The Triforium Page 6

  “Uhhh … a decapitated monarch. That’s a good start,” chimed in the woman in the white pantsuit.

  “Yes, of course. We have nothing but top-drawer spook stories at the Abbey. You see Bradshaw was the presiding justice of this court, but he showed up three days late for the trial. Then he claimed that it didn’t matter that he hadn’t heard the earlier testimony.”

  “A true bureaucrat. A man who was apparently ahead of his time,” added the woman in teal.

  “Why yes, he must have been because he ignored the king’s objections and pressed on with the remaining evidence. He made his judgment based on what little he had heard. He condemned the king to death for treason.”

  The Dean’s chat about John Bradshaw was making Bradshaw’s ghost somewhat uncomfortable. He stood next to Reverend Poda-Pirudi round-shouldered and hangdogged.

  The Reverend gleefully took this opportunity to jeer at him and wag a finger of disapproval as the Dean continued with his story.

  “Well, for his trouble Bradshaw got a lease on the deanery of the Abbey and a small office up here in the triforium. But it wasn’t all beer and skittles for Mr. Bradshaw. Ten years after he had condemned King Charles to death, he himself passed away from what they think was malarial fever. Of course the roundheads had him entombed here in the Abbey as were his co-conspirators, Oliver Cromwell and another parliamentarian named Henry Ireton.”

  “But this is just a history lesson. Where are the ghosts you promised us?” insisted the woman in teal.

  “Oh it gets better. You see when the restoration occurred, King Charles’ son, Charles II, was crowned king. Of course the son wanted revenge over his dead father. But he couldn’t execute Bradshaw, Cromwell, and Ireton because they were already dead. So, what he did do? He had their corpses removed from the Abbey and then taken to Tyburn in open ox carts. They were treated just like criminals who were still alive: they were hung up, still wrapped in their funeral shrouds. Once they were taken down, their heads and hands were chopped off and placed on spikes in front of Parliament as a warning to others not to defy the king.

  “Legend has it that Bradshaw’s ghost is still up here, where his office used to be. Perhaps that noise we just heard was a special treat?” he added with a bit of a giggle. “Supposedly he walks about this place on January 30 th, the day of the execution of the king. A few claim to have heard him over the centuries, and even fewer have claimed to have seen him. In recent times, our organist and choir director were up here for some reason … let me see … rummaging around in some boxes of old sheet music. Yes, that’s right. And while doing so, they claim that they saw Bradshaw. But please understand that they came up here just after the Abbey’s mid-winter carnival. They’d been celebrating a bit too much with a bottle of cognac and got it into their heads to go and poke about some old containers that are stored up here in hopes of finding a copy of Handel’s “ Gloria in excelsis Deo.” Did any of you notice the composer’s crypt in Poet’s Corner? It is just by the stairs we took to come up here.”

  There was silence.

  “You see, a copy of “ Gloria in excelsis Deo” had been recently found at the Royal Academy of Music and that’s like finding gold to a musicologist. I’m sure you can see why our organist and choir director were ever so keen on…”

  “Yes. Yes. That would be of interest to them. What about the ghost?” said the woman who had absolutely no desire to listen to the Dean discuss rare sheet music.

  “Of course, the ghost story. Well, these two members of our musical staff said that what they saw was Bradshaw. They insisted that the apparition matched the portrait of him at the British Museum … long gray hair, puritan style dress … but there was one curious difference … his skin was blue.”

  “Blue?” several ladies responded.

  “Yes blue. But again I must emphasize that they might as well have been seeing pink elephants. As I had said, they had been celebrating. Anyhow, even though they confessed to being tipsy at the time, they insisted that they saw the ghost of Bradshaw hunched over a small desk, holding a quill pen in his hand, while being taken to task by some fat dusky imp, who was leaning over him.”

  “Imp?” questioned the woman in the pantsuit.

  “Fat!?” stammered Reverend Poda-Pirudi, permitting only John Bradshaw to hear him. “Johnny, am I fat?” he said, again making sure to screen his voice from everybody’s hearing but Bradshaw’s.

  “No Reverend … perhaps big boned? Surely not fat. It must have been the cognac.”

  The Reverend nodded and turned his attention back to his uninvited guests.

  It was apparent that the dean’s ghost story was falling a little off the mark. It wasn’t quite meeting the supernatural standards of the West London Women’s Civic Association. Since properly entertaining these ladies was key to his fund drive, he began to embellish a bit.

  “Yes an imp. With long tusks and a tail.”

  The Reverend was now very agitated and was taking deep drags on his cigar as he stared menacingly towards the Dean.

  “They said he did a jig around Bradshaw as he held up the head of King Charles. Then the imp reached over and plucked off Bradshaw’s head from atop his shoulders and then danced about the room.”

  “I mean Johnny, did you ever?” the Reverend exclaimed as he gestured in the direction of the Dean.

  “You can imagine how alarmed our organist and choir director were when they came running to find me. I did indulge them and did listen to this rubbish. But believe me, I’ve kept a close eye on the use of distillates around here ever since. I’m sure that some would ask me why I didn’t discipline them. But you must appreciate the dilemma I was in. Both men were members of the Public & Commercial Services Union. You may recall that a few years ago the PCS had threatened to picket the Archbishop of Canterbury’s residence over a minor wage dispute. These gentlemen’s inebriated treasure hunt had occurred about this time. And truly we mustn’t judge our staff too severely. I confess that I let them off the hook too easily, but not before extolling them to heed the words from Ephesians 6:11 “ Put you on the armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil.”

  “Devil? Did he call me the devil?” The Reverend was puffing so furiously on his cigar that the paper band was beginning to be singed by the ember.

  “Well, that’s a wonderful story,” said the woman in the silk pantsuit, “but did this Bradshaw fellow smoke cigars? Because this place stinks of cigar smoke.”

  The impertinence, to claim that an Ignatsio Gaudelupe maduro torpedo No. 2 cigar could possibly stink was beyond all the other insults that the Reverend had endured. He moved across the room and planted himself eyeball-to-eyeball with the offending woman. But of course she couldn’t see him.

  “You know, now that you’ve mentioned, it does smell a bit like cigar smoke up here. Perhaps we just surprised a member of the cleaning crew? I keep after them not to smoke on the premises. The Abbey is in complete compliance with the Smoke free England laws. All of our entrance doors have the mandatory 70-millimeter international no-smoking signs attached to them. I don’t know what I’m going to do with our staff though. I’ve handed out brochures and offered them free attendance to a smoking cessation clinic. I’ve even sponsored noontime fitness walks for a smokefree Abbey.”

  The Dean then moved on. He had solicited all the sympathy he was going to get from this group of would-be donors. Ghost story over, he pushed on with his reason for inviting them up here in the first place. “Any questions about the proposed museum?”

  “Yes,” a woman said, as she raised her hand.

  “Go on, please. I’m here to answer all of your questions.”

  “It was some walk coming up all of those steps to get up here. I can’t imagine anyone who is handicapped or elderly or who has small children making their way up here. How are you going to accommodate
them?”

  “Excellent question. I’m so glad you asked that. It is almost as though you read my mind. I was just about to get to that bit. Near where you came up, in Poets’ Corner, we have this lovely design for a circular glass elevator that will bring people up and down.”

  Reverend Poda-Pirudi was now facing the Dean and blowing smoke rings at him. The Dean started to cough.

  “It will be,” he wheezed “on the outside of the masonry so we will not have to make any major structural changes, sort of like those glass elevators that you see in the lobby of some fancy modern hotel that can take you up thirty stories, but in our case it will just be a couple.”

  The smoke rings intensified, and the Dean went into another coughing fit.

  “It’s so easy to retrofit it into the existing architecture,” the Dean coughed. “The Abbey will be in full compliance (more coughing) with the Disability and Equality Act. You know I really must get security up here. This is not a smoking lounge. Just not acceptable. Ladies, I assure you that we won’t have any closet smokers up here when the museum is built. In fact we will have an ultra-modern air purification system suspended from the … cough … the hammer beams. Would you please follow me to the other end of the triforium? We passed a wonderful window with a splendid view of Parliament. I’d so like you to see it,” he said after another spasm of coughing.

  The Dean of Westminster Abbey motioned and his troop of prospective benefactors followed him back the way they had come, through the Reverend’s bookcase.

  Reverend Poda-Pirudi was very distressed. He picked up his chair and again seated himself at his desk. He even extinguished the little that remained of his cigar in his malachite ashtray. He then turned toward the doorway that led to John Bradshaw’s office. “Bradshaw!”

  “Y-e-s, Reverend,” the ghost of John Bradshaw stammered.

  “Bradshaw, I want to see Edward the Confessor in my office now!”

  Chapter Seven

  The Office in Croydon

  It was curious how this fellow seemed to know that sleep had always been a preoccupation with Wallace.

  “I have a theory,” he had gently intoned. “Could I explain it to you?”

  Butterfield didn’t really want to hear the theory. After all, the man was in his office because he had applied for the job that Butterfield had posted. Wallace hadn’t even had a chance to ask the guy about his secretarial skills and here he was offering up opinions. Theories weren’t being solicited; just the routine organizational abilities needed to help get an anemic business back on its feet again.

  “Well, sure. I have on occasion had a hard time getting some shuteye,” Butterfield lied. It was only during the past couple of nights that he could ever recall getting his full eight hours. Only since Reverend Poda-Pirudi had handed him that check had he been able to have an anxiety-free evening snooze. Maybe that was because there was now a chance to save the family business.

  “You see, sleep is very important to our health. You must get plenty of it to be healthy. Yet you mustn’t get too much.”

  Butterfield nodded as he decided that this kook obviously wasn’t going to get the job. He would humor him and then show him the door.

  “Yes we need our sleep.” It was a subject Wallace could relate to.

  “We need sleep to dream. Dreams are what everything is about. Dreams have played a vital role in evolution. You see, if a species that dreams, like, let’s say human beings, has wondrous dreams all the time, they would never get out of bed. Life would be fulfilled through dreaming. There would be little or no attempt to work at survival. The creature would starve to death while in bed or be gobbled up while napping. Any creature with consistently good dreams would go extinct.”

  “I see,” said Wallace. Maybe it was this guy’s retro-muttonchops that were straight out of the 1960s, but something more than this theory was out of whack here. Butterfield felt a cold shiver go down his spine as his ghost came out of hiding for the first time in days.

  “But if your dreams are too bad, then you wouldn’t get any sleep. No sleep, and your health falls apart. You become sluggish and slow-witted and you are either chased down or eaten or you die from an illness caused by sleep deprivation. So, you see, then your genes wouldn’t be passed on.”

  The ghost rose up to the spot where it normally stood, just above Wallace’s head, and, perplexed, looked out and immediately became spooked by what it saw. Wallace was talking to nothing — to thin air.

  The man with the mutton chop whiskers stopped, stared intently at Butterfield, and then resumed.

  “You need to have the right balance, you see. You need your good dreams to make you want to go to bed and some bad ones so you don’t grow overly fond of being there.”

  “Yes, of course. One can’t get too much sleep,” Though he had never known the experience, Wallace hoped by blurting in he would end the man’s babbling and then could see him on his way. “Mr. Berwyn have you ever been employed as an office assistant?”

  Mr. Berwyn was unflappable. He ignored the question and continued with his discourse about sleep. “The best dreams are the so-so ones. Man and other animals have evolved to have mostly so-so dreams. They don’t make much sense, they don’t make you feel good, nor do they scare you, but they do let you get the right amount of sleep. The survival of the fittest means having boring dreams.”

  Of course, Wallace’s ghost knew what was going on, but he had never seen a spirit that had been liberated from his host. The ghost knew that they must be all about, but also knew that no embryonic specter, like himself, or any living creature, could see them unless they wanted you to. What Wallace’s ghost didn’t know was why this apparition from some long-dead person was making its presence known to Wallace. Things were getting to be very unsettling around Wallace Butterfield. First there was that creepy Reverend with no spirit at all, and now a spirit had come calling on him.

  Butterfield placated the applicant with another nod and more feigned interest. He knew what was bothering him about this guy, not that he was some nutter, but that he looked ill, physically ill. He struck Butterfield as the sort of person who kept inhalators, EpiPens, and nitroglycerin tablets in every drawer of his house. He imagined that he might be a terrible sick-time abuser, and no doubt Jobcentre had sent him down to do this interview just so that he could keep his jobseeker’s allowance. Obviously no one expected him to be hired.

  “Well, thank you very much Mr. Berwyn, I’ve enjoyed listening to your little theory but I have to press on right now. I have a tight schedule today. There are several more people to interview, you know. So, when I’ve finished, you will be hearing from me.”

  Mr. Berwyn smiled faintly and appeared thankful. He seemed to be pleased that the interview was over and that he would now be allowed to leave. Butterfield moved to the office door and opened it, hoping to help the fellow on his way and get him out of his hair. But as he did so, Mr. Berwyn stopped and looked at Wallace without making eye contact. Wallace assumed that Mr. Berwyn was bashful or had some self-esteem issues. So, he stuck out his hand to show his friendly intent.

  Berwyn didn’t notice the invite to shake hands, but stared upward, to a spot a little above Wallace’s head. He then continued with his obsession upon the subject of dreams.

  “You know now my dreams are quite delightful, but then again I am no longer concerned about my survival.”

  Mr. Berwyn then noticed Wallace’s proffered hand, and clasped it weakly. “Mr. Butterfield, I so enjoyed meeting you.”

  As he shook Wallace’s hand, a mist seemed to clear so that Wallace’s ghost was able to see Mr. Berwyn for the first time. It was a shock. The ghost had never seen a disembodied spirit. There it was, a manlike creature all shimmering in blue, young, yet old. At first the specter had muttonchops, then a long beard. The face became deeply wrinkled and then it was a child’s face. A baby
floated in mid-air with its life’s history streaming behind it, then it was a middle-aged man again, with every garment that it had ever worn passing into view within a few seconds. There was a flickering of muted shades; buff, brown, grey, and green, upon fabrics of wool, cotton, and linen. Clothes suddenly fanned out as though a magician was displaying all the cards in a deck and then folded back into place. Suits, waistcoats, dressing gowns, and nightshirts collapsed into a dusty black frock coat. Just below the brim of a threadbare top hat, Mr. Berwyn’s eyes pulsated iridescent blue. These eyes locked onto those of Wallace’s ghost, gripping it hard with a mesmerizing gaze. Wallace’s ghost had had no way of knowing what being on the outside of Wallace could be like. The ghost wanted to know more. The ghost had oh so many questions … years of questions. But then the frock coat and top hat disappeared and a rather ordinary man in a soft yellow windbreaker was being led out the front door of Butterfield and Son Architects.

  Wallace Butterfield crisply snapped a door lock into place, just in case the old tramp tried to wander back in and tell him about how he had just devised a theory about how dogs domesticated man.

  Butterfield’s ghost was not happy with Butterfield. He was not happy with Butterfield at all.

  ***

  Between interviews, Wallace groped for ideas, something to show to Reverend Poda-Pirudi. He needed to come up with one quickly. He liked having the money. He didn’t want the Reverend to sue him for return of the funds. Ideas were needed, but ideas were just not there. His brain was a sponge. It could sop up other people’s ideas. It could parrot back architectural treatises from textbooks, but making something truly good and his own was just not his specialty. But, then again, Reverend Poda-Pirudi must have realized during their conversation that he couldn’t expect something that was truly good from Wallace’s head. Maybe mediocre was all that was necessary?

  Clutching to this hope, Butterfield booted up his computer and searched the Internet for photos of cathedrals. His idea was to cut and paste various towers and steeples onto a downloaded image of Westminster Abbey. Perhaps one of them would fall into place — But none of this proved to be inspirational. In desperation, he narrowed and elongated an image of his le Mareschal’s Supermarket and the placed it atop the roof of the Abbey. Of course, it looked horrible. Butterfield knew it would. All this Photoshop exercise proved was that he was woefully inadequate for the task.