by Jon Mackley
‘Terrible, fearful,’ Will said. He crossed out each of the letters in his pad. ‘It’s got 101 letters, just like the poem has 101 stanzas. And it’s got the alliteration that the poet loved so much.’ He sighed. ‘It seems too straightforward. I feel like we’re being led astray.’
‘Perfect,’ Lara scowled.
‘All we have to do is find the chapel with the tomb of a knight who died in 1212.’ He tapped his foot in frustration. ‘We can do a search on the internet or scour though every guidebook in Britain to find that out.’
‘No,’ Lara said.
‘It’s a lot of donkey-work,’ Will admitted. ‘But I don’t see we have any alternative.’
‘We’re missing the most obvious point: there aren’t 1212 lines in Pearl. There’s only 1211. The poet missed out line 472.’
‘We never did come up with a good reason why he missed out that line.’ Will exhaled slowly. ‘And again, he’s talking about something his audience would have known. He refers to Þe aghlich chapel. Most likely something he saw in Chester.’
Lara felt the blood draining from her face. She felt cold running down her back and steadied herself against the table to stop herself from falling. Her world was spinning out of her control.
Will was touching her hand and she did not pull away. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
She nodded, still not able to focus. ‘He’s not just talking about something he knows. He’s written this for a very specific audience. Someone who’d know what he’s talking about.’
‘Who?’
Lara’s voice was hollow. ‘Me. He knows I’ll read this. It’s the church I fear. Not anyone else. It’s Beaded church. The village where I grew up.’
*
Olivia had made a time-out sign, observing this had become too heavy. She sent Lara upstairs to have a bath and Lara agreed, taking the hint that Olivia wanted to talk to Will in private. When Lara came back downstairs, hair wrapped in a towel, Will announced that Olivia had agreed to lend them her car.
They left shortly after lunch. Lara sat in the back seat, behind Will. Occasionally, she saw him looking in the rear-view mirror to check to see she was all right. Lara was uncomfortable travelling with him. She repeatedly stared over her shoulder to see if they were being followed.
After nearly three hours, the motorways gave way to the dual carriageways leading towards Chester. Lara fought against sleep, but as the skies darkened around mid-afternoon she found herself dropping off with the hypnotic blurring of the sodium lights, and it was only when she heard the protesting whine of Will shifting down to a lower gear that she woke up and gazed sleepily around her.
The village was dark. A single streetlight lit the road. Lights were on in the few houses and the pub. Fear suddenly clawed at her.
‘Stop,’ she said suddenly. Her voice was an unnerving interruption following the four-hour roar of the car’s engine. Will obediently pulled the car over to the side of the road. Lara glanced out at the pub’s lights spilling across the village green. The Parish Church of St Werburgh was no more than a dark silhouette in the distance.
‘Why didn’t you tell me we were here already?’ she said.
‘I didn’t know. There were no road signs.’
Lara unlocked her door and let herself out of the car. Will dimmed the lights and turned off the engine before he stood with her outside.
The mechanism in the church clock started to whirr. It was a sound that was familiar through the fog of distant memories. It was years since she had last walked into Beaded, but everything about it was familiar, the hum of the clock before the bells chimed, sounds of the aeroplanes overhead, the smells of the pub and the village green. As she stared around her, she saw the low white fence which surrounded the green and the place where a troupe of travelling Morris dancers performed every May-time, a place where the maypole was set up, and where Michael had once led her with his boyish grin, begging her to come with him to the May Pole so he could show her what fertility rituals were all about. She saw the well into which she had nearly fallen as she had tried to balance on the rim. Her friend – Hannah, that had been her name – had run screaming for help, while Lara clung to the rim. And Hannah’s father had come running and yanked her out. Here was the place where an old story teller had come and told tales of great imagination to the school children of the area on special occasions, about the history of Chester and what part the area that became Beaded played in the Roman occupation of the county.
And at last, here was her own home. It was the first time she had returned here in years. Will had not moved from the side of the car. She felt herself being forced forwards. She was being manipulated as if she were being controlled by an unseen puppeteer. Fighting the urge to retreat, she knocked on the door.
For a moment she thought there was no one inside. Then the hall light was switched on and Lara saw the familiar stained glass flowers of her own front door, before it opened and an old man peered out.
‘Who is it?’ the man asked.
For a moment Lara believed her father must have moved without telling her, but as she stared, she realised this man was her father. She stared at the aged face. It was a terrible moment to realise time had been so unkind to him, but her own body would have changed much since she had last seen him. Her hair colour had changed. She wasn’t wearing her glasses and she had put on a bit of weight following her pregnancy. She gazed at the hooded eyes and the thick grey bushy eyebrows. Much of the hair on her father’s head was gone and his muscles had withered away to spindly limbs. She smiled gently, breathing a long sigh of relief. At last she was home.
‘Well, who are you?’ her father demanded, abruptly, but not unpleasantly.
‘It’s Lara,’ she said and, when there seemed little recognition, she elaborated in a gentle voice. ‘Your daughter.’
The man nodded, peering down at her, looking for features he could recognise. ‘Yes, she’d be about your age.’ He smiled wanly, ‘You still had to lose that fat when you left us. You seem to have grown up.’ Then his expression changed, his voice became angry. ‘But you aren’t my daughter. I don’t know who you are.’
Lara felt her heart being beaten on a blacksmith’s anvil. ‘Dad, don’t do this. It’s been a while, but …’
‘You always had the Devil in you, girl. We always feared it was so. You and the boy you left with both had the Devil’s mark. You took your mother as your unhallowed sacrifice.’ He turned his back on Lara. ‘You aren’t my daughter, I don’t know you.’
Lara tried to find something to say, but could find nothing. She caught her father’s arm, turned him round, forced the old man to look at her, but he shook himself free. ‘If you were my daughter you wouldn’t have come back here until you’d succeeded. She was such a bitter disappointment to me.’
‘That’s not fair, Dad. I did my best, you just set impossible targets.’
‘Targets which she should have met. Instead she killed her mother and drove her family apart.’ His eyes were smouldering with rage. ‘Leave.’
The door slammed in her face. Lara stayed there, staring at the stained glass flowers until the hall light was turned off. Then she staggered away, cheeks burning with shame. Her thoughts attacked her conscience. The realisation she had been disowned broke over her like a mighty wave, physically forcing her to her knees. She knelt outside her own home and wept like a baby.
Suddenly, she felt gentle hands on her shoulders. Startled, she looked up into Will’s gentle face.
He didn’t say anything as he helped her to stand and her tears flowed again. There was no controlling them. She buried her face into Will’s shoulder and his arms encircled her, his fingers tracing gentle patterns on her back. ‘Perhaps we should leave.’
She nodded and was led by her hand back to the car. She sat on the front seat, staring out at the lone streetlight. ‘He disowned me,’ she said eventually. ‘Like he never knew me.’ Her eyes were pleading. ‘He said I split my family and killed my mother. I
know my mother died when I was born, but there was only me and Dad. He adored me. We’d spend every evening together; he would read to me. He doted on me.’
‘And then you left him and he never understood why,’ Will offered.
‘I couldn’t stay here,’ Lara said and she stopped suddenly.
‘Why not?’
Lara’s expression was pained. ‘I don’t think I’m ready to tell you that.’
Will gently touched her shoulder. She flinched. ‘Listen to me, Pearl,’ he said. ‘You’re in Beaded. This is the end of the trail. Maybe you should try to confront some of your ghosts.’
‘Not now,’ Lara said coldly.
Will regarded her patiently. ‘I’m afraid there are more ghosts than you realise. More devils than vast hell can hold and all that. Do you want to talk about your brother?’
Lara jerked. ‘What? I haven’t got a brother?’
‘You sure?’
‘What do you know that I don’t? What was written about me on my files?’
‘Nothing. I was just putting two and two together.’
‘And your answer is a brother? That’s ridiculous. What reasons could you possibly have to think that?’
‘Several. First of all, in spite of your “loving family relationship” with your father, he thinks you’ve been a disappointment to him. Is it possible that your brother was the disappointment first and your father didn’t want you to do the same thing?’
‘Rubbish.’
‘And let’s take the two Shakespeare plays you know so well, so much so that your father read them to you every night. There’s one common theme in the plays which is that a missing brother is found. Did you never realise? Perhaps your father was hoping you would prove less disappointing than him, maybe your father was telling you your brother had disappointed him, and was begging you not to go the same way.’
‘This is ridiculous, it would mean he would have had to have left around the same time I was born.’
‘Is that so hard a thing to imagine? You said your father was a lot older than the other girls’ dads.’
Lara turned away from him, but found herself looking at the church. Always there was the church, the one building which terrified her and set her on an active path away from organised religion, and it was the only place to which she had to travel and, as she contemplated the building, she knew Will was telling her the truth. Hidden in a niche at the back of her mind was a memory of an argument, between an angry young man and her father. Staring back across time, she couldn’t hear the words, but knew this was a fight which had resulted from pent up, unexpressed grief. The younger man – maybe eighteen years old – had many of her father’s features and was refusing to back down in the argument. So was her father. That was the Halpin trait.
She was recalling events that must have occurred twenty years before; she would have been a very small child, hardly understanding her relationship with the older stranger, before she tried to understand why that stranger was no longer there.
‘I have a brother,’ Lara breathed. ‘Why did my father never tell me?’
‘Because he’d been a disappointment to the family by never once bowing down with his pride and admitting he was grieving as much for your mother, just as your brother was. Their grief became anger and there was no one else in the circle to direct the anger.’
‘He kept telling me he didn’t want me to disappoint him because my brother had already done it, and he didn’t want to be let down.’ She gave a sorrowful sigh. ‘And thinking he was doing nothing but berating me, I left and disappointed him further.’
‘It explains a lot,’ Will said gently. ‘So, what will you do now, Lara Halpin?’
Lara glanced at the house, then at the church, then back at the house, then back at the church. She felt the frustration of a child being forced to do homework that was too complicated; she felt the terrors she had excluded from her mind wrapping themselves around her.
She got out of the car. Her feet felt weighted. ‘I have to face my ghosts,’ she said with resolution. ‘And then I’ll prove to my father that I was “good enough”.’ She began to stride towards the church.
16
St Werburgh’s church stood beside a large field. It was silhouetted against the leaden sky, gaunt and foreboding. The moon glowered, shining a vague jaundiced light through the windows, like malevolent eyes glaring at them. The sun had set behind a small hill. The landscape was cold. The ground had frosted. Ice cracked underfoot.
A gnarled old horse-chestnut tree stood in the graveyard. As children, Lara and her friends had gathered conkers, throwing sticks up to knock down the fruits from the higher branches. A few birds’ nests clung grimly to the branches of the conker tree. Crows, startled by the intruders, flew through the branches, cawing noisily. Beneath, the tombstones were scattered through the graveyard like rotten teeth.
‘Cheerful place,’ Will breathed. ‘No wonder you’ve no fond memories from here.’
Closer to the church, Lara saw the all-too familiar granite walls. They were cold and unfriendly.
A chilling wind whipped up. Lara pulled her coat tighter around her. The wind seemed to be mocking her, taunting her to run and never return.
Lara gave a tentative look over her shoulder; the distant sodium of streetlights spread a red and orange stain across the sky, like a spreading pool of blood. One of the lights flickered uncertainly. Her breath misted in front of her. She kept her hands in her pockets, hoping to bring some circulation back into her fingers.
She wanted to tell Will that this was a hostile place and they shouldn’t be here. The very name filled her with a fear that was more than just a childhood memory: Beaded … Be Dead. How could anyone want to live around here? It was insipid, yet sucked people in so they could never escape.
But she couldn’t leave now. While their quest might be a lost cause, and they might find nothing in the darkness, there was a possibility someone might see her if she came here during the day, someone who might recognise her and speak to her father. With the blanket of dusk came anonymity.
They stepped through the lych-gate outside the graveyard. The grass was withered, like a dead man’s hair. The air was filled with a stench of rot – decomposing funeral flowers. The sound of turning clockworks cut through the silence. The clock chimed. The resounding bell seemed to be warning the locals of their presence.
‘Will,’ Lara breathed. She didn’t know what else to say, but drew comfort from his name. He did not reply, did not turn to look at her. He simply continued his relentless march towards the church like an automaton, or a man possessed.
She glanced behind her, feeling they were being watched, that Marsh was following so close behind he was treading on their shadows.
She stared at the church walls again and the fearsome gothic windows. It wasn’t a surprise she’d been put off religion when she had spent her childhood faced with such terrible images. She tried to control her laboured breathing, but the air seemed to stick in her throat, suffocating her, before it flowed into her lungs, the cold of the evening freezing her internal organs.
The crows had silenced and the echoes of the bell tower had receded. Even the ground seemed to have softened, so the cracking of ice was reduced to a sludgy step.
Then she was standing in front of the door. It had been left open for evensong. She guessed one of the churchwardens would be around somewhere and would not be averse to a couple of tourists, or pilgrims exploring the church. Is my father still a churchwarden? she wondered.
Will waited patiently by the door. ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this?’ he asked. But there was something in the way he asked that made her feel she had no choice but to go on. Even so, standing in front of the church was confronting a past that she’d tried to suppress for so long. The church was the bank vault that stored her memories.
If she turned away now, there wouldn’t be another time. In her brief visits into what her father termed ‘forbidden Shakespeare’, sh
e had learned to screw her courage to its sticking place. If she left now, she would never again find the strength to come back. She would never return here if she could help it, and she knew she couldn’t endure the further disappointment of her father.
‘When was the last time you were in this church?’ Will asked as he held open the door for her.
Lara shifted uncomfortably. ‘Years ago,’ she whispered. Too many to count. Before she had met Michael, but after she had rebelled, when she decided that enduring the beatings from her father was preferable to sitting in the cold, listening to the vicar accusing the congregation, accusing her, of guilt in a blood-and-thunder style.
Lara had eventually realised that what the vicar called guilt was no more than child-like curiosity and working through feelings and emotions like any other girl of her age, along with the pressure of growing up without a mother. Instead of shaming her for having natural feelings and instincts, the misogynist bastard should have been giving her words of support.
‘Pearl?’ Will’s voice was beside her, filled with concern. ‘Are you all right?’
So that was the ghost: lurking for her outside the church where she was not expecting it, rather than inside, waiting to jump out from the shadows. She turned away from the doors and walked towards the conker tree in the graveyard. Eight stones from the conker tree, four stones up. She crouched down in front of the black stone and stared at the gold letters. There was the name, Rowan Elizabeth Halpin, her mother.
The stone was her only connection to the woman of the past; here was her name, the epitaph “Beloved Wife and Mother”, the date of her death and her age. There was no date of birth. She had wondered if her father had been economising, or whether he had considered it unimportant.
A small pocket of snowdrops grew next to the grave. She picked one of the flowers, looking at the white petals in the distant orange light, before placing it, child-like, on the gravestone. She had never known her mother, but she still found it hard to hold back the tears when she was next to the stone, feeling the stark realisation there was a body which had been her mother’s shell during her time on the earth, resting six feet under her.
