‘Just like that?’
‘More or less. Rachel, the woman who took Fuchsia, she was this earth-mother type, done it before. I mean, it was that kind of place. Fuchsia was a child of the tribe, kind of thing. We thought Mary was gonner come back – she said she’d been offered a job, good money and she’d be back for the kid. The social services tried to find her, got nowhere. So it ended up with Rachel adopting Fuchsia, or fostering her, whatever. And I kept in touch, kind of thing. Helped out. Sent money.’
‘You left when it was clear that Fuchsia’s mother wasn’t going to come back?’
‘No, no, what happened, my ole feller died suddenly, I had to sort things out. He had a builder’s yard, my dad. I sold it after a bit, went to work for a firm of conservation builders. Learning the trade, kind of thing. Then went on my own, built up a business. Got married, got divorced. Then Fuchsia showed up.’
‘What, just appeared?’
‘We’d put her through art college, see.’
‘You had?’
‘Had the money by then, Mrs Watkins. Why not? I mean, I never meant for this … for us to be like, you know, how it’s turned out. She just arrived one day, and she was interested in what I was doing, the conservation work, and she hadn’t got a job …’
‘She went to work for you, before there was any … relationship?’
‘That was how it started, aye.’ Felix wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. ‘I call her my plasterer – what she does really is mouldings, recreates original colours, experiments with limewashes. She just loves the feel of plaster.’
‘I see.’
‘Look, Mrs Watkins, I’m under no illusions about how long it’s gonner last, but we’re rebuilding that—’ Felix nodded towards the barn. ‘It was a ruin, and I’m determined to make it into a proper home for her. Like an ancestral home, kind of thing, for the ancestry she’ll never have. She reads all these stories about folks living in country houses, and if I can give her that, things might be … good. For a while.’
‘You never heard from her mother again?’
‘Not a word.’
‘You’d never tried to find her?’
‘Didn’t know where to start. No idea where she was from. She had a bit of a Brummie accent, I remember, and she was mixed race – one of them must’ve been black. Fuchsia reckons she’s dead.’
‘Why does she think that?’
‘Just a feeling. There’s this kind of tribal mysticism in Tepee City, and she had a period of building fires in a clearing in the wood and looking for Mary in the smoke. Now she just mopes around ole churches and reads ghost stories. I was hoping, when the barn was finished, it’d be some kind of stability.’
Merrily looked at him, saying nothing. There was a sadness here. A longing, but also a realistic suspicion that it wasn’t going to work out.
‘If you can take away the fear,’ Felix said. ‘If you could just do that … you know?’
‘You think it’s more than just this place – the Master House.’
‘Look, I don’t know. I believe something happened to her in that place, I just don’t know if it’s … in her mind. I don’t know, Mrs Watkins. I accept that these things go on.’
‘What I mean is, you have a feeling for houses, but nothing seems to have … I mean for you …’
‘It didn’t have anything to say to me, good or bad. What I usually do, if a place is blocking me, is I’ll spend a night inside, in a sleeping bag. You wake up in a house, you can somehow get a proper feel of it. I might’ve got round to that, but … she didn’t want me to. Look, I know what you’re thinking, but … it’s just a job. Just money.’
‘Right. Erm … why’s it called the Master House, do you know?’
‘Not really. Bloke I spoke to said it goes back to the Templars who built Garway church. They had masters and grand masters, apparently. It could be old enough, I found fourteenth-century bits, maybe older.’
‘Did you ask anybody if it was supposed to be haunted? Anybody locally?’
‘A woman we talked to said it wouldn’t be a surprise. Said it hadn’t been a happy house.’
‘Who was that?’
‘Has a smallholding, edge of the hamlet. Sells free-range eggs and honey and herbs. Mrs Mornington … Morningside. Something like that.’
‘And the reason you won’t go back now is purely …’
‘See it from my position, if you can,’ Felix said.
Fuchsia came down the caravan steps then, wearing what looked like a bridesmaid dress with a bodice of white lace. The colours in her hair were like streaks of oil rainbowed in dark water.
Merrily felt a flicker of unease and glanced at Felix, but he was gazing across at Monkland church with its halo of gilded mist.
Pity this wasn’t the church they were using. She had no history here.
Felix turned and saw Fuchsia and swallowed.
‘Looks so much like her now it scares me a bit.’
‘Her mother.’
‘Aye.’
5
Who is This?
THE LAST TIME Merrily had been inside the Church of St Cosmas and St Damien, somebody had sacrificed a crow on one of the altars.
These things happened, just occasionally, after a church had been decommissioned by the C of E, left to fade into film-set Gothic.
Lifting cloak and cassock to climb into Felix’s silver truck outside the caravan, she was remembering the crow’s entrails arranged like intricate jewellery on the right-hand altar. It was a church with two of everything – twin chancels, twin naves – with a pulpit in the middle. They might see this as representing a dualism, Huw Owen, her spiritual director, had said at the time. Left and right, darkness and light.
This was in the very early days in Deliverance, and she’d blown it, been unable to handle the necessary cleansing of the church. Emotionally exposed at the time, her senses still snagged on memories of a fairly sickening job in the old General Hospital. Feeling clammy, palms itching, and then the explosion of coughing … and Huw, supervising, ordering her out.
This was when she’d been advised to burn the vestments she’d been wearing, and she’d done that, in an incinerator behind the vicarage. Burned everything, except for …
Oh God.
… This cloak, the same heavy, woollen, cowled cape that she’d worn here on the night of her humiliation. Because it hadn’t been at the General Hospital, it had seemed OK not to burn it. After all, they weren’t cheap, these cloaks, the female clergy still a minority market.
But – never dismiss coincidence – it was better not to take it in. She began to unlace the cloak as the truck bounced down an eroded lane where torn shards of tarmac were crumbling like piecrust into the verges and Fuchsia’s voice came cawing from the back seat.
‘Are you High Church, then, Merrily? Anglo-Catholic?’
‘Oh, well, I’ve never been one for labels, Fuchsia. You adapt … compromise where you can.’
Mix-’n’-match. Pick your own. Anything works now, in the new, flexible C of E.
‘Do you have a statue of Our Lady in your church, Merrily?’
‘No. But I’ve thought about it.’
‘We have two in the caravan, now,’ Felix said bitterly. ‘One’s above the bed. Makes you feel a bit queasy when you look up and the moonlight’s full on it.’
‘I also like to go to the cathedral in Hereford,’ Fuchsia said. ‘When it’s fairly quiet.’
Merrily turned to look at Fuchsia, rocking in the narrow rear seat, her hair centre-parted, one hand holding a cream woollen shawl together at her neck, the other steadying the canvas zip-bag on her knees – the Deliverance bag. She’d asked if she could carry it.