Idol Bones

by D M Greenwood

  THEODORA BRAITHWAITE NOVELS CLERICAL ERRORS UNHOLY GHOSTS IDOL BONES

  HOLY TERRORS EVERY DEADLY SIN MORTAL SPOILS HEAVENLY VICES A GRAVE DISTURBANCE FOOLISH WAYS

  IDOL BONES

  D. M. Greenwood

  Ostara Publishing

  Copyright © 1993 D. M. Greenwood The right of Diane Greenwood to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright. Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 1993

  by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING PLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

  in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which

  it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 9781906288242

  Printed and bound in United Kingdom

  Published by

  Ostara Publishing

  13 King Coel Road

  Colchester

  C03 9AG

  www.ostarapublishing.co.uk

  To

  Philip Tyrrell

  CONTENTS

  1 A View from a Pew 1

  2 Ill Omens 8

  3 Theophany 21

  4 Shrove Tuesday 32

  5 Dust and Ashes 50

  6 Clerical Opinions 60

  7 Strange Gods 76

  8 Cathedral Close 86

  9 Malign Influences 98

  10 Servants’ Quarters 109

  11 Dies Irae 122

  12 The Quick and the Dead 133

  13 Resurrexit 139

  CHAPTER ONE

  A View from a Pew

  The article in the Bow Examiner was on the centre page between ‘Local Firm’s Success in World Seed Drill Market’ and ‘City Striker’s Sci-Fi Goal’. It was headed ‘A View from a Pew’.

  ‘Have you ever seen a new dean put into his cathedral? If you haven’t, you wouldn’t learn too much about it from the order of service sheet for the induction of Dean Vincent Stream this Sunday at Bow St Aelfric. It has three hymns printed on it, mentions three processions and concludes with some threatening remarks against rushing the exits before the last of the processions has left.

  ‘So the fanfare took us all by surprise. Bow St Aelfric’s Youth Orchestra silver section weren’t quite together to start with, but they got better or at least louder as they went on. When they’d finished there was a longish pause. Surely they couldn’t have lost a hundred clergy? Bow St Aelfric is one of England’s smaller cathedrals, and a hundred clergy, many of them in cassock albs, queuing at the wrong door would be noticeable.

  ‘To keep us alert, there was a rustle of people preparing to stand up and then deciding not to. The order of service was no help. An enormous canon dressed like a wizard, in gold cope with modern Picassoesque embroidery on the back, ambled very slowly down the nave aisle. A tiny messenger boy of about twelve raced after him. The boy, dressed in new era postman’s blue with very broad red stripes down the side of his trousers, wore spurs which seemed unfamiliar to him. The boy’s friends recognised him as the chairman of the chemical manufacturers, CBL, dressed as the Lord Lieutenant of the county for the afternoon. The enormous canon took him by the scruff of the neck and stowed him at the end of a pew of mayors and mayoresses. He looked relieved to have found a safe slot and allowed his knees to sag, possibly supposing that he was praying.

  ‘By this point the audience (you couldn’t call us a congregation) had been waiting thirty-five minutes. The organ had finished playing fifteen minutes previously with a finality suggesting the organist had locked up the instrument and gone away on holiday. So the first procession slid in and got halfway down the nave before anyone noticed. We stumbled to our feet once more. The choir, four barrel-chested men, twelve young, pretty diminutive women and a dégagé (“we’ve been here before – often”) rout of choirboys, failed to coordinate its steps. Some waltzed, some czadased, others tangoed, to avoid treading on the too frequent feet of those in front or behind them. There’s something eerie about a procession processing to no music. There’s nothing to cover up mistakes.

  ‘The second procession, made up of clergy, was luckier. The reserve organist had been wrenched from the bosom of his family (Sunday afternoon) and eased into place. He caught up with them, before they reached the crossing. Thought had gone into this procession. Long had been paired with short, thin with fat, old with young. Thus did they exemplify the diversity of creation. Many of them had an air of having been awakened from deep sleep, many were limping; arthritis is an occupational hazard for the clergy – all that suppressed anger. The nave altar steps were greeted with enormous surprise. “What have we here? Never seen these before have you, Dick?” But up they sprang. Many of them made the top step and those who didn’t were Christianly helped up by their brothers. At their rear came six female deacons in blue suits with arranged expressions. They marched like military policemen, in step, making their point. They carried handbags to show they were women and wore dog collars to indicate the other thing.

  ‘The final procession represented other denominations and faiths. Some thoughtful pairing for maximum effect had gone on here too. The purple soutane and silver hair (matching the silvery white crocheting on his cotta) of the RC Monsignor contrasted well with the austere black suit and dapper bonnet of the Salvation Army lady. The Methodist in academicals (Sheffield MSc by the look of it) had been paired with the rabbi who did not take off his hat. The URC man in a dark lounge suit got a verger, owing to being accompanied by a black bishop, who looked as though he might know how to guard his flock, even with a kalashnikov, if necessary, in the cause of a just war.

  ‘The diocesan bishop distanced himself from this rout by some ten paces and showed he was at home on his own patch by smiling at both sides of the audience. Dean Stream, we were led to believe, would come on a bit later when he knocked to be allowed in at the already open west door.

  ‘Then things speeded up a lot. We sang a swift hymn (organist eager to return to family?), heard a reading from the remoter regions of the Old Testament in the New English Bible version which, even had the audio system been working, would not have been too meaningful. The Lord Lieutenant disconnected his spurs from each other and read the letters patent. It became clear that this was the point of the entire show. Nothing about God but a fair amount about the Queen. The bishop sat on a papier mâché throne on loan from the Bow St Aelfric Light Opera company, surrounded by five men in court gowns and wigs who clearly knew exactly what the letters patent meant. The message was plain. It was a legal charade. It was about temporal, worldly power. It had nothing to do with worship or the spirit.

  ‘The new dean decided to start as he meant to go on. He evaded his own verger, mounted the pulpit before the precentor could read a second lesson and embarked on his sermon.The precentor’s verger looked daggers at the dean’s verger and steered the thwarted precentor back to his stall with the air of having to replace the stopper in the decanter before a drop could be poured. The new dean preached about Solzhenitsyn under the impression that he represented the best modern Christian thought. The precentor plotted revenge. The final hymn saw the three processions move off at twice the speed of light and the audience reached for its car keys.

  ‘There was a time when the Anglican church knew its way about in matters of ceremonial. The clergy knew what cathedrals were for. Now they feel they’ve got to write their own scenarios to show their own values, and, indeed, they do convey those values only too well. B
ut if you thought this rigmarole had anything to do with celebrating spiritual life, if you thought it was meant to bring us into God’s presence and send us out changed and uplifted, you’d probably do better going to Covent Garden or even Bow Operatic Society.’

  This pungent piece appeared in the Bow St Aelfric Examiner on Monday, the day after the installation of Vincent Stream as dean, two days before the beginning of Lent. It was read, and indeed celebrated, in and around the cathedral in a number of ways.

  In the crypt office, a den of disaffection below the high altar of the cathedral, Dennis Noble, the second or canons’ verger, pursed his lips in appreciation.

  ‘Gets the flavour, wouldn’t you say, Nick?’

  Nick Squire, the under-verger, moved the first coffee of the day across

  the deal table and leaned over the older man’s shoulder. He ran his eye down the column and grinned. ‘To a tee. Does anyone know who writes these things?’

  ‘That’s what we’d all like to know, none more so than the new man, doubtless.’ Dennis spoke as he verged, slowly, at an Anglican pace, choosing his path, choosing his words. ‘Some of it could be libellous,’ he remarked judiciously.

  Nick pushed a plate of freshly made bacon sandwiches across the table and turned off the vent axia.

  ‘You’ll get clobbered one of these days,’ said Dennis, ritualistically taking a sandwich. ‘The precentor wouldn’t care for it at all.’

  Nick, who was well acquainted with the precentor, didn’t doubt it.

  ‘Mustard?’ he inquired.

  Dennis spread it as though it were holy oil. ‘The precentor was put out all right,’ he went on. ‘You could see that. He was growling to himself all through the sermon.’

  Nick nodded with pleasure at the memory. ‘It doesn’t augur too well for the worship side of things, does it?’ he remarked, ‘if the new dean can’t read a service sheet?’ Nick liked a row, provided it wasn’t his row. He felt in this case he could afford to be detached. In six months he’d be gone for his first year at Oxford and the troubles of cathedral vergers would no longer concern him.

  ‘Shouldn’t need service sheets, deans, not if they know what they are about.’ Dennis was censorious. He had high standards.

  ‘How did Tristram take it?’ There was a shade of anxiety in Nick’s tone. He admired the head – the dean’s – verger, and he hadn’t had a chance to see him since.

  ‘It would have been a great moment,’ Dennis paced on, ‘a professional peak, dean’s verger verging a new dean to his pulpit for his inaugural sermon, and Dean Stream went and jumped the gun.’

  Nick loved Dennis’s ponderousness and wasn’t above contriving moves to evoke it. ‘Great moment,’ he murmured.

  ‘I’m not too sure,’ said Dennis, judiciousness incarnate, ‘that the ceremony was complete without a second lesson. The Holy Gospel, a proper, nay essential, part of the celebration.’

  “What celebration?’ asked Nick in derision. ‘Nobody wanted Vincent Stream as dean, did they?’

  ** *

  ‘I really don’t think it’s very seemly talking about putting stoppers in decanters being like not letting you read the second lesson,’ said Mrs Riddable, agitating the paper so that it flopped over the breakfast marmalade.

  The parlour at the Precentory across the close from the cathedral was small. The Victorian room was taller than it was broad giving it the feeling of an upright coffin. The breakfast table took up most of the floor space and widely separated husband and wife, pinning each of them against opposite walls.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Canon Riddable asked irritably as he extracted the Golden Shred from beneath the leaves of the Examiner.

  ‘This article, this report, in the Examiner. About the installation of Vincent Stream. Dean Stream’s installation,’ his wife added, lest there should be any mistake. ‘Yesterday,’ she concluded.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ If Canon Riddable’s tone suggested that he would prefer to know no more of the subject from his wife, he should have known better than to suppose that lack of interest on his part could quell her.

  ‘Well, I think it’s such a shame, really a shame.’ Mrs Riddable’s tone would have been suitable for reporting a case of injustice to the disabled. In physique she was a small woman, as small as her husband was large, so she put a great deal of emotion into her every utterance to make up for it. Indeed, some of her acquaintance thought she exhibited more emotion than the actual sense of her words warranted. Her short top lip and slightly protruding teeth pointed in the direction of the canon.

  ‘Why?’ asked her husband, putting down his knife and glaring across the huge length of the table.

  ‘Because the dean’s new,’ said his wife anguishedly. ‘Here,’ she added. ‘A stranger within our gates. We should be welcoming him. At the start of his ministry. Among us.’

  Fifteen years of marriage had not accustomed Canon Riddable to the excesses of his wife’s conversational style, nor to her habit of dividing her sentences by dramatic pauses. It always induced in him a wish to deflate her, to bring her down to face the unpleasant truths which made up, he had no doubt, the real world. He wasn’t, in fact, quite sure whether she was as naive as she sounded. But he was sure that she roused in him more cynicism than was altogether proper in a residentiary canon and precentor of Bow St Aelfric Cathedral.

  ‘I think it calls you a wizard,’ his wife went on. ‘It was you who conducted the Lord Lieutenant to his pew, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said the canon shortly: ‘What I do know is, there’s been far too much of this pernicious anti-clerical nonsense written in that rag recently. I shall have to put a stop to it. And,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘Vincent Stream was an appalling choice of dean for a place like this. He’s unsuitable in absolutely every conceivable way.’ He found he’d raised his voice and was sweating slightly.

  ‘Just as you say, dear,’ said his wife suddenly equable, as though she had obtained the effect she wanted. A small smile slid on to her face and as quickly slid off again. ‘Pass the toast, would you, Trevor?’

  Stella Parish, in a Nissen hut on a piece of waste land called the Hollow three miles to the north of the cathedral, carefully unwrapped the bones and disengaged bloodstained scraps of the Bow Examiner from between the trotters. Her eye was caught by the name Solzhenitsyn. She’d rather liked him, she seemed to remember, way back when. Through the stains she read the rest of the paragraph. She gathered the writer hadn’t thought much of the ceremony of putting in the new dean. Why exactly, she couldn’t quite make out. Was it because it had been too long, or chaotically organised, or had there been a hitch in the ritual, or had the ritual been of the wrong sort, too high or too low? There was so much which could go wrong in religion, Stella reflected. It had become very complicated. She’d heard the bells on Sunday afternoon, coming across the river to the Hollow. Perhaps that had been part of the ceremony. She could just see the cathedral from the window of the hut. She wondered who the new man was: the disfigured newspaper hadn’t got that bit.

  As she ran her eye once more down the column of newsprint, she became aware of the black muzzle of the lurcher bitch sitting absolutely still beneath the table. A steady flow of saliva was trickling from both sides of her mouth. Stella crumpled the paper and applied a short sharp knife to the tough, fawn coloured skin of the trotter. She sliced it cleanly in half, contemplated the two halves for a moment and then pushed one over the edge of the table. Before it reached the floor, the dog’s jaws took it cleanly in mid-air with a single sharp snap of tooth meeting bone.

  The irregular popping of the gas flame from the cooker beneath the window recalled her to her duties. She kicked the calor gas cylinder and the gulping noises ceased to be replaced by a more reassuring continuous hiss. Stella stirred the chicken mash encouragingly. She swept her copious, dark hair back from her forehead and felt the scar running into the hair line. She thought how much of her life now revolved ro
und feeding animals and people. Hens’ mash, goats’ mash, the ponies’ feeds, the visitors’ feeds, the community’s evening meal. When she’d first come to the Hollow, three years ago, she’d felt she had nothing to offer. She’d come almost literally as a beggar with little more than the clothes she stood up in. It had been a sort of resurrection to find that there were things she could offer those who had taken her in without question or complaint. She had at least been able to cook. No, she wouldn’t at all discount what she had gained. They’d helped. They’d all supported. Work had kept her sane. The animals and their demands steadied her. The rhythms of the day, week, and year, the closeness to land and weather had in time mended and healed her. Even the regularity of the trains as they swung past the Hollow gave a sort of security. There was a dangerous world out there but, protected as they were on one side by the railway and on the other by the river, the Hollow and its community were able to cultivate their virtues in tranquillity. Only now was the calm beginning to be encroached on. The building site across the field was making its way towards them. She pushed the thought from her and turned her attention to the matter in hand.

  Borne on the wind with a sudden clarity, she heard the sound of the cathedral clock as it struck the hour, twelve noon. Without thinking she switched on the old wireless on the shelf above the cooker and caught the local radio station.

  ‘This is BB Bow Broadcasting’, said the matey, demotic voice of the young commentator, ‘bringing you the best in News Briefing. On Sunday … the crowded cathedral … welcomed … New face to this part of the world … well known for his work amongst the disadvantaged … in the great metropolis … Vincent Stream.’

  Stella stopped stirring. She felt the familiar tightening of the stomach. Stream. He’d definitely said it. So he’d gone on, had he, Vincent Stream? Gone on and, apparently, prosperously up.

  CHAPTER TWO

  III Omens

  ‘Those of us who know and love back waters, whose natural habitat is the betwixt and between, will find much that is congenial about Bow St Aelfric.’