Bloodstock and Other Stories

by Margaret Irwin

  “Because evil is more interesting than good,” murmured Jane.

  “Hmph. You agree with him then? What kind of evil?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just—don’t you know how words and sentences stick in your head sometimes? It’s as though I were always hearing it.”

  “Do you think you’ll hear it tomorrow?” asked York maliciously. He had been told that tomorrow was the day of her Confirmation. She tried to jump up, but as she was cramped from squatting so long on her heels she only sat down instead, and they both burst out laughing.

  “I’m sorry,” said York, “I didn’t mean to be offensive. But I’d like to know what’s bothering you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you know. But never mind. I dare say you can’t say.”

  This at once caused an unusual flow of speech from Jane.

  “Why should evil be interesting?” she gasped. “It isn’t in real life—when the servants steal the spoons and the villagers quarrel with their neighbours. Mrs. Elroy came round to father in a fearful stew the other day because old Mrs. Croft had made a maukin of her.”

  “A what?”

  “An image—you know—out of clay, and she was sticking pins in it, and Mrs. Elroy declared she knew every time a pin had gone in because she felt a stab right through her body.”

  “What did your father say?”

  “He said it was sciatica, but she wouldn’t believe it, and he had to go round to Mrs. Croft and talk about Christmas peace and goodwill, but she only leered and yammered at him in the awful way she does, and then Alice said that Christmas blessings only come to those who live at peace with their neighbours, and Mrs. Croft knew that blessings meant puddings, so she took the pins out and let the maukin be, and Mrs. Elroy hasn’t felt any more stabs.”

  “Mrs. Croft is a proper witch then?”

  York stood up, looking rather curiously at her shining eyes.

  “Cloud Martin has always been a terrible bad parish for witches,” said Jane proudly.

  “You find that form of evil interesting,” he said.

  Jane was puzzled and abashed by his tone. She peered at the wall again and thought she could make out another mark underneath the others. York quickly took a rubbing and, examining the paper, found it to be one word only, and probably of the same date as the last sentence, which had caused so much discussion about evil.

  ““Ma-ma,” ah, I have it. “Maneo’—”I remain,” that’s all.”

  ““I remain?” Who remains?”

  “Why, the same “I” who advises us to cleave to evil. Remembering, perhaps, though it hadn’t been said then, that the evil that men do lives after them.”

  She looked at him with startled eyes. He thought she was a nice child but took things too seriously.

  Hugh’s attempts at jazz on the organ had faded away. As Jane and York left the church by the little door, they met him coming out through the vestry.

  “Lots of luck,” said York, handing him the paper. “Did you turn on the verger or anyone to look as well?”

  “No—why? Aren’t the family enough for you?”

  “Rather. I was only wondering what that little man was doing by the door as we went out. You must have seen him, too,” he said, turning to Jane, “he was quite close to us.”

  But as she stared at him, he wished he had not spoken.

  “Must have been the organist,” said Hugh, who was looking back at the church tower. “Do you like gargoyles, York? There’s rather a pretty one up there of a devil eating a child—see it?”

  On the Sunday morning after the Confirmation, the day of her first Communion, Jane rose early, dressed by candlelight, met her mother and sister in the hall, and followed them through the raw, uncertain darkness of the garden and churchyard. The chancel windows were lighted up; the gargoyles on the church tower could just be seen, their distorted shapes a deeper black against the dark sky.

  Jane slipped past her mother at the end of the pew. Except for the lights in the chancel, and the one small lamp that hung over the middle aisle, the church was dark, and one could not see who was there. Mr. Lacey was already in the chancel, and the Service began. Jane had been to this Service before, but never when the morning was dark like this. Perhaps that was what made it so different. For it was different.

  Her father was doing such odd things up there at the altar. Why was he pacing backwards and forwards so often, and waving his hands in that funny way? And what was he saying? She couldn’t make out the words—she must have completely lost the place. She tried to find it in her prayer book, but the words to which she was listening gave her no clue; she could not recognize them at all, and presently she realized that not only were the words unknown to her, but so was the language in which they were spoken. Alice’s rebuke came back to her: “You shouldn’t quote Latin in your sermons, Father.” But this wasn’t a sermon, it was the Communion Service. Only in the Roman Catholic Church would they have the Communion Service in Latin, and then it would be the Mass. Was Father holding Mass? He would be turned out of the Church for being Roman. It was bewildering, it was dreadful. But her mother didn’t seem to notice anything.

  Did she notice that there were other people up there at the altar?

  There was a brief pause. People came out of the darkness behind her, and went up to the chancel. Mrs. Lacey slipped out of the pew and joined them. Jane sat back and let her sister go past her.

  “You are coming, Janey?” whispered Alice as she passed.

  Jane nodded, but she sat still. She had let her mother and sister leave her; she stared at the two rows of dark figures standing in the chancel behind the row of those who knelt; she could not see her mother and sister among them; she could see no one whom she knew.

  She dared not look again at the figures by the altar; she kept her head bowed. The last time she had looked there had been two others standing by her father—that is, if that little dark figure had indeed been her father. If she looked now, would she see him there? Her head bent lower and sank into her hands. Instead of the one low voice murmuring the words of the Sacrament, a muffled chant of many voices came from the chancel.

  She heard the scuffle of feet, but no steps came past her down into the church again. What were they doing up there? At last she had to look, and she saw that the two rows were standing facing each other across the chancel, instead of each behind the other. She tried to distinguish their faces, to recognize even one that she knew. Presently she became aware that why she could not do this was because they had no faces. The figures all wore dark cloaks with hoods, and there were blank white spaces under the hoods.

  “It is possible,” she said to herself, “that those are masks.” She formed the words in her mind deliberately and with precision as though to distract her attention; for she felt in danger of screaming aloud with terror, and whatever happened she must not draw down on her the attention of those waiting figures. She knew now that they were waiting for her to go up to the altar.

  She might slip out by the little door and escape, if only she dared to move. She stood up and saw the Crusader lying before her, armed, on guard, his sword half drawn from its scabbard. Her breath was choking her. “Crusader, Crusader, rise and help me,” she prayed very fast in her mind. But the Crusader stayed motionless. She must go out by herself. With a blind, rushing movement, she threw herself on to the little door, dragged it open, and got outside.

  Mrs. Lacey and Alice thought that Jane, wishing for solitude, must have returned from the Communion table to some other pew. Only Mr. Lacey knew that she had not come up to the Communion table at all and it troubled him still more when she did not appear at breakfast. Alice thought she had gone for a walk; Mrs. Lacey said in her vague, late Victorian way that she thought it only natural Jane should wish to be alone for a little.

  “I should say it was decidedly more natural that she should wish for sausages and coffee after being up for an hour on a raw December morning,” said her husband with unu
sual asperity.

  It was York who found her half an hour later walking very fast through the fields. He took her hands, which felt frozen, and as he looked into her face he said, “Look here, you know, this won’t do. What are you so frightened of?” And then broke off his questions, told her not to bother to try and speak but to come back to breakfast, and half-pulled her with him through the thick, slimy mud, back to the Rectory. Suddenly she began to tell him that the Early Service that morning had all been different—the people, their clothes, even the language, it was all quite different.

  He thought over what she stammered out, and wondered if she could somehow have had the power to go back in time and see and hear the Latin Mass as it used to be in that church.

  “The old Latin Mass wasn’t a horrible thing, was it?”

  “Jane! Your father’s daughter needn’t ask that.”

  “No. I see. Then it wasn’t the Mass I saw this morning —it was—” She spoke very low so that he could hardly catch the words. “There was something horrible going on up there by the altar—and they were waiting—waiting for me.”

  Her hand trembled under his arm. He thrust it down into his pocket on the pretext of warming it. It seemed to him monstrous that this nice, straightforward little schoolgirl, whom he liked best of the family, should be hag-ridden like this.

  That evening he wrote a long letter to his antiquarian friend, Hartley, enclosing the pencil rubbings he had taken of the words scratched on the wall by the Rectory pew.

  On Monday he was leaving them, to go and look at other churches in Somerset. He looked hard at Jane as he said “good-bye.” She seemed to have completely forgotten whatever it was that had so distressed her the day before, and at breakfast had been the jolliest of the party. But when she felt York’s eyes upon her, the laughter died out of hers; she said, but not as though she had intended to say it, “You will come back for Wednesday.”

  “Why, what happens on Wednesday?”

  “It is full moon then.”

  “That’s not this Wednesday then, it must be Wednesday week. Why do you want me to come back then?”

  She could give no answer to that. She turned self-conscious and began an out-of-date jazz song about “Wednesday week way down in old Bengal!”

  It was plain she did not know why she had said it. But he promised himself that he would come back by then, and asked Mrs. Lacey if he might look them up again on his way home.

  In the intervening ten days he was able to piece together some surprising information from Hartley which seemed to throw a light on the inscriptions he had made at Cloud Martin.

  In the reports of certain trials for sorcery in the year 1474, one Giraldus atte Welle, priest of the parish of Cloud Martin in Somerset, confessed under torture to having held the Black Mass in his church at midnight on the very altar where he administered the Blessed Sacrament on Sundays. This was generally done on Wednesday or Thursday, the chief days of the Witches” Sabbath when they happened to fall on the night of the full moon. The priest would then enter the church by the little side door, and from the darkness in the body of the church those villagers who had followed his example and sworn themselves to Satan would come up and join him, one by one, hooded and masked, that none might recognize the other. He was charged with having secretly decoyed young children in order to kill them on the altar as a sacrifice to Satan, and he was finally charged with attempting to murder a young virgin for that purpose.

  All the accused made free confessions towards the end of their trial, especially in as far as they implicated other people. All however were agreed on a certain strange incident. That just as the priest was about to cut the throat of the girl on the altar, the tomb of the Crusader opened, and the knight who had lain there for two centuries arose and came upon them with drawn sword, so that they scattered and fled through the church, leaving the girl unharmed on the altar.

  With these reports from Hartley in his pocket, York travelled back on the Wednesday week by slow cross-country trains that managed to miss their connections and land him at Little Borridge, the station for Cloud Martin, at a quarter-past ten. The village cab had broken down, there was no other car to be had at that hour, it was a six-mile walk up to the Rectory, there was a station hotel where it would be far more reasonable to spend the night, and finish his journey next morning. Yet York refused to consider this alternative; all through the maddening and uncertain journey, he had kept saying to himself, “I shall be late,” though he did not know for what. He had promised Jane he would be back this Wednesday, and back he must be. He left his luggage at the station and walked up. It was the night of the full moon, but the sky was so covered with cloud as to be almost dark. Once or twice he missed his way in following the elaborate instructions of the station-master, and had to retrace his steps a little. It was hard on twelve o’clock when at last he saw the square tower of Cloud Martin Church, a solid blackness against the flying clouds.

  He walked up to the little gate into the churchyard. There was a faint light from the chancel windows, and he thought he heard voices chanting. He paused to listen, and then he was certain of it, for he could hear the silence when they stopped. It might have been a minute or five minutes later, that he heard the most terrible shriek he had ever imagined, though faint, coming as it did from the closed church; and knew it for Jane’s voice. He ran up to the little door and heard that scream again and again. As he broke through the door he heard it cry, “Crusader! Crusader!” The church was in utter darkness, there was no light in the chancel, he had to fumble in his pockets for his electric torch. The screams had stopped and the whole place was silent. He flashed his torch right and left, and saw a figure lying huddled against the altar. He knew that it was Jane; in an instant he had reached her. Her eyes were open, looking at him, but they did not know him, and she did not seem to understand him when he spoke. In a strange, rough accent of broad Somerset that he could scarcely distinguish, she said, “It was my body on the altar.’

  Mrs. Oliver Cromwell

  and

  Where Beauty Lies

  Mrs. Oliver Cromwell

  She was not called by that name now. That was why she said it to herself with longing and regret mingled with awe, as she thought of those long quiet days when she had been plain Mrs. Oliver Cromwell, living in the flat fen country round Cambridge, bearing one child after another, four boys, four girls, and filling up the sleepy, happy months of pregnancy (for all that she could never get over her tendency to be sick during them—a tendency that her mother-in-law was inclined to regard as modern faddishness and weakness of nerves) with the simple duties of bottling fruit and salting mutton for the winter, going through the store cupboards, the still-room and the linen-room in company with the ignorant country girls that she and her mother-in-law always succeeded in turning into good maids. Their round faces had shone at her in anxious good humour, their round foolish mouths dropped slow words in the thick accent of the Eastern Counties, their big hands were occupied with all the same things that occupied herself—solid, satisfying things: round heavy jars with the children like flies round them (“Now, Dick, now, Betty, take your fingers out of that, Miss Pry!’), juicy hams swinging from the great beam in the ceiling, smooth glossy white baby linen and pillow-cases all woven by herself on her little hand-loom that stood always in the chimney-corner of the big room, marble slabs spread with thick dough to turn into crisp warm loaves and towering piecrusts by the time they reached the table, and Oliver’s face would light up behind them, saying, “Ah, there’s nothing like a good beefsteak pie! Who wants your foreign kick-shaws ?”

  And then he would chaff her or his mother and pull little Betty’s hair, teasing her in the flattering way that encouraged even while he rebuked her pertness, and quite forget that he had tramped in in a rage about something or other—the Spanish army in Germany or the Prayer Book in Scotland, or some such matter that always seemed to be putting men into rages,—leaving the marks of his muddy boots all over the new
ly scrubbed flagstones, and even his mother not daring to call and tell him to go and take them off before he went on saying all he wanted about the Pope or the Emperor or the King; though what had Kings or Emperors to do with them, Mrs. Oliver had sometimes asked herself in a rare spasm of irritation:—and now remembered that silent question as if it had tempted all their future fate to fall upon them.

  What had Kings and Emperors to do with them now? Just this—that Oliver had cut off his own King’s head; had made all other Kings, and the Emperor, yes, and the Pope, acknowledge his supremacy; that he himself had been offered the Crown of England.

  Mrs. Oliver Cromwell was now the wife of His Highness the Lord Protector of England, whom all the nations of Europe delighted to honour. The royal palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court were Oliver’s town and country houses now; he drove from one to the other attended by a body of life-guards in scarlet, a host of lackeys, and fifty gentlemen-in-waiting dressed, as became the personal attendants of a Puritan ruler, in sober colours, black and grey, but splendid with silver trimmings. His court held more sumptuous state than many foreign monarchs; his stud of horses was finer than any ever owned by an English King; his envoys were given such honours abroad as even the Emperor’s did not receive.

  And this very year, 1658, a superb embassy of nobles had arrived from France, bearing a jewelled sword of honour to Oliver as “the most invincible of Sovereigns.” The young French King, Louis XIV, was to have headed the embassy himself, an honour unheard of till now, but it reached only the stage of being heard of, for King Louis caught the smallpox at the last moment and had to remain at home—a bitter disappointment to Oliver’s daughters, though Oliver himself declared he minded far more when the pack of wild reindeer collected so carefully for him by the young Queen Christina of Sweden, to give a new zest to his hunting, was inadvertently devoured by wolves before starting for England.