I crashed through the bushes in pursuit, but the Devil played tricks on my ears. First, I heard his feet crunching twigs to my left, then to my right, then behind me. I swung about, expecting to come face to face with him, but he danced away and all I saw was a flicker at the corner of my eye that could have been his tail. I spun in faster and faster circles to catch a glimpse, but all I succeeded in doing was making myself dizzy.
‘Show yourself!’ I yelled, and was answered by the cawing of carrion crows. I knew it was Satan speaking through the filthy birds, and that they were laughing at me, every last one. ‘You can’t fool me! I am a man of God!’ I screamed.
The cackling grew in cruelty and vehemence. I would not let these phantasms divert me from my path. To hear the better, I scraped my hair behind my ears. It had grown long since Anne – my mind stuttered. I felt the undertow of treacherous thoughts and pushed them away.
‘Dear God, deliver me!’ I cried. ‘Deliver me to do your work!’
Perhaps He heard me, for at once the forest held its hundred tongues. There, straight ahead, I heard a twig snap. I raced in pursuit, knew I was on the right scent, for the scuffling grew more desperate the closer I approached.
‘You’ll not escape me!’ I exulted. ‘Anne is mine!’
I could not see her, but the rustling in the bushes made it easy to track her down, clear as the clang of a bell draws men to prayer. I was so near I could smell her fear. I tipped up my chin and howled to God.
O conqueror of Moab!
I grind my boot on Edom.
I shout in triumph over the Philistines!
I stretched out my hand. One more step and I would have her. I took that last step and slammed into a vast oak. I shook my head. It was not there before. The Devil must have planted it in my path.
‘Let me pass!’ I screeched, pounding my fists against the bark. ‘Please!’ I begged. ‘I must have— I must save Anne,’ I gulped. ‘Don’t you see?’
I grasped the trunk between my fists and shook it. My knuckles bled, skin ripped from my hands, blood running to my wrist. I might as well have tried to empty the sea with a spoon for all the good it did.
I scrambled to the right side of the oak, raced forwards and straight into the arms of a blackthorn. It gripped me tight; spines spearing my tunic, piercing the flesh of my arms and breast, and holding me fast. I tried to move my head, but the thorns would not let go of my hair. They pricked my cheek in a warning to hold still. I felt a tear of blood well up and trickle down my chin.
‘Let me go,’ I croaked. ‘I beg you.’
I wept salt: it joined the other wetnesses upon my face. Helpless, I listened to the rustling of undergrowth grow fainter as Anne was carried away, away and out of my life.
I was not aware how much time passed. I drowsed a little, for I was very tired from my day’s labour. The next thing I knew was that the blackthorn had released me and I was lying on a heap of brambles. The sun sent its beams from a much lower point in the sky.
I stood up carefully. I was scratched and torn, but the forest had not defeated me. I looked around. The trees had drawn back into their proper places. I picked my way back to the clearing. It was not difficult because all my thrashing and stamping had beaten a path clear enough for a simpleton to follow.
I half-expected the Maid to have been spirited away by some celestial agency, reasoning that if Anne had been dragged off by a demon, then the Maid would surely have been lifted to heaven. But she was awaiting my return and had not stirred by as much as a quarter-inch. I was so grateful that I fell to my knees, never minding how grazed they were.
‘Oh God! You have spared me!’ I cried. ‘You have spared my flock!’ I corrected myself hastily, hoping He did not notice.
I would carry her back to the village. She would continue to heal us. God had charged me with this task and I would not shirk. With no further delay, I wrapped her in my cloak. The skin on my palms was tight. I licked the stain.
The sun was almost gone. I straightened up, hefted her onto my shoulders. She weighed little, as do the holiest of God’s creatures. My over-shirt was bloody, so God guided me back to the charcoal-burner’s clearing, where I laid it on the embers and placed the men’s garments alongside. I watched them smoulder, their charred threads mingling. Even bare-chested, I felt no chill.
The last crumb of daylight illuminated my path out of darkening forest, but I needed no candle to find my way, for I bore the Maid’s radiance in my soul. Deep amongst the trees a vixen screamed out her heat, demanding a dog-fox to ram her plump with pups. The creature I carried upon my back was Vixen no longer.
Steam hovered over the pool at the foot of the well. I laid down the parcel of the Maid’s body, knelt and plunged my head into the water. I pulled straight back out, convinced that someone was waiting to leap upon me and steal my burden. Nothing stirred. I wetted my arms to the elbow; washed first one half of my face, then the other, not taking my eyes from my bundle.
The track to the village was deserted. I was beginning to think the whole world emptied out save for me, when I met a man with a heap of sticks on his back.
‘Good evening, Father,’ he said.
‘Am I your father?’ I asked. I did not know him.
‘Father Thomas?’
‘You know me?’ It was a wondrous thing.
He stared at the load I carried. ‘You shouldn’t carry such a weight yourself. Let me help you.’
‘No.’ I must have shouted, for he stepped back. ‘No,’ I repeated, gently.
‘You have brought us a new marvel from the Staple?’
‘The Staple?’ I wished he would stop staring.
‘You went there this morning.’ His eyes grew narrow. I fought to make sense of his words.
‘Yes. Indeed. The Staple,’ I coughed, trying to hide the Maid behind me. It was too dark for him to see clearly.
‘Are you well, Father? You are wearing no shirt,’ he said.
‘I am not cold. I am going to the church to tend to the relics of the Saint. We have need of intercession at this time of trial.’
The man crossed himself, muttering agreement.
‘You may leave now,’ I said. ‘I am on God’s business.’
I hastened to the church, fighting the urge to turn about and find him watching me. I ran up the nave to the shrine, grasped the handle of the great iron chest and watched my hands drag it out as easily as if it had been a basket of logs. I took the brass cross from the altar and used it to prise up the lid.
At the bottom of the box was a swirl of grit the colour of mud. Lumps the shape of turnips floated in the muck. I pushed my hands into the stickiness and swept one up, but it dissolved into corruption. I had planned to lift out the Saint’s bones and wrap them. There was nothing here to wrap.
I wiped my palms but could not rid myself of the filth. I could not permit the reliquary chest to remain soiled with this disgusting mess, not when I had such a pearl to place within. I rinsed it out with water from the font, wiping it dry with a festival cope. It was the end of the old world. Time to begin afresh. New saints. New miracles. God’s protection would remain with us as long as the Maid’s relics lay here. I unrolled my cloak and laid it like a blanket at the bottom of the box, arranged the body neatly on top and locked her in her new home.
It was Vespers. I went to the treasury and dressed myself for the greatest of feast days, lit tapers, filled the roof with incense. I strode through the chancel and my voice rose to the rafters, stronger than I had heard it in months.
Listen, O daughter!
The Lord is enthralled by your beauty.
With gladness and rejoicing you are brought:
You shall enter into the place of the Lord.
Therefore shall the people praise you for ever and ever.
I roared the words as though for the first time, my soul soaring high, leading me up the steps and to the altar. Everything was burnished with gold. I raised my hands and glorified my Lord. What I did was not my
will; it was God’s. I obeyed. God had returned to me, in pomp and splendour. I was His servant; I could be nothing else.
Tonight I stood alone in the church. But tomorrow the people would come, and the miracles would begin again. No one would die. The pestilence would be defeated – not that it was ever here. Rumours and tittle-tattle. This was my miracle. It was accomplished.
VIXEN
It is such a hot day when I leave the forest, sweat rolling from my limbs, my need for this place rolling away with it. My body is escaping me. No one can mend me now.
Death is waiting, crouched on a branch. He grins fit to burst, stretching out scabby arms to carry me off into His kingdom. But as His talons brush me, they crumble; as do His hands, wrists, elbows: the whole rattlebag shivers into dust. I spent my whole life running and it was from a bogey, a scarecrow, a raw-head-and-bloody-bones tale I told to scare myself.
But there is no time to ponder the mystery. Laughing at this great joke, I make my way through the trees or, rather, upon them: by some marvellous agency I hop to the topmost branches without so much as snagging my sleeve on a twig. I dance upon the leaves, bending them less than does a squirrel, skipping west past the patchwork of the Great Field, the dull spread of the marshes, the humped dunes. Even the sea looks small, it is so far below.
There is a heavy sound, of a gate banging in the wind. I pause, look back and see a woman, wringing her hands and weeping. She starts to follow, but I tell her she cannot come where I am going.
‘I will wait for you at the threshold,’ I cry.
I lean earthwards to kiss her on the mouth one last time, but am barely able to brush her lips, I am being swept along so fast. Above my head, the sky is falling in the shape of vast snowflakes, tumbling thicker with each step until my vision blurs and I think all the angels in heaven must be shedding their feathers.
I shout, ‘My love!’ but my voice is lost in this gentle blizzard.
It is time to go. I set my eyes forwards and slip over the threshold of the world. The sky is muffled in gathering whiteness and I am going faster and faster until I am running so swiftly my feet leave the treetops and I fly into the snowstorm.
NUNC DIMITTIS
ANNE
When I come to, I open my eyes and find branches spreading their arms above me, the sky in pieces between them. There is a wet place on my head. When I touch my fingers to it, they come away red, which almost makes me swoon again. But I am made of tougher clay than the woman I once was and will not slip into another faint. I dig my fingernails into the flesh of my palms and the pain ropes me to the quay of consciousness.
I lie in the brambles, listening to the sigh of insects, worms champing the earth beneath my head. Everything that I call Anne is seeping out of the side of my head. I will be part of this earth soon, I think. It is peaceful. Pleasant, even. Perhaps it would not be so terrible to sleep awhile. I close my eyes.
‘Anne!’
Her scream startles me awake.
‘Know this! I love you!’
I raise my head to discover why she is shrieking and the sudden movement drives a nail between my eyes. I yelp, fall back gasping. The sounds of her agony will not let off. I must know, must help her. I lift my pounding head slowly, wincingly, and this time am able to see through the trees to where she lies. I wish I could not. Of all the terrible things I have witnessed, I would wash this from my memory.
He works his will upon her, steady at his labour until she is broken and cries out no more. She is gone somewhere far beyond my reach and I know with grim certainty that he will do the same to me unless I get away. I have no desire to follow the Maid into darkness. I can no longer help her, but I can help myself.
I gulp down my groans. Despite my unwillingness to quit this soft couch of leaves, I raise my head with great care. The branches above sway with far more force than merely wind flowing through them. I try to stand, but the ground swings to and fro, a rough sea in which I cannot swim. I decide to remain on my knees.
Very slowly, with as little sound as possible, I haul myself along on my elbows, puffing and gasping at the wrenching in my brow. I crawl through the undergrowth, away from him, away from her. With the grind of each inch, his roaring and yammering grows more and more distant.
I leave behind the last remnants of the old Anne, knocked out of my brains for ever with the swipe of his stick. If there are thorns, I do not feel their pricking. When I examine my hands afterwards, I find them stuck with spines, thick-set as hobnails on the sole of an old clog. I crawl until I can hear him no longer. Then, at last, I permit myself to fall, and sleep.
When I wake, it is to searing brightness. At first I think I have died and am standing before the brilliance of God, but it is simple sunlight slicing through the trees.
I am afraid, for I seem to be hemmed in by tree trunks from which I see no escape. By small degrees my fear dissipates. I look afresh and see the trees are stretching strong branches that shelter me from harm. I let myself be cradled, mothered into comfort. The forest floor is soft as a breast, with a deep coverlet of leaves.
I thrust my hands into the cushion of leaf-mould, sift it through my fingers. Each leaf is nourishment for the small beasts of the forest, who in turn feed the greater beasts, who in turn feed men. My head swims in contemplation of this marvellous chain of being. Yet men stamp upon them, kick them out of the way as if they are nothing. I wonder if we are not poorer for the loss of a single leaf, each as lovely as the cast-off wing of a small brown angel.
I scoop up a heap and toss them into the air. They fall in a damp pattering, full of the aroma of decay that is not dying but the promise of rebirth next spring. I hurl more and more, in an unruly storm. Each leaf is a woman, a million of us, tramped into dirt. We bud, we fruit and, when we can bud no more, we serve no further purpose. After our brief harvest, we are raked into heaps for burning. I see the face of the earth swept clear of our dappled light, our softness. A barren world scraped bare and dry, lacking the thick mulch of our abundance.
I smile. I am become quite the philosopher.
I get to my feet, shake out my dirty gown, squint at the angle of the sun, reckon the best path and strike north through the trees. The bracken underfoot is black with the old year, a carpet of moss spreading its carpet. Lichen veils the trees, stiff with fungus so tough a maid could seat herself. Toadstools lift their blotched crowns, a cuckoo-pint pokes up its knobbled cock of crimson seeds.
I pick my way through brambles, heavy with wizened berries. I sigh, for it is long past Michaelmas and they have the Devil in them. I am a dozen steps further on before I stop, arrested by the nonsense that has just passed through my head. I crouch, pluck the berries and cram them into my mouth. If the Devil’s in them, I can’t taste him.
I browse bush after bush, stuffing myself until my hands are purple. A most royal colour, I think. At this, there comes to my ears a strange sound, rough and cracked, and I realise I am laughing.
Half a day on, I come upon a treasure chest of beech nuts, too deep into the forest for pigs to find. I feast till I can eat no more. A prudent housekeeper would fill her kerchief with some to eat later. The idea makes me laugh again, louder than the first time. I like the sound far more than I like the idea of being prudent, and walk on unladen.
This dead year is coming to its end. There is no surety that the next place I go will be kind, but it will be away from the village and its particular madness. This pestilence is a tide, and like the sea it will draw back. When it does so, it will leave a land scraped clean. Some of us will lie gasping, wet through, but still living. I am one of them.
If I live, and I shall live, I shall build me a life. It stretches before me, granted in answer to a prayer I did not know I had spoken. I shall live that life like the gift it is, and waste neither it nor myself. I am my own woman. I like her. She has stories to tell, and all of them are interesting.
My old life is flickering in the eye of memory, enchanting but as insubstantial as the leap
of flames in a fire. I see that Anne: her dowdy hair and dowdy mind, her sulks, her suck-a-thumb. I look upon her as a stranger, yet I do not hate her. I have tasted enough hatred to last several lifetimes and will dine on it no more. That Anne was as soft as a fist of dough, and the mould I was given was narrow and fit me unhappily. I chafed against its sides, although I hardly knew it at the time.
I am grown now. Yet I have the strangest notion that I am not done with growing, nor shall be for as long as I walk this earth, and perhaps the next. I shall find a different name to wear, one which fits my new soul. I do not know what that name is, but it will come to me in its own good time.
The Maid would be proud of me, I think. She lit the flame of my lamp, but I am the one who tends it and keeps it bright. At night I close my eyes and she is there, leaning on the doorpost of my dreams, arms folded, head tipped to one side, giving me that slow smile I so rarely saw in life. Now she is gone to a more peaceful place, she smiles all of the time and I am right glad of it. I would she were with me still – but when I say this to her she lays her hand over my heart and it pounds so mightily I fear it will burst out of its cage. She shakes her head, grinning all the while, and I wake up, crying out.
It is like that for a long time. I do not stop wanting her, but I begin to understand the shake of her head, why she presses her hand to my heart to show that mine still beats, whereas hers is still. And also, I believe, to show that she gave herself to me as much as she could. However small a portion, it is enough.
I pass through the village once, many years later, with my mistress. She is a fine lady and has a great affection for the saints. Being possessed of money from her various husbands – God rest and preserve them all – she makes many pilgrimages and takes me with her. It is my opinion that she’s prompted by curiosity and an eagerness for life rather than piety for dead men, but I keep some opinions to myself.
I see him, from far off. Despite his wrinkled face and cowering step, I’d know him anywhere. Children hide their faces, not brave enough to jeer. Men shudder as he passes, like dogs shaking off water. I pull my kerchief over my nose, but he staggers past like a man half-blind or half-drunk, hand patting the air as though affrighted by what is before him. He seems collapsed in upon himself; a man sucked dry by the leeches of his sins. I wish him no ill. I wish him nothing at all.
Vixen Page 33