Every Deadly Sin

by D M Greenwood

  D.M Greenwood describes herself as a retired low level ecclesiastical civil servant. Her first degree was in classics at Oxford, her second in theology. She worked for the diocese of Rochester for fifteen years and has published nine novels featuring The Rev’d Theodora Braithwaite. She lives in Greenwich beside the Thames.

  THEODORA BRAITHWAITE NOVELS

  CLERICAL ERRORS

  UNHOLY GHOSTS

  IDOL BONES

  HOLY TERRORS

  EVERY DEADLY SIN

  MORTAL SPOILS

  HEAVENLY VICES

  A GRAVE DISTURBANCE

  FOOLISH WAYS

  Every Deadly Sin

  D. M. Greenwood

  Ostara Publishing

  First published in 1995

  Ostara Publishing Edition 2012

  Copyright © 1995 D. M. Greenwood

  The right of D. M. Greenwood to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP reference is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781906288839

  Printed and Bound in the United Kingdom

  Ostara Publishing

  13 King Coel Road

  Lexden

  Colchester CO3 9AG

  www.ostarapublishing.co.uk

  For Keith Blackburn

  Contents

  1 Accidental Companions

  2 St Sylvan’s at Rest

  3 He Who Would Valiant Be

  4 ’Gainst All Disaster

  5 Mysterious Way

  6 From the Old Things to the New

  7 Let Him in Constancy

  8 Broken Peace

  9 Rural Retreats

  10 Holy Vestments

  11 Pilgrims’ Tales

  12 Travellers

  13 St Sylvan’s Day

  CHAPTER ONE

  Accidental Companions

  Dead at last, thought Canon Beagle and read the obituary in the Church Times with delight. It ran:

  His many friends in many walks of church life will be saddened to learn of the death at the age of eighty-seven of Benjamin Derrick Tussock. Tusk, as he was known to his large acquaintance, was the son of a West Riding family whose father worked on the railway. He always said he had little early schooling but in 1933 he took up a place at Leeds University to study mechanical engineering.

  Never knew that, thought Canon Beagle, chewing his teeth. Always reckoned Tussock was rather cack-handed in the practical area. Shows you can never tell. He pushed his glasses back up his long nose and pressed on with pleasure. In spite of his arthritis he felt all the well being which even the old living feel when contemplating the recent contemporary dead.

  There he came under the influence of Chips Hollander, the university chaplain, to whose discerning eye the Anglican communion is indebted for many able clergy in the evangelical tradition. Chips used to boast that Tusk was his finest bag. Under Chips’s aegis, Tusk went on to Oak Hill Theological College, and served his title at St Justus Without, Bradford. In 1940 he joined the Royal Marines and went through the war, first in the ranks and then as chaplain. In later years he used to say that the war made him. Certainly it gave him the opportunity to refine those pastoral and evangelical skills which were of such use to the Archdiocese of York when, in 1951, he became the Archbishop’s Missioner at Large for the whole of the northern province. He threw himself with unexampled vigour into a task which, he always said, he thanked God, fitted him like a glove. There were few parishes which did not benefit from his unrivalled enthusiasm and unequalled skills.

  ‘One way of putting it’, Canon Beagle commented out loud. Others might have said no parish was free from his meddling. Teaching men twice his age how to run their parishes. He’d no shame, hadn’t Tussock. No sense of the fitness of things. Old men don’t like being told what to do by younger ones. Invigorated by his anger he scanned the final paragraphs.

  These were years of Herculean effort for Tusk. He travelled widely over his huge cure; his sprightly figure and rubicund face with its famous smile were known both in the field and, if need be, in the corridors of power. Ever open to new ways of meeting and influencing people, he was one of the first among evangelicals to use retreat houses and pilgrimage centres as a way of spreading the faith and nurturing the Christian life in the postwar era. Many young people will recall with delight their first contact with the Church at Tusk’s ‘weekends’ at St Sylvan’s at Rest in the Yorkshire dales. His influence stretched well beyond the boundaries of parish or diocese. Intuitively he was able to meet the needs of his time; his little works on evangelism, Fighting on Frontiers and its successor Knocking on Doors were widely acclaimed. His preaching attracted large congregations in which members of the Government were often present. His opinion was sought by the media when the Church’s views were required on the many ethical and political questions of our age. His pamphlets on the welfare state, homosexuality, free school meals and satanism were classics of their kind. Men of affairs respected him because, as he often told them, he was in touch with grass roots; clergy looked up to him because he had the ear of the great and the good.

  For twenty years he bestrode the northern province like a Celtic saint of old. When he finally retired in 1989, he was made a residentiary Canon of Bow St Aelfric where, in spite of increasing deafness, he carried on a wide-ranging ministry. He died, as he would have wished, in collar. His was a very public life. His was a prophetic voice. We thank God for it. His loyal wife of fiftyseven years, Muriel, his strength and stay, as he used to call her, survives him.

  Canon Beagle savoured the heartiness, the cosiness of it all. The mind of the Church Times at its flabby best. Unequalled this, unrivalled that. Who’d written the thing? Pity they’d not asked him. He could a tale unfold. ‘Like a Celtic saint’, forsooth. How we love to trick out our tiny efforts in ancient vestments. ‘A public life.’ A whitened sepulchre more like. ‘A prophetic voice.’ The clergy always speak of the prophetic voice when one of their number had meddled in politics instead of keeping to his altar and office. Canon Beagle felt his blood pressure throb in his temples.

  About St Sylvan’s though, he had to admit, they were dead right; he’d done a lot for the place; he’d had an eye to the main, the fashionable, chance had Tusk. Canon Beagle put the paper down on his lap and surveyed the long, narrow drawing-room of the Bishop Herbert Residential Nursing Home for Retired Clergy and their Relicts in what was once a fashionable suburb of Leeds. This time next week, he thought, I’ll be there. I’ll be free of this damned prison. St Sylvan’s waits for me. I can’t now be far from death. I must make one more effort to learn what I ought to know. I’ll get there if it kills me. Just for one last go. To set the record straight.

  He glanced with distaste at the pair of young, how young, auxiliary nurses who were propelling Muriel Tussock towards the television room. The screen was showing a rugby international to an audience of five old women. Fat lot Muriel’d get out of it; she’d had Alzheimer’s for three years. Did she know, Canon Beagle wondered, that she was at last free of her husband?

  ‘Come on, love, your turn now,’ said the younger of the auxiliaries descending on him.

  ‘Don’t,’ began Canon Beagle peremptorily.

  ‘You’ll like it,’ she assured him and then resumed her conversation with her companion.

  ‘She had to have him put down in the end.’

  Canon Beagle froze.

  ‘He lost his teeth. It was all that soft food and he used to be ever so partial to a bone.’

  ‘God help me,’ the Canon praye
d.

  ‘My aunty’s went the same way,’ said her companion. ‘It was only a mongrel, though. Hold tight, love,’ she said, tucking the Canon’s rug over his knees and releasing the brake on his wheelchair. They made for the front row of the television room at a cracking pace.

  Canon Tussock’s death was remarked and, in its way, celebrated in a number of households. At eight-thirty a.m. in Tunbridge Wells, for example, Mrs Lemming tugged the drawstring, drew back the diningroom curtains and looked out on to the tiny garden of the Edwardian villa. The garden, no bigger than the dining-room in which she stood, was just as well appointed. The early morning sun of a fine July day filtered through the foliage of the wych-hazel but hesitated, as though uncertain of its welcome, to enter the room. This time next week, Mrs Lemming thought, I shall be in Yorkshire. I shall be at St Sylvan’s. I shall be free. It will all be much better.

  Since his retirement, the Reverend Norman Lemming had taken to reading the obituaries first, not because his acquaintance were dying at a faster pace than previously but because Lemming felt that they should be. Now he had ceased to be the incumbent of St Justus by the Well, a limbo which felt very like death, he could see no reason why the Church should continue to exist. In his heart he had always supposed that the Second Coming would occur before he retired so that he would, as it were, be taken up in his full professional glory.

  He cleared his throat in a mild, purposeful way, which Mrs Lemming had learned was intended to make her pay attention. She continued to gaze at the white lilies round the bole of the wych-hazel. Her own name was Hazel. She felt an affinity with the tree. Norman cleared his throat again, more loudly, and creaked in his chair. More concerned to prevent his moving too strenuously in the antique piece than to comply with his request for her notice, she returned to the breakfast table and attacked an egg.

  ‘Of course, he was never a first-rate scholar, more a populariser, but eighty-seven is no great age nowadays. I well remember …’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ben Tussock. Tusk.’

  ‘Who?’ Mrs Lemming no longer bothered to restrain her hostility to her husband. She was, in fact, unsure whether she was slightly deaf but, when conversing with Norman, she had resolved to give herself the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘Canon Tussock. Yorkshireman. I, of course, used to know him when he was getting St Sylvan’s into shape. But you may have met him at a garden party at Emma.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cambridge. Emmanuel College. Garden party. Festival of Britain year or thereabouts.’

  ‘How did he die?’ asked Mrs Lemming, cutting through several stages in the conversation which her husband would have preferred to go through one by one; undergraduate days of modest success, a college chaplaincy just missed, distinguished contemporaries. He was aware of being cheated.

  ‘I well remember …’

  ‘Have you finished with the marmalade?’

  He nudged the cut-glass dish with its pale-yellow burden across the table. His wife watched his arthritic hand cupped awkwardly against the edge of the bowl. As though it had no sensitivity at all, she thought without pity. She split her toast exactly in two.

  ‘He spat when he talked,’ she said. ‘And he talked a lot. Little Shavian man. Lot of energy.’

  If occasionally his own talent for deflation was anticipated and surpassed by his wife’s, Lemming never allowed her to suppose it. He switched now with practised ease to new ground.

  ‘An enormously valuable contribution,’ he said reverently.

  ‘To what?’

  ‘He helped to bring in the Kingdom.’

  In all her thirty years of marriage Hazel Lemming had never found a way of dealing with this particular move. In youth straightforward piety had prevented her meeting it head-on. She had thought, in her innocence, that life with Norman would reveal what counted as ‘the Kingdom’. But, as the years passed, she had grown no wiser and had in time come to feel that there was no life in the phrase, not merely for her but (and this had shaken her to despair) for Norman too. It had been merely one of many counters in the game whereby Norman brought the recalcitrant to heel. The children had suffered it for as long as they had to and then, as soon as it became economically possible, had quietly deserted for Yorkshire and America. She herself had genuinely struggled for a number of years to learn the language of her husband’s religion. It was, after all, his overt piety and the learning which, she assumed, supported it, that had attracted her to him when he’d come as a curate to her parents’ parish. She had wanted (he had been happy that she had wanted) to be his pupil. But as she had reached middle age, it seemed less and less that Norman’s language illuminated her own fraught experience. In the end she’d given up trying to understand it, though the guilt of failure haunted her and afforded (she was aware) a foothold for Norman’s capacity for blame.

  ‘Lucky old man,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tussock. Lucky to be dead.’

  ‘You can tell what the grub’s going to be like by the marmalade.’

  The Reverend Theodora Braithwaite, a woman of about thirty in Anglican deacons’ orders, who felt that conversation at breakfast was to be deprecated, mumbled in the hope that no more would follow. The high-ceilinged college dining-hall was, at this early morning hour, only lightly littered with breakfasters all widely dispersed over the large area. She had expected to be able to eat undisturbed.

  ‘I was at Keele last year and it was pale yellow with very thin peel. No use to man or beast.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘The year before that, that’s my first year, I was at UEA and they didn’t have marmalade at all, just plastic individualised miniatures of jam.’

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘This isn’t bad.’ He prodded it with a fork. ‘Got a bit of body to it.’

  In despair Theodora raised her eyes from her letter and glanced at the thin boy opposite her. He was pale, with mousey hair cut in a fringe. His eyes were bright grey and active like those of a small mammal, a vole or a water rat. They gave him the air of something sprightly and intelligent which had to be constantly alert to avoid a predator. Whose food was he? Theodora wondered. He had no visible beard. He was dressed, as many Open University students were, as though for a day’s rock-climbing, with heavy boots, padded red nylon anorak and a red wooly hat with a bobble on it tucked into his shoulder strap.

  ‘So you’re going to be all right this time?’

  ‘Reckon so. Even if the teaching’s poor, it’s not too much of a waste if the grub’s good.’

  ‘Are they connected?’

  ‘What? Oh, food and education. Well, yes. I think so. Healthy mind, healthy body like. You learn better if you’re properly fed, so you probably teach better if you’re properly fed too.’

  Theodora perceived only a tenuous connection. At both Cheltenham and Oxford the food had been vile but both teaching and learning of a high order.

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘Reading? I’ve got a Guardian if you want to … Oh, I see what you … Studying. Here. Well, I’m on my last now. Level three for honours. British empiricists.’

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘I can manage Locke. Berkeley seems to me to be a nutter. Hume I can’t get the hang of at all. I can’t tell when he’s serious or whether he’s simply joking. “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” I hope someone’s going to enlighten me this week.’

  Theodora wondered to which of her colleagues on the Open University staff it would fall to take this young man through the elaborate embroidery of Hume’s irony.

  ‘What are you studying? Reading?’ asked the young man, alive to his social duties.

  ‘Teaching,’ said Theodora. ‘Level three. British empiricists.’ She gave him a hard look.

  ‘That’s good. Just what I need. Know anything about Hume?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I hope I’m
in your group then,’ said the boy in the tone of one who intends to get his money’s worth. It was a tone which Theodora had met before among Open University students who were paying their own fees and one of which, on the whole, she approved.

  ‘That would be nice. However, if you’ll excuse me?’ She indicated the letter which lay beside her plate.

  ‘Yes. Sorry. Go ahead.’ The youth seemed content to return to his marmalade.

  Theodora drew out the thin pages covered with neat spiky script and looked once more at the relevant passage. ‘Your godmother will want to see you since you’re so rarely in the North. I said you’d ring her sometime before you go to St Sylvan’s. I trust I have your movements correct?’ You bet he did, thought Theodora. ‘It’s especially important, I feel, and I’m sure you share my feelings, to get in touch with her in the light of Ben Tussock’s demise. They were very old friends and I expect she will feel the loss. It will make an enormous difference to Guy if he gets the money, as I suppose he might. Though given how much Ben disliked his son perhaps we should not prophesy about his attitude to his grandson. I hardly see why they should need an inquest given his age. It must be distressing for his widow, though I seem to remember that Muriel has gone into a nursing home, so perhaps she’s past caring. I would hope in due course to have word of you (which I do not seem to have had for some considerable time) if your duties at your new university allow you a moment. I enclose, in case you should have missed it, the obituary from the Church Times. I am your affectionate uncle, Hugh Braithwaite.’

  Theodora considered this harpoon from all angles. Her dead father’s uncle, Canon Hugh Braithwaite, now retired to a fenland retreat, kept up a brisk correspondence with the younger members of the family, brisker indeed than some of them, with careers to make and less leisure than the Canon, could cope with. However, he was right and she ought to have written. He should have a card. She’d send him one from St Sylvan’s when she got there next Saturday.