Saltash wore a cream-coloured cotton suit. His tie was loosened. His face was narrow and evenly tanned, lined rather than wrinkled, and his grey beard was barbered to the length of his grey hair. He stood on the short, tufted grass, where shadows converged, looking around for a man whom Merrily had said was plump and friendly and conspicuously camp. He didn’t move, expecting the man to approach him.
Lol wandered over. ‘Dr Saltash?’
Saltash stared through him. ‘I’m looking for Martin Longbeach. Is he here?’
‘I think you’re looking for me.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Saltash said. ‘Because you don’t appear to be Martin Longbeach.’
‘And you don’t appear to be Lord Shipston,’ Lol said, aware of so many years tumbling into this moment. ‘But I think you know him.’
43
Nobody but God
THE PALMERS’ WINDOW told its tale in reds and blues and gold.
Merrily made out a ship bound for the Holy Land, a stylized ship like a floating horn, with people far too big to fit into it. She saw King Edward the Confessor and St John the Evangelist, whose chapel was dominated by this window. The mystical ring passing between St John and the King, via the Palmers, all dressed in blue.
Mostly myth and wishful thinking. The Saxon King Edward had predated the first of the Ludlow Palmers by about two centuries.
The Chapel of St John, the original Palmers’ chapel, was to the left of the high altar in St Laurence’s, a dark three-aisle palace of a church, not far short of a cathedral. George Lackland stood at the entrance to the chapel, his back to a narrow door set in stone. Looking down, Merrily saw she was standing on an inscribed tombstone.
‘Guild wardens buried under here,’ George said.
He and Merrily were alone in the church, George having obtained the keys from the verger on his way out. Who could anyone trust with the keys more than George, former churchwarden and a merchant of quality who, in the Middle Ages, would surely have been a prominent Palmer himself?
Not that the Lacklands had been in Ludlow in the Middle Ages; they hadn’t left East Anglia until the eighteenth century. But George, with his tiered face and his slow-burn eyes, looked like part of the story, part of the myth.
It would have been enough for Bell.
‘One weekend – a Saturday – we were all here… in the church.’ His voice was dry and ashy. ‘Nancy and Susannah and Stephen and me. And her.’
Merrily recalled George’s description of Bell on that day or a similar one: dressed decently and conservatively. Her Edwardian summer dress, her blonde hair neatly styled. Quite girlish, rather attractive.
A day in the rosy dawn of Bell’s love affair with Ludlow. Tripping and gliding around the Buttercross, her smiling face upturned to the sun.
‘Like a buttercup,’ George said now, his voice laden with a damp sorrow. ‘And then she wanted to go to the top of the tower.’ He turned to the narrow door behind him. ‘This is the way, behind here, see.’
‘Famous viewpoint,’ Merrily said, ‘I’d guess.’
‘Spectacular. See for miles. But it’s a long old haul – couple of hundred steps, and it seems like more. Bell said would someone like to go up with her? Nancy said, no, thanks, once was enough, and her legs ached for days afterwards. Susannah wasn’t particularly interested either, so I said – because, I suppose, I didn’t want her to think I was an old man – I said, Aye, I’ll go. I’ll go up with you.’
George turned his back on the door. He said the steps were very narrow and twisty, so it was necessary to go up in single file. There was a rope that you could hold on to, to help pull yourself up.
Bell went first. You can catch me if I fall, George, she said.
‘She didn’t fall. She was very light on her feet.’
‘Oh yes.’ Merrily recalled the stage act – split black skirts, bare feet.
‘I tried to leave a bit of space between us, see, but when you’re on a tight spiral the person in front’s apt to disappear around a bend. You know what I mean?’
‘Mmm.’ Vicars knew about church spirals.
‘So, three or four times, Bell would come to a sudden stop on a bend, and I’d go bumping up against her. Which was embarrassing for me, but she’d just laugh. That laugh that she has, far back in her throat.’
George wouldn’t look at Merrily while he was talking. His gaze was raised to the Palmers’ window, as if he was wishing he could sail away to the Holy Land or anywhere. Merrily felt that the closer George’s story took them to the top of the tower, the more it was plummeting to the bottom of his own deepest well.
He’d refused to tell her about this in the street, insisted on coming into the church, knowing it was about to close for the night, as if it was part of his penance to unload it all before God and a woman young enough to be his daughter, who also happened to be an ordained priest.
George in purgatory.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘when we finally emerged at the top, Bell starts dancing around, with her arms thrown out. Well… there’s not much room up there – big sort of pyramid coming out the middle with the weathercock sticking out the top.’
Such a proud cock, Bell had said and giggled outrageously, the sleeves of her dress rippling up her arms.
George’s half-shadowed face was blushing a deeper red than King Edward’s footstool in the Palmers’ window as he described how he’d turned away from the woman and gone to look out at the view to the west, doing a bit of a commentary.
Over there in the west, behind those hills, that’s towards Knighton, see, which is in Radnorshire – and that’s Wales. Not many folks know that Ludlow, although it’s in England, used to be the main administrative centre for Wales – the military capital.’
When he’d stopped talking, there had been no sound from behind him, no rustling of her papery frock. When he turned, she was nowhere in sight. Ludlow was spread out far below them, like a model village, and his heart had lurched and he’d shouted, in alarm, Bell!
And heard her laughing again, a dry, brittle, chattering sound. Looking down in horror to see her coiled on the stones at his feet, those arms and hands weaving in and out of his legs like white serpents.
‘Serpents,’ George spat.
There was an inviting-looking gift shop at the foot of the vast nave, with cards and all the books and pamphlets about Ludlow and its church. Merrily went to stand there while George stood in the nearest aisle, with his feet together and his head hanging down, like a victim of self-crucifixion.
Of course, it went without saying that he’d never behaved like that in his life before, not even when he was a young man, before he’d been married to Nancy.
Well, no.
George was… the epitome of Old Ludlow… An honourable man. Conservative in every conceivable sense of the word.
‘And on the church.’ A bony hand tightening on a pew end. ‘Of all places, on the tower itself, where…’
Where nobody could see them but God.
As if they were putting on a show for Him.
‘On the Monday,’ George said. ‘I formally handed in my resignation as senior churchwarden. Said I was not able to perform the duties as assiduously as was necessary, due to my impending mayoral year. And this, I’m afraid, is the first time I’ve been in here since, apart from services. And even then I feel dirty… soiled. Every Sunday, soiled, a disgrace.’