On his way into the church a little before eight one bright Monday morning, Francis Baynes, vicar of St Mary’s-in-Ashmore, stopped to watch Anna Dawe ride her bicycle towards him and thought what a gift her energy was to the world. Thoughts like this could still surprise him, as if he believed himself not quite mature enough to have them. At the same time, it was impossible to deny, they made him rather pleased with his own progress. He thought of himself as a vessel, which had barely begun to fill up.
Anna Dawe’s bicycle was notorious throughout the parish. You saw it everywhere, an old black ladies’ sit-up-and-beg equipped with the hub gears and worn skirt savers of another age. Its bleached wicker baskets were always full of shopping. It was as unforgiving in use as an old donkey. Nevertheless, she rode it everywhere and when Francis Baynes caught sight of her that morning the machine was moving freely enough, rattling down the hill past the almshouses to pick up speed on the steep stretch past the Green Man. By the time Anna shot out into Church Lane, he estimated later, she had achieved a brisk twenty miles an hour. It was idiotic of him, given this, to wave his arms and step into her path. For a moment they stared at one another in horror, neither quite able to wrench free of the moment. Then, a comical expression of concentration on her face, she swerved around him; while at the same time he stepped back smartly into the protection of the lych-gate.
‘Anna!’
‘Can’t stop. No brakes. Come for tea, Francis. Come at three!’
Banking with a kind of desperate athleticism round the bend at the corner of the churchyard, she was gone. Her shoulder had actually brushed his. Certainly he had been close enough to smell her perfume, something flowery and light-hearted. He raised his hand to wave after her; then, looking round as if he expected to be observed, dropped it suddenly and made his way through the gate.
History, they say, makes for a crowded churchyard; and Ashmore had seen the Saxons come and go. There were graves everywhere, long, eroded wafers of Horsham slab interspersed with stubby plaques of bland grey South African granite, as shiny as the paintwork of an expensive car. Laminated and flaky, emerging at contentious angles from the turf, the oldest stones clustered by the flint-knapped walls of the church, where a massive yew, the candles of which had enlivened a hundred winters, helped shelter them from the wind. Francis Baynes never tired of this quiet corner of his parish. It caught a little sun, even in December, and on late summer evenings the liquid song of a blackbird could be heard from the branches of the tree. Since the good weather began he had made it a habit to spend a few minutes there every morning. He was a diffident man and often felt he had more to offer his dead than his live parishioners. At any rate he liked to begin the day with them.
He bent down to scrape lichen off one of the stones. ‘Wife of’, he read; then, on the next, ‘Hys lovinge sister’. Here lay crowded together the stalwarts and notables of a thousand years of village life, the Millers, the Clements, the Rose Popes and, above all, the Herringes, Ashmore’s most powerful family, whose ancestor Joshua had built the great house Nonesuch in 1482. Herringe influence, uncontested for four hundred years, had waned sharply after the First World War – the family appearing to withdraw, rearrange itself subtly, shift the focus of its attention elsewhere – then further in the 1980s as incomers flooded the village with new money. Would it be eclipsed altogether by the recent bizarre events at Nonesuch? Or would Stella Herringe’s cousin, John Dawe, be able to turn things round again?
In life the Herringes had prospered. In death they had imparted to the turf around them a dark, healthy gloss. ‘Sir William Herringe’, Francis read, ‘He meeteth hys maker with a keene eye.’ Not far off lay the mother of William’s great-grandchildren, Clara de Montfort Herringe. Time had erased Clara’s dates but spared capriciously her curious epitaph: ‘A woman of great self-knowledge’. Clara – who had chosen to be buried alone despite the predecease of a perfectly good husband and whose portrait, done by a pupil of Holbein, had hung in the Long Corridor of Nonesuch until quite recently – was Francis’s favourite Herringe. The portrait, which he had seen only once, a few weeks before its destruction, had shown her dressed in brocade, decked with pearls, holding a stringed instrument. Her eyes had seemed to catch at his, frank with greed, used to power. ‘What a monster!’ he had thought agreeably, thankful he would never have to deal with her. A little under half the Herringe graves harboured women. And here was a curious thing: they were a long-lived family, but until Stella’s death in the unexplained fire that destroyed much of Nonesuch, the women had always outlived the men.
‘Stella Elizabeth Clara Herringe, 1947–1999’, announced her headstone. There were a few unseasonal flowers in a pot at the foot of the grave, arranged, Francis guessed, by Anna Dawe. To him they looked defeated, but he doubted Anna would see it that way. Her strength of character lay in her optimism. The grave itself had yet to settle completely, the turves fitting together over Stella Herringe with a haphazard air, raw and unfinished-looking: something Stella, always so perfectly turned out, would have hated. Appearance had meant so much to her, reputation less. Bizarre rumours, generated in the socially heated village atmosphere after the fire, still entertained the evening drinkers at the Green Man – cruelty to animals, a clandestine laboratory discovered deep inside the old house itself, death forestalling the prosecution of the woman but not of her successful cosmetics business. (This last item had actually made the television news, some months after the main event, puffing Ashmore up with a questionable kind of pride. It was like having your own murderer.) Even before the fire there had been rumours of tension between the two women over Anna’s relationship with John. Stella Herringe, Francis was sure, would have shrugged it all off. ‘But a grave like a building site, darling,’ he imagined her saying, ‘is something else again.’ She had been a difficult person, who often reminded him of her own greedy-eyed ancestress; but he had to admit he had rather liked her.
Francis dusted the dry grey particles of lichen from his fingertips and sighed. After a moment he consulted his watch. Passing through the cool shadows of the lych-gate, he looked carefully both ways before he left its shelter. The road was empty; though, crossing it, he experienced a sudden clear memory of the morning’s near disaster. He heard again the sad clank of the approaching bicycle. He heard Anna’s sudden intake of breath. ‘No brakes!’ she had called. ‘Can’t stop!’ For a moment, as she pedalled away from him, sunlight had struck through her yellow dress to give him a glimpse of her long legs and leave him in confusion. Francis Baynes was a little in love with Anna Dawe. What this meant to him as a man he was unsure. What it meant to him as a servant first of God, then his bishop and finally of the parish of Ashmore-under-Crowbury was clear enough. It meant the harrowing of his soul – or, at any rate, a considerable agitation of that entity. He shook his head, shut the lych-gate and set off into the village at a penitential pace.
He was twenty-six years old and, as one of his kinder parishioners put it, ‘still rather feeling his way’.