The dead of Ledwardine
THERE WERE QUESTIONS you learned never to ask Jane. One of them was, Won’t it wait till morning?
Awakened by the scrape of the bedroom door, Merrily sat up in bed, dizzied by the cold. The bedroom window was opaque. There had been several weeks of fog, November slipping out undercover, miserable, warmish and clammy.
‘Mum…?’
A fan of weak light making an energy-efficient halo around the kid’s head.
Kid. When you woke up and Jane was in the doorway, she was always a little girl again, the blue woolly dog called Ron under an arm and something in the darkness shaking her six-year-old sanity.
Mummy, you won’t die, will you?
Well… not till I’m very old.
From all those years ago, Merrily remembered superstitiously touching the bed’s wooden frame as little Jane came back for the specifics.
How old will you be when you die?
Next day, she’d said happily to Sean, Mummy’s going to die when she’s a hundred and six. And Sean had laughed. Sean who would die a few years later in the wreckage of his car on the motorway, aged thirty-three – same age as Jesus, although that was where the comparisons ended.
‘OK, look…’ Jane wavered in the doorway. ‘I know you’re out early in the morning and everything but if I don’t tell you and then it turns out something bad’s happened…’
Aged nineteen now. A woman. Dear God, how did that happen? Merrily pulled the duvet around her shoulders. There were still times when Jane wouldn’t get a proper night’s sleep if she didn’t take a piece out of yours.
‘It’s the churchyard. Somebody’s in there?’
‘And…?’
Not exactly unusual to find people in the churchyard at night, even in winter. And on a Friday night – men walking home from the pub caught short. Just occasionally, some recently bereaved person who couldn’t sleep, too British to weep publicly in daylight or be seen talking to the dead, in which case…
She scrabbled for the bedside lamp.
‘Mum, no, don’t put another light on, they might—’
‘They?’
‘I heard it, but I couldn’t see much from my window, so I went down to the East Wing?’
Their name for the furthest bedroom, the only one that overlooked a corner of the churchyard. Unused for years; one of them would venture up there every couple of months to bring down the cobwebs.
‘There seems to be a lamp. On the ground or a grave. Not moving anyway, except the light goes in and out, like someone’s walking across it, but that might’ve been the fog. Managed to get the window open, and there was this kind of slapping. Like boots in mud. Suggesting a few of them.’
‘What? Grave robbers?’
‘I was thinking more like a bunch of kids holding a seance or something?’
Merrily sighed. It was not unknown. Also vandalism, gravestones pushed over in a show of drunken strength.
‘What’s the time?’
‘Not sure. Gone midnight. Like I say it could be nothing. Just thought you should know.’
Merrily was feeling for the old grey fleece she’d been wearing instead of a dressing gown, her eyes refocusing. She’d thought Jane was in her bathrobe, but now she saw it was the parka.
‘Have you been out?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Well… don’t.’
Merrily swinging her feet to her slippers on the rag rug, padding over to the wardrobe, reaching inside for her jeans as Jane came hesitantly to the point.
‘I think it’s near Aidan Lloyd’s grave?’
‘Oh.’ Today’s funeral – or maybe yesterday’s by now. ‘How near?’
‘Very near.’
And she’d know. For Jane, it was a grave too far. Aidan Lloyd, killed in a road accident, was their nearest neighbour now, not far over the wall separating the apple trees in the vicarage garden from the apple trees in the churchyard. When they’d first moved here, there’d been more trees and bushes, even an area of mown grass, then new stones had come shouldering in. The dead of Ledwardine were crowding them. Jane didn’t like that.
Merrily followed her down the passage, zipping up the night fleece, stuffing her vape stick into a torn pocket.
They left the passage light on and the door open to see their way into the East Wing with its bare boards and an old bed frame upended against a wall. Merrily pushed the window hard and it flew open with a bang into the cold, curdled night.
‘Sorry,’ Jane said. ‘Should’ve told you I’d only wedged it. Can you…?’
‘I’m not sure.’
Merrily put her head out of the window and the night wrapped itself coarsely, like a soaking lace curtain, around her face. Below her, the trees in the vicarage garden were wrestling in the fog with the churchyard trees over the wall.
And then, through the tangle, she did see it: a gaseous wisp swiftly smothered and then returning, as if from a distant lighthouse.
And yes, it probably was on or near the newest grave, just a patch of raised turfs awaiting a stone. She withdrew from the night, shut the window.
‘What are you going to do?’ Jane said.
‘Guess I’d better check it out. If I’m not back—’
‘Oh come on! Like I’m letting you go on your own?’
Jane against the feeble light, hands on hips, defiant.
Merrily shrugged.
‘Yeah, all right, but we go quietly until we know what it is.’
‘And then maybe even quieter.’
Too dark to see Jane’s grin, but she heard it.
For days now, even weeks, Jane had been moody, not her normal self. Perhaps a gap year between school and further education wasn’t always a good idea. Without some absorbing work-experience, it could be very flat.
Jane had never liked flat.
Down in the hall, Merrily stepped into her boots, unhooked her waxed jacket and pulled down a scarf.
She was thinking that going out there might not actually be wise. At one time you were expected to police your churchyard, but times had changed quite quickly; not so long since a vicar had been stabbed to death outside his own church. OK, not around here, but a warning had been sounded.
And fog complicated everything. Fog itself was aggressive.
Merrily unbolted the front door but didn’t turn the key. Taking in nicotine, the e-cig glowing green, she exchanged glances with Jesus, still compassionately dangling his lantern in the framed print of Holman-Hunt’s Light of the World, then turned to Jane.
‘Don’t suppose if we were to put a ladder up against the wall at the bottom of the garden…?’
‘Too many trees.’ Jane was locating the zipper on her parka. She looked up. ‘Not that there will be soon if the graveyard goes on expanding. Couple of years’ time we’ll be burying people in our flower beds. Turning the shed into a mausoleum.’
‘Unlikely. The diocese wouldn’t devalue this place. When they get rid of me, they’ll switch the vicarage to a little semi and flog this off to a nice big family from London. Anyway, you’ll be at university soon.’
And might never come back here to live. Who knew? Merrily opened the front door, felt the air. Not at cold as the East Wing, but cold enough.
‘I really didn’t think that corner was part of the graveyard,’ Jane said. ‘How long have they had it?’
‘Since before my time.’
‘So it was just waiting there, getting mowed and weeded by Gomer, just waiting for somebody to die.’
‘They’re an odd family, flower. Wasn’t what you could call a good funeral.’
Aidan Lloyd’s service had been short and muted, not well attended for a farming family. The central aisle had separated the father from the mother and her husband. No conspicuous grief on either side, only a sense of impenetrable negativity which somehow seemed to go deeper than death.
‘Got your phone?’
‘So we can call 101 if necessary?’ Jane patting a pocket of her parka. ‘Then the cops take five minutes to answer and another five to put us through to Hereford? Where someone suggests we call back in the morning.’
‘And it’s switched on?’
‘Yes!’
Jane jerking up her zip.
Merrily pulled on her gloves.
‘Right, then.’