The Fever of the World, page 8
‘Aaaah.’ Gomer waved a dismissive hand, scattering ash. ‘If I gets him, I gets him. Anyway, they reckons you gotter be a beast to go down with him real bad.’
‘A beast…?’
‘Like a tubby bugger?’
‘What?’ Jane blinked. Thought she’d mastered all the local terms, but…
Then she grinned.
‘Oh… you mean obese?’
‘What I said, ennit? A beast. And I just yeard Danny’s shelterin’ now, see… cos his missus, her’s got the virus now. So we won’t get no heavy work done for a week or so.’
‘Greta? Is she—?’
‘Aaah, her en’t sick but her’s got it all right. Her works on the desk at the docs’, so they spotted him right away, that ole virus. And Danny’s place is a good few miles from yere, and he’s gotter stay there for fourteen days before he can go out again.’
Bliss left the building and set off across the car park, ignoring the funeral directors.
When the footsteps behind him suddenly speeded up, he noticed and casually turned and blinked, capturing a quick snapshot of her with both eyes. Following him, no question.
She was on the tall side, slim, short-haired, blonde and pretty – but slightly stern-faced, he noticed when she couldn’t help but draw level with him at the kerb.
‘Are you Detective Inspector Bliss?’
‘Yeh, I can’t deny it. What can I do for yer?’
‘Just spare a couple of minutes to hear me out, all right?’
‘I can probably do that if it’s not gonna take too long.’
‘My name’s Evelyn Eaton.’
He’d heard that name before. Where?
‘One of your detectives is David Vaynor?’
Ah. Then this had to be…
‘Eve?’
‘We’ve never met, Mr Bliss, but David’s talked about you.’
‘Yeh. He’s talked about you, too.’
She was a secondary school teacher, or worked at a college. In Worcester, somewhere like that.
‘I presume he’s told you we’re no longer… spending time together.’
He waited for a lorry to grind past before replying.
‘I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.’
‘It was just convenience really. We met at Oxford and were both from this area, so… Anyway we decided – I decided – there was no future in it and we should break up now.’
‘Well, that’s… sensible if…’
‘If I can just unload something on you. Because he thinks a lot of you. Admires you professionally.’
‘That’s, er, very generous of him. He’s the best young detective I’ve ever had. And he’s a nice lad.’
‘And gave up a brilliant academic career to follow your example.’
‘Oh.’
‘And when I say brilliant I know what I’m talking about.’
‘Yeh, I’m sure you do, but…’
‘And I think he’s thrown himself away.’
‘Oh. Do you?’
‘I might not be spending my life with him, but I don’t want to see his life wasted.’
‘I don’t wanna see that either, Eve, and I’m happy to—’
‘Encourage him to think again?’
‘Talk to him about his future prospects, I was gonna say.’
‘I couldn’t just walk away,’ Eve said, ‘and leave him to…’
‘A copper’s life, with other coppers?’
‘Mr Bliss, we’ve been given… with this pandemic, we’ve all been given an opportunity to re-evaluate our lives and…’
‘That’s why you threw him over the side?’
‘I suppose, yes. I certainly couldn’t face a life waiting for someone who might end the night in hospital or…’
‘I say this a lot. Things like that don’t often happen to detectives.’
Eve said, ‘Something once happened to you.’
‘Aw, yeh, but that was—’
‘And it happened in the beautiful, peaceful countryside, I was told.’
There was no answer to that. He didn’t even try. He’d taken a long time to recover after stupidly walking into a rural cockfight, and even now bright lights did his head in.
‘OK, I’ll talk to him,’ he said after two empty buses had passed.
‘Good. We probably won’t see each other again. I’ll be looking for somewhere to live around Worcester, where my sister is.’
‘Good luck,’ Bliss said.
Finding he liked her after all. Darth Vaynor didn’t have bad taste.
‘He gave me his thesis as a kind of farewell present,’ Eve said. ‘And to show how little it meant to him. Well, we’ll see about that.’ Walking away, she looked back at him. ‘Thanks for listening, Mr Bliss. And always remember that tall people are the first to get struck by lightning.’
13
Apoplectic
IN THE REAR-VIEW mirror, Merrily saw traffic swishing past, under the two witches-hat stone towers and the darkening sky. Only a deep greenery lay behind the towers, the main road sliding in front.
‘Hang on, Sophie… if this isn’t the entrance, why did that signpost point to Goodrich Castle?’
She’d driven or been driven past this gatehouse a dozen times in the past few years. You could see where the portcullis used to be, between the towers. They’d travelled half an hour or so from Hereford, winding past more wooded hills until they hit the wide road with its industrial traffic, catching up with the maturing Wye and, unexpectedly, some late sunshine at the sandstone-arched Kerne Bridge.
The water below was like a smoky mirror, beyond which signs of antiquity had begun to appear: Flanesford, the former priory, later a hotel, Sophie said, and, above it on the near horizon, the actual Goodrich Castle, red stone against a foil-grey sky. Only half an hour from Hereford, and it seemed like a different county. No black and white houses before the warm-toned stone of the witches-hat gatehouse.
But it seemed that this wasn’t what she’d thought.
‘Admittedly, it says Goodrich Castle on the sign.’ Sophie looked behind from the passenger seat. ‘Because that’s where this side road eventually leads. But this was never an old gatehouse.’
‘Well, I can see that. But surely it’s replaced the original Goodrich Castle portcullis…?’
‘This is not the Goodrich Castle gate, this was for Goodrich Court – not far away, but a different place entirely and now blocked from traffic. Right, take the next turn, Merrily, left, here.’
Off the dual carriageway onto a minor road. No, she couldn’t see a castle, only fields and a hill with mature trees growing out of it.
Sophie put on a thin smile.
‘Goodrich Court was built in the 1820s, very much in the medieval style, by Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick, who was enormously wealthy.’
Merrily was looking down at a copy of a book cover depicting a man who resembled an early movie villain: fleshy lips, lavish black sideburns, early Victorian long jacket. His smile was on the edge of smug. He had a pen in hand, seemed to be autographing what could be a late-medieval breastplate.
‘He was an early nineteenth-century lawyer and antiquarian,’ Sophie said. ‘Extremely wealthy. Best known later as an expert on armour and weaponry. Becoming what amounted to Royal Armourer to William IV.’
‘When was William IV?’
‘He preceded Queen Victoria, and Sir Samuel Meyrick rearranged his armoury for display. At the same time building up his own huge personal collection.’
‘Weapons?’
‘All things martial, in fact – some items dating back to the Dark Ages and beyond. Quite a few Celtic relics. When Meyrick’s collection outgrew his London home, he went looking for somewhere else to keep it all and put it on public display. Soon spotting, in this area, the perfect castle. Ruined but perhaps less so than it is today.’
‘Goodrich Castle?’ Merrily’s eyes widened. ‘But that would cost a fortune to restore and fortify—’
‘And Meyrick had a fortune,’ Sophie said.
And he’d been profoundly inspired by the extensive remains of Goodrich Castle. This was at the time when the lower Wye was at the centre of that early tourism boom – a Gothicallyromantic place of woods and rocks and chasms, choked with history and legend. In fact, once the home of men who might have worn some of Meyrick’s actual armour and slaughtered one another with his weaponry. Where better to give the wealthy tourists a preparatory frisson before they climbed back into the boats.
‘The court was essentially a folly,’ Sophie said. ‘A hugely expensive imitation, far bigger than Goodrich Castle… and quite putting it in the shade… as it was meant to do.’
‘Why? I’m not getting this, Sophie. Why did this guy want to put the old castle in the shade? And how was it possible? Compared to most others in this county it’s still remarkably well preserved for the twelfth and thirteenth century.’
‘Why?’ Sophie leaned back. ‘Because Sir Samuel Meyrick – for whom money was no object – had originally wanted to buy it – the original Goodrich Castle. Unfortunately, the owners of the castle didn’t like Meyrick at all. Didn’t trust him. Refused to sell the castle to him at any price. And Meyrick… well, he wasn’t used to being treated that way. So…’ Sophie smiled. ‘In the end, he built his own castle on the next headland. Dominating the next viewpoint. No planning permission required in those days. If you had the land and the cash you could usually go ahead.’
‘You mean he thought it would actually replace—?’
‘And he thought the village could be made to support it.’
You couldn’t see the castle from the village, but fragments of it seemed to have crumbled down the hill into the tight, wooded lanes, attaching themselves to existing buildings like the village pub, which had acquired turrets, and a deep window reaching from the forecourt almost to the roof. A village pub that was olde but not, it seemed, actually old. No pub these days called Ye Hostelrie could be genuinely historic. Sophie said she’d spent a whole day here in early autumn with Andrew, her husband – being educated about cruck-frames and quoins and learning what a broach-spire was.
This pub seemed to have them all. It might have been Dracula’s local, with its long, pointed window, high turrets, Gothic gable and spires.
‘Preserves some of the spirit of the court, according to Pevsner,’ Sophie said as deep shadows rose up the masonry as if they’d been built-in. This was certainly a kind of hotel, but it should be in the centre of an established town.
‘But it’s still here. Unlike…’
‘Unlike Goodrich Court. Previously, it was called the Meyrick Arms,’ Sophie said.
Now, parked on the edge of Goodrich village, Merrily looked through the front and side windows and then back in the direction of the stone gatehouse facing the main commercial link between South Wales and the English Midlands.
She heard the grind and hum of industrial traffic, watched the first of tonight’s headlights. Clearly, none of it had been here when Goodrich Court was conceived. But…
‘But where is it?… I’m sorry, Sophie, I really don’t know enough about the lower Wye Valley, but like…where is it hidden? I mean, if he was so keen on the court he must eventually have finished the main building to go behind the gatehouse?’
‘Oh yes. And he had a talented young architect working for him, Edmund Blore. Many people saw what he would call Goodrich Court as a great asset to the area, and it went on to attract crowds of visitors over many years. It was a huge success. Very rapidly drew thousands of early tourists.’
‘But—’
‘But, you see, not everyone liked it.’
Sophie’s face now wore a wintry smile.
Merrily said, ‘You mean Canon Dobbs? Dobbs didn’t like it?’
It was growing dark and she switched to dipped headlamps but kept the engine running, the old Freelander parked at the roadside.
Beside her, Sophie was shaking her head.
‘I don’t know what Canon Dobbs thought of it, but this was long before his time. I’m talking about the man who considered the original Goodrich Castle to be “the noblest ruin in the county”.’
‘That’s the original medieval castle, not the new Goodrich Court?’
‘And that, Merrily, is the point.’
‘Sorry…’ Merrily half-turned to face her. ‘Sophie, I’m not getting this…’
‘Nobody appreciated the spoiled grandeur of ancient castles more than the man still often widely acclaimed as the finest poet England ever produced,’ Sophie said. ‘Do I take it you haven’t heard about Wordsworth’s reaction to Meyrick’s new castle?’
‘I know he spent some time in this area in his twenties. With his doting sister sometimes.’
Remembering reading how the poet and his wife, Mary, used to stay with her brother at his farm at Brinsop, which she knew well, as it was only a few miles from Ledwardine.
No surprise, then, that he’d seen both the old Goodrich Castle and the new Goodrich Court. Even in a horse-drawn coach, this was surely no more than a day-trip along the Wye from Brinsop.
‘He loved the area,’ Sophie said. ‘Picked up a famous poem near the ruins of Goodrich Castle. But when he arrived one day to find his view blocked by the newly built and vast Goodrich Court… on the next headland above the river where before there had been nothing…’
‘Didn’t immediately take to it?’
‘The poet wasn’t widely known for his displays of uncontrollable anger,’ Sophie said. ‘But he was what today we’d call a conservationist. One word used to describe his mood, on seeing the new building was “apoplectic”.’
14
Joyless heart
THE FLAT WAS at the back of St Owen’s Street, near the city centre, the ill-lit end. The five steps to the door were slippery. Vaynor moved along the dull brick wall. His key turned stiffly in the Yale lock and the door yielded.
No lights. He was alone here. He’d pulled back, waiting for a lamp to come on or the first hiss of the kettle. Waited in the silence for a few moments before finding the old metal switch in the hall, drenching the stained panelling in oily light.
It had been a good flat, but this end of the street was becoming a depressing place, sending grim messages with its closing-down shops and its desperate parking charges.
The morning post was on the mat. Never seen that before on a weeknight. Eve had always collected the mail before he got home.
Three envelopes, pastel-coloured, his name on them. He picked them up and carried them into the kitchen. The trace of a cooking smell. The oil lamp with the glass funnel standing on the window sill. It was out, but he could smell singed wick: the smell of warm light, bitterly extinguished.
He put the envelopes on the table. Knowing they’d be cards for his twenty-eighth birthday, and the last thing he wanted was to open them on his own. He went quietly back into the hall and along to the bedroom. Opened the door into darkness, became aware that the curtains were drawn. Not for privacy, he thought, not a sign of rage, but… mourning was the word that came to him, as he saw an edge of the Cathedral tower in an upper corner of the bedroom window and couldn’t suppress it.
‘Eve?’
Waiting too long for a reply. Her voice could be light and hopeful, like one of the first birds from the dawn chorus. Always reminded him of waking up on the first morning of his last expedition to the Wye Valley, before it all became forbidding.
He sank down on the side of the cold bed, unmade.
Alone. His flat again. Through the abysses of a joyless heart, the heaviest plummet of despair can go. Kept hearing that line. He’d come home on previous occasions, dragged by something he’d been dreading having to tell her. But he’d told her anyway and it was usually OK in the end. She’d once said that if they had a future together there should be nothing they couldn’t tell one another and he’d decided, without much thought, that, on his part, there wouldn’t be.
He closed his eyes, called on darkness…
…and midnight darkness seemed to take all objects from my sight.
No. Please, no.
Back in the cave, and he couldn’t tell her about that. The deep cave that opened like a wound in the Doward. It was the first thing he couldn’t tell her.
Or anybody.
He knew that nothing like that could possibly have happened outside of his head and she’d surely know that, too. Perhaps he’d been more physically tired than he’d realized in that cave. It had been raining outside, and he’d slid into oblivion between the ambered rocks that held him like a stone coffin.
… My brain
Work’d with a dim and undetermin’d sense
Of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts
There was a darkness…
And a dampness. He felt a dampness in his eyes. He was losing the woman he’d been with intermittently since student years. And also his job, the job he’d thought would save him.
Sometimes it befel
In these night wanderings, that a strong desire O’erpowered my better reason…
The lines rushed at him through the gloom and he was back in the cave.
Vaynor rolled off the bed.
This had become her flat. He might be six and a half feet tall, but in a way, she was taller. Higher. She looked down on him. She was an already a senior academic and he was a low-ranking copper.
She was right. He’d thrown it all away.
It was barely eight p.m., and he wasn’t qualified, as a human being, to stay here on his own.
15
In Agony
AS A SEMI-RURAL darkness closed in on the car, Merrily learned that Goodrich Court had been nationally famous for a while. She read in the fading light that the great British architectural historian Nicholas Pevsner had called it ‘a fantastic and enormous tower-bedecked house’.
‘And it’s all gone?’
Merrily gazed into the dusk through the windscreen hazed by a hint of rain.
The brash newness of Goodrich Court had apparently faded fairly quickly, leaving just over a century after it had been built, a gap on the skyline, and then empty fields and woodland directly opposite the darkening remains of medieval Goodrich Castle.
