Behold a pale horse, p.1
Behold A Pale Horse, page 1
BEHOLD A PALE HORSE
by Sally Spedding
The right of Sally Spedding to be identified as the author of Behold A Pale Horse has been asserted by her under Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © Sally Spedding 2017.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or places is entirely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted by any other form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author. Also, this book may not be hired out whether for a fee or otherwise in any cover other than supplied by the author.
For information contact the author here: www.sallyspedding.com
Published in the UK by: Death Watch Books
First published as an e-book August 2017
Cover design by Dave Lewis from an original watercolour by Sally Spedding
PRAISE FOR SALLY SPEDDING
‘How To Write A Chiller Thriller comes from the Mistress of the Macabre herself. Sally Spedding has the Chill-Factor – let her help you develop your own. Highly recommended.’
- Suzanne Ruthven, author and editor of Compass Books
‘Malediction is a horrifying parable of poisoned faith. No-one does the darker side of noir like Sally Spedding.’
- Andrew Taylor, winner of the Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger
‘Malediction is an intense, intelligent, visceral thriller from the get-go. Dark, dark fiction, definitely not for the squeamish. If you thought Dan Brown was the last word in clerical depravity, think again.’
- Peter Guttridge, crime/thriller author and reviewer
‘Cold Remains will keep the reader on edge until the very end.’
- Fran Lewis. New York talk show host and interviewer
‘Cold Remains is a creepy, suspenseful read.’
- Lucy O’Connor, Waterstones
‘Spedding knows that before delivering the set-pieces, it’s essential to carefully build suspense through both unsettling incident and sense of locale – at both, she’s unquestionably got what it takes.’
- Barry Forshaw, author and editor of Crime Time
‘Sally Spedding… has been credited with being a latter-day Du Maurier.’
- Crime Squad
‘Sally Spedding is the mistress of her craft.’
- Welsh Books Council
‘Her writing is so distinctly unique, it will truly chill you to the bone.’
- Sally Meseg, Dreamcatcher
PREVIOUS PUBLICATIONS
HOW TO WRITE A CHLLER THRILLER
MALEDICTION
COLD REMAINS
STRANGERS WAITING
COME AND BE KILLED
PREY SILENCE
A NIGHT WITH NO STARS
CLOVEN
WRINGLAND
CUT TO THE BONE
THE YELLOWHAMMER'S CRADLE
In loving memory of my parents, Dulcie and David Wolff, who first showed me the south of France.
Grateful thanks to our daughter, Hannah Spedding, for her proofreading skills.
Also to my equally literary cousin, Elisabeth Parks for reading the early manuscript and for her encouragement over the years.
Hats off, too, to the inspiring poet and crime writer, Dave Lewis of Publish & Print - as ever, the skilled 'midwife'.
'He who had done more than any human being to draw her out of the caves of her secret, folded life, now threw her down into deeper recesses of fear and doubt. The fall was greater than she had ever known, because she had ventured so far into emotion and had abandoned herself to it.'
- Anaïs Nin
BEHOLD A PALE HORSE
PROLOGUE
'In the beginning is the end... '
The sound of the incoming tide pounding against the rocks, enters the tiny church to accompany the threadbare congregation's Evening Prayers. To the right of the altar in his own arched recess, lies the Knight, Mordiern Guyon, in green, mildewed repose with a whippet coiled at his feet.
They think him dead, the good singing folk of Manorcastle, but to his ears the waves that crash over their living tongues becomes another song. The song of distant seas gone by, of a love far greater than man for his Maker. And is it a sigh that the Reverend Adam Vitello Ash can hear from those sandstone lips as the dust-choked nostrils take in once more the scented hills of Roussillon?
I
'And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.'
(Revelation.6.v.8.)
Autumn in Normandy. The year of Our Lord 1271, where winter's bleak breath had blown the trees bare too soon overnight in the fiefdom of Pierre D'Alençon. By vespers, the leaves around the Chȃteau Doucelles were merely trampled stains in the bright early frost.
Suddenly, heavy footsteps neared the bedchamber from where a woman's screams filled the pious air above the evening prayers to Saint Denis as she lost her blood. The blood her firstborn had shared for two hundred days, and in turn would shed when another cooling autumn came around. And at that doleful season of his death, the infant slipped early from his refuge into a vile and restless world. Pure white against white, more a tiny corpse than a life begun. Fruit of old seed warmed for too long in the shade-less desert lands, his red eyes opened innocently to his father's face. From that moment, Jean Corbichon, the Chȃtelain of Doucelles, vowed never to look upon him again.
"See how I have sinned!" He cried. "And this is my penance. On the suffering of Our Lord, I shall make reparation." At this, the infant turned away to the wet nurse’s breast, and clung like a maggot to its providing fruit. Not in shame, for it knew nothing of its deformity, but for the pull of warm, sweet milk.
"I should never have returned." Jean Corbichon knelt by his wife who lay inert, depleted, unable to give suck. His hand on hers, but not for comforting. "Others were dying while I found safety."
"You had to bury the King." She murmured. "That was noble enough." Her lips barely moved on invisible breath.
"The Comte d'Alençon begged me to help carry his bones. How then could I refuse?"
"You could not. His land is our land. He puts meat in our mouths."
For a moment her husband fell silent and covered his face with two brown hands. "But this… this creature… cannot bear Lord Louis' name as I’d planned. That would be sacrilege."
"In time to be sure, Rome will find enough to make him a saint," muttered his wife, weary but steadfast while the October evening iced the outer stones, and within, the candles set at either side lightened her spread hair and small, oval face to alabaster. "He is our child, and for that very reason he will have the best."
"He is a monster no less." Jean Corbichon was beside himself; on his feet now, striding back and forth around the birthing bed. "Borne like a plague on the wind. Why? How?" His brow had knotted like the wreathing limbs of old trees. "There is no such terata amongst my antecedents. Nor yours. So it is God who wreaks his revenge!"
Rage excluded all reason in the man well past his middle years. Tall, still agile, Governor of the castle whose huge, extended keep crowned the surrounding plains of Mayenne. This former Master of the hordes of Turcoples and Sergeants en route from Caesarea, and confidante of the King, had had no control over what had left her womb or any authority on her resolve.
"My husband, you blaspheme." Marguerite Corbichon spoke quietly. "That which I have not heard from you before."
"This aberration will not be nourished under my roof. Take him to another hearth, give him another name. From here on I deny him mine and that of my Holy liege Lord!" His words exploded like unseasoned sparks from a hungry fire.
"If that is your wish." She restrained her tears, all the while, in great turbulence of mind, making those meagre plans, those slender choices that are the lot of the dispossessed.
Once the child was weaned, they would repair to Froissy, north of the Garonne, where Marthe, her sister, newly betrothed to one Hilaire Roland, kept two flocks at St. Just. There he would be baptised in the names already given and learn not just the arts of manhood, but her grandfather's songs. The Minnesinger Friedrich Holz had left her a legacy not in livres or bezants, but in Latin lyrics of love that he'd sung from castle to castle on feast days and holidays throughout the German Empire. One of the envied Herrenlos, masterless men. Slaves only to their art. These words were now collected, all of a piece, for a grandson who would understand. For with a mother's knowing, she knew that few enough things would so enrich his singular life.
"He is to be gone by Toussaint. I have my soul to guard." Jean Corbichon pulled the curtaining roughly around her bed, excluding her from his torment. "You may have a horse with a small 'charet' and every month, you may send for ten livres. That is not ungenerous."
His military voice faded from the chamber and Marguerite Corbichon was alone save for her own darkly distorted shadow that moved with the draught on the thin, enclosing drapes.
The light had faded to a stillness stirred only by bats who had long usurped the pigeonnier outside. Marguerite shivered, not from any puerperal weakness, but in the awful knowledge that this act of birth, their joint creation, had at a stroke, rendered her and her son as lepers.
She'd seen them often enough, scuttling from hedge to sh
"Pater noster, qui es in coeli. Sanctificetur nomen tuum… " She crossed herself upon hearing her son’s plaintive cry and, having called out in vain to her erstwhile provider, submitted their futures to God's will.
*
Some three hundred leagues away while the calling rooks flew north, and this young albino helped his uncle Hilaire pen the moulting Landes sheep near the farm, new mother Nolwenn Guyon was also delivered of a son.
Born on the light Pembrokeshire wind that ruffled the tall grass above the sea and made the new lambs leap and twist in delirium, he smiled at the world, and not an hour passed that was not blessed by his pleasure.
"He will make a true knight," his father said, bearing him proudly to the lowest field which, on stormy nights sometimes caught spray. "You are destined for great things in the Lord's service. Over the water and far away, the infidel still hold the Holy City. The great king's work is still unfinished." He looked into those replica eyes. Grey and blue intermingled. The colour of winter's sky, and the little body's warmth touched his.
By summer's end the Knight Guyon would have left the rutted sand-blown paths and the sturdy farm whose narrowest wall faced the wind. Gone to the warmth and colour of Constantinople, freed from the ravages of a northern winter. He pressed his son’s tiny hands into a prayerful pose, and closed his own eyes.
"Lord God, grant that we may so despise the prosperity of this world that we stand in no fear of adversity... "
Saint Denis' prayer once invocated by the dying king, was now addressed to the springing sea. It was for Louis not Edward, that he had surrendered his best acres. For him and his sacred memory, they both would die. The Spaniard's husband who had harassed and tortured the Jews before their ultimate removal, who after Pope Clement's death had imprisoned the aged Bacon for his mind, was not worthy of any man's sacrifice.
Caught by the glancing sun, the child smiled such a sweet-lipped smile that his father held him close. Tightly crushing, flesh on flesh, this most precious burden, soon, too soon, to be a widow's blessing.
II
London Docklands. January 1983.
"Right, Ladies and gentlemen, let's take it from the top." Daniel Madox's left hand hovered imperiously over his choir, whereupon Catherine Ash, pale from the city air, dutifully opened her mouth again, for it was not her nature to refuse.
'... Vous ay encherie
Tresdont que premiers
Vous vi
Jusqu'au morir
Vostres demour... '
"More feeling, please! Come on now. This is far too insipid!" The choirmaster impatiently laid down his tuning fork. "Look here, this is a desperate plea for love. Mordiern Guyon was a stricken man." He stared at the small choir in front of him, still in their working clothes, and in particular at the young woman in front whose Titian-coloured hair fell smoothly burnished under the artificial light.
"Catherine, you must bypass the throat. Bring the air from down here… " He gripped both sides of his lambswool stomach, straining, spoiling his fine, classical features. The only reason why the ladies in particular, were willing to endure that draughty room every Tuesday evening.
"I'll try." Catherine hated the attention, and glanced nervously at the bass on her left." It's been a bad day, that's all," she explained. Besides, the bruise under her left armpit was hurting.
"Ah! But we must rise above such things in the great pursuit of love." Madox raised his arms for a fresh start.
Catherine had almost 'phoned him at his school to say she was too tired for ballades and virelais after a long shift at the Fertility Clinic, but she was never one to let anybody down, and now her voice was weaker, self-consciously so. He always had that effect.
'... S'ay si dur a endurer
Que durer
Ne puis mie longuement... '
"Hopeless! Hopeless." The conductor looked up at the ceiling and the Early Music Balladeers fell sullenly silent. "It's not as if I'm even paid to do this. Goodwill has its limits, you know."
He pouted his full, sculpted lips, reminding Catherine Ash if such a reminder were needed, how her husband did the same with less excuse.
"Forget the concert. Fine by me." He gathered his things and ferociously zipped up his briefcase before striding, unfocussing, through their midst towards the outer door.
*
"Oh well, a problem shared is a problem halved, I suppose," observed a British Telecom baritone, slapping shut his songbook.
"What do you mean by that?" Catherine was curious.
"Er... who's for the jolly old King's Head then?" Jack Tanner, a bass, deflected. His face the colour of a weathered countryman despite years spent in a Shoreditch shipping office. "My round."
"Never say no to a G and T." Jane Bowlby fellow soprano in a loud angora sweater, gave Catherine a hefty nudge. "Come on."
"No thanks. Really." Then she turned to see Daniel Madox vanish into the dark January night. "Is anything the matter with him?" She asked the soft marshmallow face next to her, whose myriad chasms moved under the weight of powder, heaped like sand on a living body.
"Ah ha. Tell you when you're twenty-one," it laughed and walked over to flirt with the few remaining men.
*
Nearing Moorgate tube station, Catherine could see that the choirmaster was still agitated by the way he snatched up the aerial on his battered Saab. She waved, but he turned away to force his key into the lock.
"Clement sends his regards." She shouted, and suddenly he spun round, mouth open. Then it melted to a smile, and she smiled too that she had calmed him.
"Bloody cold," he said, getting in. He checked in the driving mirror. She was still there, the wife, but not yet mother, with the east wind teasing her golden mane around her head and blowing the day's debris into a dervish at her feet.
*
"Good news!" Clement Ash was home first, and behind the door the moment he'd heard her key. "Guess what?"
His face with its shock of dark hair, peered round the frame.
"Greenbaum's opening up in France, and he wants me to get the whole shebang on the road. My Carte Professionelle came through today... " His large, brown eyes seemed even more enormous, as though they belonged to someone else, and in his excitement, he bobbed up and down on hard, sprung calf muscles that never tired. Then he shut the door on her, almost trapping her shoe.
"I won't let you in until you've said Wow! How wonderful and well done."
Catherine sighed. It was one of those silly games again. But the cold wind was lashing her face. Tearing her raincoat away from her legs.
"Shit… "
"No, that won't do at all. Come on now. Say you're really, really pleased for me."
"I'm really, really pleased for you." She knew when to obey, seeing in an instant, like the moment before death, her whole life thrown into a kaleidoscopic spin.
"Well, I think we can do better than that, don't you?" He was on a high. Unpredictable. Besides, the pavement behind her was deserted, for theirs was the only occupied house in the Chute Street docklands development. A narrow oasis of lit, un-curtained rooms, offering not comfort, but fear.
Time was up.
"I think it's fantastic," she murmured, so he let her in. Fresh and strong in his flexi-time lemon yellow tracksuit with a leaping gazelle appliquéd over his left breast.
"The Carte de Séjour's O.K. too, so the old Jew wants me down there ready for the summer trade and all that."
"Where?"
"Collioure... on the Côte Vermeille... When you walk in the garden, the Garden of Eden, with a beautiful someone... " He sang and laughed at the same time, his eyes rolling lasciviously at some private thought.
"Can I come too?" Catherine interrupted sounding like a little girl who’s forgotten the latest punishment, and remembers only the nice things. Like the little blue and red boats that edged the Mediterranean shore and the rose-tipped bell tower, become orange against viridian in Matisse's eyes. Drawn beyond his balcony, to the bright, polychromed sea. "I've some Tate Gallery postcards, somewhere." She then frowned, thinking, not noticing how her husband’s face had changed and how his mouth bore that ominous downturn at the sides. But danger, like some murky insoluble slick never far from the surface, had been swept away on his high tide of expectation.
