Sabrina & The Secret of The Severn Sea

by Guy Sheppard

  ‘Wrest is a strong word.’

  ‘You think you know better?’

  ‘It’s my guess that Reverend Luke wanted your help to wrong-foot his critics to help push through the sale. Am I right?’

  ‘Naturally I refused. I might not believe in water-nymphs who can take human form to walk on land, Inspector, but I’m loyal to my parishioners. Once a month I listen to their worries in this church. As a newcomer I do not share all their concerns about the advanced boiling water reactor. As far as I’m concerned any radiological detriment to health from the generation of much needed power or any risk from the management of associated waste will be low. This being a flood zone worries me more! But I have seen the toll that this shadow has cast over people’s hearts and minds, I worry for their spiritual well-being when God seems to have turned a blind eye to their cause.’

  ‘Greed gained Luke enemies, I see that now.’

  ‘That,’ replied Rev. Buck, ‘is all greed will do. But I really can’t say that Reverend Luke Lyons struck me as particularly avaricious, Inspector. On the contrary, the more times I reminded him how much the river meant to other people, the more he apologized for selling his soul to the highest bidder. In his heart of hearts he loved its goddess, too. After all, is not a river the ancient source and origin of life itself, a timeless place to baptise newborns as a sign of purification and initiation, especially into the Christian Church? When Sabrina was drowned by her evil stepmother, many centuries ago, she was transformed into the guardian of the water. It would be a mistake to equate her with the Devil, however. Yes, this tidal estuary was once also considered a gateway to the abode of the dead and, if you went fishing on the Severn on Sunday, you might hook Satan, but it was never all bad. With the sea comes fertility. The river is where life and belief intermingle and Sabrina is its natural nurturer and custodian.’

  He could have done without the sermon, thought Jorge and looked out a window. He breathed the smell of bladderwrack and brine that blew his way on the breeze.

  Did he not still share a love of the river, too? As boys, he and Luke had learnt so much from its mysterious ways.

  Was it not the one thing which would forever link them together, for good or evil, in life and death?

  For a moment a voice seemed to come to him on the air.

  ‘Suppose somebody wanted to persuade Reverend Luke not to sell his grandmother’s property? What if they decided to give him the fright of his life? What if they ambushed him by the river in a mock ‘baptism’? It wouldn’t be the first time that somebody was dunked in the river and it went wrong.’

  ‘Is that your theory?’ said Rev. Buck, scathingly. ‘You think somebody local killed him by accident?’

  ‘I think you’d protect your parishioners no matter what.’

  She widened her eyes at him.

  ‘Reverend Luke came to me because he said he felt tempted to do something truly wrong.’

  ‘By wrong, you mean the disposal of the ‘cottage’?’

  ‘Okay, that’s what we talked about at first, along with the cult as you call it, but later on he seemed to be talking about something else altogether. He appeared to clutch at straws like a drowning man. Looking back, I see how he literally wanted to know if one wrong could ever justify doing another?’

  ‘A person secure in their own faith can confront the Devil and still win.’

  ‘But if that devil is himself?’

  Jorge gazed again out the window towards the river. He could sense its twisting currents glide past in one long, glassy serpent.

  His great weight caused the floorboards to sag under his heels.

  ‘Isn’t it always?’ he said softly.

  Rev. Buck lit herself a cigarette.

  ‘Whatever it was, it was tearing him apart.’

  *

  Myth and superstition would have to wait. Jorge left the little church in order to cycle along the bank of the Severn where, soon, there rose up before him the silent, empty building called Chapel Cottage.

  To call it a cottage was a complete misnomer. Instead he leaned his bicycle against a very substantial stone building that was the size of a barn with a high central gable. Winter honeysuckle sagged from its porch while a sign read UNDER OFFER in fast fading letters on black iron railings. A steep set of steps led up to a locked Gothic door at which he knocked very loudly.

  No answer, as expected.

  So he descended to the gravelled yard again where he let Sasha go off to explore a garden. Then he walked round the courtyard. Discovered a locked garage.

  He could by pulling at its big, badly fitting double doors, peer in through a gap.

  His heart missed a beat. Gathering dust inside was a rusty Land Rover.

  It was with such a vehicle that Luke had towed his boat.

  Next, he walked round to the other side of the house and removed a brick from the edge of the path. As Sasha was still happily hunting rabbits in the garden’s overgrown grass nearby, his gaze went beyond her to the edge of the river. To the vast estuary. To the ocean where one current met another. To where Luke had gone, he now felt certain, dead or alive. And from where he must inevitably return. At the resurrection.

  Moments later the shrill piping sound of two oyster catchers reached his ears. The presence of the birds did not distract him from his brutal intentions. He whistled Sasha and picked her up. Then he hurled the brick through the condemned building’s picture window. Stepped over shards of glass.

  It did him good to vent his anger.

  It had always been said about Sean Lyons that he made a lot of money from scrapping tanks and planes at the end of World War II, which had enabled him to buy Chapel Cottage. Other people said that he won it in a game of poker one night in The Windbound Inn. Most likely this house had been too much of an empty ruin for anyone else to take on in the 1950s.

  Jorge paused to don white plastic gloves and a face mask. With a retch or two he proceeded with caution among spiders’ webs and mouse droppings.

  Sasha sniffed chairs and tables with indifference. More rabbits, she intimated, were worthy of her attention outside.

  Someone had been placing Gwendolen Lyons’s possessions carefully into black bin bags. A real attempt months ago had been made to sort her personal effects from room to room.

  One bag was full of photographs, letters, ornaments and books of poetry. Others contained sheets, blankets and pillows.

  Certain useful or sentimental things had been destined for Severnside House care home, without a doubt, while others were due to be thrown away?

  Whatever Luke’s good intentions something had happened to make him abandon the project to help his grandmother in her new life; he had walked out on everything he had come here to do in order to end his own past one?

  Or had he?

  Every day Jorge trembled in case this was the day that he recognised his lost friend on the National Crime Agency UK Missing Persons Bureau’s website. He could imagine the cadaver that he would be invited to identify on the screen by its number: 03-001258. Gloucestershire, Berkeley. Male. Date 31 July 2016, 35. White European. He could anticipate his shock and horror when he clicked on ‘case detail’. What had once been the most intimate characteristics of a living human being soon bore all the hallmarks of a ‘thing’ in a catalogue. Hair: black. Facial hair: none. Eye colour: blue-black. Distinguishing features: old bullet wound in right shoulder. Tattoo of the goddess Sabrina on neck. Clothing: coat, black. Shirt: black. Collar: white, clerical. Footwear: boots, black, size 10. Trousers: black. Hat: black. Jewellery: none.

  It was the worst case scenario. A dreadful, horrific imagining of the quite plausible, of everything he wanted so hard to deny. Not only had his friend somehow died, but their friendship would never be restored?

  A photograph lay on a table which showed a young woman dressed in a red and white polka dot, one-piece swimsuit. Two other women linked hands with her, all posing provocatively but playfully on a hot beach somewhere in their elegant hal
ter neck monokinis from the 1950s. He removed the print from its frame. Written on the back were their names: Barbara, Mary and Gwendolen.

  More photographs loose in a box showed the three friends as schoolchildren, Girl Guides, would-be ballet dancers and bridesmaids. Not only had they grown up together, they had been a team and ridden to hounds together. One photograph showed them sitting smiling and triumphant on horseback beside a bloodied fox in the snow at Christmas time.

  Another photograph showed Luke and Gwendolen by the river.

  ‘You came home to make a new life for yourself, Luke, old friend. It was all here, your job, sister, grandmother and parishioners. So where did you go at the last minute? What was it that suddenly turned your world on its head and wrecked everything? What sudden storm? What bitter secret?’

  *

  Back at the vicarage Jorge went again to his father’s old office where he began to study everything Luke had been working on.

  He reluctantly concluded from the river charts and newspaper clippings that he could learn little more. Not so, Sasha. After a thorough reconnaissance of the hopelessly cluttered room, she did circles and wagged her tail while refusing to move far from the painting that stood propped by the room’s stone fireplace. It was the Victorian picture of the river and its railway bridge.

  She could smell her lost master on the canvas?

  Seconds later Jorge was staring hard at the composition that he held squarely in both hands.

  Luke had exiled this particular seascape from the rest of his beloved collection of nautical scenes elsewhere in the house, as if it represented some sort of – what? Reminder? Temptation? He had hung it in the office-cum-library as a visual complement to his researches?

  He turned it over. Someone had used their knife to cut something into the back of the frame.

  The painting displayed the vast curve in the river as a pointer to something?

  678 and 034 were carved into the back of the canvas.

  Hairs rose on the back of his neck when a chill shot up his spine. Something electric tingled in the tips of his fingers to shock and sear him to his core.

  It was the same combination of numbers recorded inside the cover of Rex Lyons’s Bible.

  While they might yet turn out to signify some secret code, they struck him more as a map’s Eastings and Northings.

  47

  Curiosity diverted Luke to the grassy plain at the foot of Berkeley Castle’s vertiginous battlements.

  A jousting match was in full swing, he observed on his way to the Church of St. Mary’s. Parents and children loudly booed Black Knight Lord Pendragon on his black charger as he attempted to score points off his opponent with his twelve-foot-long lance.

  Thundering hooves shook the ground in a breathtaking show of speed and courage in the pale summer sunshine.

  Suddenly he was overtaken by a gaudily attired figure who danced in and out the crowds, even as they both stopped to bow politely to King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. His fellow reveller was dressed from head-to-toe in a bright red top and trousers, while on his head he wore a floppy three-cornered hat from which three bells jingled each time he nodded to his admirers.

  It had to be the Earl of Suffolk’s jester, thought Luke. All smiles, he danced past him with a wave of a human skull that adorned his marotte.

  Murdered in revels at the castle in 1728, Dicky Pearce had been resurrected from his tomb in the nearby church graveyard to play The Fool for the day to the delight of the visitors.

  ‘Sash, stay close. Don’t run off where I can’t see you.’

  Sasha shrank to the ground and whined at his side. The presence of so many people was almost too much for her.

  Seconds later, she licked a toddler’s ice cream from its cornet with a quick click of her tongue. Lapped it all up before the mother noticed.

  Cracked ribs still made breathing difficult as Luke stood on his toes somewhat nervously to see more jousting. He felt a bit like Sasha did. However, it was no bad thing for a priest to mingle with people from his parish.

  Even the most duplicitous vicar should be seen to have fun sometimes.

  He was limping along the edge of the grassy tilt-yard at the foot of the castle’s grey walls when he chanced to look up.

  Four terraces above him someone stood beside the row of cannons near the entrance to the Outer Bailey.

  She was clothed appropriately for the festivities in a close-fitting medieval white gown with a belt of gold.

  Her head was wrapped in a wimple from crown to chin, as though it were unseemly to show any part of her hair in public.

  She folded her arms tightly against her chest and gazed at him directly. She might have been shedding tears of frustration or it could be rage.

  Instead, she uttered a laugh that chilled him to the marrow. In the time it took Luke to run back up to the Outer Bailey she no longer stood by the guns.

  When he happened to look through the iron railings of the tree-lined graveyard immediately beside him, however, he caught sight of the court jester again.

  The Fool stood by a table tomb, talking to Sabrina ap Loegres who was in the process of removing her headdress – he was, by turns, provoking and calming her with cross little gestures and frantic kisses until her face glowed with rightful indignation. It could have been a lovers’ tiff.

  Some of their agitation wore off on him.

  Overhead, young squabbling rooks blackened the air. All their screaming and cawing sounded less than natural; they seemed very enthused about something.

  A witch could not have excited them more.

  Pretty much.

  When Luke entered the graveyard it was inexplicably deserted. At the tomb his eyes came to rest on a bizarre inscription that had been carved into one side:

  HERE LIES THE EARL OF SUFFOLKS FOOL

  MEN CALLED HIM DICKY PEARCE

  HIS FOLLY SERVED TO MAKE FOLKS LAUGH

  WHEN WIT AND MIRTH WERE SCARCE

  POOR DICK ALAS! IS DEAD AND GONE

  WHAT SIGNIFIES TO CRY!

  DICKYS ENOUGH ARE STILL BEHIND

  TO LAUGH AT BY-AND-BY.

  Frankly, it was a relief to enter St. Mary’s Church, however gloomy, thought Luke. Its sodium lamps really would play havoc with his sister’s wedding photographs, should he ever choose to proceed with the ceremony?

  He watched Sasha wander off to wee on a wall. This was his church from which he was expected to give his sermons. He had set foot, as a child, in this very nave to attend a funeral or two with his grandmother.

  Back then, when feeling bored he had gazed endlessly at two gossiping heads topped by a toad that were carved on the wall directly above him.

  A chill hung in the air as if the dead hand of history haunted dark corners. Had not soldiers fought very hard for this church during the English Civil War? The parliamentarians put cannons on its roof to blast down a wall of the neighbouring castle.

  Sasha gave a growl at his side. Someone knelt before the entrance to the chancel straight in front of them.

  ‘Sabrina? Is that you? It’s me, Reverend Luke Lyons.’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘Can I help you?’

  Shrouded in gloom, she continued to stare at something very high up on the wall. It was not toads.

  He went closer and placed a hand impertinently upon the kneeler’s right shoulder.

  Angrily, her silvery sea-green eyes swirled in the yellow glow from the lamps – all manner of storms, whirlpools and vortexes surged tempestuously across her glistening pupils when she looked up at him.

  Their violent nature appeared quite at one with the fretful figure he had glimpsed on the battlements fifteen minutes ago. Her voluminous red hair flowed freely down her back and over her shoulders.

  He fancied he saw in her eyes dead sailors, fishermen, river and canal pilots, bridge builders, dock workers and suicides – all those who had ever come to grief in the River Severn.

  Close by, her black dogs Varg and Freya
waited impatiently for her command.

  ‘Has something happened? Shall we pray together?’

  ‘Do you think that this is what this is all about, reverend?’

  By ‘this’ he was secretly intrigued but suspicious.

  ‘What I mean to say is that everyone is welcome in St. Mary’s. It even ministers to the prison at which I am chaplain.’

  Sabrina rose to her feet and simultaneously stroked the silk brocade of her cotehardie dress encrusted with jewels. She swirled its voluminous train round her red velvet shoes while, with a hiss, she ordered both Elkhounds to stay still.

  ‘Been in the wars, have we, reverend?’

  He fingered the recently healed cuts on his face and smiled.

  ‘Call it a bit of a misunderstanding. But you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Can’t answer that.’

  ‘But you were there in Gloucester Docks when it happened.’

  ‘Believe me, I arrived in the nick of time to visit my ship.’

  ‘If it hadn’t been for you I would have come off even worse.’

  But she wasn’t listening.

  ‘You believe in hell, reverend?’

  It took him a while to see what exactly was still the object of her rapt attention. Slowly some indistinct shapes and colours emerged on the stonework high above the chancel arch until he saw Christ seated in Judgement. So worn away was the stone in places that wall and image flowed into each other like water.

  He could quite see that nowadays most people, himself included, would forget all about its very existence if they never thought to look up. It was a mediaeval painting called a Doom.

  ‘Hell is what we don’t do for other people,’ said Luke, somewhat coldly and watched the black hounds slaver.

  ‘Sometimes I think hell would be a blessing,’ said Sabrina. ‘I don’t know why I expected to find peace of mind in such a place as this anyway.’

  ‘You not a Berkeley, at all?’

  ‘Did I not tell you – my family predates any Fitzharding.’