9

The chapel at the Manor stood some eighty yards from the east wing, half obscured by a circle of speckled laurel bushes. Its early history and the date when it was built were unrecorded, but it was certainly older than the Manor, a single plain rectangular cell with a stone altar under the eastern window. There was no means of lighting except by candles, and a cardboard box of these was on a chair to the left of the door, together with an assortment of candlesticks, many wooden, which looked like discards from ancient kitchens and the bedrooms of Victorian servants. Since no matches were provided, the casual improvident visitor had to make his devotions, if any, without benefit of their light. The cross on the stone altar was crudely carved, perhaps by some estate carpenter either in obedience to orders or under some private compulsion of piety or religious affirmation. It could hardly have been on the order of a long-dead Cressett, who would surely have chosen silver or a more important carving. Except for the cross, the altar was bare. No doubt its earlier furnishings had changed with the great upheavals of the Reformation, once elaborately festooned, later completely unadorned.

The cross was directly in Marcus Westhall’s sightline, and sometimes for long periods of silence he would fix his gaze on it as if expecting from it some mysterious power, an aid to resolution, a grace which he realised would always be withheld. Under this symbol battles had been fought, the great seismic upheavals of State and Church had changed the face of Europe, men and women had been tortured, burnt and murdered. It had been carried with its message of love and forgiveness into the darkest hells of human imagining. For him it served as an aid to concentration, the focus of the thoughts which crept and rose and whirled in his mind like brown brittle leaves in a gusting wind.

He had entered quietly and, seating himself as usual on the back wooden bench, gazed fixedly at the cross, but not in prayer, since he had no idea how to begin praying or with whom precisely he would be attempting to communicate. He sometimes wondered what it would be like to find that secret door said to be open to the lightest touch, and to feel this burden of guilt and indecision fall from his shoulders. But he knew that one dimension of human experience was as closed to him as was music to the tone deaf. Lettie Frensham could have found it. Early on Sunday mornings he would see her cycling past Stone Cottage, woollen-capped, her angular figure pushing against the slight incline to the road, summoned by unheard church bells to some distant village church unnamed by her and never spoken of. He had never seen her in the chapel. If she came it must be at times when he was with George in theatre. He thought that he wouldn’t have minded if they had shared this sanctuary, if she had sometimes quietly entered to sit in companionable silence beside him. He knew nothing about her except that she had once been Helena Cressett’s governess, and he had no idea why she should have returned to the Manor after all these years. But in her quietness and calm good sense she seemed to him like a still pool in a house where he sensed that turbulent undercurrents ran deep, not least in his own troubled mind.