He was holding my wrist as I’d held the dogwood earlier – not knowing what to do with it, but trying to make it look meaningful now he’d started. I answered, ‘No, I haven’t seen Townshend.’
‘So then,’ he said, ‘has anything – murderous – come to light?’
I worked my wrist free and walked on. ‘Robert Tunley killed a dog.’
‘Oh.’ He collected his hands in front of him. ‘Did he sit on it?’ A rare moment of humour from the dean.
‘He poisoned it.’
The word ‘poison’ lifted him – a momentary stalling of stride, a small triumphant smile forming at the corners of his mouth. ‘Poisoned with what?’
‘Monkshood.’
‘Monkshood? I see. Monkshood – so. But, I have to ask, where did he get it from?’ He marvelled at his question as if it were a gold coin he’d unearthed. ‘Monkshood grows in the last days of summer, and it’s the middle of February.’
‘It flowers in the last days of summer, I believe its root exists all year.’
He asked then, with his face especially pinched, ‘How did he know where to find it?’
‘It grows a few fields along from the brook where Tunley and Mary Grant live, at the foot of the ridge where it’s damp and shady, in the warrens. Anybody in this village will tell you that, we lost too many sheep to it before we stopped grazing them there.’
I was irritated by him and made no effort to hide it. What did he know about our village? His questions were the wrong ones; it was no mystery how you’d kill a dog with monkshood any time of year, a piece of root the size of a child’s fingernail would kill even a full-grown man, you only had to slice a scrib of root and drop it, as if sowing a seed, into the mush of old entrails the dog had for dinner. His questions were salacious and gossiping; he hadn’t even thought to ask whose dog it was, or why it had been wanted dead. He just heard the word ‘poison’ and the serpent in him uncoiled.
‘So we know Tunley had poison at around the time Thomas Newman died,’ he was saying to my back, and I replied, ‘We could all have poison any time we wanted, it grows everywhere we look.’
Monkshood, henbane, belladonna, hellebore, which isn’t even to begin on the mushrooms whose warty caps and pearly milk can have you delirious and very soon dead. Any man, woman or child who’d grown up using the land and had so much as a speck of soil under their nails would know any number of ways to kill or be killed by the duplicitous things that grow around us – it fell into the ilk of things we called common sense, an instinct the dean lacked.
Begrudgingly, realising the topic had come to a close, he said, ‘I’d hoped you’d have something to tell me about the murder of a man, not a dog.’ And he fell quiet.
He might have had reason to be suspicious of Tunley, given that it was he who first reported a sighting of a man in the river on Saturday morning, and he who’d been away all Friday night, and no one to account for what he was doing. But Tunley was a man beyond reproach; it interested me that even the dean detected that. A man so frank and guileless that no suspicion could rest on him. Or just a man so feisty you didn’t risk an accusation.
As we rounded the top of the church my restless stride warred with the dean’s nervous shuffle. I had in me the remains of the impulse to go and see the dead dog, a coursing in my legs and arms. I couldn’t help but notice anew that my companion had the most unlikeable face – I’d tried to like it but it kept ducking clear of my respect, something about its greyish colour and its thinness, and the dour downturn of the lips.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that in Italy last year on Shrove Tuesday a man died having oranges thrown at him in a so-called carnival? He was trampled in the street and at night when the revellers left, the wolves came, enticed by the sweetness of the oranges, and ripped his body to pieces, leaving only his two eyes on the cobbles.’
The wind hit us as we rounded the corner to the east side of the church. ‘What do wolves have against eyes?’
He looked at me, then jutted his chin upwards so as better to persist in his pointless story. ‘As for the French, the things they do at Mardi Gras – God himself has to look away.’ On cue, he looked away, a theatrical little gesture. ‘It’s important,’ he went on, ‘that we here, in our gentler land, remember our own customs and the solemn piety of the occasion. Of course we may enjoy ourselves. But we’re not to behave like savages.’
Did the dean know what savagery was? It was taking up in a man’s house the very day he dies, washing with his soap, shaving with his blade, curling up on his mattress of down.
‘I noticed as I came into the village that the revelry at New Cross was already quite boisterous. Drunken. A little too much guzzling of the lift-leg, uh? Isn’t that what they call it? Angel’s food, dragon’s milk. And we’re only at noon.’ Piss-quick, I thought; that’s what they call it, not that it’s your business. He looked up at me with what I thought was his attempt at sympathy and complicity. ‘Yes, John, a difficult few days for your parish, but let’s not allow that to excuse wrong behaviour.’
He’d asked me nothing, so I said nothing.
‘I trust you’ll make sure your parish doesn’t start behaving like those Italians I mentioned. Worse still, those French.’
We’d reached the south door and I stood in front of it. ‘I think we’ll be saved from that, most of us here have never even seen an orange,’ I said.
I took his hands in mine and squeezed them gently, then let them go. He assessed me with alarm; I hadn’t done or said whatever he wanted me to do or say. Then he cradled my face with his hands, one hand cupped lovingly under each jawbone, and said, ‘Look at you, those splayed cheeks, that handsome haughty nose, those eyes grey-brown as a gibbet iron, smoky as an old pyre. There’s a bit of the Frenchman in you, I’d say. We have to watch out for that.’
His look was one of weak malice; the look of a man new to the nastiness of power and not sure about it. I stayed mute and he pressed his thumbs into the hollow pockets behind my jaw. Almost my throat, not quite. A soft place that even my own thumbs had never visited. It was a half-hearted violence and his hands dropped.
‘I suppose I think about things too much, Reve,’ he said, kneading between his eyes to demonstrate the burden of all that thinking. ‘Some of the thoughts are to be ignored, some not, and some – well, some I don’t know. For instance, if Newman’s body is found in the crook of a tree at West Fields three days after he drowned, and his shirt is found just beyond him in some rushes, why did the shirt get further than the man? How did the shirt come off, for that matter? Did it arrive at that place at the same time as the body, attached to the body? Or did one arrive a day, two days, three, earlier than the other? In which case, a coincidence that they washed up within a stone’s throw of each other. Though, of course, coincidences happen.’
He walked away from me at the end of this speech, hands linked behind his back, bumping gently on his narrow-robed rear. The dagger of his suspicion once again drawn, then resheathed.
‘Newman had been buying up Townshend’s land, hadn’t he?’ he said, turning back to me.
‘As I recall, we’ve spoken about this many times before and you know full well the answer.’
‘I know, I know. I’m trying your patience. But the more we speak of it, the less I can get it from my thoughts. Newman bought – what? Two-thirds of Townshend’s land? Newman getting richer, Townshend getting poorer. Townshend had every reason to wish him dead.’
He shrugged and looked askance for a moment, then turned, swaddled and shuffling, flapping his arms angrily at a crow that wasn’t even in his path.
The dean is a man who’s outgrown his own shoes and is feeling the pinch. We’ve no bishop, no archdeacon, not for now, and he finds himself, bewilderingly, at the top of the heap.
First of all things, Oakham is eyed greedily by the monks at the abbey in Bruton. The dean has warned me, and is worried. As they grow in numbers they need more land, so they cast their gaze about them and see place after place filled wit
h sheep, and no arable land in sight. Then their gaze stops at us, with thousands of sheepless, croppable furlongs (more than anywhere for a hundred miles), and they see that our parish abuts theirs, and that they could live well if they took us over and made Oakham their grange.
Second of all things, our bishop is in prison for trying to put a pretender on the throne, and is dying there – the dean says he won’t last long. The archdeacon is preoccupied by worry, and by doing all the work the bishop would do if he weren’t in prison. In this turmoil who’s watching out for us down here in our little parish, oak- and river-bound, with our church that matters only as much as any other, our hundred little lives with their little thrills and pitfalls, our pigs, cows, hens, our barley and wood? Our bridge-that-never-was? Who’ll keep the monks from our door, and the proverbial wolves? The reply is nobody, nobody but the rural dean. And how much does he care? He has his own skin to save. He runs about trying to please the archdeacon in a bid to gain – what? Favour? Power? He yearns to lay a murderer at the archdeacon’s feet, as a cat – quivering with pride – brings in a bird to his master.
Two years ago I had a conversation with Newman; he told me that in Rome they have purpose-made boxes for confession. They don’t kneel at the feet of the priest in the flat light of the nave, but enter a divided box with the penitent in one side, the priest in the other. A little dark box. The idea had, to me, beauty and mystery. I thought of this box as a church in miniature, a church within a church – the priest’s side being the chancel, the penitent’s the nave, and the screen between not so much that which divides the two as that which unites them, through which the two speak to one another. The ordinary man, freed by the discretion of the screen, tells the priest the things of his soul, so the priest can tell them to God and bring him closer to heaven. The screen no barrier, but a surface on which the holy mystery plays itself out.
There’d have been no hope of us having a box like this, all things being equal. Had our bishop not been punished for trying to disrupt the line of the throne, had our archdeacon not been too busy, had our rural dean not been inappropriately in charge and precisely the man he is: no, then this box wouldn’t exist. When he, the dean, visited over a year ago, at the start of that winter, I put the idea to him. The church within a church, the screen that unites-not-divides, the play of holy mystery, et cetera. He was uninterested at best; at worst he was offended. He muttered about Italians and sidled greyly across my hope like the cloud he so often is. A cloud that had lately found itself capable of producing rain.
But the winter progressed. Winters can be savage things that persuade by force. We lost a lot that season – crops to flood, animals to snow, men, women and children to illness and hunger. I did my best and so did we all, but in desperate times people do desperate things: they steal, they lie, they cheat, they despair, they forsake Mass, they seek refuge in forbidden beds.
When people are desperate, they do desperate things that they’d rather not tell their priest, who is a neighbour. Maybe it was the priest’s bread they stole. Maybe the priest’s friend’s wife they went to bed with. The priest’s sister, even. That Lent – which was the one before this – only half the village came to confess. I petitioned them every day in Mass: You must confess, you cannot take the host unconfessed. Still they didn’t come. Then I began to notice increased comings-and-goings at Four Ways where the roads go out to Oak Hill, Bourne, Bruton and Fox Hole, and when I followed someone (as if on a casual walk) I found what I’d already begun to know, that they were going a mile out of the village to meet a travelling friar who took their confessions there by the side of the road, with his hood heavy over his head. He could see them but didn’t know them, and they never once had to meet his eye, not even to pass the coins into his purse.
I told this to the dean; the money that should be staying in the village for tithes and donations is going out of it into a friar’s purse, for the sake of a confession given incognito. We’re a small village with a river that may as well be a wall, for all it keeps the world out. We’d be ruined as a parish if this custom of paying a friar continued, I told him, and it was the truth. Money is a notion the dean can follow, not because he’s shrewd or particularly opportunistic, but because he too is desperate, more and more as time goes on. The parishes he’s been given charge of suffered that winter, and whose were these sufferings now, if not in part his? If there aren’t enough people to see to the land and animals, and if half the animals have died, the village starves, and if the village starves it looks to me, and I look to him, and he looks to the archdeacon who looks to the bishop and finds nobody there. And people lose faith because their protectors have not protected them, and the Lord loses faith in the protectors, whom he appointed to keep him in the hearts of all. Once the Lord has lost his faith in you, you’re upriver with no raft and one leg.
And, so, there we were, two men who had little time for each other, one having been lucky enough to stumble on the other’s knottiest hate – to him, travelling friars were little but salesmen or frippers, with as much spiritual authority; they were thieves and thugs; one had been found that was half-beast, he said, with the body of a bear. I gave the dean ale and lamb by the fire, it was shortly after Easter, and I listened to his views. It was like having dank water seep over my feet to hear such passionless hate. But at the end of it we joined hands weakly and made our concessions – he to a period of trial for a confession box, and me to installing it without more expense.
Last winter the wide oak door at the north entrance was replaced with a new one; we propped this old door against the south-west corner of the church to improvise a triangle of space for me to sit in. Philip down at Old Cross cut a hole in it and his wife, Avvy, wove a very passable hazel lattice to serve as a grille through which sins could be spoken. A curtain on the other side of it shields the penitent, who kneels between curtain and door. It’s crude and childish. I don’t know what the Italians would think – it probably looks like an animal den to them, not fit for the workings of God – more a little place for the workings of the bowel and bladder.
Oakham, small and unknown Oakham penned between river and ridge, has the only confession box in England – at least as far as we know. Maybe there are other Oakhams. We’ve never heard of another. Any bishop in the country would order the box to be torn out – any bishop, that is, but one in prison who hasn’t had a thought for years about anything that wasn’t his own life, and how to prolong it.
There are advantages to being forgotten. The confession box has drawn the parish inwards towards itself as tight as a clump of primroses. The church is now stuffed with donations: two new chalices to add to the one we had, three extra sets of vestments, a new processional cross, a deep purple Lenten veil, a holy-water pot, four great branched candlesticks and countless simpler ones, incense, a fine carved wooden cover for the font, embroidered banners, a spare rosary for the church porch, a cushion for kneeling in the box, a lantern, paintings of St Katherine, St Erasmus and St Barbara to fend off death, a crudely illustrated Jesu Psalter, and every image and prayer to Mary it’s possible to have: a copy of the sweetest prayer to her, the Obsecro Te, and of the meditation ‘I sing of a maiden’; an engraving of the Mother of Mercy and a woodcut of the Mother of Mercy and an unaccomplished wall painting of the Mother of Mercy and an ivory figurine of the Mother of Mercy; we’ve the painting of the Pietà, the Virgin’s eyes hooded and doleful, the Christ on her lap rigid with death. Then the strange and dubious Pietà at Newman’s altar, the Virgin’s eyes turned to us searchingly, and Christ splayed shocking and wounded and tender as fresh meat. The painting glows with pigments only the Italians know how to make. And there at the chancel arch the carving of the Mater Dolorosa, where she stands at the foot of the cross in her most blood-curdling grief. And for every image or prayer donated, we have enough lights to illuminate her for months or perhaps years to come.
The dean’s always been doubtful; he says a confession box won’t stop them going back to a p
assing thuggish friar; after all I know who most of my parish are, even with a screen between us, and they know I know, and I know they know. What privacy is this? I think this is where the dean most shows his lack of subtlety. It isn’t about me not being able to see them, but them not being able to see me – does he understand this? I’ve laid the most terrible of burdens at God’s feet because I can’t see him; why else would one so great keep himself invisible? If I’d been able to look the Lord in the eye, maybe I’d have confided just one or two and kept the worst for myself. My heart would have closed in defence of itself. In other words, a placid dog looked directly in the eyes will snarl and show its hackles. No, our souls are handed over best in blindness, and if the dean needs to be convinced of this, he need only to come to confession here himself and let me, invisible to him, take his darkest and his worst.
The dean isn’t a man who has anywhere to rest his troubles. I saw he was getting worried about Oakham, that we were becoming rebellious and falling into bad habits like drinking at noon and drowning by foul play – that the priest in his little dark box was himself a maverick, too loose and daring with the commands of God. I knew he envisaged an army of monks proceeding towards us, come to take our land, which was supposed to be under his guard. He moved into Newman’s house even while we scattered the floor with preserved and faded violets. We scattered violets in case Newman’s corpse was found and could come home and rest; we had to scatter them around the dean’s feet.
From there he watched us; it was a terrible accident that befell Thomas Newman, he’d said; an accident that threatens the future of our village. He said he’d protect us all. But he’s a weak man, and weak men go for easy power; he saw a flock in grief and turmoil, and decided to prod it into the pen. Maybe he liked the sport of it, of catching us off-guard, and suddenly there he was gently, solicitously proffering notions of murder so that he could find and hang the murderer, thus fulfilling the cycle of sin and recompense that gives order to this cryptic world and would show him to be in control of his parishes. He feared the ship would sink. I don’t blame him for that; it’s the fear of anybody who’s found himself, mistakenly, at the helm. At several helms at once, and he not a captain. I dare to add, not even a sailor.
The Western Wind Page 5