The Prayer of the Night Shepherd mw-6

by Phil Rickman

Jane blinked. What am I thinking? Gripping the Sony 150 — real and modern, hi-tech, digital, third-millennial. Bringing it up and shooting the scene just to do something, avoid getting drawn in, the way she had been at the climax of Ben’s murder-mystery weekend in the lounge next door. This was a similar set piece, played out in the waxy ambience of an oil lamp with a frosted, globular shade — the same one that lit the scene when Sherlock Holmes confronted the Major.

  And here, as Matthew had explained in his introduction, was the real Holmes, the prototype, the famous tutor at the University of Edinburgh School of Medicine who had initiated the student, Arthur Conan Doyle, into the basic techniques that Holmes would employ. Dr Joseph Bell, born 1837, consultant surgeon at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, life-long advocate of the employment of forensic observation in the diagnosis of disease.

  Jane glanced over at Mum: possibly her first experience of trance-mediumship.

  It was more than acting, but…

  Sometimes it looked as if Alistair Hardy had lost weight — or at least as if his body weight had been rearranged. But it could be explained… If he seemed taller, that was because he was sitting up so straight in his hard-backed chair. If his eyes seemed brighter and shrewder — almost piercing — that was because he’d become fired up by what he was doing… or thought he was doing.

  And if his features looked sharper, his nose more like the beak of a bird of prey, that was… well, Merrily was willing to bet it wouldn’t come over on the video.

  Transfiguration. It was popular in Victorian times, but you didn’t get much of it now when people were no longer easily fooled by clever lighting and special effects. She was half and half on this — half of her thought he was sincere in the belief that something was happening; half of her thought it was a total con. She wondered how convinced Matthew Hawksley really was.

  Matthew said, ‘As you probably realize, Joe, we’re trying to solve a mystery.’

  ‘In which case…’ Dr Bell’s lips tweaked in amusement ‘… I cannot think why you would come to me.’

  Matthew smiled. Apart from this intimate tableau, the room was in shadow. One of Largo’s two static cameras was positioned in front of the altar, the other behind the semicircle of chairs. Largo himself was crouching just a few feet from the table. Alistair Hardy had declined to be filmed going into trance. Maybe he didn’t like the way his left side seemed to drop into spasm, his arm projecting from his body, his fingers curling.

  Could be some kind of nervous condition.

  ‘Would it be possible for you to ask Sir Arthur if he ever came here?’ Matthew said.

  ‘Here?’ Bell snapped. ‘Where is “here”? Be more specific, man.’

  ‘Stanner Hall, in the County of Herefordshire, on the Welsh Border. Home of the Chancerys.’

  ‘Not known to me.’

  ‘Was it perhaps known to Sir Arthur? Would it be possible to ask him?’

  Dr Bell went still. Alistair Hardy’s breathing had altered its rhythm, was going faster, and he was blinking rapidly, like REM during a dream. Merrily saw Bliss sitting in the corner nearest the connecting door to the lounge, Jeremy hunched like a hedgehog nearby. She imagined Brigid Parsons in there, perhaps asleep in a chair, watched over by the police.

  ‘Aye,’ Dr Bell said after a while, ‘I’m informed that it was.’

  ‘Did he have relatives here? Members of his family?’

  There was a longer silence this time, a blurring of Hardy’s face as Matthew pushed his luck, maybe suspecting that he didn’t have much time left.

  ‘Was he aware of the legend of Black Vaughan and the Hound of Hergest?’

  Dr Bell breathed gassily in and out through his mouth. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, as if talking to someone else. ‘Aye. Indeed.’ He turned to Matthew. ‘You touch on a most vexed issue, my friend.’

  ‘In… what way?’

  ‘I will not be…’ Dr Bell sprang up. ‘These people!’ Forefinger pointing, accusatory, around the room. ‘These people are a disgrrrrace!’

  A plastic bottle of water labelled Highland Spring was sent spinning from the table. Merrily held her cross.

  ‘The child.’ Dr Bell’s voice had deepened. It might — if you gave any credence to this — be considered a different voice. ‘The infant. To involve an infant… inexcusable.’

  You might now want to believe that this was the voice of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hardy had his hands behind his back. There was a tremor under his breath. He looked up at the ceiling, and down at the audience. He didn’t seem to see anyone.

  Until his gaze collided with Merrily’s — and it was a collision; she almost felt the jolt. She held the cross and didn’t blink.

  ‘They tarnish us.’ Then Hardy looked away and sat down. ‘They tarnish us.’

  Matthew Hawksley retrieved the bottle of Highland Spring from under a chair and poured out half a glass, as Alistair Hardy coughed himself out of trance.

  Merrily stood up. She didn’t feel very priestly tonight, in her black cowl-neck jumper and jeans.

  ‘Erm… did that suggest anything to anyone?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Beth Pollen said. ‘I think so.’

  Merrily rather liked what she’d seen of Beth Pollen. A decent woman in search of some kind of spiritual truth. To what extent she was open to deception, however, was anybody’s guess.

  Merrily opened a hand. ‘Please—’

  Mrs Pollen stood up. ‘The Chancerys… tried to build themselves into the fabric of the area. This area has always been overshadowed by the Vaughan legends, which have inspired pretty genuine fear over the years. The Chancerys were unlikely previously to have encountered the level of acceptance of hauntings, omens and curses they found here on the Welsh Border, even among fairly educated people. So they were saying, “Look, we’re the heralds of a new age of enlightenment, we can deal with this. By recreating the circumstances of the exorcism, we’ll summon the spirit of Black Vaughan, and then we’ll talk to him rationally through a medium, and we’ll find out what his problem is.” ’

  ‘But it seems to have been a fairly cobbled-together affair,’ Merrily said. ‘And they certainly didn’t have twelve priests.’

  ‘But, as Sir Arthur correctly remembers, they did have a baby.’

  Twenty years younger than Gomer, but a lot more cautious — he’d always known that — Danny went up the drive first, with the lambing light switched off. He did not like the sound of Dexter Harris.

  He stopped halfway to the vicarage front door, where the bushes on either side had been turned into great white domes. There was enough reflected light to reveal deep footmarks all over the path, as well as scuff-marks, drag-marks. Hell.

  You got a weight of snow, there wasn’t nothing couldn’t happen in these villages. Used to be police stations everywhere, now the dull bastards at the Home Office, never been west of Woking, figured cops could reach anywhere in minutes. But all it took was one big snowfall…

  Danny switched on the light. It told him that the front door was ajar.

  ‘Somebody been in,’ Danny whispered.

  ‘Well, don’t bloody well hang around!’ Gomer grabbed the lamp off Danny, planting his boot on the door, banging it open. ‘Lol! Lol, boy, you in there?’

  ‘Chrissake,’ Danny muttered, Gomer blundering past him into the vicarage. ‘Gomer?’

  ‘Bugger,’ Gomer said, dry-voiced. ‘Oh, bugger.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Better take a look.’

  Danny stepped up into the hall. Could just make out a door on his left, then a staircase, a passage in front of him, and Gomer standing in a doorway to the right. Over Gomer’s shoulder, in the lamp beam, he could see a big kitchen with a Rayburn or something of that order and a long table dragged to one side and, all down one leg of the table, long smears of red, unlikely to be ketchup.

  ‘Blood in yere, Danny.’

  ‘Take it careful, Gomer. I mean it.’

  There was a door slightly ajar at the bottom of the kitchen.

/>   ‘Lol!’ Gomer shouted. ‘You there, boy?’

  ‘This en’t lookin’ good, Gomer. Don’t touch nothin’.’

  ‘Bugger that.’ Gomer marched across the kitchen to the bottom door, hooked his boot around the side and dragged it open.

  Some kind of short passage, with an oak beam across, a door and a small window on one side, a narrow stairway on the other.

  On the floor, a body.

  Merrily froze.

  There were present, to help lay the spirit, a woman with a new-born baby, whose innocence and purity were perhaps held powerful in exorcism.

  Today, of course, it wouldn’t even be contemplated. The rule book said plainly, See that all children and animals are removed from the premises.

  But that was then. And it was only a story.

  ‘The assumption is,’ she said to Mrs Pollen, ‘that the baby in the story would have been newly baptized, otherwise it wouldn’t be seen as a symbol of purity. In the medieval church, baptism itself was considered a primary exorcism. A baby would be christened as soon as possible because it was considered to be prey to satanic invasion, or even to actual possession by the Devil, until baptism.’

  ‘That’s how I understood it too, Mrs Watkins. A child who died before baptism would not be admitted into heaven. As well as having the sign of the cross marked on its forehead in holy water, its head was wrapped in a white cloth in which it would be buried if it died, as so many did, in infancy. The baby’s immortal soul was then considered to have been formally saved.’

  Merrily nodded. This woman had done her research.

  ‘Well, then,’ Mrs Pollen said, ‘I don’t know which account of the Vaughan exorcism you read, but the one in Mrs Leather’s book does not say that the baby had been baptized.’

  ‘No,’ Merrily conceded, ‘I suppose it doesn’t. However—’

  ‘And I’m certain Hattie Chancery hadn’t been either, when her mother brought her in.’

  ‘Oh.’ Merrily sank down into her chair. She’d missed the obvious.

  ‘For heaven’s sake—’ Ben Foley’s chair legs screeched as he swung round. ‘You’re saying the baby was Hattie? How reliable is this, Beth?’

  ‘Well, it’s not actually documented anywhere, as far as I know,’ Mrs Pollen said. ‘It’s what the original servants said. We tracked down about four children or grandchildren of Stanner Hall staff who’d been involved in the ceremony. Three of them had heard the story, and two of them actually said their parents had been pretty jolly horrified when Bella Chancery proudly walked in with her new baby daughter.’

  ‘And the baby was unbaptized?’ Merrily said. ‘Do we know that?’

  ‘What we do know, from records, is that Hattie Chancery’s baptism was delayed because she became ill. Although we don’t have an exact date for the so-called exorcism, we know it took place in the winter of 1899, and the baptism is on record as having taken place in March 1900. I also know, from oral accounts, that Bella Chancery, during her spiritualist phase, was very dismissive of Church mumbo-jumbo and probably wouldn’t have had Hattie baptized at all if Walter — much older, more set in his ways — hadn’t insisted.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Ben said, ‘why on earth have you been sitting on this?’

  ‘Because of the family.’

  ‘But didn’t Natalie know?’

  ‘Clancy didn’t know,’ Beth Pollen said. ‘I also felt that talking about it… I don’t know what I felt, apart from a dreadful foreboding.’

  ‘But just assuming we’re all taking this on board,’ Ben said, ‘giving credence to… I mean, what are we saying? I can’t even put this into words…’

  ‘OK.’ Merrily moved out towards the table where Matthew and Hardy were sitting. Into the light. ‘When I was training for the Deliverance ministry, the key word was caution. You start with a prayer, build up as necessary. I’ve never done an actual exorcism of a person, and most diocesan exorcists will never do one. It’s sledgehammers and nuts. If you overreact, you can open the way for something far worse, create a situation where there isn’t one.’

  Mrs Pollen was nodding fiercely.

  ‘So,’ Merrily said, ‘someone staging a phoney exorcism, based on a real exorcism — OK, that may be apocryphal, but the techniques ring true — someone recreating that scenario risks inviting something in. Inviting madness, if you want to look at it psychologically. Or evil, if we’re allowed to be spiritual. And evil loves a short cut. Evil takes the easy option.’

  ‘The easy option being the unbaptized baby,’ Mrs Pollen said.

  49

  Requiem

  ‘Except it wasn’t intended to be an exorcism, was it?’ Merrily said. ‘Why don’t you tell us about the original owner of Stanner Hall?’

  Beth Pollen hesitated as the connecting door to the lounge opened and Alma’s bulky figure squeezed through. Bliss stood up, Alma whispered something to him.

  ‘Can I interrupt?’ Bliss said. ‘Mr Foley, do you have any more of these nice oil lamps? Or even — dare I suggest it — a generator?’

  Ben stood up. ‘Oh no.’

  ‘I’m afraid so, sir. It was only a matter of time, wasn’t it? Word is that all of Kington’s off.’

  ‘No,’ Ben said, ‘I’m afraid we don’t have a generator. There are a couple more of these lamps, and a lot of candles, and I could probably get the gas mantles going.’

  ‘Anything you can do, sir, would be very much appreciated.’

  ‘Damn. Now?’

  ‘Well, I’d hate to be a nuisance…’

  ‘All right.’ Ben walked across to the door to the hall. ‘Oh — Antony has lights, of course. And batteries.’

  ‘Not very much left, I’m afraid,’ Antony Largo said. ‘Best conserved, eh?’

  Jane laughed cynically.

  A power cut was going to cause problems, inevitably. Merrily sat and waited for the hall door to close behind Bliss and Ben Foley. At least it had given her some time to work a few things out, align what she’d just heard with what Jeremy had told her, surprisingly voluble once he’d got going.

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Pollen,’ she said. ‘I think we were talking about the original builder. I mean, I gather you’d know more about this than anybody, from your husband’s preliminary work. As I understand it, the architect who designed Stanner Hall for his own use had done quite a lot of work for Walter Chancery.’

  ‘Yes.’ Beth Pollen sat just in shadow, looking down at her hands in her lap.

  ‘And his name was?’

  ‘Rhys Vaughan. However—’

  ‘I know much of this is rumour, but we ought to hear it, don’t you think?’

  Beth Pollen sighed.

  ‘I mean, as far as I can make out, nobody knows for certain whether he was a direct descendant of the Vaughans of Hergest, but he certainly thought so,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Well, he was a Welsh-speaking Welshman, and the Vaughans were a very important family, descended from the Princes of Brecknock, supporters of a great Welsh cultural tradition, I mean, in the Middle Ages the whole of Kington was actually Welsh-speaking. It must have been important to Rhys that when he built the house it should be on a significant site as close to Hergest as possible. He did originally try to buy Hergest Court, and when he failed he was determined to build something as impressive as Hergest had been in its great days.’

  ‘And where better than the famous Stanner Rocks?’

  ‘They weren’t very famous then, Mrs Watkins. The rare plants were only discovered quite recently. But yes, it was an impressive site and he was able to buy a good deal of land. Land wasn’t terribly expensive in those days. It all took a long time because he’d keep running out of money and have to go back to the Midlands and design industrial buildings for people like Walter Chancery.’

  ‘This would be what interested your husband, who worked for Powys Council.’

  ‘The great Welsh mansion that never was, yes. Rhys was a very romantic figure. A great patriot. He obviously loved the idea of domina
ting the border, as he believed his ancestors had.’

  ‘And working for Walter,’ Merrily said, ‘meant he had quite a lot to do with the much younger Mrs, erm, Chancery.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Mrs Pollen said. ‘This is all rumour. Steve absolutely abhorred this kind of gossipy, anecdotal—’

  ‘It was a bit more than that at the time, though, wasn’t it? According to my information, Hattie Chancery bore very little resemblance to Walter, and the only person who couldn’t see it was Walter himself.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Jane said.

  ‘The word is that this was more than just a passing dalliance. Bella was seriously in love with Rhys, and when he died she was in a terrible state. Which I suppose poor old Walter put down to her being pregnant.’

  ‘Mum, where the hell did you get this?’

  Merrily raised an eyebrow at Jane and hoped that she could make it out in the lamplight. They’re all Vaughans, Jeremy had said. Hattie and Paula and Margery and Sebbie and Brigid. All Vaughans, with all the Vaughan baggage.

  ‘So Bella, in her grief, carrying Rhys’s child, desperate for her lover’s vision to become reality, put the arm on Walter to put in a bid for the unfinished folly.’

  ‘It was almost finished,’ Beth Pollen said. ‘All that Bella had to do was bring one of her interior-designer friends up from London. Cost Walter so much money in the end that I think he had to sell one of his companies to meet the final bills. Which I suppose was the beginning of the end for the Chancery fortune. Seems to be what this place does.’

  Merrily looked at Amber Foley, who sat as still as a mannequin, her face a mask of dismay. The darkness beyond the lamp-glow seemed more real, now that everyone knew it was a darkness shrouding the whole mid-Border.

  ‘Which brings us to the seance,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m calling it a seance, because I think the Black Vaughan exorcism thing was probably a cover story, possibly for Walter’s benefit. Would that be close?’

  ‘It’s all conjecture, isn’t it?’ Beth Pollen said.

  ‘Is it OK if I go on?’

  Beth Pollen spread her hands. Of course… this was the part she would have identified with, as a woman who’d lost a much-loved husband, a soulmate.