The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (MW6)

by Phil Rickman

  And Jane just screamed, high and piercing, like she never had before, at least not since she was very little, as she saw, in the middle mirror, a broad face, with thick fair hair piled up and twisted and eyes that were small and round and pale like silverskin onions.

  25

  Shifting Big Furniture

  THE WHITE COMPANY was a band of English mercenaries formed by Sir John Hawkwood in the fourteenth century, best known for its campaigns in Italy. It was also a firm supplying bathroom-related fluffy goods through mail order and two fancy-dress historical recreation societies.

  Close to the bottom of the first page, Google finally identified the White Company as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic historical novel, and Merrily clicked on it.

  Motley group of English mercenaries led by Sir Nigel Loring... assiduous attention to historical detail...

  Nothing, however, to suggest that the novel in any way reflected the central obsession of Doyle’s last two decades.

  In under an hour, she’d gathered a mass of background on this: Sir Arthur’s tireless tours of Britain and America, promoting his conviction that spiritualism would alter mankind for ever by making life after death a scientific fact. His blind defence of obvious fakery. His insistence that he’d spoken, at a seance, with his son Kingsley, a victim of the Great War, and his brother Innes. His belief that his sister Annette, over thirty years dead, had communed with Jean, Arthur’s wife, through automatic writing. Eventually, Arthur had acquired his own high-level spirit contact, Pheneas, a scribe from the Sumerian city of Ur, dead for over four thousand years.

  A kindly, decent, deluded man.

  In the snow-padded silence of the scullery, the phone went off like a burglar alarm. Two phone lines had become a necessary extravagance. Merrily plucked it up, wedging it under her chin while tapping on next, for Page Two.

  ‘Ledwardine Vic—’

  ‘Vicar?’

  ‘Alice.’

  ‘Vicar, will you be in if I comes round later on?’

  ‘I... yeah, sure. Wear wellies, though, Alice, because I haven’t bothered clearing the drive.’

  ‘With Dexter,’ Alice said.

  ‘Oh.’

  The digital clock on the desk said 7.18 p.m. The snow had turned the apple trees outside the window into cartoon wraiths. Page Two came up, with its highlighted words: white, white, white...

  ‘Sorry I’ve been so long getting back to you,’ Alice said, ‘My sisters, they said yes, they’d like to have the Eucharist. Dexter, he en’t so sure.’

  ‘He’s with you now?’

  ‘Does two nights a week in the chip shop.’

  In a steamy chip shop? With asthma?

  ‘I en’t letting him go back to Hereford tonight – what if he got stuck in the snow and he couldn’t breathe? How would they get him to the hospital? Will you talk to him, vicar? Will you make him see some sense?’

  ‘Well, you know, I’ll... I mean, I can try and explain, but I don’t want to—’

  ‘’Bout half an hour, then?’ Alice said.

  On the screen, near the top of Page Two, it said:

  The White Company. Established to further the mission of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to prove that the spirit world is an incontestable fact.

  Oh.

  ‘OK,’ Merrily said, ‘fine.’

  Replacing the phone with one hand, she clicked the mouse with the other, watching a bulky figure fading up: sagging white moustache, pinstripe suit, watch chain, watchful eyes. Encircling him, like some tragic Greek chorus, other faces less defined – misty faces blinking on and off, like faulty street lamps, in shades of white and grey. And then:

  The White Company

  welcomes you

  Walter was this fat and beaming old git, with a moustache that curled. His wife, Bella, might have been his daughter: turned-up nose, big hair gathered on top of her head. And the kid, this flat-faced kid clutching her hand, could have been Walter’s granddaughter.

  In fact this was Hattie Chancery, apparently the earliest obtainable photograph of her. It was on the wall next to the door, one of four framed photos in here: Walter and his family in the garden – Walter, formal in wing collar, and his wife Bella in some kind of flouncy crinoline. Also, two scenes of what, presumably, was the Middle Marches Hunt hounding some poor bloody fox into a badger set. And, over the bed, so she might see herself reflected in the mirror when she awoke... the adult Hattie.

  ‘Where did they get them?’ Jane’s voice was still unsteady. Shock, it seemed, could carry on pulsing through your body for whole minutes afterwards. Already she was despising herself, but that didn’t take it away.

  ‘On loan from the museum at Kington.’ Natalie lay on her back on the claw-footed bed, smoking a cigarette. ‘A deal. Ben found a really old washtub and stuff like that in one of the outhouses and donated it all. The pictures can go back after this – we’ll get them all copied when the snow goes. But Ben thought the originals might give off the strongest vibrations.’

  ‘For Hardy?’

  ‘I mean, Ben thinks it’s all shit really, but if it makes the White Company feel more inspired...’ Nat rolled over and off the bed, stood up and stretched – just the way she had when Jane had first walked in, rising up alongside the gilt-framed portrait hanging over the high mahogany headboard. She wore tight jeans and a black shirt open to a silver pendant. ‘I’m shattered, Jane. Shifting big furniture takes it out of you.’

  Jane went to the bottom of the bed and looked up at the woman in the sepia photo-portrait: the coils of glistening hair, the broad face with unsmiling lips like segments of soft white pear, and those pale, pale eyes gazing over your shoulder as if Hattie was disdainfully contemplating the mess left by her own blood on the wall between the windows.

  ‘How old was she here, do you think?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. Thirty?’

  ‘And Alistair Hardy actually wants to sleep in here?’ Jane could no longer imagine doing that. And the thought of waking up on a wintry morning to those silverskin eyes...

  ‘I don’t think he knows about it yet. It’s Ben’s idea. He’s become obsessed with the Chancery woman and this room – Stanner’s haunted room – and he’s thinking televisually. So we have to recreate the room pretty much as she’d remember it. Which, I have to tell you, has taken all day. The dressing table, we pinched from Room Seven – I spent about an hour polishing the foul thing. The bed – we had to bring that down in sections from one of the attics.’

  ‘This was her actual bed?’

  ‘God knows. It had enough dust on it.’

  ‘It bloody scared me, Nat. It’s... just unhealthy.’

  ‘Your face when you first opened the door, Jane, will live with me for a long time.’

  ‘It was just a big shell when I was last here.’ She looked around again. ‘Rather Hardy than me.’

  In fact, Hardy deserved all he got. Jane was still furious at him for using Lucy Devenish. An affront; Lucy’s spirituality was well in advance of all this.

  Natalie walked past her and opened the bedroom door. ‘Well, if we find him dead of a heart attack in the morning, it’s an occupational hazard. I can’t say I like him. Let’s go and have some tea.’

  Jane looked at her with something between shock and respect. Dead of a heart attack? It was the sort of thing a kid would say, oblivious of the rules of adult decency that obliged you to airbrush your thoughts before you exposed them. Nat was just so cool. It certainly took some kind of cool – or a complete absence of sensitivity to the numinous – to lie there alone on that bed, under that very eerie picture of Stanner’s murderer.

  ‘Nat...’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Does Amber know about this... refurbishing?’

  ‘Some of it. She’s been very quiet all week. I mean, the idea of them summoning spirits in her kitchen – the only place she can really bear to spend time in...’ Nat glanced outside, down the dark steps to the passage. ‘Sometimes I think she might surprise us al
l and leave him to it.’

  ‘Leave Ben?’

  ‘Leave Stanner and give Ben the big option. Could you blame her?’

  ‘Nat, it would destroy him. He thinks he’s doing all this for Amber.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Nat smiled with no humour. ‘Aren’t men dangerously delusional sometimes?’

  ‘And dangerously aggressive,’ Jane said.

  Nat eyed her, a warning look. It was a one-off. We don’t want Ben to get a reputation, do we?

  ‘Look...’ Jane glanced away from her, determined to get this out. ‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot...’

  ‘Well, don’t. It won’t help anybody.’

  ‘Been finding out about Hattie Chancery.’ Jane glanced warily at Hattie’s reflection in the dressing-table mirror. ‘I mean... you do know what she did in here, don’t you?’

  Natalie came back into the room. ‘Ben’s still letting Amber think she shot herself outside somewhere. I mean, Christ, they sleep just up the passage. Who told you?’

  ‘Gomer. And he told me about Hattie and all her men. What she did with them on the top of Stanner Rocks. All the aggression she had inside her. And the booze.’

  ‘If you believe all that.’

  ‘I kind of do.’ Jane looked at her. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘You’re asking me what I believe?’ Natalie supported her bum against the dressing table, stretched her long legs out, stared at Hattie. ‘I believe you don’t let anybody fuck you about. That’s it, really.’

  Jane, her back to the door, looked at the bed. It had a faded old mauve coverlet on it, with a fringe. She said, not looking at Nat, ‘When I was here, for that one night, I came back and found the quilt and the sheets had been pulled off and thrown back against the headboard. No, really, it happened. And I didn’t even know whose room it had been then.’

  Nat made no comment.

  ‘OK.’ Jane turned to Natalie. ‘Maybe Amber or somebody had been about to change the bedding and forgot and went away and left it. There could be a whole bunch of rational explanations, and I hope one of them was the truth. But I also had a really bad dream in here. I mean really bad. And also—’

  Nat said quietly, ‘Um, Jane...’

  ‘I mean, if you consider what happened last weekend... put that together with Hattie – goes up Stanner Rocks, shags some guy, comes back and smashes her sick husband’s head in. With a couple of the rocks she kept as like trophies? And then you think of Ben – OK, volatile, but basically this artistic, nonviolent bloke – who just loses it completely. On maybe the same spot? It was a horrendous attack. If you and Amber hadn’t been here, let’s face it, he might’ve killed that guy. And you know that’s true. He might be on remand now for murder.’

  ‘Jane, I don’t think this is a particularly—’

  ‘What got into him? You have to ask. Because if that was the real Ben—’

  ‘Jane—’

  ‘—Then maybe it would be a good thing if Amber did leave him. Maybe he’s the wrong kind of person to be here. You know?’ Jane blinked. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Natalie was looking over Jane’s shoulder. Apologetically.

  Jane stiffened, her shoulders hunching. She shut her eyes for a moment, opening them, in anguish, to a long, unsmiling face in the left-hand mirror of the dressing table.

  ‘Erm...’ She turned slowly, towards Ben, with her shoulders still up around her ears, forcing what she guessed would be a sick and cringing smile, holding out the camcorder like an offering. ‘Like, I... just came to... to get some, like, atmos shots?’

  Inaugurated in 1980, on the fiftieth anniversary of the passing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the White Company was originally called The Windlesham Society, after Sir Arthur’s last home in Sussex. The name was changed after the words ‘White Company’ were repeatedly received at spiritist meetings throughout Britain, both clairaudiently and through automatic writing. Finally, Sir Arthur himself conveyed to the eminent channelist, Mr Alistair Hardy, that he would consider it an honour to be patron of a society named after an especial favourite amongst his novels.

  The Society now comprises of both committed spiritists and Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts. In 1993, the outline of a planned Holmes story, The Adventure of the White Shadow, was channelled to Mr Hardy and later drafted in full by Mr Mason W. Mower, of Connecticut.

  Merrily wrinkled her nose. The idea of a society combining committed spiritualists and Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts sounded slightly unlikely, if you considered that Holmes was the creation of Conan Doyle’s rational, scientific side.

  But, then, wasn’t spiritualism considered to be rational and scientific? Wasn’t that the whole point – that they were proving the fact of life after death without the excess baggage?

  Meaning religion. Merrily fingered her small pectoral cross on its chain.

  It was easy to say that the Church was just jealous because these guys were offering direct experience. There were many people no longer scared of death because their departed loved ones were saying, We’re here for you. And even if it was faked, was that all bad? The main spiritualist wave had come after the First World War – all those grieving families who didn’t know how their sons and husbands had died, had no bodies to bury. A means of bringing closure.

  The doorbell rang. Merrily groaned. The thought of an hour with Dexter Harris was not enticing.

  She stood up, pulling on one of Jane’s old fleeces over her cowl-neck sweater. Half her wardrobe these days consisted of the kid’s cast-offs. No fire in the sitting room, so she’d have to keep Alice and Dexter in the kitchen, and it wasn’t too warm in there either, despite the Aga. She went through to the hall, meeting the eyes of the jaded Jesus hanging on to his lantern of hope in Holman Hunt’s Light of the World, Uncle Ted’s house-warming present.

  To prove that the spirit world is an incontestable fact.

  Slipping the catch, tugging the front door out of its frozen frame, she thought what a disappointment it must be to Conan Doyle, if he was still watching, that the great spiritual revolution had crumbled so quickly into the ruins of Crank City. The front door shuddered and the white night came in from the open porch in tingling crystals of cold.

  For a moment, it was surreal. The front garden of the vicarage was like some kind of fairy-tale bedchamber, the lawn a lumpy white mattress, bushes squashed into piles of pillows, a night light glimmering from the village square through the bare trees.

  Very much a part of this tableau, he unwound his scarf and a frieze of snow.

  ‘Um, I wondered if I might sing a carol.’

  ‘God!’ She laughed in delight, looking down the drive towards the snowbound square. ‘How did you—? Where’s your car?’

  ‘How would you feel about “Ding Dong M—?’

  ‘You’re insane!’

  ‘And there are medical records to prove it,’ Lol said.

  26

  White High

  LOL SAT BAREFOOTED on the rug in the scullery, defrosting his toes by two bars of the electric fire. The lights were out, but the door to the kitchen was ajar a couple of inches. His frayed blue jeans were somehow soaked despite his wellies, and there were wet patches on the dark green sweatshirt with white stencilled lettering. He sat there alone, watching the snow widening the window ledge outside, and he felt wildly happy.

  The lettering on the sweatshirt said Gomer Parry Plant Hire, commemorating the days he’d spent as an unskilled labourer in the wake of Gomer’s disastrous fire. Another small breakthrough: if it makes you a little anxious, do it. A chance to shovel tons of earth with your bare hands before playing live on stage for the first time since your teens. An impossible polar expedition in a clapped-out, sixteen-year-old Vauxhall Astra, to be with the person you love? Do it.

  The old Astra had slithered over snow-blinded hills, hugging a council grit-lorry down to Leominster. Tunnelling through the suffocated lanes, Lol had passed two abandoned cars, snow-bloated, and gone chugging on impossibly until the old girl finally gave up, r
olling away into the cascading night.

  But she only gave up – there was a God – on the hill that was already evolving into Church Street, Ledwardine, vainly spinning her wheels before sinking back, exhausted, into the Community Hall car park. Lol had climbed out like he was emerging from a trance state, and bent to kiss her cold grille thanks and goodnight before walking up to the vicarage on a white high.

  On the deserted square, a Christmas tree stood in front of the squat-pillared market hall, the whole scene loaded with snow, the fairy lights reduced to gauzy smudges of colour like ice lollies in a deep-freeze. Lol had looked back for a sign – a For Sale sign on Lucy’s old house – as if the sudden enchantment of the night might have tossed it back onto the market.

  No sign there, no lights. Maybe there was a forbidding, black-lettered sign somewhere that said he didn’t belong here, but right now he didn’t care. He sat in the glow of two faintly zinging orange bars and half-listened to Merrily in the kitchen, dealing with some people who had arrived soon after him. Best they didn’t see him; it would have been all over the village by morning. The way things had turned out, even his car wasn’t here. Snow was good at secrets.

  From the kitchen, he heard about arrangements for what seemed to be a memorial service. There was an elderly woman with a croaky voice that he recognized at once. Salt and vinegar with that, is it? And a guy called Dexter who managed to be both gruff and whiny. Sounded like routine parish stuff.

  At first, idly browsing the Cwn Annwn passages from Mrs Leather, Lol wasn’t aware of what Merrily was saying, just the soft and muted colours of her voice. Luxuriating in the proximity of her, recalling an old Van Morrison song from Tupelo Honey, about a woman in the kitchen with the lights turned down low.