by Phil Rickman
‘Who?’
‘Stock, Stephanie… Call it precautionary. Call it—’
‘To stop them becoming earthbound, right? To fix it so nobody in the future goes for an innocent walk in that field and’ – Lol actually shivered – ‘sees something.’
‘All right, to try and fix it. You’ve got to try, haven’t you? It’s what I do. Like I keep telling people. I’m actually trying very hard to believe it’s what I’ve been put here to do.’
‘Cure of souls,’ Lol said. He sensed how close she was to tears.
‘Yes.’
‘Souls of the living or the souls of the dead?’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘Merrily, it’s just a phrase I heard with the right balance, the right metre. If it sounds right, use it. What does it mean?’
‘It’s,’ she shook her head at him, ‘just an old description of what we do – what we’re supposed to do. Implies we have curative powers, which I suppose we don’t, most of us. We just know how to ask nicely. And all I want to do now is say, Please God, will you accept the souls of these two people, help them break the bonds of obsession, anger, lust, hatred – help them leave it all behind. Is that so bad?’
‘You’ve known you were going to do this ever since we left the Boswells, haven’t you?’
Something to prove, he thought. Stock’s death must have made her wonder if she wasn’t so much a force for good as a force for chaos.
‘It kind of grew,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s a responsibility. Least I can do. You don’t have to join in or anything. Just point me in the right direction. If you think it’s crap, that’s OK.’
Lol nodded. ‘Joining another river,’ he murmured.
‘Sorry?’
‘Just another song.’
* * *
The trees were closing overhead, the moon shining through a grille of high branches like the wires around a hurricane lamp. He wasn’t even sure of the way, but he was in no doubt that they’d get there.
He wondered if Merrily was secretly hoping that if she prayed in the haunted hop-yard God would mystically grant her knowledge, an explanation of the deaths of both Stephanie and Gerard Stock.
Because it seemed unlikely that anyone else could.
‘You know what I’m beginning to think?’ she said, with alarming synchronicity. ‘I’m thinking Stock – because of his professional history, because of his attitude – was sorely misjudged. I’m tempted to think he approached Simon St John out of pure need, having come to the conclusion – very gradually and very reluctantly, no doubt – that Stephanie was possessed by something evil. I think it was her he wanted exorcized, not the kiln.’
‘But wasn’t the type of guy who could ever come out and say that.’ Lol held up a branch for her to duck underneath. ‘So he laid it on Stewart. The obvious ghost.’
‘The e-mail he sent to the office was very straightforward and very sincere,’ she said. ‘He appealed to me as a Christian. He said he and his wife were being driven to the edge of sanity. I also spoke to a journalist today, called Fred Potter, who spent some time talking to Stephanie’s colleagues at the agency where she worked. She seems to have gone through a radical personality change, from mouse to… someone altogether more predatory.’
‘Are you actually talking about possession?’
‘I don’t know. I’m the only person who ever has to consider that possibility. So I try not to.’
‘I think it was Conan Doyle who had Sherlock Holmes say—Oh.’
Just as he’d done the first time, Lol almost walked into it: the first of the abandoned hop-poles. They walked out of the wood and into full moonlight, into the first alley of hop-frames, the moon overhanging the hop-yard, making the lines of naked frames gleam whitely like prehistoric bones.
‘God,’ Merrily whispered, ‘you were right. It isn’t nice at all, is it?’
She took his hand and led him to the centre of the hop-yard – the field of crucifixion. They stood together beneath a broken frame, the crosspiece hanging down, a frizzle of bine dangling from it. Lol had an image of Stephanie, with the bine in the bedroom. He blinked hard and shut it out.
‘Has to be done tonight, you see,’ she said, ‘because this place will probably be crawling with people tomorrow.’ She looked around. ‘I’d like us to get protection first against anything else that might be here. So we’ll do St Patrick’s Breastplate – Christ be with us, Christ within us… you know? And perhaps we could visualize a ring of light around the hop-yard and the kiln, spreading out to Knight’s Frome.’
‘Sure. I mean I’ll try.’
The truth was, he felt an unexpected, slightly shameful excitement. This was nothing like the cleansing of the kiln. Just the two of them this time. And the big full moon.
She said, ‘To be honest, I’m not sure I could do this alone, tonight.’
‘Well, I’ll do whatever—’
‘Just be here. And think no harm of them. Wish them… love. Maybe repeat a few things after me.’
‘Merrily, I…’
‘Mmm?’
‘I believe you can do this. I believe in you.’
‘I know.’
They were quiet for a few moments, looking across at the kiln-house, soot-black now against the creamy sky.
‘Erm… it’s about guiding the undying essence to God,’ Merrily said. The moon was full on her face and she didn’t look like a saint or a goddess. She looked like a woman. ‘That’s Deliverance.’
He said on impulse. ‘Merrily, how can you love Him? How can you commit your—?’
‘Can I love Him like a man?’
‘Words to that effect.’
‘You want this straight?’ He nodded. ‘When I pray, I don’t see a man. Or a woman. I just experience – it started out as imagination, but now it truly exists – a warmth and a light and a great core of… what you’d describe, I suppose, as endless, selfless love. Which asks for nothing in return but an acceptance of it… which is faith. It sometimes comes in a kind of blue and gold – but that’s subjective. It’s just some incredible benevolence, so beautiful and so close, so intimate that… No,’ she said, ‘this is not a man. It’s completely different.’
Lol was glad, for a moment. ‘You feeling any of it here? The benevolence?’
‘No. That’s what worries me. Somehow I can’t get going until I feel there’s something – some small light – something to… connect with.’
‘So what exactly are you feeling?’
‘Scared?’
The moon hung in the black wires, several feet above them. The moon was not Christian; it was not about selfless, undying love; the moon was cold rock and had no light of its own.
They stood together between the poles, looking down a whole avenue of poles towards the wood, and then Lol was aware of them turning and facing one another, and he didn’t actually perceive Merrily coming into his arms, she was just there, a small, warm, slippery animal, not a saint, and her mouth was soft and moist, not like the marble mouth of some sacred statue, and the air around them was full of the caramel essence of tumbled hay.
‘Oh God,’ Lol murmured, drawing back in final, fractional hesitation and then lowering his head again as he felt her lips part and her breath meeting his breath, a confluence, her breasts pushing against him. He felt the two of them were pure energy, blown down the alley, the poles to either side blurring in the warm, racing night. He felt this was the moment his soul had been rushing towards, through days and months and years and lives and…
… And yet it was wrong.
It was sickeningly, shatteringly wrong.
It grew cold. The air around them grew as cold as the moonlight. Lol heard wooden poles creaking, as if one had cracked. They were old poles, some had fallen, many were probably rotting inside their creosote shells. Held inert by a damp dread, he heard a crumbly rustling that his mind translated into images of brittle hop-cones on mummified bines. He heard the humming in the wires and looked up at stringy clouds in the luminous
green-grey northern sky, through the hop-frame, a black gallows.
‘No!’ he heard behind the studio silence, the crisp eggbox acoustic. ‘Come out!’
Merrily’s back felt cold against his hand, the cold of an effigy on a tomb. Their faces were apart, a chill miasma around them, as if they’d dropped into a vault, and Lol felt sick with the wrongness of it and sick at heart with what this implied.
37
Rebekah
CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT. Sweet, black tea. A cardigan around her shoulders. A warm summer’s night, and she was still cold under a moon that now looked pocked and diseased.
The iron table was wobbling between clumps of couch grass on the cracked flagged yard in front of Prof Levin’s studio, the four of them seated around it, Merrily between Al and Sally Boswell, with her back to the hay meadow and the moon.
‘I called you,’ Sally was telling her. ‘Didn’t you hear me? I stood in the clearing and I shouted to you to come out of there. My voice’ – she looked at her husband in sorrow and some irritation – ‘doesn’t have the carrying power any more.’
‘She means I should have gone in for you, but she thinks I was afraid.’ Al was sitting with his back to the stable wall. ‘I wouldn’t go further than the little wood.’ He put a hand over Merrily’s. ‘Well, maybe. But the real truth is, I’d only’ve made it worse. My father was the chovihano. I just make guitars.’
Sally said, ‘After you’d gone, we talked about it and then we came after you. With Stock dead, there seemed to be no reason at all any more why we shouldn’t tell you… everything, I suppose.’
Opposite Merrily, with his chair pulled a little further back from the table than the others, Lol was looking down at his hands on his lap. Merrily felt his confusion. Also the distress, coming off him in waves.
Al was talking to her. ‘… like we were saying earlier about the Romany custom of burning the vardo? Was this your Christian way of ensuring that the Stocks did not—?’
‘Maybe.’ It seemed such a long time ago. Had she actually done that? Had she completed her impromptu apology for a Deliverance? Had she even started it?
Couldn’t remember.
Couldn’t remember.
‘Brave girl,’ Al was saying, ‘but maybe not so wise. That yard – the yard in the shadow of the last kiln – they tried to turn it into pasture once, and the cattle kept aborting.’
Why couldn’t she remember? Was it the potion Sally had given her? She said, ‘Can someone tell me what happened? Did something happen in there?’
Lol looked up, bewilderment in his eyes.
‘We couldn’t see what was happening,’ Sally said quickly. ‘Too many poles.’
‘Laurence brought you out,’ Al said. ‘I respect him for that.’
She didn’t understand.
Lol said to Sally, ‘Why don’t you tell us about the Lady of the Bines? That’s what this all comes back to, isn’t it? Rebekah Smith.’
Sally shot him a glance. ‘The Lady of the Bines… there’s been more than one, of course.’
Lol nodded.
‘But the original, I suppose,’ Sally said, ‘was Conrad’s first wife. Caroline.’
It was the local secretary of the National Farmers’ Union who had got into conversation with Sally. This was in the mid-seventies, when Verticillium Wilt first hit Herefordshire in a big way. They wanted to discourage young trespassers who might carry the disease from yard to yard, and Sally had said, in fun almost, why not put a ghost story round?
And she’d thought then about the Emperor of Frome and how much more resonance the story would have if it carried echoes of the truth.
According to the ‘legend’, the Knight of Knight’s Frome had banished his wife because she could not give him a son. It wasn’t quite like that with Caroline, but the basis was there. It was true that she couldn’t have children, threatening Conrad’s dynastic dreams – Conrad, collector of farms, with his lust for land, each new field turned into a sea of stakes, a medieval battleground. Eight centuries earlier, Sally said, Conrad would have impaled the heads of his competitors on hop-poles as a warning to other potential rivals.
And yet, he could be charming. Especially away from his domain, on one of his wild weekends in London or at someone else’s house party. He’d charmed Caroline, still in her teens, a city child with dreams of vast green acres and dawn walks through wildflower meadows.
Caroline had actually loved the hops – the exuberance of them, their mellow smell, much nicer than sour old beer. Caroline had loved, especially, the month of September when the Welsh came, and the Dudleys and the gypsies. She loved to talk to them – especially the Romanies who did not want to talk, who reeked of mystery.
Conrad had said she should not mix with them, the lower orders – lower species, he’d implied. Conrad would drive among the hop-yards in his Land Rover, a royal visitor. He looked on his pickers, it was said, much as the American cotton kings had regarded their slaves.
The fifties, this was, and the early sixties: feudal times still in the Empire of Frome.
It was said the gypsies took Caroline away,’ Lol said, explaining quickly that Isabel St John had told him a little of this – some of the dirt on Conrad Lake, which would have been published in Stewart Ash’s book.
‘And I suppose they did, in a way,’ Sally said.
Caroline became particularly close to one family after helping them get medical assistance for a child who turned out to have meningitis. Caroline called out her own doctor in the middle of the night and the condition was diagnosed in time to save the child. This was something the Romanies would not forget and, from then on, the doors were open to the young Empress, the mysteries revealed. Under the tutelage of an old lady – the puri dai, the wise woman – and some others, she became aware of an entirely new way of looking at the countryside, the world.
She learned about living lightly on the land. Taking what you needed and no more and then moving on. Fires from the hedgerows, water from the springs. The secret of not owning.
‘Ecology… green politics… all this was far in the future.’ Sally’s face shone in the light from the stable walls, and her hair was like steam. ‘To Conrad it was simply communism, of course. Conrad lived very heavily on the land. For a while, she thought she could change him – women do, as you know, and sometimes they succeed. But Conrad was already middle-aged and heavy with greed, and Caroline, still in her twenties, was learning fast… too fast.’
‘They gave her a present,’ Al said. ‘The Romanies, this was. The mother of the baby she helped save made her a dress, a beautiful white dress, exquisitely embroidered. She wore this wonderful garment, with pride, to a party at the end of the hop season. This was the first and the last time she was to wear it.’
‘The Emperor went into her wardrobe and took out the dress,’ Sally said. ‘Took it into the kiln – yes, yes, that kiln. Gave it to the furnace-man to put into the furnace. The furnace-man couldn’t bear to do it and took it home to his wife, who wore it to a dance. The word got back, and the furnace-man was sacked, of course. After this, the dress was considered bad luck, but no one wanted to destroy it. It was passed from hand to hand and… well, we have it at the hop museum now. One day, I like to think, it will go on display. When it’s safe. When the full story’s told.’
‘What did happen to Caroline?’ Merrily asked. ‘She left him, presumably.’
‘Yes, after… I – I believe that Conrad began to abuse her in a more direct sense.’
‘Physically?’
‘Conrad was an owner. Body and soul. Caroline had to leave him, of course she did. She had a little money of her own, and the gypsies had awoken in her a need for more… within less. There was – we assume – a discreet divorce. She joined a community set up to develop human potential – at Coombe Springs with J.G. Bennett, who had been a pupil of the Armenian guru, Gurdjieff, at Fontainebleau. And she embraced Schumacher. But Caroline is not so important to our story from then on. If she ever ca
me back, I imagine it was to haunt Conrad’s hop-yards.’
‘She’s dead?’
‘She’s not important,’ Sally said. ‘Rebekah Smith’s the important one now.’
The Rom were always very protective of their women. The term ‘communal existence’ didn’t come close; it was a vibrantly crowded life among siblings and parents, grandparents, great-grandparents – eating together, sleeping together, part of the same chattering organism, Al explained.
The point being that young gypsy women did not go for solitary walks. Outside the camp, even outside the vardo, they were always within sight of the brothers and the uncles. Part of the traditional defence mechanism.
So how could Rebekah disappear?
‘I’ll show you some photos of her sometime,’ Al promised. ‘You’ll see the long, coppery hair, the wide, white gash of her mouth as if she’d like to seize the whole world in her teeth. It gives you a small idea of what went wrong.’
No one could explain how Rebekah came to be quite as she was. Poshrat, didekai? No way. Her lineage was impeccable. This was a good family, and Rebekah was deeply grounded in the traditions. Also, she had the sight, had been dukkering from early childhood. Rebekah could read your palm and your very eyes. Rebekah could look at you and know. They used to say a true chovihani was the result of some dark union between a Romany woman and an elemental spirit. Well, everyone knew who Rebekah’s mother’s husband was. But her father?
‘If you look carefully at the pictures, you’ll see the courage and the arrogance. She was not afraid to be out there,’ Al said. ‘She was twenty-three years old, and they all said she ought to have been married.’
When she wanted to go off, for a night or longer, she’d always outwit the brothers and the uncles, who would suffer the consequential tirades from the wizened lips of the puri dai every time they lost her. But lose her they would, whenever Rebekah decided it was time to make one of her forays into the gaujo world.
It was as if something would be awakened in her during the hop-picking season in Knight’s Frome, when the gypsies were as close as they ever came to being part of a larger community. After she went missing, the police discovered she was already well known – or at least very much noticed – in some pubs in Bromyard and Ledbury, also further afield, Hereford, Worcester. A woman of the world, it seemed: two worlds, in fact. Rebekah Smith, once away from the camp, wore fashionable clothes, was never even identified as a gypsy. Where did she get those clothes? Who bought them for her?