Engage
NEVER JANE’S FAVOURITE room, the scullery. It was small and didn’t lead anywhere, and all its window showed you was the churchyard wall, reminding you that life would one day dump you on the other side of it. Particularly ominous on a moonlit night, like this one, when the phone was ringing.
She’d bought Mum the phone a couple of years ago, a present. The kind of phone you associated with doctors’ surgeries and village police stations in old black and white British movies. It had seemed cool at the time; tonight it seemed like the kind of phone the angel of death would use and felt heavy and portentous when she uncradled it.
‘Ledwardine Vicarage,’ Jane said.
A relieved breath was trapped in the earpiece then a woman’s voice.
‘Merrily, I’m sorry to ring you at this time of night, but we have a problem.’
‘Erm… Sophie, it’s Jane.’
‘Oh. You sounded just like her.’
Was that supposed to be a compliment?
‘She’s out,’ Jane said. ‘I’m not sure when she’ll be back. Did you call before?’
‘Twice.’
‘It’s been a complicated night. Apparently.’
‘Trust me, Jane, it isn’t going to get any easier if I don’t speak to your mother soon. Is it possible she can be reached on the phone, wherever she is?’
‘Erm…’ Jane sat down behind the desk, felt around for the Anglepoise switch. ‘I don’t think she’d want me to bother her right now. She’s in the church.’
A period of, like, restraint at Sophie’s end. Jane tilted the cup of the Anglepoise lamp so that it made a tight circle of light on the desktop with its sermon book and stubby pencils. She sank back into deep shadow and felt inexplicably calm.
‘You said there was a problem.’
‘If you could just ask her to call me…’
‘She’ll probably be very tired, so if you could tell me—’
‘… as soon as she gets in. In fact, if you can reach her on her mobile…’
‘In church?’
‘It’s not a service, presumably.’
‘Depends what you mean by service. Look, I know you think I’m still some irresponsible kid, all clothes and clubbing and stuff, but—’
‘I never quite thought that of you, Jane.’
Never quite thought that?
‘But when I’m here and not injecting heroin into my arm I do try and relieve her of some of the burden. And I don’t talk about things to anybody outside the loop. As she thinks of you as inside the loop, I can tell you that this is what we like to call a night job?’
‘Damn. Does it involve someone from Kilpeck?’
‘I think it does.’
‘In which case I’m probably too late. How long’s she been gone?’
‘Over an hour. Look—’ Jane sprang out of shadow. ‘I do know about Innes and what a knife-edge Mum’s on. And I actually don’t want her to have to leave this place because of that bastard or anyone else, so anything you can tell me…’
‘Let me think about this. If I don’t hear from Merrily in the next hour I shall have to call you back.’
‘Thank you so much,’ Jane said.
Only Ethel was waiting in the kitchen. She put some Felix out in the cat bowl and went to the dresser to cut herself a slice of fruit cake. She was carrying it back into the scullery when the phone rang again. That hollow, visceral ring that shrilled emergency, emergency. Bloody hysterical phone.
She hefted it to an ear.
Ledwardine Vic—’
‘Merrily?’
‘Bloody hell, Sophie—’
Realizing, before the name was quite out, that this wasn’t Sophie.
‘That’s her daughter, is it? Jane?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry, I thought—’
‘Jane, this is Julie Duxbury, from Ewyas Harold. Is it possible you can get a message to Merrily, or am I too late?’
‘Too late for what?’
Another one?
‘Jane, is she in the church?’
Jane hesitated. Julie Duxbury didn’t.
‘I’ve been talking to Gareth Brewer’s wife, who— I’m trusting you, Jane, because I have to start trusting people, or nothing will ever stop all this. Lara’s been getting calls from Sir Lionel Darvill. Angry and frustrated and certainly suspicious of me. I meddle, you see. We have such small congregations, scattered over so many churches now, that we’re inclined to feel superficial, and so we meddle. All that’s left for us to do, I sometimes fear.’
‘Nothing wrong with that.’ Jane said. ‘Someone has to. OK, yeah, she’s in the church.’
‘With Gareth?’
‘I think so.’
‘That’s all right then. That’s good. Jane, your mother needs to know that Darvill knows she was here this evening – I don’t know how he knew, he has eyes everywhere. Suffers from an increasing paranoia and he’ll damage people without a thought. Doesn’t want her talking to Gareth. Well, that’s no surprise, and it shouldn’t affect anything, it’s her job. I just wanted her to know, but it doesn’t matter.’
‘Are you at home?’
‘Yes, but I may have a visitor later. I’ll give you my mobile number just in case but it doesn’t matter. Just tell her not to worry, and we’ll talk tomorrow.’
Jane took the number down, encouraged at someone treating her like an adult, for whatever reason. Then she called Sophie back.
A tick had formed in Gareth Brewer’s lower face, seeming to follow the rhythm of the fluctuating candle flames.
‘Wasn’t about making him dance,’ he said. ‘It was what he wanted.’
‘You thought that?’
‘It was what we had to believe.’
‘You mean that was what Darvill told you.’
He’d admitted to putting a menthol inhaler up his nostrils to block the smell when they opened the coffin. He’d read police did that at post-mortems.
On his feet now, backing away from the chancel. She’d had to stop him trying to demonstrate how he and another dancer – Jed, the cheesemaker – had shared the dead weight. The two of them lifting the body, carrying it between them, its arms over their shoulders, at one end of the open grave. The grisly customizing of a dance that Lionel Darvill had learned from his father.
‘So you were bringing him back. Into the fold. Into his Kilpeck persona – the Man of Leaves.’
‘That’s it. We put the mask on him first. By the time we’d cut the jacket off, got the bells strapped to his calves, it was like, Oh, we gotter get him out to get the rag jacket on proper. So out he comes. One of the boys was sick. Got sent into Iestyn’s field to throw up.’
Jane had described the holly and the white-berried mistletoe set in bark, the fissured features that had seemed to alter their expression in the unsteady lamplight.
Gareth Brewer looked up, that vibration in his jaw.
‘I s’pose what we’d forgotten was how he’d died. Instantly, it said in the Hereford Times. Sounds clean, that. I never figured he’d be, you know, mangled. Nobody said his face’d been half ripped off. And the post-mortem and sewn up and that. It was just a blotch. I’m sorry to be telling you all this, I—’
‘No, go on…’
‘When the lid come off, it was horrible. No blood, like, but that made it worse. This drained thing in the suit and tie. Me, I just turned off. At first. We’d agreed to do it, put the bells on him and the jacket and the mask, to bring him back into the side. We were the Kilpeck Morris. We’d had the benefits of it, and we accepted there was things you gotter do sometimes. Things outside normal experience. Seemed like a good thing to do, sending him from here as a dancer. Reverse the damage Iestyn done. We were happy with that idea.’
‘Happy?’
‘We were up for it. Specially after a few drinks. Making jokes, the way you do. Burke and Hare, all that. We had two good spades, so it didn’t take that long to get down to the box. We’d danced first. We didn’t need music. It was slow. You could almost find the rhythm by your own heartbeat. We’d bound cloth over the sticks so there wouldn’t be much noise. We felt energized. Up for it. Feeling… not good, but capable.’
‘How long was all this going on?’
‘I dunno. An hour? Hour and a half? An energy starts to come through, look. The energy you put in, it increases the energy you get back. When you first start dancing, you might think you’re fit, but you get tired quite soon. Gotter keep on till you break through it. Till you engage.’
‘Like moving up a gear?’
‘That’s it. When that happens, you come out… I don’t know where you come out, but it’s somewhere else. When you’re doing it proper. When you’re in the right place at the right time. On the right day… night.’
‘Festive days?’
‘Aye. Saints’ days. And the equinoxes. When you’re holding the balance between the seasons. Dancing the summer in. Or, in our case, more often, it’s the winter. Summoning what we needs for the hard days to come.’
‘And the energies, where do they come from?’
He shrugged.
‘Out of the earth. And the air. The rain sometimes. The wind. Ice. Or fog. Even fog. You work with what’s around. You goes at it steady till it starts to engage.’
Gareth talked about the euphoria that would often emerge in the whoops and roars of the Border morris men. And the fusion, all of them becoming the same organism. She remembered the grunts and the rhythms of breathing in the churchyard, and the smell of the country fog. No roaring, no whooping. Only what must have been the muted cackling of the bells around a dead man’s legs.
‘I still can’t imagine how you got through it.’
‘We just did, Mrs Watkins. We had the energy between us, all of us together.’
‘What were you feeling then? Inside.’
‘Nothing. It was only afterwards, when we’d gone our separate ways, that it started coming back to me – feeling what I hadn’t felt at the time. This cold bony arm bent round my neck. The sheer, bloody horror of that. But while it was happening I never felt like that, see. I was able to do it.’
‘How did it end?’
‘We put him back. And the soil, the earth.’
Not properly, though, jammed halfway down; they’d wanted out.
‘And that was it?’
‘We replaced the turfs. Neat as we could. And then we…’
He looked puzzled for a moment, as if something had occurred to him for the first time.
‘Jesus, we never done,’ he said, ‘what we should’ve done. When you finish the dance – they all do this, all the morris sides, all the ones I seen, anyway – you all walks in a circle. Around the place where you done the dance.’
‘Why do you do that?’
Like she couldn’t recognize the ritual aspect, the hint of magic: the closing of the circle, making sure that whatever energies they’d awoken would remain inside…
… the grave? Lara’s voice came to her. … started to breathe through his mouth, in great gulps, as if he’d been underwater, no air… And the cold. And the smell…
In the cold of the nave, Gareth was sweating freely, his eyes flitting erratically from the dull lustre of the organ pipes, past the pulpit to where the nave escaped the candlelight and shut down into shadow.
‘We took him out,’ he said, ‘and we made him dance, and now the bugger’s dancing and he won’t go back. Oh Jesus.’
Shaking now.
‘OK.’ Merrily stood up. ‘We need to do something about this, Gareth.’
‘Just get him away from me. Get him back.’
‘Yes.’
She was close to trembling, too. Felt a pulse in her gut.
This would not be quickly dealt with. She asked him to excuse her and went down to call home, explain to Jane, but it was engaged.
There was a text, from Julie Duxbury. it said,
whatever anyone else tells you, DO THIS!!!
*
‘You need to tell me what she’s doing,’ Sophie said.
‘I don’t know what she’s doing.’
‘How long have they been in the church?’
‘Most of an hour? She didn’t have time to explain much. Except that the guy was in a mess and she needed to organize something quickly. You probably have a better idea than me of what that’s likely to be. Now… if you think this is important enough for me to go and bang on the church door with a big stick…’
‘No. Don’t do that. Let it take its course.’
Sophie’s voice sounded surprising. Shocking, even, in its roughness, its… vulnerability? Sophie? Jane stared hard into the circle of lamplight.
‘You’re going to have to tell me, Sophie. I know that this guy Darvill, for reasons of his own, is doing his best to keep her away from Brewer. I know he’s been leaning on Julie Duxbury and… well, obviously, someone’s been leaning on you as well. So like who would that have been? As if we didn’t know.’
Cavernous silence in the old phone before Sophie’s voice came cautiously back.
‘Your mother’s presence in Kilpeck tonight was noted. The person you mentioned assumes he has the Bishop’s ear.’
‘By virtue of being Sir Lionel.’
‘And a significant patron of the church. And while the current bishop’s ear is far less accessible than the ears of his predecessor, it does tend to… prick… at the mention of certain names. Merrily Watkins being one of them. He didn’t actually speak personally to Sir Lionel Darvill, the call was intercepted by Ben. Who passed it on to the Archdeacon. From whom I received a call.’
Siân Callaghan-Clarke. That figured. Jane had met Siân and, in the end, they’d got along OK. But she was a former barrister and ambitious. Becoming Archdeacon of Hereford wouldn’t be a career summit for Siân.
‘Sounding, I have to say, not her normal self,’ Sophie said. ‘Insisting that Kilpeck is a purely pastoral matter.’
‘What the hell’s that mean? It can safely be left to the cows? Sorry—’
‘Something for which deliverance is not considered appropriate. The rector will also be receiving a call telling her it can be dealt with by prayer and counselling. I asked the Archdeacon informally if she could tell me what was behind all this. She said Sir Lionel Darvill seems to think that your mother, misguidedly, is interfering in a delicate situation that Julie Duxbury is already trying to resolve. He thinks she may be superfluous. And likely to make unnecessary waves.’
‘But… hang on, Sophie, Julie Duxbury told me, not ten minutes ago, that Darvill’s accusing her of exactly the same things. She’s, like, meddling. He’s bonkers.’
‘Nonetheless, the Archdeacon suggests it might be advisable for your mother to suspend all activity in connection with Kilpeck until further notice.’
‘Bloody hell, that’s—’
‘And I’ve been asked to keep it off the Deliverance database. And there are other complications. So you see why I thought I needed to speak to Merrily. However—’
‘I’ll get her to call you as soon as she gets back,’ Jane said.
‘No.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Don’t. Not tonight. It’s too late. She’ll have done what she thinks is necessary. And whatever she’s done, it needs to settle. I’m not a priest, but… it needs silence. She can call me tomorrow. Tell her nothing tonight. It’s too late.’
‘How can I avoid—?’
‘Go to bed or something.’
When she put the phone down, Jane stood by the window, looking up into the awful clarity of the sky, stars gathering like a huge audience over the churchyard wall. Then she called Lol.