The Sin Eater (11 page)

Michael had once tried to make vichyssoise and had put a number of ingredients in a blender, which had exploded halfway through the process, showering half-mushed potatoes and leeks everywhere. Unfortunately, Wilberforce had been sitting on the window sill at the time and had received most of the contents. He had been so disgusted he had vanished for two days, but, as Nell's Beth had said afterwards, this would be a really cool thing to include in the new book about Wilberforce, didn't Michael think so? So Michael had dutifully written a chapter in which Wilberforce, wearing a chef's hat slightly too big for him, attended a series of cookery lessons, until the mice, with whom Wilberforce waged ongoing and unsuccessful battles, gleefully tipped the pepper pot into the stew.

At the moment, the real Wilberforce was in the kitchen, keeping a watchful eye on the cooker, where the salmon was cooking according to schedule. The bowl of salad was in the fridge, and Michael could give his attention to Nell's odd experience in Benedict Doyle's house.

‘Will you go back to the house to draw up the inventory?' he asked. He liked seeing Nell here; he liked the way she always kicked off her shoes and curled her feet under her in the deep armchair by the fireplace. She still had on the jacket she had worn for London – it was golden brown and it brought out the copper lights in her hair.

‘Yes, I think I'll have to. Apart from anything else, there's this,' said Nell, producing the chess piece.

‘That looks valuable.' Michael did not say he didn't much like the slightly sneering face on the carved figure. He set it down on a low table and considered it.

‘It does, doesn't it? I'll have to get it looked at properly, though. I found it after Benedict was taken to the hospital. It's the reason I went up to the second floor – to see if I could find the rest of the set. I didn't, though.'

‘No, and from the sound of it, it's probably as well, in fact— Oh bother, that's someone at the door.'

It was Michael's friend Owen Bracegirdle from the History faculty.

‘Sorry, I didn't realize you had a guest – oh, it's Nell. Hello, Nell, how nice you look. I won't intrude, I see you're about to eat, I'll just say hello and vanish into the night like a . . . Well, if you insist, I'll have a quick glass of wine, thank you very much.'

Owen had come to find out if Michael was going to the Dean's Christmas lunch tomorrow, and who Michael was supporting for the election of Professor of Poetry.

‘I am going to the Dean's lunch, and Nell's coming as well this year,' said Michael, who was looking forward to walking into the Dean's long dining room with Nell. ‘But I'm not supporting anyone for the poetry professorship; in fact I don't even know who the nominees are.'

Owen knew, of course, and he knew all the details of each candidate. He loved college gossip and entered into it as enthusiastically as a Tudor courtier swapping backstairs intrigue. But tonight, probably in deference to Nell's presence, he forbore to launch into one of his mildly scandalous speeches. He drank his wine, observed that Michael always had good taste in plonk, and got up to take his leave.

‘I've got to read some first-year essays on the First Jacobite Rebellion, scrubby lot.'

‘The Jacobite rebels?'

‘The first years. So I'll melt into the ether and . . . Where on earth did that come from?'

He was staring at the chess piece, which was still glaring from the low table with disdainful malevolence.

‘It's a chess piece,' said Nell a bit defensively.

‘I can see that.'

‘I found it when I was doing an inventory of the contents of an old house earlier today. I'm hoping I'll unearth the rest of the set.'

‘It's not something I'd want to have sneering from the mantelpiece,' said Owen. ‘Can I look at it? Thanks.' He picked it up, turning it over in his hands. ‘Admit it, it really is a bit sinister, isn't it?' he said.

‘A bit.'

‘Wilberforce didn't like it much,' said Michael. ‘He glared at it, spat like a demon, then decamped to the kitchen.'

‘That was because he could smell food cooking,' said Nell. ‘And if it's valuable, it doesn't matter how sinister it is, or how many times Wilberforce spits at it.'

‘I've got a feeling I've seen something a bit like it somewhere else,' said Owen. ‘But I can't think where.' He put the chess piece back, then said, ‘Michael, I hate to say this, but there's a smell of burning coming from the kitchen.'

‘Oh God, it's the salmon.'

The salmon was not a complete lost cause because Wilberforce scoffed it in one sitting. Michael and Nell had salad and bread and cheese.

‘I'm sorry,' said Michael, helplessly.

‘It's fine, honestly. I love bread and cheese anyway.' As if to prove the point, Nell sliced another wedge of Double Gloucester and reached for the butter dish.

‘Yes, but I wanted to give you a really nice meal and . . . Well, anyway, there's fruit for pudding and one of those squidgy cakes from that bakery in the High,' said Michael.

‘Blow the fruit and squidgy cakes, let's take the remains of the wine to bed.' Nell said this with such abruptness that Michael, who had been cutting more bread, looked up, startled.

‘You're being very direct tonight, you shameless hussy.'

‘D'you mind?' She looked at him from the corners of her eyes as if suddenly unsure of his response.

He smiled at her. ‘Refill the wine glasses and come here, and I'll show you how much I mind.'

‘Michael,' said Owen's voice on the phone next morning, ‘are you immersed in something Victorian and romantic at the moment – or even in something twenty-first century and romantic?'

Michael was not immersed in anything remotely Victorian or romantic. He had just received an email from his editor at the publishing house to say they were about three thousand words short on the new book, so they would like Michael to come up with an extra adventure for Wilberforce. There was no immediate panic, she said, italicizing the word ‘immediate'. Perhaps he could put together something over his long Christmas holiday.

When Owen phoned, Michael was trying to think what Wilberforce could do in three thousand words that he had not already done in the first book. He said, ‘I promised to meet Nell at the porter's lodge at twelve fifteen so I can take her in to the Dean's lunch, but I'm free for the next hour. Why?'

‘Can you come along to my room? I can't explain this over the phone.'

Owen enjoyed believing that phone conversations were insecure, despite everyone telling him it was only royalty and football stars whose phones were tapped. He said he spent most of his days studying nests of intrigue at Tudor courts and secret societies plotting to restore the Stuarts (if not the Plantagenets) to England's throne, so he was allowed to be slightly neurotic about eavesdroppers. Last year a group of his students, gleefully influenced by this outlook, had written a satirical sketch for the OUDs, in which the concept of telephones was discovered three hundred years early, resulting in the foiling of the entire French Revolution by a text message and the subsequent continuation of the Bourbon line to the present day, and also in Guy Fawkes managing to blow up Parliament after all because somebody's number was engaged.

‘Can't you give me a clue?'

‘I've found something about that macabre chess piece Nell had last evening,' said Owen, and the image of the malevolently sneering chess piece rose up vividly in Michael's mind. Something seemed to prickle across the back of his neck, and he thought:
I don't want any part of this. I don't want Nell to have any part of it, either
.

But this was absurd, so he said, ‘I'll be there in ten minutes.'

‘I knew I'd seen that chess king before,' said Owen, opening the door. ‘And I was right. Sit down, if you can find a space in this muddle.'

Michael did so, and Owen picked up a slightly mildewed book and brandished it.

‘I'd set a group of second years an essay on the background to the birth of Home Rule in Ireland,' he said. ‘And one of them came up with the fact that the eighth Earl of Kilderry led a group of local men in one of the Fenian Risings against the British. Well, I'd never heard of Kilderry, let alone its having an Earl all to itself, so I was a bit suspicious – they aren't above making these things up purely for the hell of getting one up on the lecturer. So I looked it up.'

‘And had he made it up?'

‘No, he had not. Don't you hate it when your students wrong-foot you like that? Although I suppose it doesn't happen to you; an Elizabethan sonnet is an Elizabethan sonnet for all time. Anyway,' said Owen briskly and before Michael could argue this intriguing subject, ‘round about 1900 somebody wandered around the west of Ireland, collecting stories for an anthology. I followed the source to its root and unearthed the actual book, and the Earl of Kilderry did exist. The middle to late 1800s it was, and it seems he was a roistering old sinner.'

‘What were his sins?'

‘Drink, women, thieving, every kind of debauchery. Reading between the lines there was probably the odd murder, too. Even allowing for the Irish habit of exaggeration he seems to have lived a very fruity life. There's a brief biog of him here,' said Owen, reaching for the book. ‘Listen, I'll read the opening.

‘“During the middle years of the nineteenth century, the eighth Earl of Kilderry was notorious in Kilderry itself and also the surrounding villages. He was known locally as the Wicked Earl, and maidservants at Kilderry Castle [
editor's note: castle abandoned in the 1880s
] would tell how he sent for them to come to his bedchamber, sometimes singly, but more often in twos and threes, where they would be forced to pleasure the Earl in whatever way occurred to him. He was also known to be a devotee of the ancient British tradition of the
droit de seigneur
, exercising a feudal right to deflower all virgins the night before they went to their marriage bed. Despite being a scion of an old and honourable line—” Sorry about that snobby touch, Michael, I told you this was all written around 1900, so it . . . Where was I?'

‘Scion of an old and honourable line.'

‘Oh yes. “Despite that, the Wicked Earl had misappropriated considerable sums of money, by theft, forgery, and fraud, but it did him little good in the end, for by 1880 Kilderry Castle was a virtual ruin.” One gets,' said Owen, in parenthesis, ‘a marvellous image of this bawdy old sinner moving from room to room in his tumbledown ancestral home, trying to stay one step ahead of leaking roofs and death watch beetle, absent-mindedly rogering anything that strays in his path as he does so.'

‘That's the downfall of many a stately home,' said Michael solemnly.

‘Rogering?'

‘Death watch beetle.'

‘Too true.' Owen grinned, then recommenced reading. ‘“Perhaps the most curious tale about Gerald Kilderry is told by a former servant of the Kilderry family, who was still living in Kilglenn at the end of the nineteenth century.”'

He broke off and looked at his watch. ‘You'd better read the next part for yourself,' he said. ‘It's apparently a first-hand account from a maidservant who was at Kilderry Castle for a number of years – quite good primary source stuff if it's genuine. I've got to get changed before we set off for the bunfight – did you know I'm saying grace at the lunch this year?'

‘How are you saying it?' asked Michael, taking the book. Oriel College had a tradition at formal Hall of reciting an ancient Latin grace ascribed to Erasmus, and the present Dean was trying to establish his own small sub-tradition by choosing a different member of the college to say grace at his own Christmas lunch. A modest rivalry had grown up to see who could produce the most unusual form; last year had been a Greek Orthodox version which, as somebody pointed out later, was all very well, but had only been comprehensible to the Modern Language scholars.

‘I've found a really ancient form that the source swears was used at Hever Castle when Ann Boleyn was a girl,' said Owen gleefully. ‘And it certainly has an early Tudor ring to it.'

‘That ought to rock them in the aisles.'

‘Yes, and I need to run over it again because I don't want it to sound forsoothly.'

He vanished into the adjoining bedroom, and Michael sat down by the window and began to read.

When I was a girl most people went up to the castle into the service of the Kilderry family. I was twelve when I went, and it was when the old Earl, who most people called the Wicked Earl, was there, although I never called him that in case he got to hear of it.

People said the castle was the worst ruin in Ireland, but coming from a cottage with twelve of us, it seemed a palace to me. I thought the massive grey walls and the tangled gardens were like something out of a fairy story, although the mice overran the sculleries and the constant dripping of water where the roof leaked would drive you mad if you let it. The Master had no money to repair the roofs because he spent it all chasing women or fighting the British. So we set traps for the mice and put buckets to catch the water when the rain came in, though you had to remember where everything was, or you'd step on a mousetrap in the dark and nearly lose a toe, or trip over a bucket and send it clanging down a flight of steps, with a sound fit to wake the dead before judgement day. About the British we did nothing at all. We left that to the likes of the Master and his friends, although the cook used to go up to the turret and wave the frying pan and cheer when they marched off for a battle.

I had to sweep and polish the library every week. Rows and rows of books there were – I used to touch them thinking one day I might understand the symbols on the paper. When the Master wasn't away, hiding out from angry husbands or plotting confusion to the British, he sat in that room in the evening. It was a grand room: the logs burned up in the hearth so everywhere was scented with peat, and in the candlelight you never noticed the shredded fabric of the curtains where the mice chewed them, or the bullet holes in the walls where the Master had once shot a man he said was a British spy, although I never knew the truth of that.