The Abbey Farm Curse. Ch. 9.

The Abbey Farm Curse

Chapter Nine

June's cottage turned out to be everything I expected it to be and more, except that instead of roses clambering over its walls it had an early flowering wisteria in full bloom. The drooping racemes of pale lilac/blue flowers festooned the front, contrasting beautifully with the red of the brick and the black and white of the paintwork, outlining the porch and the small paned cottage windows and nearly, but not quite, scrambling onto the red pantiled roof.

I tapped on the door as gently as I could with a heavy black knocker in the shape of an iron torque, but the noise it generated still sounded to me like the knock of the grim reaper, echoing through the house in a most unromantic manner. It's impossible to do a friendly 'rat-a-tat-tat' with knockers like that, but I suppose June had got used to it. In any event she showed up at the door with an open and welcoming smile, backing up with the door and mock bowing in greeting.

'You are welcome in my humble abode,' she told me with pseudo-solemnity, her formal words made lie by her beaming face.

I had worried that our first encounter and its horny outcome would sour this second meeting, but instead it was instantly as if we'd been friends for years. The sex that had taken place in the abbey was never specifically mentioned, but nor was it an issue to be tiptoed around. It was accepted that it had happened and been enjoyed at the time, but it wasn't given such overwhelming importance as to overshadow our evening together this time.

I'll say this for June, she sure can cook. I'm not certain what we ate, she wouldn't tell me what it was called, but it was Italian based and simply fantastic. Afterwards we collapsed side by side on the sofa with my arm falling naturally around her shoulder as she snuggled up against me. What with her perfume, a beautifully full stomach and the 'smoky midnight' music of Oscar Peterson and Stan Getz on the CD player, I was as happy and content as any man could be. I cupped her chin and turned her face towards me, leaning down for a kiss.

'Whoa boy, that isn't all you came for, is it?'

At least I could hear reluctance in her refusal. But she was right of course, I had much more pressing matters (notice I didn't say more 'important' matters) for us to attend to first. We sat next to each other working our way through a bottle of wine whilst I told her all about our first couple of weeks living at Abbey Farm. It was a lot easier than I expected, June listened quietly and without passing judgment, asking pertinent questions without prying, accepting my confession of sex with Angie without drawing any conclusions, and gently leading me when the going got a little tough. As a listener, a confessor, a counsellor, she was beyond reproach, and I told her every single detail without embarrassment or shame. The only thing I held back on was our reluctant conclusion that some kind of force was actually directing our actions, and not because I was worried what she would think but because I wanted to see if she would draw the self-same conclusion.

June was intrigued by the dream I'd had involving Angie and my mother, but she was especially interested in our apparent time travel, offering the opinion that it made Angie and I special in some way, though she didn't know why. Her reasoning was that because of her interest in local history she had already delved into the site's past and she believed we were the first to experience anything along those lines. There had been no mention of anything like it in the records of the abbey, either as an abbey or a manor house, and it wasn't the sort of thing to get missed out. But as to why it should happen to us, she had no idea.

I countered with my theory that it was just a case of the force, or influence, or whatever you wanted to call it, was simply growing stronger and had now reached the point where these so-called time travel episodes were possible, but she couldn't agree. If that were the case, she reasoned, it should have happened when she and I made love in the church or when Angie and Willow spent the night together, but it clearly hadn't. Although admittedly it seemed that, if the latest incident was anything to go by, it was now capable of initiating it without sex having taken place at all.

'There you are,' I told her triumphantly, 'it's getting stronger like I said.'

'Look, don't ask me to justify this, but I've got a weird feeling,' she replied, 'that it's more a case of now it's identified you two as ones that suit it and it has dispensed with sex as a means of setting things off.'

'But if that's the case,' I told her, 'it means that the influence, the force, is being controlled by some sort of intelligence.'

'Yes, I know. But that's what I'm beginning to think.'

I felt vindicated. June had come to the same conclusion we had, albeit by a rather different route. Now at least I didn't have to worry about my sanity and I could concentrate on trying to set the abbey straight. 'But why do you think so?'

'Because it doesn't seem random to me,' she answered, 'and nor did it to Willow. You told me that she said it seemed that you were being shown the couple by the pool as a way of proving the site's original innocence after you'd been exposed to its later wickedness. That sounds like intelligence to me, doesn't it to you?'

'Unless one hotspot is innocent and the other one not so.'

'Possibly.'

We lapsed into thoughtful silence for a while, until June got up to replace our empty wine bottle with a full one and came back with an arm full of papers, determined to fill me in on a lot of the site's general history to try and provide a background for our current troubles. I found it fascinating, especially as a couple of details consolidated my opinion that we were seeing genuine episodes from the abbey's history. But don't let me jump the gun, I'll tell you little more about my strange home first. It seems the monks who built the first known abbey had been an austere lot, having little contact with the outside world except through a hospital run for the sick and dying of the local villages. The earliest building, therefore, consisted of little more than cells for the monks, a chapel, refectory and kitchen, plus, of course, the hospital.

But as time moved on the foundation kind of lost its way, becoming rich and prosperous from land given 'for the sake of their souls' by local lords and knights, until eventually it had moved away from its original charitable function altogether to become to all intents and purposes simply another landed estate. After that its buildings became more and more impressive, the chapel became a church, the simple cells were replaced by much more generous quarters, and then (after the bubonic plague emptied the neighbouring village) the hospital itself was turned into a fine scriptorium - all 'for the glory of God' of course. Eventually it became so grand that the abbot's own lodgings outshone most of the local manors and its visitor's accommodation was said to be suitable for royalty.

Over the years there were rumours, apparently well substantiated rumours, of corruption and 'scandalous conduct', although such was the abbey's power and influence that nothing was ever proven against anyone who could claim to belong to it. Church decadence came under the remit of the ecclesiastical courts, and they had a very big carpet to sweep things under when it was deemed necessary. But not even such a prosperous establishment could escape unscathed forever and in the sixteenth century it became a natural target for the avaricious claws of King Henry VIII when he set about dissolving the monasteries. The monks were ejected, the abbey's wealth swiftly disappeared into the king's coffers and the abbey itself and its immediate estates were made a gift to one of his aristocratic cronies, who promptly converted it to secular use.

These new owners were soon the subject of more tales of debauchery, but as had happened with the religious order before them, their wealth and position kept them relatively safe. But even then the abbey's future was not quite settled, because at the beginning of the eighteenth century this particular set of owners ran out of male heirs and the entire estate passed, via the sole surviving daughter, to a rapidly rising mercantile family. They used it first as a home for their heir apparent, but after some unnamed family problems (the nature of which both June and I would have happily made a guess at) its use was changed to that of a dower house in which to deposit aging and widowed members of its line.

The family was already trading with the Mediterranean and North Africa when they inherited the abbey, and soon they invested very heavily and very profitably in the West Indies and the Americas, buying both cotton and sugar plantations, as well as the ships to transport both their own and their neighbours' workforces straight from Africa. Throughout the eighteenth century money poured in from the slave trade and the plantations, and they grew in wealth and influence. Soon one of its more formidable women of the family realised one day she too might need to spend her twilight years in the Abbey, and she persuaded her husband, then a newly created Earl, that a medieval building was no longer suitable accommodation for a dowager Countess and consequently he built a brand new and very luxurious mansion incorporating the site of the abbot's lodge, and relegated the rest of the remaining monastic structure to decay as underused out-buildings and stores.

And so it continued until early Victorian times, when the 'new' mansion caught fire and burned down, leaving only its east wing and some bits of the rest intact. But by now the family owned a number of splendid manors and the fire was little more than an inconvenience to them, so instead of rebuilding the whole thing they merely converted the surviving wing for use as a farm house, built a new farmyard roughly where the other wing of the main building had stood, and rented it out to a tenant farmer.

Over the next hundred or so years a succession of more or less successful tenants held the farm, until the last one found himself in trouble with the authorities for 'inappropriate conduct' with his own daughter. This was the Barker family that we'd already been told about. Incest was not the sort of thing the aristocratic owners encouraged, although it must be said their own reputation was far from snow white, and they terminated his tenancy forthwith and put the farm up for sale. Not that the fact bothered the farmer much, because he was given free board and lodgings in one of her majesty's prisons after the police found certain films and photographs among his belongings. That, of course, is where we eventually came in by buying the farm and, as June pointed out, inheriting its problems. It was those problems I was hoping she could help us combat.

Over time June had accumulated copies of an assortment of plans and maps, and even documents, relating to the history of the abbey, and knowing they would be useful, she'd hunted them out ready. Those were the papers she'd brought in with the wine and now, with dinner cleared away, she laid them on the table and invited me to look them over.

The first thing I noticed was how big the manor house had been in its heyday, a true stately home of splendid proportions that the surviving portion could not convey. The owning family must have been extremely wealthy, but then the slave trade did tend to be on the lucrative side. In order to build such a magnificent edifice it had been necessary to landscape some of the site, flattening a part of it to form a level platform for the building to stand on and at the same time getting rid of a lot of ancient earthworks, earthworks which I'd actually seen surrounding the iron age village. That, it seemed, was the time of the pool being drained, when the surrounding land was dug away. For a few moments I looked at it with only the pool in mind, but then something of much greater significance came to mind. I checked the medieval abbey plans against the manor building plans, and those against the modern O. S. Maps, and had my 'eureka' moment.

'June?' I asked, as calmly as I could. 'Will you compare the elevation of the old abbot's lodgings against that of the farmhouse.'

Looking puzzled she peered at each map in turn.

'It looks like they flattened the ground when they built the manor, and so the lodgings stood higher than the farmhouse. Why?'

'About one story higher, would you say?' I asked again, trying to suppress a triumphant grin.

'Maybe, yes, roughly that....' Suddenly she saw what I was driving at. 'So where the abbot lived would have been where your bedrooms are, and that's why the seat of manipulation in the farmhouse is on that floor. So it all stems from when it was an abbey proper.'

'Or earlier,' I prompted, 'when an iron age chieftain had his roundhouse on exactly the same spot.'

'Yes.' She agreed. 'But how does that help?'

In the practical sense it didn't, and I felt instantly deflated.

'I don't know.' I admitted. 'But at least it narrows the time frame for when everything started. It must have been after the part of the iron age that we saw, because that was fine, and before Tudor times when the abbey was dissolved.'

There was a flaw in my timeline that June immediately spotted, and she promptly pointed it out.

'Actually, it could have been any time up until the big house was built.'

'Fuck, so it could.'

'But,' she continued, 'I don't know why, but I think your dream holds at least a part of the key. I think the stone slab represented the Celtic altar and so I think it all went wrong here long before that alter was replaced by a Christian one. Though where Angie or your mother come into it I have no idea.'

Lights of sudden confused understanding were going off in my head and I wanted to tell her that I agreed, and that I thought she'd hit the nail straight on the head about the altar. There was something about that lump of stone that was vaguely bothering me - but then, a lot of things were bothering me. I tried to sum up what conclusions I thought we'd arrived at.

'Okay, so what you're saying is that there is an intelligent force originating sometime in the dim and distant past, that has plagued Abbey Farm ever since by making people sex mad, and it's now decided to concentrate on Angie and me for some reason that makes no sense, and it plays us movie clips of what was happening here in the past?'

'Yeah, that's about it, and before you say it I know that's not very helpful.'

'You can say that again!'

'Yeah, that's about it, and before....'

She got about that far before I grabbed her and clamped my mouth over hers to shut her up.

'Do you think we should change the subject?' She asked when we finally broke for air.

'Good idea, what would you like to talk about?'

'Who says I want to talk?' She grinned, and I understood every word she hadn't spoken. Why talk when you can do?

I think it had already been tacitly agreed I'd be staying the night, which is why neither of us had tried to keep my alcohol consumption to safe driving limits, but now it was an accepted fact and half an hour later we were in bed and in each other's arms. Now, throughout this story I've been open with you, my reader, about what I did in bed, and about how I felt about it. But this time.... Well this time I wasn't simply having sex, I was making love to a beautiful woman who I already begun to hope could potentially become my new life partner, and that sort of relationship is one to keep private. So you'll forgive me if this chapter finishes early.