by Phil Rickman
‘This song? “The Crow Maiden”?’
‘Which of you actually wrote it?’
‘We both did. I do the tunes, James does the words. Like, he gives me a poem or something and I work a tune around it – or the other way about. You know?’
‘It’s a bit more, er, resonant than the other stuff, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘James tell you where he got the idea?’
‘I assumed he made it up – or pinched it from some ancient Fairport Convention album or something. Actually, you know, what can I say? I mean… James is a shit, isn’t he?’
‘Oh?’ Lol tilted his head. ‘Why?’
‘He just is, isn’t he? He kind of tells lies a lot. Enjoys getting up people’s noses. Does kind of antisocial things for the hell of it. Well, lately, anyway. God, this is stupid of me; you’re his dad’s mate, aren’t you? You used to kind of work with him, right?’
‘Oh, well, that’s over now,’ Lol said. ‘Nothing you say will get back to James’s old man, OK. “The Crow Maiden”, it’s about Denny’s sister.’
‘Sorry?’
‘She committed suicide last weekend. She cut her wrists with an ancient blade.’
Eirion’s fingers fell from the frets.
‘Mmm,’ Lol said, ‘I can see you didn’t know that.’
At the front door, Jane sniffed. ‘What’s burning out there?’
‘I can’t smell anything, flower. It’s probably from the orchard. Gomer’s been clearing some undergrowth.’
‘Right.’ Jane inspected her mum in the first bright daylight of the week. ‘You’re looking better.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Pressure off now?’
‘Maybe. You’re going to miss the school bus.’
Jane said casually, ‘You know, if things have loosened up a bit, Mum, you really ought to take the opportunity to think about your long-term future.’
‘It’s not a problem, flower. I’ll be going to heaven.’
‘God,’ said Jane, ‘you Christians are so simplistic. ’Bye.’
‘Work hard, flower.’
When the kid was out of sight, Merrily went around the side of the house to check out the garden incinerator. The vestments were ashes. She made the sign of the cross over them.
Then she burned the suit.
Merrily called directory enquiries for the Reverend Barry Ambrose in Devizes, Wiltshire. She rang his number.
‘I’m sorry, he’s just popped round to the church,’ a woman said pleasantly. ‘He’ll be back for his breakfast any minute. I’m Stella, his long-suffering wife. Can I get him to call you?’
‘If you could. Tell him I really won’t keep him a minute.’
‘That’s no problem. He’s talked a lot about you, Merrily, since you were on that course together. He thinks you’re awfully plucky.’
‘Well, that’s… a common illusion. Has Barry done much in the way of Deliverance so far?’
‘Only bits and bobs, you know. He’s still quite nervous about it, to be honest. And you?’
‘Still feeling my way,’ Merrily said.
Waiting for Barry Ambrose to call back, she went to the bookcase in the hall where they kept the local stuff. She plucked out one she’d bought in the Cathedral shop: St Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford: Essays in His Honour. She hadn’t yet had time to open it.
I have been reading, Edna Rees had said, about St Thomas of Hereford.
In the book, several historians explored aspects of the saint’s life and the effect he’d had on Hereford – enormous apparently. Merrily began to read about Cantilupe’s final months, in 1282, after his dispute with the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Pecham.
This seemed to be a bureaucratic argument about one going over the other’s head, further fired up by a clash of temperament. It had ended with Cantilupe being excommunicated and travelling to Italy to appeal personally to the Pope. On the way back, exhausted, he’d collapsed and died – at dusk on 25 August – while still in Italy. As was the custom (Really? Christ!) the body was boiled to remove the flesh from the bones. The flesh was buried at the monastery church of San Severo, the heart and bones were brought back to England by Cantilupe’s steward, John de Clare. The heart was then kept at Ashridge, in Buckinghamshire, at a college of canons, while the bones came back to Hereford.
Where they began to attract pilgrims – thousands of them. When news of the miracles spread – cures of the crippled and the blind – it became the most important shrine in the West of England. And it made this comparatively remote cathedral very wealthy.
Although several of the bones seemed to have been removed as relics before this, it was not until the shrine was destroyed in the Reformation, on the orders of Henry VIII, that they were dispersed. The book recorded, without further comment, a story that during the journey from Italy the ‘persecuted bones’ had bled.
Barry Ambrose called back. She liked Barry: he was inoffensive, hamsterish, an old-fashioned vicar.
‘Hey, Merrily… you heard about Clive Wells?’
The lofty old-money priest who’d sneered at Huw. ‘Should I have?’
‘He’s packed it in,’ said Barry.
‘What, Deliverance?’
‘The lot. He’s apparently planning to emigrate to Canada with his family. Had some experience he wouldn’t talk about to anybody – now he can’t even go into the church. Can’t even pass a church without going to pieces, so they say.’
‘God.’
‘Makes you think, doesn’t it, Merrily. What can I do for you?’
It was, she admitted, a long shot. ‘There’s a girl moved into this area from Wiltshire… Salisbury.’
‘Oh, they’re very doubtful about me in Salisbury. You know what it’s like.’
‘Yeah. No, it’s just… if you happened to hear anything. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. This girl’s called Rowenna Napier. They left the area earlier this year. It was suggested to me that there was something funny in her past which might not seem very funny to a church minister. I’m sorry, that’s it, I’m afraid.’
Barry was unfazed. ‘Well, I’ve got a name – that’s a start, I suppose. I can only roll it along the Cathedral Close and see if anybody picks it up.’
‘Could you?’
‘Give me a day or two. So, how’s it going, Merrily – really?’ She heard the boxy sound of him covering the mouthpiece. ‘I tell you, it scares seven shades out of me sometimes.’
‘Thank God you said that, Barry. Stella gave me the impression you hadn’t been doing too much.’
‘All she knows,’ Barry said with an audible shudder.
Viv arrived at the shop with a Hereford Times.
‘Not too much about Moon, thank Gawd. They haven’t picked up on her father’s suicide, so that’s a mercy. Maybe nobody’s worked there long enough to remember.’
Or else Denny had refused to talk to them, Lol thought, and they were sitting on it till it all came out at the full inquest.
Viv said, ‘Oh, yeah, I talked to my friend who still goes to the Pod. It’s bizarre, but these two girls turn up out of nowhere: your friend’s kid and an older one, right? Patricia, who is like mother superior in the group, says to make this Jane feel at home, she’s a special person, they have to take care of her, she’s got problems at home – this kind of stuff.’
‘Problems at home?’
‘I only mention this… like maybe you don’t know as much as you think. You got something happening with the mother, is that it? Was that her the other day, when you ran outside?’
Lol didn’t answer. Viv had tossed the Hereford Times on the counter, and he’d just noticed the lead headline.
CROW SACRIFICED IN COUNTY CHURCH HORROR
He snatched up the newspaper…
38
Nevermore
‘DO YOU KNOW how many messagesI have left on your machine in the past two days?’ Sophie demanded angrily. ‘Surely, even if you were ill…’
Ill? Yes, she’d been ill. She saw that now. Merrily sat at the desk in the office with the D on the door. Nothing had altered and yet everything had. The white winter sun lit the room. There were things to do.
‘I’m very sorry, Sophie. I’ve behaved very badly.’
It could have been entirely psychological. If her vestments were tainted, however slightly, with Denzil’s insidious musk, it would have a subliminal effect: expanding at moments of high emotional stress or extreme sensitivity – like the buildup to an exorcism in a country church – into a near manifestation. And it would then take root, and arise again at times – like emerging from sleep – when the subconscious was in free-flow.
Whatever, someone out there had tried to break her. But now, deep in her solar plexus, she was feeling the warm, pulsing thrill of redemption.
Sophie wore a royal-blue two-piece woollen suit. Her white hair was tightly bunned. She looked angry and perhaps overtired, but her eyes also displayed a small sparkle of hope. She’d become like a mother, Merrily realized.
‘Merrily, about your resignation e-mail…’
‘Oh, yes. Has the Bishop received that yet?’ She heard the unconcern in her own voice. It didn’t really matter any more whether or not she was the official Deliverance consultant. That was a spurious, manufactured title which conferred no special powers. It was just a beacon for the rat-eyes in the dark.
‘The Bishop doesn’t read his e-mail,’ Sophie said. ‘I read his e-mail, and print out the relevant items and put them on his desk. This is yours, I think. What would you like me to do with it?’
She placed in front of Merrily a sheet of A4.
Dear Bishop,
After long consideration…
Merrily saw what Sophie wanted – how she could make Sophie much happier. ‘Could you wipe it?’ she said easily. ‘I wasn’t really myself, was I?’
Sophie gripped the desk tightly, and then let go.
‘Sophie?’ Merrily stood up, took her arm.
‘I didn’t want you to go, and leave me alone here.’ Sophie swallowed. ‘Sometimes I feel I’m going mad.’
‘That doesn’t sound like you.’
‘I know. Capable, reliable old Sophie – total commitment to the Cathedral. That’s the problem, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’
‘Something in the Cathedral’s going wrong, and I’m afraid Michael…’
Merrily sighed. ‘Might as well say it, Sophie. He can’t see it, can he? He wouldn’t feel it because he has no basic faith or spirituality? Isn’t that what you’re saying: that the Cathedral’s not safe in Mick’s hands?’
Treason.
‘Sophie?’
Sophie brought a finger to her brow, as if to halt a fastescaping thought. ‘We have to talk, Merrily.’
The phone rang on her desk in the other office.
‘Sure,’ Merrily said. ‘Whenever.’
She went in search of Lol. In John Barleycorn, the large, triballooking woman regarded her with some interest.
‘You must be Jane’s mum.’
‘You know Jane?’
‘Not personally,’ the big woman said with an enigmatic smile. ‘But I’ve got daughters, so I know the problem.’
‘Is there a problem?’ What the hell had Lol been saying? Merrily rocked inside with a blinding urge to wipe away all the rumours and gossip and deceit that had gathered in the days of the fog.
And, oh, there was so much to say to Jane and so much to bring out, after a week in which Merrily had felt so scared of her own daughter that the only way she’d been able to approach this issue was behind the kid’s back.
The shop woman smiled to herself, heavy with superior knowledge.
‘Where’s Lol?’ Merrily snapped.
‘Oh.’ The woman recoiled. ‘I think he’s over in the central library. That’s where he said he was going.’
‘Thank you.’
The day had taken a sharp dive into December dusk. She became aware, for the first time, of Christmas lights. Little golden Santas racing across Broad Street on their sleighs, and the warm red lanterns winking a welcome to wallets everywhere.
Christmas in three weeks: goodwill to all men… school Nativity play in the church… afternoon carol service… midnight eucharist. The churchwardens beadily monitoring those big festive collections. Courtesy visits: Glass of sherry for the vicar, Celia. Not too much – don’t want you falling out of the pulpit, ha-ha.
And the core of cold and loneliness at the heart of it all. The huddling together, with drunken bonhomie and false laughter to ward off the dark.
She stopped outside the library, the lights still blinking universal panic over parties unorganized, presents unbought. For Merrily they emphasized a core of darkness in the little city of Hereford, deep and intense. She stood amid the rush-hour shoppers and she felt it in her solar plexus, where the ghost of Denzil Joy – the ghost that wasn’t – had formed an interior fog. And now it was clear.
Lol was coming down the library steps, with a big brown book under his arm.
‘Merrily!’ Santa-light dancing across his gold-framed glasses.
Lol, she wanted to shout, I’m all right. I’m clear.
And rush into his arms.
And I still can’t go to bed with you. We priests don’t do that kind of thing.
‘We have to talk, Merrily.’
Suddenly everybody wanted to talk.
‘Me too,’ she told him, still on that strange, sensitive high. ‘Let’s go to church.’
The vicar of All Saints had a bigger, more regular congregation than the Cathedral’s.
This was because they’d cleared a big space at the rear of the medieval city-centre church and turned it into a restaurant. A good one too. It might not work in a village like Ledwardine, but it had worked here. This church was what it used to be in the Middle Ages, what it was built to be: the centre of everything. It was good to hear laughter in a church, see piles of shopping bags and children, who maybe had never been in a church before, gazing in halffearful fascination down the nave towards the secret, holy places.
They carried their cups of tea to a table. Lol still had the big brown book under his arm. ‘That’s the Holy Bible, isn’t it?’ Merrily said. ‘Go on, I can take it. Excite me.’
‘Not’ – Lol put down the book – ‘exactly.’
On the spine it said, black on gold:
ROSS: PAGAN CELTIC BRITAIN
‘Damn,’ Merrily said. ‘So close.’
‘The crow,’ Lol said.
‘What?’
‘You didn’t tell me about the bloody crow they spread all over the altar at that little church.’
‘Should I have?’
Lol opened the book. ‘Didn’t anyone give a thought to why they would sacrifice a crow?’
‘Lol, we just want to keep the bastards out. We’re not into understanding them. Maybe you should talk to the social services.’
‘Crows and ravens,’ Lol said. ‘Feared and venerated by the Iron Age Celts. Mostly feared, for their prophetic qualities. But not like the you’re-going-to-win-the-lottery kind of prophecy.’
‘ “Quoth the raven, Nevermore.” ’
‘Right. That kind of prophecy – harbingers of darkness.’
‘Being black. The persecution we still inflict on anything or anybody black, how bloody primitive we still are.’
‘In Celtic folk tales, it says here, crows and ravens figured as birds of ill-omen or… as a form taken by anti-Christian forces.’
Merrily sat up.
‘There’s a story in here,’ Lol said, ‘of how, as late as the seventeenth century, a congregation in a house in the north of Scotland that was used for Christian worship… how the congregation was virtually paralysed by the appearance of a big black bird sitting on a pillar, emanating evil. Nobody could leave that house for over two days. They became so screwed up that it was even suggested the householder’s son should be sacrificed to the bird. This isn’t a
legend.’
‘Then why, if it inspires so much primitive awe, would anyone dare to sacrifice a crow?’
‘Possibly to take on its powers of prophecy, whatever. That’s been known to happen.’
‘This makes me suspicious,’ Merrily said. ‘You’re doing my job for me. Why are you doing my job?’
‘Because of something that happened with Moon.’
And he told her about the disturbed woman standing on the Iron Age ramparts at Dinedor, with her hand inside a dead crow.
Merrily, thinking, drank a whole cup of tea, then poured more. She stared down the nave into the old mystery.
Lol said, ‘The way she died – I don’t believe she would have killed herself like that. I can’t believe in the reasons. Like the psychological answer, that she was locked into this fatal obsession, so when she found out how her father died it all came to a head. Or the possible psychic theory that maybe Denny’s been turning over in his mind: some lingering dark force which periodically curses his family with madness, and the only way you can make sure of avoiding it is to stay the hell away from Dinedor Hill.’
‘That can happen, Lol. We believe that can happen. Psychology and parapsychology are so very close. But I don’t necessarily buy a connection between what happened to Moon and the crow sacrifice at St Cosmas.’
‘No,’ Lol said, ‘maybe you’re right. Maybe I just saw the headline in the Hereford Times at the wrong time. Crows were on my mind then.’ He closed the book. ‘You look better, Merrily. Tired, but better.’
‘Tired? I suppose I must be. I didn’t realize. I’ve been dashing about. Oh, I took back my letter of resignation.’
‘Figured you might.’
‘Something… gave.’
‘Like, you found out about this guy Huw and old Dobbs.’
‘No, I… still don’t know about that. But I will, very soon.’
‘And Jane?’
‘Inquiries are in hand.’
Lol said, ‘I’ve had Viv in the shop looking into the Pod.’
‘Ah… that explains her.’
‘Apparently – you might find this interesting, not to say insulting – the women were told to look after Jane. That she was a special person with, er, a problem background.’