Fabric of Sin (9 page)

As Merrily was leaving the church, Teddy Murray had said,
We, ah … we have a room for you, Merrily. I’m not sure what you …

I don’t know, to be honest, Teddy. I don’t live that far away, and I can’t really understand why the Bishop feels the need to inflict me on you
.

Oh, I think we both know what that’s about. They want you to put the lid on something … firmly. As regards my interpretive role, I suspect Mervyn Neale might have had a hand in it
.

The Archdeacon. Been with the Bishop when the issue was raised by Adam Eastgate.

Mervyn and I have known one another for some time. He refers people to us – people looking for an open-air holiday. Not on a percentage basis, I have to add
.

Well
, she’d said finally,
I have a few things to sort out at home, so maybe I could ring you tomorrow
.

Pleasant enough guy, but Merrily had been glad to get away. His
interpretive
role suggested he’d been appointed by the Archdeacon as her native guide. Useful in some ways, but there was a sense of remote control that she didn’t like.

The rain gusted into her face and drummed on the side of her hood. She let it come, shivering, thinking of the wind that had suddenly arisen when Parkins, the academic in the M. R. James story, had blown, experimentally, on the old whistle he’d found in the remains of the Templar preceptory.

Who is this who is coming?

A figure like wind-blown rags pursuing Parkins along the deserted beach. Making its final, most memorable appearance at night in his room at the Globe Inn. Arising under the sheets of the second bed and standing in front of the bedroom door, with its arms outstretched and its
intensely horrible face of crumpled linen
.

Although the dust sheets were plastic, you got the idea.

Merrily turned back towards the old Volvo, with the wind behind her.

U
SING THE MOBILE
from the scullery – this was insane – she called Sophie at home. Sophie’s husband, Andrew, answered,
humph
ed a bit. Andrew, the architect and cathedral widower – they even lived in one of the cloisterish streets behind the close.

‘Merrily.’ Sophie had picked up an extension, Andrew humphing again and hanging up. ‘I was half-expecting you to call this afternoon – the Bishop having suggested, in an email from the Palace this morning, that a preliminary written report might be quite useful.’

‘And you thought, odd – he’s never previously particularly requested a report of
any
kind on anything relating to deliverance.’

‘Correct.’

It was almost dark, the grey-brown sky melding with the churchyard wall outside the scullery window. Still no rain here. Maybe Garway Hill had its own climate.

‘Well, Sophie, it might all be academic now, anyway.’

Merrily put on the desk lamp and explained in some detail about Huw Owen’s M. R. James revelation. Never any discretion problems here; next to Sophie, the grave was Broadcasting House.

‘So the woman made it up?’ Ice particles in Sophie’s voice. ‘The whole thing?’

‘Either that or her perceptions have been conditioned by her reading habits, which seems unlikely.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Presumably you’ll go back and ask her.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘That should be revelatory.’

‘I’m almost looking forward to it, in a rather unChristian way. I’ll try and get over to Monkland tomorrow after the morning worship. With or without a Special Branch tail.’

‘I’m sorry, Merrily – I may have misheard.’

‘You didn’t.’ Merrily looked at the cigarettes on the desk, decided against. ‘Sources close to Gaol Street intimate I’ve been checked out by the security services. Jane, too – the heritage terrorist.’

‘This is purely because of your unsolicited proximity to the business interests of the heir to the throne?’

‘I don’t know, Sophie.’

‘But you’re a minister in the Church of England.’

‘That makes me harmless? Think about it.’

‘The amount of surveillance in this country is becoming quite terrifying.’ A pause. ‘Incidentally, have you had a chance to read Canon Dobbs’s file on the Prince of Wales?’

‘Not really. It’s on the desk here. I’ll try and have a look later.’

‘Well,’ Sophie said, ‘I realize we live in troubled times, but I think this has gone far enough. Leave it with me.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I think I’m going to call the Bishop in London.’

Sophie was probably the only person, outside his immediate family, with the Bishop’s mobile number.

‘I’m not sure that would really—’

‘Will you be in tonight, Merrily?’

‘Yeah, but I don’t want to ruin
your
night. Or Andrew’s.’

‘Merrily,’ Sophie said with some severity. ‘This is what I
do
.’

Merrily sighed, pulled over the old black box file and opened it up. Unwrapped a wodge of A4 copier paper, held together by two rubber bands, the top page splashing two headlines.

CHARLES IN HEALTH STORM

TOP DOCS SLAM PRINCE OVER SUPPORT FOR ‘QUACKS
’

Both dated back to the early 1980s when the Prince of Wales, newly married to Diana Spencer, had been appointed President of the British Medical Association, the conservative and seriously cautious organization representing doctors in the UK.

The BMA was not into alternative therapy. In fact, the hatred of the association for practitioners who had not been through the System knew few bounds.

You would have thought these guys might have known better than to appoint, as their figurehead, a man whose famously healthy family had a long history of consulting osteopaths, homeopaths and various spiritual healers.

The first warning came at a dinner for the new President. In his speech, the Prince said how touched he’d been that the BMA should have even considered electing him, adding,
You may, for all I know, wish to get rid of me after six months
.

The laughter, Merrily thought, must have been hollow. She’d thought she remembered the row, but was now realizing that she couldn’t have fully absorbed it, nor been knowledgeable enough at the time to recognize its significance.

One of the cuttings had an edited transcript of Charles’s speech to the BMA.

It was dynamite, basically.

One of the least attractive traits of various professional bodies is the deeply ingrained suspicion and downright hostility which can exist towards anything unorthodox. I suppose it is inevitable that something which is different should arouse strong feelings on the part of the majority whose conventional wisdom is being challenged.

I suppose, too, that human nature is such that we are frequently prevented from seeing that what is taken for today’s unorthodoxy is probably going to be tomorrow’s convention …

Perhaps we just have to accept it is God’s will that the unorthodox individual is doomed to years of frustration, ridicule and failure in order to act out his role in the scheme of things, until his day arrives and mankind is ready to receive his message … a message which he probably
finds hard to explain himself but which he knows comes from a far deeper source than conscious thought …

Merrily lit a cigarette. Amazing to think he’d actually said that to a bunch of doctors.

It got better – or worse, depending on your angle of approach.

Through the centuries, healing has been practised by folk healers who are guided by traditional wisdom that sees illness as a disorder of the whole person, involving not only the patient’s body but his mind, his self-image, his dependence on the physical and social environment, as well as his relation to …

Bloody hell.

… the cosmos. I would suggest that the whole impossible edifice of modern medicine, for all its breathtaking successes, is, like the tower of Pisa, slightly off-balance.

You could imagine some of Britain’s leading physicians having to leave, at this point, to check their own blood pressure. Especially if they looked closely at the Prince’s sources.

Merrily found an interview with Charles, which Dobbs, or someone, had marked down the side in what looked like felt pen.

It seemed that Charles – how had she avoided knowing about all this? – had become interested, apparently via the writings of Carl Jung, in the power of dreams, coincidence and what he called
signposts
.

In other words, the idea that individuals were open to guidance from … elsewhere – the collective unconscious. The cosmos. That they should be alert for psychic pointers.

One of which had apparently manifested while Charles was in his study attempting to draft his speech to the BMA. He was quoted as saying.

It was the most extraordinary thing. I was sitting at my desk at the time and I happened to look at my bookshelf and my eyes suddenly settled
on a book about Paracelsus. So I took the book down and read it, and as a result I tried to make a speech around Paracelsus and perhaps a relook at what he was saying and the ideas he propounded. Wasn’t it time to think again about the relationship between mind and body, or body and spirit?

Paracelsus. Rennaissance physician and … herbalist?

Also, an occultist of the Renaissance period. A magician.

Deep waters.

‘A
S ABOVE
…’ Jane did the arm movements ‘… so below.’

At least she seemed happier, the sullen face replaced by the concentration face. It always paid to consult Jane. They’d built a log fire in the parlour and eaten from trays, and Jane had produced one of her paperbacks with planets and pentagrams on the front.

‘Paracelsus was just the name he adopted, OK? His real name was – this is interesting – Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, from which the word
bombast
is derived. Because that’s the kind of guy he was. Always throwing his weight about and losing his cool. Got up people’s noses.’

‘Can we get back to “As above, so below”?’

‘Paracelsus said the human body was like a microcosm of nature … or the universe. Whatever. It’s the basis of astrology. He had this theory that your main internal organs corresponded to individual planets? It made serious sense in the Renaissance. Still does, in a way.’

‘He
was
an occultist, though?’

‘Ah, see, that’s a typical
Church
attitude.’

‘Terribly sorry.’

‘He didn’t think of himself as an
occultist
– like, nobody did. It was science. Science and philosophy. It was like high learning. Cutting edge. Like, is Stephen Hawking an occultist? I can see where Chazza was coming from on this. Homeopathy operates on this microcosm basis, doesn’t it?’

‘I believe it does.’

‘So you could consider Paracelsus as the father of alternative medicine. Except it wasn’t alternative then, it was—’

‘Cutting edge. State of the art.’

‘Exactly. So does this mean the Duchy of Cornwall’s going to be setting up a centre for alternative healing at Garway?’

‘No, it … there’s probably no connection at all. I’m just interested in why the late Canon Dobbs was interested in the spiritual development of Prince Charles.’

‘Be a good place for it, though, Mum.’

‘Garway?’

‘With the Knights Templar. A lot of this started with them and their excavations of the Temple of Solomon. Most ritual magic, raising of spirits, all this, goes back to Solomon. And maybe the whole microcosm/macrocosm thing.’

‘Sometimes I wish you didn’t know all this,’ Merrily said, and Jane smiled.

Happy … ish. Down on the rug, arms around her knees, watching baby flames scurrying from log to log. She’d be happier still if she knew she’d been checked out by the Special Branch, but perhaps this wasn’t the time to enlighten her.

‘I was over in Coleman’s Meadow this afternoon,’ Jane said.

‘I thought it was all fenced off.’

‘It is, but Coops has a key to the temporary gate.’

Coops?

Jane turned from the fire, picked up Merrily’s look.

‘Neil Cooper – the guy from the County Archaeologist’s department?’

‘Oh.’

‘Actually, he’s pretty pissed off. Been trying to leave for a while – too young, obviously, to be tied to local government. He’d like to be a field archaeologist. But he’s afraid of what will happen at Coleman’s Meadow if he quits now.’

‘In what way?’

It had gone suspiciously quiet since the initial excitement over the discovery of the three long-buried megaliths in Coleman’s Meadow. Jane had been euphoric about the stones, because the field was bisected by what she – and the great visionary Alfred Watkins before her – had considered to be a seminal ley line linking Ledwardine
Church with the Iron Age earthworks on the summit of Cole Hill, the village’s
holy
hill.

Hills again. Always hills.

‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘You know about rescue archaeology, right?’

‘This is where archaeologists are given a specific period of time to excavate an area scheduled for development?’

‘It’s what most archaeology is these days, thanks to the rampant overpopulation that’s suffocating Britain.’ Jane scowled. ‘Time we scrapped all family allowance if you’ve got more than two kids, so it’s like … three kids, no more benefits. Four kids, compulsory sterilization.’

‘That’s your personal concept, is it?’

Jane’s politics could veer from extreme left to extreme right and back again within seconds.
Extreme
being the only constant.

‘I don’t know. We’ve got to do
something
, haven’t we? Like I don’t care what colour people are or what they worship, as long as there are
less
of them.’

‘Fewer,’ Merrily said.

‘You clergy are just
so
pedantic.’