Sometimes they seem to talk between themselves but know I’m listening.
‘That Sarah had a child by Brendan when she wasn’t much more than a child herself. Kept to her room for months while her belly swelled, studying the Book of Air. And Janet helped her have it in secret at the Hall. Then she and Brendan gave it to the scroungers. Janet told me this herself when she had a fever and thought it was her own dead mother mopping her face.’
My real secrets – my ink bottle, my pen, my book – I keep under my skirt where no one looks. The bottle is almost dry, but the empty pages still stare up at me, hungry for words. I will become mad if there is no more ink. If I don’t bleed.
If they forgot to feed me, if I knew no one would come, if they were all dead of some disease and only me left alive, locked in this room, and one piece of bread only, I would take one bite each day and try to live. And so with my ink. I should make myself not write until I must.
‘My father died when I was a child, and Roger came at night to our cottage and hurt me, and I thought if my mother died too I would be an orphan and live at the Hall, so I put hawthorn berries in her stew and she was sick until her skin turned yellow. For twenty years I’ve nursed her, but kept the cause hidden. I should be flogged to a rag.’
Sometimes at night the smell of sage rises from the herb garden all the way to my window to mingle with the honeysuckle blooming on the wall.
‘Poor Janet had a child born tiny, before it showed, and dead as a box. She buried it in secret, they said, and for weeks after lay staring at the wall. Then she took her brother Morton’s leather belt and put it tight round her neck. So they locked her in the red room to bleed four times – once for each book, till she should be brought to a right understanding.’
‘The Mistress goes to the Ruin every new moon and meets there with the Monk. They say you can see the teeth marks on her teats.’
‘Janet was locked up once and was never the same after. Old Jack her father died clutching his heart to lose her.’
‘It’s nice to have you back, lovey, it’s been too long.’
I’ll go mad if the voices don’t stop. If I don’t bleed. If I have no ink.
Jason
Voices and visions were all in a day’s work for Derek. He’d hear the word of God in the roar of the traffic. One day he told us he’d had a vision of a field bathed in golden light, a barn for worship, a river. ‘Almost a week ago now,’ he said. ‘Last Thursday it must have been because it was the day Lester found a crack in the cylinder head, and we prayed over the bonnet.’
Lester had been a machinist, but had mashed his hand and taken early retirement. Then his wife left him for a trombone player who used to busk on the embankment, and Lester caught the Jesus bus.
‘I took a walk along the canal,’ Derek said, ‘and asked for guidance. I saw the field floating on the water. I didn’t think to mention it. Not until this showed up.’ He held out the envelope, crumpled from sweaty hands and trouser pockets and smelling faintly of dung. ‘It’s been chasing us around the country. See all these addresses.’
It had come from a farmer called Lloyd Morgan. We’d met Lloyd at a revival meeting near Brecon. The date of the letter was the day of Derek’s vision. It had been written, Derek assured us, at the very hour of his walk along the canal. Lloyd Morgan was offering the Jesus bus and its weary occupants a place of rest.
It was a few days later, on that last trip, that they sent us kids off up the road in search of blackberries and we found the orchard and I saw this place for the first time, and I swore I’d have it, with Penny as a witness, and little Tiffany, whose mother was on the game. We stayed that night on the side of the road, near the church. From the top deck where us kids slept you could see the chimney stacks through the trees. ‘I’ll have it,’ I told myself as I went to sleep. ‘I will, though.’ If Derek could have visions, so could I.
I woke from a dream of apples. I was still getting dressed when the bus started up. We only had forty miles to go, Derek said. We’d be at the farm in time for breakfast. Before we’d picked up any speed we passed the gateway to my house and I saw it had a name – Talgarth Hall. And there was the lawn sweeping up to the front door, and there were the apple trees. We turned into a lane that ran along the side of the orchard. I had a glimpse of the stables and a last look at the back of the house, as we rose between fields to a moor where sheep grazed, then down into another valley. Settling into a seat near the front I watched the roads narrowing, the villages getting meaner and more sparse. Crossing a bridge, we joined a river and followed it upstream.
Lloyd was at the entrance to the farm, filling potholes. He gave Derek a sideways nod and led us on foot through the yard and up a track. We followed at a perilous tilt, the old panels creaking, Derek wrenching the gear lever into first as the gradient steepened.
The field Lloyd had in mind for us sloped down towards the river. He had us park at the top end, next to a stone barn with an iron roof. When Derek cut the engine, it coughed a few times and sighed and the silence closed in. You felt the bus and everything in it come to rest. A butterfly settled on the windscreen. You could hear birdsong and the water washing the bank where the river curved around the bottom of the field. For a moment no one moved. I felt their contentment crowding in on me. I knew things would never be the same. I’d lived through changes, Dad dying, then Derek saving our souls, and I had a premonition that this was next – a change we’d never recover from.
Derek called a meeting. He showed us the cold water tap by the gate post, told us where we’d be digging the latrines, outlined his plans for the barn, including a couple of sleeping rooms and a gathering place with a log-burning stove. He led us in prayer. To mark this new beginning, he said, he was going to baptise us all in the river. Not all in one go, but over the next few days, because it would take time for the Lord to make known to him what new names we should take. Each of us in turn would renew our commitment to Jesus, opening our hearts to his love. First, though, Derek himself would have to be baptised. He asked Walter if he’d mind doing the honours. ‘The oldest among us,’ Derek called him ‘our John the Baptist, if you will.’ Was I the only one who felt, following that thought to its logical conclusion, that Derek was getting above himself? They did it after breakfast, both of them fully dressed, standing with the water up to their waists. We gathered under the trees to watch.
‘From henceforth,’ Derek said, ‘I shall be called Caleb and this our field shall be known as Hebron.’ He held his nose and dipped down into the water and up again.
While the water was still cascading from his hair, Walter began. ‘I baptise thee, Caleb, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. We thank you, Heavenly Father, that by water you have bestowed upon this thy servant the forgiveness of sin and have raised him to the new life of grace, for the sword outwears its sheath and the soul outwears the breast and the heart must pause to breathe and love itself have rest. Though the night was made for loving and the day returns too soon, yet we’ll go no more a roving by the light of the moon…’ He stopped and we heard the water tumbling over the rocks and watched the sand martins swooping in and out of their nests. Walter looked lost and cold.
After a moment, Derek said, ‘Amen,’ and helped him back to the bank where the women were ready with towels. Walter couldn’t stop shivering, so they piled him with bedding and sat him by the stove.
Next morning Derek had his breakfast alone. He appeared while the girls were washing up. I’d thought about who would be next. Walter, obviously, then Lester, then the women. The kids would be done in order of age, probably. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I could still remember the first time I’d been done – a humiliating experience at the age of ten to have to lower my head over the same pink bowl that Penny had been bathed in as a baby, and in our own front room with our new friends in Christ looking on, whoever they were.