After just over a minute, Felix returned and told Merrily that Fuchsia didn’t want to talk to her.
‘No offence to you, Mrs Watkins. She gets like this. Maybe leave it a few days?’
‘A few days?’
‘We’ll get back to you, all right?’
‘No. I’m afraid it’s not all right. I’m under a certain pressure to get this sorted one way or—’
‘You’re under pressure …’ She heard the clangs of him hurriedly clambering down the caravan steps into the night, then his voice, upclose and frayed. ‘Tell the Duchy we won’t be touching that job now under any circumstances, all right?’
‘But that—’
‘Yeah, I know this is me burning my boats with them for ever, and that’s some kind of madness, and I’m going to regret it for a long time, but that’s the size of it.’
He was panting.
‘Has something happened, Felix?’
‘We’ve told you everything we can. Why do you need us any more?’
‘Because …’ Merrily really didn’t want to say any of this to him, she needed to put it directly to Fuchsia, but it was late and she was overtired, and … ‘… because I’m not sure you have told me everything.’
‘I have to go now.’
‘Where is she?’
‘In the … bathroom. Doing her hair. She got soaked.’
‘Tell me one thing. Has anyone else been to talk to her about that house? Or to you?’
‘Why would they?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You think Fuchsia’s holding something back, is it, Mrs Watkins? Or do you think she’s lying?’
‘I think we need to discuss it again, that’s all.’
‘You think she’s lying, Mrs Watkins?’
Oh God, why had she made this call? Why hadn’t she thought about it first? Or maybe prayed for advice, sat in silence and listened to the voice inside.
‘How’s she been, Felix, since the blessing?’
Through the scullery’s open doorway, the kitchen clock ticked off the seconds of silence in the phone.
‘I think she’s been back,’ Felix said.
‘Back?’
‘To Garway. To the Master House. I had to go and collect some timber for the barn, and when I got home she wasn’t here. Gone off in the van. When she got back it was dark. She said she’d been shopping in Hereford. Which is something she never does on a Saturday. Hates crowds.’
‘How do you know she went back to the house?’
‘Because we still got a key to the place. When I said I’d take it back to the Duchy, Adam said no hurry. Likely still thinking we might go back to the job one day.’
‘And the key was missing?’
‘It’s back now. And, no, she won’t talk about it.’
‘All right,’ Merrily said. ‘How about I come over now?’
‘No!’
‘I think it might help.’
‘It might help you, it wouldn’t help me. If she won’t let me go back to the bloody place because it’s so evil, why did she go there again? You explain that?’
‘I can’t. I wish I’d known. I was in Garway this afternoon, too.’
‘At the house?’
‘No. I was at the church. I didn’t go to the house.’
‘Why not?’
Good question. Because I’d decided I was being misused, under-informed, short-changed. Because I was pissed off. Because it was raining.
‘If I’d known she was there, I would have, obviously.’ Christ, what a mess. ‘Felix, can you ask her to ring me? Can you tell her it’s very important?’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll try and get her to call you.’
‘Any time. Doesn’t matter how late.’
‘Yes.’
On which basis, Merrily took the mobile to bed and kept waking up in the night, thinking she was hearing its electronic chimes.
Although she never did.
12
Ghosts and Scholars
USUALLY, AFTER A Eucharist, you were aware of subtle ambient changes: a charge of energy, a sharpening, a recolouring – on a fine day, shards of sunlight spilling between the apples in the rood screen, raising shivers of gold dust in the air.
This was not a fine day. When Merrily unlocked the church, under a sky like a gravestone, the interior had been unresponsive. Sixteen people had since taken Holy Communion. Afterwards, nothing much seemed to have altered. Or so she felt, blaming herself and her headache.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Shirley West said in the vestry, cradling the empty chalice like a sick baby. ‘I’m so terribly clumsy. I just get nervous, I’m afraid, Merrily.’
‘But you didn’t knock it over.’
‘I very nearly did.’
‘Shirley, I nearly do most weeks. I’ve stopped worrying about it.’
You were often told that a Mass was supposed to be like perfect theatre, conducted with precision and …
‘Grace,’ Shirley said. ‘I have no grace.’
‘Shirley …’ Merrily shook her head. ‘That’s not true.’
Which was a lie, but what could you say?
Shirley had come to live in Ledwardine a few months ago and had shown up in the church before the removal van had left. She was in her early forties, overweight, divorced, a bank manager in Leominster. She had family here. She’d come to virtually every service, moving up rapidly to giving out hymn books, arranging flowers and assisting, eventually, with the Eucharist.
Altar girl.
‘Someone said in the shop,’ Shirley said, ‘that there’s been talk of those old stones they found in the ground being put back up.’
‘Mmm. It’s a possibility.’
Merrily looked up from the chalice into deep-set brown eyes full of worried fervour.
‘Shouldn’t we be doing something to try to stop it?’
‘Stop it?’
‘The raising of heathen stones opposite our church?’
‘Erm … well, you won’t see them from the church, will you, Shirley? You’ve got the market square in between, and the market hall. Besides, I suppose they were here first.’
‘And duly toppled over and buried. There was a Christian purpose to that, surely.’
‘I think it was probably more to do with three big stones getting in the way of ploughing and haymaking.’
Evidently nobody had told Shirley about Jane’s pivotal role in the discovery of the Coleman’s Meadow stone row. Parish life. Complications everywhere.
‘The thing is, Shirley, quite a lot of medieval churches were actually built on the sites of prehistoric stone circles and burial chambers.’
‘Exactly. Burying the evil under the house of God, surely.’
‘I’m not sure if pre-Christian necessarily means evil.’
‘Our Lord was born into a world full of darkness. He was the Light of the World.’
‘And, in fact, looking at it in a practical way, most archaeologists seem to think the early Christians put the new churches in the places where local people were used to worshipping.’
‘I’ve never heard that.’
Shirley looked at her, eyes narrowed.
Merrily sighed.
‘Nothing’s ever quite as it seems,’ Huw Owen said on the answering machine. ‘Give me a call, would you?’
Priests rarely phoned one another on Sundays.
Merrily had twenty minutes before having to go back for the Morning Service. She’d only slipped home in the hope of finding a message from Fuchsia or, at least, Felix – she’d been worrying about it on and off since waking into the grey light. Suppose Felix had gone back into the caravan and told Fuchsia that she was being accused of lying?