Of course these details were soon corrupted by repetition, and Satanic purpose ascribed to the building. It became babies’ blood that was used to anoint the stone, and a mad dog’s grave that marked the spot where the altar was built. Sealed up behind the high walls of his sanctum, it was doubtful that Lord Godolpnin even knew that such rumors were circulating until, two Septembers after his withdrawal, the inhabitants of Yoke, the village closest to the estate, needing a scapegoat to blame the poor harvest upon and inflamed by a passage from Ezekiel delivered from the pulpit of the parish church, used the Sunday afternoon to mount a crusade against the Devil’s work and climbed the gates of the estate to raze the Retreat. They found none of the promised blasphemies: no inverted cross, no altar stained with virginal blood. But having trespassed they did what damage they could inflict out of sheer frustration, finally setting a bonfire of baled hay in the middle of the great mosaic. All the flames did was lick the place black, and the Retreat earned its nickname from that afternoon: the Black Chapel; or, Godolphin’s Sin.
If Jude had known anything about the history of Yoke, she might well have looked for signs of its echoes in the village as she drove through. She would have had to look hard, but the signs were there to be found. There was scarcely a house within its bounds that didn’t have a cross carved into the keystone above the door or a horseshoe cemented into the doorstep. If she’d had time to linger in the churchyard she would have found, inscribed on the stones there, entreaties to the good Lord that He keep the Devil from the living even as he gathered the dead to His Bosom, and on the board beside the gate a notice announcing that next Sunday’s sermon would be “The Lamb in Our Lives,” as though to banish any lingering thought of the infernal goat.
She saw none of these signs, however. It was the road and the man at her side—with occasional words of comfort directed towards the dog on the back seat—that consumed her attention. Getting Estabrook to bring her here had been a spur-of-the-moment inspiration, but there was sound logic behind it. She would be his freedom for a day, taking him out of the clinic’s stale heat into the bracing January air. It was her hope that out in the open he might talk more freely about his family, and more particularly about brother Oscar, What better place to innocently inquire about the Godolphins and their history than in the grounds of the house Charlie’s forefathers had built?
The estate lay half a mile beyond the village, along a private road that led to a gateway besieged, even in this sterile season, by a green army of bushes and creepers. The gates themselves had long ago been removed and a less elegant defense against trespasses raised: boards and corrugated iron covered with barbed wire. The storms of early December had brought down much of this barricade, however, and once the car was parked, and they both approached the gateway—Skin bounding ahead, yapping joyously—it became apparent that as long as they were willing to brave brambles and nettles, access could be readily gained.
“It’s a sad sight,” she remarked. “It must have been magnificent.”
“Not in my time,” Estabrook said.
“Shall I beat the way through?” she suggested, picking up a fallen branch and stripping off the twigs to do so.
“No, let me,” he replied, relieving her of the switch and clearing a path for them by flaying the nettles mercilessly.
Jude followed in his green wake, a kind of exhilaration seizing her as she drew closer to stepping between the gateposts, a feeling she ascribed to the sight of Estabrook so heartily engaged in this adventure. He was a very different man to the husk she’d seen slumped in a chair two weeks before. As she clambered through the debris of fallen timbers he offered her his hand, and like lovers in search of some trysting place they slipped through the broken barrier into the estate beyond.