The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps Page 6

  ‘Another time,’ he said, as he stepped onto the cobbled street and motioned Hadrian to accompany him into the town. Hadrian looked around once at Siân, then trotted to join his foster-carer in a fast-flowing stream of tourists, native Northumbrians, and less adorable dogs.

  In Siân’s dream next morning, there was, for a change, no knife. The man was cradling her in his arms, both his hands safely accounted for, one supporting her back, the other stroking her hair. It wasn’t what you’d call a happy dream, though: her hair felt wet, slick with a shampoo-like substance which she realised after a while was her own blood. In fact, she was covered in it, and so was he.

  ‘I will carry you up the hundred and ninety-nine steps,’ he was crooning to her, in a broken voice. His eyes were almost incandescent with love and grief, and there were droplets of blood twinkling on his eyebrows. He looked like Magnus, except he wasn’t. ‘I will carry you up the hundred and ninety-nine steps,’ he kept promising.

  She tried to speak, to reassure him she understood why he had done what he had done, but her windpipe blew blood bubbles, and her tongue was growing stiff.

  No particular climactic event woke her, only thirst and a pressing need to go to the loo. She’d drunk half a bottle of wine last night, to kill the pain in her ‘innermost parts’, and it seemed to have done the trick: her headache was so bad she wasn’t aware of the lump in her thigh at all.

  Her hair felt tacky, and smelled of alcohol; she washed it in the bathroom sink, half-expecting the water to run crimson. The veins in her temples went whumpa whumpa whumpa as she rinsed the shampoo out and groped for a towel. Only then did it occur to her that she may have been sozzled when she was working on the confession.

  The second page was still lying on the table, pressed flat under a rectangle of transparent plastic. She examined the wrinkled leaf of paper and the curlicues of ink closely, anxiously. As far as she could tell, there was no damage that hadn’t already been done before she came along.

  Next she consulted the little Star Wars notebook in which she’d jotted the transcript. It was perfectly lucid – neater, if anything, than her handwriting tended to be when she was stone-cold sober.

  She wandered back to the bathroom to dry and style her hair.

  At lunch-time, in the same West Side café where she’d made herself sick on pancake, Siân read aloud from her little notebook while Mack listened intently. He leaned very close to her, his cheek almost brushing her shoulder, but then it was quite noisy in the café, as the staff and other customers were watching American soap operas on an elevated TV.

  ‘So, I resolved only to strangle her,’ she declaimed, while third-rate actors spat fake bile at each other overhead.

  But, God help me, my thumbes became weak, & made no mark upon her flesh, or none that did not fade straightway afterward. These same hands, which have slashed deep into the hide of a Whale, which have lifted barrels heavier than a man; these hands which, even in my latter years of feebleness, could cleave a log in twain with a single ax blow – these hands could not put upon her pale and tender neck the bruises that would save her. I fancied I could hear her voice, already condemn’d to inhabit the wilds of Perdition, crying to me, imploring me to act afore the alarum be raised, and she be found, naked and ripe for Damnation. Nothing, only I, stood betwixt her helpless soul and the worst of Fates. I did but pause to cover her with a blanket, then hurried to fetch my knife

  Siân put the notepad down, lifted her coffee-cup to her lips.

  ‘Wow,’ said Mack, grinning broadly. ‘Talk about coitus interruptus …’

  She sipped the hot brew, troubled by her inability to judge the aptness – or offensiveness – of this remark. Seen in one light, it was a flash of wit only a prude would object to (and after all, he was a doctor), but in another light, it was gruesomely, outrageously off. From one light to another she veered, and the moment passed, and she was silent. With Patrick, too, she’d become unable to stop her morality dispersing into his.

  ‘You know what we should do?’ he said, stabbing his fork into a wodge of chocolate cake. ‘We should sell this story to the press.’

  We? she thought, before replying: ‘The press? What press? The Whitby Gazette?’ Only a few minutes before, he’d been leafing through the café’s free papers, chortling, in his smug London way, at local place names like Fryup, and inventing preposterous news stories for the Gazette, such as an outbreak of psittacosis amongst homing pigeons. ‘Chief Inspector Beaver is investigating claims that the deadly bacterium was purchased from an unscrupulous doctor,’ he’d intoned, poker-faced, ‘by Mister Ee-Bah-Goom of the Whitby Flying Club, as part of a cunning plan to employ germ warfare against his rivals.’ She’d laughed despite herself.

  ‘You do think small, don’t you?’ he gently disparaged her now. ‘I’m thinking of a big colour feature in one of the major national supplements – The Sunday Times, maybe, or the Telegraph.’

  She was pricked to anger by his condescension; she felt that, after all she’d seen at Patrick’s side, she wasn’t a total innocent in the big bad world of newspapers.

  ‘Do you think they care? Look at the way they’ve ignored our dig at the abbey! To get a major newspaper interested nowadays, you virtually have to dig up King Arthur’s round table, or a previously unknown play by Shakespeare.’

  ‘Not at all. This is murder. Murder sells.’

  She knew he was right, but felt compelled to keep arguing anyway. The thought of her beautiful 18th-century manuscript, which she was so lovingly unpeeling from itself, being splashed across the pages of a throwaway Sunday supplement, made her sick.

  ‘It’s a very, very out-of-date murder,’ she said, hoping a cynical, jocular tone would score with him. ‘Way past its use-by date.’

  He laughed, and leaned across the table, staring straight into her eyes.

  ‘Murder never goes off,’ he said, and, leaning further still, he kissed her on the cheek, right near the edge of her lips.

  Siân closed her eyes, praying for guidance as to how to respond. Slapping his face would be so frightfully old-fashioned, and besides, she was afraid of him, and also, it might spoil her only chance of happiness before the cancer decided that her time was up.

  ‘Hadrian will be getting lonely,’ she said. ‘You’d better go and rescue him.’

  That afternoon, Siân left the dig early, telling Nina she thought she might be coming down with ’flu.

  Nina scrutinised her face and said, ‘Yes, you don’t look well at all,’ which was rather discouraging, since the ’flu story was a lie. In reality, the lump in Siân’s thigh was so painful she could barely work, and she was hoping that if she stopped kneeling at her appointed excavation and putting so much pressure on her stump hour after hour, the pain might ease off.

  ‘I’m getting a sore throat myself,’ said Nina. ‘Let’s hope it’s not the Black Death, eh?’

  Siân walked stiffly back into town. Her whole pelvis was aching: a subtle network of pain radiating, it seemed, from the lump inwards. A kernel of malignancy haloed with roots and tendrils, like a potato left too long in a cupboard, silently mutating in the dark. Fibrosis. Metastasis. Dissemination. Words only a doctor should be intimately familiar with.

  On her way to the White Horse and Griffin, she bought a bottle of brandy, a box of painkillers and, as an afterthought, a king-size block of chocolate. In the privacy of her hotel room, she consumed some of each, at regular intervals, while working on the next page of Thomas Peirson’s secret testament.

  ‘OK,’ said Mack the following day, leaning forward expectantly. ‘Carry on where we left off, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’ She took a long deep breath, filling her lungs with sea air.

  She’d arranged to meet him half-way up the hundred and ninety-nine steps, on the same bench where they’d first sat together. It was more convenient than a café or a restaurant; she wouldn’t have so far to walk back to the dig, and she was quite content to eat the apple she’d pocketed that mornin
g in the hotel’s breakfast room. Fruit was probably quite a sensible thing to lunch on after a hangover, and she’d already promised herself that chocolate would never again pass her lips – in either direction.

  Also, it was brilliant sunny weather today, and being out in the fresh air meant that Hadrian could be here with them, and she’d missed Hadrian so badly yesterday.

  Also, Mack was less likely, she imagined, to kiss her on a public thoroughfare. Thus postponing the inevitable.

  ‘I did but pause to cover her with a blanket, then hurried to fetch my knife,’ recited Siân from her little notebook. Hadrian promptly laid a mendicant paw on her knee – the right knee, the one that was flesh and blood – to alert her to the fact she’d stopped stroking him. ‘Oh, Hadrian, I’m sorry,’ she crooned, ruffling his mane. ‘What a bad mother I am …’

  ‘Come on, come on,’ growled Mack impatiently. ‘He’ll survive. Read.’

  She raised the notebook, savouring her modicum of power over him – the only power she had left, before she surrendered completely.

  I did but pause to cover her with a blanket, then hurried to fetch my knife – that same knife I have used for a thousand innocent purposes – cutting rope, gipping fish, paring fruit, carving blubber. Believing myself to be alone in the house, I came down the stairs without caution, and was surpriz’d by our Anne in the parlour, crying, Father, what is the matter? Go catch your Mother up at market, I says. We are not needing a ham after all, for I mind now that Butcher Finch said he would give us one in lieu of payment for his oil. So she runs off, God bless her.

  I found my knife, and returned to the room upstairs – the same room where I now write these words. It seemed to me that Mary had moved away from where I put her down – crawled towards the door – but when I spoke her name, she lay still. Once more I gathered her close to my breast, cradling her like a bairn. How I yearned to spare her the knife! Had I the nerve to beat her black and blew instead, to stave in her soft skull with my fists, and splinter her ribs like kindling? I owned I had not. So, without pausing any more, I lowered her into the wash-copper, and hewed the blade deep into her neck, cleaving her flesh to the bone. Her blood flowed out like a wave, like a wave of shining crimson, clothing her nakedness.

  Siân looked up. Mack’s eyes were bright with excitement, his great hands clasped white-knuckled against his chin. In her eagerness to bring him the latest instalment, she must surely have known he’d respond like this, but now that she saw that look in his eyes, she felt ashamed.

  ‘That’s all,’ she said, with an awkward smile. ‘That’s all I could get done. If you knew what it took …’

  He leaned back, letting it all sink in. ‘Wow,’ he sighed. ‘This guy was a genuine, authentic 18th-century psycho. Hannibal Lecter in a frilly shirt.’

  ‘Who’s Hannibal Lecter?’

  ‘Come on! The world’s favourite serial killer! You mean you’ve never seen The Silence of the Lambs?’

  ‘Lovely title,’ she said, responding to Hadrian’s urgent pleas for stroking at last. ‘Sounds like a Pre-Raphaelite painting by William Holman Hunt or someone like that.’

  ‘Who’s William Holman Hunt?’

  They sat in silence for a few seconds, while Siân petted Hadrian and Mack watched the dog go demented in her hands.

  ‘Anyway, our man Thomas Peirson,’ he declared, when finally, to his bemusement, Siân’s face disappeared in Hadrian’s flank. ‘He’s a star, can’t you see? He could really put Whitby on the map – the modern map.’

  Siân surfaced, blinking.

  ‘Don’t you ever get tired,’ she challenged him, ‘of this ever-so-modern fascination with psychopaths and sick deeds? It can’t be good for us – as a culture, I mean. Filling ourselves up with madness and cruelty.’

  ‘Face it, Siân, when was it ever different? Madness and cruelty have always been the staple diet of history.’ And he smiled, secure in the knowledge that he had, among many other things, Hitler and De Sade on his side.

  Siân looked away from him, towards the headland, for inspiration. ‘Think of Saint Hilda founding the original monastery here,’ she said, ‘long before Whitby was even called Whitby. Think of the devotion, the sheer strength of spirit invested in this place. A little powerhouse of prayer, perched on a clifftop next to a wild sea. I find that thrilling – much more thrilling than serial killers.’

  ‘Jolly good, jolly good,’ he said, in a fruity mockery of an upper-class relic. ‘But honestly, Siân, I’m sure your Saint Hilda was as twisted as they come.’

  Violently, she jerked to face him, startling Hadrian with the sudden movement.

  ‘What would you know?’ she snapped, as the poor dog cowered between them.

  ‘Oh, I’ve read plenty,’ Magnus shot back. ‘Did you know that in the middle of the night, friendly elves drop history books through my letterbox? It’s like the Open University, it’s amazing what you learn. The complete rundown on religious fanatics in England, with colour illustrations. Step-by-step instructions for flagellating yourself.’

  ‘You’re making no effort to understand these people! Just because they weren’t driving around in cars, talking into mobile phones …’

  He threw his hands up, just like Patrick used to do, and exclaimed, ‘Christ almighty: the arrogance! You’re assuming that if I were only a bit more educated, I’d realise what total darlings these lunatics really were. Well, I have read my history books and my glossy brochures, thank you very much. And these monks and friars and abbesses, some of them may’ve believed in what they were doing, but their philosophy stinks. Hatred of the human body, that’s what it boils down to. Hatred of natural desires, hatred of pleasure. Think of their routine, Siân: knocked out of bed at midnight, walk to a horrible gloomy hall, kneel down on a hard floor, start praying in the freezing cold, pray and chant all night and all day. Wear rough clothes specially designed to stop you feeling too comfortable. Nice food forbidden, just in case you’re tempted to gluttony. Conversation forbidden, in case it distracts you from being a zombie. And if you dare to break the rules, you get flogged publicly. It’s sick!’

  He pointed up towards the abbey, his thumb and forefinger as rigid as a gun.

  ‘That’s why those ruins are ruins, can’t you see that? It’s got nothing to do with hurricanes, or Henry VIII, or German warships taking pot-shots at the abbey in 1914. It’s got to do with society growing up – evolving to the point where we realise we don’t need a bunch of sad old perverts telling us we’ll go to Hell if we enjoy life too much. It’s the 21st century, Siân, wake up!’

  ‘You’re yelling at me,’ she said, miserable with déjà vu. Screaming rows with Patrick, heads turning in crowded places, furious tussles finally won and lost under rumpled bedsheets.

  Magnus folded his arms across his chest and glowered.

  ‘For Christ’s sake.’ He was making a strenuous effort to keep his voice down. ‘The Dark Ages are over, haven’t you noticed? People enjoy taking a peek at the ruins, they’ll buy a postcard of Saint Hilda at the kiosk, but that’s as far as it goes. Sooner or later, the last few walls will fall down, and it’ll be adios, ta-ta, goodnight.’

  ‘Those walls,’ said Siân frostily, ‘will still be standing when people like you are long gone. None of your … huffing and puffing can change that.’

  He glared at her, thrusting his massive shoulders forward as if bracing himself to punch her. Instead, with a groan of frustration, he suddenly threw his arms around her and pulled her close to him, crushing her against his chest.

  ‘You drive me crazy,’ he murmured, his breath hot in her ear, his heartbeat pervading her bosom. ‘I want you.’ And he kissed her full on the mouth.

  Siân squirmed, embarrassed for him, loath to reject him so publicly, in front of anyone who might be passing by – and besides, she was aroused, intensely aroused. She pulled her mouth away, but wrapped her arms around his waist, clinging hard, her cheek pressed against his jaw. If they could only hold each other like th
is, breast to breast, for the rest of her life, it would be enough. Nothing else would need to happen.

  He began to stroke the back of her head, one palm smoothing her hair; his hand felt big enough to hold her skull inside it, and she was electrified with fear and desire.

  ‘Give me time,’ she whispered – and he let her go.

  ‘All the time … in the world,’ he reassured her, breathing harder than if he’d just run up and down the steps. ‘Just say you’ll see me again.’

  She laughed shakily, delighted with the high drama of it all, despising it too. Hadrian only made it worse, looking from her to Mack and back again, with that absurd wrinkle-browed What next? expression of his.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow, lunchtime. I’ll have the rest of the confession for you.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, perspiring with relief. A semblance of normality settled in the air around them; the world expanded to include passersby on the church stairs, seagulls, the harbour. The town and its environs had held its breath while they were kissing; now it was letting it out.

  ‘Where shall we meet?’ said Mack.

  Siân thought for a moment.

  ‘The Whitby Mission. They let dogs in there.’

  He opened his mouth to argue, then grinned.

  ‘The Whitby Mission.’ His right hand, whose warm imprint still tingled on her back, reached down to Hadrian, grabbing the dog by the scruff of the neck. ‘They’ll let you in there, did you hear that?’ he announced, pulling the handful of hair teasingly to and fro. ‘And we’ll find out what that bad man did with the body, eh? Won’t that be exciting?’

  Hadrian wasn’t convinced, baring his teeth and twisting his head in frustrated pursuit of the badgering grip.

  ‘Rough!’ he complained.

  The inner layers of the scroll were, contrary to Siân’s expectations, the most damaged. Something had leaked into them at some stage in their two-hundred-year confinement, something more corrosive than simple moisture or the intrinsic hazards of the gelatine and the ink. Try as she might to peel the pages apart with no damage to the integrity of the fibres or the calligraphy, there were small mishaps along the way: an abrasion of the paper surface here, a comma or a flourish lost to impatience. She took a swig of brandy straight from the bottle, and worked on, sweat trickling into her eyes.