‘Because God chose to become incarnate in a patriarchal society. He chose only male apostles. Just as he wanted a woman, the Virgin Mary, to have the highest possible human vocation.’
‘We’re not living in first-century Palestine any more.’
‘I don’t think God’s choice of time and place was an accident. It would be absurd for a Christian to think that. There’s nothing in Scripture to support the idea of women priests. So we can only conclude that a male priesthood is what God wanted. If it were just a matter of human tradition, of course it could be changed. But it’s not. It’s a divine institution.’
‘I’ll have to take your word for it. But can’t the Church sometimes admit it’s got it wrong? After all, it’s changed its mind before. For instance, you don’t go around burning people at the stake any more just because they don’t agree with you.’
‘The two things aren’t analogous.’
You can’t argue with fanatics, I thought. If David wanted to inhabit a fairy-tale universe conducted by fairy-tale laws, that was his business.
‘I’ve got to do some work,’ I said. ‘I’d better go. Thanks for the theology lesson.’
For an instant I thought he looked disappointed, like a dog deprived of a bone. Perhaps he had seen me as a potential convert, the prodigal daughter on the verge of a change of heart. We said goodbye and he walked on towards the Porta and the Theological College.
I ducked into the cloisters and walked slowly towards the south door of the Cathedral. On my way I passed the entrance to the Chapter House, a large austere room with a Norman arcade running round the walls below the windows. Nowadays the chapter met in more comfortable surroundings and the room was used mainly for small concerts and large meetings. They were going to use the room for the exhibition. Hudson was in there talking to the dean, and he gave me a wave as I passed the doorway.
Before I started work I got out a couple of histories of Rosington and one of the county. There were references to Mudgley, both Abbots and Burnham, and to outbreaks of plague in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But I found nothing about Isabella of Roth, women priests or angelic visitations.
After that I catalogued half a dozen books. But my attention kept wandering back to Francis Youlgreave and Isabella and to the boy called Simon, the one Youlgreave thought might be ‘useful’. Finally I decided that I would take my coffee break early and skip the coffee part of it.
Instead I went to the public library which was housed in a converted Nissen hut in a street off the marketplace. Janet had taken me to join the library a few weeks before but I had never used it. The librarian in charge was a thickset man with a face like a bloodhound’s and thick, ragged hair the colour of wire wool. I asked him if they had anything on Francis Youlgreave.
‘About him or by him?’
‘Either.’
‘We’ve got a book of his poetry.’
‘Good. Where can I find it?’
Wheezing softly, he stared at me. ‘I’m afraid it’s on loan.’
I felt like a child deprived of a treat. ‘Can I reserve it?’
The book was called The Tongues of Angels. ‘Is there a biography?’ I asked as I handed the librarian the reservation card and my sixpence.
He glanced at my name on the card. ‘Not that I know of, Mrs Appleyard. But he’s in the Dictionary of National Biography, and there’s also something about him in a book we have called Rosington Worthies. Chapter nine, I think. You’ll find it in the reference section under Local History.’
I was impressed and said so.
‘To be honest, I hadn’t heard of him until last week. But someone happened to be asking about him.’
‘Would that have been Canon Hudson, by any chance?’
‘It wasn’t him. No one I know.’
It was another little mystery, and one which irritated rather than intrigued me. I was surprised to find I didn’t like the idea of someone else being interested in Francis Youlgreave. I felt he ought to be mine. A substitute for Henry, perhaps, safely dead and therefore able to resist the lures of widows with more money than morals.
I thanked the librarian, went into the little reference department and dug out the bones of Youlgreave’s life. But, like the model of the Octagon we’d found in the library, the bones didn’t give much idea of the finished article.
Francis Youlgreave was born in 1863, the younger son of a baronet. He published Last Poems in 1884 while he was an undergraduate at St John’s College, Oxford. After coming down from the university he decided to go into the Church. These are facts, you can look them up for yourself in the Dictionary of National Biography. He was in fact one of the first ordinands at Rosington Theological College. Several curacies followed in parishes on the western fringe of London.
In 1891, still in London, Francis became the first vicar of a new church, St Michael’s, Beauclerk Place, which is west of Tottenham Court Road. (That’s how I came to think of him, by the way. As Francis, as if he was someone I knew.) In 1896 he published his second volume of poetry and then The Four Last Things. Four years later he became a canon of Rosington. Osbaston had been right about a family connection. The dean at the turn of the century was a cousin of Francis’s mother.
His last book, The Tongues of Angels, was published in 1903. The following year ill health forced him to retire. He went to live in his brother’s house, Roth Park in Middlesex, where he died on 30th July 1905. Nowadays he was best known for the one poem ‘The Judgement of Strangers’, said to have been admired by W. B. Yeats.
At lunchtime there were usually only the three of us at the Dark Hostelry. Rosie was at school and David had lunch at the Theological College. Janet had found time to read Youlgreave’s letter in The Journal of the Transactions of the Rosington Antiquarian Society. While we ate cold lamb and salad I told her about the failure of my attempt to find out more about Isabella. Meanwhile Mr Treevor chewed methodically through an immense quantity of meat.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Janet asked.
‘It’s such a strange story. And I can’t help feeling sorry for the woman.’
‘If she ever existed.’
‘I think she did. Why would Francis have invented something like that?’
Janet looked across the table at me. ‘I don’t know. So you think the poem was inspired by Isabella?’
‘Of course. Have you read it?’
‘Not yet. I’ll look at it after lunch.’
‘The poem’s in three parts.’ I held up my hand and ticked off the fingers. ‘First the soldiers come for her when she’s in church. Then there’s the trial scene. And finally there’s the bit at the end where she’s burnt at the stake.’
‘When was it written?’ Janet said.
‘It was one of the poems in The Four Last Things, which was published in 1896. So –’I broke off as the implication hit me.
‘And when did he write this letter to the Antiquarian Society?’
‘In 1904. He’d become a canon of Rosington in 1901.’
Janet smiled at me. ‘Then isn’t it a little hard to see how a discovery he claimed to have made in the Cathedral Library could have inspired a poem published at least five years earlier?’
‘Is there any more lamb?’ asked Mr Treevor, looking at the remains of the joint.
For a moment I felt ridiculously depressed. Then I cheered up. ‘I know – Francis was at the Theological College here. That must have been in the eighteen-eighties. So he could have come across the book then. Perhaps the students were allowed to use the Cathedral Library. And then he found it again when he came back to Rosington. That makes sense, doesn’t it? He’d be bound to look for it.’
For a moment Janet concentrated on carving the meat. ‘Why does it matter?’
‘It’s quite interesting. Especially in view of that sermon of his, the one about women priests that made them give him the sack. There must be a connection.’
‘More?’ Mr Treevor suggested.
Janet went back
to the carving and Francis Youlgreave slid away from us, back into the void he had come from. Instead we talked about the Principal’s Lodging at the Theological College, and whether it would make a better family home than the Dark Hostelry.
I was glad of the change of subject. I didn’t want to think too much about why Francis was interesting me, or to allow Janet to delve too deeply into my motives. All right, I was bored. I needed stimulation. But another reason for my interest is painfully obvious now. But believe me, it wasn’t then – in those days I fooled myself as well as everyone else.
I wanted to find a way of impressing David Byfield. I wanted to make him take notice of me. How better to do this than by making a scholarly discovery? It makes me squirm to think about it. I wouldn’t say I was in love with David. Not exactly. What I felt about David had a lot to do with wanting to get back at Henry. But it wasn’t entirely that. The thing you have to understand about David, the real mystery perhaps, is that despite his arrogance and his habit of patronizing the little women around him, he was actually very sexy.
Living in the same house I couldn’t avoid him. Once I saw him naked. Despite its size there was only one bathroom at the Dark Hostelry. I came down one morning in my dressing gown, opened the door and there he was – standing in the bath, the water running off his white body, reaching for a towel draped over the washbasin. As the door opened, he stopped moving, apart from his head turning towards the door, and in that instant he was like a statue of an athlete, a young god frozen in time.
‘So sorry,’ I blurted out. I closed the door and bolted back to my room on the next floor. If it was anyone’s fault it was his, because we always locked the door of the bathroom. But somehow I felt the blame was mine, that I had been prying like a Peeping Tom. Twenty minutes later we met at breakfast and both of us pretended it hadn’t happened. I wonder if it stuck in David’s memory over the years as it has in mine.
21
The dean’s exhibition was taking shape in the Chapter House. Janet told me that the idea had aroused considerable opposition because it smacked of commercialism. I was never quite sure whether the opposition was on religious or social grounds. In the Close, it was often hard to tell where the one stopped and the other began.
The dean had financial logic on his side. There was deathwatch beetle in the roof of the north transept. The windows of the Lady Chapel needed re-leading and the pinnacles at the west end were in danger of falling into Minster Street. The available income barely covered the running costs, according to David, and was incapable of coping with major repairs or emergencies. Opening the Chapter House for an exhibition might be the first step towards setting up a permanent museum. The real question was whether the tourists would be prepared to pay the entry fee for what was on offer.
‘If this works, the dean’s talking of having a Cathedral café,’ David told us one evening. ‘It makes a sort of sense, I suppose. Why should the tea shops in the town reap all the benefit from the Cathedral’s visitors?’
‘But where would they put it?’ Janet asked.
‘If they close the library there would be plenty of room there.’
‘But that’s inside the Cathedral.’
He shrugged. ‘They could move the exhibition into the library and use the Chapter House or somewhere else in the Close for the café.’
The collection included a good deal of medieval stonework – fragments of columns, tombstones and effigies, some of the grander vestments from the great cope chest, fragments of stained glass, and of course the model of the timber skeleton of the Octagon which David had found in the library cupboard. Canon Hudson asked me to keep an eye out for attractively bound or illustrated volumes in the Cathedral Library, particularly ones with a Rosington connection. I tried to make David laugh by suggesting they used the Lady Chatterley I had found, but he preserved a stone face and said he did not think it would be suitable.
The whole thing was done on the cheap. The dean had no intention of wasting money on new display cases or on extending the collection until there was evidence that the exhibition would make a profit. They had decided against hiring staff, too. One by one, the ladies of the Close were recruited for the exhibition rota. There was to be a grand opening in June with the bishop. The Rosington Observer had promised to send a photographer.
‘I’m sorry you got landed with this as well,’ Janet said to me on the evening of the day I was asked to join the rota. ‘I don’t think David should have asked you.’
‘I don’t mind. Anyway, it may never happen.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I may not be here by then. This job isn’t going to last for ever.’
Janet looked at me and I saw fear in her eyes. ‘I hope you don’t go. Not yet.’
‘It won’t be for a while,’ I said, knowing that I would never be able to resist Janet if she asked for my help, if she asked me to stay. ‘Anyway, the cataloguing may take longer than I think. You never know what’s going to turn up.’
Or who. When I left the library the following afternoon I found Canon Osbaston loitering in the cloisters.
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Good Lord! I’d forgotten I might find you here, Mrs Appleyard. I was just examining the exhibition.’
Wheezing softly, he held open the door to the Close.
‘You’re going to the Dark Hostelry?’
‘Yes.’
He fell into step beside me. ‘Perhaps we might walk together. I’m on my way to the High Street to buy some tobacco.’
We walked for a little while without talking.
Suddenly he burst out, ‘Youlgreave was mad, Mrs Appleyard. Absolutely no doubt about it. Don’t you find it rather warm for the time of year?’
‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘Let’s hope the sunshine lasts. We have a jumble sale for the South American Missionary Society on Saturday.’
Our progress through the sun-drenched Close was slow, a matter of fits and starts. We stopped while Osbaston mopped his face with a large handkerchief. In honour of the weather he was wearing a baggy linen jacket and a Panama hat with a broken brim.
‘When you say “mad”,’ I said after a moment, ‘what do you mean exactly?’
‘I understand Canon Youlgreave was considered eccentric when he first came to Rosington,’ Osbaston said, edging closer to me. ‘And then he grew steadily worse. But it was in ways that made it difficult for one to insist on his having the appropriate medical treatment. When I arrived here in 1933 there were many people living who had known him and all this was common knowledge.’
‘So what did he do?’
‘It was a particularly distressing form of mental instability, I’m afraid.’ Osbaston glanced at my face as if it was a pornographic photograph. ‘It seems that his private life may not have been above reproach. And then there was that final sermon. Caused rather a stir – there were reports in the newspapers. They had to bring in the bishop and I believe Lambeth Palace was consulted too. Fortunately the poor fellow’s family were very helpful. No one wanted any scandal.’ The little head nodded on the great body. ‘So we have that much to be thankful for, Mrs Appleyard. And we mustn’t judge him too harshly, must we? I believe he was always very sickly even as a boy.’
By now we were standing outside the door in the wall leading to the garden of the Dark Hostelry.
‘I must say goodbye, Mr Osbaston.’
He moistened his lips just as he had on Saturday night when he was about to take a sip of Burgundy. ‘I thought I might have a cup of tea at the Crossed Keys Hotel. I don’t suppose you’d care to join me?’
‘That’s very kind, but I should go. Janet’s expecting me.’
He raised his Panama. ‘Some other time, Mrs Appleyard. Delightful to see you again.’ He ambled away.
Janet was on her knees weeding a flower bed near the door into the house. ‘What have you got to smile about?’ she said.
22
‘How nice to see you again, Mrs Byfield,�
�� Mrs Elstree said. ‘Such a shame about the weather.’
‘It’s not a bad turnout all things considered,’ Janet replied. ‘By the way, this is my friend Mrs Appleyard. We were at school together. Wendy, this is Mrs Elstree.’
I shook hands with Canon Osbaston’s housekeeper, a tall, drab woman who looked as though she had stepped out of a sepia-tinted photograph. She stared at the base of my neck. I wondered if my neck was dirty or if a button had come adrift and my bra was showing. But she smiled quite affably and then turned her attention back to Janet.
‘Let’s have some tea, shall we?’ she suggested. ‘I need to check they’ve remembered everything. I’m afraid some of our staff need watching like a hawk.’
The three of us made our way through the crowd to the urn controlled by the Theological College’s cook. It was raining hard so the jumble sale was being held in the dining hall. Since the doors had only just opened, there wasn’t a queue for tea. Most of the people here were middle-aged women in hats and raincoats, armed with umbrellas. They intended to let nothing get between them and a good bargain.
Janet insisted on buying the tea. Mrs Elstree examined the sugar bowl, felt the side of the urn and checked the level in the milk jug.
‘Nothing to worry about, I’m glad to say,’ she murmured in my ear. She had a Fen accent, its harsh edges softened by years of contact with clerical vowels. ‘They know better than to try monkeying about with me.’ She smiled at Janet’s back and lowered her voice still further. ‘Lovely lady, Mrs Byfield. Such a nice family to have in Rosington.’ Then, at a more normal volume, ‘I understand you work in the Cathedral Library, Mrs Appleyard.’
‘For the time being,’ I said. ‘Which reminds me, Canon Osbaston told me you might be able to tell me something about Canon Youlgreave. I came across something he’d written in the library a week or so ago.’
‘He was a strange man and no mistake.’ She lifted her eyes to my face. The pupils were large and black. ‘Not that I knew him well, of course.’
‘Where did he live?’
The Office of the Dead Page 11