The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [119]
God forgive me.
Peter, forgive me.
I must take back the car in the morning. I shall speak to my cousin first thing tomorrow.
Twenty-Six
Seaton had read her account out loud so that Mason might hear it, too. And it was Mason who spoke first when Seaton had finished and slowly brought the covers of the little volume back together in his hands.
‘She was in love with you, Father.’
The priest spoke with his back to them. ‘She was very beautiful. And she was abundant with intelligence and life. And I was a little in love with her, I think.’
Seaton said, ‘Where did you get the notebook?’
‘She gave it to me herself. She presented it to me bound in brown paper and string secured by sealing wax. She said I was to read it only in the event of her death. Otherwise, she said, she would be back to collect it from me within a fortnight or so. The occasion upon which she gave me the journal was the last on which I ever saw Pandora.’
‘It was her last confession,’ Mason said.
‘She never got to make her first confession,’ Seaton said. ‘She never finished her instruction, was never accepted into the faith. Edwin Poole saw to that.’
‘Nevertheless, Paul. I think that in every important particular, Nicholas is right.’
‘Did she have a premonition of her own death?’ This from Mason.
Lascalles hesitated. ‘The last time I saw her, she was serene. She handed me the package containing her journal with a smile. But the precaution speaks for itself, I think. She was reconciled to her course of action. Perhaps she was even confident of the outcome. But she was never in doubt about how malign and formidable were the forces she was challenging.’
‘She called you Monsignor,’ Seaton said. ‘So did the Franciscan who brought the food in here earlier. It suggests a Vatican rank.’
‘I am a priest.’
‘One who could summon an instant favour from a cardinal.’
‘I had a telephone. A cardinal is a priest before he is a prince of the Church.’
There was silence in the library.
‘It wasn’t malnutrition, when they found her body in the river,’ Seaton said. ‘She wasn’t starving, she was fasting. It was penance.’
Lascalles took out his rosary and kissed its crucifix. Mason thought that there were tears in his eyes. But in the unsure light of the dying fire, it could have been age. Or fatigue.
‘I’m going to find Peter,’ Seaton said. ‘Pandora found him with a purloined library pass. I was a reporter once and good at it. I’m going to find him, find out who he was.’
Seaton’s tone of voice here was new to Mason. There was a certainty to it. So Mason spoke tactfully, ‘It was nearly seventy years ago, Paul. And it won’t bring the boy back to life. Or her.’
‘We need to know why he was singled out and taken.’
‘They chose shrewdly,’ Mason said, quoting Pandora. ‘He was probably a workhouse foundling, some poor infant soul no one cared about.’
Seaton shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t think that was what she meant. I think there was more to it. And I think that when I’ve found Peter, we’ll be ready for the Fischer house.’
Mason looked to the priest. ‘Father?’
Lascalles was looking at Seaton. ‘I pray that God is with you,’ he said. ‘I pray that He is with both of you.’
Seaton was at the British Museum by the following afternoon. Mason got off the train at Ashford, where they had parked the Saab on their outward journey. He would drive it back to Whitstable.
‘How long is this going to take?’
‘As long as it takes,’ Seaton said. There was no point discussing it. Mason thought he was wasting his time. Seaton thought it might actually be worse than that. He was following hunches again, felt the old familiar compulsion that had lured him before