Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

‘So he’s camped up here, walking the hills and waiting for Gwilym to buy back the house?’

‘Gwilym told me Murray said the time was coming. It would happen around the anniversary of the 1307 inquisition. He’d seen the signs, all this shit. Points out the significance of people by the name of Gray … you know about that? OK, well, then this guy Gray develops MS.’

‘He wasn’t claiming …?’

Hayter shrugged.

‘Bad prayers, Robinson. The power of bad prayers.’

‘This gets sicker, Jimmy.’

In the bedroom next to the chimney, the light was the purple of bruises, the smell of decay was worse and the two bed-frames looked, Merrily thought, like medieval appliances for obtaining confessions.

The holy water glittered mauve.

Merrily said, ‘Heavenly Father who never sleeps. Bless this room and guard with your continued watchfulness all who take rest within … within these walls.’

Muriel Morningwood picked a cobweb from Merrily’s alb. With hindsight, the alb had not been a good idea.

In a corner of the room, the floorboards had been removed, stones and cement hacked out, revealing the priest’s hole. From an oblique angle, you could see down into the hearth, where Murray had removed more stones so that the bones could be tipped directly down into the waiting sacks.

Merrily lowered herself into the space. It seized her like a trap. Rubble, dirt, a stench. She didn’t want to breathe. Her throat felt raw and constricted, and she remembered the lesions on Muriel’s neck.

It wouldn’t have taken much.

You wouldnt know me Muriel. Theres nothing of me no more I am so thin and my head feels like a rotten egg sometimes and what can you do with a rotten egg …

‘Oh God, bless this space where Mary lay …’

Croaking out the words, sprinkling out the water.

Hadn’t lain here at all. Had probably been arranged squatting, strangled, stripped of any residual dignity.

‘…may her spirit rest in peace and may the light of Christ rest upon her and in this place.’

When she finished, Mrs Morningwood had turned away.

‘Never said she was a saint. Probably trying to get money out of them. Needed to make a life for the child, didn’t want to be in a tepee for ever.’

‘Which I suppose brings us to Fuchsia,’ Merrily said. ‘Where all this began – for both of us, I suspect.’

Glasses in her hand, Mrs Morningwood stood at the top of the half-spiral, lit by a diagonal shaft from a cracked skylight. Merrily three steps below, on the curve.

‘I haven’t … been one hundred per cent truthful about Fuchsia.’

‘No kidding.’

‘When she first came to see me, with Barlow …’

‘And you recognized her …’

‘… I obviously had to see her again, on her own. Whispered it to her as they were leaving, and she was back the same afternoon. Sat her down on the chaise longue and made some herbal tea, for relaxation of the mind.’

Mrs Morningwood backed away along the landing, agitated.

‘I asked her how she’d got her name, Fuchsia, and she said she didn’t know. She said people had told her that Fuchsia was a character from Mervyn Peake and she’d read Titus , and said how much she liked that kind of book. And then I asked her if she liked M. R. James because he’d been here, and it turned out she’d read a few of his stories. And I told her the story I’d told Jane, that I’d got from my mother.’

‘Why?’

‘Told her several local stories. She loved them. She was eager for more. Me, I was simply putting off the moment. Wanting her to trust me. Eventually, we went for a walk on the hill, where Mary and I had walked all those years ago. That was when I told her.’

Mrs Morningwood shook her head in some sadness. She was wearing a cream cotton dress and a grey woollen cardigan and looked almost demure.

Merrily said, ‘And?’

‘And everything changed … I thought she was putting me on … thought it was joke, you know? But I can see her now, backing away into the sun. Arms out, warding me off. Didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to know about her mother. Had her own amorphous fantasy. Princess rather than prostitute.’

There’s this kind of tribal mysticism in Tepee City , Felix had said, and she had a period of building fires in a clearing in the wood and looking for Mary in the smoke .

‘What did you tell her had happened to Mary?’

‘Disappeared. Tried to downplay the seedy side, but the damage was done. Didn’t want to hear any more at all . Next thing, Barlow the builder comes banging on the door asking me what sort of rubbish I’ve been feeding her because Fuchsia can’t work in that house any more.’

‘So she passed on to Felix what you’d told her? Because if he knew that when I saw him, he certainly wasn’t letting on.’

‘No, she came out with the M. R. James story, the dustsheets, the face of linen. She’d read that story.’

And she’d played it well, hadn’t she, in the church of St Cosmas and St Damien. ‘Who is this who is coming? ’ And still Merrily’s feeling was that the desire for a blessing had been real. That Fuchsia had felt menaced by the house. By her mother’s ghost, then … just as Mary had felt an estrangement – not exactly unknown in the annals of mother/daughter psychology – from the infant Fuchsia.

The baby cries whenever shes WITH ME . Thats not how it should be!

And because of Felix’s feelings for Mary, she’d wanted him out of there, too. As if she thought Mary would come between them.

‘The coincidence of him bringing Fuchsia here, that terrified her,’ Muriel Morningwood said. ‘Maybe she thought he’d been here, too … that he was her father.’

‘And you wondered that, as well.’

‘Although, now I think Mary simply used him – soon as she’d learned Felix had some money in the background, pulling that stunt with the cord. Saying he must’ve been chosen by the baby as its godfather or guardian or what you will. Making provision for the child.’

‘Ah.’ A light coming on. ‘And you thought Fuchsia might’ve killed him because of what you’d told her. So not only had you failed to save the mother, you’d—’

‘Driven the daughter over the edge.’

‘You could have told me this the other night, Muriel.’

‘Told you enough, that night. Was feeling pretty shell-shocked generally.’

Merrily stared at the wall. Had there been some kind of psychic experience, perhaps while actually working in a room concealing the skeleton of her mother? If ever there was a situation crying out for the paranormal …

‘Anything else you’re not telling me, Muriel?’

‘Not intentionally, no. Well …’ Muriel raised her eyes towards the skylight. ‘Sycharth. Until you told me, I didn’t know for certain he’d been here in the Seventies, but … I suppose I wanted him to have been involved. I said he’d made a play for me. Truth is, I’d made a play for him a year or so earlier. No taste at that age and he did have a Triumph Spitfire. Bastard had me, then sneered. Called me a whore.’

‘Oh.’ That certainly explained the hostility. ‘Well … he’s a worried man now, Muriel.’

Merrily went back to the stairwell, brushing red stone-dust from the alb.

‘Look … before we go down to that room, I’d like to try and get the sequence right. Did Fuchsia go rushing into the church, finding Teddy there, before she first came to see you?’

‘My feeling now is she saw him at least twice. If he was as shocked as me the first time—’

‘He’d surely be a bloody sight more shocked. He might’ve been looking at his daughter. And more than that—’