They were strange, black-spirited folk, these Dorset peasants. The men of the village came one by one and squatted and stared; but none of them tried to take the worker from his task. It would have been useless; he would have returned, as surely as the wind returns again and again to the heaths and half-seen hills. The hammer rang from dawn to nightfall; rain gusted on the wind, pelting John’s back, soaking his body through the robe. He ignored it, as he ignored the frozen aches in belly and thighs, the flashing and fainting thunders of his brain. The Old gods would have understood, he thought; they who roared and sweated through the day, hacking each other’s guts in endless war to fall and die and be raised each dusk again, carouse the night away in their palace of Valhalla. But the Christian God, what of Him? Would He accept blood sacrifice, as He accepted the torn souls of His witches? Of course, mumbled John’s tired brain, because He is the same. His drink is blood, His food is flesh. His sacraments work and misery and endless hopeless pain…
By the second dawn the piles of stone stretched yards across the heath; and the hammer was still falling, faltering now and erratic, cutting more. Stone for the palaces of the rich, cathedrals for the glory of Rome… The huge wind roared among the hills, flapped the cloak of the girl as she sat patient as a cow, hands crossed in her lap, eyes brimming with half-comprehended pain. John crouched defeated, unable now to stand, fingers frozen in their clasping, while the villagers watched dour from across the heath. And it was ended, the sacrifice made and taken; the worker of stone lay face down, the stuff of a score of legends. A vein pumped in his brown leather neck, blood glowed brightly on muzzle and throat; his body coughed and moved, settling, and John, shuffling forward on useless knees and hands, knew before he reached him he was dead. He raised himself, with an agonised creaking of bones. At his feet the girl stared greyly, stone herself among the grey stone hills; his shadow reached before him, thin and long, wriggling on the tussocky grass of the heath.
Brother John turned slowly, the rushing and the drumming once more in his brain, raised a white face as above him a weird sun glowed. Brighter it grew and brighter again, a cosmic ghost, a swollen impossibility poised in the blustering sky. John cried out hoarsely, raised his arms; and round the orb a circle formed, pearly and blazing. Then another -and another, filling the sky, engulfing, burning cold as ice till with a silent thunder their diameters joined. became a cross of silver flame, lambent and vast. At the node points other suns shone and others and more and more, heaven-consuming; and John saw quite clearly now the fiery swarms of angels descend and rise. A noise came from them, a great sweet sound of rejoicing that seemed to enter his tired brain like a sword. He screamed again, inarticulate, staggering forward, shambling and running while behind him his great shadow flapped and capered. Then the people ran; out into the heath, back along the village street, spreading out from round him as from a focus, tatting and pecking at the shuttered houses while the word spread faster than feet could move, quicker soon than the quickest horse; that round Brother John the heavens opened, transfiguring with glory. The tale grew, feeding on itself, till God in His own person looked down clear-eyed from the azure arch of the sky.
The soldiers heard, at Golden Cap and Wey Mouth and Wool inland on the heath; the clacking telegraphs brought the news of a countryside on the stir. Messages flew for reinforcements, shot and powder, cavalry, great guns. Durnovaria answered and Bourne Mouth and Poole; but the hurricane was in the towers, felling them like saplings. By midday the lines were silent, Golden Cap itself a jumble of broken spars. The garrison commander there mustered a platoon of infantry and two of horse and force-marched across country, hoping against hope to nip rebellion in the bud. One man and one only could hold the rabble, make it fight; Brother John. This time, one way or another, Brother John had to go.
The glory faded; but still the people came, flocking across the heath, fighting their carts and waggons over the hills, bogging in the squelching lanes as they strove to reach him. Some came to him with money and clothing, food, offers of shelter, fast horses. They begged him to run, warned of the soldiers racing to cut him off; but the noise still roaring in his ears deafened him and the sun dogs, glowing in his brain, blinded the last of his reason. The host, the ragged army, grew behind him as he reeled across the heath, face to the great wind from the south. Some brought arms; pitchforks and scythes and knives on poles, muskets hauled from the thatch of twenty score of cottages. Chanting, they reached the sea; following-still, on horseback and on foot, down the steep roads of Kimmeridge, out to the black bite of a bay and the savageness of the water. There they collided at last with the contingent from Golden Cap. The soldiers of the Blue attacked; but there were too many. A charge, a scattering, a man pulled down, trampled and cut; screams tossed away by the wind, a red thing left shaking on the grass, a horse running riderless stabbed bloody by the pikes… The Papists withdrew, following the column just inside long musket shot, sniping to try to turn its head.
Brother John ignored the skirmishing; or perhaps he never saw. Riding now, driven forward by the voices and the noises in his brain, he reached the cliff edge. Below was a waste of water, wild and white, tumbling to the horizon and beyond. Here were no rollers; the hurricane, into which a man might lean, flung the tops off the waves. From a score of runoffs the cliffs spouted water into the bay; but the streams were caught by the wind and held, flung bodily back over the edge of the land, wavering upward arcs that fed a ruffled lake of flood. At the cliffs, John reined; the horse turned bucking, mane streaming in the wind. He raised his arms, calling the people in till they crowded close to hear; black-faced men in sweaters and caps and boots, stolid women clutching scarves to their throats; dark-haired Dorset girls, legs sturdy in their bright bluejeans. Way off on the left the cavalry bunched and jostled, carbines to their shoulders; the smoke of the discharges was whipped away in instantaneous flashes of white. A ball curved singing above John’s head; another smashed the foot of a girl on the edge of the crowd. The mob turned outward, dangerously. The riders pulled back. A gun was coming, dragged by mule teams from the barracks at Lulworth, but until it arrived their captain knew he was helpless; to throw his handful of men into that rabble would be to consign them to death. Miles away, out on the heath, the teams strained at the limber of the culverin; square ammunition carts jolted behind, heading a column of infantry. But there were no more cavalry, none to be had; there was no time…
Over Brother John the seagulls wheeled. He raised his arms again and again, seeming to call the birds in till the great creatures hung motionless, wings outspread a scant six feet above him. The crowd fell silent; and he started to speak.
‘People of Dorset… fishermen and farmers and you, marblers and roughmasons, who grub the old stone up out of the hills… and you, Fairies, the People of the Heath, you were-things riding the wind, hear my words and remember. Mark them all your lives, mark them for all time; so in the years to come, no hearth shall ever be without the tale…’ The syllables ran shrieking and thin, pulverised by the wind; and even the injured girl stopped moaning and lay propped, against the knees of her friends, straining to hear. John told them of themselves, of their faith and their work, their lonely carving of existence out of stone and rock and bareness; of the great Church that held the land by the throat, choking their breath in the grip of her brocade fist. In his brain visions still burned and hummed; he told them of the mighty Change that would come, sweeping away blackness and misery and pain, leading them at last to the Golden Age. He saw clearly, rising about him on the hills, the buildings of that new time, the factories and hospitals, power stations and laboratories. He saw the machines flying above the land, skimming like bubbles the surface of the sea. He saw wonders; lightning chained, the wild waves of the very air made to talk and sing. All this would come to pass, all this and more. The age of tolerance, of reason, of humanity, of the dignity of the human soul. ‘But,’ he shouted, and his voice was cracking now, lost in the great sound of the wind, ‘but for a tim
e, I must leave you… following the course shown me by God, who in His wisdom saw fit to make me… the least worthy of His people… His instrument, and subject to His will. For He gave me a sign, and the sign burned in heaven, and I must follow and obey…’
The crowd jostled; a roaring came from it, faint then louder, rising at last over the sound of the wind. A hundred voices shouted, ‘Where… where…’ and John turned, gown sleeve flogging at his arm, and pointed into the brilliant waste of the sea.
‘Rome…’ The word soared at the people. ‘To the earthly father of us all… the Rock, guardian of the Throne of Peter… Christ’s designate, and His Vicar on Earth… to beg wisdom of his understanding, mercy of his compassion, alms of his limitless bounty… in the name of the Christ we adore, whose honour is stained too often in this land…’ There was more but it was lost in the noise of the crowd. The word spread like wildfire to the farthest members of the mob that a miracle was to be performed. John would go to Rome; he would fly; for a sign, he would walk on water. He would command the waves… The more levelheaded, still carried away, set up a cry for a boat; and a woman shrilled suddenly, her voice rising above the rest. ‘Thine, Ted Armstrong… Give him thine…’
The man addressed waved furious arms. ‘Peace, woman, ‘tis all I own…’ But the protest was lost, swept aside in a surging movement that bore John and his followers down the cliff path, through the singing stands of gorse and bramble that lined the sea. To the watching soldiers it was as if the mob thrust out arms into the water; men, skidding and tumbling in mud, hauled the vessel to her slip, launched her down it. She lay heaving and rolling in the backwash of the waves; oars were shipped, John tumbled aboard. Girls swarmed atop the piles of lobster pots stacked and roped on the beach, climbed back up the cliffs under the reversed firehose-spraying of the springs. The boat, cast off, corkscrewed violently, rolled to show her bilge, straightened as the wind caught her stump of mast, headed for the first of the seething ridges of white. To either side the vast headlands of peat, black iron against the glaring sky; in front the miles on flattened miles of water seething in over the rim of the world. The watchers, straining against the brilliance, saw the keel lift to a hammer blow, surge off one-sided into a trough. Swamped, the craft rose again tinier and dwindling, a dark blob against brightness. And again, further out still in the yeast boiling and roaring surge of the sea; till tired eyes, streaming and screwed against the wind, could no longer mark her progress against the tumbling plain of the ocean.
They hauled the great gun up to the western headland, and primed her and loaded with canister; she rumbled threatening over the brink as dusk was settling on the waste of water below. But she menaced an empty beach; the whole huge crowd was gone. The soldiers stood-to till dawn, huddled in their greatcoats, squatting backs to the wind against the cold iron of the gun while the hurricane, dropping, blew itself away. And the waves, frothing still, slapped at the upturned keel of a boat, urging it back gently towards the land.
Fourth Measure
LORDS AND LADIES
The group of people clustered round the bed had something of the sculptured stillness of a stage tableau. A single lamp, hung above them from one of the heavy beams, threw their faces into sharp relief, accentuated the pallor of the sick man as he lay with one end of Father Edwardes’s violet stole tucked beneath his neck, the fabric stretched between them like a banner of faith. The old man’s eyes rolled restlessly; his hands plucked at the covers as he breathed in short, painful gasps.
Beyond the group, framed in the window against the bluing dusk sky of May, sat a girl. Her long dark blonde hair was bound in a chignon at the nape of her neck; one wisp had escaped, lay curling on her shoulder. It brushed her cheek as she turned her head; she pushed it aside irritably, looked down across the long roofs of the engine sheds to where the late train swung into the yard with a rattle and clash, manoeuvred towards its bay. Some scent from it floated up to the casement; Margaret seemed to feel momentarily the warmth from the steamer brush her face, tinging the mild air with giants’ breath. She looked back guiltily into the room. Her mind, seeming half dazed, translated snatches of the priest’s rumbling Latin.
‘I exorcise thee, most vile spirit, the very embodiment of our enemy, the entire spectre… In the name of Jesus Christ… get out and flee from this creature of God,..’ The girl twined her fingers in her lap, compressing them to feel the knuckle joints grind into each other, and lowered her eyes. The Dutch lamp hanging from the ceiling swayed slightly, its flame leaping and flickering. There was no wind.
Father Edwardes paused and lifted his head quietly to stare at the lamp. The flame steadied, burning again bright and tall. A muffled sob from old Sarah at the foot of the bed; Tim Strange reached forward to squeeze her hand.
‘He Himself commands thee, who has ordered thee cast down from the heights of heaven to the depths of the earth. He commands thee, who commands the sea, the winds, and the tempests… Hear therefore and fear 0 Satan, enemy of the faith, foe to the human race…
Down below the loco chattered again, softly. Margaret turned back unwillingly. Strange how the very sound of oiled steel could evoke such a tapestry of images. The summer-night roads, whitish-grey ribbons trailing into darkness, warm still with the sun’s heat, owl and bat haunted; buzz of early insects in the air, churr of feeding birds; grass knee-long, rich as black velvet under the moon; tall wild hedgerows heavy with the blood-pouring scent of the may. She wanted in an intense flash of longing to be clear of the room and the house, run and dance, roll in the grass till the stars spun giddy sparks above her face.
She swallowed and made instinctively and automatically the sign of the Cross. Father Edwardes had counselled her very closely against any such levity of thought, any aberration that might herald the advent of a possessing and vengeful spirit. ‘For my child,’ the priest had warned solemnly, quoting from the Enchiridion of Von Berg, ‘they may approach mildly; but afterwards they leave behind grief, desolation, disturbance of soul, and clouds of the mind…’
A vein throbbed in Father Edwardes’s temple. Margaret bit her lip. She knew she should go to him now, join the force of her prayers with his, but she couldn’t move. Something stopped her; the same Thing that held her tongue at confession, wouldn’t have her near the box. It seemed, if such a thing were possible, that the long room was skewed; twisted in some strange way, its walls discontinuous, the floor curving and waving hinting at dimensions beyond the senses. As if the short distance that separated her from the group by the bed had become a gulf across which she had stepped to another planet. She shook her head, irritable at the idea; but the fancies persisted. She felt a moment of giddiness; the swinging over nothing, the awful fetch and check of the falling nightmare.
The room steadied on its new dimensions; ‘up’ was now clearly represented by two differing directions. The lamp, hanging still, seemed to be twisted towards her; at her back the window leaned away. She caught her breath, feeling stifled, and the scents and visions came again, soothing and lulling, profferings from hell. Sweet musk of the may, fresh brown stench of new furrows where bread and other things were buried in defiance of Mother Church…
She wanted to call out, take the robes of the priest and beg forgiveness, tell him to stop his mummeries because the fault and the evil lay in her. She tried to scream and thought she had but a deep part of her knew her lips hadn’t moved. She could still see Father Edwardes as if through darkened glass, the hand falling and rising, making again and again the sign of the Cross; she could hear the voice grind on but she herself was a million miles away, out among the cold burning of the stars and the balefires on the mounds of the dead where the Old Ones watched for a time. She was conscious dimly of a knocking and rattling rising to crescendo, the curtains flapping sudden and nauseating across the window. The lamp flame waned again, browning.
‘YIELD THEREFORE; YIELD NOT TO ME, BUT TO THE MINISTER OF CHRIST. FOR HIS POWER URGES THEE, WHO SUBJUGATED THEE TO HIS CROSS. TREMBLE
AT HIS ARM…’
The clanging in the room was thunderous. Margaret fell upward, into night.
A voice calling in the darkness, strident and bright.
‘Margaret!’
‘Margaret!’
A waiting; then, ‘Will you come this minute…’
But the voice could be ignored, until its final utterance. ‘Margaret Belinda Strange, will you come…’ That, the mystic invocation of the second name, must never go unheeded. To defy it would be an open invitation to slapping, to bed-without-supper; and that was a terrible thing on a bright summer night.
The small girl stood on tiptoe, fingers clutching the edge of the desk top. Its surface stretched away from an inch before her nose, rich with wood grain, greasy, shiny, magical with the special magic of grown-up things. ‘Uncle Jesse, what are you doing?’ Her uncle put his pen down, ran his fingers through thick hair still black, touched with grey now at the temples. He shoved his steel-framed spectacles up to pinch at the bridge of his nose. His voice rumbled at the child. ‘Makin’ money, I guess…’ Nobody could have told whether he was smiling or not.
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