The Angel in the Glass

by Alys Clare

  There was something wrapped in sacking, roughly rectangular in shape and the longer side around the length of my forearm and hand, and the object, or objects, had been thickly padded round with straw. Then as Jonathan went on digging I saw that there were two sacking parcels … no, three, for there was a smaller one lying between the two larger ones that hadn’t been visible at first. Carefully, cautiously, Jonathan pulled them out of their earthy vault and laid them reverently on the floor of the dell.

  ‘These are what we came for?’ I whispered. The mood was such that whispering seemed appropriate. Jonathan nodded.

  I waited for him to speak – to perhaps give some sort of explanation, for such was very much in order – but he didn’t. He just stood there, head bowed, staring down at the sacking parcels.

  So I said, rather more firmly than I’d intended, ‘We should go, Jonathan. Those dogs may not be able to come at us with their mouths wide open in anticipation of our flesh, but if they wake up they’ll start such a riot of barking and howling that sooner or later – and probably sooner – someone will alert Farmer Haydon.’

  Jonathan started, and I had the feeling he was coming back from some far-distant place. ‘Yes, right, of course,’ he muttered. But he was still wide-eyed, abstracted.

  ‘You take this one’ – I handed him the heavier of the two larger parcels – ‘and I’ll bring these two.’ I picked them up, noticing as I did so that on one of them a corner of the wrapping had rotted or been chewed away. I closed the gap as best I could, tucked one parcel under each arm and took a firm grip, then led the way up and out of the dell.

  The dogs hadn’t moved. However, both were clearly still alive; one was making a soft, whining sound and the other was snoring.

  With a brief exclamation, Jonathan put down his parcel and untied the rope, coiling it and looping it across his body. There was a small piece of meat left beside the second dog, a stringy piece of fat beside the first one, and he picked both up. ‘Be careful,’ I warned, and he nodded, holding the meat at arm’s length. He picked up his parcel and we hurried away.

  Halfway back to his house, I called out to him – he was walking ahead of me – and nodded towards a deep ditch running beside the track. ‘There?’ I suggested, indicating a rat hole just above the water level.

  ‘Yes, it’ll do,’ he muttered. Climbing down, bracing himself so as not to fall into the water, he shoved the remains of the meat deep inside the hole.

  Then he picked up his parcel and we went on.

  Back in the sanctuary of the Priest’s House, we threw our wet cloaks on the floor and wiped the water and mud off our hands and faces. As I stood transfixed by the sacking parcels, carefully placed on the stone floor of the tiny vestibule just inside the door, Jonathan fetched brandy and glasses. He poured out generous measures, handed one to me and, raising his own glass, said, ‘Thank you, Gabriel, for what you did tonight. Apart from the fact that it was you who found them’ – he gestured towards the parcels – ‘and provided the sedation, I couldn’t have done this without you, and you have my eternal gratitude.’

  He downed his brandy in three or four gulps, and I did the same. As I felt its burn go down my gullet, Jonathan put his glass down, squared his shoulders and muttered, ‘We’d better see what we’ve found.’

  SEVEN

  Jonathan and I knelt side by side on the worn stone flags of his room. I realized all at once that the storm was long gone, the rain had ceased and the wind had dropped. There was barely a sound from the deep, still darkness outside. Jonathan had fastened the shutters and barred the door, as if what we were about to do had to be kept at all costs from the eyes of anyone but the two of us.

  He had lit a fire in the hearth, for, although the night was quite warm, both of us had got very wet. The heat was welcome, as was the light of the flames. In addition, several candles burned around us, set in a rough circle. Although I was in the company of a man of God – a priest in holy orders – I had the strongest sense that there was something there in the snug little room with us that wasn’t anything to do with God at all.

  Jonathan had a small penknife in his hand and, leaning over the first of the parcels, he slipped it under the string that had been used to stitch the sacking together and hold the parcel tight. Whether by accident or design, he had selected for the first parcel to be opened the one that had a hole in one corner. He cut the string in several places and then drew the contents out of the sacking. Then he unfolded the sacking, spreading it out on the floor, and began to bundle up the straw. I helped him, and soon the contents of the parcel were revealed.

  I wanted to stop and stare, for even that first rapt glance had enchanted me. But Jonathan was busy with the second of the large parcels, working more swiftly now, tearing at the sacking in his impatience and shoving the straw aside.

  On the remains of the sacking and straw that had concealed and protected them lay five glass panels, about a foot across by a foot and a half high. The glass was set in lead, and the top of each panel formed a pointed arch. One of the panels had been damaged at the lower right-hand corner; it was from the first parcel, whose wrappings had been disturbed. By an inquisitive animal or by human hands?

  But then Jonathan lifted up one of the panels and held it against the candlelight, and there was no room in my mind for anything but wonder.

  It was old; anyone could have seen that. It was the work of an early medieval artist, and it had all the charm, vitality and quirkiness of the very best stained glass. The central image was of a man in a close-fitting white coif stooping over someone lying propped up in bed, both figures smiling and looking rather cheerful for a doctor and patient.

  For that was what they had to be.

  The image was bordered with a deep band of flowers and plants, as if to illustrate the raw materials from which the physician had made whatever medicine he was spooning into his patient. And the colours were so brilliant that they dazzled the eye.

  Jonathan laid down the first panel and picked up the second. The same deep, wonderfully coloured border – I spotted corn liberally dotted with poppies, lavender, a vine heavy with deep purple grapes – and within it, a trio of plump, red-cheeked nuns in white veils and black gowns busy gathering blooms and putting them in wide, flattish wicker baskets. The third panel was devoted only to flowers, and its images were the most stunning of all. It was the damaged one, and the corner where the glass had been shattered was filled with a posy of the most flamboyant of garden blooms, in every conceivable colour.

  I understood how it was that the lads who had been nosing around in Farmer Haydon’s dell had believed they’d found precious jewels.

  Jonathan held up the last two panels. One depicted the doctor in his coif again, this time bent over what looked like a mortar and pestle and presumably grinding some ingredient to powder. I’d done the same myself, countess times. The last of the five showed the same man, but this time he stood a little behind the central figure, which was that of a slender man dressed in a golden robe holding out for the viewer’s consideration a bunch of lilies.

  My eyes met the clear, intelligent gaze of the slender man and instinctively I bowed my head. The style of this early glass work might be simple, rustic and naive, but the artist’s love for the Son of God must have guided his hand when he made the image, for the calm face shone with powerful compassion.

  ‘Our Lord,’ came Jonathan’s quiet voice. Even though he spoke so softly, I detected profound love and reverence. ‘“Consider the lilies, how they grow; they labour not, neither spin they, yet I say unto you, that Solomon himself in all his royalty was not clothed like one of these.”’ He met my eyes. ‘The Gospel according to St Luke,’ he added. He laid a hand lightly on the repeated image of the doctor. ‘And here he is, standing at the Saviour’s side.’

  I already knew.

  I’d already recognized the man as a doctor, doing the very things I did, and in the context of sacred stained-glass panels in a church named for him, he could
only be St Luke. And I’d realized as soon as I saw the shape of the panels where they belonged. ‘They were made for your side chapel.’

  ‘St Luke’s Little Chapel. Yes, they were.’

  ‘And at some point in the recent past, the power in the land told the people that all such images were blasphemous, evil and wrong, and had to be collected up for destruction,’ I went on. Perhaps, I reflected, it had happened when the boy king, Edward, succeeded the giant figure of his father, at which time the iconoclasts had forcefully insisted that so much of beauty must be destroyed because the miracles, the feigned stories, as they’d had it, depicted in the old stained-glass windows were no more than religious superstition. ‘But someone couldn’t bear that fate for these five panels, so they removed them and hid them.’

  Jonathan nodded.

  I waited for him to speak, for I was certain he knew far more about the matter than I did.

  But he was silent. As I watched him, I saw some strong emotion working in him. His expression was one of deep sorrow – of grief – and, as if he couldn’t bear my scrutiny, he turned away.

  I wanted only to distract him from whatever was troubling him. Without even pausing to think what significance there could be to the last parcel – the smaller one that had been pushed in between the other two – I drew it forward and said, my voice sounding so falsely cheerful that I was embarrassed, ‘There’s one more! Go on, open the final one!’

  Jonathan seemed to make a big effort to return from wherever his sombre thoughts had taken him. With a sigh, he carefully packed away the first five panels and then took the last parcel from me. This one had been wrapped in much the same way, although possibly there was more straw; it certainly did a better job of padding out what lay hidden within.

  Even as Jonathan uncovered the image, it struck me that this was the sixth image, and there were only five empty apertures high up in the wall of St Luke’s Little Chapel …

  And then I heard Jonathan’s muttered exclamation of amazement.

  And I too looked at what the last parcel had concealed.

  It was quite clearly work of a much later date than the first five images. The lines of the lead were straighter and simpler, and the process by which the panel had been made was altogether more sophisticated. The five earlier panels were beautiful, vibrantly colourful, and, enchanting in their naivety, they brought a smile to the face.

  The image in this sixth one didn’t bring a smile.

  It – communicated, was the only word I could think of, but the emotions it invoked were very far from the delight, the reverential love and the simple happiness of the first five panels.

  It had a power that seemed to leap out from the inert glass and lead from which the panel was made and smack the viewer right between the eyes. It was as if – I struggled to analyse the strong emotions – as if uncovering it, exposing it to the human gaze, had unleashed some latent force with which it was invested that now surged impatiently into life …

  In silence, Jonathan and I tried to take in what we were staring at.

  It was an angel.

  He was slender, his naked body elegant, perfect. His shoulders were square, his chest deep, his pectoral muscles well defined. His torso narrowed to the waist and the straight, boyish hips, and the legs were long and graceful. The genitals had been depicted in great detail – the penis was uncircumcised – and a first glance looked out of proportion; too large for the body.

  The head, shoulders and upper body were framed by the wings, large and curving, drawn with such care that each feather could be clearly made out.

  The angel’s hair was bright gold and he had blue eyes.

  His face was so beautiful that it took the breath away.

  On hands and knees at his feet, elbows resting on the ground and hands clasped before the face, was a man. He was of the middle years, bearded, his face lined, his expression full of love, of adoration, of total prostration before the object of his worship. He too was naked.

  After what seemed a long time, I said, ‘This, surely, is no holy image.’

  ‘No,’ Jonathan replied.

  ‘It’s – he’s—’ But I didn’t know how to go on.

  ‘I have no idea what this is or where it came from,’ Jonathan said. ‘I was certainly not expecting to find it hidden away with the five panels from the chapel.’

  ‘It’s not from the chapel?’

  I regretted the question even as I heard myself pose it.

  ‘Of course it isn’t!’ Jonathan said scathingly. ‘For one thing, there are only five clerestory openings. For another, can you really believe this is a sacred image?’ He was still staring at the last panel, his eyes fixed to it as if he couldn’t bear to look away.

  ‘No,’ I said shortly. Then: ‘It’s erotic, isn’t it? It has … power.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jonathan said shortly. Then suddenly he grabbed a big bundle of straw and spread it over the image. He folded the sacking back into place and then began searching for some string. I pulled a long piece from the sacking that had been round one of the bigger parcels and silently handed it to him. He wrapped it round the sacking and tied it.

  With that angel covered once again, the atmosphere in Jonathan’s room changed.

  It was as if we’d been bathed in some fierce, dazzling light, and its source had abruptly been cut off.

  I wasn’t sure if I felt relieved or dismayed.

  Theo too had been busy over the last two days.

  He had talked at length with Jarman Hodge about the visit to Wrenbeare and the suspicious divergence of evidence concerning the dead vagrant. They agreed that the outdoor servants’ version was far more credible but, as Jarman had said in some frustration, ‘Bugger-all we can do, chief, if her ladyship swears there never was any intruder.’

  In the rare moments when he was alone in his office with nothing very pressing to do, Theo would open the cedar-wood chest and have another look at the torn sketch. On one occasion, as he was tidying up for the day prior to joining the family for supper, his daughter Isabella caught him staring at it and, clambering up onto his lap for a cuddle, asked who the man was. ‘I don’t know, sweeting,’ he had to admit.

  She leaned against him and he stroked her long, soft, blonde hair. ‘He’s sad,’ she said. ‘Can you make him happy again?’

  Theo sighed. ‘I don’t know that, either.’

  In the morning of the following day, Theo had a visitor.

  He was shown into Theo’s office by a member of the staff who habitually sat in the outer room and whose purpose was to filter out enquiries that didn’t really need to be referred to the coroner himself. As Symon tapped on Theo’s door and muttered, ‘This one insists on seeing you. Sorry, chief, but he won’t take no for an answer,’ he looked decidedly nervous and Theo noticed with a smile that, backing away, he gave the visitor a wide berth.

  Theo studied the man. He was huge. He was probably a head taller than Theo, who was by no means small, and so broad that he gave the impression of only just managing to squeeze his shoulders through the doorway. He was dressed in an ankle-length coat, tattered and not very clean, which bulged here and there as if all manner of unlikely objects were stored beneath it. He had close-cropped hair of a nondescript mid-brown sprinkled with grey, and he was unshaven: on first sight, he was wild-looking. But his brown eyes, set deep in the folds of his anxious face, were soft and kind. His mouth, wide and, as he hovered on the threshold of Theo’s office, quivering into an uncertain smile, was well-shaped. It stuck Theo irrelevantly that, before the years of hardship wore him down, the man might once have been fine-looking.

  Theo waved a hand towards the chair in front of his desk. ‘Sit down,’ he said.

  The big man glanced apprehensively at the chair and, very gingerly, did as he was bade. The chair gave a creak of protest.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ Theo asked.

  The man eyed him for a few moments, then said, ‘You are the coroner?’

  ‘I am. Theophi
lus Davey is my name.’

  The man nodded swiftly as if he already knew that. He raised a hand and, pointing a none too clean hand at his vast chest, opened his mouth as if to announce his name in return. But then, with a sudden violent shake of his head, he let the hand drop and closed his mouth with a snap.

  There was another, longer, pause, and then he said, the soft, tentative voice at odds with the big, wild body, ‘I am hunting for someone.’

  Theo was trying to place his accent. He didn’t sound like a native English speaker. But then the words the big man had just uttered penetrated and suddenly Theo was on the alert. ‘Who?’ he rapped out.

  The big man seemed to shrink away. He held up both hands, palm outwards, as if to ward off an attack.

  ‘I apologize if I sounded sharp,’ Theo said more gently. ‘Please, tell me who it is you seek and why you think he may be known to me.’ He paused, wondering how to explain delicately to this frightened, worried man that in general people only came to the coroner’s notice once they were dead.

  ‘I seek my friend,’ the man said after an even longer pause. ‘He was with me, I cared for him, making him eat when he wasn’t hungry, finding a warm place to sleep when he was cold and exhausted.’ He hesitated, glancing up at Theo from beneath unkempt and bushy eyebrows. ‘When he was sick,’ he added in a whisper.

  ‘Your friend?’ Theo prompted as the silence extended.

  The man nodded violently. ‘My friend, yes, yes, of course, since we were not much more than boys. I was the big one, the strong one, and I looked off for him … that is right, no?’

  ‘Looked out for him,’ Theo corrected.

  ‘Thank you,’ the man said, giving a polite little bow.

  ‘And why do you think your friend came here?’

  The big man frowned. ‘I believe it is so,’ he said simply. ‘Jannie told me what he was planning, and I—’ But then all at once all colour left his face. He put both hands up to his mouth as if to stop any more words getting out and, abruptly standing up with such force that the chair fell over, he blundered for the door and wrested it open.