It’s the same as the one in Cyril’s study. Mother Julian of Norwich and all manner of heavenly wonderfulness.
My mouth is almost too dry to speak, but I do say, ‘Father, I am not ready and I am very unworthy. I—’
He interrupts. ‘No one is ready and no one is worthy.’
Parry takes my phone and car keys.
He doesn’t say anything, but doesn’t have to. I know what he’ll do next. What I’d do if I were him. Drive far enough that he’ll be sure my car is getting picked up on cameras. Turn my phone back on again somewhere random – Leominster, Bristol, Whereverthehell – then drive a bit more. Create a trail. Send some texts to DI Burnett – brilliantly labelled as such in my phone book. Cute little texts. ‘Got something really interesting. Brief you properly in the morning.’ That kind of thing.
Fiona Griffiths: last seen in Swansea.
Next recorded in Leominster, or Bristol, or Whereverthehell. Absolutely no reason for anyone to suspect I’d been anywhere near Llanglydwen. I even parked well away from the village so if by any chance Burnett has officers out here, they won’t have seen my car, won’t have logged the number plate.
Brilliant work, Griffiths. You’re lost, forgotten, unknown.
When we first met Cyril, he told us about the ‘refugees from the world’ the monastery sought to help. He told us, There are people who might look happy and successful to you. Perhaps, I don’t know, they have money, jobs, boy- or girlfriends, whatever they want. But they have lost their connection to God. And without that, what are they? Souls in trouble. People who need our help. Sometimes they know that. Sometimes they half-know it. Sometimes they have to learn it, or re-learn it. We are here for them all.
I think I’m in for a learning experience myself. About to learn precisely how far these monks were prepared to go in their soul-rescue mission. And I’m not sure I’m going to appreciate the ride.
As I’m thinking those thoughts, Cyril places a glass of water in front of me. A pill. Red and white. The polite little medicament that smooths this coercive trail.
I start to shake my head, but Cyril says, ‘My daughter, if you resist, we will force you. And I don’t want to force you.’
I nod, acknowledging the logic.
‘Father, this pill . . .?’
‘Will quieten you. It’s only for while we prepare you. You will be alive and unharmed and perfectly conscious.’
‘Thank you.’
I open my mouth. Cyril places the pill inside, where I hold it on the tip of my tongue. He raises the water to my lips.
‘Pray for me, Father,’ I say, and drink.
I swallow the pill. Ketamine, I imagine, or one of its many bedfellows.
Cyril places his hands on my head, as he did that time in church. There is something wonderfully peaceful in that touch. Brother Nicholas and Dylan Parry kneel down facing me, their heads bowed. Cyril says a prayer, quietly and repetitively. It’s in Greek, I think. Not English or Latin at any rate.
Unconsciousness starts to nibble at me. A darkening and slackening. An easy road, not a scary one. I can’t resist and I don’t try to. Wait for the blackness to rise and claim me.
And DI Alun Burnett, my doggedly capable boss, has absolutely no idea where I am.
43
Dreams.
Turbulent and confused. A rushing upwards. Like a diver breaking for a distant spill of brightness.
A brightness which spreads and dazzles.
I keep my eyes closed, but start to feel my body again. The loll of my head. The pull of my limbs.
My tongue is clumsy and oversized. A cow’s tongue in a lamb’s mouth.
There are voices around me. A low, murmuring chant. I’m shivery, but I can’t tell if I’m cold. I try moving my arms, my legs. No dice.
‘Do what you need to do, Fiona.’ Burnett said. ‘Just do what you need to do.’
For once in my life, I’ve pretty much done things by the book. Cut some corners, yes, but not many. Worked a little hard, a little obsessively at times, but I’ve always brought my findings to one of my many bosses. I’ve kept them in the loop. I’ve not gone crazy. Not sworn at the wrong times or deliberately messed up things I was told to do.
I’ve played this whole case as cleanly as DS Griffiths of the South Wales Police is ever likely to play it – and here’s the result.
‘Do what you need to do, Fiona.’
Steps. A man approaches.
Brother Anselm. ‘Are you waking?’
My ox’s tongue lashes around in its little space. Asks for water, or tries to.
Anselm’s voice moves in and out, but he comes back with a glass of water.
Drink some, spill some.
My eyes are still gummed shut.
Anselm tells me that what I’m feeling is normal. That it takes time to clear the muddiness. He places his hand on mine and lets me lean my head against his arm.
Days or minutes pass.
Seconds or centuries.
I ask for more water. Drink. More effectively this time.
My head and arms, body and legs feel like they belong to me. As much as they ever did anyway.
I open my eyes.
I’m in the monastery’s little church, of course. Where I knew I’d be. The view is blurry though. Hazed out. At first, I think that my faculties are still blunted by the drug, but then I realise my faculties are just fine.
I’m wearing a veil. A white veil that falls below my shoulder. An appliqué hem of lace and beads brushes my bare arm.
I’m wearing a dress. A white dress.
Cottony pintucks and broderie anglaise.
My wrists and ankles are cable-tied to a chair, but tied with gentleness. Cloth pads stop the ties from cutting into me.
Cyril approaches.
‘How are you feeling, my daughter?’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘I’m OK.’ Then, because he doesn’t respond to what is transparently a lie, I add, ‘I am very frightened, Father. I am very frightened indeed.’
Cyril says, ‘Can you find the voice of God within you?’
I shake my head. Mam used to drag us to chapel when we were kids, but I stopped going as soon as I could, allying with my dad, who was bored by the whole thing. Me and God are like kids who used to know each other, vaguely, in a junior school playground. Him playing footie with the big boys. Me playing skipping ropes and clapping games with the girls. We hardly knew each other then. We’re near-total strangers now.
I don’t know how much of that my headshake conveys, but Cyril just smiles sadly and quotes, ‘“Our Lord said not, Thou shalt not be tempested. He said, Thou shalt not be overcome.”’
Mother Julian of Norwich. That’s one of her zingers.
I do a sad smile of my own and whisper back. ‘It’s one heck of a tempest.’
He nods.
I say, ‘Where are we?’
In time, I mean, not place.
The abbot catches my meaning, and says, ‘We have just celebrated none. We keep vigil for an hour, then mass, then the ceremony of enclosure.’
I nod.
Stupid.
Clues right in front of me the whole time. Literally from the first day I stepped foot in this monastery. Me too blind to see them, because I thought we were investigating a modern crime committed by modern criminals. Which we are and were, except that when the crime entered this valley, the crime morphed. Turned wickedly. Changed direction, losing six or seven hundred years in the process. Clues that would have blazed like beacons to the medieval mind almost entirely hidden from ours.
I ask for more water.
Drink it.
Smile thanks.
Up at the altar, Brother Gregory flashes a look down at us. I’m on a red and gold seat – a throne, if you like, a throne – at the head of the nave, just below what I think is called the chancel. Gregory’s look is nudging a reminder at Cyril. The vigil, I guess, is due to start.
I whisper, ‘Sorry.’
My lips shape the w
ord anyway. I don’t know if anything comes out.
Cyril’s eyes stay on me. Intent, serious. Loving.
‘Father?’
‘Yes?’
‘I know I have no choice in this. That is: I have no choice the way I used to mean it.’
He inclines his head. He knows what I mean. Neither of us especially want to touch on the dark heart of what is being done here.
I continue, ‘But perhaps there is a choice of the heart. I don’t know if I can make that choice, but if it’s possible, I would like to try. I would like to go into this knowing that, at the very least, I did try.’
‘You do know the door here is locked? The windows have bars?’
‘I’ve already tried escaping. That didn’t work out so well.’
Cyril looks at me. His eyes are oddly ambiguous. By day, in sunlight, his eyes have an extraordinary paleness and clarity. In the weaker light of this chapel and with his eyebrows, as now, drawn forward, his pupils are open and cavernous and dark.
And then – I don’t know. There is a shift between us. A melting. Like some intense wave of compassion, almost physical in its force.
He grips my hand and says, ‘Daughter!’ There is nothing fake about his emotion.
He calls for a knife. Someone gives him one and he cuts my ties. Rubs my wrists and helps me to stand.
I’m wobbly to start with, but find my balance.
At the back of the church, there’s a metal basin and a jug. A ewer, I think you’d call it. Soap.
I walk, shakily but unaided, to the basin. Pour water. Wash my hands.
The soap is heavily scented. My hair is too, I realise. That same dusky scent that Carlotta wore in hers.
‘Frankincense?’ I whisper.
Anselm, who is with me, nods.
I turn back to the altar.
Cross myself. Genuflect.
I almost fall when I genuflect, but Anselm’s strong arm catches me and raises me up.
I steady myself and walk up the nave. My shoes are wedding shoes. Satin lace with a tiny white bow. A sweet little kitten heel. They’re not hard to walk in, but hard enough that I need to take care with my steps, my still-muzzy head.
At the altar, I genuflect again and kneel before the cross. The six monks flank me, three and three, sitting in their regular places in the little choir stalls.
Someone rings a small handbell. The start of the vigil, I assume. I bow my head.
Pray.
Not fake-pray, even. Real-pray. To who, to what, for what purpose – I couldn’t say. With what words, or meaning, or intent – that too, I don’t know, can’t tell.
All I know is that there is a roar, an intensity of purpose in this space. A purpose whose object and plaything I am. I don’t surrender to it, but nor do I fight it. I bob on its current and it hurtles me forward, taking me where it will.
Time detaches. We slip its feeble moorings.
It’s like that time under the church tower in Ystradfflur again, except that these infinities are greater. Their wash runs deeper.
When someone rings the little handbell again to mark the end of our vigil, I am genuinely startled that an hour has gone by. I’m almost frozen into position. One of the monks, I don’t know who, thinks I’m resisting the next bit and comes forward to move me on, but I gesture him back with a hand.
I’ve never knelt this long in my life and, now that I notice it, my back is a red flare of pain and stiffness. My attention dwells on the pain for a moment, then simply glides off again. I’m having difficulty anchoring myself in anything like this time and place.
Anchoring. People think that the word ‘anchorite’ derives somehow from ‘anchor’, but it doesn’t. It derives from a Greek word that means to ‘withdraw.’
To withdraw from temptation. From the world. From all things human.
Again the monk behind me moves forward.
Again I gesture him back.
I stand up, staggering as I do. Partly the ghost of the ketamine still in me. Partly just my stiff and unresponsive muscles. I hold the altar rail to steady myself, then turn.
What next?
What’s next is that throne again. Red and gold. Placed at the end of the chancel, facing the altar. Candles lit on either side.
Still veiled, and walking unsteadily but without support, I walk to the chair.
Sit.
I’m not normally a graceful sitter. Not the skirt-smoothing, dress-adjusting kind of girl. But I am now. Tweak my dress as I sit, smooth it after. Check and adjust the fall of my veil.
Then – nothing. There is nothing more to be done. I sit with my legs together but uncrossed. Place my hands on my lap. Look up, find Cyril’s eye, and nod once. As the monks rise to begin a chant in plainsong – a psalm, I think, but don’t quite hear – I stare forward at the altar. A golden cross on a white cloth. The whole church has been kept quite dim, candlelit for the most part, but a bright halogen spot keeps the cross bright and ablaze.
I can’t keep my eye on anything else.
Psalms and canticles.
Prayers of penitence and praise.
I don’t participate, or I don’t think I do. Perhaps my lips form a few amens, a christe eleison or two. Mostly, though, that timelessness seizes me again. There is me. There is a golden cross on a snowy altar. Everything else passes in a haze.
And the strange thing is: I feel this as I think I’m meant to. Feel bridal. Like a consecrated, beautiful object being passed from one honoured hand to another.
It’s partly the clothes, of course. That whole white veil, church music thing that almost no woman I know is wholly immune to. But it’s more than just that. More than this setting, these monks. There’s something – something – in this wash of ceremony that invites my participation.
Invites and secures it.
Then, as a psalm ends, Cyril steps forward. He wants me to stand. Gestures me forwards towards the altar. I do as he wants. He asks me to prostrate myself.
It is hard to obey, as hard as anything so far, but I do as he asks. Lie face down before the altar as the monks chant and sing above me.
Then I rise.
Cyril is asking me questions. I give responses, I think, but there are only two parts of the ceremony I really hear.
The first is where I am asked to renounce the seven capital sins. Luxuria. Gula. Avaritia. Acedia. Invidia. Ira. Superbia.
Lust. Gluttony. Avarice. Sloth. Envy. Anger. Pride.
I renounce the first five with barely a tremble. But on number six and seven, the words don’t come to me. ‘Father, I cannot.’
Cyril doesn’t answer. Just waits. Then nudges again. Then again.
And on that third time, I say, ‘Anger. I renounce it. Pride. I renounce it.’
Then the final question and my final response. The question and answer that makes this whole ceremony binding and for ever.
‘Do you withdraw from the world? Do you renounce it?’
‘I do.’
Then someone raises my veil. Folds it back over my head. I am given bread and wine. Flesh and blood.
I am very shaky. So much so that I can hardly stay standing. Indeed, when Cyril withdraws the goblet from my mouth, I do actually buckle at the knees. A half-collapse that I parlay into a further act of submission. A deep, penitential kneel and I feel a wave of surprised approval from the men around me as they watch.
I stay kneeling for five minutes, perhaps ten or twenty. Then rise. Anselm’s hand supports me as I do.
He escorts me to the first icon, the first piece of darkened glass, the first inset candle.
The glass isn’t there to reflect the candle. It is one-way glass, arranged so that the person on the other side can always see the altar, that golden cross.
I say, ‘Saint Hilarion?’
Cyril says, ‘Halarion the Anchorite lived in the desert in the fourth century. Lived alone in a low-ceilinged cell that was more like a tomb than a house. Fasted often. Prayed always.’
I can’t
tell if the person on the other side is watching me. There’s no flicker behind the glass, but I don’t think there would be no matter what.
I wonder why the person doesn’t tap, if he’s there. Then realise that perhaps he is tapping. Perhaps there are two or three or five thicknesses of glass. Whatever is soundproofed enough.
I cross myself in front of the man’s cell.
God help you, I think. And God help me. Then – and this isn’t premeditated, just the most natural thing to do, somehow – dip into a deep curtsy. Again, I feel that wave of monkish approval.
The next icon.
Osmanna.
I glance sideways and Cyril says, ‘In the seventh century, an Irish woman of noble family chose to retire to France to live in solitude with the Lord. She died aged about seventy.’
Cross myself. Curtsy. Move on.
At the next icon – Aurelia – I don’t know why, but I have a powerful sense that the woman on the other side is looking at me. I wonder what I must look like to her. What my face conveys. I must, at a minimum, remind her of her own strange journey to this place. The dress. The veil. The pale shock of what’s been and what’s coming.
Cyril: ‘Saint Aurelia of Strasbourg. Lived for fifty-five years as an anchoress in the praise and service of her Lord.’
I don’t quite know how to honour the face I feel watching me from the glass. Don’t know how to communicate, or even what message I want to pass on.
You and me, Sister. We’re in this together. Sisters now and sisters for ever. Something like that.
I cross myself and curtsy – a deeper, longer curtsy than the others received – but it’s still not enough.
I say, ‘May I have a candle, please?’
I need to say that twice. Wet my lips and say it twice, because my voice is little more than a croak. A wooden spoon, stirring ashes.
Someone brings me a candle and I light it from the flame that poor Aurelia gazes on. Set the second candle in the same little niche.
Something in the interaction still feels incomplete, but I don’t know what would complete it and, in any case, Saint Anthony – the bearded, haloed toughie who, in an only somewhat different life, could have been one of those seen-it-all, done-it-all big city DIs – now claims my attention.
The Dead House: Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller (Book 5) (Fiona Griffiths Crime Thriller Series) Page 32
