by Phil Rickman
‘The Eternal Bull’ An edge of desperation. ‘Will you be joining us, Thomas? Will you pray with us before you take me? I’m your priest, Thomas. Still your priest, when all is said. Tom? Tom Bull? Will you come and pray?’
There was an almost audible apprehension in the church, faces lifting to the organ pipes and the wooden panel which sheltered them from the eyes which were open for eternity.
Merrily watched from the rearmost pew of the northern aisle, where the women sat. Stefan, it seemed, had had no difficulty at all in persuading the women away from their husbands, and they all clustered in the Satan sector in their variety of costumes, Minnie Parry at the front in dark brown wool, the velvet wives, mostly incomers, conspicuously in the middle, like visitors from Restoration London.
Silence apart from some shuffling, a few coughs. Stefan wiped his brow with an arm. He sniffed. He looked beyond the burnished walls and pillars into the blackness of the rafters.
‘It goes dark,’ he said sadly. ‘We have so little time.’
He was at the front of the northern aisle now, close to Minnie. Merrily could see Gomer Parry, sitting just across from her in the central nave, squeezed into his inquest suit. He looked in need of a cigarette; she could sympathize. In the otherwise empty pew behind Gomer sat the only woman who, unsurprisingly, had resisted attempts to put her in the northern aisle, but Annie Howe looked curiously uncomfortable.
‘Bessie!’ Stefan called out suddenly. ‘Where are you, Bessie Cross?’ Advancing down the aisle, looking this way and that over the heads; wherever he went he seemed to take the light with him. ‘Bessie Cross! Nay, don’t deny me now, woman!’
He stopped three pews from the bottom of the aisle. He waited.
‘Bessie?’
Two rows in front of Merrily, a woman moved: Teresa Roberts, a farmer’s widow in her late sixties, a friendly, decent soul and a regular churchgoer. Earlier, she’d been one of several people Stefan had asked Merrily to point out to him.
Teresa said hesitantly, ‘Bessie Cross ... she was my grand-moth—’ But Stefan was leaning over the pew end, reaching for her hands to pull her to her feet.
‘Bessie! How is the girl now? How is Janet? For I myself have prayed for her many times. Bessie, don’t be affeared, he’s not here. The Bull’s not here yet, we have time for this. How does she lie now, Bessie, is Janet Cross at peace?’
The woman next to Teresa looked up quickly and Merrily saw, with widening eyes, that it was Caroline Cassidy in a dark brown cape. She must have come in alone, after the others.
Still holding Teresa’s hand, Stefan turned to the wider congregation, raised his voice.
‘You all know about this. All of you know what happened to Bessie Cross’s girl, who went into the Bull’s meadow to look for her cockerel at close of day, fearing the attentions of the fox, and was caught and branded for a poacher.’
A murmuring. Merrily remembered what Stefan had said, before Coffey could shut him up, about hiring a researcher to gather memories and old stories from the village. But, if this was about Teresa Roberts’s grandmother, it was Victorian – for Wil Williams, a couple of hundred years in the future.
It didn’t seem to matter. Stefan was clearly invoking memories of a figure which bestrode the centuries: the Eternal Bull.
‘And the Bull said to the child, did he not, “Now, Janet, would you appear in court and bring shame down upon your family or have me deal with you now?” ’
Stefan paused.
‘Deal with you now,’ he repeated quietly, with low menace. ‘Bessie, my poor, dear woman, is what I say true in every detail?’
Teresa Roberts, entirely in shadow, said, ‘Well, my mother, she used to tell me—’
‘How old was she, Bessie? How old was Janet when she was brought before the Bull?’
The church had gone very quiet. Some had turned to look at the dim tableau of Stefan and Teresa. Others gazed stoically in front of them as if they were afraid to respond, afraid of repercussions. Merrily marvelled at the willingness of a group of disparate people in an enclosed space to relinquish their world for another ... indeed, their inability not to. The power of theatre. Power. She’d never had, nor wanted, power, but this was what being a successful minister was still all about.
Twenty minutes, and he’s got them in his hands. They’ve never given me half this much attention.
Teresa said, ‘Twelve. Twelve year old.’
‘Has she stopped crying now?’ Stefan asked gently. ‘Has the poor child stopped crying in the night?’
‘She ... she never stopped. Hardly a week went by they wouldn’t hear her crying in her bed. Hardly a week, my mother used to say.’
‘Deal ... with ... her ... now. A whipping? Was that not what you were told by the gamekeeper, when he brought the child home?’
‘It was.’
‘A whipping? Does a whipping do that to a girl? A farm girl, a big, hardy, raw-boned girl, a scamp? Does a whipping do that?’
Teresa Roberts said, pain coming through, ‘Please ...’
‘Don’t worry,’ Stefan whispered, just loud enough for Merrily to hear. ‘This should be heard.’
The air inside the church was thicker and darker now, the walls like dull earth, but a heart of pure red fire in the circular window. All that was visible of Stefan was the white of his shirt. He moved around the pew like a restless ghost.
‘Does a whipping do that, Bessie? I’ll bet she’d been whipped a time or two at home.’
‘Aye.’ Teresa Roberts was a talking shadow. ‘We all were, back then.’
‘How long did she cry at night?’
‘They say she was never at peace and she couldn’t look no man in the face from that day till—’
‘Where did the Bull take her, Bessie? Don’t be afraid. Let it be told, in this holy place, for this haunts your family still’
‘The cider house! He took her in the ole cider house, where they say he took all his women. Because the air itself in there, they used to say, the smell of it could make you drunk. So’s you wouldn’t notice. The cider house. It was always the ole cider house. It made you drunk, to be in there. And ... wanton.’
Merrily froze up in the darkness. Images came alive in her head, the dream she’d had in the afternoon in the Black Swan, the dream of Dermot Child in the foetid, sweating cell.
‘The cider house,’ Stefan said with satisfaction. ‘The old Bull cider house. God bless you, Bessie, for your courage! God have mercy on the Bull! And God bless the child who cries in the night!’
‘No!’ The voice of Teresa Roberts was ragged. ‘She don’t cry n’more, Reverend. Don’t cry n’more ...’
‘How old was she?’ Stefan’s voice gentle but full and round and relishing his punchline. ‘How old was she the day she hanged herself in the barn?’
‘Sixteen,’ Teresa whispered. ‘Sixteen that day, sir.’
In the long, hollow silence that followed, Merrily was aware of Gomer Parry edging out of his pew and then Stefan Alder was leaning over her, his lips against her ear. She could smell his sweat.
‘The light, please, Merrily. The spot. Five minutes?’
He was so screwed up he couldn’t think. He kept walking around the room, pulling books from the shelves. He didn’t know where to start. He had so little time and no idea where the hell to start.
He made himself sit down.
Traherne. Start with Traherne. How did Traherne come to know Wil Williams? Help me, Lucy. Just remind me.
Thinking back to when Lucy had first introduced him to Traherne, who had a link with Ledwardine through Wil Williams and ...
Hopton.
Susannah Hopton. The patroness.
It took Lol nearly twenty minutes to discover, from the various histories of Herefordshire, that Susannah Hopton had been the wife of a judge on the Welsh circuit who lived right on the border at Kington and was a devout high Anglican with some kind of circle of disciples. During the puritan Cromwellian years, Mrs Hopton had move
d towards Roman Catholicism but returned after the Restoration of the monarchy. She had a strict and punishing regime of daily worship, which began before dawn. She was very fond of clergymen and her best-known protege was Thomas Traherne.
But Wil Williams, Lucy said, had become virtually a part of her household.
His background had equipped him to meet her schedules without difficulty.
‘I was born,’ Stefan said, ‘on a grey and wind-soured hill farm at Glascwm in Radnorshire.’
He looked down at his fingernails, as if remembering a time when they were black and ragged.
‘My father held seventy acres of rocky, boggy, clay-heavy, God-deserted earth. My father had little faith. No hope. And no conception of charity ...’
Stefan moved around the church; you could hear the crackling of his footsteps, the only sound, and wherever he would stop light would flare.
Candles.
All around the church, faces were lit by little, oval spears, and in this timeless light, the centuries dissolved, and you saw that essentially nothing had changed, farming faces no less rough and reddened than ever they were, than the stones themselves. And no face more severely stony than Garrod Powell’s. An axe to grind ... Merrily recalled the councillor’s fist striking the table in the village hall ... Let him grind it somewhere else, sir. Not in our church. And would he say a word tonight? Probably not. No muscle would twitch in Rod’s puritan face, no eyebrow rise.
There were no stray breezes in the church tonight, and the flames were vertical, sending up wispy tapers of smoke and that faintly bitter, singeing aroma.
Faces. She saw the moon-bland countenance of Dermot Child. He had not looked at her. She saw the pert, urban features of Caroline Cassidy made gaunt and austere by the wan and waxy light and the anxiety that many a mother knew in the seventeenth century when so many children would expire in infancy. Caroline had not noticed her.
Then she saw Alison Kinnersley. Who had slipped into the back central pew occupied, at the other end, by Annie Howe.
Behind them, Jane hovered. Merrily walked over, made a little signal with a forefinger to tell her to put on the left-hand spot. She could easily have done the lights herself, but it was an excuse to have the kid safely in the building. Jane nodded.
By the time the spot came on, a dusty yellow tunnel from the rafters to the area below the pulpit, Stefan was there, sitting on the second step, half in the beam, half in shadow. He began to speak conversationally, as though to friends, about his adoption by a rich and pious woman who recognized in him an intelligence, a longing and a purity of spirit so rare it required special nurturing.
He had everyone’s attention. The world of Wil Williams. But he spoke boastfully, and that wouldn’t go down well. Herefordshire people were generally laid-back and self-effacing.
All around her, Merrily felt a cloudy, ancient atmosphere, but when she looked at Stefan she saw ... an actor.
Why? She rubbed her eyes. Was it jealousy, because they were never so silent, so attentive to her? She went and stood against the back wall of the nave, next to the heavy curtain covering the entrance to the vestry, and listened to Stefan telling of his introduction to Traherne. How Traherne, with, perhaps, financial assistance from Hopton, had secured Wil’s acceptance to his old Oxford College, Brasenose.
Merrily felt very strange. She felt a tightness in her chest. She leaned against the wall, took deep breaths until it subsided.
Stefan was saying something about him and Traherne being two halves of the same apple. Traherne was a poet and a mystic, Wil was deeply sensitive, a natural psychic, a visionary in the most direct sense. When Wil walked out on the hills or into the oak woods, the spirits came to him like the birds and animals to St Francis. He was a wild child, possessed of a raw, exciting beauty.
Where was this leading? Traherne’s rough trade, or what?
Merrily felt that alarming tightening in the chest and this time she couldn’t make it go away. She held on to the curtain to the vestry to prevent herself falling to her knees. When she began to wheeze, heads turned.
Oh no, not again. Not again, no way.
Merrily walked out.
‘Mum?’
Jane stood in the porch, watching her anxiously.
Merrily took gulps of air. All around her, the graves were washed amber-pink by the moon.
‘You’re not ill again, are you?’
‘Sorry, flower, I think it’s the fumes from all those candles. You go back. Stefan’ll think we don’t like it.’
‘I don’t. Do you?’
‘I’ll tell you when it’s finished. Just go back, Jane, OK? There’s nothing to worry about. I’m just going to have a cigarette, OK?’
‘God,’ said Jane. ‘You can’t go an hour without one, can you?’
She gave her mother one final disapproving glance before disappearing into the porch.
Merrily turned away and leaned her arms over a tall gravestone as a red speck came up from behind another stone.
‘Sorry, Vicar, went and hid, I did. Thought it was gonner be my Minnie.’
His cigarette end made a glowing triangle with the twin moons in his glasses.
‘Hello, Gomer.’
‘Lost track of time in there. En’t allowed to wear my watch tonight. Digital, see, gives a bit of a bleep on the hour. Minnie says, What’s that gonner sound like in the seventeenth century, eh? Had to sit at the back, too, on account of not havin’ a proper fancy-dress costume.’
‘Still. You came. I’m glad.’ Out here, the pain in her chest had dulled to a throb.
Gomer took a pull on his cigarette. ‘En’t workin’, is it?’
‘What en’t? Sorry.’
‘Thought ‘e was gonner hit the spot, that young feller, when he got on to cider, but it went by, see.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The cider house. Got me thinkin’, that did, so I come out to think sumore. Does a lot o’ thinkin’ these days. Too much time.’
‘The cider house?’
‘Where the Bulls took their women. Not their wives, like, you know. Their women. Them as was old enough to qualify as women.’
‘Their mistresses?’
‘Not even their mistresses, Vicar. The ones they used for their sport, you might say. The ones as didn’t count for shit, ‘scuse my language.’
‘There were more like this ... Janet?’
‘I should say. God bless you, Vicar, it were cheaper than fox ‘untin’, and no hounds to feed.’ Gomer shook his head sadly. ‘You looks in need of a ciggy. I got a few yere, ready rolled.’
‘Thanks, but ... Oh, sod it ... if you can spare one.’
Gomer produced a skinny roll-up and lit it for her.
‘When you’re retired, see, God damn it, you gets to hangin’ around and dwellin’ on things and all the folk you ever worked for or had a pint or two with, and they all gets jumbled up in your memory, and then a coupler things rolls out when you en’t expectin’ it, and you thinks, well bugger me. Why’d ole Edgar Powell shoot ‘isself ... accidently, like? Why en’t the cider the real stuff?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’ll tell you, you got time. I’m sick of keepin’ it all up yere. ‘Cause I don’t understand, neither, and I reckons it’s time we did.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, you start with the ole cider house. That’s the Powell cider house now, see. The Bulls originally, but the Powells, they had it off ’em, way back when the Bulls got rid of all that ground. Interestin’, when you works out just how much Bull ground’s now Powell ground. I reckon it’s gotter be ...’
Gomer stopped talking. Merrily followed his gaze towards the lych-gate, through which they could see car lights.
‘You notice when you come in, Vicar, them cars parked on the edge of the square just across from the church.’
‘So many these days. Why?’
‘Miserable Andy Mumford in one, coupler young fellers in the other usually wears unif
orms, but plain clothes tonight. Mind if we just ...?’
Gomer set off towards the lych-gate, Merrily following.
‘They’re on to somefhin’, I reckon. Don’t waste manpower on that scale, less they got somefhin’ in mind. And that lady copper in the church? They’re lookin’ for somebody. Or they got somebody in mind. Where’s your friend Mr Robinson tonight?’
As they approached, one of the parked cars had put on its lights and pulled out to make way for another vehicle which took over its space just left of the lych-gate. The new vehicle was a battered blue Land Rover with a torn canvas. The driver’s door opened as the wheels gritted to a halt.
Gomer put a hand under Merrily’s arm and pulled her into the trees beside the gate, as James Bull-Davies stepped down and ducked quickly under the lych-gate, slamming the Land Rover door behind him.
Both front doors of the parked police car opened. Mumford and another man followed Bull-Davies at a distance.
Gomer looked at Merrily.
‘Not my place to ask, mabbe, but they clear this with you, the police? Stakin’ out your church and whatnot?’
She could hear Bull-Davies’s voice crackling into the answering machine. I shall personally take action to put a stop to this homosexual farce. You may consider this an ultimatum.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They bloody didn’t.’
‘You better get back in there. Wouldn’t be anythin’ I could do, would there?’
‘I think there would.’
From the apple trees next to the porch, Jane watched James Bull-Davies go in, followed by the two detectives.
The Eternal Bull. It could start to get interesting at last. Sadly, she couldn’t stay for it. She waited for Mum to come back – on her own and looking pretty fired up – before she slipped away.
46
Pretty Foul
‘THE ORCHARD WAS mine,’ Stefan Alder said.
The spotlight hugging him like a sunbeam from a high window as he knelt at the pulpit steps, looking up towards the rood-screen, where a hundred apples were carved.
‘Oh, yes, it belonged to the church, the whole forty acres, but it also belonged to me. It was where I found my peace. And my God. God was always in the orchard.’
