“No.”
“Your health improved because you threw off the effects of the virus, or whatever it was. We’ve all had mysterious illnesses that come and go. Yours was more severe than most.”
“I know what happened, my son. Believe me, I was dying. I know why it went away. I don’t deserve to be here. Your father should have been at that lecture tonight, not me.”
Tom leaned closer to him and said earnestly, “The whole tenor of my talk was that superstitions are founded on coincidence and false reasoning and this is a classic example. You were too close to events to judge them analytically. You accepted the supernatural explanation. Come on, Walter, you’re an intelligent man of good education.”
Pearl chimed in with, “I forgive you, Walter.”
Tom swung around in his chair. He was incensed. “For God’s sake, Mother — there’s nothing to forgive! He had nothing to do with Father’s death. This whole thing about the curse is mumbo-jumbo — and I’m about to prove it.” He got up and snatched the key from its place over the hearth.
“Don’t!” cried Walter.
Tom’s mother shrieked his name, but he had already crossed the room, grabbed his coat off the hook and stepped outside.
Pearl screamed.
Tom strode along the road towards the church, regardless of the driving rain.
Odstock Church stands alone, a few hundred yards from the rest of the village. Distant lightning gave Tom Staniforth intermittent glimpses of the agitated trees along each side of the road. The castellated tower and steep tiled roof of St Mary’s came into view, silvering dramatically each time a flash came. He refused to be intimidated.
Too far behind Tom to influence events, his mother and Walter Fremantle had started in pursuit. Neither was in any condition to move fast, yet they were trying to run.
Tom reached the church gates. Without pause, he stepped under the archway formed by two pollarded trees and up to the timber-framed porch. A lantern mounted on the highest beam lighted the path. The church doors were of faded oak fitted into a stone arch, with iron strap-hinges and a turning latch with a ring handle. A brighter flash of lightning turned the whole thing white. Tom found the rusted key-escutcheon, thrust in the key and turned it. The mechanism was a devil to shift. He was afraid that the key would snap under the strain. Finally it turned through a full arc and he heard the movement of the bolt sliding home.
Done.
He didn’t withdraw the key. He wanted others to know that someone with a mind free of superstition had defied the gypsy’s curse.
Hearing the footsteps of his mother and old Walter Fremantle, Tom stepped aside, away from the door. They would see the key in the lock. He was triumphant.
The glory was brief. Lightning struck the church roof. The thunder — an immense clap — was instantaneous. The ground itself vibrated. Scores of tiles loosened, slid down the pitched roof and fell. Two, at least, razor-sharp, cracked against Tom’s skull and felled him like a pin in an alley.
Neither Walter nor Pearl saw the body when they first came through the gate. The porch-light had blown when the lightning struck. They groped at the door, feeling for the key in the lock.
Walter located it and gasped, “He did it. I tried to stop him. I tried!”
Pearl found her son lying insensible against a gravestone, with blood oozing from a head wound. Whimpering, she got to her knees and cradled his damaged head. He made no sound.
Pearl rocked her son.
“Is he...?” Walter could not bring himself to speak the word.
Pearl ignored him anyway. The pride she had felt in the village hall when Tom was speaking with such authority had ended in blood and tears. She sobbed for the limp burden in her arms and the bigotry of rational thinking. She mourned her wise, never-to-be- forgotten husband and her rash, misguided son.
Gently, Pearl let Tom’s bloodied head rest in her lap. She brought her hands together in front of her, fingers tightly intertwined. Then in a clear voice she called the name of Joshua Scamp. She called it three times. She cried out passionately, “Take Walter Fremantle. He knows the power of the curse better than any man, having used it to kill my husband. He is a believer. Take him. For pity’s sake, take him instead.”
She remembered nothing else. She didn’t see old Walter unlock the church door, remove the key and take it across the road to the river and throw it in. She didn’t see him collapse as he tried to climb up the bank.
The next morning, in the intensive care ward at Odstock Hospital, Tom Staniforth’s eyelids quivered and opened. His mother, in a hospital dressing-gown, watching through a glass screen, turned to the young policeman beside her, gripped his hand and squeezed it. “He’s going to live!”
“I’m happy for you, Ma’am,” said the constable. “Happy for myself, too. Maybe your son can tell me what happened last night. What with you having passed out as well, and old Mr Fremantle dead of a heart attack, I was afraid we’d have no witnesses. I’m supposed to write a report of the incident, you see. I know it was the lightning that struck the church, but it’s difficult working out what happened, with all three of you going down like that.”
“However did you find us?” Pearl asked.
“Wasn’t me, Ma’am. Now I’d really like to trace the man who alerted us, but I’m not optimistic. No one seems to know him. Right strange chap, he was. Came bursting into a farm cottage soon after midnight, in fancy dress from one of them Halloween parties. Top hat and smock and a piece of rope around his neck. He nearly scared the family out of their wits, ranting on about a dead’un at the church door. Didn’t leave his name. Just raced off into the storm. Drunk, I expect. But I reckon you owe him, you and your son.”
Author’s footnote: I should like to pay credit to three sources for the story of Joshua Scamp and the Curse of Odstock. Wiltshire Folklore, by Kathleen Wiltshire (Compton Russell, Salisbury, 1975) gives the version told by Canon Bouverie about 1904; Wiltshire Folklore and Legends, by Ralph Whitlock (Robert Hale, London, 1992) has Hiram Witt the blacksmith’s memoir of 1870; and the fictional story of the lecture and its consequences was suggested by my son, Philip, who visited Odstock with me at Easter, 1993.
A Parrot Is Forever
That eye was extraordinary, dominated by the yellow iris and fringed by a ring of spiky black eyelashes. In the short time I had been watching, the pupil had contracted to little more than a microdot.
“It’s magnificent, but it’s a lot larger than I expected,” I told the young woman who was its keeper.
She said, “Macaws are big birds.”
At this safe distance from the perch, I said, “I was expecting something smaller. A parrot, I was told.”
“Well, a macaw is a member of the parrot family.”
This member of the parrot family raised itself higher and stared over my head, excluding me, letting me know that I was unworthy of friendship at this first meeting.
“No doubt we’ll learn to get along with each other,” I said. “I’m willing to try, if the bird is.” I took a tentative step closer.
Too close for the macaw, because it thrust its head at me and gave a screech like a power drill striking steel.
I jerked back. “Wow!”
The keeper said, “It’s a pity. Roger was just getting used to us. Now he has to start over again.”
First lesson: you address parrots as you would humans. The impersonal “it” was unacceptable. This was Roger, a personality.
Roger. About right for this rebarbative old bird. Roger is one of those names redolent of wickedness. Jolly Roger, the pirate flag; eighteenth century rakes rogering wenches; Roger the lodger, of so many dirty jokes. The glittering eye and that great, black beak curved over the mouth in a permanent grin would make you believe this Roger had been everywhere and tried everything.