Harbinger
NOT LONG AFTER ten p.m., it began like a few grey feathers blown from an old nest. Soon it was filling the cracks in the walls and gleaming like epaulets on the sagging shoulders of the graves in the churchyard.
On the edge of the pathway between the church and the castle mound, Darvill looked up from under his Russian hat.
‘This is good. Cleansing. Do you want to go and light a few candles in there, Nora?’
‘I’ll help,’ Merrily said.
She was wearing her heaviest funeral cape over the meditation outfit of black cashmere and dark jeans. In some conditions, the cassock and surplice just didn’t cut it.
‘No need,’ Darvill said, as Nora walked around to the south door. ‘We begin at eleven with a dozen candles. Then snuff them one by one. We only light them all at midnight.’
They’d talked in the big kitchen at Maryfields, over soup, about the structure of the service and the ritual at its centre. It would be a ritual, and not a fully Christian one, and she was glad Crowden wouldn’t be there to see it.
The church had felt lighter after he’d gone. She’d felt surer-footed on the wooden steps down to the nave and a certain gratitude to the building itself. It put her in mind of the Celtic chapel where she’d found sanctuary after Sean’s betrayal and death. A church that she felt you could know even if you didn’t understand it.
And it did, of course, know you.
There was at least a possibility that she’d seen the last of Crowden, though she wouldn’t be taking bets. She’d thanked Darvill for organizing their meeting, and it seemed to please him that he’d been part of some clerical sting, even if it could have been more successful.
Now they were alone for the first time.
‘Julie didn’t want to do this,’ he said. ‘I wanted to make sure you knew that.’
‘I think she was entirely sure of what she wanted it to achieve. But maybe a bit suspicious of the church itself. The castle in ruins, the original village gone but the church as good as new. As if it was leeching off the community.’
‘You feel that?’
‘Not really. It has an air of independence. And mystery, of course. I get increasingly fond of mystery – this kind, anyway.’
‘All that matters to me now,’ Darvill said, ‘is appeasing the mystery.’
She wasn’t sure what he meant. He wasn’t what she’d imagined. Under that sheen of arrogance, she was aware of a sadness and an apprehension.
The snow had stopped again and she lowered her hood.
‘He won’t come, you know,’ Darvill said.
‘Iestyn? He might.’
‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘I hardly knew him. We’ve never quarrelled. Never had the opportunity to. And then he sets fire to…’
He looked up at her.
‘Looks like he found out a lot he hadn’t known about Aidan, and all very quickly. And not exactly at a good time.’
‘How can you be sure he did that?’
‘Don’t think he did it in person. He’d’ve got Hurst to do it.’
‘You think?’
‘Iestyn’s halfway demented.’
‘You know that?’
‘Doesn’t live much in the present, and the past, for him, is a noxious place, full of an old hatred. He thinks I’m my father. He thinks Henry Darvill’s still here and out to destroy him.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Aidan.’
‘When?’
‘He’s always told me everything. This was a couple of months before his death. I’m telling you, to clear the air. I want this finished.’
‘The feud? How can that happen if he’s not here?’
‘We’re bringing Aidan home tonight.’
‘I don’t understand. You took the extraordinary decision to dig up his body, clothe him as a dancer… and dance with him before putting him back.’
‘You think that was an awful thing to do, don’t you?’
‘I do, actually, yeah.’
He shrugged.
‘And then you – they – put his body back.’
‘But the dance goes on,’ he said.
‘But—’
‘The less you know, the less you’ll have to worry about.’
‘I tend to think that’s up to me to decide, don’t you?’
‘Please.’ Darvill’s chair began to roll along the path to the corner of the church. ‘Call me an old mystic – and people do, and not in a good way – but it’s all I have to hold on to. You’re right about this church. It’s like a yew tree, it has immortality. It’s its own powerhouse. The white square on the Nine Men’s Morris stone. You can’t reach it through the Bible, or the Koran or the witches’ Book of fucking Shadows. It transcends the lot. Can’t be interpreted, only felt. What I’m trying to say is that round yere we don’t put things into words.’
‘This is morris talk again.’
‘The morris is the oldest sacred dance in these islands. Spiritual energy transmitted directly from the earth. And this earth, by God… the red earth of the border country… when it hasn’t been turned to dust by pesticides for short-term profit.’
‘I have to put things into words. It’s what we do.’
‘Not what this church does. It transmits wisdom through images. Like him.’
He stopped the chair at the south door. Merrily looked up to the right-hand corner.
‘The Man of Leaves. As you call him. What’s he want with us, then? What’s he telling us?’
He looked up at her.
‘Really getting your pound of flesh tonight, aren’t you, Watkins?’
‘I’m practically a veggie these days, Lionel, what would I want with a pound of flesh?’
He laughed.
‘All right. For that, I’ll tell you about the Man of Leaves.’
They gave Lol a can of cider.
‘Weston’s,’ Tim said. ‘Nothing but the best. Now wet your face with it and then apply the burnt cork yourself. All over. Don’t want to see any pink bits. Neck, too. Go on, I’ll tell you when you’re all done.’
Tim was a small man, a Londoner perhaps in his sixties, fit-looking, not much hair and an up-curving scar at the end of his left eyebrow that made him look a touch devilish. He said he’d been in the army, and everybody knew what that meant in Hereford.
Lol said, ‘But if I’ll be wearing the mask…’
‘Even with the mask, you got to have the whole face blacked. Then the hands. You got to feel different.’
They were in a small room behind the kitchens at the Kilpeck Inn. They’d leave, when the time came, without going through the pub.
When they were all blacked up, Tim looked at Lol, got him to turn side-on.
‘You’ll do. A blacked-up face always reminds me of the old days.’
‘Somebody called us that once,’ Chris, the farm manager said. ‘The SAS of morris. We’re perfectionists and we don’t give up.’
‘I’d’ve done the Man of Leaves,’ Tim said. ‘I didn’t want to, but I would have. But he wouldn’t have me. You’re a good dancer, mate, he goes, but that’s not what it’s about.’
‘Lionel?’
Lol felt his left cheek.
‘He wanted you, son. Soon as he heard from you, he was on your case. He gets feelings about people. He’ll do, he won’t. He finds you when you’re not sure who you are. Me, I was out of the regiment, no money problems, two kids, nice wife, nice house. Another year of that I’d’ve topped meself, know what I mean?’
‘I think so.’
‘Morris dancing saved me. You wouldn’t think it, would you? Anyway, congratulations, Lol, you’re a bigger basket-case than me.’ Tim peered over Lol’s shoulder. ‘Here’s your proof.’
Gareth Brewer was carrying something the size of a small grave-wreath: twigs, holly, eyeholes.
The imminent darkness played with the green man in the arch. The stems curving from either side of his mouth seemed like lengths of a belt with notches.
Darvill strapped on his head lamp.
‘No one knows what he means, and, do you know, I don’t believe they ever did. Not even the stone carvers who put him into churches. Why churches? Most likely because they’re the only buildings in the countryside that would survive. Some more perfectly than others. Look at him. Think he was finished last week, wouldn’t you?’
He must hate it, Merrily thought, that the green man is so far above him, while tall men can look him in his goggle eyes.
‘They didn’t know,’ Darvill said. ‘Knew what he looked like, didn’t know what he was for. He probably came out of a vision. Or a host of visions, who can say? Don’t have those now, most of us. God, what I wouldn’t give for a vision…’
‘By all accounts you have a lot of vision.’
‘Not what I mean. We’ve shrunk, Watkins. The human race has shrunk. Only have to look at the appalling dregs of humanity posing as politicians. But there’s a reason, you see, why those Norman sculptors – and the Saxons and Celts before them – didn’t know what they’d created. Because it wasn’t for them. It’s true. Meant nothing to them in their green paradise, heavy with all those intoxicating scents and colours. This chap was a harbinger of the distant future.’
‘In what way?’
‘Taking a message to their spiritually stunted descendants living in an unthinkable future. Where the colours and the smells are dying back, year by year, as the countryside gets poisoned by chemicals and suffocated under concrete. For us.’
‘Yes…’
Merrily spun round.
‘Jane. I didn’t hear you coming.’
‘Soft snow,’ Jane said. ‘Absorbs sound.’
A young man she didn’t recognize came up from the path.
‘Hello, Mrs Watkins.’
‘Blimey.’
He’d lost weight and actually seemed to have grown. At twenty?
‘I didn’t recognize him either,’ Jane said. ‘This is Eirion. That’s Sir Lionel Darvill, Irene. He’s a prophet. OK, introductions over. Back to the crucial stuff. Message for the future? God, Lionel, are you the first to say that?’
She looked quite unsteady, as if rocked by a surge of unexpected empathy.
‘Didn’t want an audience, Jane,’ Darvill said. ‘And no. I’m probably not the first.’
‘Well, I have several books on green men, and none of them gets that far.’
‘I think you mentioned Lady Raglan, Jane, who came up with that term. It hadn’t really started then, or perhaps it had. Interesting that she was from round here. This could be the last area of southern Britain that had it all – lovely soil, meadows, wildlife, a manageable population. Every year now, they’re building the equivalent of a new English city. Soon it’ll be two. As for the countryside… East Anglia’s gone, hedges ripped out for chemical prairies. My old man saw it coming, though. The Man of Leaves knocking on his door, teeth bared. My dad invited him in. What else could he do?’
Merrily was looking around through the thickening snow. She saw slow cars and people coming down from the direction of the pub, a few carrying lanterns. Not long now.
‘Where’s Lol?’
‘He’s with the morris side,’ Jane said. ‘I don’t know where. You don’t get to see them until they’re changed. Rules of the dance. I think Sir Lionel’s trying to avoid telling us how he came to what sounds to me like the truth about the green man. If not through a vision, that is.’
‘Not my vision, Jane. Had it from the Man of Leaves himself.’
Merrily thought about it.
‘Your Man of Leaves. Aidan?’
‘Gomer,’ Jane said, half turning, her face shining in the beam of Darvill’s lamp. ‘Gomer knew what Aidan was.’
Darvill looked up.
‘Not the old plant-hire man?’
‘Ow’re you, boy?’
‘Parry! Bloody hell!’
Darvill’s head lamp reflected in Gomer’s bottle glasses.
‘Couldn’t not persuade him to come,’ Jane said.
Gomer peered not at Darvill but his chair.
‘Big tyres. Power steering?’
‘This dreadful man doesn’t have to come into the church, does he?’ Darvill said.
Merrily smiled and turned the ring handle, opening the door into quivering light.
But she didn’t feel as good as she’d hoped.