abby let out a cheer.

Nightingale’s Mercedes turned into a shadowy driveway through black iron gates. Marcus followed down the gravel track above which trees clasped a thick canopy. The track ended in a turning circle in front of a high, dark house. Lancing Manor had two large wings that shot off from the main building, further outbuildings and laundry rooms that were linked by covered cloisters. The rickety gables and turrets seemed to be climbing the body of the house, clambering over one another, reaching up to the low clouds. Rooks perched monkish on the gabled roof, their beaks the colour of bones. The ivy that grew up the front of the house seemed to be gathering itself for some great effort, balling itself into a fist in an attempt to pull the building into the ground, sending out single vines as scouts snaking along the brown Hornton stone. The house was perched on the brow of a hill looking down over thickly planted pine trees and, halfway down the hillside, where the ground flattened out before plunging down into the misty valley, a lake that was bright with weed in the midday sunlight. A boathouse stood in the shadow of overhanging trees at one end. The Earl came out of the oak doors, rubbing his large hands.

‘Welcome to Lancing Manor. You found the place without trouble? Good, good.’

He was wearing a thick brown jumper and corduroys, his heavy body somehow more at home in front of the vast, dark house than it was in London. David embraced him and turned to help Sally with their luggage and his guitar case. Marcus and Mouse hefted their own belongings into the entrance hall. Marcus watched as Abby and Lee looked upwards, slowly realising the size of the great room they had entered, a room whose shadows were punctuated by etiolated stems of green-white light that fell down from stained-glass windows set high above. A staircase reared in front of them from the black-and-white chessboard marble of the floor. Embers dimly glowed in the fireplace, along whose mantel carved stone vines extended themselves between armless caryatids. Doors led off the hall, interrupting bookcases filled with dusty works of philosophy, Latin and German texts whose names Lee revealed with a sweep of her thumb down leather spines. A thin woman with short grey hair came through a swing door and nodded severely in their direction.

‘This is Mrs Millman,’ said the Earl. ‘She’ll show you to your rooms. I’ll walk with you, David. I thought we’d put the youngsters in the east wing. Keep all the trouble in one place.’ Mrs Millman made her way up the staircase with the delicate steps of a wading bird. The four friends followed her.

The dust increased as they climbed the staircase to the gallery that encircled the hall. The fan-vaulted ceiling was hung with giant pendants. Shards of sunlight fell into the dusty air, shimmering with the colours of the stained glass. Marcus could make out the pictures depicted in the glass of the high windows, scenes of martyrdom and religious heroism: Sebastian pierced by arrows, Moses on the Mount, Daniel among the lions. On the walls hung portraits of what Marcus assumed were the Earl’s family. He saw a young girl with a bright parrot perched on her thin hand, a dog sleeping at her feet. He thought she looked like Lee. Further along there was a stern Roundhead, a jovial Victorian slumped behind an enormous belly, a pale woman with an Elizabethan ruff dandling a baby. Then the Earl, perhaps twenty years younger, his hair — longer then — a dark flame atop his head. Behind him Lancing Manor, presented against a fantastical background of mountains and ravines, rose dark and gloomy. The artist had ignored any sense of perspective and so the painting looked primitive, wild, the Earl the master of a dismal kingdom, rooks circling above him.

They passed through white doors and then in single file down a long corridor whose windows looked out over a courtyard on the right-hand side that reminded Marcus of the quadrangles at university. But the courtyard was empty and the fountain that bubbled in the centre served only to highlight the stillness of everything around it. The wallpaper of the corridor was pale yellow and the walls here were hung with photographs of stiff Edwardians in formalwear. There was something ghostly in the stare of those long-dead people, their faces trapped in forced joyless smiles or stern Imperial frowns. The photographs had faded in the evening sunlight that had fallen through the windows over the decades. Some of the lost-looking women holding pudgy babies seemed almost to have disappeared into the walls behind them. Marcus tried to work out which of the mewling infants was the Earl. Finally, they came out to a landing at the top of what looked like a maid’s staircase. Three white doors opened to light-filled bedrooms. Mrs Millman turned and stood in front of one of them and smiled. Her face was transformed; pinched disapproval was replaced by something warm and welcoming. Colour rose to her grey cheeks.