Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

Can of worms!

Although it felt no warmer inside, Merrily unzipped her waxed coat and put a hand to the bump in her sweater, her pectoral cross.

This was because the atmosphere in the Cathedral was different.

Live?

Sophie touched her arm. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’ Merrily remembered reading once that gothic churches somehow recharged themselves at night, like battery packs. She felt again the powerful inner call to prayer she’d experienced on the afternoon she’d emerged from the shell-like chantry to encounter Dobbs and the woman.

‘I won’t put on any lights,’ George whispered. ‘Don’t want to draw undue, ah… attention.’

He snapped off his torch for a moment. The only illumination now was the little aumbry light over the cupboard holding the emergency sacrament: wine and wafers in a silver container. Merrily felt a desperate, vibrating desire to kneel before it.

There was no sound at all.

‘All right.’ George switched on his torch again, and they followed its bobbing beam through the Lady Chapel and into the North Transept, where the great stained-glass window reared over the temporary screening partition hiding the dismantled tomb of St Thomas Cantilupe. George shone his torch over the various posters drawing-pinned to it, telling the story of Cantilupe – a wise and caring bishop, according to the Cathedral guidebook, who stood firm against evil in all its guises.

George stopped and called out harshly, ‘Thomas?’ as though he hadn’t intended to – as though the word had been wrenched out of him.

Merrily quivered for an instant.

Thomas? – as if he was summoning the spirit of Cantilupe.

He might as well have been. There was no response.

Merrily looked at Sophie. ‘You’re sure he’s still…?’

George moved across and shone his torch on the plywood partition door. Merrily remembered a padlocked chain connecting steel staples on the outside.

‘All this will be taken down quite soon,’ George said. ‘They’re putting the tomb back together next week.’

The chain appeared to have been dragged inside through a half-inch crack between the ill-fitting door and its frame. Dobbs – or someone else – had to be still behind it.

Merrily said, ‘Do you feel anything?’

‘I feel quite annoyed, actually,’ Sophie muttered. ‘Why isn’t he doing… what he was doing earlier? You’ll think we only dragged you here on a such a dreadful night on some sort of perverse whim.’

‘No. The atmosphere, Sophie – the atmosphere’s somehow… I don’t know… disarranged.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never been in here at night before. Not like this, anyway.’

She had a feeling of overhead cables cut, slashed through. Of them hanging down now, still live and dangerous.

‘Thomas?’ George rapped on the plywood door. ‘Thomas, it’s George. Getting a bit anxious about you, old chap.’

‘Something’s happened,’ Merrily said suddenly. ‘Can you break it down?’

‘Thomas!’ George slapped the partition with a leather-gloved hand. ‘Are you there?’

‘Break it down!’

He swung round. ‘This is a cathedral, Mrs Watkins.’

‘Maybe you can snap the chain?’

‘I can’t even reach the chain.’

‘Kick the door.’

‘I… I can’t.’

Merrily hurriedly unzipped her coat and slipped out of it. ‘Stand back, then. I’ll do it.’

‘No, I… Thomas! For God’s sake!’ George put an ear to the crack between the door and the frame. ‘Stop… wait… I can hear…’

Merrily went still.

‘I can hear him breathing,’ George said. ‘Can you hear that?’

She turned her back to the plywood screen, steadying her own breathing. She rubbed her eyes. Think practically, think rationally . When she turned back, both George and Sophie were staring at her. And the air in the high transept was still invisibly untidy with snipped wires.

‘All right.’ Big George began to unbutton his overcoat. ‘I’ll do it.

He wore fat, black boots. Doc Martens probably, size eleven at least. With equipment like that, he could bring the whole damned partition crashing down.

He gave Merrily the rubber-covered torch, which felt moist. By its light, she saw that his brown eyes were wide and scared, and a froth of spittle glistened in his beard.

‘Christ be with us,’ Merrily heard herself saying.

SIREN WARBLING, BLUE beacons strobing – violently beautiful over the snow – the ambulance broke the rules by cutting from Broad Street across the Cathedral Green.

Merrily stood outside St John’s door with Sophie. Feeling useless.

Even in his condition, Dobbs had reared up from the stones at the sight of her, one arm hanging limp, and his face like a waxwork melting down one side. George Curtiss had then taken charge, suggesting she and Sophie should phone for help from the office in the gatehouse.

Merrily had glanced back once before they hurried away, and had seen George fumbling at the wall under the aumbry light.

‘The sacrament.’ Sophie had started to shake. ‘Oh, dear God, he’s asked for the sacrament.’

Merrily wasn’t sure Dobbs had been in any condition, at the time, to voice a request; this was probably George’s own decision. Probably a wise one.

She and Sophie stood back while the paramedics brought the old man out. Multiple headlights creaming the snow and more people gathering – one of the vergers, a couple of policemen.

And the Right Reverend Michael Hunter loping towards them. The Bishop in a purple tracksuit.

‘Merrily, what on earth are you doing here?’

‘Michael, I sent for her,’ Sophie explained at once. ‘I thought—’

‘That’s good,’ the Bishop said. ‘That’s fine. Entirely appropriate.’

Summoned from his bed, no doubt, by the ambulance siren, he seemed neither cold nor tired. Merrily could almost see his athlete’s glow as an actual halo as he raised a palm over the two women, like a blessing.

‘Poor Canon Dobbs,’ Sophie said.

The Bishop nodded. ‘A good and distinguished servant of God.’

Huh? Merrily recalled their discussion in the Green Dragon. ‘ The old man’s ubiquitous. Hovering silently, like some dark, malign spectre. I’d like to… I want to exorcize Dobbs .’

Classic episcopal hypocrisy.

‘But he worked himself too hard – and for too long,’ the Bishop said. ‘A stroke, I gather.’

‘Yes,’ Merrily said, ‘that’s what it looks like.’

‘No!’ Cool, efficient Sophie started to cry. ‘ Two strokes. It must have been two, don’t you see? We thought he must be… must have been drinking. When we heard his voice all slurred, in fact he was simply struggling to speak after a first stroke – probably only a minor one. And then… I remember my father… Oh God, how stupid we were, how utterly thoughtless.’

‘Sophie,’ Merrily said, ‘if it wasn’t for you, he might still be lying there.’

‘Perhaps it was us shouting at him to come out… perhaps all the fuss threw him into some sort of confused panic and that was what brought on the second stroke.’

‘Sophie, listen.’ The Bishop took his secretary by both shoulders, then eased back her scarf so as to look into her eyes. ‘We all knew that Thomas was long, long overdue for retirement. His particular ministry put him under enormous pressure. Several of us, as you know, tried very hard to persuade him to give it up. I think it was becoming explicitly clear to everyone that this good man’s mind was breaking down. Hey, watch yourself…’

He guided Sophie out of the path of the ambulance as it started up, preparing to bear the stricken Dobbs to the General Hospital. George Curtiss appeared from behind it, breathing hard through his beard.