Free Pestilence by Ken McClure Page A

entertaining as she was attractive. She was not however slow to point out the failings of Skelmore as a place to live, a view that Saracen happened to agree with, although he did feel a little irritated that an outsider should be so forthright so quickly.
    But such considerations had long since ceased to be important enough for him to take issue with. Throughout the course of the evening he smiled and laughed in all the right places. Jill might have been goaded into some kind of defence of her home town but she was kept fully occupied by Alan Tremaine who was having difficulty keeping his eyes off her cleavage and kept repeating - due to over-indulgence in Cotes du Rhone - that he hadn’t realised what delights had been lurking beneath the drab blue cotton of a Skelmore nurse’s uniform. Jill was well able to handle the situation for, at twenty seven, she had seen a lot of randy housemen come and go.
    ‘So why have you come to Skelmore Claire?’ asked Saracen.
    ‘My first job,’ replied Claire. ‘I’ve been doing a PhD at Oxford in archaeology and my supervisor is leading the search for the site of Skelmoris Abbey. He took me on despite the fact that I haven’t written up my thesis yet.’
    ‘Why the sudden interest in Skelmoris Abbey?’ asked Saracen. ‘No one has ever bothered to look for it before, have they?’
    ‘Not in recent times,’ agreed Clare but that was because no one really had any idea where the site was.’
    ‘And now?’
    ‘A few months ago a librarian in Oxford was leafing through the pages of some old books that had been bequeathed to the university and he found a map. It was very old and very yellow’
    ‘How exciting,’ said Jill.
    ‘Just like Treasure Island,’ added Tremaine.
    ‘It included a plan of Skelmoris Abbey and it contained information about the surrounding area. A lot has changed of course in six hundred years but we now think we have a reasonable chance of finding the actual site.
    ‘There was something about this in the local paper,’ said Saracen. ‘The abbey was supposed to have been destroyed by fire wasn’t it?’
    ‘The fire is fairly well documented,’ said Clare.
    ‘And the legend?’ smiled Saracen.
    Clare smiled and said, ‘Legends are legends.’
    ‘So the curse doesn’t bother you?’
    ‘What curse?’ asked Jill.
    Claire said, ‘According to the story, the abbey was entrusted with the safe-keeping of a chalice. Anyone attempting to remove the chalice would incur the wrath of God and pay with his life. Legend has it that a lot of people did.’
    ‘Creepy,’ said Jill.
    ‘What the story in the paper didn’t say was that the fire was deliberate,’ continued Claire. ‘After the deaths of the original Abbot and brothers the church tried several times to re-open the abbey. Although the new monks were God-fearing and had no intention of removing the chalice they met with the same fate as the others. In the end the church gave up and burned the place to the ground.
    ‘What an awful story,’ said Jill with a shiver. ‘I think if it was up to me I would let well alone.’
    Claire smiled and said, ‘The plan is that I dig during the day and write up my thesis in the evenings.”
    ‘Sounds like a full life,’ said Saracen.
    ‘I think the idea is that there won’t be too many distractions up here in the sticks so here I am as an uninvited guest of little brother.’
    “Consider yourself invited,” said Tremaine, leaning across and kissing his sister on the cheek.
    “I wish I had a brother like that,” said Jill. “Keith and I fight like cat and dog whenever we are together!”
    Tremaine made a rather unsteady attempt to kiss Jill on the cheek too. “I’ll be your brother,” he grinned.
    Jill laughed it off and expertly avoided Tremaine’s advance. In another person his behaviour might have been considered offensive but, from Alan Tremaine it was accepted with good humour. If anyone was upset by it was his sister. Saracen noticed her