by Ashly Graham
‘B-beggin’ your ladyship’s pardon for to be troublin’ ye again, but...’ Hob was already cursing himself for bandying further words with her. He had not said as much in weeks.
‘What is it now? Come on, spit it out. But even if I had all the time in the world, which I do for worse and worse, I can’t see why I should waste any more of it on a wittol like you.’
‘Mum, not to be beatin’ the devil round the gooseberry bush, Oi was wantin’...par’n me for makin’ so bold-like...to ax if mebbe ye be one of dey devils Parson tells us about in church. Ye know, the devils who roastses sinners in Hell. Ye doan’t seem lik a farisee to me, but it fair queers me what ye might be, an Oi’d lik to know afore it drives me a-milkin’.’
The devil lady’s eyes widened with interest. She turned the back of her left hand towards her, flat like a woman rather than as a man would bend the fingers, and examined her fingernails as if she were thinking of giving her manicurist a piece of her mind.
Her tone became silken. ‘Oh they do, do they? I’ll be demned if they do...that was a joke, man, treasure it. Well, yes, I am indeed one of those devils and not a farisee or fairy. An important devil, too, in my way, or used to be, though I say so myself and there are many who would disagr....’ The DL registered her own surprise at the confession, but put it down to the novelty of her position. ‘And since I’ve acquired this accursed property, and all within it, in fee and title it would behove you not to question my authority.’ The DL dismissed the state of her cuticles from consideration. ‘Now adone-do and dorm off, villein, before I lose my good humour.’
As she departed she could not resist rounding for a Parthian shot. ‘Better the devil you know, though, eh? Take my word for it, better the devil you know!’ And with her most fiendish laugh she departed, rather too fast on her rafty and contrary mount, leaving Hob to ponder his encounter and the extraordinary change in his fortunes.
Chapter Three
The strangest village I have ever known:
At the Post Office, butterflies for stamps;
In the pub a horse, eyeing the brasses.
On the Street, rabbits in waistcoats;
On Sunday, before church, a flock of sheep
Arrive over a stile from the field
Where, in an old iron bath, the shepherd
Was soaped and scrubbed by his two dogs.
At my house birds fly down the chimney
And make themselves at home in the larder;
As I leave, the cats run in from the garden
And slam the door, locking it against me.
*
Soon after the devil lady had been comfortably installed as Lady of the Manor in the elegant Georgian edifice of the Rectory, now the Old Rectory, her optimism as to her prospects was given a considerable fillip when she was further advised, by an unusually competent member of staff at the Infernal Infocentre desk, that a Lord or Lady of the Manor had powers that extended considerably beyond those of estate management. Although the fine print in the documents that were faxed to her had not come through clearly on the Rectory machine—getting recycled print cartridges from HQ was like pulling teeth—the sum and substance of the matter appeared to concern something called the Advowson, or Right of Presentation, by which she as feudal lord and Patron had the right to appoint a minister of her choosing to the ecclesiastical Living on her estates. According to Leviticus: “And all the tithe of the land, whether of the seed of the land, or of the fruit of the tree”, and Deuteronomy: “the tithe of thy corn, of thy wine, and of thine oil, and the firstlings of thy herds and of thy flocks”, the Church was entitled to tithe most religiously the goods and produce of the glebe land in the parish. Just as a goodly parson might endeavour to keep his parishioners’ souls intact, an ungoodly one, after taking ten per cent of each parishioner’s worldly goods while he was alive, could also be influential in the relocation of one hundred per cent of his soul after death.
The devil lady’s gleanings came to her as manna did not usually come from Hell, and she rubbed her hands with glee. At her age and after the ignominy of failing as a mover and shaker of souls in London, the intelligence could not have come at a more opportune moment. It was almost too bad to be true. All that interested the DL was that, since she had had the foresight already to give the vicar the bum’s rush, there was a vacancy for the position, and filling it was going to require careful deliberation and handling. For in Hell, Anglican or Church of England souls were as prized as sheeps’ eyeballs in Mongolia. Greatly chuffed, she took this as auguring well for her prospects. With glee she contemplated the notoriety and credit at HQ she would gain for curbing this village to the bit of her authority, as one might a horse, and milking it of its souls, as one might a milchcow.
What the devil lady did not know was that the Infocentre’s information regarding Patronage was out of date. Nowadays, when clerical vacancies arose in the parishes, diocesan bishops preferred not to appoint a new rector but to retain the freehold and confer the lesser title of Priest-in-Charge (an office affording so little remuneration that a church mouse would have turned it down) of the ecclesiastical Benefice, which operated within a rural Deanery under the aegis of the diocesan bishop, a suffragan or deputy bishop, and an archdeacon.
The DL’s village was a tightly knit community, closed to the outside world. It had never lost the anonymity that so suited it in the past as a base for smuggling, when barrels and chests by the score of spirits and luxury goods were brought over the beacon on the downs from the coast. When a boat made a successful night landing from France, while officers of His Majesty’s Customs and Excise, acting on a false tip-off, were known to be patrolling further down the coast, and its untaxed cargo was being unloaded on the beach, by the light of a full moon—hence the term moonshine—a rider would be dispatched to the crest of the hill on a white horse. This was the signal to the villagers waiting below on the landward side that they should make ready. The merchandise would be brought down and stored in secret rooms, behind false walls and in any number of other ingeniously contrived hidden places, while the frustrated revenue men, who always arrived on the scene too late after discovering that they had been duped, huffed up and down the Street in a fruitless effort to locate the contraband. By which time the residents would be getting well-oiled in the inn, congratulating themselves and singing such ditties as were celebrated in Kipling’s Smuggler’s Song:
Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark¾
Brandy for the Parson,
’Baccy for the Clerk;
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!
It was at the scrag-end of the village¾the analogy was appropriate, for the hills were crawling with sheep and there was no shortage of mutton¾farthest from the DL’s residence that sat the church the devil lady had been shown by the perfidious agent. It was as if it had seceded from the world, or made a mad dash to escape before being apprehended, put in the stocks, and pelted with rotten fruit.
Reflecting...or perhaps, given its Saxon origins, being responsible for...the unpredictable disposition of its natives, the village’s down-at-heel church was charming when the weather was clement and it was in a good mood. The rest of the time it was as temperamental and ornery as could be. Although, like the Rectory, it was a listed building, the Church did not consider itself responsible for its upkeep, and its fabric had deteriorated badly over the centuries for lack of public subscription. Nothing much ever got refurbished, and when some patching-up had to be done for safety reasons the residents were curiously dissatisfied, as if they had preferred it remain untouched. As did the institution of the Church because, whenever anything was proposed, it insisted on a “Faculty”, or ecclesiastical permit, being sought, which was a process so protracted that it might be preceded by the super-glaciation of Hell.
Ironically, when a public fund-raising Appeal raised an astonishingly substantial amount of money,
from the closet atheists who wished to pad their résumés just in case and earn the right never to have to go to church again, and the contractor went professionally bust but flushly with the funds to a new and Mediterranean life...the faithful were relieved. The church was a symbol of themselves, and synonymous with family, the BBC, and the State Pension and National Health Service. As the building decayed so did they, and when bits of it fell off or collapsed they debated hotly for years how the place might be restored with the greatest love and care, without ever intending to do anything about it. Attendance at popular events, such as Harvest Festival, Easter and the Christmas carol service, had nothing to do with religion, when believers, agnostics and atheists alike attended elbow-to-elbow without it occurring to any of them how anomalous such behaviour was. These occasions were enactments of pagan ritual, and no more remarkable than the annual barn dance and summer fayre. Church was an invitation-less party where everyone was a guest with no obligation to reciprocate hospitality; a place to keep an eye on the neighbours, talk about those who were absent, and sieve for nuggets of gossip.
Wealth was abundant in the region and some very tidy sums and valuable, even by urban standards, properties had been passed down from generation to generation in the established families. The size of these heritages was never manifested in personal or sartorial appearance, which was quite misleading as a guide to wealth, and it was a mistake to try and judge the net worth of an individual by his or her grooming or attire. Here the style and quality of one’s garments were of no consequence. It was enough for people to know that one was rich in order to command their respect, and the less clean and dressy the better because it did not show the others up. The safest assumption was the opposite of the obvious. The toothless tramp slumped on a broken-down wall mumbling to some scabby mutt was not a vagrant: he was the area’s biggest landowner and was worth a bundle in Old Money. One could be a millionaire and live in a barn with an outdoor toilet and electricity from a generator rather than off the National Grid, and keep chickens—and some did—for all the locals cared. The old-timers did not go in for central heating, reliably piped water, and gardens with flowerbeds and manicured lawns. They lived in draughty and insanitary mansions, drew water from a well or a pump, and grew their own organic-by-default vegetables. They ate off five-hundred-year-old tables that were carved with the initials of their ancestors and covered in tobacco burns and coffee rings. Their balded carpets and rugs, if they had any at all, were shagged with dog hair. They drove rusty old bangers with treadless tyres. They stoked and riddled ancient furnaces to keep the temperature above freezing in winter, never went on holiday, were never ill, and they blew their noses on leaves of hard Bronco toilet paper.
The prestige residences still in the ownership of the original families were crumbling ruins. Though none was of architectural interest and most were downright ugly, much more so than the despised bungalows that carbuncled the area and had the best views, they were communally prized because they could be identified in old photographs and exuded the characteristic timeless façade of the village. They had battered antique furniture in the drawing-rooms, and foxed and unread books in the library. Valuable paintings blackened with age and kitchen-grease and smoke hung in the passageways. They were also home to rangy wolfhounds and lurchers and many other sporting and working canines, who in the evenings stretched on the flagstoned floors of the kitchen and hearths in the company of their owners as they shared and scratched their own fleas and ticks and bites.
The Establishment looked down its nose at the occasional incoming nouveaus who were always looking to outdo each other in ostentation, aspiring to join a memberless club, affiliation with which had to do not with wealth or profession or influence but length of generational tenure. A crusty old curmudgeon who saw trespassers off his land with a blunderbuss was more respected than any distant relative or friend of royalty. Whether one was a Baronet, Judge, Member of Parliament, or rich industrialist or commercial businessman, it made no difference. Here, isolation conferred upon the villagers an aura of independence and status that most would be unlikely to achieve in the city or suburbs. One had to have lived in the area for at least a quarter of a century before one was eligible to be acknowledged as an honorary junior resident...a probationer, for the least offence against the social order was enough to set one back to zero-minus. For newcomers were more often than not sorts who failed to apply for planning permission and gave the finger to the parish council; who were rude to their elders and betters; who raced their vehicles down the Street scaring the horses and their riders; who erected naff gates and conservatories on their properties that were modelled on the Crystal Palace...and who usually moved on in five years or less, as if there could possibly be anywhere else more desirable to live. There was no limit to the effrontery of such Philistines.
As to how the neighbourhood was ruled and regulated, as difficult as it might be for any casual visitor to believe that this thatched and cobbled hamlet could be riven with personal jealousies, and be the domain of spiteful political factions, it was a Sicilian enclave in which the verbal stiletto was the weapon of choice, and where the Cosa Nostra’s omertà or “code of silence” was honoured only in the breach thereof. It was a Doone Valley of vengeful parties who sentimentally passed their conflicts down from generation to generation. Insignificant details of village administration were fought over tooth and nail as if they were matters of national importance, and they often remained on local constitutional agendas, scrupulously minuted, for many years. Even those of the men who held real jobs would catch early trains back from their desks in the City and the rowdy Exchanges, and rush home to attend the quarterly parish council meetings, rising to their feet in quivering umbrage—their wives had coached them in this—at anything they had been told to disagree with, flooding the floor with all the vehemence, rhetorical flourish, incoherence, long-windedness, and unparliamentary language of a debate in the House of Commons.
The Village Hall was the laboratory where the amoebae of village biology were scrutinized under the microscope of village political scientists. Every new proposal was suspected of being a revolutionary, liberal, Communist or anarchistic plot to destroy the equilibrium of village life. At Parish Council meetings the least controversial subject on the agenda was treated as if it were a loosely pinned hand-grenade, a radioactive metal, a test-tube containing the Ebola virus, or a suggestion that one emigrate to France. Anything that smacked of innovation, however philanthropic, was Dead on Arrival and consigned to a pauper’s grave.
With the confidence of children who hide from their friends by covering their eyes with their hands, the locals turned a blind eye and deaf ear to national and world events and news, indulged in their arcane affairs and internecine conflicts, and celebrated their bogus traditions. Here, because there was no one to naysay or deny them or otherwise interfere, there was no business except their business. For ten miles away, in the metaphorically soulless town where regional administrative matters were in principle overseen, the District Council knew better than to embroil itself in the Balkan intricacies and acidulous disputes of local governance, and it ignored any villager so ill-versed in parish etiquette or stupid as to appeal to it to reverse some decision that was not to that person’s advantage or liking.
As in the Old Norse sagas, wherein Heaven, Earth and Hell are bound together by the multi-brachial limbs and tendinous roots of Yggdrasil, the mighty ashen Tree of Life, here everything was locked in the villagers’ Scandinavian grip.
Chapter Four
In the Confucian Book of Rites there are seven justifications for abandoning a woman: if she is childless; if she commits adultery; if she does not respect her parents-in-law; if she gossips, or steals, or is given to jealousy; and if she has an incurable disease. The men of the village would each have given a testicle for such a law to have existed in their own time; but historically the women had their spouses’ gonads under lock and key and took great care that it did not. Children who
showed signs of being of masculine were neglected and ignored by their mothers. Women who had been unfortunate enough to give birth to a boy severed the umbilical cord with their own teeth and accepted the sympathy of the midwife. Boys were dressed like their sisters until their teens and told to keep their hair long. At the first signs of pimples and promise they were exiled to boarding schools and universities, and encouraged to pursue careers in the Armed Forces or overseas Diplomatic Corps.
They took the advice and never came back.
This was a woman’s world in which every man was an unprized eunuch, present on sufferance, and forbidden to speak on pain of having his remaining appendages of tongue and ears removed and stopped with Super Glue. The role, if one could assign it so active a term, of the men was to make themselves as scarce as possible about the house. From Monday to Friday they were expected to be absent earning money; and they were grateful to have somewhere to go, to get away from the shrews whom they had consented to wed in the folly of youth. At weekends they pottered about the garden, and occupied themselves doing the sort of unnamed tasks that Weekend Man does in his shed. They were allowed to play golf and tennis and bowls with each other, to appease their yearnings for stag company and a modicum of fun, and to allow themselves a sense of self-worth and -importance and an opportunity for feckless complaint amongst themselves (“Just who does she think she is?”, “That witch!”, “The nerve!”; “Not if I have anything to do with it!”; “Her and the horse she rode in on!”; “Over my dead body!”); but under no circumstances were they to get under their spouses’ feet or interpose themselves in deliberations about village policy.