The Second Sleep

by Robert Harris

  ‘What questions might those be?’ She looked wary. He wondered how old she was. Fifty, perhaps. Sallow, plain-faced, hair already grey, eyes raw, presumably with weeping. How grief ages us, he thought, with sudden pity; how vulnerable we are, poor mortal creatures, beneath our vain show of composure.

  ‘I am charged, as part of my duties, with the delivery of Father Lacy’s eulogy – a task seldom easy even if one knew the deceased, but trickier still if one had never met them.’ He made it sound as if it was a problem with which he was familiar, although in truth he had never conducted a burial or composed a eulogy in his life. ‘I stand in need of certain simple facts. So – ink? I imagine a priest must have had ink?’

  ‘Aye, he had ink, sir, and plenty of it.’ She sounded affronted and went off, presumably to fetch him some.

  He sat at the table, gripped the edge of it and took stock of the room. A plain wooden cross hung above the fireplace. The walls were a dull orange brown in the candlelight. The sides leaned in markedly and the ceiling bulged in the centre. Yet the room had a feeling of great solidity and antiquity, as if it had settled centuries before and nothing now would shift it. He imagined the generations of priests who must have sat in this very spot – scores of them, probably – quietly doing God’s work in this remote valley, unknown and forgotten. The thought of such unsung devotion humbled him, so that when Agnes returned, he tried to display some humility himself, by bringing over a chair so that she could sit opposite him, and talking to her in a kindly tone.

  ‘Forgive me – I should know this – but how long was Father Lacy priest here?’

  ‘Thirty-two years this January.’

  ‘Thirty-two years? Well nigh a third of a century – a lifetime!’ Fairfax had rarely heard of so long a tenure. He dipped his pen in the ink pot and made a note. ‘Did he have family?’

  ‘There were a brother, but he died years back.’

  ‘And how long were you in his service?’

  ‘Twenty years.’

  ‘And your husband, too?’

  ‘No, sir, I am long widowed, though I has a niece – Rose.’

  ‘The one who looked after my horse?’

  ‘She lives here in the parsonage with us – with me, I must learn to say.’

  ‘And what is to become of you both now Father Lacy is dead?’

  To his dismay, her eyes filled with tears. ‘I cannot say. It’s been so sudden, I has given it no thought. Perhaps the new priest will wish to keep us on.’ She looked at him hopefully. ‘Will ye be taking the living, sir?’

  ‘Me?’ He nearly laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea of entombing himself in such a place, but realising how rude it would seem, he managed to stop himself. ‘No, Mrs Budd. I am the lowliest member of the bishop’s staff. I have duties to attend to in the cathedral. My task is to conduct the burial only. But I shall inform the diocese of the situation.’ He made another note and sat back. He sucked on the end of his pen and studied her. ‘Could not some local priest have taken the service?’

  He had asked the same question of Bishop Pole the previous day when the task of officiating had first been entrusted to him – had phrased it diplomatically, of course, because the bishop was not a man who expected to have his orders interrogated. But the bishop had made a thin line of his mouth, then busied himself with his papers and muttered something about Lacy being a strange fellow and unpopular with his neighbouring colleagues. ‘I knew him when he was a young man. We were at the seminary together. Our lives took different paths.’ Then he had looked Fairfax straight in the eye. ‘This is a good opportunity for you, Christopher. A simple task, yet one that requires some discretion. You should be in and out in a day. I’m relying on you.’

  Agnes looked at her hands. ‘Father Lacy had no dealings with parsons in t’other valleys.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He went his own way.’

  Fairfax frowned and leaned forward slightly, as if he hadn’t quite caught her words. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t follow you. “He went his own way”? There is but one way, surely – the true way? All else is heresy.’

  Still she refused to meet his gaze. ‘I cannot rightly answer, Father. Such matters lie beyond me.’

  ‘What about his relations with his parishioners? Was he popular with his flock?’

  ‘Oh aye.’ A pause. ‘Wi’ most.’

  ‘But not all?’

  This time she made no answer. Fairfax laid down his pen and rubbed his eyes. Suddenly he felt weary. Well, this was a just chastisement for his pride in the bishop’s favour: to ride eight hours to bury an obscure cleric, a heretic possibly, whom a good proportion of his parishioners apparently disliked. At least his eulogy could be short. ‘I suppose,’ he said dubiously, ‘I might speak in general terms – of a life well lived in God’s service, and so forth. How old was he when he died?’

  ‘Old, sir, yet still fit enough. He were fifty-six.’

  Fairfax calculated. If Lacy had been here thirty-two years, he must have arrived when he was twenty-four – his own age exactly. ‘So Addicott was his only parish?’

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  He tried to picture himself in the old priest’s place. Planted in so quiet a spot, he was sure he would go mad. Perhaps over the years that was what had happened. While Pole had risen to eminence, Lacy had been left to rot out here. An idealistic heart shrivelled to misanthropy by loneliness. ‘A third of a century! He must have liked it here.’

  ‘Oh aye, he loved it. He would never leave.’ Agnes stood. ‘Ye’ll be hungry, Father. I’ve prepared you something to eat.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Fairfax has an early night, and makes a disturbing discovery

  SHE SERVED HIM a simple supper of rabbit and sheep’s heart stew and a jug of strong dark ale, which she told him Father Lacy had brewed himself. He invited her to join him, but she excused herself. She said she had to prepare the refreshments for the wake. Of the girl Rose there remained no sign.

  To start with, Fairfax picked at the food. But by some strange paradox of digestion, with each tentative mouthful his appetite revived, so that by the end he had eaten the lot. He dabbed at his mouth with his handkerchief. Every experience had a purpose, knowable only to God. He must make the best of this situation. The bishop would expect no less, and he would at least have a good story to tell over dinner at the chapter house.

  He threw another small log on the fire in an effort to soften the cold, then returned to the table, shifted his plate to one side and took out his Bible and prayer book. He struck a match, lit his pipe and sat back in his chair. For the first time he took notice of the ink pot – ink bottle, in fact. He picked it up and held it to the candle flame. It was of a curious design, three inches long and an inch wide, made of thick clear glass with ribbed sides. It had a hollow angle inset two thirds along the base so that the ink could be pooled conveniently at the smaller end in a reservoir. He had never seen one like it before. It was obviously ancient. He wondered how the old priest had come by it.

  He set it down and began to write.

  Nothing disturbed the silence save the ticking of the long-case clock in the passage. He became absorbed in his task. Christ’s final instruction to the Apostles before his Ascension was that they should stay in the city and await, in contemplation, the arrival of the Lord. Wasn’t that what Lacy had done? Stayed humbly where he had been placed and waited for God to show Himself? He could make something of that.

  After an hour or so, Agnes returned to clear the table. When she came back from the kitchen, she announced that she was turning in for the night. ‘I’ve made thee a bed in Father Lacy’s study.’

  She went around extinguishing the candles with a snuffer. He wondered what time it was. Nine? Usually at that hour he would be gathering with the others in the lady chapel for compline. But although it was an earlier retirement than he was used to, he did not complain. He could finish his eulogy in the morning. Besides, he had left Exeter not long after dawn, and his
bones ached with weariness. He put his possessions back into his bag and knocked the bowl of his pipe empty against the side of the fireplace.

  The study was smaller and more cluttered than the parlour. Agnes carried in two candles and set one down for him on the edge of the desk. The home-made tallow hissed and spluttered. Its yellow glow lit a couch with a thin pillow and a patchwork quilt, doubtless sewn by the housekeeper over the interminable winter evenings. In the shadows beyond its gleam he had a vague impression of well-stocked bookshelves, papers, ornaments. The curtains were already drawn.

  ‘I hopes ye’ll be comfortable here. ’Tis but two chambers upstairs – Rose and I shares one, and the parson lies in t’other. Mind,’ she added, ‘we could move him to the floor if ye’d prefer.’

  ‘No, no,’ he said quickly. ‘This will do me well enough. It’s only for one night.’ He sat on the couch. It was hard and unyielding. He smiled. ‘After such a day I swear I could sleep standing up. God keep you, Mrs Budd.’

  ‘And ye, Father.’

  He listened to the sounds of her locking the front door and the creak of the boards as she went upstairs. Her footsteps passed above his head. He said his prayers (Into Thy hands, O Lord …) and lay down on the couch. A minute later, he sat up again. At least a quart of the old priest’s strong ale was pressing on his bladder and he was in urgent need of relief. He groped around under the couch for a chamber pot, but found only cobwebs.

  He took the candle and went out into the passage. He retrieved his boots from beside the front door and carried them past the parlour and the study towards the rear of the house. In the kitchen, the warm smell of baking lingered. Muslin cloths covered various dishes that Agnes must have made for the wake. He sat on a chair beside the back door and pulled on his boots.

  Outside, the blackness and the silence were absolute. Accustomed to the hourly bells and lights of a cathedral city, to the night-time prayers and shuffling feet, to the sounds of the sailors up from the docks on the English Channel running from the patrolling sheriffs, he felt almost dizzy at such nothingness – as if he were poised on the edge of eternity.

  And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

  It was hopeless to try to find the privy. He ventured forward a few paces, placed the candle-holder on the damp grass, hoisted his cassock, pulled down his drawers, planted his feet apart and pissed into he knew not what. The strong stream made a noise – percussive, unmistakable – that must have been audible on the other side of the valley, let alone upstairs, where he imagined Agnes and Rose cowering in alarm. Again it was all he could do not to burst out laughing.

  He shook himself dry, rearranged his clothes, picked up his candle and stumbled back over the grass to the door. The timber was as old as the house, but the lock was new he noticed, as it was at the front. Like many townsmen, he had a romantic notion that country folk never locked their doors. Apparently this was not the case in Addicott St George.

  He went back into the study, took off his cassock, threw himself down on the couch and fell immediately asleep.

  Something woke him. He was not sure what. The room was in such darkness that between his eyes being shut and open there was no difference. The sensation was alarming, like being blind, or buried alive. He reasoned that if his candle had burned out, it must mean that several hours had passed and that his body had woken him as usual after the first sleep.

  He thought he heard a man’s voice, muttering something he couldn’t quite make out. He strained to listen. There was a pause, and then it came again. He propped himself up on his elbow. Now the first voice was interrupted by a second. Two men were talking – the rolling local dialect, ye, thee, thou: low, indistinct, almost musical, like the droning of bees. They were just outside his window.

  He rose from the couch and stood swaying for a moment, trying to find his bearings. He edged forward, and at once his knee struck the edge of the desk. He started to utter an oath, quickly stifled it, rubbed his knee, then reached out and began feeling along the wall until he touched fabric. He burrowed his hands into it, mole-like, searching for a gap, parted the curtains, ran his palms over the small diamond-shaped panes of cold glass, found a handle and opened the window. He stuck out his head.

  The men had moved on. Away to his right and slightly below him two lights bobbed in the darkness. He guessed he must be looking out at the lane that ran along the side of the parsonage towards the church. Beyond the two lanterns were other, fainter lights, some stationary, a few moving. Far in the distance, a dog barked. He could hear the trundle of cart wheels.

  Above his head, the floorboards creaked.

  He shut the window and felt his way across the room to the door. He threw it open just as Agnes turned the corner at the bottom of the stairs. She was carrying a candle. Her hair was in curling papers. Over her nightdress she wore an outdoor coat, which she pulled tight around her as soon as she saw him. ‘Oh, Father Fairfax – what a fright ye gave me!’

  ‘What hour is this, Mrs Budd? Why does everyone wander about in this strange manner?’

  She turned slightly and held her candle to the face of the long-case clock. ‘Two o’clock, sir, same as normal.’

  ‘In Exeter, the custom between the first and second sleeps is to stick to our rooms. Yet the villagers here are abroad. What of the curfew? They risk a whipping, surely?’

  ‘Nobody here gives much mind to curfews.’ She was carefully avoiding looking at him, and he realised he was wearing only his drawers and undershirt.

  He took a pace back into the study and called out through the doorway. ‘Forgive my lack of modesty. This middle-of-the-night wandering – the practice is new to me. Might I take another candle? Two, if they can be spared?’

  ‘Wait there, sir, and I’ll fetch them.’ Her head still averted, she went past him into the kitchen. He searched around in the darkness for his cassock and fastened a few of the buttons, his fingers clumsy with sleep.

  ‘Here’s your candles, Father.’ She placed them on the floor just outside the study.

  He collected both, closed the door and set one upon the desk. Rather than his usual nocturnal meditation, he decided that he might perhaps seek some fresh inspiration for his eulogy. What better way to take the measure of a man than by the nature of his library? He began an inspection of the shelves.

  Father Lacy had a hundred books or more, some plainly of great antiquity. In particular, he had a remarkable array of volumes produced by that army of scholars who had dedicated their lives to the study of the Apocalypse. Fairfax ran his finger along the titles – The Fall of Man … The Great Flood of Noah … The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah … God’s Wrath Against Babylon … The Ten Plagues of Egypt … The Locusts of the Abyss … The Lake of Fire … What a gloomy fellow he must have been, he thought. Little wonder his fellow priests had shunned him.

  He took down a volume at random, Pouring Out the Seven Disasters: A Study of Revelation 16. It fell open at a well-marked passage:

  And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.

  And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of Heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done.

  And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the Earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great.

  And the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell.

  He closed it and replaced it on the shelf. Such a collection would not have been out of place in the bishop’s library; to find it in a small parsonage in an isolated village struck him as peculiar.

  He took up his candle again and moved along to the second bookcase, where his eye was immediately drawn to a shelf of small volumes bound in pale brown leather. He held the flame up close to the spines – The Proceedings and Papers of the Society of Antiquaries – and in that instant he became wide
awake, for he recognised the name at once, even though he had been but a boy at the time of the trials. The organisation had been declared heretical, its officers imprisoned, its publications confiscated and publicly burned, the very word ‘antiquarian’ forbidden from use. He recalled the priests in the seminary lighting a bonfire in the middle of Exeter. It had been midwinter, and the townspeople had been as impressed by the heat as they had by the zealotry. And yet here was a set of the society’s works still extant – and in Addicott St George, of all places!

  For a few moments, Fairfax stared at the shelf in dismay. Nineteen volumes, with a narrow gap where the twentieth had been withdrawn. What did this mean for his mission tomorrow? Lacy was a heretic: there could be no question of it now. Could a heretic be knowingly buried in consecrated ground? Ought he to postpone the interment, however ripe the corpse, and seek fresh guidance from the bishop?

  He considered the matter carefully. He was a practical young man. Not for him the fanaticism of some of his fellow younger clergy, with their straggling hair and beards and their wild eyes, who could sniff out blasphemy as keenly as a water hound unearths truffles. His instructions were to be quick and tactful. Therefore, the wisest course would be to go on as planned and pretend he knew nothing. Nobody could prove otherwise, and, if necessary, he could always square his conscience with God and the bishop at a later date.

  Thus resolved in the matter, he resumed his inspection of the study. Two more shelves were entirely devoted to the same perversion. He noted monographs on burial sites, on artefacts, on inscriptions, on monuments. It amazed him that the old priest had displayed them so brazenly. It was as if the valley, with its singular geographic isolation and its contempt for the curfew, existed somehow outside time and law. There was a thick volume on the ruins of England entitled Antiquis Anglia by a Dr Nicholas Shadwell, ‘President of the Society of Antiquaries’. He passed his candle quickly along the titles, tempted to linger but forcing himself not to look at them too closely, then turned his attention to the display cabinet in the corner of the room.