A Great Deliverance (26 page)

The low ground fog hid and revealed in alternate patches. The early sunlight weakly dappled the stones. An inquisitive bird watched with bright eyes from a grave nearby. He was only dimly aware of this, but he knew that with her camera she would capture it all.

He looked for St. James. Surely the man would be sitting somewhere nearby, fondly watching his wife work. But he was nowhere in sight. She was very much alone.

He felt immediately as if the church had betrayed him with its early promise of comfort and peace.
It’s no good, Deb
, he thought as he watched her.
Nothing makes it go away. I want you to leave him. Betray him. Come back to me. Its where you belong
.

She looked up, brushed her hair off her face, and saw him. He knew from her expression that he might as well have said everything aloud. She read it at once.

“Oh, Tommy.”

Of course she wouldn’t pretend, wouldn’t fill the awkward moment with amusing chatter that, Helenlike, would serve to get them through the encounter. Instead she bit her lip, looking very much as if he had struck her, and turned back to her tripod, making unnecessary adjustments.

He walked to her side. “I’m so sorry,” he said. She continued to fumble uselessly with her equipment, her head bent, her hair hiding her face. “I can’t get past it. I try to see my way clear, but it’s just no good.” Her face was averted. She seemed to be examining the pattern of the hills. “I tell myself that it’s ended the right way for us all, but I don’t believe that. I still want you, Deb.”

She turned to him then, her face quite white, her eyes gleaming with tears. “You
cant
. You’ve got to let that go.”

“My mind accepts that, but nothing else does.” A tear escaped and descended her cheek. He put out his hand to wipe it away but remembered himself and dropped his arm to his side. “I woke up this morning so desperate to make love with you again that I thought if I didn’t get out of the room at once I should begin clawing at the walls in pure, adolescent frustration. I thought the church would be a balm to me. What I didn’t think was that you would be wandering round its graveyard at dawn.” He looked at her equipment. “What are you doing here? Where’s Simon?”

“He’s still at the hall. I … I woke up early and came out to see the village.”

It didn’t ring true. “Is he ill?” he asked sharply.

She scanned the branches of the cypresses. A shallowness in Simon’s breathing had immediately awakened her shortly before six. He was lying so still that for one horrifying moment she thought he was dying. He was drawing in each breath carefully, and she knew all at once that his only thought had been not to awaken her. But when she reached for his hand, his fingers closed bruisingly round her own. “Let me get your medicine,” she whispered, and had done so, and then had watched his determined face as he battled to be master of the pain. “Can you … for an hour, my love?” It was the part of his life that brooked no companion. It was the part of his life she could never share. She had left him.

“He had … there was some pain this morning.”

Lynley felt the full impact of Deborah’s words. He understood so well everything that they implied. “Christ, there’s no escaping it, is there?” he asked bitterly. “Even
that’s
part of the miserable account.”

“No!” Raw horror tore her voice. “Don’t say that! Don’t you
ever!
Don’t you do that to yourself! It isn’t your fault!” Having spoken so quickly, really without thinking of the impression that her words would have upon Lynley, it was suddenly as if she had said too much—far more than she had intended to say—and she went back to fumbling with her camera, taking it apart this time, detaching lens from body and body from tripod, putting everything away.

He watched her. Her movements were jerky, like an old-time motion picture run at the wrong speed. Perhaps sensing this and realising what her discomfort revealed, she stopped what she was doing, her head bent, one hand at her eyes. Her hair was caught in a shaft of sunlight. It was the colour of autumn. Summer’s death.

“Is he still at the hall? Did you leave him there, Deb?” It wasn’t that he wanted to know but that she needed to tell him. Even now he couldn’t let that need go unanswered.

“He wanted … it was the pain. He doesn’t want me to see it. He thinks he’s protecting me if he makes me leave.” She looked up at the sky, as if for some sort of sign. The delicate muscles worked in her throat. “Being cut out like this. It’s so hard. I
hate
it.”

He understood. “That’s because you love him.”

She stared at him for a moment before she replied. “I do. I do love him, Tommy. He’s half of myself. He’s part of my soul.” She put a tentative hand on his arm, a mere whisper of a touch. “I want you to find someone to love you like that. It’s what you need. It’s what you deserve. But I … I can’t be that someone for you. I don’t even want to be.”

His face blanched at her words. His spirit despaired at the finality behind them. Seeking composure, he found a distraction in the grave at their feet. “Is this the source of your morning’s inspiration?” he asked lightly.

“Yes.” She deliberately matched her tone to his. “I’ve heard so much about the baby in the abbey that I thought I’d have a peek at its grave.”

“‘As Flame to Smoke,’” he read. “Bizarre epitaph for a child.”

“I’m rather attached to Shakespeare,” a thin voice said behind them. They swung around. Father Hart, looking like a spiritual gnome in his cassock and surplice, stood on the gravel path a few feet away, hands folded demurely over his stomach. He’d managed to come upon them noiselessly, like an apparition taking its form from the mist.

“Left to my own devices I always think Shakespeare’s just the thing for a grave. Timeless. Poetic. He gives life and death meaning.” He patted the pockets of his cassock and brought out a packet of Dunhills, lighting one absently and pinching the match between his fingers before pocketing it. It was a dream-like movement, as if he were unaware that he was doing it at all.

Lynley noticed the yellow pallour of his skin and the rheumy quality of his eyes. “This is Mrs. St. James, Father Hart,” he said gently. “She’s taking photographs of your most famous grave.”

Father Hart stirred from his reverie. “Most famous …?” Puzzled, he looked from man to woman before his eyes fell on the grave and clouded. His cigarette burned, ignored, between his stained fingers. “Oh, yes. I see.” He frowned. “What a horrible thing to have done to an infant, leaving it out naked in the cold to die. I needed special permission to bury the poor thing here.”

“Special permission?”

“She was unbaptized. But I call her Marina.” He blinked quickly, moving on to other things. “But if it’s famous graves that you’ve come to see, Mrs. St. James, then what you really want is the crypt.”

“Sounds like something from Edgar Allan Poe,” Lynley remarked.

“Not at all. It’s a holy place.” The priest dropped his cigarette to the path and crushed it out. He stooped unselfconsciously for the extinguished butt, put it into his pocket, and began to walk in the direction of the church. Lynley picked up Deborah’s camera equipment, and they followed.

“It’s the burial place of St. Cedd,” Father Hart was saying. “Do come in. I was just getting ready for daily Mass but I’ll show it to you first.” He unlocked the doors of the church with an enormous key and motioned them inside. “Weekday Mass is a bit of a bygone now. No one much bothers unless it’s a Sunday. William Teys was my only consistent daily attendant, and with William gone … well, I’ve found myself more often than not saying Mass in an empty church during the week.”

“He was a close friend of yours, wasn’t he?” Lynley asked.

The priest’s hand wavered over the light switch. “He was … like a son.”

“Did he ever talk to you about the trouble he had sleeping? About his need for sleeping pills?”

The hand wavered again. The priest hesitated. It was too long a pause, Lynley decided, and adjusted his position in the dim light to see the old man’s face more clearly. His eyes were on the light switch but his lips moved as if in prayer.

“Are you all right, Father Hart?”

“I … yes, fine. I just … so often the memory of him.” The priest pulled himself up with an effort, like someone drawing the scattered pieces of a puzzle into one disjointed pile. “William was a good man, Inspector, but a troubled spirit. He … he never spoke to me about having difficulty sleeping, but it doesn’t surprise me at all to hear it.”

“Why?”

“Because unlike so many troubled souls who drown themselves in alcohol or escape their difficulties some other way, William always faced them head on and did the best he could. He was strong and decent, but his burdens were tremendous.”

“Burdens like Tessa leaving and Gillian running away?”

On the second name, the priest’s eyes closed. He swallowed with difficulty: it was a rasping sound. “Tessa hurt him. But Gillian devastated him. He was never the same once she’d gone.”

“What was she like?”

“She … she was an angel, Inspector. Sunshine.” The shaking hand moved quickly to the lights and switched them on, and the priest gestured towards the church. “Well. What do you think of it?”

It was decidedly not the expected interior of a village church. Village churches tend to be small, square, purely functional affairs with an absence of colour, line, or beauty. This was none of that. Whoever had built it had cathedrals in mind, for two great pillars at the west end had been intended to bear more tremendous weight than that of St. Catherine’s roof.

“Ah, so you’ve noticed,” Father Hart murmured, following the direction of Lynley’s gaze from pillars to apse. “This was to have been the site of the abbey; St. Catherine’s was to have been the great abbey church. But a conflict among the monks resulted in the other location by Keldale Hall. It was a miracle.”

“A miracle?” Deborah asked.

“A real miracle. If they’d built the abbey here, where the remains of St. Cedd are, it would all have been destroyed in the time of Henry VIII. Can you imagine destroying the very church where St. Cedd lay buried?” The priest’s voice managed to convey his complete revulsion. “No, it was an act of God that brought about the disagreement among the monks. And since the foundation for this church was already laid and the crypt complete, there was no reason to disinter the body of the saint. So they left him here with just a small chapel.” He moved with painful slowness to a stone stairway that led from the main aisle down into darkness. “It’s just this way,” he beckoned them.

The crypt was a second tiny church deep within the main church of St. Catherine’s. It was a vault, arched in Norman style, and pillared with columns that had meagre ornamentation. At its far end a simple stone altar was adorned with two candles and a crucifix, and along its sides stones from an earlier version of the church—crossheads and cross shafts and pieces from vesicular windows—lay preserved for posterity. It was a damp and musty place, poorly lit and smelling of loam. Green mould clung to the walls.

Deborah shivered. “Poor man. It’s so cold here. One would think he might prefer to be buried somewhere in the sun.”

“He’s safer here,” the priest answered. He moved reverently to the altar rail, knelt, and spent the next few moments in meditation.

They watched him. His lips moved and then he paused for a moment as if in communion with an unknown god. His prayer completed, he smiled angelically and got to his feet.

“I speak to him daily,” Father Hart whispered, “because we owe him everything.”

“Why is that?” Lynley asked.

“He saved us. The village, the church, the life of Catholicism here in Keldale.” As he spoke, the priest’s face began to glow.

Lynley thought fleetingly of Montressor and restrained himself from looking for the mortar and bricks. “The man himself or the relics?” he asked.

“The man, his presence, his relics, all of it.” The priest flung out his arms and encompassed the crypt, and his voice rose in zealous jubilation. “He gave them courage to keep their faith, Inspector, to remain true to Rome during the terrible days of the Reformation. The priests hid
here
then. The stairway was covered with a false floor, and the village priests remained in hiding for years. But the saint was with them all the time, and St. Catherine’s
never
fell to the Protestants.” There were tears in his eyes. He fumbled for his handkerchief. “You … I’m … please excuse me. When I talk about Cedd … to be so privileged to have his relics here. To be in communion with him. I’m not quite sure you could understand.”

To be on a first-name basis with an early Christian saint was obviously too much for the old man. Lynley sought a diversion. “The confessionals above look like Elizabethan carvings,” he said kindly. “Are they?”

The man wiped his eyes, cleared his throat, and gave them a shaky smile. “Yes. They weren’t originally intended for confessionals. That’s why they have such a secular theme. One doesn’t generally expect to see young men and women entwined in dance on the wood carving in a church, but they’re lovely, aren’t they? I think the light in that part of the church is too poor for the penitents to see the doors clearly. I expect some of them think it’s a depiction of the Hebrews left on their own while Moses went up to Sinai.”

“What
does
it depict?” Deborah asked as they followed the little priest up the stairs and into the larger church once again.

“A pagan bacchanal, I’m afraid,” he replied. He smiled apologetically as he said it, bid them good morning, and disappeared through a carved door near the altar.

They watched it close behind him. “What an odd little man. How do you know him, Tommy?”

Lynley followed Deborah out of the church into the light. “He brought us all the information on the case. He found the body.” He told her briefly about the murder, and she listened as she always had, her soft green eyes never moving from his face.

“Nies!” she cried when he had completed the tale. “How dreadful for you! Tommy, how completely unfair!”

It was like her, he thought, to cut to the quick of the matter, to see beneath the surface to the issue that plagued him at the heart of the case.