The Smile of a Ghost by Phil Rickman Page B

Merrily said. ‘Can we…’ She squirmed a little. ‘Can we talk about Marion now?’
    * * *
    The ‘Dear Marion’ postcard. She talked about that.
    ‘When we go over there, I’ll ask Mrs Mumford if I can show it to you.’
    ‘Needs to be photocopied, I think, Merrily,’ the Bishop said.
    ‘Good idea.’
    ‘Then Andrew has to decide if the police should see it. Meanwhile, let me… let me get this right – this is a postcard, with a photograph of the castle on the front, written by Robbie Walsh to someone he actually addresses as… as Marion.’
    ‘Someone he imagines he’s walking with in the castle grounds, holding hands. And there’s a drawing of what appears to be a spectral female figure. Pleading with her to come to him. “I’ll be waiting,” he says.’
    ‘I see.’ Bernie Dunmore was silent for a moment. He seemed agitated. ‘What are your conclusions about that?’
    ‘The psychological one first?’
    ‘Please.’
    ‘Shy, solitary kid, fascinated by medieval history, besotted with Ludlow…’
    ‘You’re thinking fantasy-girlfriend,’ the Bishop said.
    ‘I don’t know. Is she fantasy-girlfriend material?’
    He sighed. ‘All right… look… I do, as it happens, know something about this story. Goes back to the twelfth century. Or, in my case, about thirty-five years, to when I was a young curate. Here, as it happens.’
    ‘I didn’t know you were a curate in Ludlow.’
    ‘Not something I’ve ever emphasized on my CV. A bishop is expected to have been around. Unfortunately, once I’d lived here I didn’t want to end up anywhere else. Moved on, drifted quietly back. I’ve been, ah, fortunate.’
    ‘You jammy sod, Bernie.’
    ‘Yes, that’s another way of putting it. So… I happened to be a young curate at St Laurence’s when a chap called Peter Underwood – doyen of British ghost-hunters, though I didn’t know it at the time – was researching a book called, if I remember rightly, A Gazetteer of British Ghosts . It has quite an extensive entry on Ludlow – most of which, as it happens, is taken up by the story of Marion de la Bruyère. Marion of the Heath.’
    She was usually described as ‘a lady of the castle’, Bernie said.
    Which could have meant anything – possibly she was a lady-in-waiting, if there were such creatures in the reigns of King Stephen and his successor, Henry II.
    Turbulent times. Less than a century after the Norman conquest, and the ownership of the new and highly strategic Ludlow Castle was in dispute. Stephen had put the fortress in the charge of a Breton knight, Joce de Dinan – arguably the source of the name Dinham, for the community under the castle’s perimeter wall, to the south-west. But the powerful baronial de Lacy family thought it should be theirs, and it was the conflict between Joce and the de Lacys that led to a young knight called Arnold de Lisle, a de Lacy man, being taken prisoner.
    ‘While not exactly established history, it’s certainly well-documented in a medieval epic known as The Romance of Fulk FitzWarrin ,’ Bernie said. ‘Seems that Marion de la Bruyère – described by one source as “a guileless damsel” – had fallen in love with the prisoner, Arnold, and helped him escape from the castle either down a rope or knotted sheets.’
    And then – her fatal mistake – Marion had arranged to let Arnold back into the castle, on a later occasion, by means of a rope ladder.
    ‘While the two of them are otherwise engaged in Marion’s bedchamber, a large number of armed men from the de Lacy camp come swarming up the ladder to capture the castle. Now we know that happened – de Lacy did get the castle. Appears to have slaughtered a lot of people and set fire to property in the streets of Ludlow that night to make it clear that he was now running the show. In fact, some of the killing and the burning would have happened exactly where we’re parked now.’
    ‘Thanks for that, Bernie.’
    ‘Anyway, when she finds out