Broken Voices

8

That evening Mr Ratcliffe made cocoa again. The three of us — four if you counted Mordred — sat close to the fire.

The weather had changed during the afternoon. It was still cold, but clouds had rolled in from the south-west, bringing with it a wind that blew in gusts of varying strengths with lulls between them. The wind carried raindrops with it, with the promise of more to come. It rattled doors and windows in their frames. It sounded in the wide chimney.

It was Faraday who reminded Mr Ratcliffe about his promise.

‘Please, sir — you said you’d tell us about Mr Goldsworthy.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes, sir. You said there was a real story about the ghost.’

‘Real? To be perfectly truthful, Faraday, I can’t be absolutely sure which parts of the story are real and which are not. I don’t think anyone can after all this time.’

‘When did he live, sir?’ I asked.

‘Nearly two hundred years ago. He was the Master of the Music, one of Dr Atkinson’s predecessors. He was a composer, too. You remember the anthem we have on Christmas Day? The Jubilate Deo? He wrote that.’

Faraday’s face was in shadow. But he shifted in his seat as if someone had touched him. It was the anthem that Hampson Minor had sung in Faraday’s place.

‘He died as a result of a fall,’ Mr Ratcliffe went on, ‘and he’s buried in the north choir aisle. There’s a tablet to him on the wall more or less opposite the organ loft.’

‘But why is he a ghost?’ I said. Into my mind slipped an image of Dr Atkinson, who was small, red-faced and irascible, draped in a sheet and rattling chains like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

‘If he is,’ said Mr Ratcliffe. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it?’

‘Has anyone seen him, sir?’ Faraday asked, leaning forward. ‘They must have done. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have said he was a ghost last night.’

‘You must be patient.’ Mr Ratcliffe began the elaborate ritual of cleaning, filling and lighting his pipe. ‘Did you know that the Cathedral once had a ring of eight bells? One of our canons, Dr Bradshaw, wrote a standard treatise on the subject in the sixteen-seventies. Campanologia Explicata. There were eight bells, and they hung in the west tower. You know, I am sure, that our church bells are rung according to a series of mathematical permutations.’ He looked up at us and took pity on our ignorance. ‘It’s like a pattern of numbers. Each bell has a number and it rings according to its place in the pattern.’

By now Mr Ratcliffe was crumbling flake tobacco into the palm of one hand. He fell silent, concentrating on rubbing the strands into a loose, evenly distributed mixture.

‘Bells don’t last for ever, you know. Our bells had to be taken down in the eighteenth century. They needed to be recast. This was done, at considerable expense. There was to be a service of dedication when the new ring of bells was rung for the first time. The Dean and Chapter asked Mr Goldsworthy to compose a special anthem to mark the occasion, to be based on Psalm a hundred and fifty. “Praise him in the sound of the trumpet: praise him upon the lute and harp”.’

Mordred, who had been slumbering on Mr Ratcliffe’s lap, jumped to the ground. He stretched himself out with luxurious abandon on the hearthrug.

‘They say that Mr Goldsworthy was an ambitious man,’ Mr Ratcliffe went on. ‘And a troubled one. The Dean had a piece of patronage in his gift, the Deputy Surveyorship of the Fabric, a position that came with an income of two hundred pounds a year for the holder, and entailed no obligations apart from a few ceremonial duties. Mr Goldsworthy thought there was no reason why the post should not go to himself as to the next man. And the Dean gave him to understand that it might well be his, if his new anthem was a particularly fine piece of work that brought renown on the Cathedral. And, no doubt, on the Dean.’

As Mr Ratcliffe was speaking, Mordred rose to his feet. He stared at the three of us in turn and, to my surprise, came towards me and rubbed his furry body against my legs. I felt the vibration of his purring against my legs. Flattered by his attention, I bent down and stroked him.

‘The problem was,’ Mr Ratcliffe continued, ‘Mr Goldsworthy found that for once his inspiration failed him. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. His career was at a crossroads. If he failed in the commission he would earn the Dean’s disfavour. To make matters worse, I believe there was a lady in the case: and Mr Goldsworthy could not afford to marry without a larger income.’

The cat unsheathed the claws of his right paw and ran them into my calf. I squealed with pain and shock.

‘Mordred!’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘I’m so sorry — he can be such an unmannerly animal. Perhaps one of you would put him outside.’

Mordred frustrated this design by going to ground under the grand piano, sheltered by the wall on one side and a pile of books on the other.

‘What did you do then?’ Faraday said. ‘Did he compose the anthem in the end?’

‘That’s the strange part of part of it. It is said that he did. He told his friends that he had succeeded at last, and at the very last moment. He said it would be his masterpiece. The newly-cast bells had already been hung in the tower. He found that if he went up into the tower himself, into the ringing chamber with pen and paper, the music came to him as if borne on the wind. But then came disaster.’

‘He died?’ I said, half hopefully, half fearfully.

Mr Ratcliffe held up a hand. ‘Hold your horses, young man. No, the first thing to happen was that cracks were discovered in the tower, when the workmen were hanging the new bells. You see, the west tower was built in the Middle Ages. The tower simply wasn’t designed for a ring of bells. It’s not the weight of them, you know. It’s the vibration they cause when they are rung. The Cathedral Surveyor told the Dean and Chapter that there could be no question of ringing the new ones.’

‘Which is why there aren’t any bells now,’ I said.

‘Yes — because they could well bring the tower crashing about everyone’s ears. The Surveyor said that the new bells must come down, and the tower had to be strengthened as soon as possible, and braced with iron ties. The Dean raged against this — his reputation, his judgement, was at stake. But he was forced to give way in the end. So there was no longer a need for an anthem to celebrate the new bells, and no longer any purpose on wasting a perfectly good piece of patronage on the Master of the Music.’

‘What happened to it?’ Faraday asked. ‘The anthem, I mean.’

The anthem, I noticed, not the man: the Rabbit’s as mad as a hatter; and I smiled at my own joke.

Mr Ratcliffe lit his pipe and tossed the match into the fire. ‘No one knows for sure. Perhaps it was never written or perhaps it was destroyed. But the sad part is what happened to Mr Goldsworthy. The story was that he had left the manuscript in the west tower, where he had been working on it. One winter evening, he went up to retrieve it. But he was not aware that the workmen had already begun to remove the new bells from the tower. There are hatches in the floors at the various levels, to allow the bells to be lowered down from the belfry to the floor of the tower. By some mishap, the workmen had left open the hatch at the lowest stage, which is the ringing chamber just above the painted ceiling. There was very little light up there and poor Goldsworthy must have stumbled in the dark.’

The room was no longer cosy, despite the cups of cocoa and Mr Ratcliffe’s tired, gentle voice. I glanced at him, sitting back in his chair. The old man looked back at me and, for an instant, by some trick of the firelight, I saw Mordred’s eyes staring at me. Amber, flecked with green. But the cat was still lurking under the grand piano.

‘He fell?’ Faraday said, his voice awed.

‘More than a hundred feet on to the floor of the tower.’ Mr Ratcliffe had returned to normal. ‘The poor fellow must have been killed outright.’

It occurred to me that five or six hours earlier I must have walked across the very spot where Mr Goldsworthy’s body had lain.

‘It was an accident, of course,’ Mr Ratcliffe said. ‘That’s what they decided. There was nothing to show it had been suicide, after all, and a verdict of accidental death meant that he could have a Christian burial.’

‘Someone must have looked for the anthem,’ Faraday said.

I wondered why Rabbit was so concerned about a bit of music. What did it matter, after all, beside the fact of a man’s death? But then I have never been able to understand the value that people place on music. It’s nothing but a series of sounds, sounds without meaning.

‘They searched his pockets. It wasn’t there, though they did find a pen and a portable inkwell. They looked among his papers. They looked in the tower, as well. But they didn’t find any trace of it. The anthem had vanished, if it had ever existed.’

‘Perhaps it hadn’t,’ I said.

‘The lady who was engaged to Mr Goldsworthy had actually seen the manuscript. He had played her some of the melodies. She said it was a thing of a ravishing beauty, that it would draw the heart out of an angel. But I suppose in the circumstances she would be inclined to have a high opinion of the piece.’

Mr Ratcliffe rose stiffly from his chair and knocked out his pipe. He looked down at us in our chairs.

‘It’s long past time for you boys to be in bed.’

‘But, sir,’ I protested. ‘What about the ghost?’ I could not help thinking of the person I had glimpsed in the west tower this afternoon. ‘Do people see him? Does he haunt the tower?’

‘Poor Goldsworthy?’ Mr Ratcliffe shook his head. ‘Not as far as I know. No, it’s his music that people hear. Or they say they do. Fragments of melody, just a few notes.’ He waved his pipe in the direction of the Cathedral. ‘It’s as if the anthem was broken into many pieces in the fall. And all the notes it contained were thrown up into the air. They are still there. Looking for each other. Trying to come together again.’