The Burning Altar Read online

  Table of Contents

  A selection of titles by Sarah Rayne

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Epilogue

  A selection of titles by Sarah Rayne

  BLOOD RITUAL*

  THE DEVIL’S PIPER

  THORN: AN IMMORTAL TALE*

  CHANGELING: AN IMMORTAL TALE*

  WILDWOOD: AN IMMORTAL TALE*

  PROPERTY OF A LADY

  THE SIN EATER

  *Originally published under the pseudonym of Frances Gordon

  THE BURNING ALTAR

  Sarah Rayne

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in 1996 by

  HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

  a division of Hodder Headline PLC

  338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH

  eBook edition first published in 2012 by Severn House Digital an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited.

  Copyright © 1996 by Frances Gordon

  The right of Frances Gordon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0067-9 (epub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  Chapter One

  Extract from The Times, 2 January 199–

  Lewis Chance, the descendant of the notorious Victorian traveller Patrick Chance, is to be created a baronet in the New Year’s Honours’ List for his charity work over the last 15 years. The announcement has caused renewed interest in a family which has seldom been out of the news for long.

  Sir Lewis, 50, has twice been in the ‘Ten Most Eligible Batchelors’ list, and although he has had a number of close female companions, he has never married.

  His early life was eventful: following his father, Charles’s, conviction in 1970 for misappropriation of funds from the famous House of Chance – one of the last remaining private banks in England – he spent some months in Tibet, reportedly retracing the footsteps of Patrick Chance whose autobiographical book, A Lecher Abroad, was published in unexpurgated version shortly after Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which it outsold. The sensation it created became a legend in publishing circles, and the Lord Chamberlain’s famous remark, ‘It appears that women would rather take a Chance than have a Game (keeper)’ [sic] now appears in many contemporary books of quotations.

  Patrick Chance left England in the 1880s, according to rumour because of his close friendship with one of Edward VII’s female companions, but his later life was surrounded by mystery. However, despite a number of approaches, Sir Lewis has always declined to be interviewed on the subject of his great-uncle – a determined silence that stimulated the public’s interest in him.

  Sir Lewis has recently acquired a derelict property in St Stephen’s Road, in London’s East End, which he intends to restore and use as a centre for helping the homeless and despairing, and also as a headquarters for the Chance Charitable Trust.

  Readers will recall that St Stephen’s Road has lately been the focus of a number of unsolved disappearances, almost all of them known prostitutes. Sir Lewis, when asked briefly about this, said he could not see that it would affect his centre’s aims.

  Extract from the Daily Banner, 10 January 199–

  BARONET TO TAKE A CHANCE IN JACK THE RIPPER LAND?

  VICTORIAN RAKE’S DESCENDANT TO DESCEND TO CANNING TOWN

  Lewis Chance, last week honoured for his charity work, was yesterday spotted on a tour of inspection of the tumbledown property in St Stephen’s Road, which he intends to turn into a charity centre. With the tally of vanished rent boys in Canning Town already at five, it appears that the noble Sir Lewis is going intrepidly into a part of the East End where a twentieth-century Ripper in gay mood might very well stalk . . .

  The property itself was a music hall in the 1880s when it was frequently patronised by the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, and the Duke of Clarence who came to watch their actress ladyfriends on the stage. Today, it’s doubtful if Dirty Bertie would recognise his old stamping ground.

  Certainly the elegant baronet would have been wiser not to make his tour wearing Italian leather shoes and a Savile Row overcoat. What’s de rigueur in Chelsea is disastrous in Canning Town, Sir Lewis!

  The newspapers had not missed much – the tabloids had not missed a thing – but Lewis thought that on the whole he had been treated more sympathetically than he had dared hope, although he could have done without The Times’s thinly veiled insinuations that he had made mysteries in order to make money, and he could certainly have done without the Banner’s jibes about Savile Row and Chelsea.

  Inevitably most of the papers had dug up Patrick’s book – and equally inevitably there had been a fresh wave of speculation about his own marriage intentions, one of the women’s page journalists going so far as to cull his circle of friends, and come up with a kind of shopping list of possible wives. Most were plain and some were downright ugly and all were dull, and Lewis was damned if he was going to marry anyone purely to satisfy the gutter press.

  The Banner’s crack about Jack the Ripper in gay mood would bring down the wrath of every homosexual organisation in the country, and the editor would probably be hauled up before the Press Complaints Committee, but if rent boys were vanishing from the area, it was probably fair game for the journalists.

  Only the Banner had bothered to come up with anything about the house itself, which Lewis found surprising. The place was one of the many sad lost music halls that had fallen into disuse, though this one had suffered a fire and had not even survived until the twilight that fell across the Edwardian theatre after the First World War. Others had rallied, and enjoyed brief ren
aissances as picture palaces and dance halls in the twenties and thirties, but St Stephen’s Road hall had prematurely rotted quietly into dereliction behind its peeling plasterwork and flaking stucco. It would be an act of madness to buy it, but it would be an act of chivalry as well. The notion of making a chivalrous gesture to coincide with the newly bestowed title rather pleased Lewis.

  According to his solicitor, tutting over the haphazard title deeds and frowning at surveyors’ reports, the place had been the home of a recluse from around the turn of the century, until the First World War. Since the Allies signed the Armistice, it had been the home of tramps. The solicitor had taken one look at the structural surveys, and groaned and reached for the phone.

  ‘I see you’re on one of your mad altruism trips again, Lewis,’ he said. ‘Don’t come to me to bail you out on this one because I shan’t do it. If you buy this rotting hulk, you do so against my advice. It’s got fifty kinds of dry rot, and every one’s listed in Latin.’

  Lewis said temperately, ‘Merulius lacrymans and Xestobium rufovillosum,’ and heard through the phone a half-strangled curse. ‘Dry rot and deathwatch beetle.’

  ‘I might have known it was no good advising you,’ said his solicitor, crossly. ‘I dare say you’ll buy the place no matter what I say – yes, I thought you would. Well, it’s your decision, but it sounds to me as if the place is tumbling into the Thames brick by brick. Listen, for the love of all the gnomes in Zurich make sure you get those grisly sounding cellars looked at.’

  ‘Bodies and smugglers?’

  ‘Rats and rising damp,’ said the solicitor caustically. ‘Although come to think of it, bodies wouldn’t surprise me.’

  ‘You’ve been reading the tabloids,’ said Lewis, and rang off.

  He would buy the property, even if the cellars turned out to be flooded by the Thames twice a day, and even if bodies floated in the debris. The ground and first floors would provide the kind of hybrid centre he had wanted to build for a year or more: part soup kitchen and canteen for derelicts and runaways, and part counselling centre for the newly divorced or bereaved or redundant. The helpless, the homeless and the despairing, The Times had called them.

  The recluse had evidently gone some way towards turning the place into an ordinary house, but traces of the original music hall lingered. Lewis, prowling through dusty, high-ceilinged rooms, saw that the dividing walls were flimsy affairs, easily torn down. In some of the rooms the partitioning had been done so sketchily that the plaster mouldings near the ceilings had been chopped up so you got a leering cherub’s head in one room and his feet in the other.

  But Lewis could see where the stage would have been and the dressing rooms, with supper and smoking rooms on the first floor. Once an elaborate curving staircase would have led to the upper floors: a wide sweeping affair of polished mahogany the colour of molasses and treacle, framed in crimson velvet and gilt, and cream walls. But the original stairs had long since gone, the banister had been torn out by enterprising vandals and the walls were cheesy with damp and defaced with graffiti. It was remarkable how most of today’s wall-writers seemed unable to spell even the most basic of Anglo-Saxon epithets. Piles of distasteful rubbish lay in corners: greasy papers that had enclosed hamburgers or foil trays of curry, and smashed beer bottles and sodden newspapers and used condoms. You could make out a very convincing argument for the things the human race regarded as necessary to survival just by studying the rubbish in derelict buildings. Shelter, food, drink and sex.

  Lewis went up to the first floor, keeping a wary eye out for rotting boards and slumbering tramps. Would it be possible to make a set of apartments out of the very top floor, always assuming the very top floor was sound? The penthouse suite? The attic suite would be nearer the mark. To live here would be the maddest thing he had done yet; this was London’s Dockland but it was not the smart overdeveloped docks of the eighties; this was the older, vaguely sinister wharfland beloved of thriller writers before the last war. Nayland Smith stalking Limehouse after the evil mandarin, Fu Manchu. Sherlock Holmes prowling Chinatown on the trail of Moriarty. Patrick Chance making assignations with actresses . . .? Yes, Patrick might easily have come out here; he might well have been in the audience when the place was a music hall. Had he been one of the Prince of Wales’s set? There was no mention of it in the insouciant travel journal which had been published after his death by a cousin, but at this distance it was impossible to know what had been expurgated beyond recall by his scandalised relatives and what had not. Lewis thought it served them right that Patrick’s diary had finally emerged to that blaze of shocked delight fifty years later, although much of the credit had to go to the enterprising editor at the publishing house who had turned up the original manuscript by sheer chance, scrapped Patrick’s modest title of Travels in Tashkara, substituted the tag A Lecher Abroad, and so precipitated one of the biggest bestsellers of the decade.

  He looked through the grimed window panes into St Stephen’s Road. Whatever it had been in Patrick’s day it was a slum now, even without the press’s coverage of the vanishing rent boys. If you were foolish enough or reckless enough to walk down the street by yourself after dark, you could count on being accosted by prostitutes of both sexes at least half a dozen times. If he lived out here he would go in permanent fear of muggers and the house would probably end up being burned to the ground by meths drinkers and drug addicts – and all anyone would say was that it served him right, poor Lewis, he was always a bit eccentric.

  But the idea of abandoning the elegant comfortable Chelsea house and living out here attracted him. How practical was it? Supposing the attic floor was beyond rescue?

  But the long light attics were spacious and had a tranquillity that Lewis had not expected. He had no idea how to test for the safety of the floors, but although they creaked ominously as he walked across them, they felt firm enough. If Merulius lacrymans and Xestobium rufovillosum had ventured inquisitively up here they had not inflicted very much damage.

  Last of all he descended to the cellars, the sounds of traffic and the street noises from St Stephen’s Road dying away. The cellars were a small subterranean labyrinth, a secret world: at the foot of the rickety wooden stairs was a narrow tunnel like a culvert, the walls rippling greenly with waterlight from the nearby river. Several small doors opened off the tunnel, and from somewhere up ahead was the faint drip of water, echoing softly in the enclosed space. There was a smell of wet brick and decay.

  Lewis looked about him. Someone had brought not only the old gas lighting down here – several rusting brackets hung from the walls – but electricity. He tried the old-fashioned switch, and incredibly was rewarded by a faint glow from the single bulb hanging on a long cord from the roof. So far so good.

  As he went cautiously along the tunnel, he began to have the feeling that he had slipped through a chink in the house’s history. I’m going back, he thought. I’m going back and back, maybe as far as the recluse’s day. Was this his hiding place?

  The room was at the far end of the cellar tunnels: a large cavernous chamber with stone walls and a groyned ceiling. There was no light, but the faint overspill from the passage cast a glimmer. At some time someone had furnished the room, and a sad air of decayed Edwardian grandeur still remained. Tattered hangings adorned the walls, and there was a small desk, once beautiful but now scarred and worm-eaten beyond repair, and an old day bed, the fabric so mildewed that it was impossible to know what its original colour had been. There was a stench of damp and mould, but damp and mould could be dealt with. Electricity should be properly laid, on the very credible basis that the wiring in the passages was so old that it was probably dangerous.

  His lips curved into a smile. If he had hired a team of architects to design this it could not have been better. It did not matter if this rotting crumbling place had been a music hall or a recluse’s hideaway or a brothel; he was going to buy it.

  The cellars that his solicitor had so deprecated were exactly what he
had been looking for.

  What he had not bargained for was the curiously persistent legends, not of the old theatre, but of the recluse himself.

  The workmen – most of whom were local – related the faintly grisly tale with relish, smacking their lips over mugs of strong tea and chomping down bacon sandwiches. No one knew the recluse’s name, which added to the mystery – it might be that nobody ever had known it – but until quite recently you could find very old people who remembered seeing him: tall thin bloke he’d been, and a bit of a posh plum by all accounts. They glanced at one another as they said this, because Sir Lewis was a posh plum himself, not that he didn’t speak very polite when he set you to do a job, and not that he wasn’t being very pleasant now, perching on the window ledge and accepting a mug of tea – a good strong brew he’d find it as well – and asking about the legend.

  The workmen, quick to spot and resent patronage, were very happy to tell what they knew, it being their tea-break and all, and always supposing he had the time to listen, him being a sir and everything. They dared say you didn’t get ghosts in Chelsea?

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Lewis. ‘This is very good tea, by the way. I’m not interrupting your break, am I? Do go on about the ghost.’

  So they settled in for a bit of a gossip, and told how the recluse had seldom been known to emerge from his dark seclusion, but how now and then he’d come creeping out, when the streets were deserted or maybe thick with one of the old fogs – real pea-soupers in those days there’d been, said the workmen. London Particulars they’d called them, and there was nothing like a London Particular for hiding them as didn’t want to be seen – yes, and for having a bit of the old how’s-your-father up against the wall— But here they recollected their company, and came abruptly back to the subject of how the recluse would prowl the streets, wound up in a long dark overcoat, with a wide-brimmed hat pulled well down to hide his face, and how people would tell children not to go near the house, and say things like, If you aren’t good the Fog Man will get you. Like you might say, The Bogeyman will get you. There was some as maintained he’d been horribly mutilated in the First World War, and daren’t show his face for fear of people running screaming from him, but there was others as said, No, he was a bastard of old Edward VII’s, and so like him in appearance that he’d been paid to keep his face forever masked, for fear that anti-Royalists might use him in a plot against the Throne. Not everyone had supported the Crown in those days – well, not everyone did today.