Fireside Gothic

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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 me. 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 he do then?’ Faraday said. ‘Did he compose the anthem in the end?’

‘That’s the strange part of it. It is said that he did. He told his friends that he had succeeded at the very last moment. He said the piece 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. ‘Be patient, 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. It 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 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.’