Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

The choir sang on. The Boy Bishop and his entourage were now out of sight, out of earshot, paying homage to Cantilupe in all his fragments.

She should be there, too. She should be with them in the ruins of the tomb, where the barrier was down, where Thomas Dobbs had fallen. Yet – yes, all right, irrationally maybe – she also had to dispose of the blood… the most magical medium for the manifestation of… what? What? Anyway, she couldn’t be in both places, and there was no one else… absolutely nobody else.

Sophie was tending to the woman, the contents of her large handbag emptied out on the pew, the woman’s head tilted back – Sophie dabbing her nose and lips with a wet pad, the woman struggling to say how sorry she was, what a time for a nosebleed to happen.

‘She has them now and then,’ a bulky grey-haired man was explaining in a low, embarrassed voice to nobody in particular. ‘Not on this scale, I have to say. It’s nerves, I suppose. It’ll stop in a minute.’

Merrily said sharply, ‘Nerves?’

‘Oh,’ he mumbled, ‘mother of the Boy Bishop, all that. Stressful time all round.’

‘You’re Dick Lyden?’

‘Yes, I am. Look, can’t you leave the cleaning-up until after the service. Nobody’s going to step in it.’

‘That’s not what I’m worried about, Mr Lyden. This is his mother’s blood?’ She was talking to herself, searching for the significance of this.

‘I don’t want the boy to see the fuss.’ Dick Lyden pulled out a white handkerchief and began to mop his wife’s splashes from his shoes. ‘He’s temperamental, you see.’

Someone had given James Lyden one of the votive candles from near where the shrine had stood, and he waited there while they pushed back the partition screen.

‘Not how we’d like it to be,’ Jane heard this big minister with the bushy beard say. ‘Still, I’m sure St Thomas would understand.’

‘Absolutely,’ James Lyden said, like he couldn’t give a toss one way or the other.

There was no sign of Rowenna.

Pressed into the side of one of the pointed arches screening off the transept, no more than six yards away from them, Jane saw it all as the bearded minister held open the partition door to the sundered tomb.

Only the minister and the Boy Bishop went up to the stones – as though it was not just stone slabs in there, but Cantilupe’s mummified body. The two candle-bearing boys in white tunics waited either side of the door, like sentries. One of them, a stocky shock-haired guy, saw Jane and raised a friendly eyebrow. She’d never seen him before and pretended she hadn’t noticed.

The bearded minister stood before one of the side-panels with those mutilated figures of knights on it – their faces obliterated like someone had attacked them centuries ago with a hammer and a stone-chisel, and a lot of hatred.

The minister crossed his hands over his stomach, gazed down with closed eyes. He saw nothing.

‘Almighty God,’ he said, ‘let us this night remember Your servant, Thomas, guardian of this cathedral church, defender of the weak, healer of the sick, friend to the poor, who well understood the action of Our Lord when His disciples asked of Him: which is the greatest in the Kingdom of God and He shewed to them a child and set him in the midst of them.’

Jane saw James Lyden’s full lips twist into a sour and superior sneer.

The minister said, ‘Father, we ask that the humility demonstrated by Thomas Cantilupe throughout his time as bishop here might be shared this night and always by your servant James.’

‘No chance,’ Jane breathed grimly, and the shock-haired boy must have seen the expression on her face, because he grinned.

‘It is to our shame,’ the minister went on, ‘that Thomas’s shrine, this cathedral’s most sacred jewel, should be in pieces, but we know that James will return here when it is once again whole.’

Wouldn’t put money on it . This time Jane looked down at her shoes, and kept her mouth shut.

Which was more than James did when he put down his candle on a mason’s bench, and bent reverently to kiss the stone. Jane reckoned he must have spent some while dredging up this disgusting, venomous wedge of thick saliva.

When his face came up smiling, she felt sick. She also felt something strange and piercingly frightening: an unmistakable awareness, in her stomach, of the nearness of evil. She gasped, because it weakened her, her legs felt numb, and she wanted to be away from here, but was not sure she could move. She felt herself sinking into the stone of the arch. She felt soiled and corrupted, not so much by what she’d seen but by what she realized it meant, and she groped for the words she’d intoned with all the sincerity of a budgie – while Mum held her hands – before the altar at Ledwardine.

Christ be with us, Christ within us .

And then the electric lights went out.

‘Look, darling,’ he said, ‘it’s Mr Robinson. You remember Mr Robinson.’

Tim Purefoy held a large glass of red wine close to the tablecloth white of his surplice.

Anna wore a simple black shift, quite low-cut. She was a beautiful woman; she threw off a sensual charge like a miasma. Like an aura, Lol supposed.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I thought, one day, there would be somebody. I really didn’t think it would be you.’

‘The brother, perhaps.’ Tim lowered himself, with a grateful sigh, into the chair. ‘All rage and bombast, amounting, in the end, to very little – like most of them.’

‘Or the exorcist,’ Anna said, ‘Jane’s mother. I did so want to meet her before we moved on.’

‘But not this little chap here. No, indeed. Hidden depths, do you think?’ A bar of pewtery moonlight cut through the high window, reaching almost to the top of Tim Purefoy’s pale curls. He held up a dark bottle without a label. ‘Glass of wine, old son?’

‘No thanks,’ Lol said tightly. ‘I… seem to be interrupting something.’ Everything he said seemed to emerge slowly, the way words sometimes did in dreams, as though the breath which carried them had to tunnel its way through the atmosphere.

‘Not at all.’ Tim Purefoy took a long, unhurried sip of wine. ‘It’s finished now. It’s done. We’re glad to have the company, aren’t we, darling?’

‘Done?’

‘Ah, now, Mr Robinson…’ Tim put down his glass then used both hands to pull the white surplice over his head, letting it fall in a heap to the flags. ‘You must have some idea of what we’re about, or you wouldn’t be here.’

Anna Purefoy brought Lol a chair and stood in front of him until he sat down – like he was going to be executed, sacrificed. Anna looked young and fit and energized, as if she’d just had sex. She must, he thought, be about sixty, however. ‘Sure you won’t have a glass of wine?’

Before you die?

‘Communion wine?’ Lol said.

Tim Purefoy laughed. ‘With a tincture of bat’s blood.’

‘It’s our own plum wine, silly.’ Anna took the bottle from her husband and held it out to Lol. ‘See? You really shouldn’t believe everything you read about people like us.’

Lol remembered her patting floury hands on her apron. One can buy a marvellous loaf at any one of a half-dozen places in town, but one somehow feels obliged, living in a house this old .

He was almost disarmed by the ordinariness of it, the civility, the domesticity: candles like these, in holders like these, available in all good branches of Habitat. He blinked and forced himself to remember Katherine Moon congealing in her bath of blood – glancing across towards the bathroom door, holding the image of the dead, grinning Moon pickled like red cabbage. In that room over there, beyond those stairs . Behind that door .