Eleven Pipers Piping

by C. C. Benison

  When comes another year

  For to bloom well and bear well

  So happy let us be

  Let every man take off his cap

  And shout to the old apple tree.

  I should have worn a cap, Tom thought, noting that no one, man or woman, removed his or hers.

  “Now shout!”

  “Old apple tree, we wassail thee!” everyone shouted, breath streaming into the chilly air.

  Here’s hoping thou wilt bear

  Hats full

  Caps full

  Three-bushel bags full

  And little heaps under the stair!

  Hip-hip-hooray!

  “Well, that was inter—” Tom began as the third hip-hip-hooray was overtaken by a staccato of explosions ripping through the darkness of the orchard, the force of which seemed to shake the air and certainly made him jump. “Oh, my God, what was that?” slipped from his mouth before he realised it was, of course, the dramatic finale—the Guns firing off rounds to chase away the evil spirits and wake the trees from their winter slumber. He realised, too, in that second, he had crushed Miranda to him. She was now wriggling free. “Sorry, darling. Daddy isn’t completely attuned to country life.”

  As the quartet of cressets around the apple tree was extinguished, a new set flared into life around another tree farther down the orchard’s slope towards the millpond.

  “Do we do this more than once?” Tom watched the throng drift through the darkness towards the new light while a squeezebox somewhere played impish melodies. Through the flickers of flame, he could make out Màiri’s uncovered head bent, to Ariel no doubt, the Kaifs in some uneasy truce as they shepherded Becca forward, and the red tip of Old Bob’s bobble hat bouncing along like a little jelly.

  “Three times, if I remember,” Judith replied, slipping from the partial shadow of light cast by Tom’s cresset.

  “I’m going to get closer!” Miranda darted away.

  “We’ll be right here at the back,” Tom called after her. “I’ve got this … torch thing,” he added, glancing at Judith’s pink jacket. “You can’t miss us.”

  “You’ve been blessed with a fine daughter,” Judith remarked as Tom caught up to her and they trailed after the villagers over the spongy grass.

  “You’re the second person to say that to me tonight.”

  Old Bob caught his attention again. Remarkably for a man his age, and condition, he was helping one of the lads set the ladder against the tree. Tom had a question for Judith about Bob, though the middle of the Wassail probably wasn’t the best time to voice it. Nevertheless: “May I ask, did Bob talk of anything else with you yesterday?”

  Judith stopped with him at the edge of the crowd, and fell again within the penumbra of light from his cresset. “Well,” she said, lifting the hood of her jacket over her head, “he told me of his prognosis, of course. Didn’t we talk about this yesterday in the churchyard?” She gave him a swift elliptical glance. “I think that’s what spurred him in part to tell me the details of my father’s death, which had been weighing on his conscience all these years. But you know how ill Bob is, despite appearances, Tom. Other than his doctor, I think you’re the only person he’s told.”

  “You say, ‘in part.’ ” Tom glanced over to the radiant apple tree, into which the king and queen were climbing. “Was he seeking something else from you? You are a nurse.”

  She was tying the strings below her hood, but she turned her head again. This time her eyes in the flicking flame were gimlet-thin. She said evenly: “You’re fishing for something, Vicar.”

  But the crowd began again the Wassail chant, sparing Tom for the moment. He was uncomfortably aware that Judith might very well think his enquiry intrusive and unwelcome, but he felt morally bound to offer his dissent and caution her. As he absently recited the Wassail verse for the second time, he formulated in his mind what he would say, but when the final cheers were followed by another shattering volley of shotgun fire, he flinched again. The words flew from his mind.

  “You are a townie, aren’t you?” Judith observed as she led the way down the grass towards a third tree, again lit against the obtruding darkness. Stopping, she hunched her shoulders and moved her arms protectively across her chest, as if drawing in against the cold.

  “That looks more like a mulberry,” she remarked as the ladder was raised into the branches.

  She wasn’t alone. Tom could hear similar mutterings around him until finally one voice—sharp, female, and recognisable—rose above the chorus: “You ridiculous man! That’s not an apple tree!”

  “Florence?” Tom scanned the backs of heads and profiles visible in the tenebrous light. He and Judith were standing on a gentle rise in the orchard’s uneven terrain, which climbed behind them to the vicarage wall. “How did she manage to hobble down Thorn Hill?”

  “She probably made poor Venice carry her.”

  But Judith’s remark was lost amid the titters and Florence’s triumphant declaration: “That’s a mulberry!”

  “The Wassail,” the emcee interrupted, then raised his voice as the crowd hummed like disturbed bees, “the Wassail is not just about apples—”

  “Nonsense!”

  “—it’s also about pears and other fruits. It wasn’t just about getting cider, it was about a good summer full of fruits.” His voice gained in confidence. “This is probably not an apple tree, but it is, however, a berry tree.”

  “You don’t wassail a mulberry tree! You might just as well wassail a yew tree and you wouldn’t want to give a leg up to those poisonous beggars, ha!”

  The buzz became a collective gasp.

  “Florence! Really!” Venice’s voice broke through but then subsided into a jag of coughing.

  “Yewberries are not poisonous, and you know it, Florence Daintrey!” a new voice snapped. Madrun’s. From his vantage point, Tom could discern his housekeeper’s face dancing in flame on the other side of the tree and the thunder in her expression. “Only the seeds are poisonous.”

  “Oh, dear,” Judith murmured.

  Emollient words formed on Tom’s lips and he was about to step forward when the emcee, by now choleric—the uncooked dough of his face had grown blotchy with patches of red and white—began to shriek in a way unbecoming a gentleman.

  “Ladies, it doesn’t matter! It doesn’t bloody matter! We’re wassailing this bloody tree and I don’t care if it bears coconuts! Poisonous coconuts! Now shut up!”

  Everyone was stunned into silence, as if their normally proper schoolmaster had been revealed a champion swearer.

  “Well, get on with it then!” Florence snapped, her voice slightly subdued.

  “Thank you, madam!” He jammed his hat forward on his head.

  This time Emily Swan scrambled up the tree (whatever its genus) after the king with something less than regality and the whole rite began a new cycle, with the emcee, his hand shaking in the aftermath of rage, pulling a new slice of bread from a bag and dipping into a proffered bowl of cider. But the atmosphere had soured. Tom sensed an eagerness to get it over with and get back to the warmth of the Scout Hut and the promise of more food and drink.

  “After all these years,” Judith remarked, “how could they not know which trees in this orchard are apple and which are not? Anyway,” she continued, regarding Tom speculatively. “You were on a fishing expedition about Bob Cogger.”

  “Please don’t take this amiss, but earlier today my daughter happened to mention—quite innocently—that you had been … researching something, well, disturbing on my computer—”

  “Yes, I know what you mean. I’m sorry, I’d had a call on my mobile and forgot to sign out. You’ve been so kind to let me use it. I realised my mistake about an hour later, but it was too late. I didn’t think it would be Miranda who would come upon it.”

  “She had questions in the car this morning. Mercy killing, assisted death—they’re novel concepts to her.”

  “And I apologise for putting you in an awkw
ard position.”

  “That’s all right. I don’t mind talking with Miranda about such things. It was simply …” He couldn’t find the words.

  Judith lifted the programme. The others had begun to recite the Wassail verses again, albeit in a somewhat desultory fashion. She opened her mouth to join in, then dropped her hand and turned back to Tom.

  “I think I understand.” She held up a gloved finger. “Because I’m a nurse and because Bob is old, diabetic, and suffering from chronic renal failure—and because of what I was looking at on the Internet—you thought I might be helping him to end his life.”

  “Well …”

  “I wouldn’t really need to look on the Internet specifically for that, Tom. I do know how. When Trevor was moving into stage three of Parkinson’s and unable to walk or stand, we talked about it, looked into it.” She raised the programme again. “ ‘Old apple tree,’ ” she began reciting with the others, then glanced up at him, “Shall we continue …?”

  “But you didn’t—with your husband, I mean.”

  “No. We couldn’t. I couldn’t. I’m a Christian woman, Tom, despite spotty church attendance. I believe in the sanctity of life.”

  “Then why …,” Tom began, his voice lost in the final eruption of hip-hip-hooray. “Oof,” he grunted, flinching as one gun went off again, blasting into the night sky, one shot following sickeningly—though less rhythmically than before—on another.

  But his mind was arrested by a curious anomaly in the third—and frighteningly close—volley, what to his townie ears sounded like a slightly different resonance. And in that second, before he could even think to grasp his meaning, he heard another sound, a hideous groan, and felt Judith’s body slam against his own, crumple and pitch forward onto the grass, an ooze of pink on the outer edge of an inconstant ring of firelight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The tea was hot and sweet, much hotter than his tongue should accept, much sweeter than he would normally take, but Tom sipped at it greedily, hungry for its restorative powers, welcoming the glorious warmth radiating from his solar plexus outwards up through his chest and along his arms. Brooking no argument, Madrun had settled a blanket around his shoulders, though warmth enough seeped from the kitchen’s Aga and the vicarage’s central heating. Thus cosseted, he could feel himself begin to sink into a kind of torpor of relief, as if he were a child back in Gravesend settled by Dosh or Kate back into sleep with hot chocolate and Jaffa cakes after waking from a particularly savage nightmare. He fought to keep his eyelids from descending, but they did, and when they did cascading images of the last hour jolted him awake with new horror.

  In his first heartbeat, he had thought Judith had fallen into a faint, shocked by the proximity of the third shotgun blast, but at the second beat, as a spray of hot liquid touched his throat and hands, he understood this was nothing so quaint, though his brain refused at first to make sense of what was passing before his eyes in the flickering light of the cresset—the spreading stains along the yoke of her jacket like dark wine newly spilled, the pink fabric split and shredded, its downy filling burst and spilling. And when, by the third beat, all the disparate details coalesced into a vision of horror sprawled at his feet, he was seized by a shock so sweeping in its intensity, he felt his knees buckling. Some good part of that, he understood now, as he gulped the sweet tea, was the hideous echo of his own wife’s death, flickering images like an old silent movie of a woman’s body, Lisbeth’s, fallen in a wash of blood, images that still haunted his dreams and intruded into his waking thoughts. On the fourth beat, barely conscious of the nasty damp penetrating to the skin of his knees, he was crouched over Judith, dipping the flickering light of the torch close in desperate search for some vestige of life.

  There was none.

  And then tumult. Like a rogue wave, alarm coursed through the revelers. The varied pitch of the explosion, perhaps, the varied direction of the shot, some incongruity below the radar of consciousness, sent those on the periphery of the crowd, those nearest Tom, twisting their necks in puzzled enquiry, a few eyes coming to rest on the ground, now a bier for Judith’s body.

  “Someone’s been shot!” a voice bawled. A hush of disbelief contained the orchard for a second, and then a thrum, like the susurration of disturbed bees, swept through the crowd, but unlike bees agitated in their hive, none swarmed in a single direction. Though barely conscious of anything behind the light encircling him, Tom could sense a pandemonium of movement, hear the tramping boots and the brush of fabric, glimpse the frail light of lanterns fading towards the Scout property or towards the gate to Poynton Shute and the village centre. But others raced towards him, drawn by the spectacle of the fallen body and the crouched figure.

  “Oh, my Lord!” one woman shrieked. Tom looked up to see her spread her hands over her face, then looked at the other downturned faces, each one wearing some expression of horror and disbelief, some glancing quickly away, others staring hard into the darkness as if in search of the source of this outrage.

  “Is she—?” said one.

  “I’m afraid so,” Tom managed to croak, rising unsteadily, lurching to his feet still grasping the cresset. He noted faces before him flinch.

  “Vicar, you’ve blood all over you.”

  Tom swiped at the wetness along his neck above his collar, then stared at his glistening fingers, smeared and viscous. Without thought, he rubbed them down his trousers, over and over in hard, repulsed motions until he felt his skin chafe.

  “Has someone a mobile?” He surveyed the stricken faces in the flickering light.

  “I’ve called emergency, Tom.” Màiri’s calming voice broke through. “Perhaps we should all give the vicar a little room,” she added, slipping through a breach in the phalanx of villagers.

  Tom watched her eyes travel to the lifeless body at his feet, watched her flinch, watched her eyes return to his, full of disquiet. But all she said was, “Madrun has taken Miranda away.”

  He nodded, grateful, but suddenly sick at the notion that this frightening episode had erased from his mind for even a moment the most precious thing in his life. As his eyes, unbidden, returned to the corpse, two new figures shouldered into the circle of light.

  “Oh, my God, what’s happened?” Penella’s voice was strangled with disbelief. One arm went to her middle, as if she were trying to keep herself from crumpling. But in the crook of her other arm, almost obscenely casual, rested a shotgun.

  “What’s happened,” a voice barked from the crowd that recoiled from the sight of the weapon, “is that you’ve killed this woman.”

  “I don’t even know who she is!” Penella stared goggle-eyed at the body. “I didn’t …” She gestured helplessly to the male figure beside her, similarly gripping a shotgun. “It’s impossible. I was—”

  “We were over there.” Adam Moir motioned down the orchard, in the direction of the entrance gate to Poynton Shute. He gaped at the ground, his face blanched, a sheen of sweat breaking over his skin. “Over there.” His hand trembled. “And—”

  “And we shot in the air! We shot in the air!” Penella’s face crumpled in tears.

  “They’re blanks,” Adam insisted, his voice cracking. “We shot blanks.”

  “That weren’t no blank used, lad.” The belligerent voice intruded again, rich with country authority. “That weren’t shot, neither. Look at her! T’were a slug in one of yours and—”

  “There wasn’t!” Adam began to rally.

  “All right!” Màiri broke in. “There’s no point in arguing this now. We need to clear the orchard. Any of you who think you saw something or heard something that might be useful, go and wait at the Scout Hut or give me your names now. You lot”—she turned to a few of the younger men—“pull up those torches and bring them here. The rest of you go to your homes … or back to the Scout Hut, if anyone has the heart to keep this poor sad Wassail going.”

  Folk glanced at each other with distress and hopeless resignation.

&nbs
p; “We were all turned the wrong way,” said the woman who had kept her hands over her face through most of the exchange. “And it’s too dark to see anything.”

  “But it did sound more like it came from over this part,” said another.

  “There!” Adam said. “I told you.”

  His antagonist gave him a sour glare, then everyone began to shuffle off, gathering up other folk who’d lingered, curious on the periphery, their voices fading into the darkness.

  “You two will need to stay.” Màiri addressed Adam and Penella, glancing at their shotguns. Penella nodded, crying fat sobs, leaking mascara down her cheeks. Adam offered no succour; he glanced at Màiri, then stared sullenly at the body.

  “I don’t expect we’ll be having that drink,” Màiri murmured as the young men returned with the cressets and planted them in the grass around Judith’s fallen body, as if preparing the ground for some primitive midnight ritual.

  Tom glanced at Màiri, grateful for the bonhomie. “No, I expect not.” He sensed his smile wobbling.

  “You’ve had a wee shock, Tom. Why don’t you go back to the vicarage? They can find you there when they need you.”

  “Best I stay, I think. I’ll be fine, really. I feel I should keep a vigil of sorts.” Because I didn’t with Will.

  Màiri raised a doubting eyebrow, though she said, “Of course. I understand.”

  Now, in the kitchen, Tom took another gulp of tea and considered what he was going to say to the detectives when they arrived. In the orchard, by a body uncomforted by anything but the dross of leaves and putrefying fruit, unmarked by anything but crude tin-can torches, unwitnessed by anyone but himself, he had begun a simple prayer for Judith Ingley, asking the Lord to receive her soul, have mercy on her, pardon all her sins and shelter her soul in the shadow of His wings. The invocation, murmured into the still air, was almost reflexive in its choice of the words, burnished as they were by vigils at other deathbeds. And it was just as well the words slipped without difficulty from his tongue, for his mind, fuelled by a spasm of pure anger, had flown to un-Christian thoughts of hate and reprisal: The outrage of shooting into a crowd where children—his child!—were present. The outrage of a public execution, for this was no accident. And then came the terrifying thought—he couldn’t block it; it rose on beating black wings—that he may have been the target. Had he and Judith shifted stance as the trigger was pulled? He was certain they hadn’t, and he felt a moment’s guilty relief that he had been spared, but the thought of Miranda rendered fatherless as well as motherless left him nauseous, suddenly gasping for air, and it took an effort of prayer to steel himself and allow a regular measure of cold night air to cleanse his lungs, clear his brain, and restore him to the shattered world. Peering into the shadows, he spotted the silhouettes of Penella and Adam waiting, as they all were, for the klaxon of the first emergency vehicles to sound down the Pennycross Road. They were in muttered argument when he approached.