“It’s for the best, Ernie-boy,” the gentle Andy said. “Us knows what’s for the best.”
Ernie pointed at Chris and continued to back away from him.
“You tell him to lay off of me,” he said. “I know him. Keep him off of me.”
Chris made a disgusted gesture. He turned away and began to examine the tools near the anvil.
“You keep your hands off of me,” Ernie shouted after him. Sergeant Obby woke with a little snort.
“Don’t talk daft. There you go, see!” Nat ejaculated. “Talking proper daft.”
Dan said, “Now, listen, Ern. Us chaps doan’t want to know nothing but what was according to plan. What you done, Wednesday, was what you was meant to do: whiffle, dance, bit of larking with Mr. Ralph, wait your turn and dance again. Which you done. And that’s all you done. Nothing else. Doan’t act as if there was anything else. There wasn’t.”
“That’s right,” his brothers counselled, “that’s how ’tis.”
They were so much alike, they might indeed have been a sort of rural chorus. Anxiety looked in the same way out of all their faces; they had similar mannerisms; their shared emotion ran a simple course through Dan’s elderly persistence, Andy’s softness, Nat’s despair and Chris’s anger. Even Ernie himself, half defiant, half scared, reflected something of his brothers’ emotion.
And when Dan spoke again, it was as if he gave expression to this general resemblance.
“Us Andersens,” he said, “stick close. Always have and always will, I reckon. So long as we stay that fashion, all together, we’re right, souls. The day any of us cuts loose and sets out to act on his own, agin the better judgment of the others, will be the day of disaster. Mind that.”
Andy and Nat made sounds of profound agreement.
“All right!” Ernie said. “All right. I never said nothing.”
“Keep that way,” Dan said, “and you’ll do no harm. Mind that. And stick together, souls.”
There was a sudden metallic clang. Sergeant Obby leapt to his feet. Chris, moved by some impulse of violence, had swung his great hammer and struck the cold anvil.
It was as if the smithy had spoken with its own voice in support of Dan Andersen.
Mrs. Bünz made a long entry in her journal. For this purpose she employed her native language and it calmed her a little to form the words and see them, old familiars, stand in their orderly ranks across her pages. Mrs. Bünz had an instinctive respect for regimentation — a respect and a fear. She laid down her pen, locked away her journal and began to think about policemen: not about any specific officer but about the genus Policeman as she saw it and believed it to be. She remembered all the things that had happened to her husband and herself in Germany before the war and the formalities that had attended their arrival in England. She remembered the anxieties and discomforts of the first months of the war when they had continually to satisfy the police of their innocuous attitude, and she remembered their temporary incarceration while this was going on.
Mrs. Bünz did not put her trust in policemen.
She thought of Trixie’s inexplicable entrance into her room that morning at a moment when Mrs. Bünz had every reason not to desire a visit. Was Trixie, perhaps, a police agent? A most disturbing thought.
She went downstairs and ate what was, for her, a poor breakfast. She tried to read but was unable to concentrate. Presently, she went out to the shed where she kept the car she had bought from Simon Begg and, after a bit of a struggle, started up the engine. If she had intended to use the car she now changed her mind and, instead, took a short walk to Copse Forge. But the Andersen brothers were gathered in the doorway and responded very churlishly to the forced bonhomie of her greeting. She went to the village shop, purchased two faded postcards and was looked at sideways by the shopkeeper.
Next, Mrs. Bünz visited the church but, being a rationalist, received and indeed sought no spiritual solace there. It was old but, from her point of view, not at all interesting. A bas-relief of a fourteenth-century Mardian merely reminded her unpleasingly of Dame Alice.
As she was leaving, she met Sam Stayne coming up the path in his cassock. He greeted her very kindly. Encouraged by this manifestation, Mrs. Bünz pulled herself together and began to question him about the antiquities of South Mardian. She adopted a lomewhat patronizing tone that seemed to suggest a kind of intellectual unbending on her part. Her cold was still very heavy and lent to her manner a fortuitous air of complacency.
“I have been lookink at your little church,” she said.
“I’m glad you came in.”
“Of course, for me it is not, you will excuse me, as interestink as, for instance, the Copse Forge.”
“Isn’t it? It’s nothing of an archaeological ‘find,’ of course.”
“Perhaps you do not interest yourself in ritual dancing?” Mrs. Bünz suggested with apparent irrelevance but following up her own line of thought.
“Indeed I do,” Sam Stayne said warmly. “It’s of great interest to a priest, as are all such instinctive gestures.”
“But it is pagan.”
“Of course it is,” he said and began to look distressed. “As I see it,” he went on, choosing his words very carefully, “the Dance of the Sons is a kind of child’s view of a great truth. The Church, more or less, took the ceremony under her wing, you know, many years ago.”
“How! Ach! Because, no doubt, there had been a liddle license? A liddle too much freedom?”
“Well,” he said, “I daresay. Goings-on, of sorts. Anyway, somewhere back in the nineties, a predecessor of mine took possession of ‘Crack’s’ trappings and the Guiser’s and the Betty’s dresses and ‘props,’ as I think they call them in the theatre. He locked them up in the vestry. Ever since then, the parson has handed them out a week or so before the winter solstice to be looked over and repaired and used for the final practices and performance.”
Mrs. Bünz stared at him and sneezed violently. She said in her cold-stricken voice, “Id is bost peculiar. I believe you because I have evidence of other cases. But for these joyous, pagan and, indeed, albost purely phallig objects to be lodged in an Aglicud church is, to say the least of it, adobalous.” She blew her nose with Teutonic thoroughness. “Rebarkable!” said Mrs. Bünz.
“Well, there it is,” he said, “and now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go about my job.”
“You are about to hold a service?”
“No,” he said, “I’ve come to say my prayers.”
She blinked at him. “Ach, so! Tell me, Mr. Stayne, in your church you do not, I believe, pray for the dead? That is dot your customb?”
“I do,” Sam said. “That’s what I’m here for now: to say a prayer or two for old William’s soul.” He looked mildly at her. Something prompted him to add, “And for another and unhappier soul.”
Mrs. Bünz blew her nose again and eyed him over the top of her handkerchief. “Beaningk?” she asked.
“Meaning his murderer, you know,” the Rector said.
Mrs. Bünz seemed to be so much struck by this remark that she forgot to lower her handkerchief. She nodded her head two or three times, however, and said something that sounded like “No doubt.” She wished the Rector good morning and returned to the Green Man.
There she ran into Simon Begg. Alleyn and Fox witnessed their encounter from behind the window curtain. Simon contemplated Mrs. Bünz with, apparently, some misgiving. His very blue eyes stared out of his pink face and he climbed hurriedly from his car. Mrs. Bünz hastened towards him. He stood with his hands in his pockets and looked down at her. Alleyn saw her speak evidently with some urgency. Simon pulled at his flamboyant moustaches and listened with his head on one side. Mrs. Bünz glanced hastily at the pub as if she would have preferred not to be seen. She turned her back towards it and her head moved emphatically. Simon answered her with equal emphasis and presently with a reassuring gesture clapped his great hand down on her shoulder.