“What is it about you and knights, Jon?” my mother used to ask me when, for five years when I was a kid, I would refuse to dress up as anything else for Halloween. Yes, what? Maybe they let us believe that all the evil in this world can be banished with a sword and armor.
Ella freed The Beard (she called him Uncle Matt), and I untied Zelda.
Longspee was still there, but he was already fading.
“Why did you not call me sooner, Jon Whitcroft?” he asked.
Then he was gone, without giving me a chance to answer his question.
LONGSPEE’S DARKNESS
That night Zelda insisted on making up a bed for me on her sofa. She sent The Beard to notify the Popplewells, even though he looked nearly as dead as Stourton’s servants.
“Just tell them you picked Jon up from school and the two of you had so much fun that you forgot to call,” she said, gently nudging him out the door.
“Fun? Do I look like I had fun?” The Beard groaned. But he did manage to convince the Popplewells to let me stay two more nights with Zelda. Then he spent an hour on the phone with my mother, who had of course already called the Popplewells and set them on high alert. Life can get complicated when you can’t just tell the truth. Please excuse Jon Whitcroft’s absence. He had to save his best friend’s life and break an old family curse. We would’ve all given a lot if Zelda could have just written that kind of note to the school.
The next morning I woke up to a toad staring down at me from the sofa’s armrest and to the sweet smell of pancakes.
“After a night like that, you can’t just go to school!” Zelda announced as I stumbled into the kitchen. “I already called Mrs. Tinker and told her both of you have upset stomachs because Matthew let you have too many sweets. Luckily, she doesn’t know he’s a dentist.”
The Beard was great for excuses. I was just mulling over how I could use him in the future, when he came hobbling into the kitchen. He looked much worse for wear, but that was not the reason I nearly didn’t recognize him. The Beard no longer had a beard.
“I just felt so different this morning,” he said, shoveling pancakes between his immaculate teeth. “The beard no longer felt right.”
Ella gave him a kiss on his smooth cheek, but I wasn’t sure whether I liked his face better this way, so I decided to keep thinking of him as The Beard for the time being (and I still do). But I had to admit, the scar on his chin was pretty impressive. Looking at it, I nearly regretted that Stourton hadn’t left any such visible marks on my face.
After breakfast I finally told Ella about the dead chorister in the school chapel. She listened, as usual, with a deadpan face, which alone was enough to make me feel quite uneasy again.
“You have to tell Longspee about this!” she said. “I’m sure he’ll explain everything.”
“And then?” I replied. “He’ll probably figure out that I didn’t call him to Kilmington earlier because I believed the chorister’s lies.”
And that earned me a Jon Whitcroft, you’ll probably just have to deal with it look.
“Fine!” I muttered. “Can you at least come with me when I talk to him?”
“Sure!” she said. “I still have to thank him for last night anyway.”
Ella wanted to get locked overnight in the cathedral again, but Zelda crushed that plan with a particularly deep frown.
“Out of the question. No more nightly excursions for the both of you,” Zelda said. “At least not without adult supervision.” She’d managed to wangle keys to the courtyard and the side door of the cathedral from one of the guides.
“He’s an old admirer of hers,” The Beard whispered when Zelda proudly dropped the two keys on the kitchen table. “He supposedly etched her name into at least three pillars, and he never married because of her.”
Ella tried to convince her grandmother to at least let us talk to Longspee alone, but Zelda shook her head so violently that her glasses slipped off her nose.
“Nonsense!” she said as we all squeezed into her car. “What if he really is a murderer? End of discussion! I promise I will only appear if you call for help.”
We slipped in through the side door just after evensong. The cathedral felt like an old friend. Zelda went to wait by a column next to the font while Ella and I approached Longspee’s tomb.
It seemed such a long time since I’d first come here. So much had happened since then. I felt like a different boy from the one who’d first called William Longspee for help.
What should I say? How could I look him in the eyes after having accused him of being a murderer? The murderer of a boy barely older than me.
I felt his presence even before I heard his voice.
“So, Jon… why did you call me only when it was nearly too late?”
He was standing between the columns, as if he’d been waiting for me.
I lowered my head. The chorister’s words tasted like poison on my tongue. I loved William Longspee, but I’d seen the darkness in him, and the chorister had made me doubt that his light had always been stronger. Fighting Stourton on the church tower of Kilmington, I’d felt for myself how strong the darkness could be in all of us.
“I met the chorister. The one you asked to find your heart.” I whispered the words, but the empty vastness of the cathedral made them loud and heavy.
“I understand.”
There was so much weariness in his voice. And I could see the walls of the cathedral through his body, as if sadness and guilt had left hardly any of it behind. “What did he tell you?”
Telling him took more courage than fighting Stourton.
“That it was you who killed him. I know,” I quickly added, “I shouldn’t have believed him. It was probably not at all like that….”
“No, Jon. It’s the truth.”
I felt cold, as though I had Stourton’s bony hand on my heart again. Longspee was barely visible in the shadows, but his words wrote themselves onto the darkness as if each and every one wanted to burn itself into my soul.
“But… w-why?” Ella came to stand by my side. It was the first time I ever heard her voice tremble.
William looked along the columns. “He told me he found my heart and he would give it to me under one condition: that I kill his teacher.”
The knight went to his sarcophagus, where his effigy lay so peacefully in its marble sleep.
“The boy said, ‘He’s an old man,’ ” Longspee continued in a very faint voice. “ ‘His heart will probably stop if you just show yourself to him.’ ‘And why do you want him dead?’ I asked. He laughed. ‘Because I don’t like him!’ he answered. I’d heard that before, from a king. John always said such things. ‘Get him out of my way. I don’t like him.’ And there was always someone who would carry out his wish. Sometimes that someone was me. I was tired of it. So tired. Tired of taking orders from a spoiled boy.”
Longspee reached out to touch the stone face that looked so much like him. His fingers sank into the marble as though it were as insubstantial as he.
“I told him I would not fulfill his wish, and I asked for my heart. He laughed at me. ‘No, in that case I’ll bury it again,’ he said. ‘I hope it will make you so weak and miserable that you can never fulfill your oath. And you will never see your wife again. What would she do with a heartless knight anyway?’ ”
Longspee rubbed his face.
“In my helpless rage, I drew my sword. He stumbled and fell backward out the window. He broke his neck. His cry etched murderer on my forehead, and that darkness tainted my soul forever. ‘Just one more, William,’ I told myself. ‘It was just one more. You killed so many, and this one was probably bad.’ But the darkness would not leave me, and I lost all hope of ever washing it off my soul. Or of seeing Ella again. William Longspee is nothing but a shadow. A heartless knight, bound to this world for eternity.”
He dropped to his knees in front of his own grave and all the saints and sinners who were looking down at him with their stone faces. The walls of the
cathedral seemed to be whispering words of comfort, and the columns stretched themselves as if they wanted to bear the knight’s guilt with him. But the night poured its darkness through the windows, and the only light was that of Ella’s flashlight.
Ella approached him cautiously, as though she thought he might send her away.
“You saved Jon and me,” she said, “and Zelda and Uncle Matt. As far as I’m concerned, your oath has been fulfilled, and you will see your wife again someday. Because Jon and I will find your heart and bury it by her feet. I promise you that on my name. And now please get up!”
THE CHORISTERS’ ISLAND
To his credit, The Beard did not ask any annoying questions when Ella and I told him that we’d need his help one more time. He appeared, as promised, just after the end of school and engaged the supervising teacher (Mrs. Bagenal, math and chemistry) in a discussion on dental hygiene so that Ella and I could sneak upstairs into the school chapel.
My idea had been to bully the filthy little blackmailer into telling us where the heart was, but Ella had frowned and asked how I was going to accomplish that. I, of course, had no idea, and so we did it her way. I hid between the pews (really uncomfortable!), and ten minutes later Ella sauntered in and looked around, pretending to make sure she really was alone. She’s a great actress, as I learned that day.
“Aleister? Aleister Jindrich?” she asked into the silence. (Longspee had told us the chorister’s name.) “Where are you? I have to talk to you.”
She didn’t have to wait long. Ella is very pretty, and Aleister’s vanity was tickled that such a girl was calling for him.
At first he was barely a flicker by the altar steps. Then his head appeared, grinning like the Cheshire Cat, and finally the whole boy was standing in front of Ella. His chorister’s gown looked like a bleached version of Angus’s.
“Well, whom do we have here?” he purred, giving Ella such a sleazy smile that I would’ve liked to sock him for it. “Do we know each other? I don’t think so.”
Ella eyed him with a deadpan face, as though nothing was more normal than speaking to a dead chorister.
“My name is Ella Littlejohn,” she said. “My grandmother Zelda does ghost tours in Salisbury. That’s why I’m here.”
“Indeed?” Aleister began to prowl around her like a cat around a milk jug. “Please do continue.”
Ella folded her arms. The Beard had told us that supposedly stops ghosts from melting with you. He did know a few useful things, as long as he forgot that he was a dentist.
“I told my grandmother all about you,” Ella said. “After all, everyone in this school knows about you. But Zelda says she can’t talk about a boy who was childish enough to jump out a window because he was homesick and then found nothing better to do than to haunt his old school and feel sorry for himself.”
Perfect. Aleister turned as white as a sheet. Not that he’d been very colorful to begin with, but it was a noticeable change.
“So, that’s what your grandmother told you?” he hissed. He really did have a striking resemblance to a cat.
“Yes, that’s what she said,” Ella replied impassively. “But I recently heard a different story.”
She paused for effect and smoothed her skirt. The girls’ uniform is not very exciting, but Ella made even those clothes look terrific.
“A boy in my class,” she continued, “told me that a knight who haunts the cathedral killed you because you stole his heart. Sounds much better than the homesickness story to me. But which one is true?”
“That’s the truth! That blasted knight killed me!” Aleister stood on his toes to make himself as tall as Ella. Pompous little freak! It was no wonder neither heaven nor hell wanted him.
“Oh?” Ella brushed back her hair. “Prove it!”
“Prove it?” Aleister looked very confused. “How?”
“Show me the heart.”
At first I thought he’d see right through Ella’s ploy. But I’d underestimated his vanity. Not to mention that falling out a window and haunting an old school for centuries had probably done nothing to sharpen his mind.
“Fine,” he said. “But if I show it to you, you will have to kiss me.”
Little cockroach! I saw Ella swallow hard, her fists clenched under her folded arms, but her voice betrayed none of her disgust.
“Of course,” she said calmly. “I always wanted to kiss you anyway. You look so good in that painting out there.”
He swallowed it. Swallowed the bait like a dumb fish. Pathetic little blackmailer. Aleister had obviously forgotten that he couldn’t touch people, even if they were as good-looking as Ella.
“I hid the heart in a safe place!” he whispered into Ella’s ear. “It’s not far from here.”
So he hadn’t taken it back to Stonehenge.
Ella masterfully hid her surprise. “Fine. Show it to me.”
Aleister shook his head. “It has to be dark. My skin itches like crazy in daylight.”
Ella looked at the colorful windows. “But that’ll be hours from now,” she observed. “Why don’t you just tell me where you hid it and I’ll go and get it?”
Nice try, but not even Aleister was that stupid. His lecherous smile was back in a flash.
“No, I really have to show it to you myself, my pretty one,” he purred. His voice sounded quite silly with its little echo. “Wait for me behind the school at nightfall.”
“Fine.” Ella actually managed an excited smile. “Just one more question: Aren’t you afraid the knight might turn up here one day and ask for his heart back?”
Aleister’s smile was so vicious that a stroke of lightning would’ve been the only appropriate answer for him, but apparently celestial justice doesn’t work like that, even in a chapel.
“That poor dog can leave the cathedral only if someone calls for his help.” He giggled. “It’s got something to do with that silly oath of his.”
“How stupid of him!” Ella looked at the filthy little creep, and her eyes betrayed her disgust, but in the next moment she was already giving Aleister her sweetest Ella smile again. “All right, then!” she said. “I’ll see you after sunset.”
The Beard hadn’t had the best of times with Mrs. Bagenal. “Heavens, that teacher told me about every rotten tooth of every one of her colleagues!” he groaned when we met him in front of the school a little while later. And when we told him we had to be back at the school at nightfall, he wasn’t very enthusiastic. He insisted on keeping us company until then, so we let him take us for ice cream on High Street. But when it got dark and we returned to the now-locked school gate, Ella made it very clear that she and I had to do the rest alone. Her uncle played the responsible pseudo-dad and tried to argue with us, but in the end he capitulated, since we were only meeting one ghost, who was nearly a head shorter than Ella.
In the moonlight the Bishop’s Palace does not look at all like a school. As Ella and I scaled the wrought-iron gate, I imagined Aleister roaming the empty corridors at night, dreaming of the pranks he’d played on long-dead teachers and fellow students.
The meadow behind the school, where we always played rugby and football, looked, without its daytime throng of students, as alien as the moon.
“What are you still doing here?” Ella whispered when I stopped next to her in the middle of the lawn. “Hide, before he sees you.”
I hated leaving her alone. The moon vanished behind a cloud, and the night suddenly became very dark. But Ella was right, of course. I found a hiding place in the bushes by the school, hoping that Aleister would take her to a place where I could follow them unnoticed.
Luckily, the little creep was far too keen to see Ella again to make her wait for him. She had paced the length of the lawn fewer than a dozen times, when the white figure appeared through the school’s wall and started walking toward her. Yes, ghosts don’t hover, they walk, and it looks very strange, because they do it a few inches above the ground.
I couldn’t hear what the two talked
about. All I saw was that Aleister’s pale ghost body came far too close to Ella, and I would have loved to push him out a window all over again. As they walked off across the grass, I had a hard time keeping myself from jumping out of my hiding place and running after them. But I forced myself to stay, as we’d agreed, until it was clear where he was leading Ella.
That where became clear very quickly.
Aleister was heading to the island.
The name is a bit misleading. The island is nothing more than a little knoll that during rains becomes surrounded by water and mud from the little stream that runs through the school grounds. The first and second graders always go there to play pirates or shipwreck, and the third graders built a dam from branches and old crates so they could attack the first and second graders. After the rain of the previous weeks, that dam was the only access. As soon as Ella had crossed it, I crawled out of my hiding place.
I crept as quietly across the lawn as years of playing hide-and-seek with my sisters had taught me. Crossing the dam, however, was a near-impossible task. The branches cracked with every step, but Ella raised her voice to drown out the suspicious sounds, and finally I reached the island and saw Aleister’s pale figure behind the bushes.
“I buried the urn by the stones over there,” I heard him say. “It all looked quite different back then, but I’m sure that’s the place.”
Back then. Of course! After he fell to his death, he could never reach the heart again. That meant that it had been buried here for more than a hundred years, unless someone had found it meanwhile.