Paul Moorcraft - The Anchoress of Shere

“Don’t you find me attractive?” she asked provocatively. “You always avoid touching me.”

He closed his eyes.

“I know I’ve got a bit skinny and pale, but has being locked up made me so ugly? I haven’t looked in a mirror since I came here. Look at me, don’t you find me attractive?”

“Of course I do,” he said, almost stuttering.

“Please open your eyes. Am I so frightening?”

The traditional wood stove in the kitchen was pumping out heat. Marda, returning to her own seat, took off her shoes and socks, then skipped around on the bare linoleum, humming to herself. The drink had fortified her, while he seemed relaxed, trusting almost, she thought, and this might be her last chance. She swallowed hard and, as she twirled around, she pulled off her dress while grabbing a tea towel to cover her breasts.

“Look at me. Don’t you want me? Isn’t this what you really wanted me to be?”

She flicked the towel into the air, leaving herself naked except for her pants.

“Do you want to see me naked? Is that what you want? Then I’ll do it for you. Here.”

She tugged off her pants, covering herself with her hands as she walked towards him.

Panic swept his face, he stood up and retreated until his back was pressed against the main kitchen door.

She followed him, standing on tiptoes to put her arms around his neck, and whispered, “You can hold me if you like. Do what you like with me…as long as you don’t hurt me. Take me to your bedroom now if you want to. Anywhere, but not down there in the coal-hole.”

As she pressed her naked body against him, he uttered a half-suppressed croak.

“Go on, kiss me if you want,” she said aggressively.

Reluctantly, almost like an automaton, he leaned forward to kiss her on the lips lightly as she squeezed against him.

Out of the corner of her eye she could see the large knife he had used to carve the turkey, and she desperately tried to estimate whether she could reach it. Marda pressed hard against him to move him towards the sideboard where the knife lay, tantalisingly close. She edged him towards it, keeping his back to the knife. Pressed against him, she felt the surprising roughness of his tweed jacket against her naked breasts.

She was sure he was not aware of the knife. Marda steeled herself to kill, but her most pressing fear was whether she could be quick enough to reach the knife before he reacted. She prayed that he would keep his eyes shut.

“Stop. Stop. Don’t kiss me any more, Christine,” he barked in a pained, almost strangled voice. He seized her hand and, with surprising strength, dragged her towards the trapdoor. “You’re the Whore of Babylon. The scarlet-coloured beast. Go to the pit where you belong.”

“No, please, please don’t put me back. Please,” she begged. “I’ll put my clothes on. No!” she shouted at the top of her voice. “Michael. Don’t.”

The last thing she heard on the radio as the trapdoor closed was the current hit song by the Spencer Davis Trio: “Somebody help me, yeah. Won’t somebody tell me what I’ve done wrong?”

That night Mark Stewart was waiting for Irvine Gould in the White Horse bar, and he was one or two drinks ahead of the amiable professor.

“Hi, Mark, sorry I’m late,” the gangly American said in his watered-down southern drawl.

Mark gave him a half-hearted salute. “I take it that you’ll have your customary pint of best English ale. Can’t take the stuff any more myself after German lagers. Too flat, too warm…” He ordered a pint at the bar. “But if you’re determined on researching the habits of the locals, then you might as well understand the reason for their flatulence.”

Professor Gould realised that Mark was masking his fear for his sister with an external bluffness that was typical of the British officer class.

“Any news today about Marda?”

Mark shook his head slowly. “Bugger all, professor. I’ve spent a week ingratiating myself with a bunch of gypsies who’ve been camped near the common for about six months. The police suggested I try them out. Some of the locals have visited their Madame Rosa. I had my fortune told, but nobody had seen Marda. Anyway, I don’t think she’d get involved with them.”

“What did the crystal ball say? A tall dark stranger would change your life?”

“No, it’s a lot of balls, but I thought I needed to jolly them along. I didn’t find out anything. The police aren’t too helpful, except for that old so-and-so in Shere, Constable Ben McGregor. He keeps sniffing around, hasn’t come up with much, but at least he’s trying. As for the rest…I don’t know. Anyway, how’s your research? I still don’t understand you colonials being so keen on tracing family trees.”

The professor gulped down his pint. He had noticed how the locals tended to do just that. When in Rome…“As I think I told you,” he said, belching into his hand, “my interest in genealogy is only a sideline. Medieval church history is my bag, as the saying goes.” The professor sometimes liked to think he was “cool”; he believed he could “relate” to the flower-power movement, for example. “My bag, man,” he said self-mockingly, “my area of specialisation. They’ve got great church records in this area, especially in Guildford.”

The captain, joining in the self-parody, felt it was his duty to play up to the professor’s stereotypical image of the English gentleman. “Sounds a bit dull to me, old boy.”

“Not at all. Fourteenth-century England was as bloody and as lively as Vietnam. Your guys were fighting all over France, pacifying the Welsh and kicking the crap out of the Scots, although the Scots gave as good as they got. And the English were fighting each other. It’s no wonder that so many hooked up with the Church.”

Gould had already explained his interest in St. James’s church and its unique architectural heritage. “I’ve been working my butt off to finish a paper on the church and its anchoress.”

“Bit far from the sea for mermaids, aren’t we?”

“Everyone around here knows about the anchoress. You mean to say you don’t?”

“Only joking. English sense of humour.”

The academic ignored the jibe. “I can see your glass is empty. Let me get you another.”

Over the next round of drinks, Gould explained his work on female hermits, and Christine Carpenter in particular; as well as the possibility of an interesting French connection to Christine. The professor meant to keep his description short and sharp, but he was an academic, and his learning and enthusiasm resulted in a long monologue.

“Sorry, Mark, I must be boring you.”

“No, not at all, but I can’t understand why an eighteen-year-old bird would want to lock herself away in a bloody wall. Sounds a bit insane, not to mention insanitary, to me.”

“No, it’s a fascinating case, and I have some really interesting new material that I unearthed in Bordeaux. So few English-or American-scholars work on French medieval records. They were so bureaucratic then…”

“They still are, Irvine. They still are. I’m glad the Frogs are out of NATO, I can tell you…”

“Yep, can’t stand us Yanks running the show. The trouble with us is that we’re fixers, not preventers. We could have soothed de Gaulle’s feelings and prevented this cock-up. Same back home. I despair when a failed movie actor becomes governor of California. I know they’re weird out there but Reagan . How could they?”

Mark Stewart enjoyed teasing the professor, despite the fact that Gould’s lazy drawl made him suspect the man was falling asleep in mid-sentence.

“Politics and films are the same in the USA. Washington is one big B-movie, always looking for the happy ending.” Mark was trying to coax the anglophile into xenophobia.