Saxon's Bane

by Geoffrey Gudgion

  “So what do you call it?”

  Eadlin looked at him and sighed, as if weighing up a decision.

  “Well, if you’re going to work around here you’d better know, so you don’t barge in on any more morning prayers.” Fergus felt himself blush. “Some people would call us pagans but even that’s a label that the Christian church smeared us with, centuries ago. To us it’s simply the Old Way. Mostly it’s just traditions.” She looked around for inspiration, and then waved her piece of leather at the freshly ploughed field beyond the paddock.

  “Farmers round here will plant a cake in the first furrow that they plough in the spring. Whether you call that tradition or superstition, it’s like a kind of respect to the soil that sustains them. Later in the year the same farmer will ask the Vicar to bless the harvest, and afterwards he’ll join in the village harvest festival. You won’t find the Vicar planting cakes in the first cut of a field, but he won’t turn the farmer away from communion neither. Traditions and faith rub along together well, if you let them.

  “But do me a favour, and keep what you see private, like. Around here we’ve learned to live peaceably together by not being too obvious about any differences. Even pillars of the church like Mary Baxter know that kindness doesn’t have to wear a crucifix.”

  Eadlin’s voice was even, with no undercurrent of mysticism, so she might as well have been talking about a church fete. Fergus had let his cloth drop onto the table, fascinated, but she waved a bridle at his pile of tack and reminded him that there was plenty more to do.

  “So is this ‘Old Way’ a faith, or is it a way of healing?” Fergus was having difficulty concentrating on the stiff buckles in front of him. Eadlin put her own work down as if her answer was too important to be diluted with other activity.

  “The Old Way teaches us that all living things are sacred, that there is a life force in everything and connecting everything.” She closed her eyes and inhaled, so that her words seemed part of the vitality she described. “The life force is stronger in some places than others. Old trees concentrate it, so do springs and streams. Some places are naturally sacred, others are made sacred. The church in the village is sacred not because some priest scattered holy water in it, but because people have been worshipping there for at least a thousand years. You try going in there. Close your eyes and feel the peace.”

  Fergus felt that however bizarre this conversation would have been in the concrete of a city, it was strangely appropriate here in the countryside, surrounded by birdsong and blossom, the sounds and smells of spring.

  “Isn’t it a bit strange for a... for someone from the ‘Old Way’ to be enthusing about a church?”

  “Nah, why not? To us it’s simply a different way of saying the same thing. Christians pray to God for divine guidance. We chant to focus the energy of life, so our minds can find the spirit that’s inside all of us. When you’ve had a few more riding lessons we’ll hack out, and I’ll take you to some places that will feel at least as sacred as a church.”

  “I think the Vicar might disagree. About it being similar, I mean.”

  “I’m sure he would. He’d probably think we’re a bit too liberal in other ways, as well.” Eadlin’s eyes sparkled.

  “In what way?” Fergus kept his tone innocent. He liked it when she flirted.

  “Well I don’t go along with it personally, but some people think that making love is a way of channelling energy.” There were throaty undertones to Eadlin’s voice.

  “But you don’t agree with that?” Now it was Fergus’s turn to flirt.

  “Nah. If the sex is that good, the last thing I want to think about is a cure for Grandma’s lumbago.” Eadlin chuckled in a rich, earthy way as she picked up a piece of leather and started polishing. Fergus caught himself flicking a sideways glance at the way her sweater moved as she worked, and he spoke a question as it came into his mind, without thinking.

  “So is Jake a follower of this ‘Old Way’?” He couldn’t reconcile his high-energy, high-ego picture of Jake with Eadlin’s picture of her faith.

  Her mood changed as if some switch had been thrown. Too late, he realised that Jake’s alley-cat look that morning probably hadn’t been acquired in Eadlin’s company.

  “Jake,” she said finally, “has chosen his own path.”

  Then she worked silently, punishing the leather with brisk movements, with her mouth set into a line. Fergus bit his lip and cursed himself for his insensitivity.

  Part Three

  Ēastre

  April

  The Paschal month… was once called after a goddess of [the Anglo-Saxons] named Ēastre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.

  Venerable Bede,

  De Temporum Ratione written in AD725

  Chapter Nineteen

  IN HIS SECOND week, the week before Easter, Fergus’s body was a collection of articulated aches, and he started to wonder if his exercise routine was too gruelling. At the end of the day he’d drag his bicycle through Mary Baxter’s front gate, in urgent need of a hot soak and a large glass of wine, but one evening he paused in Mary’s tiny front garden to listen to a woman’s voice singing in a rich contralto. But for the mess a pianist was making of the accompaniment, it could have been mistaken for a radio performance. Someone, nearby, could sing. The pianist fumbled to a stop.

  “Sorry.” Clare’s voice was followed by more, inexpert attempts at a chord. Fergus traced the sounds to the fanlight window of Mary’s front room. Through the glass he could see Clare sitting at the piano, with Mary standing behind her, now humming her encouragement as Clare tried to find the notes. Fergus found it hard to believe that such a sound had come from Mary’s frame. It should have come from an operatic dame, all bodice and bosom, not from dumpy little Mary. The music stopped as his key turned in the lock, and the two women turned towards the door into the hall as he appeared, smiling at him over the top of their spectacles in accidental co-ordination.

  “Hi Fergus.” Clare sounded genuinely pleased to see him. “We’re practising Mary’s piece for Holy Thursday.”

  “With the choir,” Mary added. “I’m doing a duet with Cynthia Lawrence.” Fergus had a vague memory of Cynthia as the over-dressed soprano with the loud voice.

  “Do you like Pergolesi?” Clare asked.

  “Love it. Especially with a little grated parmesan and a nice Chianti.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him. “Baroque church music. Mary’s singing Pergolesi’s ‘Stabat Mater’ and it’s beautiful. I’m staying in Allingley until after the evening service so I can listen. Do come.”

  Which was how Fergus found himself in church on a Thursday, possibly for the first time in his life, and sharing a pew with Clare. Behind them people came through the doors in ones and twos and family groups, exchanging whispered greetings as they hurried to their pews. Kiss, kiss, how’s the family? The church inhaled life as the evening fell, with people fluttering in from the fading day to mass in the church’s candlelight like a horde of flightless butterflies. Beside him Clare craned her neck to study the church’s ceiling, and interrupted his reverie.

  “Imagine what the medieval peasants would have thought of this place.”

  Fergus sensed that Clare was about to launch into one of her imaginative descriptions. An easy companionship was developing between them; she was good company when she wasn’t talking about dreams.

  “Much the same as us, probably,” he prompted.

  “I doubt it. This would have been the only stone building for miles around. Put yourself in the mind of a serf who lives in a draughty, wattle-and-daub hovel. The priest would be dressed in a clean white surplice, and speak Latin, and you’d know yourself to be dirty and illiterate. His incense would make you realise you stank, and this,” she slapped the great column beside her, one of a line marching down the aisle, “stamps his authority on
earth.”

  Fergus looked around, impressed. Clare could conjure up the minds of the ancients. He could see no further than the plaques on the walls, and still only wonder at their lives. Near their heads, beneath a family crest and the badge of a distinguished regiment, was a simple memorial to Robert D’Auban, 2nd Lieutenant, Mons 1914, Aged 19. Albert D’Auban, Captain, Ypres 1917, Aged 24. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Above them in the darkening glass a yellow-haired, infant Christ raised chubby fingers in blessing. How typical of the hubris of Empire, he thought, to show a blond Christ. It spoke of an age when God spoke English and had commissioned the British to civilise the world in their image.

  Eadlin had said something about this church’s atmosphere, about it being a holy, peaceful place. Fergus shut his eyes and opened his mind, trying to let the tranquillity come to him. There was something there, perhaps, some pervasive calm amidst the hushed movements of the gathering congregation, but nothing as powerful as his moment of communion that day with Trooper. It was elusive, calling to him like the scent of a distant flower.

  “Can you smell it?” He turned to look at Clare, interrupting a comment about the Tudor roses on the ceiling. She lifted her nose like an animal testing the wind.

  “Smell what? I smell musty books, wood polish, candles, flowers… Smells like a church to me.”

  Fergus shrugged. One minute Clare could have romantic notions about ancient peasants, the next she would deliver an academic treatise on medieval ceilings. Fergus tried to put his thoughts into words, surprised by his own candour.

  “Peace. Centuries of peace.”

  Clare looked at him through the top of her glasses, then pushed them slowly up her nose as if she needed a moment to digest his comment. “Well,” she said eventually, “this place has certainly been around for a while.” She nodded over her shoulder at a painted board, listing ‘Priests and Rectors of St Michaels Church’ in an unbroken line starting in 1210. A footnote explained that records before 1210 were unreliable.

  Fergus shook his head, lacking the words to articulate a concept that was only half formed in his own mind. He was wondering if a place could have an atmosphere that would survive the people within it, the way mellow brick could absorb heat from the sun and stay warm through a chill evening.

  Still musing, Fergus stood, sang, sat and knelt through the service’s ritualised choreography, as much a bystander as he’d been at that last sales meeting. His mind drifted back to another act of worship, when Eadlin had saluted the sunrise of Ostara on her lawn.

  But gently, so gently that at first Fergus did not notice the shift in his mood, the atmosphere of the place started to take hold. As the light faded outside, the ceiling softened into a faint tracery, almost lost in darkness. Where it met the supporting columns, a line of stone angels gazed down. A trick of the eye and mind could easily imagine the music to be coming from them and from a celestial void beyond rather than the choir below.

  In an expectant silence Tony Foulkes moved a music stand to the front of the choir stalls, and Cynthia Lawrence and Mary Baxter, in cassocks and flowing surplices, moved out to face the congregation. The cardboard edge of Mary’s music folder shook a little as she prepared herself, her face tight with nerves. Beside and towering above them, a bare wooden cross had been erected as the church’s only decoration this Holy Thursday night. Fergus glanced down at his service sheet, reading:

  Pergolesi (1710 – 1736): Stabat Mater

  Chapter Twenty

  THE RHYTHM OF the village had changed the following morning. Fergus set off on his bicycle into a fog that deadened sound and smothered light, as if spring had reversed back into winter. He’d become accustomed to seeing the same patterns of movement. Village people, apparently, were as regular in their lives as commuters who caught the same train each morning. Clare, he knew, was a temporary feature as she packed in a morning run before returning home for the Easter weekend, but the slack-bellied men swivelling their heads to watch her run past would still be fetching their morning paper at the same time without the distraction of her body. Their faces, though, had a haunted look about them in the fog.

  Tony Foulkes was also an early riser, usually striding out behind a Labrador and calling cheerfully to everyone he met. Today the Labrador was tied to the church notice board, whining for its walk, while Tony and John Webster scrubbed at the church porch, letting daylight show them the smears they had missed the night before. Above them the tower faded into the fog so that its castellation appeared insubstantial, and the banner of St George beyond was a mere hint of scarlet in the void. Both men nodded at Fergus, their faces tightening into smiles that did not reach the eyes.

  Fergus paused on his bicycle and called a greeting, wanting to offer support but unsure what to say. Webster hoped that the daubing was a childish prank, perhaps by the same kids who had been frightening old ladies by leaping out of bushes with biro tattoos on their foreheads. Webster had decided not to wait for the police, wanting his church to be cleaned of the stain without delay. Foulkes wondered how many children had access to a bucket of blood. He had scraped a sample into a plastic medicine bottle and taken photographs. Neither imagined that the police would take the incident very seriously. Fergus left them to their task.

  The fog could not deaden the sounds of a furious row that spilt out of the office at Ash Farm later that morning. Fergus paused in his task of mucking out a stable, trying to hear the words. The shouting ended in a metallic crash and he started moving towards the house, hefting a fork. Jake stormed out while he was still crossing the yard, slamming the door behind him and almost knocking Fergus over as he passed.

  “Are you OK?”

  Eadlin looked up from where she was gathering scattered rubbish from the floor, and nodded. It looked as if the waste bin had been kicked against the wall.

  “Sodding man.” She picked up a toppled desk tidy that had scattered a spray of pencils and slammed it upright, hard enough for more pencils to bounce out and rattle across the desk. “Sodding, bloody man. Can’t think what I ever saw in him.” Eadlin slumped into her chair, closing her eyes as if with a bad headache. “I need to let off steam. Let’s go for a hack. It’s time you rode out.”

  Outside in the yard Jake was swinging into the saddle, yanking at his horse’s mouth to turn it towards the bridleway.

  “If you think I’m ready.” So far he’d only ridden in the sand school.

  “You’re ready, on the right horse. We’ll keep it gentle, like.” Fergus’s attention was still on Jake. The horse was prancing under him in the car park, feeling its rider’s tension, and Fergus winced as he saw Jake’s riding crop swing backwards in a punishing blow to its rump. The horse bucked at the sting but Jake stayed glued to the saddle, perfectly balanced, and then struck again, hard.

  “Bastard.” Eadlin had seen the blows. “I can’t believe he just did that.”

  Eadlin led Fergus out of the farm on a different route. She was quiet for the first few minutes, riding ahead of him up a narrow track towards the hills. Her shoulders were set and her horse was skittish, jogging in its impatience to run, so that its tail swished with the movement. Above it, Eadlin’s hair flowed from under her riding hat, an auburn waterfall echoing the chestnut below. Then the path widened and she stood in her stirrups, turning back to invite him alongside.

  “Sorry ’bout that. Jake, I mean.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  She breathed so deeply that her shoulders broadened as if she was about to hit something.

  “Jake and I are history.” She exhaled, her body settling deeper into the saddle. “We’ve been history since Ostara, even though he won’t accept it. No woman dumps Jake, you see? His ego won’t allow it.”

  “Was that why you were arguing?”

  “Nah, today’s fight was about the blood on the church. Things are getting way out of hand.”

  Fergus wondered what ‘things’ were getting out of hand. He was also surprised. He hadn’t s
een Jake as someone who’d daub blood on a church. “You think Jake did that?”

  “Nah, not him personally, and he’ll have a dozen cronies who’ll swear he was in his pub all evening. But the stag mark tells me it’ll have been done by one of his gang, someone who looks up to him, like that little runt Dick Hagman.”

  “You mentioned him once before.”

  “He’s a local odd-job man. He’s not the sharpest tool in the box but like one or two other Green Man regulars, he idolises Jake. If it’s not Dick Hagman, it will be someone like him, so I hold Jake responsible.”

  “Look, it was a pretty sick thing to do, but why are you so upset about graffiti on a Christian church?”

  As the track rose towards the hills the sun started to burn off the fog so that they rode in a bright, suffused light. For a moment the only sound was the wet brushing of the horses’ hooves as they pushed through the grass. When Eadlin spoke she sounded calmer.

  “The Old Way survived round here because we was quiet about our beliefs. People said we was just keeping quaint local traditions alive and we didn’t, like, threaten anyone. Even the healing was done as a favour to friends. Now it feels like Jake wants to start a war.”

  “What’s his problem? What does he want to fight about?”

  “Y’know, I’m not sure? It’s like he’s just flexing his muscles, trying to prove he’s king of the roost. But please, let’s stop talking about him. He’s spoiling my ride.”