The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps Read online

  Now, in my own dying days, I know not if I shall meet my daughter again. If she be in Hell, I pray that God finds reason to send me there; if she be in Heaven, I beg His forgiveness. These last years, folk have taken to calling me Bible Thomas behind my back, for I have read the Scriptures more than most Clergie-men, and there are some who say, He should have been a Monk, & a host of Whales would be the happier for it! None can guess why I have studied the Holy Book so earnestly, leaving not a word of it unturned – but I must be certain that no case like mine was ever judged before!

  Under the strict terms of Scripture, I broke no Commandment – this much I know. I can also be sure of one other thing: that if I had left my daughter even as I found her, with the powder of poison on her dead lips, and the name of her faithless lover writ on her belly, she should have been buried in unhallowed ground with a stake through her heart. Now she lies among the Blessed, and soon I shall join her. For how long? Only at the Last Trump shall we know.

  You who find this; You who read this – Pray for her, I beg of you!

  Thomas Peirson,

  father and Christian, as best he could be.

  Siân laid the notebook on the table, and drank the rest of her milk. Hadrian had settled down to sleep on her feet, his warm flank breathing against her left shin. Magnus was frowning even more than before, his dark eyebrows almost knitting together.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Was she a vampire after all? This stake-through-the-heart business …’

  ‘It’s how they used to bury suicides,’ said Siân. ‘Mary killed herself, Mack. She was already dead when her dad found her.’

  His frown only deepened. ‘So …’

  ‘So he did what he had to.’

  ‘Slashed his own daughter’s throat so she’d score a place in the correct patch of dirt?’

  Siân picked up her empty glass and shifted it to one side of the table, as if clearing the way for an embrace – or an arm wrestle.

  ‘Magnus,’ she said as calmly as she could, ‘I’m starting to wonder if you have everything it takes to be a good doctor. Can’t you see that for our man Thomas, defending his child with a bit of 21st-century sarcasm just wasn’t an option? As a suicide, she’d’ve been an object of disgust and shame; instead, he managed to get her buried with love and respect. You can’t blame him for that.’

  Mack leaned back in his chair and ran his hands through his hair, flustered, it seemed, from the effort of understanding such rank idiocy.

  ‘But … what difference does it make? God’s not fooled, is he? If Mary killed herself, she goes to Hell, right?’

  ‘Maybe Thomas was hoping God would turn a blind eye.’ Siân winced at the ugly vehemence of the sound Mack interjected – something between a sneer and a snort. ‘Please, Mack: just once, try to put yourself into the mind of a person who believes there’s an afterlife and a loving and just God. Imagine the end of the world, when the last trumpet sounds and all the dead rise from their graves, all the millions of people who’ve ever lived. Imagine God looking down on Whitby, at Saint Mary’s churchyard, and there, in amongst all the resurrected souls, there’s Mary, standing hand in hand with her father and mother and sister, all of them blinking in the light, wondering what happens next. Imagine. God and Mary’s eyes meet, and suddenly each of them remembers how she died. The door to eternal life is open, the other townsfolk are walking through, all the drunkards and the gossips and the men who broke women’s hearts. But Mary hesitates, and her father puts his arms around her. Now, tell me, Mack. If you were God, what would you do?’

  Magnus pouted, scarcely able to believe what she was asking him, discomfited by the shiny-eyed intentness of her stare. ‘I wouldn’t’ve taken the job in the first place,’ he quipped. ‘I would’ve told the Deity Registration Board to go shove it.’

  He flashed a grin, a pleading sort of grin painfully at odds with his sweating forehead and haunted eyes. He was evidently hoping the wisecrack would break the tension and restore an atmosphere of warm banter, but that hope died in the chill between them.

  ‘Well,’ said Siân with a sigh. ‘It’s a good thing nobody asked you, then, isn’t it?’ And she folded the notebook back into her jacket.

  Alarmed at the prospect of her preparing to leave, Mack searched for a re-entry point, a way to prolong if not redeem their conversation.

  ‘The bit … the bit about Mary having her lover’s name written on her belly is weird, isn’t it? Do you think she may have been mentally ill?’

  Siân rested her chin on her clasped hands, half-closed her eyes. ‘I think she was very, very unhappy.’

  ‘That’s what I was getting at. Clinically depressed, if she’d been diagnosed today.’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Or maybe she’d found out she was pregnant?’

  ‘With a little test kit from the pharmacy?’

  ‘I’m sure they had ways of knowing, didn’t they, in the 18th century?’ He looked at her hopefully, as if to call attention to his willingness to concede the wisdom of past ages.

  ‘I don’t think Mary was pregnant,’ said Siân. ‘Or if she was, she wasn’t aware of it. I think this William Agar fellow deflowered her, and then rejected her, and she couldn’t cope with the loss of her honour.’

  ‘Wow. That’s so Victorian. Or Romantic. Or something.’

  ‘We all need a sense of personal integrity, Mack,’ she said, finally pulling her feet out from under Hadrian’s sleeping body. ‘These days more than ever. There’s far more people committing suicide now than at any time in history. What have all those people lost, if not their honour?’

  ‘Yeah, but come on … To link whether you live or die to being dumped by a boyfriend …’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Siân. ‘Who we give ourselves to is very important, don’t you think?’

  ‘Oof,’ came a voice from under the table.

  Siân shifted in her chair, and started laughing – ticklish, involuntary laughter. Her right leg, having gone to sleep some time ago, was suddenly buzzing with pins and needles; the lump in her thigh was giving her hell; in fact, the only part of her that didn’t feel lousy was the part that was manufactured by Russian technicians.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Mack, smiling nervously, keen to share the joke.

  ‘No, I’m not all right,’ she groaned, and giggled again. To make matters worse, Hadrian had woken up, and was pawing gently against the leg whose nerve-endings were going berserk. ‘Have you ever been dead, Mack?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have you ever been clinically dead? You know, in an accident, before they revive you.’

  He shook his head, dumbfounded.

  ‘I have,’ she went on. ‘And you know what? I saw the light that people always talk about, the shining light on the other side.’

  Before he could stop himself, Mack blurted, ‘Yes, I’ve read a couple of investigations into that: it’s actually the brain’s synapses flaring or something …’

  This, for Siân, was quite enough, and she rose from her seat.

  ‘Sorry, Mack,’ she said. ‘I have to go now.’

  * * *

  A week later, when Siân had just been released from hospital, she walked gingerly up the hundred and ninety-nine steps to the abbey. The ruins were still standing, large as life, despite a summer storm that had damaged roofs and satellite dishes on Whitby’s more modern buildings. Siân walked all the way around, making sure nothing was missing that hadn’t been missing already, then stood for a minute in the shadow of the abbey’s towering east front, enjoying the Gothic symmetry of the great tiers of lancet windows and the scarred perfection of the ancient stonework. Maybe God still had plans for this medieval skeleton after all.

  When she wandered over to the dig and said hello, her fellow archaeologists treated her like a returning heroine, everyone downing tools to crowd around her. Even the lovey-dovey couple from Wales were distracted from their industrious serenity long enough to ask how she was ge
tting on. To be honest, everyone seemed extravagantly relieved that she was upright and walking around. This surprised Siân; she’d told no-one she was going into hospital, only that she was ill and needed some time off work, but her colleagues made such a fuss of her, she could have been Lazarus. Perhaps, in those agonised last few days before she’d gone to the medical centre and burst into tears in the arms of a nurse, the fear of death had been showing on her face, naked and ghostly pale, for anyone to see.

  Then again, perhaps the fear had been showing for years.

  The site supervisor told her that a handsome young man had been asking after her every day. Siân took the news pensively, as if calling to mind a host of men who might possibly be the one, then enquired if this guy had a beautiful dog with him. More a miserable-looking, whiny sort of dog, was the reply.

  Warmed by the brilliant afternoon sun, Siân walked down to Saint Mary’s churchyard, to the very edge of the cliff. She could tell that some of the soil had crumbled away during the storm, and fallen off the headland to the rocks below. Erosion was nibbling at the East Cliff, a never-ending natural labour to equalise the disparity between land and water. With every clod of earth that fell into space, empty air encroached closer to the great community of graves. At some stage in the future, sometime between tomorrow and when the sun turned supernova, Thomas Peirson’s remains, and the remains of his loved ones, would tumble down to the shore of the North Sea.

  Siân walked back from the edge onto the firmer terrain, found the Peirson headstone, and stood staring at it. She swayed a little on her feet, dopey with painkillers and antibiotics and the lingering aftereffects of anaesthetic. The marks on the ground where she’d hacked with her trowel were barely perceptible, like scratches from a dog’s claws.

  Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed something hurtling towards her, but before she could brace herself against the impact, she was knocked reeling. She didn’t quite fall, though, and her assailant wasn’t a car – it was Hadrian, bouncing back from her torso like an oversized soft toy thrown in a tantrum. While she was staggering and wind-milling her arms, he danced around her and offered woofs of encouragement.

  A man’s deep voice shouted ‘Hadrian, no!’, just as Siân managed to steady herself against Thomas Peirson’s headstone. Magnus leapt to her side, his hand extended, and she grasped hold of it, even though it wasn’t strictly necessary now.

  ‘Christ, I’m sorry … !’ said Mack. They stood locked in an absurd handshake over the graveplot, he dressed like a corporate businessman, she all in black like a Goth – the modern kind. Hadrian was bouncing up and down between them, panting and snuffling, and although his manic behaviour was annoying at first, it gave them a convenient excuse to let each other go.

  ‘Maybe he’s desperate for exercise,’ Siân suggested, fondling the dog’s sumptuous flank with both hands. ‘Have you given up running?’ And she aimed a nod at Mack’s classically formal suit, the trousers of which were the kind she could imagine the wearer fastidiously inspecting for evidence of dog-hair. The memory of this man plastered with a dark arrowhead of sweat, scantily-clad in T-shirt and shorts, was difficult for her to retrieve now, so faded had it become.

  ‘It got a bit … unmanageable,’ he said, jerking forward in an abortive attempt to assist her as, with a grunt of pain, Siân knelt next to Hadrian and started stroking the dog in earnest. ‘Hadrian wouldn’t run with me anymore, you see. He’d just shoot ahead like a missile. Totally out of control.’

  ‘And this is what drove you to dress up like a sales executive for an insurance firm?’

  But his appetite for sparring seemed to have deserted him; instead of firing off a witty rejoinder, he only winced.

  ‘I’ve got a meeting today, a conference,’ he explained, his already rather pained eye-contact with her faltering. ‘In fact, I’m leaving. Leaving Whitby.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ she said, after only a moment’s pause in her stroking. ‘Going back to London?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Research paper finished?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Proved what you wanted to?’

  He shrugged and looked down towards the town, in the general direction of the railway station. ‘That’s for other researchers to decide.’

  Siân had her arms around Hadrian’s neck, her chin nudging his bony, downy skull. She waited a few more seconds to see if Mack would oblige her to ask, or if he’d have the courage to put her out of her suspense.

  ‘What’s going to happen to Hadrian?’ she enquired at last, in the silence of the headland.

  Mack blushed crimson, an ugly inflammation from the roots of his hair to the collar of his creamy-white shirt. ‘I don’t know. I’ll take him with me, I suppose, but … I can’t see myself being able to manage him in central London.’ Sweat glistened on his great blushing forehead, and he began to stammer. ‘Still, he … he’s a pure-bred, isn’t he, and I’m sure he’s worth a mint, so I expect there’ll be … experts, you know, connoisseurs, who’d … ah … take him.’

  ‘How much do you want for him?’ said Siân. She’d no doubt he would respond badly to this overture; braced herself for a shame-faced display of something horrible – craven retaliation, evasion, anger. She was wrong. He was enormously, unmistakably relieved.

  ‘Siân,’ he declared, clapping a palm to his brow, ‘if you want him, you can have him.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘He’s worth a mint, as you so … bluntly put it. How much do you want?’

  Magnus smiled, shaking his head. ‘I’ve owned him long enough, Siân. Now I want you to have him as a gift – like those history books you dropped through my letterbox.’

  ‘Don’t be patronising.’

  ‘No, no!’ he protested, as animated and confident now as she’d ever seen him. ‘You don’t understand – I was thinking of offering for ages! It’s just that I … I didn’t know where you lived – whether you’d be able to have a dog there. I had an idea you might be staying in a hotel …’

  ‘I might be,’ she said. ‘But I could move somewhere else, if I wanted to. If there was a reason to.’ Yes, Yes, Yes, she was thinking, hiding her daft grin of exultation inside the dark fur of Hadrian’s back. Mine, Mine, Mine.

  ‘I just don’t want you to be left,’ Magnus was saying, ‘with the wrong impression of me, that’s all. Like I didn’t have a generous bone in my body …’

  She giggled, hugging Hadrian tighter to keep a grip on her own hysteria, her own longing to weep and wail. The wound in her thigh was throbbing; she wondered if it had burst its stitches when she was staggering off-balance.

  ‘Don’t want to go down in history misunderstood, eh?’ she said.

  With a flinch he acknowledged she’d scored a direct hit. ‘Yeah.’

  Siân stood up, using Hadrian as a four-legged prop, which the dog seemed to understand instinctively. She noticed Mack cast a furtive glance at his watch; only now did she twig that he probably had a train to catch, and a roomful of people somewhere in London waiting to be impressed by a man in an immaculate suit.

  ‘I’m making you late, aren’t I?’

  ‘Nothing a few grovelling apologies to a bunch of medical registrars won’t fix.’ And he enclosed one giant hand gently inside the other, in an attitude of prayer, bowing his head like a penitent monk. ‘Mea culpa, mea culpa.’

  Time accelerated suddenly, as Siân realised this really was goodbye.

  ‘I’ll have to return your confession,’ she said. ‘And the bottle. Not through your letterbox, though.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said wearily. ‘Keep it.’

  ‘It’s worth a hell of a lot more than a Finnish Lapphund, you do realise that, don’t you?’

  Her attempt to speak his language missed its mark; he smiled ruefully and looked away. ‘Not to me. I liked it the way it was, before … before I understood it. When it was a mystery, a mysterious object my dad rescued from the ruins of Tin Ghaut when he was a kid. Someth
ing he’d take out to show me if I was good, and then put back in its special place.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mack,’ said Siân. ‘Mea culpa.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said breezily. ‘I’m sure you’ll write an academic paper on it one of these days. Then you can thank me in the acknowledgements, eh?’

  She stepped forward and embraced him, pressing her hands hard against his back. He responded decorously at first, then allowed himself to clasp her tight, uttering a deep and protracted sigh. He smelled of toothpaste, deodorant, aftershave and, very faintly, mothballs – a combination which somehow got past her defences and, despite her vow to avoid a melodrama, made her cry after all.

  ‘I don’t even know your surname,’ she said.

  He groaned, and a hiccup of laughter passed through his breast into hers. ‘Boyle.’

  ‘Can’t blame your father for that.’

  ‘And yours?’

  She hugged him tighter, suppressing a tiny fear, left over from the nightmares, that his hand would cease stroking her hair and seize her by the throat. ‘It’s a secret,’ she said, and, pulling his head down to her lips, she whispered it in his ear.

  When Mack was gone, Siân took shelter behind Thomas Peirson’s gravestone and lifted her skirts to inspect her bandaged thigh. The gauze was clean and white, wholly devoid of the spreading stigma of blood she’d envisioned. Over-active imagination, as always.

  Tentatively, she prodded the site of the surgery; it hurt less than before, and the pain was localised now, no longer a web of soreness throughout her innermost parts.

  ‘It seems you’ve been carrying a little chunk of Bosnia around with you for quite a few years,’ the doctor had said, when the X-rays were ready. She’d been slow to catch on, assumed he was making some smug, oh-so-penetrating comment about her relationship with the past. All he meant was that a fragment of stone, ploughed deep into her flesh when the car was dragging her mangled body twenty yards across a street roughened by tanks, had managed to escape detection in the desperate attempts to mend her afterwards. Overworked military surgeons saved her life, did their damnedest to save her knee, were forced by monstrous swelling and infection to sacrifice it. Somehow, though, in all the drama, an embedded crumb of tarmac had been overlooked, and had spent all these years since, inching its way – millimetring its way, more like – to the surface.