Best New Horror #26

Derek John THE DESECRATOR

“AND THIS…,” SAID the tour guide, posing theatrically before the wall of the bedchamber, “is the secret priest hole of Gaulsford House!” With a deft gesture she pressed her fingers against a section of wainscoting which pivoted upwards to reveal a gloomy recess set into the thickness of the wall. One by one, the tourists took turns to peer inside as the guide played the beam of her torch around the dark and airless cavity.

“How awful!” said one. “Why there’s barely room for a person in there!”

“Yes, it’s a bit of a squeeze, isn’t it?” replied the guide. “And I wouldn’t recommend that anyone try to climb inside. The last visitor who did so ended up in a dreadful pickle—just like Pooh Bear in Rabbit’s front door!”

“So why were they called priest holes then?” asked a bemused American tourist.

“Well, it’s all to do with the Reformation, you see. From the time of Elizabeth the First right up until the accession of Charles the Second, Catholic priests in England were ruthlessly persecuted by the Protestant authorities. They were, to all intents and purposes, outlaws. And so, they were forced to lead a clandestine existence, moving from safe house to safe house under cover of darkness, where they performed the sacraments for those families who stayed true to the old faith. Recusant was the term of abuse directed at these die-hard Catholics. And the fate of those captured was a grim one: to be hung drawn and quartered at Tyburn—and I needn’t remind you how awful a punishment that was! The priest holes, like the one you see here at Gaulsford, were intended as a last ditch place of refuge for a priest during a surprise raid. Many of them are ingeniously constructed in order to avoid detection and, indeed, this particular one was only rediscovered in Victorian times, so cunning is the concealment.”

“That’s all well and good,” said a man at the back of the group. “But there’s no evidence at all that the Leventhorps of Gaulsford were secret Catholics is there? Wasn’t Sir Samuel Leventhorp an ardent Puritan and a colonel in the New Model Army during the Civil War? And it was he who built this house was it not? Why would he put a priest hole in it? It just doesn’t make sense!”

The guide sighed to herself; there was always one know-it-all in every tour.

“That’s a good point,” she said, smiling politely, “but if we take the examples of any number of wayward politicians in recent times, we often find that the public persona and the private individual can be shockingly and even hypocritically at odds with each other. Yes, in public, Sir Samuel was the epitome of Puritan righteousness, but the existence of the priest hole tells otherwise. And now, ladies and gentlemen, let’s make our way back downstairs via the servants’ staircase.”

As the gaggle of tourists followed her out the door of the bedchamber, a solitary figure lingered behind. He flexed his fingers against the wainscoting to see if he could reveal the secret hiding place, but try as he might it remained firmly shut. There must be some knack to it, he guessed, and resolved to ask the guide for a quick demonstration after closing time.

He wandered back down the steps of the Great Staircase with its ancient walls lined with the stern portraits of his ancestors and paused before that of Sir Samuel Leventhorp, founder of the dynasty. The oil painting was rumoured to be an original by Sir Peter Lely, albeit created long after the death of the subject as a commission by one of his descendants. He studied the portrait with interest, and wondered idly what obscure genes from this long dead grandee were now forming part of his own make-up. Sir Samuel had an angry, intolerant face, deeply unlikeable, and his sombre, black-clad figure was every inch the model of puritan probity. The man smiled at the thought that his ancestor was as much a hypocrite as those ‘whited sepulchres’ his fellow Protestant dissenters fulminated against in their lengthy sermons. In a moment of hubris, he had himself recently sat for a new portrait to be hung at the top of the staircase; perhaps his own naturally sunny disposition would ameliorate the dour centuries of sour-faced and glowering Lords of Gaulsford.

He was the latest in a long line of Leventhorps, but he, at least, had no pretensions to religious enthusiasm. In fact, until a few months ago, he had no pretensions to anything much at all. He was plain Jonathan Leventhorp of Melbourne, Australia, and although dimly aware of his connection to Gaulsford, it came as a complete shock when he opened the door of his apartment to the private detective hired by the executors to track him down. A combination of childlessness, illegitimacy and premature death amongst the heirs-apparent had determined that the cadet bloodline from his great-grandfather’s side, of which he was the sole representative, suddenly stood to inherit the entire estate.

Jonathan had lived a feckless life in Melbourne, and cash was always tight. A hefty pile of final demand letters was accumulating unopened on the occasional table in his hallway, and the rancorous knocking and peering in the front window by assorted debt collectors left him cowering behind the sofa for significant portions of the day. For a brief instant, after the news of his inheritance had sunk in, he had envisaged himself living a country squire’s life: strolling his acres, maintaining a discreet pied-à-terre in London, nights at the casino with a charming debutante on each arm, polo matches, riding with the hunt and countless others of those pointless pursuits favoured by the English aristocracy. And not to forget, his heritage of fine estates, a household of fawning servants and endless rooms stuffed with priceless antiques and objets d’art.

But alas, even though Gaulsford House did indeed possess all these attributes, they were not his. The Leventhorps had, it seemed, been mostly absentee landlords through the generations, as if Gaulsford held some special repugnance for them. They preferred, instead, to spend the majority of their lives overseas in their Jamaican plantations, or latterly, in the upper echelons of the diplomatic service; and they had let the estate become run down. In recent years, crippled by death duties and unable to maintain the house from the meagre income of the estate rentals and home farm, they had gifted it to the National Trust. As a result, Jonathan’s inheritance merely amounted to a grace and favour apartment in the east wing and a small stipend from a trust fund at Coutts. Small though the allowance was, it was still considerably greater than his income from bartending and odd-jobbing in Melbourne, and the prospect of an early retirement at the age of thirty-eight was more than enough inducement to pack his bags and take the next flight to England.

For his first few weeks at Gaulsford, he had contented himself with simply exploring the house and grounds. The stately home was laid out much as it had been in Victorian times: a grand suite of master bedrooms were located on the upper floor, whilst on the ground level could be found the dining room, library and assorted day-rooms. The meagre servants’ quarters were hidden out of sight in the discreet service wing, and down in the basement stood the kitchens and pantries which were now peopled during the daytime with voluble re-enactors eager to expound on the drudgery of their everyday life below stairs to the tourists. In the stables, a short distance from the main house, could be found the cafeteria which sold cream teas to the coach-loads of hungry visitors after their obligatory rounds of the National Trust gift shop, where, if they so wished, they could purchase an assortment of scented soaps, tins of shortbread biscuits and other mass-produced bric-à-brac stamped with the coat of arms of the Leventhorps.

His new apartment looked out over a formal parterre towards the dark façade of Gaulsford woods in the distance. The house had remained largely unoccupied during the stewardship of his ancestors and of necessity, he supposed, all the lower ground floor windows, including those of his own rooms, were barred on the inside with substantial rods of iron to deter burglars and other undesirables. Though the east wing was officially out of bounds to the public, bands of horrible schoolchildren running riot in the grounds would still peer and make faces in through the windows as he sat and watched television, forcing him to jump up and shout some very unaristocratic language after them.

He found that he had the house to himself on most nights, after the National Trust staff had closed up and left. A security cum odd-job man lived in the Gaulsford gate lodge and was supposed to do the rounds once or twice during the hours of darkness, though Leventhorp very much doubted his dedication in keeping to this schedule. At night, Gaulsford was filled with the cacophony of creaks and groans made by all old buildings, but it didn’t feel haunted in the least, which was, he supposed, mildly disappointing to him. The only sounds that came to his ears were the distant barking of foxes in Gaulsford woods and the unearthly shrieks of the barn owls as their ghostly figures flitted back and forth across the lawns in search of their prey.

The old library held a particular attraction for him. Although not much of a reader, there was something about the smell of old volumes that resonated deeply with him: how the effluvia of leather and paper mingled in the air to create a subtle incense that seemed to distil the very essence of Gaulsford House itself. The books covered the library walls from floor to ceiling, with the upper tiers only accessible by an ancient and somewhat unsteady rolling ladder.

He spent hours perusing the shelves with their cargo of unread and mostly unreadable volumes: a full series of Migne’s Patrologia, multi-part expositions on turgid theological subjects by long-deceased Protestant divines and innumerable bound volumes of pamphlets on obscure 17th century political controversies which he guessed must date from Sir Samuel’s era. On the lower levels was to be found a selection of more practical reading material: manuals of agriculture, animal husbandry and household management, plus some collected volumes of Punch, Country Life and Horse and Hound which, he supposed, would probably not have met with Sir Samuel’s approval quite so much.

As he made his way along the library shelves one evening, he heard a sudden loud report against the windowpane. Outlined against the glass was the dusty imprint of a bird strike, with the wings splayed wide like some impromptu visitation of the Holy Ghost. He rushed over and, reaching through the bars, raised the window and looked outside. Lying on the windowsill was a young barn owl, still stunned and confused from the impact. He gently picked up its quivering body and smoothed the ruffled feathers as the pathetic bird regarded him with cold unblinking eyes. Then, with a sudden spasm of flapping wings, it wrenched itself free from his grip and took off into the darkness. He yanked his hand back in pain and saw the bloody scratch where one of its talons had cut deeply into the flesh.

He patched himself up with some TCP and a plaster from the first aid box in the front desk and returned to his exploration of the library. In the upper ranks were some remarkable old volumes, with the most exquisite tooled and gilded bindings. Perched high on the rungs of the rolling ladder which wobbled and bowed alarmingly under his weight, he took down a fine example bound in blue morocco leather and decorated with gilded armorials. Even though it had been many years since Leventhorp had darkened the door of a church he recognised it immediately as a Book of Common Prayer. The title page confirmed his intuitions.

He took it over to the reading desk and examined it under the light. The fly-leaf was inscribed in a fine flourishing hand:

Underneath this was written:

But below, in a different hand, was scrawled.

As Leventhorp flicked through the pages, the fragmented childhood memories of dull Sunday mornings at the interminable cathedral services at St Paul’s in Melbourne came flooding back: prayers to be used in storms at sea; earth to earth, ashes to ashes; not three eternals, but one eternal; a man may not marry his father’s mother. When he came to the readings for April 25th he saw that the page had been torn out as if in a fit of rage. In the shredded remnants of the margin were traces of annotation in the same intemperate hand as before.

For an instant, he saw the scowling face of Sir Samuel Leventhorp swim before him. The date on the flyleaf was 1653, which fitted well with the likelihood that it was he who was the author of the accusatory marginalia. He read the inscription again, and he supposed that unless it was a gift (which seemed most unlikely) the book properly belonged to Lady Sadleir of Brockstone Court or her heirs.

The name Brockstone was vaguely familiar to him. On the wall of the library was a framed map of the Gaulsford Hundred, broken up, no doubt, from some dull compendium of county history from the 1800s. And sure enough, it showed that Brockstone was a stately home just a few miles further down the River Tent from Gaulsford. But who was Anne Sadleir? He lifted down a hefty volume of Burke’s Landed Gentry. Brockstone Court, it related, had been built in 1554, by one Sir Thomas Sadleir. His son Ralph Sadleir, known to many as the “Noble Mr Sadleir” from Walton’s Compleat Angler, had married Anne, the daughter of Sir Edward Coke a noted Jurist, in 1601. It seemed that Lady Sadleir had spent the majority of her life in quiet retreat at Brockstone and was a collector of obscure manuscripts including a curious illuminated Apocalypse later donated to Trinity College, Cambridge.

He looked again at the map; as the crow flies, Brockstone was barely three or four miles away. Perhaps he might pay a visit, use the book as an introduction, anything to combat the dreary isolation of his days at Gaulsford.

Behind the house stretched the vast and dark demesne of Gaulsford woods. According to the map, a path led through its gloomy recesses emerging after a couple of miles onto the banks of the river Tent, where it followed the meandering watercourse until it came to the gates of Brockstone Court. And so, on a fine autumn day, Leventhorp decided to walk the three miles or thereabouts to his neighbour’s estate, clutching the prayer-book, safely cocooned in a parcel of bubble-wrap and yesterday’s newspapers.

The walk through the woods took longer than he expected. Though it was indeed a public right of way, it was clearly one of the less frequented ones, and several times it dwindled to little more than a dirty rabbit track through the undergrowth. Eventually, he heard the gentle sounds of running water and the path emerged onto the bright and green banks of the upper reaches of the river Tent, where a much more pleasant stroll could be had through the fields and pastures of Hertfordshire. The path finally disgorged itself over a stile a few yards away from the grand Tudor gateway to Brockstone Court. Through the trees he could see the grey walls of a chapel and further beyond, the grand elevation of Brockstone Court itself.

Leventhorp called at the gate lodge, hoping to enquire if it were possible to talk to the current owners.

The building was unoccupied and seemed to be in use as a lumber-room for various agricultural implements; he heard the purr of a ride-on lawnmower not far away and flagged down its driver. The owners of Brockstone were, it seemed, absentee landlords just like the Leventhorps and the house and its demesne were run by an estate manager. The gardener rang through to the house and announced (to Leventhorp’s parvenu delight) that Sir Jonathan Leventhorp of Gaulsford requested an audience.

“Go right up,” he said. “But use the back way; the front door hasn’t been opened in ten years. No need for it now with the house being empty.”

Leventhorp walked the short distance up the drive to the house. It had an imposing Tudor façade but, like Gaulsford, the building was clearly in its declining years, having reached the point where restoration had been abandoned and the occupants were merely erecting a temporary bulwark against the erosive forces of decay. A middle-aged man, sharply dressed, was waiting to meet him outside.

“Sir Jonathan! Well, this really is an honour for us! I’m Daniel Clark, the estate manager.”

“That’s certainly a big responsibility,” said Leventhorp, shaking hands and looking around at the wide expanse of house and grounds. “Have you been long in the job?”

“All my life,” said Clark, smiling. “My family have served the Sadleirs for six generations as loyal agents and retainers. I know of nothing else.”

“Ah, yes, the Sadleirs. That’s the reason for my visit. I have, what you might call, a piece of lost property to return.”

Leventhorp proffered the ragged package.

“I was rummaging in our library at Gaulsford when I discovered this book. It’s very old and, judging by the inscription, it belongs to one of the Sadleirs from way back. I thought I’d return it to its rightful home as a neighbourly gesture.”

Mr Clark accepted the ill-wrapped package with an air of bemusement, but as he finished unravelling its layers and began to examine the contents, he uttered a sudden cry of joy.

“The missing prayer-book! I can’t believe it! You know this has been considered irretrievably lost for over three centuries?”

Leventhorp saw how he handled it with the reverence of a holy relic.

“And you say it was in your library?”

“Yes. I have a horrible feeling that one of my ancestors may have borrowed it and forgotten to bring it back!”

“We’ll waive the late fees in this case, I think!” said Clark. “You have no idea what a priceless treasure it is that you have returned. On behalf of the Sadleir family, we are eternally grateful for your generosity.”

“Is it really that special?”

“Ah, so you have never heard of the prayer-books of Brockstone? You are not a bibliophile then, I guess? Well, let me explain. During the Commonwealth, the use of the Book of Common Prayer was banned outright. Even to own a copy was punishable by a fine, let alone having a new edition printed. Which is exactly what Lady Sadleir did in 1653, and so far as we know, these are the only examples from that period. I hope you realise that there are more copies of the Gutenberg Bible in existence than there are of the Brockstone prayer-book! There were, until now, just eight copies extant at Brockstone. The prayer-books used to be kept here in the chapel before an unfortunate incident of attempted robbery early in the last century necessitated their removal. As a result, they are all now safely stored in a vault at Lloyd’s Bank in the City of London.

“There are eight stall-boxes here in Brockstone Chapel and so, naturally, they required eight books, one for each stall. But of course, Lady Sadleir, as a woman, would not have been permitted to sit in the choir and would have followed the service from her private box pew. Hence there has to have been a ninth copy, her own personal one, which has been missing for over three centuries. Missing…well, until now that is!”

He opened the book at the title page.

“Hmm, I see someone has been scribbling in it at some time in the past.”

“Yes, I must apologise; I have a horrible feeling it’s in the hand of my ancestor Sir Samuel Leventhorp.”

“I expect that’s probably true. There was no love lost between your ancestor and the Sadleirs, that’s for sure. It almost had the aspect of a feud. It all came down, like so many things at that period, to religious and political differences. They were, you might say, natural enemies—like fox and hound, or barn owl and shrew.

“You must forgive me for saying that Sir Samuel was the worst sort of Puritan: bigoted, narrow-minded and puffed-up on the certainty of his own election to Paradise. Lady Sadleir’s royalist views were, of course, well known, but in addition to that, she had pronounced high church leanings, was certainly a staunch supporter of the unfortunate Archbishop Laud, and there was much speculation at the time that she may have harboured secret Catholic sympathies.”

“Ah, but you have no priest holes here at Brockstone Court, have you?” said Leventhorp.

“No, the only one you’ll find in this area is at Gaulsford. Now that’s very curious, don’t you think?”

Clark escorted him inside on a tour of the house, which was much the same as Gaulsford with its dreary accumulation of Grand Tour detritus and middle-range art and furniture. What did come as a surprise were the paintings on the walls and ceiling of the Great Hall. In the style of the Baroque master Andrea Pozzo, they receded in perspective to infinite heights in a virtuoso display of trompe l’œil, as if the ceiling itself had been lifted away to reveal a starry Empyrean.

At the centre, ascending to the glories of Heaven and supported by crowds of winged cherubim, was the figure of a crowned king, presumably Charles II, while at the edges of the triumphal scene, trampled underfoot in the outer darkness, crouched the squat figure of Satan and his attendant minions, a parade of grotesques straight out of Dante’s Inferno. Around His Satanic Majesty there writhed various figures in aspects of eternal torment. Not quite the Sistine Chapel, but effective nonetheless.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” said Clark. “It was one of the last commissions by Lady Sadleir, and dates from around 1665. It’s called The Triumph of Loyalty and the Defeat of Sedition. Those unfortunate chaps getting their what-for from the Devil are the Regicides. Cromwell, you can recognise by his grotesquely exaggerated wart; there’s Ireton, Harrison, Pride and all the rest.”

One corner of the room was covered in scaffolding and the entire framework was draped in cotton sheets as if to contain the spread of dust. At the bottom, a corner of the covers flapped open and Leventhorp peeked inside. The scaffolding was protecting a wall painting of the Doom or Last Judgement. It was a continuation of the torment of the Regicides from the ceiling, as a further series of unfortunates was dragged into the gaping jaws of Hell by eager demons. There was something odd about it, but before he could formulate just exactly what it was, the fabric was plucked out of his hand and firmly tied back in place by Mr Clark.

“It’s just some remedial work I’m doing on the wall paintings,” he said. “I’m a trained art restorer as well, you see. I learnt my trade at the Courtauld Institute in London when I was younger. The paintings are showing their age, three centuries of candle smoke and oil lamps has left them looking a little tired, shall we say, and in need of some curatorial TLC.

“I suggest we go and visit the Brockstone Chapel, and take the prayer-book back to its original home. Though of course, alas, it will have to end up in the bank vault with the rest of them.”

It was a short walk across the lawn and through a copse of beech trees to reach the chapel which, although small, had a certain quiet grandeur to it.

Once inside, the two men stood at the head of the nave.

“Let’s see what the psalm for today is,” said Clark. But as he flicked through the pages, the prayer-book sprang open at the missing leaf. “Oh, it’s been defaced! Not the first time that Sir Samuel has vandalised Sadleir property, I fear.”

“How so?” said Leventhorp.

“Well, this is called the new chapel, but in fact, it was built in the mid 1650s or thereabouts to replace the one desecrated by Sir Samuel. That unfortunate edifice was the original chapel at Brockstone and was built, as was standard at the time, as an annexe to the house in 1554.”

“Desecrated? I hope you’re not suggesting Sir Samuel was one of these Aleister Crowley black magic types?”

“Oh no, not at all! In fact, quite the opposite—though Lady Sadleir might well have said he worked at the Devil’s prompting.

“I’m sure you’ve heard of the iconoclasts, those Puritans who interpreted the commandment against graven images to the letter of the law. William Dowsing in East Anglia was the most celebrated example, a self-appointed ‘Inspector of Monuments’ who went from church to church shattering statues, destroying rood screens and altars, stained glass and anything else that smacked of high church tendencies. Many people admire the austere beauty of East Anglian churches; little do they realise that it’s mostly the result of Dowsing’s destructive rampage!

“The scourge of iconoclasm did not confine itself to East Anglia: the contagion soon spread over the border here into Hertfordshire as well. Fired by Puritan zeal, Sir Samuel Leventhorp commissioned himself as the iconoclast inquisition in the Gaulsford Hundred, and together with a band of thugs armed with pickaxes and mallets he sought out every country church and chapel for some twenty miles around. And, eventually, in his rounds of destruction he paid a visit to Brockstone in 1648. There is an extract of his report to Parliament in the Victoria County History which we have reproduced in the guide to the chapel—it’s rather a depressing thing to read.”

He handed Leventhorp a photocopied piece of paper which gave a history of the fabric and integuments of the chapel and indicated the relevant passage in his ancestor’s own words.

“How appalling!” said Leventhorp.

“Yes, Lady Sadleir was most upset, and was said to have cursed the Leventhorps and their heritage, in true Old-Testament fashion, yea, unto the tenth generation and all that.”

Clark stopped and suddenly flushed red. “Oh dear, I forgot about your relative’s recent passing. Please excuse my insensitivity and accept my sincerest condolences.”

Leventhorp shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure you can tell from my accent I’ve not had much doing with the English branch of the family. I never met him or indeed any of the Gaulsford Leventhorps. I have no idea even how he died.”

“Probably just as well not to know,” Clark said, quietly. “Those sorts of details can upset one unnecessarily.”

After a brief moment of uncomfortable silence, Clark conducted Leven-thorp down the nave and pointed out the various features of interest to him.

“The original Brockstone chapel was an opulent affair erected during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary when certain Protestant ordinances were being relaxed. After the desecration by Sir Samuel, it seemed that Lady Sadleir considered the whole edifice to be irretrievably defiled and as an act of defiance she demolished it and built the chapel we have today in a secluded location away from the house. After the Restoration in 1660, it was redecorated in the high church fashion you see around you.”

“And nothing from the original chapel survives?”

“Not quite. By sheer chance, one or two relics are still with us. If you follow me to the chancel you’ll see in this display cabinet that we have the remains of some paintings on wood, dating from about 1430 or thereabouts, perhaps salvaged by the Sadleirs from the dissolved priory of Stanford Magdalene. These images formed the lower part of a rood screen in the original Brockstone chapel, and it is conjectured that there would have been several other panels, all of which are now unfortunately lost. This particular panel was hidden in the rafters of one of the local tithe barns and only rediscovered quite recently, when they were being converted to holiday lets as is the fashion around here. You can see the results of your ancestor’s iconoclasm, a pretty thorough job I fear. The painting depicts three saints, and though severely damaged, by the various accoutrements, we can identify them as St Michael, St George and St Thomas Becket.”

The cabinet was opened so Leventhorp could inspect the images up close. The faces had been gouged out, quite literally de-faced. A fanatical assailant had attacked the painting in a frenzy of religious enthusiasm with a chisel or some other sharp instrument and the scarred woodwork remained as a testament to the grim determination of Puritan iconoclasm.

Identified by their accoutrements, Leventhorp thought to himself; so tragic really, like some poor murder victim who can only be identified from their dental records.

“So how do you think Sir Samuel came by the prayer-book?” he asked.

“I suspect he probably paid a visit to the new chapel soon after its opening, looking for evidence of Romanizing tendencies, and seized the volume as ‘Exhibit A’ in his ongoing persecution of the Sadleirs.”

“So why wasn’t Lady Sadleir hauled before the courts? If this book was, as you say, pretty strong stuff.”

“Well, she might have been, but looking at the dates: Sir Samuel passed away not so very long afterwards, in December 1653, perhaps before he had time to press for prosecution. And of course, in the turmoil after the dissolution of the Rump Parliament in April of that year and in the interregnum before Cromwell was named Lord Protector, perhaps the times were simply not conducive for these sorts of petty witch hunts.”

Clark gently closed the door to the cabinet. “Thankfully, your family became less enthusiastic about religious matters and I think it was in a moment of mischief that one of Sir Samuel’s sons commissioned the portrait of the great iconoclast which hangs on the staircase at Gaulsford. How droll, immortalising him in the very format he took to be the deepest blasphemy!”

“Yes, I suppose it was,” smiled Leventhorp.

“Isn’t it good to live in the age of reason where we can put these unfortunate misunderstandings behind us!” said Clark. “I must return and do a bit more work on the wall paintings before it gets dark, but please feel free to wander about. Just let the gardener know at the gatehouse on your way out and he’ll come and lock up.”

The sun was declining behind the surrounding trees, and their wavering shadows played on the chapel window-glass like gesticulating figures from an angry crowd. Now that Leventhorp was alone, the silence of the building was unnerving. He clapped his hands to test the acoustics and tunelessly whistled a few bars of Jerusalem. An old organ stood at the rear of the chapel, and he sat down at the pedals, switched on the electric blower, engaged vox humana and allowed himself a little tootle of ‘chopsticks’ on the keys.

There was little else of interest in the chapel, save for one curious discovery. Amidst the florid dedications to the Lords of the Manor and their various incumbents over the years, Leventhorp noticed a curiously plain marble slab set into the floor of the nave and inscribed simply with the initials A.C. Into the centre of the slab was attached a metal ring, standing slightly proud of its surroundings, as if inviting the onlooker to grasp its circumference and haul away the deadweight to reveal whatever secret charnel-house lay concealed beneath. Leventhorp nudged the ironwork gently with his foot and it left a faint, iridescent sheen on the leather of his shoe as if it had just been recently oiled.

Returning through Gaulsford woods in the late evening, he caught glimpses of a white figure flitting through the branches, seemingly keeping pace with him as he trudged through the overgrowth—the local barn owls out hunting, no doubt, he thought to himself. And he shuddered at the fate of whatever poor field creatures were venturing abroad that night, oblivious to the silent death which awaited them from above. The keen talons that would pierce the skin in a swift and bloody embrace; the relentless beak tearing into the still quivering flesh…

When Leventhorp arrived home to Gaulsford, footsore and slightly dishevelled, the house was closing-up for the day and he engaged the tour guide in conversation as she was bolting and locking the main door after the last coach-party had departed.

“What do we really know about this chap?” he said, indicating the portrait of Sir Samuel at the foot of the stairs. “How did he die, for instance?”

“He suffered from a mental breakdown,” replied the guide. “At least that’s what the National Trust archivist tells us. According to the fragments of his letters that remain in our collections, he seems to have developed some sort of acute persecution mania in the last few months of his life. It was Sir Samuel who put up all these ugly bars on the inside of the windows and made the place a regular fortress. He became a recluse, refused to leave the house for any reason whatsoever and was found dead in his bed not long after. There’s a potted biography of him in the official guidebook; you’ll find copies by the front pay-desk. Help yourself!”

He thanked the guide and picked up a copy of the glossy National Trust guidebook to Gaulsford which had been written some years previously by a retired academic from Cambridge. According to the author, Sir Samuel suffered a sudden mental decline in the six months before his death in December 1653: an illness comprising paranoia, hypochondria, a black depression and most significantly, an obsessive persecution mania (hence the bars on the windows) as a result of which he never once ventured outside the house again. Some contemporaries said it was the result of the pox: the dementia praecox of tertiary syphilis, contracted from a mistress of ill-repute. But such scurrilous Royalist propaganda was typical for the times and highly unlikely to be true.

He saw from the blurb at the back of the book that the same author had written a history of the churches of Hertfordshire and with his master key he let himself into the gift shop and scanned the shelves until he found a copy. Looking up the index, he turned to the entry on Brockstone Court.

The account of Sir Samuel and his wanton desecration of the earlier chapel was substantially the same as he had been told by Mr Clark. There was an exhaustive description of the decoration of the new chapel, all rather dull, and a lengthy encomium on the church organ, which certainly hadn’t sounded so very special when he was playing ‘chopsticks’ on it. It was all as dry and tedious as any copy of Pevsner’s Buildings of England. But the author finally got into his stride once he began to relate the legends associated with Brockstone Court and the curious prayer-books:

A fascinating relic. The order of service is the same as the common edition except for the service for St Mark’s Day on April 25th, which is, significantly, also the day of Cromwell’s birth. The psalter and collects for this day are highly irregular. Psalm 109 is to be sung, a most terrible cantrip, both a curse and an invocation of God’s wrath upon the unnamed tyrant, and the subsequent petitionary prayers are equally bloodcurdling. As convinced Royalists, it is strongly suspected that the Sadleirs and their retinue would gather each year on this appointed date to invite divine execration on the head of Cromwell and his minions. It is said that all nine books—nine being the Ennead, the mystical number of creation—needed to be present together in order for the charm to work. And one supposes it must have been efficacious after a fashion, because Cromwell did indeed pass away in unspeakable agonies within a few years of the book’s printing.

Amongst the other passages of local colour, one in particular grabbed his attention:

The stone with the mysterious and laconic inscription ‘A.C.’ is often pointed out as evidence for Lady Sadleir’s unhealthy interest in occult matters. It is said by local people that the slab covers the tomb of one Anthony Cadman, infamous to all bibliophiles as the London-based printer of the sacrilegious Brockstone prayer-book. Cadman was suspected by many contemporaries of being a noted continental magician living incognito in the city and a confidante of the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria. According to the account rendered in John Evelyn’s Diary, the ‘gentleman calling himself Cadman’ was rumoured to have dabbled in alchemy and those areas of mystical theology which are perhaps best avoided by the unwary.

These murmurings reached a climax during the June of 1653, when, shortly after the printing of the infamous prayer-book, he was publically accused of ‘attempting to procure the deaths of divers persons by necromantic means’. While such accusations were not unusual for the times; Cadman’s links to the Royalist cause were doubly damning and he was swiftly trialled and hanged for the alleged offence. His wry-necked corpse was gibbeted at the crossroads at Hampstead Heath as a gruesome landmark for the populace and a warning to the curious. It has long been rumoured that his cage was blown down from the gibbet not long afterwards during a great tempest of allegedly supernatural origin, and the mummified remains secretly removed by agents of Lady Sadleir for burial in the new chapel at Brockstone.

Leventhorp was awakened the next morning by the screech of an angle-grinder. A workman was removing the bars in the library windows, apparently at the insistence of their insurers for health and safety reasons. The house was being shut up for the winter, and he could finally expect some peace from the screaming hordes of bored schoolchildren. The housekeepers moved methodically from room to room, giving the silver and ceramics a last clean and polish before boxing them away and covering the furniture and statuary in commodious dust-sheets, leaving each room with the faintly ridiculous appearance of an eerie tableau from some forlorn seaside ghost train.

As he sat down to watch television one evening after the final departure of the house staff, Leventhorp found his mind wandering. He was strangely troubled by the paintings in the Great Hall at Brockstone; there was something about the images under the scaffolding, that had registered subliminally in his brain, but which he could not recall to conscious scrutiny. Unable to concentrate on the programme he retreated to the library, reached down one of the collected volumes of Country Life, and began leafing randomly through it to pass the time.

Amongst the articles, one from the early 1990s caught his attention: a typical lightweight puff-piece entitled ‘Springtime at Brockstone Court’.

The article was mainly comprised of elegiac soft-focus scenes of the gardeners at their seasonal round: digging the beds, planting the walled garden with annuals and pruning the espaliers as the lawns and arbours of Brockstone bloomed with a glorious carpeting of snowdrops and crocuses. Inside the house, the winter cobwebs were being chased away by the housemaids; the rooms illuminated in the weak spring sunlight as they performed their duties. There was a photo of Mr Clark, then a much younger man, barely in his thirties, mentioned in the caption as having recently returned to his family sinecure after a stint at the Courtauld Institute. The various artworks of note were enumerated, mostly uninspiring 18th-century studio copies, and the article ended with a double-page spread of the paintings of the Great Hall.

The ceiling was no less impressive in reproduction, but something else caught Leventhorp’s attention. A small inset photograph clearly showed the section of wall painting depicting the torments of Hell, of which he had previously only caught the barest of glimpses behind the scaffolding. The artist had clearly taken great relish in enumerating the miseries of the damned Parliamentarians and their fellow-travellers—as inventive and gruesome as any medieval Doom. Leventhorp studied the agonised faces of the unrepentant sinners as they were crammed into Hell’s gaping maw: naked, shivering, and somehow very familiar.

Still clutching the heavy volume, he ran out to the Great Staircase, and compared each face from the Brockstone wall paintings with his ancestors’ likenesses. They were identical. Each face, from his recently deceased third cousin to the scowling enmity of Sir Samuel had been incorporated into the apocalyptic wall painting, and each writhing victim had been given their own attendant demon and unique mode of torture. At the very edge of the dismal procession, one figure had been left seemingly unfinished, as if the space were being readied to take the artist’s impression.

He put the volume down and went searching for his car keys. He decided that he would drive over to Brockstone and get to the bottom of whatever mischief was going on. No matter what obscure genealogy had led him here to Gaulsford, he felt some sort of family honour was at stake and the memory of Clark’s deliberate shielding of the wall painting from him smacked of subterfuge and contempt. He would demand to see it, and observe Clark’s reactions: even if it were a mere bagatelle and mockery on his part, it was certainly in dubious taste and he would have no compunction in venting his disgust to the supercilious estate manager.

The gates of Brockstone were locked, but a small postern gate was open and Leventhorp entered unseen. He walked through the landscaped gardens and past the chapel, which was wreathed in a sombre gloom. There were no owls in flight tonight; only strange rustlings and cries from the nocturnal fauna in the surrounding undergrowth broke the stillness of the moonlit night.

As he approached Brockstone Court, the house was in darkness except for a single light which blazed in the Great Hall. Leventhorp crept up to the mullioned windows and peered inside. The dust-sheets had been removed from the scaffolding and Clark was kneeling on the upper tier with an artist’s palette and brush in his hands. After a few minutes of thoughtful dabbing at a segment of the wall painting, he climbed down from the scaffold and stood back to admire his handiwork. Leventhorp threw himself down amongst the shrubbery as Clark strode over and flung open the window to dispel the lingering paint fumes. From his den amongst the leaves, Leventhorp could see the light in a far annexe switch on and then a gurgle of steam rose from the drains. Clark was obviously cleaning himself up, having finished his artistic efforts for the day.

Leventhorp rose again from his hiding place and leaned over the windowsill to better observe the wall painting, which was now clearly visible through the unencumbered scaffolding. He saw his ancestors held up for public humiliation in various ridiculous and lurid scenarios, just as the magazine article had reproduced, except now, viewing the images in person, their impact was exponentially greater. At the sight of this obscenity, he felt the old familial acrimony against the Sadleirs rise within him like a sudden delirious fever. It was just as Mr Clark had described: an instinctive, almost genetic hatred. Like fox and hound, like barn owl and shrew. Before he knew it Leventhorp had scrambled over the windowsill and made his way into the Hall.

Up close, the images were detailed and exact renditions of Sir Samuel’s lineage, with the likenesses of each figure deliberately copied from the family portraits in the Great Staircase at Gaulsford. And now, he saw to his disgust that the final figure had been completed by Clark with Leventhorp’s own visage, with his doppelgänger staring gormlessly into the Hellmouth whilst being intimately skewered by the red-hot poker of his demonic companion.

He climbed up onto the scaffolding for a closer look at this outrageous work of pictorial libel. And as he regarded the awful images he felt a destructive urge rise with in him, an iconoclastic zeal as fanatical as any of his forebears. A drum of turpentine stood amidst the painterly paraphernalia on the topmost tier of the scaffold. Leventhorp unscrewed the cap and began to fling the contents at the wall paintings, feeling a deep satisfaction as the images dissolved into chaos, their outlines collapsing and streaming down the walls in streaks of colour like some abstract expressionist mess by Jackson Pollock.

Leventhorp broadcasted the solvent without discrimination. Cromwell and Ireton faded into nothingness, angels and demons were united in their common fate; even the majestic finery of Charles II took the brunt of a well aimed squib and dissolved into a gelatinous ichor which dripped onto the floor in variegated puddles. The images were fading into obscurity, evaporating into the bare outlines limned by their under-drawings. The air was now shimmering with fumes and Leventhorp ran to the window to escape the choking vapours of the turpentine. The distant sound of a door slamming signalled to him that Clark was returning for a final review of his work. Leventhorp eased himself back out the window and hurried through the grounds to his discreetly parked car before the alarm could be raised.

Back in the safety of Gaulsford, he poured himself a large whiskey and retired to the library to contemplate the consequences of his impetuous actions. He was at a loss to explain himself. It was as if the vengeful spirit of his ancestor’s Puritanism had short-circuited the centuries to possess his soul for a brief moment of insanity. Thankfully, more by good luck than by good judgement, he had kept his leather driving gloves on, so no incriminating fingerprints had been left at the scene should the police be called.

Yet the question still remained unanswered: what was Clark doing painting an image of him on the walls of Brockstone Court? He had told Leventhorp that his family had served the Sadleirs for generations—did their service include more than just simply rendering the daily round of household duties? Was Mr Clark the hierophant of some vengeful ritual against the Lords of Gaulsford: a legacy of Dame Sadleir’s unquenchable ire? And what was the meaning of the strange prayer-book and its vicious and unauthorised psalmody?

The words of the local historian circled in his mind: Highly irregular. Both a curse and an invocation.

He needed to consult a bible, and unsurprisingly, there were several to choose from in the Gaulsford library. He climbed the unsteady ladder, lifted down an old Victorian leather-bound copy of the King James Version and opened it at the Book of Psalms, number 109.

Was he, Jonathan Leventhorp, being cursed somehow for the iniquity of his own forebears? Cursed via some unforgiven hereditary guilt for the grotesque vandalism of Sir Samuel so many generations before?

Leventhorp thought about his previous life eking out a pathetic existence on the other side of the world, and the equally peripatetic careers of his forebears at Gaulsford—was the line meant to apply to him as well? It seemed eerily apposite.

But this surely wasn’t fair; this couldn’t be the actions of a beneficent deity, one who begged us to turn the other cheek, to love one another as ourselves? Leventhorp began to wonder what strange being the Sadleirs had invoked: this demiurge of Brockstone, this jealous God, brimming with wrath and vengefulyea, unto the tenth generation. He read the awful maledictions of the psalm again.

Now that the nine prayer-books were together again for the first time in three centuries, was some strange conclave of shadows reaching its blasphemous apogée in the chapel this very night under the direction of Mr Clark?

In the corner of his eye he caught a brief flash of white against the outer darkness of the lawns and then a crash and tinkle of breaking glass sounded in the shadows at the far end of the room. One of the barn owls must have dashed itself against the glass of the library again, he thought, no doubt attracted by the glimmer of lights inside. He saw that the lower part of the window had been completely smashed by the impact and a glittering spray of shards littered the floor of the room inside. The shattered remains of the windowpane were covered with the same dusty traces as before, but there was nothing to be seen either within or without the library walls.

Leventhorp felt utterly alone in the midnight emptiness of Gaulsford and was seized by a sudden unaccountable chill of anxiety. The National Trust had installed a central fuse-box by the main desk, which controlled all the internal and external lighting in the house, and he ran and grappled with the switches until the entire building was a blaze of light. Outside, the blue-grey nocturnal landscape of the lawns brightened as if at the impending approach of dawn, but the shadows cast by the house lights were deeper, more impenetrable, more concealing.

The lights of the upper landing came on behind him and he turned and gaped at the scene of wanton destruction which had been revealed on the Great Staircase.

The Leventhorp family portraits had been utterly defaced by some unseen hand. Each one had had its face roughly scraped away just as on the medieval rood screen at Brockstone, and to his disgust he saw that his own portrait had not been spared the outrage. He climbed up the stairs past each ruined picture until he came to the remnants of his own self-commissioned likeness. His face had been gouged out in a series of deep scars through the canvas and, as if to heighten the atrocity, a single eye remained visible between the vicious stripes, peering out sorrowfully from the midst of the surrounding carnage.

Clearly a gang of local yobs had found their way inside somehow and had embarked on a vandalism spree. If they came across him in the midst of their mindless rampage he would probably end up with a good kicking, or worse. He needed to raise the alarm with the security guard, and somewhere on the upper floor, he remembered, was a house phone. As he hurried along the corridor he noticed a roll of crumpled linen, about four or five feet in length, lying in front of the door to one of the bedchambers. A dust-sheet, thought Leventhorp in passing, fallen from one the housekeepers’ baskets perhaps, while they were closing up the house. But as he moved closer, the fabric began to stir fitfully as if animated by a network of unseen puppet strings and he paused and watched with incredulous fascination as slowly, and with a snakelike undulation, it began to creep across the floor towards him, leaving a faint spoor of whitish dust in its wake.

At the last instant Leventhorp recognised it not as a piece of forgotten household linen, but as a foul and decaying roll of ancient grave cloth. And at that very moment, the creature within raised itself semi-erect like some hooded serpent to reveal the expressionless and desiccated face of one dead for centuries. Around its withered neck was traced a band of twisted flesh, the eternal imprint of the hangman’s rope. The sightless eye-sockets were crammed full with the festering dirt of the grave, and a forked tongue flickered back and forth from within the crumbling jaws, tasting the air like a ravenous viper seeking out its prey.

Leventhorp staggered back to the main bedchamber, slamming the door shut on the awful vision, but there was no lock or bolt with which to secure it. He looked around in desperation for some means of escape, but the drop from the upper windows was too great to attempt. There was only one place of concealment left to him: the priest hole.

He crammed his body inside the tiny space, and pulled the panel of wainscoting closed behind him. As he cowered in the suffocating darkness, he now realised its true significance. Sir Samuel Leventhorp was no secret Catholic, there were no renegade priests sheltering in his house, and there never had been. The priest hole had been made for himself alone. It was a sanctuary, a castle keep, a refuge of last resort from the tormenting demon sent by Dame Sadleir to plague him and his descendants. Despite his terror, vague recollections of Sunday School scripture lessons came whispering to him, echoes of yet another vengeful incantation: the awful words of Psalm 58, which now bore a stark and literal relevance.

Through the wainscoting Leventhorp heard the door of the bedchamber slowly creak open inch by agonising inch and the dark air around him seemed to thicken with the stench of decay. Then a knock came at the panelling beside him: polite, gentle, a dainty rat-tat-tat of someone requesting an entrance…

The sadly premature death of Sir Jonathan Leventhorp came, paradoxically, as rather a boon to the National Trust, because a codicil in the original deed of bequest meant that the remainder of the estate and trust fund became their prerogative with the extinction of the family title after ten generations.

The priest hole is still featured on the house tour, but thankfully for the long-suffering guide, no visitors have yet had the insensitivity to mention the unfortunate accident that occurred within its confines. Though some, thinking themselves out of earshot, will still mutter amongst themselves as they gaze into its dark airless cavity:

“That’s where they found him, you know. They say he had some sort of nervous breakdown and destroyed all the ancient family portraits that used to hang in the stairway. And he was missing for a full week before anyone even thought of looking for him in the priest hole. The police reckoned he squeezed himself inside somehow, but then couldn’t open the panel to get out again and went stark staring mad from being locked up alone in the darkness.

A pretty sight he was too when they found him. Tore his own face off with his fingernails, so they say, right down to the bone.”