Twenty-Nine

The monthly gathering of the Parish, the Vestry Meeting, was held at the church. Only those on the Committee attended: and the priest, the two parish overseers and Aubrete were all that entered the long aisle that evening, flinging off their coats against the early summer rain, trailing the damp along the stone floor.

As the evening light grew dim, the conversation grew heated.

‘Sink another shaft,’ Joshua Maudham said. His face was suffused with angry colour.

‘And bear the cost?’ Aubrete retorted. ‘And lose the seam in this one?’

‘Steam coal,’ Maudham said. ‘Sink another shaft at Hammerton, up the coast, where the grade’s likely to be better.’

‘There’s no need to sink another,’ Aubrete insisted. ‘Look on him as an engineer, an adviser.’

Maudham crashed a fist on the pew alongside him. ‘He is no engineer!’

‘He may as well be,’ Aubrete said. ‘We have had all the engineers in the district. We have had those from Bristol. And the only time that the water has sunk is after the Egyptian.’

‘With his filthy worship, God help us,’ Maudham replied.

Each man looked at the priest. The Reverend was fatter than Maudham, slumped in his corner seat, his face showing weakness, uncertainty, his hands hidden in his unseasonal and heavy coat.

‘Even if you offer him shares in the pit, there is no certainty he’ll do as you wish,’ he said.

Maudham rose to his feet. ‘Is that all you have to say, man?’ he demanded. ‘Drive him off the parish, or we shall be damned for all eternity!’

The priest shrugged. ‘I can bring the village to Christ,’ he said. ‘I cannot make them believe.’

‘Believe?’ Maudham thundered. ‘They are no more than cattle. They believe what they are told.’

The priest looked at him with shaded, cynical eyes. ‘They believe in what their grandfathers have told them,’ he said softly. ‘Gods of the hill, wraiths in the dark, voices in the grass.’

Maudham advanced on him. He pointed into the priest’s face. ‘I’ll see you run off this living, and take no other,’ he said.

‘I am a realist,’ the priest replied.

‘You are the devil!’

The priest said nothing at all.

Aubrete was already pulling on his coat. Above him, the rain beat on the stained glass, speckling the faces of the angels with tears.

‘I shall offer him half my shares, if he can cure the water,’ he said. ‘Money may keep him, if nothing else.’

Maudham stared at the younger man. ‘You shall be in hell with your idolatries,’ he said.

‘I do not doubt it,’ Aubrete replied.