by Alys Clare
‘Guilty? But what’s he got to feel guilty about? Surely he didn’t hide the panels away?’
‘No, of course not. They’ve been missing for years, haven’t they? And Jonathan only came to Tavy St Luke’s … Actually, when did he come?’
I thought about it. ‘He was here when I first came to Rosewyke, in ’97, although I was still worshipping with Mother and Father then and didn’t meet him until later.’ I tried to recall what Jonathan had said about his recent past when we had first met. As memory served, he said he hadn’t been at Tavy St Luke’s for long, having come from a brief stint in London and, before that, Cambridge, where he had studied canon law at Trinity Hall.
‘Well, it’s not worth trying to puzzle it out now as he wouldn’t even have been born when the iconoclasts were smashing up the windows and the relics,’ Celia said dismissively. ‘He certainly wouldn’t have been prising the St Luke panels out of the wall and hiding them away in Foxy Dell.’ She turned to frown at me. ‘So why is he guilty?’
‘I’m not sure I agree with you,’ I said. ‘He might just have been—’
But she interrupted me, irritation in her voice and the very way she sat on her mare, her body tense. ‘He’s in torment, Gabe! I sat there in that room of his and I felt waves of anguish coming off him. Dear God, I was wishing and wishing I knew him better, that I was his good friend, his sister, whatever, because then I could have knelt down on the floor beside him, put my arms round him and tried to comfort him!’
I looked at her, amazed. Seeing my expression, she shook her head and turned away, but not before I’d seen tears glistening in her eyes.
‘His emotion touched you, I see,’ I said gently.
She smiled swiftly, a quick quiver of her mouth, there and gone again. ‘It did,’ she agreed.
I thought carefully before I spoke. Then I said, ‘He may not be a close enough acquaintance for you – for us – to impose comfort on him.’ For that requires a degree of intimacy that I believe may be all but impossible to achieve with Jonathan Carew, I could have added. ‘But nevertheless he is our friend, and I do agree with you that something troubles him deeply.’ I paused as something struck me. ‘It’s – it’s almost as if he’s on some sort of crusade, or mission,’ I said hesitantly, realizing the truth of it even as I put it into words. ‘As if something very powerful is driving him. So we shall do as friends do,’ I went on, trying to lighten the sombre mood, ‘and keep an eye on him.
Celia looked at me as if to say, Is that the best you can come up with? But, after a moment, she nodded. Then she kicked the grey mare to a trot, then a canter, and we rode home.
The day delivered the heat that the early mist had promised, and then some more. I had a call to make to the north of Rosewyke and as I returned, longing for a draught of cold water and a bucket of the same to plunge my head and face into, I was summoned urgently to a little community close to the river. Some children had gone too near a bee swarm and several had been badly stung.
I’d almost anticipated someone being stung today. I’d heard the bees, I’d even seen them fly overhead as I rode out. There must have been thousands of them, forming a dense, dark, sinister little cloud, and the noise of their combined buzzing had been so alarming and eerie that I’d felt goose pimples break out on my skin, despite the heat.
I tethered Hal and rushed into the cool kitchen where the parents and a couple of other older people – grandparents perhaps – were trying to calm the frantic children. The old woman was holding a large earthenware bowl and there was a very strong smell of urine. Day-old, no doubt; I recalled the sovereign country remedy for bee stings.
The mother, wrestling to hold a little boy of about five still while she tried to extract one of the stingers on his forearm with the end of a spoon, gave me an anxious look. ‘He’s got two, her over there’s got one’ – a little girl weeping pitifully, sitting on her father’s lap with his big, tanned arms round her – ‘and the lad in the corner’ – she jerked her head towards a boy of eight or nine, cowering under the table and trying to make himself as small as possible in the hope of being overlooked – ‘has three, or maybe more.’ She shot the lad a furious stare. ‘Won’t let me look, little sod!’
I knew full well that her anger came from her distress. ‘I’ll see what I can do when I’ve looked at these two,’ I said, keeping my voice low and calm.
I knelt down before the child being held by his mother. I had already taken my long, pointed tweezers out of my bag and now, hoping that involving the little boy in what I was doing might catch his interest and lessen his panic, I showed them to him. ‘I’m going to grasp that nasty sting very firmly and with one quick twitch, I’ll have it out. I’ll do the same with the other one – don’t worry, I’ll be so fast that you won’t have time to feel more than a brief little burning sensation – and then your grandmother there’ – I looked enquiringly at the older woman holding the bowl and she nodded eagerly – ‘will put some of that wee on them.’ The little boy made a face. ‘I know, it’s not a very nice thought, is it? But it’ll help stop the stinging, you’ll see.’
The operation was carried out much as I’d predicted, other than having to take a brief pause to wipe my streaming eyes when the grandmother advanced with her bowl of piss. Noticing, she looked at me apologetically. ‘I’m sorry, Doctor, it reeks, doesn’t it?’
‘Just a bit,’ I agreed.
She leaned closer. ‘It’s one of old Black Carlotta’s remedies,’ she confided in a whisper.
I might have known.
Black Carlotta was what, in a less paranoid and fearful age, we would probably have called a hedge witch. Nobody, ever, called anybody a witch nowadays. But I had met Carlotta and I admired her; I’d even say I liked her, except that she was so strange and so different that liking or not liking her seemed irrelevant and also slightly disrespectful.
‘It’s a good one,’ I said now to the worried grandmother, who appeared to have realized a little too late that mentioning one medical practitioner to another one – who, moreover, just happened to be treating your grandchildren – wasn’t exactly tactful. ‘Most households can lay their hands on urine, and there’s no doubt that something in it seems to ease the pain of bee stings.’
‘Vinegar does the same if it’s a wasp,’ the grandmother told me helpfully.
I smiled. ‘So I’ve heard.’ She missed the mild irony.
I turned my attention to the little girl, then managed to persuade the lad under the table to come out and be as brave as his younger siblings.
When I’d seen to him and the kitchen and all of its occupants, including me, stank of stale piss, the father said apologetically, ‘While you’re here, Doctor.’
He held up both arms, on which I could see at least seven stings without even looking very hard.
With an exclamation – ‘Why didn’t you tell me straight away?’ – I got to work on him.
He was clearly in considerable pain. He had a sting on his brow as well, up under his hair, and that one took me some time to extract. I went to treat it with the urine, but he waved my hand away. ‘So close to my nose, Doctor, I reckon I prefer the pain,’ he said quietly.
His wife, watching with eyes full of love and pride, said, ‘He went racing over when he heard the children screaming. Went right in there amongst those blasted bees, batting at them and trying to beat them off while the little ones ran for home.’
‘Well done,’ I said quietly to him. I stood up straight, stretching my back. ‘Keep up the bathing, only you could probably exchange urine for cold water quite soon.’
He gave me a quick grin. ‘That’ll be a relief.’
The family offered me water, ale, something to eat, but I declined. Declaring that they all needed a bit of peace and quiet after the excitement – it would have been tactless to say I couldn’t even contemplate food or drink when the stench was still so strong in my nostrils – I made my farewells and rode home.
The heat intensified as the
sun reached, and passed, its zenith.
Rosewyke was cool and quiet. Samuel and Tock had disappeared somewhere, probably to the shady spot by the river where Samuel claimed he liked to fish, although I was pretty sure the main attraction was the proximity of cold water and the soft, cooling breezes that rose up off it. Sallie, after serving Celia and me with a light midday meal – nobody was hungry – had retired to her room. I was in fresh clothes, and my attire of the morning was outside in the yard, steeping in a bucket of cold salted water.
Celia, too, had gone to her room, and was undoubtedly already asleep.
I strolled through the house, staring out at the blazing sun, the overheated land, the total stillness.
I could work, I thought. I had papers to write, notes to make up.
But then, yawning, I decided that work could wait. I climbed the stairs, went into my bed chamber and, heeling off my boots, lay down.
I was asleep in moments.
At Wrenbeare, Denyse Fairlight is out of sorts.
Despite the heat, her mother, Lady Clemence, has visitors. She sits in her once-opulent but now shabby room, holding court. Her elder daughter and her son-in-law, impatient with the ritual, long for the visitors to be gone so that tight, formal garments can be loosened and they can begin to cool off.
Denyse is hiding again. She is too hot. She has been made to wear one of the heavy robes that her mother insists upon when the rich ladies come calling. The robe is a little too small for Denyse, who has grown plump, not to say fat. The maidservant had to haul on the strings of the stays in order that the gown should fasten. Denyse is sweating underneath all the clothes. She hates sweating.
After an interminable time, the visitors get up and they go.
Denyse sits on the wide window ledge, hidden behind the curtain, watching as the big woman on the bay mare and the two younger, smaller women, one on a roan, one on a black horse with a star, ride away.
Denyse doesn’t like visitors. She doesn’t like strangers of any sort. She doesn’t much like anybody, and she barely tolerates her mother, her sister and her sister’s husband. She is wary of the servants and she thinks there are far too many of them. They are always watching, watching, watching her with their narrowed, chilly eyes, muttering about her behind their hands, reporting to her mother the things she does and the wild, stray comments that fly out of her mouth before she can stop them. (She can’t stop them. That is the trouble.) Then she is summoned before her mother to give an account of herself. How Denyse loathes that phrase, with its assumption, even before she’s had a chance to explain, that she’s in the wrong and has been unacceptably naughty again – another phrase she detests – and has earned herself a punishment.
Her mother’s punishments are inventive, varied and always dreadful.
Denyse closes her hands into fists and beats them on the window sill.
She always hides when outsiders come. Her mother receives people in the big room, and there are plenty of places where Denyse can conceal herself. There are three big windows for a start, each of which has heavy, full-length curtains. Today when she heard horses coming up to the house she jumped up onto the window sill below the little window in the alcove beside the fire, then crouched down low behind the big arrangement of flowers sitting on it. The flowers make her sneeze, but she has taught herself to suppress the noise of a sneeze. Sometimes doing that makes her nose bleed and that is frightening. Blood, pouring from her nostrils and soaking the bosom of her gown. But the ability to silence a sneeze is useful, nevertheless, since so often she needs to be absolutely quiet.
Somehow the rest of the hot, scorching, airless, windless day passes.
Denyse is called to eat her supper, but she won’t. She clamps her jaws together and, when the big woman in the kitchen tries to prise them apart to push in a smelly piece of cold meat, Denyse bites her finger.
Then Denyse’s sister’s husband is summoned and he speaks to her very sternly. ‘You will eat,’ he says in a cold and toneless voice. ‘Your mother has decreed it. You know what I shall do if you refuse.’
Denyse does know. She emits a tiny whimper: she can’t help herself. She unclamps her jaws and eats. A mouthful of meat – ugh! It tastes like it smells – and some bread. Some of the vegetable mess, slimy on the side of the platter, even slimier in her reluctant mouth. A hunk of bread with some cheese.
Finally her sister’s husband nods, turns and stalks away.
Everybody is too hot, thinks Denyse. They are scratchy, irritable, and even nastier than they usually are.
She is called, washed, undressed, put in her nightgown and sent to bed. Sometimes Mary lets her go back downstairs to say goodnight.
But they are in a hurry tonight – her mother, her sister, her sister’s husband – and Denyse knows they want to talk about secret matters. She has heard her sister mutter, ‘We have to have a talk about the secret matters!’
She’s not sure what these matters are, because every time she tries to creep up close and eavesdrop, somehow they always know and they haul her out of her hiding place and eject her from the room, very often hurting her. Sometimes they hurt her quite badly.
Her sister’s husband quite often hurts her on purpose. He beats her. So does her mother. Beatings are, however, more acceptable than the punishments that her mother inflicts on Denyse’s most serious misdemeanours.
We have to have a talk. Denyse hears her sister’s hissed words inside her head. She repeats them aloud, but in a soft and almost inaudible whisper. She knows – although she doesn’t understand how she knows – that these secrets they want to discuss are bad things.
So many bad things seem to have happened here.
Denyse doesn’t understand, but she is scared all the same.
She has been scared for much of her life.
She falls asleep, despite herself.
She wakes. She doesn’t know what time it is. It’s cooler, and it’s dark.
She remembers that they – her mother, her sister, her sister’s husband – were going to Have a Talk. She gets out of bed, tiptoes past the door to Mary’s room – Mary is deeply asleep and snoring softly – and creeps downstairs.
The big room is empty.
Moonlight shines in through the three long windows. Somebody must have forgotten to draw the curtains.
Denyse goes on into the room.
It’s not empty after all.
There’s someone asleep on the rug in front of the fire.
Oh, oh, how funny! It’s her mother!
Denyse starts to giggle, but puts her hands over her mouth to stop the sounds.
She can smell something … It’s not very nice. It smells like the privy after she’s used it for more than pissing.
She stands very still.
Her mother is in her nightdress. It’s white, with embroidery on the yoke.
But the embroidery, Denyse knows full well, is blue and green. It’s meant to be bluebells in a chain.
So why is there red all over the front of the nightgown?
Has her mother suppressed a sneeze and given herself a nose bleed?
Denyse creeps nearer. She doesn’t want to – she wants to run, run, run back to bed and shut the door, bury her head beneath the covers – but she can’t seem to help herself.
She stands over her mother.
She takes a swift look at the face and then thinks with relief, It’s not Mother, for that can’t be her face. She never looks like that.
But why, then, is this person wearing Mother’s nightgown with the bluebells on it?
And what’s that smell?
There are two smells now, the horrible privy stench and something that reminds her of when a pig or a calf is slaughtered. Denyse is not meant to watch and they have no idea that she does, but she has hiding places elsewhere than in the big room.
She bends forward.
Some bad person has torn the front of the bluebell nightgown. There’s a huge rip, gaping at the edges.
And th
ere’s a hole in the body underneath, too.
It looks to Denyse, as her eyes widen and she has the first glimpse of the truth, as if someone has slashed a hole in the chest and reached in for the heart.
It looks as if the heart has been burst, crushed, destroyed.
Denyse’s damaged, broken mind sheers away from the terrible sight.
And, still with her hands over her mouth, she starts to scream.
Her hands muffle the sound.
Which is why it takes some time for her sister’s husband, a lighter sleeper than his wife, to perceive at last that there’s an odd noise coming from downstairs and realize reluctantly that he ought to go and see what it is.
He sees his mad sister-in-law in the main room. She’s in her nightdress, the generous folds of the back, gathered from a yoke, caught up unattractively between her large, floppy buttocks. He can see one of her pale, fat, hairy legs. The thigh has a huge, blue-black bruise spreading across it.
He reflects, yet again, how much he loathes her.
‘Come along now, Denyse, stop that silly noise,’ he says with a long-suffering sigh. ‘You know you’re not meant to be down here in the middle of the night.’ He sighs again. ‘Where the hell is Mary?’ he mutters. ‘She’s meant to watch out for your night-time wanderings.’
He steps forward to take hold – reluctantly – of Denyse’s arm.
She is squat and wide, and her sturdy body has been hiding what lies before her on the hearthrug.
But then the stink hits him, so forcefully that he heaves and dry-retches.
And then he sees the body.
Avery Lond, unlike Denyse, is not a young woman with a broken mind, and it is his mother-in-law, not his own mother, who lies brutally slaughtered at his feet.
