Twelve Drummers Drumming

by C. C. Benison

  “May I help you?”

  “Possibly.”

  Tom frowned at the vague reply. “Didn’t I see you at the village hall last night?”

  “Yeah, I did drop in. Interesting work.”

  “I seem to recall you being shown the door.”

  “Occasionally I meet people who don’t appreciate the free exchange of ideas that is the hallmark of a democratic society.”

  “Which paper are you with?”

  “The Sun.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you, Mr.…?”

  “Macgreevy. Andrew Macgreevy.”

  “… The diocesan press office is handling all enquiries.”

  “So they are.” The reporter’s eyes roved the interior of the vestry.

  “And I don’t think you’ll find anything interesting here,” Tom insisted, wondering that the promised constabulary presence seemed a little lacking.

  “I’m not sure that’s true.”

  “It’s simply a vestry—a small annex with much clutter.”

  “Yeah, it is a bit of tip,” Macgreevy agreed cheerfully. “But, I ask myself, who are you likely to find in a vestry?”

  “A priest, for one,” Tom responded with rising asperity, trying to remember that newspapermen had souls, too.

  “True. But I thought I might find the verger here.”

  “You might. But he’s coming down from Pennycross and hasn’t arrived.”

  “From Pennycross? I was sure your verger lived in this village. I thought I saw him come out of a cottage clearly marked ‘Verger’s Cottage.’ ”

  “I have two churches, Mr. Macgreevy.”

  “Then you have two vergers.”

  “I can see your fine education has not been wasted on you.”

  Macgreevy scowled. “I was hoping to talk with the man who calls himself Sebastian John.”

  “Regrettably, Sebastian has been called away and won’t be with us this morning. Perhaps I can take a message to him …?”

  Macgreevy’s scowl began to curl into a smile.

  “Mr. Macgreevy …?”

  The reporter raised a cautionary finger. Seconds later, Tom heard the sound of a key scraping the lock of the vestry’s outside door. And then Sebastian was in the room, dressed in jeans, carrying a small rucksack. His hair was loosened from its band.

  “Tom, I’ve had a call from Dickie’s sister. He’s … well, under the weather, I suppose you could say, and can’t be here this morning. I’m very sorry that—”

  Sebastian hesitated, as if sensing Tom wasn’t wholly concentrated on him. He followed Tom’s eyes.

  “Hello, Sebastian.” Macgreevy’s smile grew wider.

  “I didn’t realise you had a visitor, Tom.” A wariness had stolen into Sebastian’s eyes.

  Intruder, more like, but he let the thought pass as he introduced the reporter to Sebastian.

  “I’m not commenting on this tragedy,” Sebastian replied evenly, turning to leave.

  “I’m not asking you to,” Macgreevy said.

  “Tom, I’m sorry about this complication with Dickie. I really must go—”

  “Perhaps, Sebastian,” Macgreevy interrupted, gripping the edge of the vestry door, “you might like to know that Lord Kinross has had a stroke.”

  Baffled, Tom watched as Sebastian stared hard at the reporter. Then the verger yanked the door from his hand and stumbled backwards over the step to the gravel path. He heard a pained exclamation in a female timbre, followed by a hasty apology in Sebastian’s voice.

  “Whatever’s got into Sebastian?” Julia stepped into the vestry. “I thought Dickie was substituting … Oh, hello,” she added, noting the stranger in the room.

  Tom had been studying the look of satisfaction that lit Macgreevy’s thin features during his brief exchange with Sebastian and felt a chill of foreboding. He, too, had experienced the sensation of a life—his own—made unrecognisable by journalists with inscrutable scripts. The Bristol Evening Post had callously exhumed an old quote of his supporting a safe-injection room for Bristol drug-users, juxtaposed it with police speculation that a thwarted drugs transaction lay behind Lisbeth’s homicide, and implied that he shared in the blame for his wife’s death. “Vicar Said ‘Yes’ to Drugs” had been the headline. He addressed Macgreevy:

  “Do you think you could be persuaded to leave sleeping dogs—or at least sleepy villages—lie?”

  “Not if there’s a good story, mate.”

  “I see. But will your ‘good story’ serve some common good?”

  “I leave philosophical speculation to my betters.” Macgreevy rubbed his knuckles along the edge of the door. “Do you vet your vergers in this sleepy village?”

  Tom flicked a glance at Julia and was rewarded with a mystified frown. Beyond the vestry, he could hear subdued voices echoing in the sanctuary. The choir was arriving. Reaching for his cassock, he told Macgreevy:

  “I’m so sorry, but I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave. We have a funeral to prepare for.”

  The journalist’s response was to flash him a tight smile and retreat back into the nave. Tom noted the choir’s chattering halt momentarily, and then resume.

  “Do you know of a Lord Kinross?” he asked Julia.

  She shook her head. “Scottish peer?”

  “He seems to know something about Sebastian.”

  “Lord Kinross?”

  “No, that reporter. Macgreevy. He writes for The Sun. If you’d been at Mitsuko’s opening at the village hall yesterday you would have seen Karla give him the heave-ho.”

  Julia groaned. “Alastair decided he’d rather golf. I didn’t feel like going alone.”

  “Oh, well. The quilts are up for the next ten days or so.” He frowned. “What is it, Julia? Are you all right?”

  “It’s nothing. Really. It’s … the thought of some Grub Street hack nosing into village affairs. Bad enough the police, though I know they have to do their job.”

  “Have they talked to you, the police? I meant to ask you earlier.”

  “Someone took a statement from me on Tuesday. A detective constable, a young woman. There wasn’t much I could say, other than what I told you about finding the village hall unlocked Monday morning. I didn’t know Sybella well enough to be of much use.”

  “I’m afraid we’re all rather in for being poked and prodded, aren’t we? By police or press. What with Sybella’s cruel death and Fred finding Peter’s body … although,” Tom added, fastening his cassock, “I don’t understand Mr. Macgreevy’s particular interest in Sebastian, do you?”

  He had asked it rhetorically, but when he looked up he was disconcerted to see Julia’s face grown pale above the collar of her black suit.

  “Julia? Do you know something about this?”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t know why a reporter would have some particular interest in Sebastian. He’s a bit of a mystery to us in the village, but …”

  “But?”

  Julia’s face crumpled. Her beautiful eyes, ineffably sad, returned to his. “Oh, Tom! Surely the old rumour has reached your ears by now.”

  “What old rumour?” he asked, bewildered.

  The question seemed to hang suspended in the air.

  “The rumour,” Julia replied at last, dropping her voice, “that Sebastian and I were having an affair.”

  Tom stared at her, shocked as much by a sudden wrenching of his heart as by the notion of his sister-in-law’s faithlessness. Without thinking he mouthed the words: “And were …?”

  “No, Tom,” Julia responded with some vehemence, pushing the door to the sanctuary closed. “Sebastian and I were not having an affair.”

  “Sorry, I really didn’t mean to suggest …” Tom backtracked, ashamed that his mind found the coupling so believable, flustered by his sudden, unbidden jealousy.

  “It’s stopped now—the rumour, that is—but a couple of years ago, people would fall into a hush in the post office when I came in. Or there would be a titter behind my back if
Sebastian and I happened to be in the pub at the same time. Finally, Belinda Swan took me aside.”

  “But what in heaven’s name put the notion into people’s heads in the first place?”

  “Mrs. Prowse, that is what! She saw me come out of the verger’s cottage one afternoon, and gave me what I can only describe as a ‘look.’ ”

  “I see,” Tom responded, not quite seeing. Evidently, what might be a commonplace bit of social intercourse in the city could be fraught with import in a village. “And you think any reporter sniffing around Sebastian will dig this up.”

  Julia nodded. Tom found himself almost wanting to laugh with relief. Affairs and rumours of affairs were happening up and down the country. Surely they could be of little concern to any but the protagonists and their nearest and dearest. But Julia appeared worryingly on the verge of the sort of tears she had exhibited the day before, under the yew tree, and he wondered, not for the first time, if she was about to have a nervous collapse.

  “But, Julia,” he began softly, “I know it’s unpleasant to be the subject of unfounded rumour, but I can’t imagine The Sun—or any newspaper—being terribly interested, even if it were true you and Sebastian … Does Alastair know none of this?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Tom, Alastair works, he golfs, he watches sport on TV. He’s not the subtlest of men. He’s not terribly good at detecting ‘atmospheres.’ But he doesn’t like life to be untidy. If he had heard the rumour, I doubt very much he wouldn’t have said something to Sebastian … or to me.”

  “Yes, I expect so.” Tom reached absently for his surplice. “I’m assuming, however, that Sebastian wasn’t oblivious to these rumours.”

  “No.”

  “Then why didn’t he tell the rumourmongers to naff off? I’m surprised at him. I thought he had more integrity.”

  “Oh, Tom, you don’t understand.”

  “Don’t understand what?”

  “I’ve said far too much.” Her face now ashen, she turned to the door. “Look, I must get to the choir vestry.”

  “Julia!” Tom grabbed her arm. Touching the fabric, a part of his brain registered that it was the same suit she’d worn at Lisbeth’s funeral. “You’re clearly in some form of distress. The yew tree yesterday and now this. I’m worried about you. I’m your family. I can’t say I’m your priest, but I wish you would tell me what’s troubling you.”

  Ten minutes later, Tom positioned himself within the shadow of the lych-gate, clasped his hands in the folds of his surplice, and lifted his eyes, first towards Pennycross Road in the middle distance, down which the cortège would soon make its slow descent into the village, and then to the black-clad figures massed nearest him on the river cobbles of Church Walk. Framed by a burst of ivy tumbling over the short span of stone wall that turned into Poachers Passage, Colm’s face was pale with strain, the skin around the eyes bruised and blue. He was staring sightlessly past the vicarage wall, beyond the tops of the apple trees in the Old Orchard towards the cottages that curled up Thorn Hill, one hand pressed onto the shoulder of his son, whose own face appeared to struggle for some composition suited to the moment, at once frowning, distracted, curious, bored, then—abruptly—pained. Tom noted Celia pluck her husband’s hand from Declan’s shoulder and give them both a tight, reproving smile before giving a sideways glance to a slender figure a cautious three yards distant squeezed into what looked curiously like Victorian bombazine embossed with a pattern of lace and scored with fasteners of no evident utility.

  So this was Oona Blanc, Tom thought, trying not to stare. He allowed his eyes to pass over her as he looked down Church Walk to the silent mourners, those closest young and dressed either sharply chic or morbidly Victorian—London friends, presumably, who had arrived too late to find a place in the church—those farther, villagers of mixed age in unremarkable attire. Oona’s face, under a black straw pillbox with a wisp of a veil, was alabaster, the skin taut over high cheekbones, her full lips silky with scarlet lipstick. Yet the face was unreadable. Giant sunglasses lent her the impassive faceted stare of an insect. Only her posture, her body bowed, her hand grasping the arm of an angular young man with a trimmed three-day growth of beard, suggested strong emotion.

  Tom had been aware of her approach. From inside the church, as he was readying himself to exit through the north porch, he had heard a rustle of noise, as if a breeze had risen in the trees—the sigh of the common folk when tabloid celebrity is made flesh. Oona had arrived at almost the last minute—to be a sensation, he thought darkly—and he had witnessed her final steps as he had wound his way down the pea shingle path bordered with tombstones towards the lych-gate. How she had managed the cobbles in those shoes—the heels were torturously high—he had no idea, but he imagined they were as natural to her as a farrier’s fabrications were to a horse. His eyes returned to Colm, who no more made a movement to acknowledge his ex-wife than she did him. Apparently shared grief had no dominion over pride and ancient belligerence.

  Now, catching the first glimpse of the funeral car round the bend by the village hall, his mind went back to Julia. He thought he had not seen such a concentration of misery on her face—not when she had appeared at his door in Bristol in the hours after Lisbeth’s death; not in her unguarded moments when he and Miranda had first visited Thornford; not when he tumbled at the base of the yew and mumbled some pagan wisdom. She was raw.

  The cortège drew closer. Tom could see villagers straightening themselves mindfully, pressing against the stone walls, to let the flower-draped black Daimler pass unimpeded. One or two youths, he noted, stood or sat on the wall—a less respectful posture—but the village, he guessed, had not been witness to many such attention-garnering events and he could hardly blame them. There was genuine distress, but there was a dash of morbid relish, too. He could see the edge of a scaffold that some television network had erected next to the pub and another one, kitty-corner, where Pennycross Road intersected Poynton Shute—manifestations of indelicate attention, about which he could do nothing, and to which he contributed, oddly enough, in the form of the CCTV screen, tucked between the lych-gate and the north porch. Nearer, at the door of the Old School Room, DI Bliss and DS Blessing stood scrutinising the crowd. Behind him, the church was full, but for the chief mourners. They, like him, had turned their attention to the approaching hearse. He could hear, through the ancient stone of the church, the strains of Julia playing on the organ. And despite this admixture of solemnity and carnival, he couldn’t help thinking like a foolish villager at the village pump, or like a jealous teenager:

  What was Julia doing in Sebastian’s cottage?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Oona’s sunglasses remained as firmly affixed to her face as a fender to a car frame through the course of the service, which made her a distracting presence, particularly if one was facing the congregation, as Tom was. He glanced at her in the left front pew from time to time as he recited the familiar words of the rite. It was difficult not to be drawn to the famous visage, which he had first noted more than two decades before in the video for Colm’s hit “Bank Holiday,” lending her cool presence to a giddy scene in a Butlins holiday camp, later sighted on the covers of Vogue or Marie Claire, then more recently glimpsed in a somewhat less flattering form on the cover of one of the tabloids, accompanying a story that often involved noses—either stuffing substances up hers or hitting someone else’s.

  “May God our Father forgive us our sins

  and bring us to the eternal joy of His kingdom,

  where dust and ashes have no dominion.”

  He intoned the words, then invited silent prayer as this was the moment before the Collect. In that pause, broken by intermittent sniffles, a squeak resounded, followed by a collective rustle, as if a multitude sought avoidance of mice. It was Enid Pattimore. Having sprung a leak once again, she leaned her head back while Roger, his bald pate bowed and glistening in the gentle light of the south window, rummag
ed in his mother’s bag for her tissues and her nose clamp. Oddly, Oona alone had remained stock-still through this tiny eruption, as she had through the entire service. Was she slumbering behind those dark glasses? Tom wondered as he began the Collect. Her companion at least had flinched, which meant he couldn’t be deaf, a thought which had crossed Tom’s mind as he sensed the young man’s intent focus not on the words he was speaking but on the movement of his lips. Possibly he was Italian or Spanish—he certainly looked Italian or Spanish—and in want of English lessons. The young man rose to his feet a little after everyone else for the hymns, cued by the commotion in the pews behind, lightly touching Oona’s arm, signalling her to follow. Had Oona gone blind? Was this the reason for the eyewear? Perhaps the young man was a seeing-eye toy boy. But, no—if Oona had lost her sight, Madrun would have told him. She seemed to know these things.

  He glanced at the coffin before beginning a reading from Saint John. “Jesus said to his disciples: ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled …’ ”

  He was returned by the soothing words to the gravity of the occasion, and obliged to face the truth that his heart was troubled indeed. And that his meandering thoughts had served more to avoid this single truth: that the funeral of someone young was a terrible, terrible thing. The last funeral he had presided over at St. Nicholas’s—Ned Skynner’s—had been untroubling because Ned, besides being a stranger to him, had lived well beyond his three score and ten. But Sybella had been a mere nineteen. Tom had attended to many bereaved people in the years of his ministry, watched eyes brim and heard speech falter, but he hadn’t understood depth of grief until Lisbeth—a mere thirty-four—had been taken so brutally. He could never have guessed that he would find himself so plunged into sadness, so filled by a silent keening, that there would seem to be no surcease—though, slowly, he did glimpse an end to suffering: It had been vouchsafed to him on these very chancel steps, in this little church, in this pleasant village.