Before calling Huw back, she tried ringing Felix. Phone switched off. For possibly the first time ever, she took the mobile back to the church with her, calling Huw from a damp bench in the graveyard, catching him in his Land Rover, between parishes. The signal wasn’t brilliant.
‘… Might be pu … oincidences …’ Huw on the hands-free, breaking up. ‘… You should know … James collection … foreword mentions … based … ordshire … call you back.’
‘Mobile, Huw – on the mobile!’
Getting interested glances now from fragments of congregation filtering through the lych-gate. In most parishes, the Morning Service was as good as it got, congregation-wise, Evensong having been dumped through low attendance. Here, mornings had actually been overtaken by the Sunday-evening meditation, even though the rumours of healing had long since died down. It was satisfying, a good reason to be able to be here tonight rather than at Mrs Murray’s guest house in Garway.
Merrily waved to James Bull-Davies, a fairly impoverished remnant of the Ledwardine squirearchy, and his partner Alison Kinnersley who, when she and Jane had first come to Ledwardine, had been living with Lol. Always faintly troubled, Alison would return tonight for the meditation – alone. James wasn’t into silence.
A nervous sun tested the clouds, and the phone chimed.
‘“The Stalls of Barchester”,’ Huw said.
‘Sorry?’
‘M. R. James mentions in his foreword to the collected edition that his Barchester Cathedral was partly based on Hereford Cathedral. I’d forgotten that. Herefordshire was also the imagined setting for one of the later stories, “A View from a Hill”.’
‘I thought they were always set in East Anglia.’
‘Sorry to complicate matters, lass.’ No engine rattle now; he’d parked up somewhere. ‘But it seems that James – Monty, as he was known – came to relate to rural Herefordshire extremely well. You could even say it became a refuge for him.’
‘You didn’t know this before?’
‘Of course I didn’t, else I’d’ve mentioned it.’
‘How come you know it now?’
‘How does any bugger know owt these days? I Googled Montague Rhodes James and found an unusually erudite website called Ghosts and Scholars, devoted entirely to the man. How much do you know about him?’
‘Hardly anything. He was an academic, wasn’t he?’
‘Divided his career between Eton – his old school – and King’s College, Cambridge. Son of a clergyman, brought up in the parish of Livermere in Suffolk – moody sort of place, apparently, very inspirational. In later years, he reckoned there was only one area to match it.’
‘Let me guess.’
‘Aye. Specifically, the countryside around Kilpeck and Much Dewchurch. Four miles from Garway? Five?’
‘Thereabouts.’
‘The trail, however, does lead to Garway itself.’
Merrily pulled her cloak over her knees, wanting a cigarette. Watching an unexpected sunbeam stroking a mossy headstone. Where was this going?
‘Monty never married,’ Huw said. ‘But he did have a close, though presumed platonic, female friend called Gwendolen McBryde. Widow of his good mate James McBryde, a talented artist, illustrated some of the early stories. Gwen was pregnant when he died, very young, and gave birth to a daughter. Mother and daughter moved to Herefordshire.’
‘As youngish widows with daughters sometimes do.’
Oh, sod it. She pulled her bag onto the bench, found the cigarettes. ‘Seems Monty would visit Gwen on quite a regular basis,’ Huw said. ‘Finding the countryside much to his taste, like I said. Monty was very fond of old churches and extremely knowledgeable about them. No big surprise that he’d visit Garway.’
‘If you say so.’
‘This is the point. After Monty’s death, Gwen published a collection of his letters – Letters from a Friend. In one of them, James recalls a particular visit to Garway in, I think, 1917. Actually, there are two mentions of Garway, but one just in passing. The one you need to know about … Well, I’ve already emailed it to you. Best if you read it when you get back home.’
‘Huw, for heaven’s sake—’
‘The woman who edits the website, Rosemary Pardoe, says Monty appears to have had, quote, a peculiar experience at Garway, the nature of which is, quote, tantalizingly unclear, but which he writes about with typical spooky Jamesian humour.’
‘Saying …?’
‘Read it when you get back. I don’t want you thinking I’m embroidering it, winding you up. Some places just attract this kind of thing.’
‘Huw—’
‘Have to be off, anyroad. I’ve work to do, and so have you.’
And then he wasn’t there, the bastard.
But if he’d thought it was so important, surely he’d have told her.
13
Couldn’t Make it Up
AFTER THE SERVICE, when everybody else, even Shirley West, had gone, Merrily had a furtive cigarette with Gomer Parry behind the tower. Asking him what the feeling was in the village about the resurrection of the old stones in Coleman’s Meadow. Maybe most people would actually prefer a new estate of executive homes?
‘En’t so much that, vicar,’ Gomer said. ‘Few more fancy houses en’t the argument. Tip o’ the muck-heap. It’s who’s in bed with Lyndon Pierce. Who wants to see the village turned into a town? Supermarkets and posh restaurants. And who’s on young Janey’s side.’
‘And yours, Gomer. Let’s not forget that.’
‘Ar. I’ll be doin’ my bit, sure to, to see Pierce gets his arse kicked, vicar.’
The light was back, big time, in Gomer’s wire-rimmed glasses, his white hair topping his weathered brown face like the froth on beer. Councillor Pierce had said Gomer Parry was halfway senile, an old joke who ought to be in a home. Gomer would need to be a long way into senility to forget that.
‘Harchaeologists needs a JCB and a driver,’ he said. ‘Won’t be no charge from me.’
‘That’s very generous of you, Gomer. I’m sure Jane’ll see it gets back to the right people. Erm … you know Felix Barlow?’
‘Barlow …’ Gomer adjusted his cap, screwed up his eyes. ‘Builder?’
‘From Monkland. Knows Danny.’
‘Ar. Met the feller a few times over the years. He don’t build no mock-Tudor rainbow-stone crap. Don’t build nothin’ new at all, far’s I can see.’
‘Good bloke?’
‘Oh, straight, I reckon. Liked a drink at one time, so I yeard. That’d be when he was married.’
‘When was that?’
‘Eight years, nine … I lose track. But I remember his wife. Oh, hell, aye, I remember her, all right.’
It started to rain. Merrily leaned into the base of the tower.
‘You know Lizzie Nugent?’ Gomer said. ‘Widow, up by Bearswood?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Husband left her with two kids and a twenty-acre smallholdin’. I was over attendin’ to some ditchin’ one day, early March it’d be, when the gales blows the roof off Lizzie’s cowshed. Smashed to bits. So I calls a few people, see if we could get some galvanized, cheapish, and somebody puts me on to Felix Barlow. He comes round in his truck that same day, with these sheets off a shed he’s took down, and we fixed the ole roof between us. Took us n’ more’n a few hours, and when he found out Lizzie en’t got no insurance he was very reasonable about it, was Felix, no question ’bout that.’