Midwinter of the Spirit (41 page)

‘Hoped you might be about, Mr Robinson. I just… didn’t really feel like going to school until I knew where we stood, you know?’

‘Come on up,’ Lol said.

Once inside, Eirion went straight to the guitar. ‘Wow, is that a Washburn? Could I?’

Lol handed Eirion the Washburn and the boy sat down with it, picking out the opening riff to ‘The Crow Maiden’.

‘I have to play bass in the band because James is rather better on this than me.’

‘Like McCartney,’ Lol recalled.

‘Really?’

‘He was the worst guitarist in the band, so he wound up on bass.’

‘Brilliant bass-player, actually. I… You know, I didn’t mean what I said about how he should have been shot. You feel you’ve got to keep up with James’s cynicism sometimes. Like, he’s younger than me, you know?’

‘Right,’ Lol said.

‘I… Mr Robinson, I really don’t have much time. I just sort of…’ Eirion hung his head over the guitar. ‘I don’t know what we did, but we did
something
, didn’t we? I mean, this is really important to me, this recording. I don’t want to blow it. You know?’

‘Well, it was that song,’ Lol said.

‘
This
song? “The Crow Maiden”?’

‘Which of you actually wrote it?’

‘We both did. I do the tunes, James does the words. Like, he gives me a poem or something and I work a tune around it – or the other way about. You know?’

‘It’s a bit more, er, resonant than the other stuff, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘James tell you where he got the idea?’

‘I assumed he made it up – or pinched it from some ancient Fairport Convention album or something. Actually, you know, what can I say? I mean… James is a shit, isn’t he?’

‘Oh?’ Lol tilted his head. ‘Why?’

‘He just is, isn’t he? He kind of tells lies a lot. Enjoys getting up people’s noses. Does kind of antisocial things for the hell of it. Well, lately, anyway. God, this is stupid of me; you’re his dad’s mate, aren’t you? You used to kind of work with him, right?’

‘Oh, well, that’s over now,’ Lol said. ‘Nothing you say will get back to James’s old man, OK. “The Crow Maiden”, it’s about Denny’s sister.’

‘Sorry?’

‘She committed suicide last weekend. She cut her wrists with an ancient blade.’

Eirion’s fingers fell from the frets.

‘Mmm,’ Lol said, ‘I can see you didn’t know that.’

At the front door, Jane sniffed. ‘What’s burning out there?’

‘I can’t smell anything, flower. It’s probably from the orchard. Gomer’s been clearing some undergrowth.’

‘Right.’ Jane inspected her mum in the first bright daylight of the week. ‘You’re looking better.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Pressure off now?’

‘Maybe. You’re going to miss the school bus.’

Jane said casually, ‘You know, if things have loosened up a bit, Mum, you really ought to take the opportunity to think about your long-term future.’

‘It’s not a problem, flower. I’ll be going to heaven.’

‘God,’ said Jane, ‘you Christians are so simplistic. ’Bye.’

‘Work hard, flower.’

When the kid was out of sight, Merrily went around the side of the house to check out the garden incinerator. The vestments were ashes. She made the sign of the cross over them.

Then she burned the suit.

Merrily called directory enquiries for the Reverend Barry Ambrose in Devizes, Wiltshire. She rang his number.

‘I’m sorry, he’s just popped round to the church,’ a woman said pleasantly. ‘He’ll be back for his breakfast any minute. I’m Stella, his long-suffering wife. Can I get him to call you?’

‘If you could. Tell him I really won’t keep him a minute.’

‘That’s no problem. He’s talked a lot about you, Merrily, since you were on that course together. He thinks you’re awfully plucky.’

‘Well, that’s… a common illusion. Has Barry done much in the way of Deliverance so far?’

‘Only bits and bobs, you know. He’s still quite nervous about it, to be honest. And you?’

‘Still feeling my way,’ Merrily said.

Waiting for Barry Ambrose to call back, she went to the bookcase in the hall where they kept the local stuff. She plucked out one she’d bought in the Cathedral shop:
St Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford: Essays in His Honour
. She hadn’t yet had time to open it.

I have been reading
, Edna Rees had said,
about St Thomas of Hereford
.

In the book, several historians explored aspects of the saint’s life and the effect he’d had on Hereford – enormous apparently. Merrily began to read about Cantilupe’s final months, in 1282, after his dispute with the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Pecham.

This seemed to be a bureaucratic argument about one going over the other’s head, further fired up by a clash of temperament. It had ended with Cantilupe being excommunicated and travelling to Italy to appeal personally to the Pope. On the way back, exhausted, he’d collapsed and died – at dusk on 25 August – while still in Italy. As was the custom (
Really? Christ!
) the body was boiled to remove the flesh from the bones. The flesh was buried at the monastery church of San Severo, the heart and bones were brought back to England by Cantilupe’s steward, John de Clare. The heart was then kept at Ashridge, in Buckinghamshire, at a college of canons, while the bones came back to Hereford.

Where they began to attract pilgrims – thousands of them. When news of the miracles spread – cures of the crippled and the blind – it became the most important shrine in the West of England. And it made this comparatively remote cathedral very wealthy.

Although several of the bones seemed to have been removed as relics before this, it was not until the shrine was destroyed in the Reformation, on the orders of Henry VIII, that they were dispersed. The book recorded, without further comment, a story that during the journey from Italy the ‘persecuted bones’ had bled.

Barry Ambrose called back. She liked Barry: he was inoffensive, hamsterish, an old-fashioned vicar.

‘Hey, Merrily… you heard about Clive Wells?’

The lofty old-money priest who’d sneered at Huw. ‘Should I have?’

‘He’s packed it in,’ said Barry.

‘What, Deliverance?’

‘The lot. He’s apparently planning to emigrate to Canada with his family. Had some experience he wouldn’t talk about to anybody – now he can’t even go into the church. Can’t even
pass
a church without going to pieces, so they say.’

‘God.’

‘Makes you think, doesn’t it, Merrily. What can I do for you?’

It was, she admitted, a long shot. ‘There’s a girl moved into this area from Wiltshire… Salisbury.’

‘Oh, they’re very doubtful about me in Salisbury. You know what it’s like.’

‘Yeah. No, it’s just… if you happened to hear anything. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. This girl’s called Rowenna Napier. They left the area earlier this year. It was suggested to me that there was something funny in her past which might not seem very funny to a church minister. I’m sorry, that’s it, I’m afraid.’

Barry was unfazed. ‘Well, I’ve got a name – that’s a start, I suppose. I can only roll it along the Cathedral Close and see if anybody picks it up.’

‘Could you?’

‘Give me a day or two. So, how’s it going, Merrily – really?’ She heard the boxy sound of him covering the mouthpiece. ‘I tell you, it scares seven shades out of me sometimes.’

‘Thank God you said that, Barry. Stella gave me the impression you hadn’t been doing too much.’

‘All
she
knows,’ Barry said with an audible shudder.

Viv arrived at the shop with a
Hereford Times
.

‘Not too much about Moon, thank Gawd. They haven’t picked up on her father’s suicide, so that’s a mercy. Maybe nobody’s worked there long enough to remember.’

Or else Denny had refused to talk to them, Lol thought, and they were sitting on it till it all came out at the full inquest.

Viv said, ‘Oh, yeah, I talked to my friend who still goes to the Pod. It’s bizarre, but these two girls turn up out of nowhere: your friend’s kid and an older one, right? Patricia, who is like mother superior in the group, says to make this Jane feel at home, she’s a special person, they have to take care of her, she’s got problems at home – this kind of stuff.’

‘Problems
at home
?’

‘I only mention this… like maybe you don’t know as much as you think. You got something happening with the mother, is that it? Was that her the other day, when you ran outside?’

Lol didn’t answer. Viv had tossed the
Hereford Times
on the counter, and he’d just noticed the lead headline.

CROW SACRIFICED IN COUNTY CHURCH HORROR

He snatched up the newspaper…

38

Nevermore

‘D
O YOU
KNOW
how many messagesI have left on your machine in the past two days?’ Sophie demanded angrily. ‘Surely, even if you were ill…’

Ill? Yes, she’d been ill. She saw that now. Merrily sat at the desk in the office with the D on the door. Nothing had altered and yet everything had. The white winter sun lit the room. There were things to do.

‘I’m very sorry, Sophie. I’ve behaved very badly.’

It could have been entirely psychological. If her vestments were tainted, however slightly, with Denzil’s insidious musk, it would have a subliminal effect: expanding at moments of high emotional stress or extreme sensitivity – like the buildup to an exorcism in a country church – into a near manifestation. And it would then take root, and arise again at times – like emerging from sleep – when the subconscious was in free-flow.

Whatever, someone out there had tried to break her. But now, deep in her solar plexus, she was feeling the warm, pulsing thrill of redemption.

Sophie wore a royal-blue two-piece woollen suit. Her white hair was tightly bunned. She looked angry and perhaps overtired, but her eyes also displayed a small sparkle of hope. She’d become like a mother, Merrily realized.

‘Merrily, about your resignation e-mail…’

‘Oh, yes. Has the Bishop received that yet?’ She heard the unconcern in her own voice. It didn’t really matter any more whether or not she was the official Deliverance consultant. That was a spurious, manufactured title which conferred no special powers. It was just a beacon for the rat-eyes in the dark.

‘The Bishop doesn’t read his e-mail,’ Sophie said. ‘
I
read his e-mail, and print out the relevant items and put them on his desk. This is yours, I think. What would you like me to do with it?’

She placed in front of Merrily a sheet of A4.

Dear Bishop,

After long consideration…

Merrily saw what Sophie wanted – how she could make Sophie much happier. ‘Could you wipe it?’ she said easily. ‘I wasn’t really myself, was I?’

Sophie gripped the desk tightly, and then let go.

‘Sophie?’ Merrily stood up, took her arm.

‘I didn’t want you to go, and leave me alone here.’ Sophie swallowed. ‘Sometimes I feel I’m going mad.’

‘That doesn’t sound like you.’

‘I know. Capable, reliable old Sophie – total commitment to the Cathedral. That’s the
problem
, isn’t it?’

‘What is?’

‘Something in the Cathedral’s going wrong, and I’m afraid Michael…’

Merrily sighed. ‘Might as well say it, Sophie. He can’t see it, can he? He wouldn’t feel it because he has no basic faith or spirituality? Isn’t that what you’re saying: that the Cathedral’s not safe in Mick’s hands?’

Treason
.

‘Sophie?’

Sophie brought a finger to her brow, as if to halt a fastescaping thought. ‘We have to talk, Merrily.’

The phone rang on her desk in the other office.

‘Sure,’ Merrily said. ‘Whenever.’

She went in search of Lol. In John Barleycorn, the large, triballooking woman regarded her with some interest.

‘You must be Jane’s mum.’

‘You
know
Jane?’

‘Not personally,’ the big woman said with an enigmatic smile. ‘But I’ve got daughters, so I know the problem.’

‘
Is
there a problem?’ What the hell had Lol been saying? Merrily rocked inside with a blinding urge to wipe away all the rumours and gossip and deceit that had gathered in the days of the fog.

And, oh, there was so much to say to Jane and so much to bring out, after a week in which Merrily had felt so scared of her own daughter that the only way she’d been able to approach this issue was behind the kid’s back.

The shop woman smiled to herself, heavy with superior knowledge.

‘Where’s Lol?’ Merrily snapped.

‘Oh.’ The woman recoiled. ‘I think he’s over in the central library. That’s where he said he was going.’

‘Thank you.’

The day had taken a sharp dive into December dusk. She became aware, for the first time, of Christmas lights. Little golden Santas racing across Broad Street on their sleighs, and the warm red lanterns winking a welcome to wallets everywhere.

Christmas in three weeks: goodwill to all men… school Nativity play in the church… afternoon carol service… midnight eucharist. The churchwardens beadily monitoring those big festive collections. Courtesy visits:
Glass of sherry for the vicar, Celia. Not too much – don’t want you falling out of the pulpit, ha-ha
.

And the core of cold and loneliness at the heart of it all. The huddling together, with drunken bonhomie and false laughter to ward off the dark.

She stopped outside the library, the lights still blinking universal panic over parties unorganized, presents unbought. For Merrily they emphasized a core of darkness in the little city of Hereford, deep and intense. She stood amid the rush-hour shoppers and she felt it in her solar plexus, where the ghost of Denzil Joy – the ghost that
wasn’t
– had formed an interior fog. And now it was clear.