Doug took breakfast the next morning on the terrace overlooking the sea. The rain clouds had cleared and the beach in front of him was bathed in sunlight. Surfers were already preparing their boards for the Atlantic breakers which crashed in a confusion of white foam on the wide foreshore.
The bracing sea air, the bitterness of the coffee and the reassuring fragrance of freshly cooked scrambled egg, conspired to put him in a better mental state than he'd enjoyed in many days. He was glad to be out of London.
Studying the local map, he saw that Penhallam Manor was no more than a ten mile drive. It lay just outside the village of Poundham – off the main A49 coast road.
It was ten o'clock by the time he found himself squinting into bright sunlight as he searched for the turning. Rounding a bend in the road, he suddenly spied a sign and narrowly missed hitting a tractor with a trailer of logs as he swung right across the main carriageway into a narrow lane. He stopped, angry with himself for misjudging the turn. The lane he had entered was bounded on both sides by high trees which obscured the sky and created a sense of having entered a lost world. Crows screeched in the branches above, angry at his intrusion. He drove slowly down the lane, catching glimpses of substantial detached residences hidden behind tall hedges and barred by forbidding metal gates. It was still too early to make his call, so he stopped the car by the entrance to a church which lay beyond a tiled lych-gate. A winding path took him into an overgrown graveyard with little evidence of any maintenance. He ran his hand over a couple of the tombstones, trying to decipher information about the occupants interred below, but a combination of encrusted lichen and scarred stone face made it an impossible task.
He followed the path up to the doorway of the church and found that it was open. Inside, the church was in surprisingly good shape – not the hard pews and straight-back chairs of some churches he'd known. Here, there were modern, ergonomically designed seats covered in a mauve fabric. Whoever this congregation was, it demanded comfort to practice its religion.
His attention was caught by a large engraved stone set into the back wall of the church. The text was in a form of old English which he couldn't make out but, just as his attention was waning, he noticed a modern translation set inside a wooden frame next to the stone.
'In memory of Josiah Penhallam, priest of this parish, who was brutally struck down and murdered on the altar steps of this place of worship by the enemies of the King in the year of our Lord 1643.'
He felt his body bristle. This was his first direct contact with anyone from his own lineage, albeit nearly four hundred years ago. He was brought up an only child and his grandparents died when he was young. He had vague memories of an ancient aunt, with whiskers on her face and an unmistakable odour, who he would visit with his parents at Christmas. Apart from this, there was no other family. However, just before his father died, he discovered that he had been researching the family history and had established a direct link with the Penhallams. In 1752, Diggory was born to Rupert Penhallam. But Diggory was the last of three brothers and his fortunes lay outside the dwindling family estates. He died in the nearby town of Plymouth in 1801 and his progeny fared little better. They were recorded variously as charcoal burners and labourers, having by then moved to the docklands of east London. It was from this line of impoverished dock workers that Doug was descended.
All of this mattered little to him at the time but now, faced with Josiah Penhallam, a distant relation 'brutally murdered on the altar steps of this place of worship', he began to feel a sense of empathy with this strange Cornish clan.
Leaving the church, he eased the Mercedes around the twists and turns of the lane as it plunged further into dense woodland. He crossed a small humpback bridge and spied Penhallam Farm – a landmark that the waitress in the hotel had told him to look out for. Parking the car on the wide concrete drive that led to the farm, he continued on foot, taking a path that led down an unmade road bordered by an ancient stone wall. The wall suddenly gave way to two sturdy wrought iron gates. In the centre of the gates was a coat of arms – a shield guarded on each side by two posturing birds and a Latin inscription – the only word of which he could decipher was 'pareo' – 'obey' – a remnant of memory from his tortured years learning Latin at school. Underneath the shield was a plaque which read 'Penhallam Estates'.
YOU ARE READING
The Voice Within
ParanormalA journalist sacked for phone hacking and tired of his decadent life style researches a triple murder that took place in his own ancestral home during the English Civil War. He discovers that events which occurred there nearly four hundred years ago...
