That night Zelda insisted on making up a bed for me on her sofa. She sent The Beard to notify the Popplewells, even though he looked nearly as dead as Stourton’s servants.
“Just tell them you picked Jon up from school and the two of you had so much fun that you forgot to call,” she said, gently nudging him out the door.
“Fun? Do I look like I had fun?” The Beard groaned. But he did manage to convince the Popplewells to let me stay two more nights with Zelda. Then he spent an hour on the phone with my mother, who had of course already called the Popplewells and set them on high alert. Life can get complicated when you can’t just tell the truth. Please excuse Jon Whitcroft’s absence. He had to save his best friend’s life and break an old family curse. We would’ve all given a lot if Zelda could have just written that kind of note to the school.
The next morning I woke up to a toad staring down at me from the sofa’s armrest and to the sweet smell of pancakes.
“After a night like that, you can’t just go to school!” Zelda announced as I stumbled into the kitchen. “I already called Mrs. Tinker and told her both of you have upset stomachs because Matthew let you have too many sweets. Luckily, she doesn’t know he’s a dentist.”
The Beard was great for excuses. I was just mulling over how I could use him in the future, when he came hobbling into the kitchen. He looked much worse for wear, but that was not the reason I nearly didn’t recognize him. The Beard no longer had a beard.
“I just felt so different this morning,” he said, shoveling pancakes between his immaculate teeth. “The beard no longer felt right.”
Ella gave him a kiss on his smooth cheek, but I wasn’t sure whether I liked his face better this way, so I decided to keep thinking of him as The Beard for the time being (and I still do). But I had to admit, the scar on his chin was pretty impressive. Looking at it, I nearly regretted that Stourton hadn’t left any such visible marks on my face.
After breakfast I finally told Ella about the dead chorister in the school chapel. She listened, as usual, with a deadpan face, which alone was enough to make me feel quite uneasy again.
“You have to tell Longspee about this!” she said. “I’m sure he’ll explain everything.”
“And then?” I replied. “He’ll probably figure out that I didn’t call him to Kilmington earlier because I believed the chorister’s lies.”
And that earned me a Jon Whitcroft, you’ll probably just have to deal with it look.
“Fine!” I muttered. “Can you at least come with me when I talk to him?”
“Sure!” she said. “I still have to thank him for last night anyway.”
Ella wanted to get locked overnight in the cathedral again, but Zelda crushed that plan with a particularly deep frown.
“Out of the question. No more nightly excursions for the both of you,” Zelda said. “At least not without adult supervision.” She’d managed to wangle keys to the courtyard and the side door of the cathedral from one of the guides.
“He’s an old admirer of hers,” The Beard whispered when Zelda proudly dropped the two keys on the kitchen table. “He supposedly etched her name into at least three pillars, and he never married because of her.”
Ella tried to convince her grandmother to at least let us talk to Longspee alone, but Zelda shook her head so violently that her glasses slipped off her nose.
“Nonsense!” she said as we all squeezed into her car. “What if he really is a murderer? End of discussion! I promise I will only appear if you call for help.”
We slipped in through the side door just after evensong. The cathedral felt like an old friend. Zelda went to wait by a column next to the font while Ella and I approached Longspee’s tomb.
It seemed such a long time since I’d first come here. So much had happened since then. I felt like a different boy from the one who’d first called William Longspee for help.
What should I say? How could I look him in the eyes after having accused him of being a murderer? The murderer of a boy barely older than me.
I felt his presence even before I heard his voice.
“So, Jon… why did you call me only when it was nearly too late?”
He was standing between the columns, as if he’d been waiting for me.
I lowered my head. The chorister’s words tasted like poison on my tongue. I loved William Longspee, but I’d seen the darkness in him, and the chorister had made me doubt that his light had always been stronger. Fighting Stourton on the church tower of Kilmington, I’d felt for myself how strong the darkness could be in all of us.
“I met the chorister. The one you asked to find your heart.” I whispered the words, but the empty vastness of the cathedral made them loud and heavy.
“I understand.”
There was so much weariness in his voice. And I could see the walls of the cathedral through his body, as if sadness and guilt had left hardly any of it behind. “What did he tell you?”
Telling him took more courage than fighting Stourton.
“That it was you who killed him. I know,” I quickly added, “I shouldn’t have believed him. It was probably not at all like that….”
“No, Jon. It’s the truth.”
I felt cold, as though I had Stourton’s bony hand on my heart again. Longspee was barely visible in the shadows, but his words wrote themselves onto the darkness as if each and every one wanted to burn itself into my soul.
“But… w-why?” Ella came to stand by my side. It was the first time I ever heard her voice tremble.
William looked along the columns. “He told me he found my heart and he would give it to me under one condition: that I kill his teacher.”
The knight went to his sarcophagus, where his effigy lay so peacefully in its marble sleep.
“The boy said, ‘He’s an old man,’ ” Longspee continued in a very faint voice. “ ‘His heart will probably stop if you just show yourself to him.’ ‘And why do you want him dead?’ I asked. He laughed. ‘Because I don’t like him!’ he answered. I’d heard that before, from a king. John always said such things. ‘Get him out of my way. I don’t like him.’ And there was always someone who would carry out his wish. Sometimes that someone was me. I was tired of it. So tired. Tired of taking orders from a spoiled boy.”
Longspee reached out to touch the stone face that looked so much like him. His fingers sank into the marble as though it were as insubstantial as he.
“I told him I would not fulfill his wish, and I asked for my heart. He laughed at me. ‘No, in that case I’ll bury it again,’ he said. ‘I hope it will make you so weak and miserable that you can never fulfill your oath. And you will never see your wife again. What would she do with a heartless knight anyway?’ ”
Longspee rubbed his face.
“In my helpless rage, I drew my sword. He stumbled and fell backward out the window. He broke his neck. His cry etched murderer on my forehead, and that darkness tainted my soul forever. ‘Just one more, William,’ I told myself. ‘It was just one more. You killed so many, and this one was probably bad.’ But the darkness would not leave me, and I lost all hope of ever washing it off my soul. Or of seeing Ella again. William Longspee is nothing but a shadow. A heartless knight, bound to this world for eternity.”
He dropped to his knees in front of his own grave and all the saints and sinners who were looking down at him with their stone faces. The walls of the cathedral seemed to be whispering words of comfort, and the columns stretched themselves as if they wanted to bear the knight’s guilt with him. But the night poured its darkness through the windows, and the only light was that of Ella’s flashlight.
Ella approached him cautiously, as though she thought he might send her away.
“You saved Jon and me,” she said, “and Zelda and Uncle Matt. As far as I’m concerned, your oath has been fulfilled, and you will see your wife again someday. Because Jon and I will find your heart and bury it by her feet. I promise you that on my name. And now please get up!”