The Chymical Wedding

by Lindsay Clarke

  He shrugged off my thanks. “Problems?” The vague shake of my head did not deter him. “Things do catch up,” he fished.

  To no avail.

  “I was just going down to the Feathers for a jar. Why don’t you come? Leave the windows open here. It’ll have cleared by the time you get back.”

  There were things on my mind, but, “You can’t sit in there,” he pressed. “Anyway, it’s your civic duty. If you don’t use the pub, the brewery will shut it down. Things are measured by the till these days. The school’s gone already. The bloody accountants are tearing the heart out of the villages. Dormitories, that’s what they’ll be. Geriatric wards. Even the church can only run to the occasional service. Not that that’s any great loss. But the pub… I mean, a pint’s worth fighting for, isn’t it?”

  His grin was seductive.

  Within the hour I was tipsy. An hour later I was drunk.

  “Ah, Gypsy May!” Bob had said. “Now thereby hangs a tale.”

  “A tail and a half,” Bill Rush had added. He was the pigman at Home Farm, a man with a long thirst and a Sagittarian eye for the doubles on the dartboard. The whole Snug sniggered – the verb might have been the active principle of the noun. Even George Bales, the dour gamekeeper, joined in the laughter from his solitary corner. Clearly the joke was an old friend, but I was having trouble enough with the sing-song local accent, and the pun escaped my innocent ear.

  “So are you going to tell me?”

  “I’ll do better than that,” Bob had winked. “You come along to church with me tomorrow morning and I’ll introduce you.” The laughter enlarged itself, masculine – no women about; the old, smokily reassuring alliance.

  It was the next morning now as Bob and I strolled down the green lane to the church. To my eye the tower should have been taller in proportion to the nave, but funds must have run out back in the Middle Ages, for the church looked hunchbacked now where it stood on a hummock across from the Feathers, outlined against a marbled sky. The Rectory, a yew-shaded Georgian manse of rosy brick, stood empty over the way from the lychgate. It was up for sale.

  “Riddled with dry-rot,” Bob told me. “The last Rector to live there died of gangrene. It’s true, I promise you. The present man lives over at Thrandeston. He has four parishes to look after and not enough Christians to go round.”

  We entered the churchyard through a narrow wicket gate off the lane where a path had been trodden through thick grass freckled with dandelions and buttercups among the gravestones. “He wanted to keep goats on the grass here,” Bob explained, “but the old biddies wouldn’t have it – said they were creatures of the Devil. If he’d kept goats, he’d have lost his congregation. Creatures of the Devil, I ask you! So we have dandelions instead, till someone puts a scythe to it.” He plucked a blade of grass and stood, sucking on it, looking up at the flints of the church.

  I walked on round the tower taking in the view across the village street. No one was about, and the morning was silent save for birdsong and the distant rumble of an aircraft out of the base at Thrandeston. The breeze was rich from the sties. Two stone angels shook censers over the entrance to the porch, and there was a dead fledgling inside. I pushed the door open onto a hollow silence. Light shafted down across the narrow pews from clear-glass lancet windows. Except for the usual church furnishings and more angels at the high beam-ends, it was plain and white as a dairy in there, smelling of stalled air and damp hassocks.

  These days, at the end of the Christian era, the solemnity of a country church has less the air of a temple about it than that of a museum. Yes, it makes you feel you have to speak in whispers, but even the noise of your feet on the flags sounds like an intrusion, and entering such ancient space is like stepping out of time. Yet there is an awesome sense of continuity too. Here in Munding St Mary’s, for instance, a board near the west door recorded the incumbents from William de Witneshame in 1190 down to Neville Sallis, who had recently taken the living. There were fewer names than I would have guessed: apart from Nicholas Launce in the plague years and one Edwin Lucas Frere who’d lasted only from 1848 to 1850, most of them seemed to have had a good innings. Only boredom could have tested their nerves in this quiet retreat.

  Somewhere in this building lurked Gypsy May, about whom Bob had remained teasingly reticent. Yet apart from the old propane heater with its twin gas bottles, nothing anomalous caught my eye. The two brasses let into the flags were undistinguished, and only one of the swagged memorials on the chancel wall was imposing. Commemorating Sir Humphrey Agnew, Bart, 1622–1695, it was flanked by a fanfare of Resurrection angels and bore a familiar quotation from Virgil:

  Facilis descensus Averno;

  Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;

  Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,

  Hoc opus, hic labor est.

  The Agnew family were well represented here, and no doubt Ralph would eventually join these dead ancestors whom time had turned to tablets of stone. Like Louisa Anne, for example, whose name and dates, 1821–1913, were carved on the open pages of a marble book with the brief inscription Mutus Liber. It felt a sad little epitaph – to have lived so long and be remembered only as a silent book. I was pondering it when Bob came up the nave behind me and said, “Were you married in church, Alex?”

  I hadn’t told him I was married at all, but, “The works,” I admitted, “monkey suit and all. What about you?”

  He shook his head. “Registry Office. Never had much time for these places. Too tied up with this for my liking.” He indicated another tablet commemorating Capt. Henry Wharton Agnew, 1894–1916, and Lt Hilary Louis Agnew, 1896–1916; brothers presumably, and probably killed in the same battle. The words Hæc Manus Pro Patria were inscribed beneath the names. My Latin was fresh enough to recognize a clever if sombre pun, for I remembered that Manus meant both “a hand” (in reference to Mucius Scaevola’s sacrifice of his right hand for Rome) and also “a little band of soldiers”.

  “Pro patria,” Bob said aloud and sniffed. “No marble slabs for the other ranks, you see – just a list on the cenotaph outside. Would you believe that even this small village lost nine men in Flanders? There was nothing for the poor sods here, and not much in Flanders either. But I’ll bet the Yaxleys grieved over their two lost sons just as bitterly as the Agnews did.”

  There was something faintly depressing in the air of the silent church. “So where is she?” I asked.

  Bob looked back from his pondering and grinned. “You walked right past her.” I glanced round the white walls again. “Outside,” he said, and led me back down the nave. The heavy door banged shut behind us. The light seemed harsher out there, and the morning was loud with the sound of a chainsaw somewhere. “This way.” Bob pushed through the long grass away from the church, then turned and pointed upwards.

  I shielded my eyes from the sun as they followed his finger. It took a moment or two to distinguish the slab of stone from the surrounding flints, but there was shadow enough to define the rough contours of the figure carved there. I was uncertain whether simply to gasp or to laugh out loud at the improbable sight of it.

  “That’s Gypsy May,” Bob said.

  2

  The Figure in the Stone

  In 1848, a few years before the railway cut past the hollow on its way to Saxburgh, the view from the mound of the church across the village of Munding had not been so very different. The street was untarred, of course, and there were no wires for electricity or telephone, but the same copse masked the hamlet from the west, and the same water meadows on the south and east were flooded most winters by the stream that crossed the lane to Saxburgh in a shallow ford. A wrong turning among the warren of hedgerows approaching the village (though, sadly, too few of these would survive the aggressive farming of a later age), and a traveller might pass within a slingshot of its reed-thatched cottages without knowing they were there.

  There has always been something reclusive in the way Munding St Mary’s clasps
the Norfolk light, and in that it perfectly matched the temperament of Sir Henry Agnew, and the undemanding taste of his daughter, Louisa Anne.

  For a long time that young woman had been at her window watching the clouds ferry the October light across the sky as though they were the carriers of urgent news. Except for the rise and fall of her breath she was still, one hand lightly pressed against the pane, the other at her side holding a Michaelmas daisy, head downwards, by the stem. Her dress was of grey silk, its sheen answering to the tilt of the evening light across the lake, so that she was now little more than a marbled shadow among shadows.

  For three days, since the month had changed, an easterly had fretted among the trees and would not back, but now she sensed a veering in the air, a softness where things had been gritty and bitter before. Or perhaps it was no more than her own uncertain mood which had veered all day between expectancy and swift, inexplicable fits of sadness. Her customary poise had absconded. Disagreeably. Even arranging the flowers in the vase, she had found herself reflecting how there had been a war in heaven once, and these Michaelmas daisies – neither angel-white nor wholly serpent-darkened – were its wounds. Which was a solemn and untypical thought. And with guests about to arrive at any moment, such moroseness would not do. It would not do at all.

  Perhaps too warily, and for too long, she had held the world at bay, and now she was just a little afraid. Not that she was discontented with her life and with her work – few people had ever been entrusted with a task of such pressing gravity – but an offended suitor had once consoled himself for her failure to swoon at his feet by comparing her to Mariana of the Moated Grange, and the remark, however unjust, had stayed with her. On such vulnerable days as this she could wish herself ordinary enough to fit such simple expectations as his, but she shuddered at the diminishment this would mean. On the lozenge of the glass closest to her lips her sigh made a small mist which blurred the park and the distant trees a moment, and then, as she turned away, dispersed.

  There was nothing more to do, but she must do something. And what she did was decidedly unwise – she knew it even as she laid the flower on the sill and crossed to her writing desk. From the compartment at the back she took out a small wooden casket, turned the key, and opened the lid on the piece of velvet in which the cards were wrapped. It was of a blue so dense it glimmered on the brink of blackness.

  There was no time, and she was not composed enough, to attempt a thorough reading. She knew too that it was wrong to approach the cards in so restless a way, but it might still be illuminating to see which particular image would present itself out of a long shuffle and a single, decisive cut.

  Neatly she folded the velvet aside to reveal the golden floral pattern on the reverse of the top card, then seated herself more comfortably and picked up the deck. The cards were too large for nimble shuffling – one must rearrange them a few at a time, passing them from one palm to the other, making sure that none should fall. The surfaces were cool and shiny to the touch. As she changed the order of the procession in her hands, she called upon an old meditational device to still herself. She made her mind a mountain spring, which became a stream that coursed through crevices of rock until it reached a point where it must plunge in a long fall to the lake beneath. As her imagination plummeted, cold and clear, down into the black abyss of the waiting lake, the cards travelled, tapping and sliding, one against the other, from hand to hand.

  Now she was ready. Eyes still closed, she patted the cards back into a solid deck and laid it flat on the palm of her left hand. The fingers of her right tested the thickness of the deck, then cut.

  She opened her eyes and, in the same instant, there was an inward pang like that of breaking ice. A man was smiling up at her from the face of the top card where he dangled upside down on a gallows, his arms fastened behind his back, the loose leg crossed behind the one from which he hung, and money was falling from his pockets to the ground.

  It was the twelfth and, to her, the most mysterious of the Trumps: The Hanged Man.

  And then she heard the sound of horses in the drive.

  “Damnation!” said Henry Agnew, who had heard the same stamping hooves, the same jingle of harness, through the window of his library. With a sigh of exasperation he put down his magnifying glass and closed the volume of Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Brittanicum. At sixty-nine, though still reasonably sound in health, he resented every hour that kept him from completion of his life’s work, and in recent weeks he had been pestered by more distractions than he could patiently abide.

  The Rector of the parish had died in scandalous circumstances. The locum had seized the opportunity to admonish the congregation on its more pagan than Christian standards of morality, and his overlong sermons had proved tiresome even to the virtuous. Agnew, as local squire, had been under some pressure to hasten the appointment of a more congenial incumbent, but the living was not in his gift. It lay with the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge, to whom the spiritual welfare of a remote Norfolk hamlet was not of pressing moment.

  There had been much correspondence between Agnew and King’s, between the Dean and the Bishop, until at last a possible replacement had been found. The eligible man was circumspect, the Dean’s last letter had advised, and would, of course, wish to visit the parish before committing himself. The Rectory had been closed since the last parson’s death, and it had fallen to Agnew to entertain the Reverend Edwin Lucas Frere and his wife while they considered how they should answer God’s call to link their destinies with that of a parish so far from the main highways of preferment.

  Not for the first time Agnew mourned the early loss of a wife who had been so much better equipped for this kind of ordeal than he was himself. Thank God at least for a daughter as capable as Louisa Anne. In her he was truly blessed. If his son was too immersed in the passing excitements of the great world to recognize the importance of Agnew’s work, that certainly was not the case with the girl. Each day as he returned to his desk he could expect to find there, penned in her elegant hand, a lucid redaction of the texts with which he was currently engaged. With the same delicacy of touch she would do her best to shield him from this intrusion now.

  It was Louisa who opened the library door on her way to receive the guests, and said, “The visitors are arrived, Papa.” She seemed elated at the prospect, a little breathless.

  “I know. I know.” Agnew’s eyes sloped to the corners under their lids, and a large, gnarled nose jutted between. Displeasure was writ large.

  “Then will you be so civil as to come? They will not go away again for wishing it.”

  “Two,” Agnew growled beneath his breath. “Two miserable couplets today. That’s all.” He got up from his chair and allowed Louisa to straighten his collar, which she did a little sternly. “You are to swear on your honour that you will not play the Trappist,” she responded. It was marvellously convenient the way a vocation of silence descended upon her father the moment visitors arrived – unless it chanced to be Tom Horrocks, or Mr Speedwell with a fresh consignment of books for his approval. She planted a kiss on his grimace and said, “Who knows but that the parson may prove an agreeable fellow? A university man should have some wit to commend him.”

  “But the woman… I never yet met a parson’s wife who wasn’t a confounded stickler.”

  “Then you must charm her. Now come, sir. Best foot forward, if you please.” She had placed in parenthesis for a moment the thought of that disturbing Tarot card. Besides, the drag of a dull pain in her loins had now explained much.

  Having prepared herself for barbarous discourse on the merits of gun dogs and the adventures of the local hunt, Emilia Frere was relieved that intelligent conversation should be so readily available. The baronet himself did not greatly entertain, but the girl… a vivacious mind, suitably responsive to maturer guidance, a most winsome smile (those angled eyes were quite beguiling) and with a light-foot wit. A surprising find in these rural deeps, with as yet no major fa
ult to be seen. It could only be a kindness to restrain her immoderate enthusiasm for the novel under discussion.

  “One must indeed be compassionate with anyone in Mrs Huntingdon’s plight,” Emilia was saying of the novel’s heroine, “but as a clergyman’s wife, I can hardly condone a woman who deserts her husband, no matter how grievous the provocation. No, my dear, a vow is a vow, and those of marriage the most sacred of all. I confess myself amazed that any gentleman could recommend their abrogation as Mr Bell’s narrative appears to do.” Once more she found herself wondering at the mild precision of the young gaze across from her. Hard to conceive how the girl had escaped marriage for so long herself – though twenty-seven was no great age. Later she would console her with the thought.

  Louisa Agnew, calmer now that the guests were met and measured, avoided controversy. “But can one be quite certain that the novel is a man’s work?” she enquired. Since she had taken The Tenant of Wildfell Hall on loan from Saxburgh subscription library (looking to find there no more than a refreshing contemporary companionship after a hard day’s work over Latin texts), Louisa had felt too close a kinship with the author not to put that provocative question. The light in her eyes contrived to be sprightly and earnest at the same time, and their blue sorted well with the black tresses of her hair. “Do you not feel a woman’s sensibility in its insights?”

  “Thus the gossip runs,” said Emilia, who had learnt much in the fencing school of Cambridge conversation, “but I prefer to believe otherwise. Were it conceivable that one of our own sex should publish such a questionable narrative, well… I could only think my reservations more strongly founded.”

  “Or the passion with which it is written more intensely felt?” Louisa suggested, and smiled.

  Henry Agnew cleared his throat, glowering at his daughter the while. He had long since decided the parson’s wife a cold fish. Dinner was over, and as neither he nor Frere had read the novel in question, he felt it high time the sexes took their separate ways.