The Prayer of the Night Shepherd mw-6

by Phil Rickman

  The water in Leonard’s eyes had become pools, and he turned his head away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ben said.

  ‘Switch that thing off, would you?’

  The tape cut out and the TV screen went blue.

  Jane just sat there, watching it, relieved in a way, because there was an awful lot to think about. There was a link between Hattie and the Hound, and the link was Ellen Gethin: Ellen in her long, girdled gown, the small cap on her head. Comely wench, Antony Largo had said irreverently. Nice body. And then Ben had said, Me and Thomas and Ellen. I feel, in a strange sort of way, that we’re kind of a team now.

  The TV screen flickered, and Leonard was back. It must have been some time later because his eyes were dry and calm now, and it was a different camera angle — Leonard’s chair pushed closer into the window. A shirt-sleeved arm came into view, with a mug of tea or coffee on the end.

  ‘There you are, Leonard.’ Vaguely familiar voice.

  ‘Thank you, Frank.’ Leonard’s hands wrapped themselves around the mug. ‘You don’t mind this, do you, Mr Foley?’

  Frank Sampson, Jane thought, Arrow Valley Amateur Dramatics.

  Ben said something inaudible.

  ‘Yes,’ Leonard said. ‘That’s all right. I’ll talk about that. I wasn’t there, though, you understand that. I’m old, but I’m not that old.’

  ‘You don’t look a day over sixty, Leonard,’ Ben said heartily, and Leonard giggled shrilly, and Ben started to ask him questions about Walter Chancery and his crass attempts to become a society host in his castle by the rocks. Leonard kept stopping to remind Ben that this was only what he’d heard from Mrs Betts, the cook, and a few others of the staff who’d been there many years, and Ben kept saying, don’t worry about that, just keep it coming.

  Leonard said it wasn’t quite right about the Chancerys building the house from scratch. In fact, they’d taken it over from a business associate of Walter’s, who was an architect and had done some industrial design for Walter. He’d built the house for himself, lovingly, over many years and had been killed when some masonry collapsed.

  ‘Here?’ Ben asked.

  ‘No, no. On a site over in the Midlands. But he’d invited Walter and Bella to see his house, and Bella had fallen in love with it. And after this chap died, she urged Walter to buy it. They’d just found out Bella was pregnant and, of course, this made Walter more amenable to the idea of a new family home.’

  Leonard then told a long story about how Walter had had all these stags’ heads with huge antlers brought down from Scotland, and a suit of armour from a place in Gloucestershire. There was a duke came to stay once, Leonard said, or it might have been an earl.

  ‘And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?’ Ben said nonchalantly at one point. ‘Didn’t they say Sir Arthur was there?’

  Leonard looked thoughtful, then he smiled. Outside the window, a woman with a black labrador walked across the car park to a silver Ford Focus.

  ‘Oh my Lord, yes,’ Leonard said. ‘No doubt about that.’

  Jane thought she heard Ben’s sigh, and if she hadn’t heard it she’d sensed it.

  But Leonard’s eyes narrowed, and his hands came up, a forefinger quivering.

  ‘But he never came back, you know,’ Leonard said. ‘That’s why it’s been forgotten. He came here the once, but he never came back, and you can quite understand that. When you know what they did.’

  31

  Noise and Blood

  The hedgerows were swollen on both sides into vast white bales, the lanes squeezed down to one vehicle width. The snow was still falling, but in a desultory way, like a handful of pebbles after an avalanche.

  The cab of Gomer’s truck smelled of oil and sawdust and the suspension hung down on the left, as if the truck had a hernia.

  ‘No, she hasn’t really talked much about the mother,’ Merrily said over the heater’s phlegmy cough. She had on Jane’s duffel coat, woollen gloves, a white woolly hat from the WI Christmas Fair, and Lol’s scarf. And she was still cold. And chilled, which was different.

  ‘We always knowed there was some’ing we din’t know, vicar,’ Gomer said, ‘that’s the point. First the boy was gonner marry Mary Morson, then her’s gone off with this naturalist feller from the Rocks. Next thing, this Nat’lie’s turned up with her camper van and the kiddie, and they’ve moved into The Nant inside the week, and the ole van gone to Stanner Rocks. Burning her boats kind of thing.’

  They passed a barn in a field, cloaked in snow, one of the few isolated barns in this particular area not yet turned into luxury dwellings, and therefore still available for farmer-suicides. It was nearly always the barn, the engine room of the farm. Barns had fully exposed hanging beams and trusses and bales of hay you could build up, steps to the gallows. Dozens of farmers in this area had gone out this way in the past twenty years. Something ritualistic about it: a dying breed speeding up the inevitable.

  ‘Love at first sight?’ Merrily thought of Lol, back at the vicarage: Go — pushing her mobile phone into her hands — This situation gets you over there, with a good reason. Two birds, one stone. I’ll keep talking to Matthew. Keep it switched on.’

  ‘Seemed that way.’ Gomer dipping his lights as they made it round a bend. Ahead of them, a small dead tree poked out of a field like a stiffened hand from under a shroud.

  Merrily said, ‘But?’

  The truck started to skid; Gomer casually spun the wheels into it; the truck rocked and steadied and shaved a few inches from the left-hand snow wall. Gomer bit down on his thin ciggy.

  ‘Other day, see, what happens is Danny comes home, finds Mary Morson there. Says this Natalie’s been seen in her ole camper van up on Stanner. With a feller. Gettin’ up to things.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Well, Mary Morson, her figured they could get back together, her and Jeremy, if it all broke up — that’s Greta’s view of it. Likely on Mary’s terms. Her’d wanner crush him first, then pick up the bits, ennit?’

  ‘Likeable girl, then.’

  ‘All heart. So Greta, her says to Danny, He’s your mate, you better go tell him. Mary Morson, her en’t gonner sit on this potato for too long. Well, Danny, his renowned diplomat skills don’t extend to tellin’ his mate his woman’s playin’ away.’

  ‘Difficult.’

  ‘Near impossible, for a Radnorshire farmer.’

  ‘Who was the man she was with, Gomer?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Danny didn’t tell him about it, but you think someone else did?’

  ‘Mary Morson, mabbe her rung to break the news to him as he wasn’t the only fish in Natalie’s stream.’ Gomer went silent for maybe eight swings of the wipers. ‘Well, see, the thing is, you didn’t always have to tell Jeremy things. He’d know. Wouldn’t let on, mabbe, but he’d know.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘No big deal, vicar. Well, mabbe now it is, but it din’t used to be when farm life rolled along with no distractions, no form-fillin’, no ministry inspectors on your back.’

  ‘You’re saying—?’

  ‘Boy’s what we used to call a natural farmer. In the ole sense. A quiet farmer. Goin’ quietly on.’

  Gomer turned left, and the many-tiered lights of a transcontinental lorry came into view, like a remote cocktail bar. Merrily pulled out her cigarettes and lighter.

  ‘My ole mam,’ Gomer said, ‘her’d never leave part of an onion in the house. Use the lot, else throw the rest away, or put him on the fire. First new moon in May, my ole feller used to set about the nettles. You done it then, the ole nettles’d stay down. And they wasn’t that superstitious, see. Just that most folk, they’d have one or two things they’d stick by.’

  ‘Mmm. I count magpies, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Jeremy’s family, they knowed the lot. Why you never watches a funeral through glass. Why it en’t right for a woman to come in first on Christmas Day, ’less her slept there the night before, and definitely not if her’s wearing new shoes. Boy growed up with
all that. All of it. Most youngsters, it gets to the stage when they rebels against the ole ways, only Jeremy’s dad died when he was young, and he took over the farm when he was n’more’n a child. Took on the farm, took on the traditions. Small world, no distractions. Found he had a… haptitude. You followin’ me, vicar?’

  ‘Go on.’ Remembering her Herefordshire grandad, his relationship with apple trees.

  ‘Danny d’reckon it was like it was all talkin’ to him: the ground, the trees… the stock. He sees stuff some of us mabbe don’t notice, and it tells him things. Sounds like ole wallop, don’t it?’

  ‘A touch pagan, maybe.’

  ‘Oh hell, no. Big churchgoers, all their lives, the Berrows. That’s why Danny said could you come, take care of things now.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘He…’ Gomer hesitated. ‘He never was good with people, see, Jeremy. Church services scared him. But he’d go on his own, see, when the church was empty, take bits of stuff for Harvest Festival when nobody was about. Time of the Foot-and-Mouth, he’d be there every morning and every night, on his own — not for long, mind, just slipping in quietly. And the Foot-and-Mouth stayed well away from The Nant. The Berrows ground, see, always been in good heart, never no chemicals.’ Gomer gave Merrily a quick glance. ‘I en’t specifically implying nothin’ by this, vicar. Boy went quietly on, that was all.’

  ‘You said he… knew things, without having to be told.’

  Again, Gomer didn’t offer a direct answer.

  ‘Danny was over there earlier. Boy’d already brought his sheep down, cleared his track. So when he phones to ask if Greta can take this kiddie, Clancy, for the night, Danny knowed straight off some’ing was wrong. The woman always took the kiddie back to the farm at night. Then her went back to Stanner herself if her had to work late, like doing the bar.’

  ‘So she’d stay the night, but she wouldn’t have her daughter stay there.’

  When Merrily had asked Jane if Clancy worked at the hotel too, at weekends, Jane had said Natalie wouldn’t allow it because the kid was so far behind at school. Natalie was very strict about homework and early nights. Odd really, Jane had said, because she certainly wasn’t the Victorian-parent type.

  ‘But, Gomer, Jeremy must have known that Danny would be suspicious and go rushing up there. And that Danny would have the means to get through the snow.’

  ‘Likely the boy wanted to be sure it was Danny found him, ennit?’

  ‘Oh.’

  Gomer switched off the wipers, and Merrily saw that the snow had almost stopped. You could see low cloud now, shifting like smoke, the pale suggestion of a moon behind it. They crested a hill, and there was Kington: a snug medieval snow-fantasy tucked under the white wings of the border hills. With its brave twinkling of Christmas lights, the town looked small and cosy; the hills didn’t.

  There were no visible lights in the Welsh hills. Sometimes, from outside, Wales loomed like a threat. It all relaxed once you were across the border, down in the pale, quilted pastures of the Radnor Valley. All the threat was in the space between.

  ‘It’s a… strange kind of place, isn’t it? This valley. Hergest… Stanner… the, erm, Hound.’

  ‘They don’t talk about it, none of it, you know that. Not the local people.’

  ‘No.’

  Not even whimsy for tourists, she knew that much. Hergest Court, long since relinquished by whatever remained of the Vaughan family, was apparently tenanted most of the time, but never promoted as a visitor attraction. When you thought about it, very little of anything here was for the tourists.

  ‘Temptin’ fate, see,’ Gomer said. ‘You asks people, they’ll give you, Ah, load of ole wallop. But they en’t gonner tempt fate, all the same.’

  ‘But, if the Vaughan family’s long gone…’

  ‘Temptin’ fate,’ Gomer mumbled, almost angrily. ‘You don’t do that.’

  ‘Gomer, tell me one thing: you see any basic connection between the legend of the Hound of Hergest and the stuff you were telling me about the other night — whatever’s been killing this guy Dacre’s sheep?’

  Gomer grunted. ‘Has it?’

  ‘Has it what?’

  ‘Been killin’ sheep. I en’t yeard of any, save for Dacre’s. And Sebbie…’ Gomer paused, chopping down to second gear. ‘Sebbie’s losin’ it, big-time. Fact.’

  They came to the traffic island on the edge of town: an iced cake, uncut. Chances were nobody would get in or out of town tonight. The truck creaked around the island and on to the bypass via a shallow gully down the middle.

  ‘Losing it how?’ Needing a firmer handle on this before she went into the Berrows farm.

  ‘On the booze. Givin’ out daft sentences on the Bench. Makin’ a spectacle of ’isself in the pubs. Family thing, I reckon. Mabbe it all comes down to wassername… genetic. Only, you feels it’s in the ground, too, weighing it down like clay. Two attitudes to the ground, see, vicar: either you goes quietly on, tendin’ and healin’, like Jeremy Berrows, or you goes roarin’ over it, like with the hunt. Whoop, whoop.’

  ‘Domination.’

  ‘Makes you feel like you’re in charge, I s’pose. I wouldn’t know. Mabbe it’s just about noise and blood. All I know is, there’s what feels like a terrible rage buried somewhere in this valley. You take the tale of ole Black Vaughan — mad as hell, turnin’ over market carts. The Hound in the night, the bull in the church. Blood and noise all around. Yere’s Sebbie Dacre, Master of the Middle Marches: blood and noise. Like his granny. And in the middle of it all, this little farmer goin’ quietly on, little island of calm. Can’t be easy. Mabbe Jeremy, mabbe he was yearin’ all the noise and blood poundin’ in his head, gettin’ closer and closer, until he couldn’t take it n’more.’

  ‘Maybe someone should’ve…’

  ‘Sorry, vicar?’

  Rural stress came in many forms, most of them unrecorded, unrecognized by psychiatry.

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ Merrily tightened Lol’s long scarf. ‘Are we nearly there?’

  With the lights of Kington behind them, they’d followed the bypass into a harder, lightless landscape, ranks of snow-caked conifers forming on the hazy edges of the headlight beams.

  ‘What have they been shooting at, Gomer? Do you know?’

  She’d been here many times, and she knew that when you turned the corner and cruised down into the Radnor Valley, the landscape and your spirits usually lightened. Only tonight they wouldn’t be turning the corner.

  ‘Likely shadows,’ Gomer said. ‘Shootin’ at shadows.’

  At first, Jane had thought like, Wow, the enterprise, the bravado, the spectacle.

  Realizing in seconds that nothing else the Chancerys might have done could have been more blatantly insane. And in that situation today they would have known it — between them, they would have seen, for heaven’s sake, a dozen crazy horror movies with the same simplistic message: don’t meddle. A pulp cliché now.

  They’d been mature people, people of wealth and status, and they’d behaved like irresponsible kids.

  But, of course, they were Victorians — at the decadent end, verging on the Edwardian. Jane had done her social history and, at this particular period, in the heat and smoke of technological revolution, superstition belonged to the more primitive corners of the Empire. The Chancerys would have felt some kind of immunity, by virtue of being Victorians.

  Jane sat down on the edge of her bed, looking at the window, a blackboard dusted with chalk, and still seeing the ill-fitting dentures of Leonard Parsonage working their way around the word exshorshism. The beetle-like personal mike distorting it, too close to his mouth because of the way his tie bulged out of his pullover.

  Jane shuddered. Sitting there in the dark, with three inches of snow on the window sill, she finally called home.

  Not thinking too hard about what she was going to say. Fairly confident, now, that she could turn this around with Mum. Because it was a fact that if she hadn’t kept quiet, stuck arou
nd, picking up pertinent information here and there, ear to the ground… well, no outsider would know the full extent of it, and that—

  ‘Knight’s Frome— sorry, Ledwardine Vicarage.’

  Jane stiffened for a moment, not expecting this.

  ‘Lol? Is that you?’

  ‘Jane!’

  ‘What are you doing there?’ Mum and Lol: a secret love-tryst. The things that went on when your back was turned.

  ‘Not enough,’ Lol said. He didn’t sound happy.

  ‘Are you snowed in?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘You and Mum?’

  ‘I wish,’ Lol said.

  As soon as Merrily walked into the living room at The Nant, her gaze connected with the eyes of Jesus whose face wore a bleak smile of acceptance, his halo dull with weariness. Kind of, Just get this over. The picture wasn’t as famous as The Light of the World, but it wasn’t any more guaranteed to engender hope.

  The half-mile track hadn’t been blocked. Gomer had been able to drive up to the wall around the farmhouse, where Danny’s tractor was wedged.

  She stood near the living-room doorway, spotting the dog next: a sheepdog, more black than white. The dog’s head was pointing upwards, between the knees of the man sitting on a wooden stool. The man was looking down at the floor. Behind him, a fire roared in the range, gilding perhaps everything in the room except the picture of Jesus.

  Gomer prodded her gently into the room, and Danny Thomas stood up from somewhere.

  ‘Mrs Watkins… Good of you.’

  Now she was here she didn’t know what to say, how to go about this. It was like the strangeness of the whole area was concentrated in this square, fire-lit room. And when Danny spoke, that was also surreal, initially.

  ‘I, er… I had this album once, see. In my folky days.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Fairport Convention,’ Danny said. His hair hung over his face like wet seaweed over a rock. ‘Babbacombe Lee. Period when Dave Swarbrick was writin’ the songs? Before your time, I ’spect.’