Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

‘I’m sorry …’ Merrily kept on looking at the point of the church tower and the autumnal woodland glowing dully, like dying embers, under clouds the colour of old brick ‘… but did you say The Globe ?’

At the first oblique sight of it, you thought of a fox dozing in the undergrowth.

Except they didn’t, did they? Not out in the open, by day. Foxes didn’t sleep like that.

They’d walked uphill for about fifty paces, cresting a rise with two oak trees on top, boughs locked like antlers, and then the house was in a hollow below them: sprawling side-on, low-slung and sagging in a frame of bleached oak, built of rubble-stone the muddy colours of Garway church. A tin-roofed lean-to had collapsed at one end, exposing arms of oak raised in a ragged V to the rafters.

There were the usual twentieth-century additions to the house itself, notably the dormers jutting from the old stone tiles, but you could see that they were already rotting – slates slipping, guttering hanging off, while the original oak endured.

‘Sort of Welsh longhouse in one of its incarnations,’ Mrs Morningwood said. ‘Barn or cattle shed attached. Are you all right, Mrs Watkins?’

‘I’m fine.’

If disoriented. Like she’d passed into a dream and then from one dream into another that was darker. The Globe: where did fiction begin? And why had Mrs Morningwood suddenly decided to pass on information that would make the place, for Jane, even sexier?

‘Nice job on the roof, actually, Mrs Watkins. Timbers patched rather than replaced, and he had the foresight to use second-hand stone tiles. New ones might’ve been disastrous. The chap was good. Pity he couldn’t stay.’

‘What’ve you heard, Mrs Morningwood?’

‘His girl was frightened.’

‘He told you that?’

‘Yes, he did.’

‘You told him it was an unhappy house,’ Merrily said. ‘Would it be possible to explain further?’

Moving beyond the second oak tree, she saw a granary, with stone steps and a barn with a badly holed roof. Mrs Morningwood zipped up her cracked and fissured Barbour over the pink scarf.

‘Last time I was in there was nearly fifty years ago. I was nine years old.’

‘You lived next door and you haven’t been in for fifty years?’

‘“Next door”’s a relative term, darling. My cottage is six fields away, including one we let go to conifers, for purposes of concealment.’

‘So you wouldn’t see this house?’

‘Word is the Duchy of Cornwall wants to turn it into craft workshops, employing green energy. Good luck to them. I’ve nothing against Charles – been times I’ve even applauded the chap. Especially when he supports alternative remedies against the weasels of the medical profession taking their grimy little backhanders from the drug companies to cure us of non-existent ills. Cholesterol – who the hell invented cholesterol?’

Mrs Morningwood had sunk her fists so deeply into the pockets of the worn Barbour that you could see her knuckles through the holes.

‘Do you know what a watch night is, Mrs Watkins? Or was.’

‘Erm … maybe.’

‘Most places it had faded out by the end of the nineteenth century. Garway’s said to be the last part of Herefordshire to carry it on. Even so, it had almost vanished, even here, when it was reinstated by the Newtons.’

‘This was the family who’d bought the place from the Gwilyms?’

‘And how much do you know about that?’

‘Not much. That’s why I’m here. Learning history.’

‘Fychan Gwilym,’ Mrs Morningwood said.

‘Sorry?’

‘A name inevitably – and deliberately – mispronounced this side of the border. It all begins with Fychan. The Gwilyms, while not exactly marcher lords – being, of course, mainly Welsh – nonetheless had a substantial domain, and Fychan was their patriarch around the turn of last century. Notorious drunk, gambler, fornicator, wife-beater and, worst of all, a very bad farmer. Weekends, he’d take himself off to the fleshpots of Hereford and Monmouth. Weekdays, he’d be out hunting and gradually running the farm into the ground to pay off his debts.’

‘When was that?’

‘Early 1900s? Fortunately, one morning they found the bastard dead on the road to Bagwyllydiart. The eldest son far too young to take over, and the widow – much relieved, one imagines – rejected the local vultures, moved to a cottage on the edge of the village and shocked everyone by flogging the farm to the Newtons. From Off, Mrs Watkins.’

‘How far off?’

‘Over towards Ross, I believe. Well-heeled farming family, the Newtons, looking for a living for a second son. Gwilyms incandescent with rage. Hordes of them wriggling out of their holes. Imagine a raiding party of red-necked bastards, spitting and cursing – well, I exaggerate obviously, but such were the recriminations that the widow Gwilym found it expedient to leave the area altogether within the year.’

‘This house was so important to the family? Or was it the land?’

‘Oh, the house, principally. Ancestral family home, you see. Attempts to stop the sale, but it was legal, and once the Newtons were in they started buying more land – couple of fields here, bit of woodland there – gradually assembling a lucrative holding. Aware all the time, of course, of the Gwilym family closing in like Birnam Wood from the Welsh side – for many years in the ample shape of one Owain Gwilym, who had a farm near Skenfrith, ground extending almost to the border. Dedicated to getting the Newtons out and the Master House back. Not an ideal neighbour.’

‘Sounds like the seedbed of a classic border feud.’

‘Inevitably. Two farming dynasties head-to-head. Harassment … destruction of fences … smashing of gates … rustling of stock …’ Mrs Morningwood sniffed in contempt. ‘Farmers can be like children – petty bullying and breaking one another’s toys. Split the community down the middle. You were either for the Gwilyms or the Newtons. And the Newtons, during this period, had considerably more money and were generous to their local employees.’

‘Always helps.’

‘And they were clever. Always thinking of ways to weave themselves into the very fabric of the area, learning its psychology, absorbing its traditions – and using them. Which brings us back to the watch night. You remembered yet?’

‘I think …’ Merrily flicked a wary glance at Jane ‘… that it was about … keeping company with the dead?’

Mrs Morningwood folded her arms and hunched her shoulders, leaning her head back, as if to allow the memories to come sliding down like grain.

‘Specifically, Felicity Newton. Only ever remember her as an old woman. Must’ve been close to a hundred when she died in the 1950s – and not many people made the century in those days. Her son, Ralph, head of the family, decided to make an event of it – in theory, to allow everyone to pay their respects. One can see now that it was designed to work as a kind of ritual homage, binding the village and the neighbouring farms to the Newtons. All I know is, it haunted my dreams for years.’

‘You all had to see the body?’

‘Darling, if only it had stopped there.’

Mrs Morningwood pointed down to the Master House, where the skeleton of a porch had been half pulled away from the Gothic-shaped front door of whitening oak. She described a square hall just inside, which had also served as the living room. With a large inglenook, in front of which the remains of Felicity Newton had been displayed.

‘It must have been about eleven p.m. on a winter’s night – I was quite excited, I’d been allowed to stay up. We walked across the fields, my mother and I – just across here. People going in before us, all dressed in black, leaving their hurricane lamps outside. People who all knew one another, but no one spoke. I remember there was a fire in the room, kept very low, the only source of light, apart from the one candle. Like a grotto, a shrine. We were allowed to enter in ones and twos, and each time the door closed behind us, so that we were shut in with the corpse.’