The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [124]
‘Leave,’ she said. She had the picture held in one hand, her pride in the saintly Miss Pegg forgotten, redundant.
And there was no organ music. It had been his imagination. The time for games was past. He was the only one still playing them, and he was ashamed of his little deception here. Ashamed. He bowed his head and reached for the door handle and walked before the altar and along the silent aisle and past the font, out of the church porch.
He found himself among graves. It was still light, though the evening darkness was fast enough descending. He had blundered to the right instead of the left and the route down the hill to Penhelig in his haste to get away. When he looked around, he was on a small plateau to the rear of St Luke’s. The headstones were modest, rain-stained sandstone and dull granite rather than marble. The grass was recently cut. The shadows of the graves stretched over the grass in low sunlight. It was still raining from above him, but over to the west, out over the sea, the cloud had thinned in a fiery horizon. Seaton looked at the headstones. After a moment, he found the grave belonging to Peter Morgan’s father. By Public Subscription, it said on the granite, chiselled and still somehow free of moss after seventy years. His name was etched into the stone below a handsome carved relief. It was a small stone. But Seaton thought the people of his village had done the memory of Robert Morgan proud.
Seaton knew from the account written up by Philip Beal that Peter’s father had been the cox of the Aberdyfi lifeboat. He had perished in a storm after the lifeboat capsized, attempting to reach a foundering cargo vessel in Cardigan Bay. That had been in 1925. He had been thirty-seven years old. It had been the sort of small tragedy familiar to seafaring communities. It had deprived Peter Morgan of his father at the age of five. It had inspired the piece of commemorative art carved and rubbed into granite that Seaton looked at now, flushed with low November sun, the sound to the rear of him of rain dribbling through church gutters, the tended grass wet under his knees as he ran respectful fingers over the relief.
It showed a lighthouse mounted on a rock. Its single beam spread to the right across the stone. The dead man’s name had been written in the beam. And under it, the lines:
A BRINGER OF HOPE
LOST BUT REDEEMED
IN GRATITUDE
Well. The Aberdyfi boat would have saved a lot of lives. It was why they were built. It was the reason their crews went out.
Seaton got to his feet. His legs ached. Dusk was creeping now among the graves. Most of the headstones were crowded with names. Morgan’s ancestors had been buried elsewhere. He had come to Aberdyfi from Barmouth, where he had himself put to rest the bride who died bearing him his son. He had come to Aberdyfi to escape grief. But they had done him proud, his adopted people, with their tribute, with this refuge on the plateau in the quiet and the late light tucked to the rear of the old church. It seemed to Seaton as good a place as any to be buried. It was a place of peace and sanctity where a noble soul could sleep untroubled.
The barman at the Penhelig Arms was disappointingly young. Seaton would find no enlightenment there. He took his pint of Banks’s bitter over to a table by the window. In the morning he would try to talk to the Reverend Madden. He had lied, but the clergy were generally forgiving. Tomorrow he would tell the truth, if not the whole truth, admit his interest lay solely in the abducted boy. He had lied because closed communities were apt to conceal their crimes and the disappearance was exactly the sort of appalling event to provoke collusive, clannish secrecy. He had hoped to stumble upon the subject of her vanished pupil as though inadvertently, discussing the unsung qualities