by Paul Doherty
‘Yet there’s a serpent in our paradise, isn’t there?’ Edmund declared, pushing his horse forward. ‘Have you ever found out what it is, Brother?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
Suddenly the morning didn’t, seem so bright. The death of the previous incumbent was a matter neither Philip nor Edmund had referred to. Father Anthony had been a kindly, middle-aged man, a gentle scholar. No one had yet explained why, one night at the end of November, he had gone out and hanged himself from a yew tree in the cemetery. Even the bishop did not know. The aged prelate had simply shaken his head and muttered about the nonsense of ancient legends and left it at that.
‘I am cold,’ Philip declared. ‘Roheisia, the widow woman who looks after the priest’s house, said she’d have the place ready. It’s time we went down.’
They rode down the hill into the woods following the trackway as it wound along into the village. The trees, black and gaunt after a severe winter, blocked out the sunlight. A fox ran across their path, a rabbit in its mouth. Crows circled, calling raucously, fearful of the hawk hovering so close to their nests. The three men rode in silence. Stephen, as if resenting the brooding quietness of the trees, hummed a song they all knew. Philip was about to join in when he glimpsed movement amongst the trees. Philip held his hand up. He turned his horse and stared into the darkness of the wood.
‘What is it, Philip?’ Edmund asked.
‘Horsemen,’ his brother replied. ‘Perhaps a trick of the light, but I’m sure I saw men, cowled and hooded.’
‘Horsemen!’ Stephen exclaimed. ‘Philip, are you sure?’ Merkle’s face was pale.
‘What’s the matter?’ Philip asked. ‘You look frightened.’
‘It’s nothing.’ Stephen shook his head. ‘No, no, I’ll be honest, Philip. When we entered the forest I, too, thought I saw horsemen, a line of knights, as if they were moving alongside us.’
Stephen glanced furtively at Philip. The priest looked even more severe than usual. Unlike Edmund, with his boyish good looks, plump cheeks and laughing eyes, Philip always carried himself with authority. Keen-eyed and thin-lipped, Philip, when angry, had the look of a hawk with his sharp nose and those eyes which never seemed to miss anything.
‘Come on, Stephen,’ Philip urged. ‘This has happened before, hasn’t it? You don’t frighten easily.’
Stephen stared into the trees.
‘Yes, it’s happened before,’ he replied slowly. ‘Oh, the village is good, pleasant and welcoming. However, here in the woods, or out on the heathland, you have this impression of someone watching you, of being followed.’
‘His Lordship the Bishop,’ Philip declared, ‘talked about legends. Have you heard about these, Stephen?’
‘Oh, every village and hamlet in Kent has its ancient lore,’ Stephen retorted crossly. ‘Scawsby’s no different.’ He urged his horse on. ‘Come on, Philip. I’m cold and I’m hungry. Every wood has a life of its own. It’s only shadows moving amongst the trees.’
All three were relieved to be out of the trees and on to the road leading into Scawsby. Men in the fields on either side stopped to shout their welcome and raise their hands. Some of the children, armed with slingshot to drive away the marauding crows, came running up, their dirty faces brightening with pleasure.
‘It’s Father Pip!’ one of them shouted, waving his hand. ‘It’s Father Pip!’
‘They can’t get their tongues round my name,’ the vicar whispered. ‘So Pip I’ve become and Pip I’ll remain. God knows what they’ll make of Edmund and Stephen!’
They all reined in as the men left their ploughs and walked on to the trackway. The villagers were pleased to see their new priest. It was sad for a man to be buried without a requiem Mass or for babies waiting to be baptised. The young lovers, who wanted to become handfast at the church door, also had to wait until the priest consulted the Blood Book to pronounce they were not within the forbidden degrees: only then could wedding arrangements go forward. The sick would now have a visitor to bring the viaticum, hear their confessions and shrive them. The great Holy Days would be blessed and, once again, the Mass would celebrate the beginning of the day and the end of the week. Accordingly, Philip and Edmund were welcomed as if they were Princes of the court. The children danced around. The men, unwilling to shake the priests’ hands with their mud-flaked fingers, just shuffled their feet and grinned in pleasure.
‘It’s good to be here,’ Philip declared. ‘My brother Edmund and I will become members of all your families. My good friend Stephen Merkle is a master mason. He has come to advise us on our new church.’
The villagers were not so pleased at this. Smiles disappeared, replaced by glowering glances in Merkle’s direction.
‘St Oswald’s good enough.’ A burly farmer stepped forward. He pushed back his leather hood, his great red face scored and chapped by years of wind and rain. ‘My name’s Falmer,’ he declared. ‘I was baptised in St Oswald’s. My father, and his father’s father lie buried in God’s acre.’
‘The new church,’ Philip replied tactfully, ‘will be built in their memory. However, now is not the time to discuss the matter, there will be meetings enough.’ He raised his hand in benediction.
The labourers clapped, stood aside and the horsemen continued on into Scawsby.
Despite the protests about the new church, the rest of the village were welcoming enough. Philip felt immediately at home. A prosperous, hard-working place; some of the peasants owned their own land and had used the profits to build stone houses with red tiled roofs. In front and behind these were large garden plots for vegetables and flowers. Some even had their own stables, piggeries, hen coops and dove cotes for pigeons. All these supplied the necessary manure for the great open fields around. A busy, bustling place: dogs and pigs roamed the streets; chickens pecked at the hard-packed earth; women sat in doorways weaving or, just inside, busily baked bread or brewed their own ales. The sweet smell from these kitchens hung heavily on the air. Philip stopped time and again to introduce himself. He caught Stephen blushing as some girl or young woman caught the man’s eye and gazed boldly at the stranger. Strong, handsome people who fed well on the riches of the earth. Philip knew that many of these peasants were now free of any seigneurial dues and, like others in East Anglia or the rich vales of the Cotswolds, were becoming landlords in their own right. It took him at least an hour before they could leave the huge taproom of the Silver Swan tavern which stood in the centre of the village. They rode on, past the well, the gibbet and the stocks, down the trackway and through the lych-gate into the cemetery.
St Oswald’s was a low, squat building, built of grey ragstone with a dark slate roof. The church was built like a barn, one long huddle of bricks. The front formed into an apex, the carved tympanum above the heavy oaken doors long faded by the weather. A square tower had been built alongside, its top crenellated. There were only three narrow windows in the tower and, despite the length of the church, its windows were really no more than mere arrow slits. All three walked round the church stepping over crumbling crosses and decaying headstones. Stephen, carefully examining the outside, pointed to the crumbling buttresses, the decayed sills beneath the window, the cracks in the eaves.
‘There will be rottenness in the wood inside,’ he declared.
Philip stared round the broad, gloomy cemetery which bounded the church on every side.
‘This will be a problem,’ he announced. ‘The parishioners will be deeply upset to lose their cemetery.’
‘What does Canon Law say?’ Edmund asked.
‘The Church’s ruling,’ Philip replied, ‘is that corpses buried within living memory may be exhumed, or indeed, the remains of any can be duly removed to a new cemetery. There must be thousands of corpses buried there.’ He added, ‘This will be a most difficult obstacle to overcome: persuading our parishioners, not only that their old church should be pulled down, but the cemetery should be grassed over and eventually forgotten.’
‘Why not bui
ld a new church here?’ Edmund asked.
‘Because we are at the foot of a hill,’ Stephen explained. ‘The ground becomes water-logged. Centuries ago they probably raised the church here because it was the easiest land to build on. High Mount is different. There are some ruins but they can be cleared. It would make an excellent place. The land is owned by Montalt, the land around it could become a cemetery.’
Philip stared round the cemetery. A cloud now covered the sun and the graveyard looked dank and grim; the yew trees twisted and gnarled, their branches snaking out like skeletal fingers.
‘Father Anthony hanged himself from that one.’ Stephen pointed to a yew tree which stood in the centre of the graveyard, between the church and the priest’s house.
Philip walked over. ‘How did he do it?’ he asked. ‘I mean, the lowest branch is high off the ground?’
‘According to what I have learnt,’ Stephen replied, ‘he used a ladder. He went up, tied the rope round a branch, the other end round his neck, then jumped.’
Philip said a prayer for the repose of the man’s soul but the question hammered inside his mind. Why should a gentle, scholarly, old priest go out on a winter’s night and hang himself in his own graveyard?
‘Let’s go inside,’ Stephen offered. ‘It’s getting cold and my belly’s grumbling.’
Philip agreed. They walked back to the church porch. Stephen opened the door; he and Edmund went inside. Philip paused and stared around. Was there someone else here? Someone in the graveyard watching him? He gasped. Beneath the yew tree, the very one from which Father Anthony had hanged himself, stood a cloaked and hooded figure. Philip could make out the face, tanned and weather-beaten: grey beard and moustache, he had the air of a fighting man. The eyes seemed almost larger than the face, black and hard as pebbles. Philip blinked and rubbed his eyes. When he looked again, there was nothing there.
‘Are you all right?’ Edmund came back. ‘Philip, what’s the matter?’
‘Nothing at all. Let’s see the inside of this church.’
They walked into the vestibule: the air was dank and smelt of mildew. On the left was a door leading to the tower; to the right a small, narrow room dusty and full of cobwebs where broken benches and other items had been stored. The nave was long, the pillars on either side were round and squat. Because of the poor light, the transepts on either side were dark and gloomy. Philip gazed up at the hammer-beam roof.
‘That’s new!’ Stephen explained. ‘Probably no more than sixty years old. New beams were put in to reinforce the roof. It must have been a costly enterprise. What I can’t understand,’ the master mason continued, ‘is they also started to replace the slates on the roof but discontinued it? I mean, what’s the use of putting new beams up if the water is allowed to drip through and rot them?’
Philip walked up the nave, where his foot caught on a loose paving-stone. He stared down.
‘That’s another reason,’ Stephen continued. ‘The church is built over wells and, in places, the floor is beginning to subside.’
Philip walked on more carefully. He stopped before a great stone coffin built just in front of the entrance to the rood screen which divided the nave from the sanctuary. The tomb was a long, rectangular shape. On top lay an effigy of a knight, mailed legs crossed, hand grasping the hilt of his sword. There was a Latin inscription on the side of the tomb. Philip crouched down and translated the faded Latin: ‘Died in the year of Our Lord 1311.’
‘The present lord’s grandfather!’ Stephen explained.
Philip’s attention was then held by the strange markings above the inscription. He had never seen the like before, a pair of eyes and, beneath, a faded Latin tag. Philip peered closer and translated it.
‘We are watching you!’ he whispered. ‘We are always watching you!’
Chapter 2
Philip moved round the tomb. On the side facing the sanctuary was another inscription. It caught his eyes because it was not professionally done but gouged into the pillar by a chisel and a hammer.
SUB ALTO MONTE,
PRETIOSA COPIA
ILI DAVID
RESIDET ET SEMPER RESIDET
DOMINE, MISERERE NOBIS
WALTER ROMANEL 1312
Philip called Edmund across and read him the inscription. Edmund went into the sanctuary. He struck a tinder, lit a candle and brought it back; the crude lettering flared into light.
‘“Under the high mountain,”’ he translated, ‘“the precious load of David’s son resides and will always reside. Oh Lord, have mercy on us. Walter Romanel 1312.”’
‘Romanel!’ Philip got to his feet. ‘Wasn’t he—?’
‘He was a priest here,’ Stephen interjected. ‘He went mad and had to be taken to St Bartholomew’s hospital in London.’
‘This is a strange place,’ Philip declared.
He went up and studied the Lady Chapel to the left of the sanctuary. The statue of the Virgin was like the one at Walsingham. Mary, a crown on her head, the robes of a queen round her shoulders, embraced the infant Jesus on her lap. Philip took his own tinder out and lit a taper. The damp Lady Chapel had faded paintings on either wall: Philip felt repelled by the air of neglect. He then walked round the transepts; these were no better, being dark and shabby. Some crude paintings covered the walls but the plaster was beginning to crumble, lying like snowflakes on the uneven flagstones. The parish coffin, which stood on an open-sided cart, also looked as if it had seen better days.
‘I can’t understand it,’ Edmund declared. ‘St Oswald’s is a wealthy parish yet I have seen better churches in some of the poorest villages in Kent.’
‘Now that’s one thing I do know,’ Philip replied. ‘His Lordship the Bishop was rather reluctant to discuss the matter but I have seen the list of vicars who have served here over the years. Their names should be painted on a board in the church but I can understand why they are not. Very few of them remained here for more than a few years. Father Anthony, who served here for at least twelve, was an exception.’ Philip smiled. He had always considered the Bishop of Rochester a cunning old fox: now Philip realised why, at such a tender age, he, who had only been ordained recently, had been given such a benefice.
‘Look at the pillars,’ Edmund declared.
Philip did so. He noticed how, just above head height on each pillar, a pair of eyes had been painted. This had been crudely done, yet all the eyes looked towards the sanctuary. Moreover, each pillar bore the same faded inscription: SPECTAMUS TE, SEMPER SPECTAMUS TE.
‘“We are watching you,”’ he translated. ‘“We are always watching you.” What does this mean, Edmund? Who is watching? Why?’ He looked round the church. ‘Stephen, where are you?’
His words echoed, bouncing off the wall. Philip had the impression that someone was mimicking him, chanting the words back. He was concerned about this cold, damp place, very aware of a watching malevolence. Philip hurried into the sanctuary. He had seen this before and matters had not improved. A bare, empty place with an altar, sedilia, lavarium and lectern. The cloth across the altar was of good quality whilst the silver pyx, hanging from one of the beams, shimmered in the light of the red sanctuary lamp.
‘Stephen!’ he shouted. ‘Stephen, where are you?’
‘I am down here, Philip. Don’t worry!’
Philip closed his eyes. ‘Of course,’ he murmured. ‘I had forgotten . . .’
In the far corner of the sanctuary, almost hidden in the shadows, was a small door leading down to the crypt. Stephen had taken the candle and gone down. Philip followed. If the church was gloomy, the crypt was dismal. Some light seeped through from a grating in the ceiling into this bare, empty place. Low-roofed, bare walled, the crypt was devoid of anything except supporting pillars. The central one was at least two yards wide and the same across: Stephen was studying it carefully.
‘If we could weaken this, Philip.’ He looked up at the plastered roof. ‘The entire church would crumble.’
‘And how can we
do that?’
‘Oh, quite easily,’ the master mason replied with a smile. ‘I’ve talked to soldiers, master gunners from the wars in France. They did the same to French castles. You dig a mine beneath the pillar, place the gunpowder and fire the fuse. The entire church would collapse inwards.’
‘I’d love to do that,’ Philip replied. ‘Stephen, have you ever visited such an eerie, depressing place? What shall we do with it?’
Stephen stood back, still more concerned with the pillar.
‘Oh, don’t worry, Philip,’ he replied. ‘We’ll get permission from Lord Richard to build a new church. You are a fine preacher: the parishioners will accept what you say. We’ll level this church and build another on High Mount. One that will be the talk of Kent.’ He grasped Philip’s hand. ‘Just think of it, Philip.’ He turned and put his other hand on Edmund’s shoulder. ‘A jewel of a chapel: soaring roof, light transepts. Painters will come from Canterbury. They’ll work for free, just to have their scenes on the walls of our church!’
‘Stephen, do you know much about the history of this place?’ Edmund asked abruptly.
The master mason took the candle off a wall ledge and sat down with his back to a pillar.
‘Just a little.’ He smiled shyly. ‘The parish is a wealthy one. You know that. You probably also know that vicars who come here do not stay long. Now that is not extraordinary. I can think of similar parishes where the same has occurred. Father Anthony was writing a history, doing his own research. Apparently it all began with Romanel.’
‘The vicar who did the carving on Montalt’s tomb?’
‘The same. He was apparently a man of ill repute. Scawsby is not far from the coast and, in the chaos of Edward II’s reign, Romanel and some of the villagers did their fair share of smuggling.’
‘Oh come, Stephen!’
Philip sat down beside him, trying to control his shivers as he stared into the shadows which filled the place. The candles they had brought down only intensified the eerie atmosphere: every time they moved, dark shapes danced all around them.