The Stone Wife

They got out of the car. To Diamond’s eye, this was a perfect setting for a horror film. Extending from the tower were a gothic nave and an oratory that must have been part of the original, housing the antiques collection. More parts had been added at intervals since. Perversely the late nineteenth century two-storey wings were in the Tudor style, but still constructed from the grim, grey lias found locally. So this much-enlarged building now boasted at least four different styles of window — lancet, oriel, stone-mullioned and casement. Turrets and chimneys sprouted from the otherwise flat roofs. On the east side of the building was a twentieth century feature, an integral garage that still managed to look sinister, as though it led directly through the Tudor section into Stradling’s crypt below the tower. And the whole building was topped with battlements in an attempt to salvage some sort of unity from chaos.

‘Is it me, or is it a mess?’ Diamond said.

‘Stradling called it his repository,’ Leaman said.

‘Sums it up.’

‘You may be thinking of something else.’

‘Terrific view. I’ll give it that.’

The so-called priory — which had never housed a monk or a nun — stood on Cox’s hill, a high point of the Polden ridge. The peat moor stretched for miles below them, across the Vale of Avalon to the north where the Mendips made a dramatic blue backdrop. But in reality (difficult to grasp here) they weren’t particularly high up. The flatness of the terrain below made the impression.

‘He claimed that when he used a telescope from his tower on a clear day he could see across the Bristol Channel to his other house in South Wales,’ Leaman said.

‘My second home is the nick,’ Diamond said, ‘and I thank the Lord I can’t see it from my place. When did you say this was built?’

‘1838–9 the same year the book came out.’ Leaman as always couldn’t be faulted on his facts.

‘So he wrote the book to promote his collection.’

‘I suppose.’

‘And as he didn’t mention the Wife of Bath, we can assume he acquired her some time after?’

Leaman’s eyebrows popped up in tribute. The boss seemed to have grasped the fundamentals now.

‘But from where?’ Diamond said.

‘Some stonemason’s yard, I expect. He found a lot of his pieces lying about when buildings were being renovated. He was on a mission. Victorian restoration, so-called, stripped bits from a lot of churches and great houses and he salvaged whatever he could.’

Diamond was silent, thinking.

Leaman continued to prattle on like an audio guide. ‘The three pinnacles up there are very old and were originally part of the tower at Langport, which you can see from the other side of the road. He says in his book — he has a good way with words — that they now look down on their tawdry usurpers.’

‘What time are we meeting our local contact?’ Diamond said, weary of words and gingerbread architecture. ‘We’d better move on.’