by Ashly Graham
When Fletcher Abraham Dark accepted on the spot the devil lady’s offer to move him out of his dead-end job as a curate in Whitechapel and modestly increase his stipend, he fancied that he was finally getting somewhere in the priestly profession that he had chosen years ago after he was dismissed from the Polytechnic where he was not taking a course in English Literature. Having answered a higher calling by attending and not much else Cuddesdon, the Oxfordshire location of the theological college where Anglican priests are trained, he had worked as an exhaust fitter at the Morris Car Company, Cowley, before being employed as assistant chaplain in Her Majesty’s Prison Service at Bullingdon, near Bicester, where he succeeded in converting a lot of prisoners who had got religion since their arrival to atheism.
In sum, though he was no longer young, Fletcher Abraham Dark struck the devil lady as being a reductio ad absurdum of his class who exuded a certain puppy-dog enthusiasm. He seemed to fancy that promotion and a successful Church career still awaited him as a reward for his dedication to whatever it was that he was dedicated to...it being obvious to the DL that this was something he was agnostic about. And as for Dark, where he thought he was ascending to as he heaved his corpulent frame onto the second rung of the employment ladder he had no idea, nor did he have a head for heights, and he had once broken an ankle falling off a rotten ladder; but movement of any kind was preferable to stagnation, and he had marinated in failure for a long time.
Thinking to mingle for a moment with the parishioners, the devil lady dismounted with difficulty owing to her new jodhpurs being several sizes too small in the seat. When the material parted at the seam, a quantity of pink frilly undergarment blossomed through the split. Standing at an awkward angle to disguise her misfortune, she walked the horse from stall to stall and examined a marrow before clambering back into the saddle. As everyone watched and sniggered at her underwear one individual commented, to murmurs of assent, that it would be worthy of a prize at the county fair for the biggest carnation.
A bold urchin stuck his ice lolly between the buttocks of Elagabalus, upon which the stallion reared and took off at great speed with his mistress clinging to his side. The DL’s serving-man, who had just arrived on foot with a wicker basket in hope of finding some organic vegetables without slugs in them, stared after her. He shrugged. Having made a number of purchases for the kitchen of local honey and jam, some loaves of freshly baked bread, a dozen eggs and two bottles of elderberry wine—the root vegetables were riddled with worms and the lettuces gnawed to the point of being second-hand—he heaved a sigh, and the groceries onto his back, about-faced and plodded off home. He heard a distant scream from her ladyship from atop the bostal, or drovers’ track, on the downs that intersected the ridge way leading to the Devil’s Breach above the Old Rectory, where she was not enjoying the view. It was unlikely that she would make a further public appearance that day.
Several days later, knocks at front doors along the Street were answered to a cloaked figure who announced himself in a plummy voice as, ‘The Reverend Fletcher Abraham Dark, at your service.’ Dark continued to darken the door until he was invited in and offered a seat and refreshment. Having scooped half a bowl of sugar into his cup of Nescafé or Yorkshire tea, and grinding it with his spoon into the bottom of the cup, he would help himself to more cake and biscuits, two at a time, than any well-mannered individual ought to help himself to one at a time. When the plate was empty, Dark would look in the direction of the pantry, as if he suspected that items of patisserie were being held there against their wills. After a tense silence, he was usually successful in obtaining their release, upon which the hostages were dispatched into his digestive tract for safety.
As his Charybdian suckling became notorious, with further prejudice to his waistline, around the village Dark acquired the nickname of Flabby. The goodwill of the locals quickly wore thin to the extent that they would not open the door when they saw him through the front window coming up the garden path, or received a call from a neighbour that he was in the offing. Pastoral care was not Fletcher Abraham Dark’s forte. He was a wolf in wolf’s clothing with an appetite for sugar rather than flesh.
In person Dark was rotund, his hair sleekly plastered to his skull with a central parting, and his face fat and oily with a bulbous nose and an incongruous rosebud mouth. A short man, he tilted his head back as he spoke, addressing the air above people’s heads. He dressed in the black cassock of his adopted trade and moved with a rolling gait as if his feet were gimbals. An eponymous aura hung about him to match the bat’s wing cloak that was always about his shoulders, secured at the chest, irrespective of season and climatic condition, to distinguish him from the general dross of humanity. He met people’s looks, as he half acknowledged them, with a combination of impatience and intolerance conveying that each person’s secrets, passions, foibles, superstitions, and impulses, were already known to him, and that he or she was past saving, and that he was wasting his time on them except when in search of victuals.
A curiously punctilious individual, this penumbral pretend-parson thrived upon the minutiae of ritual and precedent and nitpicking with which the Church of England diverted itself in an effort to avoid addressing larger issues. The Bishops, and the Archdeacon and the Rural Dean, had they met him, would have approved of him as much as the devil lady did his confidence that his yoke was easy compared to the burden of those who did not share the convictions of which he was supposed to be possessed. Dark had never suffered from the kind of doubts that plagued others of his non-calling, as they professed beliefs that they did not admit to themselves that they may not believe in. Unlike them, Dark had never sworn allegiance to anything that he did not believe in, consequently they did not have his sympathy. While his non-fellow Church inductees had settled into miserable ruts of boredom and marriage to dowdy women, and while they prayed for divine guidance from No One that they knew for sure existed—if the Light was on, No One was not often Home—and anguished over how to dull the allure of calls from the Abyss, Dark, who was a bachelor, bore himself erect and slept like a log.
Dogma and creed were to Dark both everything and nothing: he knew nothing of them, and that was everything. His role, as he saw it, was to act as the guardian of an unwritten rule book that he interpreted on behalf of those who had done a shoddy job of not compiling it. He prided himself on being an orthodox unorthodox individual who had the easiest of relationships with immorality, because the best way to understand immorality was to follow the adage of keeping one’s friends, of whom he had none, close and one’s enemies closer, which meant that his enemies were his friends. He admired the way that evil swaggered and preened, as he did, and drove off its competitor as a cuckoo chick bullies a natural fledgling from the nest. Evil, Dark would have told anyone who was prepared to listen to him, had there been anyone who was not a captive audience, and there were not, was a strong and pragmatic force that was impossible to ignore—nor did the Church require him, were he qualified to be so required, to ignore Evil: on the contrary, it was encouraged. Goodness, on the other hand, was so weak and disorganised that there was no point in trying to define it because it could only be defined in the context of defining its opposite, which was easy. Goodness was all dressed up with nowhere to go. Goodness was like eating the same unseasoned meal every day and drinking only water. An understanding of evil, ergo, rooted one in the well-composted soil of reason. Evil stimulated Man’s creative juices and replaced sickly virtue with a Manichaean duality in which evil had the upper hand. The supposedly unresolved alternative of “for better or for worse” for better or for worse had been resolved. Quod erat demonstrandum.
To the devil lady, that she did not like Dark or admire him as a person any more than she did not like or admire anyone only served to confirm to her his suitability for purpose. Here was a cleric who was not always beating his gums together about Good Works and pretending to practise what he was only expected to preach. He was a poster-boy for her cause, a credit to the disc
redit of the Church. In time he would surely drive everyone off the straight and narrow into the zig-zagging wilderness and headlong over the cliff at the foot of which lay her Home, Sweet Home away from home.
Chapter Six
The devil lady was as yet far from aware that there was, extraordinary to relate, a well-established force of a very different colour to the sort she might expect in the neighbourhood: a woman who went forcefully about by the name of Effie. Effie went about a lot, like a whirlwind, and was generally acknowledged to be a force to be reckoned with by any reckoning-minded person; and the villagers spent a lot of their time a-reckoning.
Effie was a resident at the far end of the village at the end of the DL’s demesne, and she owned a cottage that she shared with the curate of the parish, who was also of the female persuasion, and who would have rejoiced if she had been the rejoicing kind in the handle and name of the Reverend Ophelia Blondi-Tremolo. As such Ophelia, who was a real priest, was about to find out that as curate of the parish she would now be required to report, insofar as anyone could who had never reported anything to anyone except to Effie on domestic matters, to the new qua-vicar, Fletcher Dark, as his one and only underling.
Effie and Ophelia were of a certain age. They complemented each other, and attributes that could not be ascribed to one were sometimes uncharacteristically manifest in the other. No single quality was fixed in either and some were interchangeable. Thoughts were often transmitted between them without need for statement, question, and answer. Theirs was a relationship of opposites. Ophelia was sympathetic and sensitive in nature, generally vague and inscrutable in her looks and manner of self-expression, though she had a scalpel tongue and coruscating manner when roused, which was rare. Effie was as easy to read as a comic strip, and from the moment she woke up truculent and brash. Ophelia was transcendentally beautiful in a free-floating way, tall and slender with an occasional drowning-pool smile, still taut-complexioned with a chiaroscuro of age about the eyes. Effie, formerly handsome in a county way, was now dumpy with a wattle-and-daub face. Her naturally curly hair, which once had been flaming red, was now magenta from blue-rinsing, which she did herself and badly. Both women were greatly liked throughout the village, Ophelia for her kindness and Effie because she was uncomplicated, good-hearted and she got things done.
Ophelia was suspected by her parishioners of being mildly religious. Though this was considered neither an essential nor common qualification in her profession, those who took a moment to reflect on what convictions she might or might not have, gave her the benefit of the doubt and deemed them, whatever they were, to be an asset. Effie, larger than life Effie, who was blessed with the ability to fathom matters of Byzantine intricacy with mercurial speed, acted as the priestess for Ophelia’s Delphic conundrums of speech, in the process filtering out the detail and purging them of ambiguity, to the point that often there was nothing left to say. She was also a serial baker, an accomplishment that was generally appreciated, except when the rock cakes came out hard, by the recipients of her largesse at home and in church, as an accompaniment to the streaming cups of strong coffee and tea that her cohort of willing helpers dispensed at the end of services.
The ecclesiastical business that inevitably occupied most of their lives, Effie regarded as an allegory of the battle between her and those who agreed with her, and those who were against. When problems arose, while Ophelia favoured unresistance and would never countenance anything but the gentlest of approaches to the worst of them, Effie viewed every dispute as a personal attack to be quelled either by a sharp application of a blunt instrument or a lethal dose of subterfuge, whichever came to hand first. Even an archdeacon, who had once in an informal setting tried to explain to Effie the whys and wherefores, pros and cons, and on-this-side-and-on-thats of how things were supposed to work, received the same shortness of shrift as she meted out to everyone else who crossed her, and was subdued. Although Ophelia always did what she could to restore the peace when confrontation—and the slightest difference of opinion quickly escalated into such—arose, once Effie’s dander was up it was impossible to contain her. She knew that she was better able to realize her objectives as a free agent, rather than trying to work with those who were dedicated to deferring action to a biblical fullness of time; and even then could not be relied upon to do the right thing.
Effie refused to stand for the Parochial Church Council, the body that had input into the running of the church; she disdained all committees and had neither time nor patience for their interminable ruminations and ramblings. She and the late-lamented vicar who was the council’s de facto Chairman had enjoyed an affinity, because he was happy to do as he was told. Without Effie the process of decision-making in the parish would have flowed like a river of molasses in January, and she took every advantage of her domestic association with the curate-in-charge to assert herself. As a result she was accorded the begrudging respect that those who set themselves up as a law unto themselves often command.
Although Ophelia was a co-opted member of the Parochial Church Council, she hated meetings and never attended on a participating basis, only to listen briefly before tuning out what was being said. Like Effie she disliked meetings, especially those that were charged with politics and contention, but would on occasion drop in with a solicitous bottle of wine whenever curiosity got the better of her as to what murderous actions were being conducted under her nose in the name of brotherly and sisterly love. Having disrupted the proceedings, for in deference to her the other members would be too embarrassed to continue with their agenda in her presence, she would filibuster the gathering with whatever irrelevances happened to be on her mind that day; until it was too late to continue and business had to be deferred until the next quarter. By which time the matter had to be revisited from the beginning because the Secretary had failed to write up the minutes and nobody could remember where things stood.
The two churchwardens, who were the lay officials of the church, presented no impediment to Effie’s exertions. The deafness of the elderly senior warden, Mrs Bawtrey, who was well intentioned enough but scatty and illogical, compounded her ineptitude. She refused to use a hearing-aid because it would oblige her to listen to her husband’s ranting at home; but because she was a supporter of Ophelia, her acoustical deficiency merely meant that she neither heard nor understood what she was acquiescing to. The other warden, Mrs Patnode, was shrewder and less inclined to toe Effie’s party line. However she was of a timid disposition and kept in her place by Mrs Bawtrey, who overwhelmed her with paperwork and lists of telephone calls seeking help in discharging obligations that she should perform herself. And living in fear that the Day of Judgement might be announced for Wednesday next, with the books and minutes not yet brought up to date, Mrs Patnode was usually too prostrate with nerves to articulate any objections she might have.
Now Effie, who knew about everything that went on almost before it happened, soon became possessed of the knowledge that some alien female personage had accomplished the extraordinary feat of acquiring a title to the village that she, Effie, did not know existed—for if she had she would have set about acquiring it herself. Whether it had to do with this person availing herself of some seigneurial vesting of mesne or tenancy-in-chief, attainder or escheat, she would not have known or cared, only determined that any such mediaeval loophole had to be tightened like a hangman’s noose about this woman’s neck. No serf or vassal she to pay homage to anyone.
As incensed as Effie was about the loss of her silent partner the vicar, she knew that such a full-frontal assault on the status quo of the village could only have been made by some very confident individual, similar to herself, who meant to commit further outrage. The nuisance would have to be extirpated before the local balance of power, in which the lower of the scales was weighted by Effie’s undainty foot, was upset. As the villagers’ champion she intended to accomplish this the only way she knew how: mano a mano using her favourite, indeed her only, weapon, the blud
geon. The appointment of Dark was highly prejudicial to her oversight of local affairs, and she determined that, Lady of the Manor or not, this presumptuous person needed to be apprised that the village was not big enough for the three of them, counting Ophelia, and that the last to arrive should be the first to leave and that right speedily.
So, stiffening her sinews and summoning up her blood, Effie filed her teeth and prepared to imitate the action of the tigress imitating her.
The morning that Effie was working up a lather of indignation in the cottage that she shared with Ophelia, her companion was in the conservatory talking to her orchids. The subject was metaphysics, and Ophelia was interested in knowing what her plants believed in and how they had come to their conclusions, and to what extent they might have been influenced or coerced by the levels of humidity or light or the amount of water she gave them. So far as she could tell, it was going to be a while before she received a reply; but she was a patient woman and decided to stick at it until lunchtime.
Not that Effie noticed, but when she barrelled out of her house and down the Street on the bay gelding that she occasionally borrowed from a neighbour, the weather was exceptionally pleasant. After an early morning shower the light spring air was laden with the scent of grass and flowers, and amidst a lot of snorting and farting, mostly on the part of the horse, could be heard the humming of bees and many tender exchanges between the ewes and their lambs.
Effie was no better a rider than the devil lady, but somehow twenty minutes later both beast and rider drew up almost simultaneously outside the gates of the DL’s mansion. The Rectory had always been an imposing edifice, and now that it had been restored she could see why the DL had decided to appropriate it for her own use, even without the symbolic value it held that she was not yet aware of.