Читать книгу The Venemous Serpent - Brian Ball - Страница 6

CHAPTER TWO

Sally burst into our crafts shop with the yell that means she thinks our fortune is made. I’ve heard it many times, but we still had trouble finding the rent.

“Andy, we’re rich! Leave that trendy junk and see what your beautiful true love had discovered!”

She wins no prizes for modesty, Sally Fenton, but she’s truthful. I can’t think where she gets her features and figure: her mother turns the scale at a hundred and eighty, and her father is a bald, skinny clerk with a face like the late Jimmy Durante (and if you don’t know him from the old movies, he’s a nose and a set of ears looking for a weather-worn gargoyle). Sal is ripe and luscious of body, tall and big-busted, and with a heart-shaped face; she’s blonde in the dull-gleaming ashy way of many German women; her eyes are dark blue, and she had promised to marry me when I got her pregnant. She tells me she loves me, and I have to believe her. We had been together for four months.

I had met her at art school. We were both nineteen. After a few months of it, we counted our money, borrowed what we could, and told our lecturers that we thought school was the last place for an artist to practise; fornication, politics, and drugs, yes, but not art. Three agreed with us; one asked if he could come along when he learned our plans, and two said we were stark raving mad to give up the chance of freeloading for a few years. No one thought we should stay. We had to disappoint the volunteer—I’m not in the least liberal-minded when it comes to Sally—and we left to the cautious good wishes of everyone.

We had already found the place where we were to try to earn a crust. It was a stone barn built around 1710, and derelict. I saw that it would easily adapt for a crafts workshop and saleroom, and that we could knock up a partition or two to make a bedroom and kitchen area. The farmer who owned it drove a hard bargain.

It was February when we moved in, and by March the place was habitable. That was when the first Peak District tourists took to their cars and sallied forth to buy expensive junk in the small towns of the High Peak. In the Middle Ages, robber-barons used to levy a toll on travellers who used the passes over the Backbone of England: now, it’s the gift-shops. I didn’t feel any compunction about joining them. If people want to buy plaster casts of gnomes at twice Woolworth’s prices, why shouldn’t they buy mine? We sold candles, too, garish objects in purple and yellow.

They went well at first. I also picked up bits of interesting junk from the industrial towns nearby—I had a regular arrangement with a couple of scrap-merchants. Anything that would go on my shelves they set aside for me. Chamber pots were highly prized.

We both did some painting. I went in for landscapes, Sal for rather moody pictures of horses. She was much better than me, and she had more ideas about stocking the shop.

When the craze for chalk-on-velvet came, she could sketch in purple volcanoes and green-eyed Eurasian girls with the best of them; we made some money that way, but when he saw how well we were doing, the farmer upped the rent.

We had little time for our own painting; I found I was wrong in thinking we could do more of our own thing in Derbyshire than at the school. We were busy from morning till night painting gnomes, producing instant antiques from the junk we sorted, and knocking off cheap watercolours of things like “Mist over Mam Tor”. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not complaining about the amount of work we did; in a way, it was very satisfying. We didn’t charge the tourists too much, and if we saw that a customer really felt something about one of our bits of paintings and hadn’t much money, we’d knock it down to half the asking price.

What we were looking for was a way to get a few thousand together quickly so that we could negotiate a proper lease on the barn, or find somewhere else where we wouldn’t be subject to our landlord’s gloomy rack-renting; so far we’d backed losers. I had invested good money in the velvet boom, but I had caught it at its tail end. Now, I had hundreds of assorted lengths of velvet that no one wanted: that was one of Sal’s ideas. After that, came the potting-wheel.

Sal bought it in a sale. She’d forgotten that we didn’t pot. It stood in a corner of the saleroom—it looked good, I must say, but it wasn’t going to bring us any money; and no one wanted to buy it. Likewise our several hundreds of decorative candles. I don’t understand the tourist. One week she—rarer he—will buy anything. The next they become choosy. Candles were in during the winter—everyone wanted candles, red and green, purple and yellow, pink and blue—we had them all; I had sweated for hours over the greasy pots. Now, candles were out.

So, when Sally burst in to say that we were rich, I treated it with some suspicion. Not that I showed it, of course. I hadn’t got her pregnant yet, and I wanted to make sure of her before I put on the dominant male image.

“Make us rich,” I told her. “We’ll buy the farm and throw Judson out.” He was our landlord.

“Mock, scorn me, revile me—I’ve made some mistakes, Andy, but this is the real thing. Catch!”

The thing brought bad luck at once. She had rolled it up in a tube of cardboard. In the badly lit salesroom I didn’t see the damned thing until too late. It caught me squarely across the eyes, then it went on to knock over a shelf of plaster gnomes.

Sal laughed like a drain for five minutes. She had an excellent laugh—medium-pitch, sustained, none of your yelping gulps, but a full-throated belly laugh. I began to see the joke when I had got over the sharp pain. We lost a customer just then, someone who popped a head around the door and retreated when he saw Sal doubled over the remains of a dozen gnomes; he mumbled something and ran for his car.

“For Christ’s sake!” I got out when I recovered. “What is it, Sal?”

“Your face—the gnomes—that funny man in the raincoat—”

“They’re all hilarious, early Charlie Chaplin, great jokes, but what’s this you’ve found?”

“Open it! Oh, your face!”

It isn’t a bad face. A bit on the thin side, but pleasant enough. Sometimes I think I have an Italian face—something Florentine. Maybe not. At least it was an innocent face in that Derbyshire spring.

I pulled the paper out of the tube.

“Brass rubbing?” I asked. I had seen only a corner.

“Of course! It’s fantastic! We’ll make a bomb, Andy! It’s lucky I had some paper and a crayon in the van! Can’t you see it—we can do a couple every morning before we open the shop—if we only sell one a week, we can live like in the Hilton!”

Her enthusiasm was infectious. I unrolled the rubbing and began to look at it closely.

As I’ve said, the place is badly lit. We have two neon tubes high in the roof of the barn. The windows are high and don’t amount to much, and anyway it was a miserable day. The hills were covered in mist, and the roof leaked in the two usual places. I shifted the large rectangle of stiff paper so that the rain wouldn’t drip on it; there was more light on what served as a counter.

I saw the disfigured face of the woman first. I thought Sal had been a bit slapdash, but I didn’t say so. There were two main figures, a man and a woman. Overall, the rubbing measured about five feet in width by about four feet. The figures occupied most of the space; there was the usual band of inscriptions set into the fancy border, but it wasn’t this that I looked at. It was the woman. Her face, or rather the lack of it. It was missing.

Someone had scored out the lines of the engraving where there should have been features. What was left was a mass of gouged marking; yet even though the face had been almost obliterated, there were signs of beauty in the long-dead woman’s neck and shoulders. The artist had had an eye for proportion; he had caught the graceful contours of her body with extraordinary skill.

“That’s Sybil,” said Sally. “He’s Humph. Humphrey to the customers. Humphrey, Lord of Stymead. Sybil and Humph, come to make us rich.”

Did I sense the power of the dead? It’s possible, though I think it might have been a certain exasperation as well as foreboding that made me say:

“It’s no good to us, love. Sybil’s incomplete. We couldn’t get away with a faceless wonder, not even with the Yanks. Stupid they may be, but they know about faces. Now, Humphrey’s handsome enough—we could do a line in Humphs.”

He wasn’t handsome at all. The artist had tried, but Humph’s portly, short body just wouldn’t do. Where Sybil was tall and willowy, Humph was plain fat. In his hooped armour, he had the shape of a certain kind of ice lolly Sally was addicted to. I think they call it a Space-Whopper.

“It’s going to be Syb and Humph,” said Sally firmly. “We can’t separate them. Besides, it wouldn’t take me much longer to do two figures once I’ve got the paper set up.”

“Sal, we can’t sell them. Brasses have to be perfect. I know there’s a good market, but no one wants a badly disfigured brass-rubbing.”

For answer, Sally winked. She took out a soft-lead pencil and made a few rapid lines on a sketchpad. There was no doubt that Sally had talent—far more than I. In a moment, a woman’s face had emerged, a calm and peaceful face of the kind that is common on brasses. The woman looked back at me with a wonderful serenity. I pictured her face on the graceful neck and shoulders.

“Well?” asked Sally.

“It’s cheating, but it’s terrific.”

She and I grinned at one another. Any doubts I felt slipped away. We both knew we were cheating, but that’s what the art world’s about. Why shouldn’t we put a face in the roughly-scored space where the Lady Sybil’s face had been before someone got to work on it with a chisel?

Sally took a knife and scored along the edges of the face. She placed the cutout over the brass rubbing. I nodded.

“It’ll do, Sal. Now, where does it come from?”

Sally and I knew about brass-rubbings. They’re a lucrative source of income for impecunious art students. Find a good brass, spend a few pounds on paper and rubbing-wax, and you could net yourself ten times your outlay, say five from a dealer. If the brass was rare, the figure could go considerably higher. The trouble was that too many rubbers were chasing the few high-quality brasses left in the churches. Rightly, the parsons up and down the country were beginning to kick against the way brasses were being exploited.

“You won’t believe this Andy, but it’s from a derelict church a few miles from here. And I’m sure it’s an unrecorded brass!”

That really was amazing. The Church has always attracted scholars, and the British Isles are particularly rich in ecclesiastics who have compiled lists of this or that feature of buildings: vestments, documents, ornaments, funerary, and memorial inscriptions—anything and everything that can be listed and described. Non-clerics have added their contributions, so the literature of church architecture, furnishings, and fittings is massive.

“They couldn’t have missed a brass. Not an important one.” I didn’t want to argue with Sally, but I had to. The likelihood of anyone finding a piece of engraving like this, one that wasn’t listed somewhere, was extremely low.

Sal threw the van keys onto the counter.

“Just where do you think I’ve been all day?”

“I did wonder, my love.”

“I’ve checked three of the leading authorities on brasses. Not one of them lists it. There’s no mention of a Humphrey or a Sybil of Stymead. Not one. I looked in four other books as well, but they’re not systematically indexed, so it took me time. Nothing! We’ve got this to ourselves!

It was worth money, even more now.

I have slightly more than the normal share of natural cupidity. Besides, I wanted to lay the best studio money could buy at Sal’s feet. The rubbing was the only short cut to come our way.

“You’re beautiful, intelligent and lucky,” I told her. “Apart from having my heart in your hands, you have the wit to know when you’re on to a good thing. You brought your find to me. By the way, where did you find it?”

“Stymead.”

“South of here?”

“East. Towards Chapel-en-le-Frith. There’s a back road that leads to Hathersage eventually. I got lost and came across the village.”

“Far?”

“Ten, twelve miles. It’s steep. The Ford got stuck twice.”

All the roads in the Peak Districts get to be steep after a mile or two. They wind as well. Our van was ancient, but it got us about. One of my friends at art school had given it me as an unwedding present: that’s what he called it, so I didn’t argue. There was a craze for Lewis Carroll at the time.

“But you got there.”

“Weird, Andy, weird! You know it rained this morning?”

I looked at the yellow plastic bucket in the centre of the salesroom. It was nearly full again.

“I know.”

“Well, I’d got a load of best quality antique junk from Barlow at Huddersfield—by the way, he wants another fiver, I didn’t have enough with me, but it’s lovely genuine stuff—where was I?”

“On the way back.”

“—and it poured! The road was awash! I had to stop, or I’d have floated down a mountainside. So I pulled in and just waited until the rain stopped.”

“It didn’t.”

“I know. But it slacked off, and just as I was going to start the engine. I saw the ruin.”

“At Stymead?”

“There isn’t much of Stymead. It’s a pub and a post office and about a score of houses. But this was outside the village—on a bit of a hill about a mile from the buildings. It’s overgrown with oaks and birches.” It would be, I thought. Small, stunted oaks and slender birches. “And nettles,” she said, looking down at her ankles. “Even at this time of the year. Bloody nettles everywhere.”

“So you couldn’t resist having a look when you saw the ruin.”

“You know me, Andy, sweetie. I can’t pass a castle or an old barn without looking inside.” She was right. After all, she’d found the barn we lived and worked in on one of her expeditions. I couldn’t complain. “Anyway, I went over the sheep wire and right into this very wet thicket. No one saw me go across the field. Come to think of it, I didn’t see anyone at all in Stymead. It looks like a village underwater—you know, as if it had been left behind in a valley that was flooded. It was a bit like that going into the church.”

“What period?”

“Chancel from about mid twelve hundreds. I think part of the tower’s a good bit older. It hasn’t been used for a long time—no remains of Victorian pews. Just piles of rubble from the roof and smashed gravestones.”

“And the brass engraving.”

“And the brass. It was fantastic the way I found it. I got in through a gap in the wall—I didn’t say the walls hadn’t fallen in. They’re still in fairly good condition to a height of say ten or twelve feet, but there’s not much left of the roof. The porch is rather good. Quite a bit later than the chancel. It was a bit creepy, but not much. I daresay if it had been night time I’d have thought twice about going any further, but it seemed all right at that time in the morning.” She paused, her brow wrinkling.

“Funny thing, you normally get birds in a thicket. Or a building. When it rains, I mean. They shelter.”

“And?”

“I didn’t notice it at the time, but I didn’t hear any bird calls.”

Our twin kittens woke up at that moment. They must have heard Sally’s voice before, but they had been fed only an hour since, so they had decided to ignore her. We called them the Furry Queens. No separate names. I can’t remember why. They made for her, wet as she was, and fawned about her ankles. She gave me an accusing look.

“They’ve been fed! And the dog!”

We had a large dog of mixed parentage that came and went as it pleased. We only needed a marriage licence to turn us into a properly domesticated household.

“Oh, you darling Queens!” Sally purred to the kittens. They purred back in the way female kittens do.

“You were in the church. Sal.”

“Creepy and a bit disturbing, love. Come to Momma, pretty little things,” she ordered. They did. “You see, the brass was sticking out of a heap of roof struts—they’d fallen onto it.”

I could imagine the scene now. The rain, still wild in the heavy breeze, the slim figure of Sally Fenton bending over a blackened metal tablet, the mist swirling on the hills high above, and Sally exulting in what she had found.

“You had to clear the rubble?”

“It wasn’t difficult—but, do you know, Andy, I think it had been concealed. There was quite a lot of rubble, but not all of it the kind of stone the roof had been tiled with.”

I should say that in Derbyshire the local stone was used to a couple of hundred years ago not just for the walls, but for the roof-tiles of most important buildings. Slates came later.

“What sort of stone?”

“Alabaster.”

Alabaster is a strangely beautiful white stone, very hard and durable. It isn’t easy to work, so it’s expensive as a building material. Its main use is in funerary monuments. I wondered why an alabaster structure should cover a brass engraving.

“So what then?”

“I saw that I could clear the rubble away. It didn’t take long. I knew it was good right away. The detail’s terrific. Just look at the lion of Humph’s feet.”

I hadn’t looked at the animals. Usually there’s a lion at the knight’s feet and a lapdog at his lady’s. Humphrey’s lion had a half-snarl on its face, tongue protruding, and its claws threatened Humph’s plump, armoured claves. Altogether a very proper beast. The lapdog was something else. Beneath Sybil’s slender feet, a rather odd creature cowered.

When I say cowered I don’t mean it looked afraid. It seemed to be hiding, as if it didn’t like the light. A bit of drapery served to half conceal it, so there wasn’t much of its face showing. One eye looked out of a squarish face. There was a disproportionately large muzzle. It didn’t look like any dog I’d ever seen; I supposed that in medieval England they had some odd breeds. If Cornelius, our wandering hound, had seen it, he would have fled.

“The lion’s fine, but the dog’s odd.”

Sally looked at it thoughtfully.

“I thought so. It isn’t in keeping with the rest.”

I thought of the prices we could ask and put down any thought of the beast’s unpleasant appearance.

“Sally, I think you’ve got it this time. We can clean up on the Stymead brass. You say the church is derelict?”

“I don’t think it’s been used for a couple of hundred years.”

It was looking better and better. Obviously no church ever crumbles away without being noticed—the church authorities are excellent guardians of their buildings; but, for some reason, this particular building had been allowed to fall down. It might be a lapse on the part of the diocesan authority, but it seemed likely that a decision had been made to let the place slowly fall apart. If no one was interested in it, then we would make a stack of rubbings and sell them on the stall later in the summer when we got the Americans, Germans, Japanese, and Canadians—all would pay well for a bit of genuine English craftwork. As it was.

All we had to do was keep quiet about our discovery, and make our rubbings at times when we weren’t likely to be seen approaching the ruined church.

The kittens decided to spring up at Sally—they think she’s a sort of cat-goddess, and she might very well be just that, so what with one thing and another we shut the shop and listened to the wind and the rain in our leaky bedroom-lounge-dining room. As a sort of gesture to celebrate Sal’s find, I put the brass-rubbing on the wall opposite the high window.

Sally wanted to paste onto it the sweet, serene face she had drawn for the disfigured image on Sybil, but somehow she didn’t get around to it. In the grey light of the Pennines early evening, we lay close together, occasionally looking up with a smug satisfaction at the source of our good fortune.

Later we went out to the local pub. Sally attracted the attention of a party of rock-climbers. I found myself glaring at them, but they weren’t impressed; she didn’t seem to notice their flattering gaze. She had been rather quiet during our meal of sausage and beans—we aren’t gourmets.

“Tired, Sal?” I asked.

She had been up early, and she looked rather pale.

“A bit, yes. But a thought’s been bothering me ever since I got back.”

“What is it?” She was an impressionable girl, with the kind of imaginative powers that make me feel like a robot.

Her paintings—which are good—have a deep sense of mystery, She does horses with wide, flat moorland background; the horses look lost, as if they were in a ghost-land.

“Nothing—”

“The church? Is that it, Sal? It frightened you a bit?”

She shook her head. One of the rock-climbers looked hopeful. “Not much. Not more than any old building does—there’s always a touch of sadness about any ruin, but it wasn’t that.”

She looked at me directly. Her deep blue eyes were almost violet-black. “You know I come from Derbyshire, Andy? Not from here, but not too far away.”

Of course I did. I’m strictly a town bird, reared amongst high-rise flats and traffic. She was born in Sheffield, on the Derbyshire side. We had settled in the High Peak because she loved it there and I would go anywhere she wished. I liked it too.

“So what’s the trouble, Sal?”

“Today—in the church—I had the oddest sensation. Only for a moment, and it didn’t particularly frighten me. A sort of chill, but not the rain.” She leant forward and took my hands. “Andy, I had the weirdest feeling that I’ve seen the church before.”

I knew what she meant, We all have these odd dreams when we’re rambling through some strange place, and then months or years later we found ourselves in it and we say something like it’s broken my dream. There’s a fancy term for it and plenty of books about it. I told her what I knew.

She didn’t smile, so I didn’t make the rather silly jokes I was going to make. “If you like, we’ll go together to do the rubbings,” I told her.

“Oh, I’m not afraid of the church!”

Her vehemence startled me. The rock-climbers were interested again. They would be delighted if she quarrelled with me.

“That’s good.”

We looked at one another rather uncomfortably. Only for a minute or two though. Sally has this way of knowing when a bit of physical contact is necessary. She wound her leg around mine and linked hands again with me. The rock-climbers recognised defeat and turned back to their beer.

We didn’t talk about the rubbing again, not that night.