by Ashly Graham
When your ship returns
Guided by the stars;
When the bird of your arrival,
Straddling the cross-currents,
Lands after arduous adventures...
I will be here to greet you.
Assisted by much reading
In palmistry and horoscope,
I have drawn out the fabric of time
Upon the loom of circumstance,
Daily unmaking and reweaving
A shroud of memories.
One day I’ll sense an imminence,
And hear a cold floating
Harmonic scale; a bubbling
Curdling curlew’s cry, skirling
In hollow notes that chute
Like capsules of loneliness,
Amid the bellowing wind and
Billowing clouds that clutch
And dance across a light-besotted sky.
See how angular at first we are
In unaccustomed company,
Home after so many adventures,
Storms and squalls; the scudding
Grey and long long rain.
Now understand, what seems like
Centuries ago, we never could,
Nor should, have made farewell;
Apart we never were,
Nor could we be, nor will;
For at that moment when you left
We were joined as on a monument
Standing, still, for ever.
The signature was that of
Arbella Stuart.
OPHELIA
Chapter One
Time was, somewhere between then and now, a devil lady decided to leave her practice in London, where she was living in a flat in Belgravia. The competition had become too intense for her liking; the rent had gone up for the third time in the last three years; and the idea of leading a less cramped and more easy-going life was very appealing to her after many stressful years in the city. So the devil lady—or DL as we may call her, since in Hell one is not permitted a name—sent in a request to HQ, and, after the usual delays, was granted permission to look for a patch of turf in the countryside and to buy it if the price was reasonable.
Truth to tell, the DL did not have any choice in the matter. Younger, more energetic devils were vying for positions in the most densely populated urban areas. They made a sickening habit of exceeding their quotas, and as methods became more sophisticated, and criteria for evaluating results more stringent, many senior devils were finding that their own returns were inadequate by comparison. There was only one thing to do if the devil lady was to preserve a shred of dignity, and that was to head for the hills.
One day as she was leafing through Country Life, in the back where the minor sales were listed, the devil lady saw a box advertising a small village in Harrumphshire, freehold ownership of which came with the title of Lady of the Manor. This tickled her fancy and the price was decent enough. Property prices and the value of land were negligible in these remote parts, where commerce was non-existent compared to those in the metropolis.
The DL called the estate agent and made an appointment to view what was on offer. When she arrived, travelling first class on the train in an orthodox manner, the agent met her at the station and showed her around the neighbourhood in his Volkswagen Beetle. It did not take very long, and everything, though modest and unassuming in the extreme, seemed satisfactory. When the tour was complete, the devil lady asked to see the worst that there was to see. The man was taken aback; he thought for a minute and eyed her tail, the tip of which was shaped like an arrow or half a lozenge and peeking from the vent in her coat. The devil lady flipped the garment over it, but it crept out, curious as to what was going on.
Finally the agent sighed and whispered, ‘Well, there is a church. Sort of a church. Saxon, originally.’
The DL’s eyes flashed red. ‘Church?’ she snapped; ‘why, may I inquire, don’t the particulars say anything about a church?’
‘Well ma’am, it’s only a small place, and very run down,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t think it’d be of interest. It’s not included in the details because it has no value, being property of the Church of England. You can find it on the map: it’s marked with a cr.... Should you want to, of course. You may prefer not. No worries. But you wouldn’t be able to turn it into a house, or use it to store grain in, for example, unless it was deconsecr...’
‘Not of interest?’ The devil lady bristled. ‘All churches,’ she said, ‘are interesting to one;’—she stuck a long fingernail into the agent’s chest, and he winced as she prodded him with it in time with her words—‘and one always...needs...to know...where they are. Though, for your information, I’m what you might call Low Church. Now take me to this place; immediately, s’il vous plaît...or even if you don’t.’
The agent did as he was told, and indeed the church was far from impressive. It had a tired air to it and was badly in need of restoration. Also it was very cold: the temperature was lower inside than it was out- because the heating system, if it existed, was either not on or did not work. The plaster was dripping with moisture and falling from the walls and ceiling in chunks; there was a musty smell of mould, and mushrooms were growing in the corners. When they came out and walked round the back, they looked up and saw a tree growing from the parapet round the bell-tower, and a lot of moss on the roof.
Now that she had viewed the tout ensemble, the DL was somewhat placated. ‘Are regular services held here, every Sunday?’
‘Well,’ the agent replied, talking fast, ‘I’m not sure about that, not being of the religious persuasion myself, no ma’am, not me, no way no how. And judging from the state of the place, you wouldn’t think it was in use hardly at all if that. Everything is so old. My wife, who likes these buildings for their architectural interest only, you understand, should you care to, you may not, showed me a Saxon Mass-clock scratched on the wall.
‘Ah, here it is, see…if you like, on the corner of the porch. Now that’s what I call interesting. Possibly. Or not. It’s a sun-dial, basically, that’s what it is, a very basic one, and this hole in the middle is where the metal “style”, or gnomon, went. My wife, she told me that, she’s clever, she is, not like me. These grooves here on the corners of the stones were made by archers sharpening their arrows. Fancy that. Scratch-dials were how the field-workers knew what time it was, before alarm clocks were invented, and they were dependent on someone ringing the church bell to tell them when to get up, and when to go to Ma..., when to kneel in the fields and say their...and when to knock off work, ’smore like it, and go to dinner. Though perhaps only in the summertime, eh? Hrgh hrgh.
‘There’s another dial, but when the south-facing Saxon walls collapsed the silly Normans—you’re not French originally, are you ma’am?—rebuilt the stone into the north side of the building, where the sun don’t shine. It’s also upside down. Perhaps that was why people stopped coming to...going to...ch...places like this, quite right too. Hrgh. Oh, and another thing, the font inside, not that I’ve seen the inside and I only know what it’s called because my wife told me before she saw the light, the light of day, that is, the fonty thing was buried in the ch...yard during the Civil War so that the Roundheads—I don’t mean to be unParliamentarian—wouldn’t melt it down for bullets. You can see...rather, one can see, the mineral salt line from the soil beneath the rim. Hrgh. No worries.’
There was a long pause, during which the agent gasped for breath.
‘You make me sick,’ said the devil lady. ‘Nonetheless I’m going to buy the whole property, at half the listed price because of the church that you tried to hide from me. It’s not as if anyone else has expressed interest or made an offer. Don’t bother lying to me, man—I wasn’t born yesterday. More’s the pity.’
The agent looked at her out of the corner of his eye. Indeed what she said was true: the country was in economic recession and the rural property market was dead. So the DL was able buy the village, not for a song, for she had a v
oice like a corncrake, but for not much money, and the agent crept away to sort out the deeds.
The devil lady was pleased with herself. It was clear this was a niche opportunity that she had been lucky to happen across, for soon there would be all sorts of infernal riff-raff nosing around the district, looking for corruptible pastures new at bargain rates. Why, she would commend herself in her diary that evening for her shrewdness and initiative, and puff herself, for who else was going to do it for her? in a memorandum to HQ using those very words, “corruptible pastures new”, and “shrewdness”, and “initiative”, and other terms HQ liked to hear, such as “business-oriented decision”, and “creative forward planning”, and “with an eye to the bottom line”—which was something she normally associated with her practice of wearing a swallow-tail coat in public to cover her bottom, the size of which she was sensitive about, and her tail, when it was behaving.
A new phrase occurred to describe herself, such a ferment of planning she was in, which also warranted diary notation: “tirelessly soul-searching”. A soul was a soul was a soul, and country villagers were no match for a senior devil possessed of the freehold Deed of Ownership, the title of Lady of the Manor, and a Bottomless Pit expense account.
On the train going back up to Town, the devil lady decided that, as soon as she had sold her flat and made the necessary moving arrangements, she would occupy as her residence the Rectory building. The Rectory was a stately Georgian pile, which for some strange reason was located at the opposite end of the village from the church. A nice irony, thought the DL. It was as if the two buildings did not want to have anything to do with each other, and she found this delightfully appropriate to her situation. In addition to which, owing to the dearth of titled folk and gentry in the area, it was the only noteworthy house around. The wealthy clergymen of old, who had multiple livings and preferments, and dozens of children because they had so little to do except drink port and procreate, and collect their tithes, had considered such places to be both befitting of their station and necessary.
As the stopping-train rumbled into Victoria Station, after a long and unexplained delay outside East Croydon, and another at Clapham Junction, the DL wondered at her sudden pioneering spirit after many years of potentially and ultimately inevitably career-ending sloth and apathy. “Accidie” was the mediaeval spiritual term for the condition, and it was as much of a sin in Hell as it was on earth. The devil lady’s confidential diary was full of such transgressional confessions. But notwithstanding, and as much as she was a homebody at heart, hating disruption, she had to make a fresh start and this by Beelzebub was it.
Chapter Two
“Have you seen a ghost, Margaret,
Or has a ghost seen you?
Trailing around the churchyard
In your skirt of linseed blue.
“People are saying, ‘Does she live here?’
And, ‘Haven’t got a clue:
We saw a shadow in the Street,
And said, How do you do?
“‘You must come round, now that we’ve met
¾So nice there’s someone new¾
We’ll telephone as soon as poss.
Must fly! Adieu! Adieu!’
“And there you left them, in mid air...”
[Which spirits, passing through,
Know as a vacuum made for them,
With such a lovely view.]
*
The village, or hamlet, that fell within the devil lady’s new domain nestled beneath a range of hills intervening between a plain of fertile land and the sea. The place could hardly be described as having been forgotten, because that would imply the outside world had ever been aware of it. The region was sparsely populated—most natives moved elsewhere as soon as they were able or had the means to do so. The hills meandered in a shifty east-westerly direction, as if they too were looking for somewhere else to go, eating up the miles with a digestive break to allow for the passage of a sluggishly tidal river to the coast, which lay a half dozen miles to the south. The only hint of the sea’s proximity was the seagulls that streamed behind the plough over the earthen waves of fields, as if they were flying in the wake of a fishing trawler.
Nothing ever happened here. The sheep were doing pretty much the same as they always had, in the same fields that they had been doing it for a thousand years. Leaving it to their wives to establish the correct proportions of vinegar and sugar in mint sauce, all the farmers had to do was chivvy them around occasionally to areas of fresh grass, give them a hand at lambing time, wash and shear them when they became so dirty and woolly that they could no longer be sure which end was which, and go to the pub and sing songs that became more ribald as the evening wore on.
Following the DL’s arrival, at first the villagers did not notice that anything significant had taken place, so wrapped up were they in their non-existent affairs. They did not even pay attention when the devil lady moved into the Rectory, which was a matter worthy of passing interest given that the incumbent of the Benefice, the Reverend Nathaniel Posey and his wife Laetitia, had given no thought to retiring and were still very much at home there. Although the vicar had served the parish for as long as most people could remember, one afternoon the DL breezed in, greatly alarming the pair and their parrot, and announced that she was kicking them out without giving them time to pack. Astonished though the couple were at this grievous turn of events, they were in no professional doubt as to the identity of the woman with whom they had the misfortune to be dealing, and realized the futility of arguing.
The devil lady sternly advised the incumbent and his wife that she had pre-empted any idea they might have of bringing their eviction to the attention of the Church authorities. Even as she spoke, she said, lubricious rumours were being circulated regarding their eye-popping sexual activities. The Bishop was unlikely to be sympathetic to their case. That this allegation was a vile calumny did not detract from its effectiveness, for the vicar knew how pointless it was to insist that the most exciting thing he and his wife had ever done after nine o’clock in the evening for the last forty years was to drink a mug of cocoa before tottering to separate beds; in different rooms, because Laetitia snored. In return for their compliance the DL informed them that she had provided them with a comfortable cottage in nearby Rotten Bottom, with proximity to the sea, Sainsbury’s, and several of their children’s families.
When the devil lady added that this offer would remain open for exactly six-point-six-six seconds, they looked at each other, drew a deep breath and accepted. No sooner had the couple beetled off, than the DL had her servant make a bonfire of their meagre possessions and worn furniture on the front lawn. Then, though they were in the middle of a summer heat-wave, she sat in front of a roaring fire in the great fireplace in the drawing-room, twiddled with her tail and smiled a secretive little smile.
Next day the DL summoned an army of builders, and set them to work ripping everything apart, so that the place might be brought up to her exacting modern standards. To her annoyance the workmen sucked their teeth a lot over the complexity of the job, which would have to be on a time-and-materials rather than contract price, and declared the impossibility of giving any undertaking as to when it might be completed. Then they settled in for the open-ended duration with practised ease, ignoring her threats and tail-waving, and made it clear that her presence underfoot was not welcome. They had taken a liking to the place, and saw no reason to depart so long as their well-padded invoices were paid promptly and the kettle was working.
The DL could not argue that the house, like the church, was in a parlous state and needed a tremendous amount of work to render it habitable. Still, she begrudged having to make the commute down from London every few days to check on the workers, on trains that never ran according to schedule for all sorts of imaginative reasons. Over the weeks she worked up a great frustration, which she released by rushing along a deep ravine in the hill behind her new residence, letting off steam-clouds of impatience. Tear
ing around in such a manner would not have been appreciated in the DL’s urban neighbourhood. There, perambulating in Green Park, she was expected to behave with decorum, nodding to acquaintances and holding stilted conversations with the wives of those who did Something in the City.
But here she had much greater latitude to do as she wished. The devil lady’s good humour might have been restored had she been aware that, even before she had taken to whooshing up and down it, this coomb or combe (as such a feature of the landscape was known in this part of the country), which ran from east to west parallel to the coastline six miles away, was called The Devil’s Breach; and that it was the deepest dry valley in the world. In Edwardian times, a single-track steep-grade railway, since removed, had ferried weekend visitors in a cable car from the well-known landmark down to the village below, where a giant teapot on a roof advertised the availability of refreshment upon the premises. These days, in the early morning and evenings, the Breach was popular with those who drove up to the top of the hill via the narrow road with their dogs, so that the animals might get some exercise and do their business; whilst their owners got no exercise, and did no business, but sat and smoked and contemplated the three-hundred-and-sixty degree vista.