Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

Although she never did.

USUALLY, AFTER A Eucharist, you were aware of subtle ambient changes: a charge of energy, a sharpening, a recolouring – on a fine day, shards of sunlight spilling between the apples in the rood screen, raising shivers of gold dust in the air.

This was not a fine day. When Merrily unlocked the church, under a sky like a gravestone, the interior had been unresponsive. Sixteen people had since taken Holy Communion. Afterwards, nothing much seemed to have altered. Or so she felt, blaming herself and her headache.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Shirley West said in the vestry, cradling the empty chalice like a sick baby. ‘I’m so terribly clumsy. I just get nervous, I’m afraid, Merrily.’

‘But you didn’t knock it over.’

‘I very nearly did.’

‘Shirley, I nearly do most weeks. I’ve stopped worrying about it.’

You were often told that a Mass was supposed to be like perfect theatre, conducted with precision and …

‘Grace,’ Shirley said. ‘I have no grace.’

‘Shirley …’ Merrily shook her head. ‘That’s not true.’

Which was a lie, but what could you say?

Shirley had come to live in Ledwardine a few months ago and had shown up in the church before the removal van had left. She was in her early forties, overweight, divorced, a bank manager in Leominster. She had family here. She’d come to virtually every service, moving up rapidly to giving out hymn books, arranging flowers and assisting, eventually, with the Eucharist.

Altar girl.

‘Someone said in the shop,’ Shirley said, ‘that there’s been talk of those old stones they found in the ground being put back up.’

‘Mmm. It’s a possibility.’

Merrily looked up from the chalice into deep-set brown eyes full of worried fervour.

‘Shouldn’t we be doing something to try to stop it?’

‘Stop it?’

‘The raising of heathen stones opposite our church?’

‘Erm … well, you won’t see them from the church, will you, Shirley? You’ve got the market square in between, and the market hall. Besides, I suppose they were here first.’

‘And duly toppled over and buried. There was a Christian purpose to that, surely.’

‘I think it was probably more to do with three big stones getting in the way of ploughing and haymaking.’

Evidently nobody had told Shirley about Jane’s pivotal role in the discovery of the Coleman’s Meadow stone row. Parish life. Complications everywhere.

‘The thing is, Shirley, quite a lot of medieval churches were actually built on the sites of prehistoric stone circles and burial chambers.’

‘Exactly. Burying the evil under the house of God, surely.’

‘I’m not sure if pre-Christian necessarily means evil.’

‘Our Lord was born into a world full of darkness. He was the Light of the World.’

‘And, in fact, looking at it in a practical way, most archaeologists seem to think the early Christians put the new churches in the places where local people were used to worshipping.’

‘I’ve never heard that.’

Shirley looked at her, eyes narrowed.

Merrily sighed.

‘Nothing’s ever quite as it seems ,’ Huw Owen said on the answering machine. ‘Give me a call, would you? ’

Priests rarely phoned one another on Sundays.

Merrily had twenty minutes before having to go back for the Morning Service. She’d only slipped home in the hope of finding a message from Fuchsia or, at least, Felix – she’d been worrying about it on and off since waking into the grey light. Suppose Felix had gone back into the caravan and told Fuchsia that she was being accused of lying?

Before calling Huw back, she tried ringing Felix. Phone switched off. For possibly the first time ever, she took the mobile back to the church with her, calling Huw from a damp bench in the graveyard, catching him in his Land Rover, between parishes. The signal wasn’t brilliant.

‘… Might be pu … oincidences …’ Huw on the hands-free, breaking up. ‘… You should know … James collection … foreword mentions … based … ordshire … call you back .’

‘ Mobile, Huw – on the mobile! ’

Getting interested glances now from fragments of congregation filtering through the lych-gate. In most parishes, the Morning Service was as good as it got, congregation-wise, Evensong having been dumped through low attendance. Here, mornings had actually been overtaken by the Sunday-evening meditation, even though the rumours of healing had long since died down. It was satisfying, a good reason to be able to be here tonight rather than at Mrs Murray’s guest house in Garway.

Merrily waved to James Bull-Davies, a fairly impoverished remnant of the Ledwardine squirearchy, and his partner Alison Kinnersley who, when she and Jane had first come to Ledwardine, had been living with Lol. Always faintly troubled, Alison would return tonight for the meditation – alone. James wasn’t into silence.

A nervous sun tested the clouds, and the phone chimed.

‘“The Stalls of Barchester”,’ Huw said.

‘Sorry?’

‘M. R. James mentions in his foreword to the collected edition that his Barchester Cathedral was partly based on Hereford Cathedral. I’d forgotten that. Herefordshire was also the imagined setting for one of the later stories, “A View from a Hill”.’

‘I thought they were always set in East Anglia.’

‘Sorry to complicate matters, lass.’ No engine rattle now; he’d parked up somewhere. ‘But it seems that James – Monty, as he was known – came to relate to rural Herefordshire extremely well. You could even say it became a refuge for him.’

‘You didn’t know this before?’

‘Of course I didn’t, else I’d’ve mentioned it.’

‘How come you know it now?’

‘How does any bugger know owt these days? I Googled Montague Rhodes James and found an unusually erudite website called Ghosts and Scholars , devoted entirely to the man. How much do you know about him?’

‘Hardly anything. He was an academic, wasn’t he?’

‘Divided his career between Eton – his old school – and King’s College, Cambridge. Son of a clergyman, brought up in the parish of Livermere in Suffolk – moody sort of place, apparently, very inspirational. In later years, he reckoned there was only one area to match it.’

‘Let me guess.’

‘Aye. Specifically, the countryside around Kilpeck and Much Dewchurch. Four miles from Garway? Five?’

‘Thereabouts.’

‘The trail, however, does lead to Garway itself.’

Merrily pulled her cloak over her knees, wanting a cigarette. Watching an unexpected sunbeam stroking a mossy headstone. Where was this going?

‘Monty never married,’ Huw said. ‘But he did have a close, though presumed platonic, female friend called Gwendolen McBryde. Widow of his good mate James McBryde, a talented artist, illustrated some of the early stories. Gwen was pregnant when he died, very young, and gave birth to a daughter. Mother and daughter moved to Herefordshire.’

‘As youngish widows with daughters sometimes do.’

Oh, sod it . She pulled her bag onto the bench, found the cigarettes. ‘Seems Monty would visit Gwen on quite a regular basis,’ Huw said. ‘Finding the countryside much to his taste, like I said. Monty was very fond of old churches and extremely knowledgeable about them. No big surprise that he’d visit Garway.’

‘If you say so.’

‘This is the point. After Monty’s death, Gwen published a collection of his letters – Letters from a Friend . In one of them, James recalls a particular visit to Garway in, I think, 1917. Actually, there are two mentions of Garway, but one just in passing. The one you need to know about … Well, I’ve already emailed it to you. Best if you read it when you get back home.’