Bloodstock and Other Stories

by Margaret Irwin

  But the night was waiting for something more; something from her and Tom. What had she been at, to spoil the sweetness of their love by greedy clutchings at pleasures she did not want? She would tell him that she did not want them.

  She turned towards him, and at that moment a slight figure muffled in a heavy cloak stepped back from the departing group of villagers, held out her hand to Tom, then slid into the dark.

  Tom stood motionless, his hand still outstretched.

  Nell’s breath came quickly. “Did you give her something?”

  “No. She gave me …’—he spoke strangely, in a husky whisper—“What is it? A pearl?”

  Lying in the palm of his hand was a milk-white bead of mistletoe.

  “She has given you the sign,” said Nell. “But, dear heart, I did not need it. I knew.…”

  That night they stole out of the house together, and before the day broke, came the first soft flakes of snow, floating down through the still air, covering the track of their horses” hooves, hiding all trace of the lovers who had fled away to a New World, into a silent world as white as mistletoe.

  The Earlier Service

  Mrs. Lacy and her eldest daughter Alice hurried through the diminutive gate that led from the Rectory garden into the churchyard. Alice paused to call, “Jane, Father’s gone on,” under the window of her young sister’s room. To her mother she added with a cluck of annoyance, “What a time she takes to dress!”

  But Jane was sitting, ready dressed for church, in the window-seat of her room. Close up to her window and a little to the right, stood the square church tower with gargoyles at each corner. She could see them every morning as she lay in her bed at the left of the window, their monstrous necks stretched out as though they were trying to get into her room.

  The church bell stopped. Jane could hear the shuffle of feet as the congregation rose at the entrance of her father; then came silence, and then the drone of the General Confession. She jumped up, ran downstairs and into the churchyard. Right above her now hung the gargoyles, peering down at her. Behind them the sun was setting in clouds, soft and humid as winter sunsets can only be in Somerset. She was standing in front of a tiny door studded with nails. The doorway was the oldest part of the church of Cloud Martin. It dated back to Saxon days; and the shrivelled bits of blackened, leather-like stuff, still clinging to some of the nails, were said to be the skins of heathens flayed alive.

  Jane paused a moment, her hands held outwards and a little behind her. Her face was paler than it had been in her room, her eyes were half shut, and her breath came a little quickly, but then she had been running. With the same sudden movement that she had jumped from the window-seat, she now jerked her hands forward, turned the great iron ring that served as a door-handle, and stole into the church.

  The door opened into the corner just behind the Rectory pew. She was late. Mrs. Lacey and Alice were standing up and chanting the monotone that had become a habitual and almost an unconscious part of their lives. Jane stole in past her mother, and knelt for an instant, her red pig-tail, bright symbol of an old-fashioned upbringing, flopping sideways on to the dark wood. “Please God, don’t let me be afraid—don’t, don’t, don’t let me be afraid,” she whispered; then stood, and repeated the responses in clear and precise tones, her eyes fixed on the long stone figure of the Crusader against the wall in front of her.

  He was in chain armour; the mesh of mail surrounded his face like the coif of a nun, and a high crown-like helmet came low down on his brows. His feet rested against a small lion, which Jane as a child had always thought was his favourite dog that had followed him to the Holy Wars. His huge mailed hand grasped the pommel of his sword, drawn an inch or two from its scabbard. Jane gazed at him as though she would draw into herself all the watchful stern repose of the sleeping giant. Behind the words of the responses, other words repeated themselves in her mind.

  The knight is dust,

  His good sword rust,

  His soul is with the saints we trust.

  “But he is here,’ she told herself, “you can’t really be afraid with him here.”

  There came the sudden silence before the hymn, and she wondered what nonsense she had been talking to herself. She knew the words of the service too well, that was what it was; how could she ever attend to them?

  They settled down for the sermon, a safe twenty minutes at least, in the Rector’s remote and dreamlike voice. Jane’s mind raced off at a tangent, almost painfully agile, yet confined always somewhere between the walls of the church.

  “You shouldn’t think of other things in church,” was a maxim that had been often repeated to her. In spite of it she thought of more other things in those two Sunday services than in the whole week between.

  “What a lot of Other Things other people must have thought of too in this church,” she said to herself; the thought shifted and changed a little; “there are lots of Other Things in this church; there are too many Other Things in this church.” Oh, she mustn’t say things like that to herself or she would begin to be afraid again—she was not afraid yet—of course, she was not afraid, there was nothing to be afraid of, and if there were, the Crusader was before her, his hand on his sword, ready to draw it at need. And what need could there be? Her mother was beside her whose profile she could see without looking at it, she would never be disturbed, and by nothing.

  But at that moment Mrs. Lacey shivered, and glanced behind her at the little door by which Jane had entered. Jane passed her fur to her, but Mrs. Lacey shook her head; presently she looked round again, and kept her head turned for fully a minute. Jane watched her mother until the familiar home-trimmed hat turned again to the pulpit; she wondered then if her mother would indeed never be disturbed, and by nothing.

  She looked up at the crooked angel in the tiny window of mediaeval glass. His red halo was askew; his oblique face had been a friend since her childhood. A little flat-nosed face in the carving round the pillar grinned back at her and all but winked.

  “How old are you?” asked Jane.

  “Six hundred years odd,” he replied.

  “Then you should know better than to wink in church, let alone always grinning.”

  But he only sang to a ballad tune:

  “Oh, if you’d seen as much as I,

  It’s often you would wink.’

  “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost—”

  Already! Now they would soon be outside again, out of the church for a whole safe week. But they would have to go through that door first.

  She waited anxiously till her father went up to the altar to give the blessing. After she was confirmed, she, too, would have to go up to the altar. She would have to go. Now her father was going. He took so long to get there, he seemed so much smaller and darker as he turned his back on the congregation; it was really impossible sometimes to see that he had on a white surplice at all. What was he going to do up there at the altar, what was that gleaming pointed thing in his hand? Who was that little dark man going up to the altar? Her fingers closed tight on her prayer book as the figure turned round.

  “You idiot, of course it’s father! There, you can see it’s father.”

  She stared at the benevolent nut-cracker face, distinct enough now to her for all the obscurity of the chancel. How much taller he seemed now he had turned round. And of course, his surplice was white—quite white. What had she been seeing?

  “May the peace of God which passeth all understanding—”

  She wished she could kneel under the spell of those words for ever.

  “Oh yes,” said the little flat-nosed face as she rose from her knees, “but you’d find it dull, you know.” He was grinning atrociously.

  The two Rectory girls filed out after their mother, who carefully fastened the last button on her glove before she opened the door on which hung the skins of men that had been flayed alive. As she did so, she turned round and looked behind her, but went out without stopping. Jane almost r
an after her, and caught her arm. Mrs. Lacey was already taking off her gloves.

  “Were you looking around for Tom Elroy, Mother?” asked Alice.

  “No, dear, not specially. I thought Tom or someone had come up to our door, but the church does echo so. I think there must be a draught from that door, but it’s funny, I only feel it just at the end of the Evening Service.”

  “You oughtn’t to sit at the end of the pew then, and with your rheumatism. Janey, you always come in last. Why don’t you sit at the end?”

  “I won’t!” snapped Jane.

  “What’s the matter, Jane?” asked her mother.

  “Why should I sit at the end of the pew? Why can’t we move out of that pew altogether? I only wish we would.”

  Nobody paid any attention to this final piece of blasphemy, for they had reached the lighted hall of the Rectory by this time and were rapidly dispersing. Jane hung her coat and hat on the stand in the hall and went into the pantry to collect the cold meat and cheese. The maids were always out on Sunday evening. Alice was already making toast over the dining-room fire; she looked up as the Rector entered, and remarked severely: “You shouldn’t quote Latin in your sermons, Father. Nobody in the church understands it.”

  “Nobody understands my sermons,” said Mr. Lacey, “for nobody listens to them. So I may as well give myself the occasional pleasure of a Latin quotation, since only a dutiful daughter is likely to notice the lapse of manners. Alice, my dear, did I give out in church that next Friday is the last Confirmation class?”

  “Friday!” cried Jane, in the doorway with the cheese. “Next Friday the last class? Then the Confirmation’s next week.”

  “Of course it is, and high time, too,” said Alice, “seeing that you were sixteen last summer. Only servant girls get confirmed after sixteen.”

  That settled it then. In a spirit of gloomy resignation Jane engulfed herself in an orange.

  There were bright stars above the church tower when she went to bed. She kept her head turned away as she drew the curtains, so that she should not see the gargoyles stretching their necks towards her window.

  Friday evening found Jane at the last Confirmation class in the vestry with her father and three farmers” daughters, who talked in a curious mixture of broad Somerset and High School education and knew the catechism a great deal better than Jane.

  After they had left, she followed closely at her father’s elbow into the church to remove the hymn books and other vestiges of the choir practice that had taken place before the class. The lamp he carried made a little patch of light wherever they moved; the outlying walls of darkness shifted, but pressed hard upon it from different quarters. The Rector was looking for his Plotinus, which he was certain he had put down somewhere in the church. He fumbled all over the Rectory pew while Jane tried on vain pretexts to drag him away.

  “I have looked in that corner—thoroughly,” she said.

  The Rector sighed.

  “What shall I say

  Since Truth is dead?’

  he enquired. “So far from looking in that corner, Jane, you kept your head turned resolutely away from it.”

  “Did I? I suppose I was looking at the list of Rectors. What a long one it is, and all dead but you, Father.”

  He at once forgot Plotinus and left the Rectory pew to pore with proud pleasure over the names that began with one Johannes de Martigny and ended with his own.

  “A remarkably persistent list. Only two real gaps—in the Civil Wars and in the fourteenth century. That was at the time of the Black Death, when there was no rector of this parish for many years. You see, Jane?—1349, and then there’s no name till 1361—Giraldus atte Welle. Do you remember when you were a little girl, very proud of knowing how to read, how you read through all the names to me, but refused to say that one? You said, “It is a dreadful name,” and when I pressed you, you began to cry.”

  “How silly! There’s nothing dreadful in Giraldus atte Welle,” began Jane, but as she spoke she looked round her. She caught at the Rector’s arm. “Father, there isn’t anyone in the church beside us, is there?”

  “My dear child, of course not. What’s the matter? You’re not nervous, are you?”

  “No, not really. But we can find the Plotinus much easier by daylight. Oh—and, Father—don’t let’s go out by the little door. Let’s pretend we’re the General Congregation and go out properly by the big door.”

  She pulled him down the aisle, talking all the way until they were both in his study. “Father doesn’t know,’ she said to herself—“he knows less than Mother. It’s funny, when he would understand so much more.”

  But he understood that she was troubled. He asked, “Don’t you want to get confirmed, Jane?” and then—“You mustn’t be if you don’t want it.”

  Jane grew frightened. There would be a great fuss if she backed out of it now after the very last class. Besides, there was the Crusader. Vague ideas of the initiation rites of knight and crusader crossed her mind in connection with the rite of Confirmation. He had spent a night’s vigil in a church, perhaps in this very church. One could never fear anything else after that. If only she didn’t have to go right up to the altar at the Communion Service. But she would not think of that; she told the Rector that it was quite all right really, and at this moment they reached the hall door and met Mrs. Lacey hurrying towards them with a letter from Hugh, now at Oxford, who was coming home for the vacation on Wednesday.

  “He asks if he may bring an undergraduate friend for the first few days—a Mr. York who is interested in old churches and Hugh thinks he would like to see ours. He must be clever—it is such a pity Elizabeth is away— she is the only one who could talk to him; of course, he will enjoy talking with you, Father dear, but men seem to expect girls too to be clever now. And just as Janey’s Confirmation is coming on—she isn’t taking it seriously enough as it is.”

  “Mother! Don’t you want us to play dumb crambo like the last time Hugh brought friends down?”

  “Nonsense,” said the Rector hastily. “Dumb crambo requires so much attention that it should promote seriousness in all things. I am very glad the young man is coming, my love, and I will try my hardest to talk as cleverly as Elizabeth.”

  He went upstairs with his wife, and said in a low voice: “I think Jane is worrying rather too much about her Confirmation as it is. She seems quite jumpy sometimes.”

  “Oh—jumpy—yes,” said Mrs. Lacey, as though she refused to consider jumpiness the right qualification for Confirmation. The question of the curtains in the spare room however proved more immediately absorbing.

  Hugh, who preferred people to talk shop, introduced his friend’s hobby the first evening at dinner. “He goes grubbing over churches with a pencil and a bit of paper and finds things scratched on the walls and takes rubbings of them and you call them graffiti. Now, then, Father, any offers from our particular property?”

  The Rector did not know of any specimens in his church. He asked what sort of things were scratched on the walls.

  “Oh, anything,” said York, “texts, scraps of dog Latin, aphorisms—once I found the beginning of a love song. When a monk, or anyone who was doing a job in the church, got bored, he’d begin to scratch words on the wall just as one does on a seat or log or anything today. Only we nearly always write our names and they hardly ever did.”

  He showed some of the rubbings he had taken. Often, he explained, you couldn’t see anything but a few vague scratches, and then in the rubbing they came out much clearer. “The bottom of a pillar is a good place to look,” he said, “and corners—anywhere where they’re not likely to be too plainly seen.”

  “There are some marks on the wall near our pew,” said Jane. “Low down, nearly on the ground.”

  He looked at her, pleased, and distinguishing her consciously for the first time from her rather sharp-voiced sister. He saw a gawky girl whose grave, beautiful eyes were marred by deep hollows under them, as though she did not sleep enou
gh. And Jane looked back with satisfaction at a pleasantly ugly, wide, good-humoured face.

  She showed him the marks next morning, both squatting on their heels beside the wall. Hugh had strolled in with them, declaring that they were certain to find nothing better than names of the present choir boys, and had retired to the organ loft for an improvisation. York spread a piece of paper over the marks and rubbed his pencil all over it and asked polite questions about the church. Was it as haunted as it should be?

  Jane, concerned for the honour of their church, replied that the villagers had sometimes seen lights in the windows at midnight; but York contemptuously dismissed that. “You’d hear as much of any old church.” He pulled out an electric torch and switched it on to the wall.

  “It’s been cut in much more deeply at the top,” he remarked; “I can read it even on the wall.” He spelt out slowly, ““Nemo potest duobus dominis.” That’s a text from the Vulgate. It means, “No man can serve two masters.’”

  “And did the same man write the rest underneath, too?”

  “No, I should think that was written much later, about the end of the fourteenth century. Hartley will tell me exactly. He’s a friend of mine in the British Museum, and I send him the rubbings and he finds out all about them.”

  He examined the sentence on the paper by his torch, while Hugh’s “improvisation” sent horrible cacophonies reeling through the church.

  “Latin again, and jolly bad—monkish Latin, you know. Can’t make out that word. Oh!”

  “Well?”

  “It’s an answer to the text above, I think. I say, this is the best find I’ve ever had. Look here, the first fellow wrote “No man can serve two masters,” and then, about a century after, number two squats down and writes— well, as far as I can make it out, it’s like this, “Show service therefore to the good, but cleave unto the evil.” Remarkable sentiment for a priest to leave in his church, for I’d imagine only the priest would be educated enough to write it. Now why did he say that, I wonder?”