I didn’t mind the dark. I had trodden every centimetre of this path since I could remember. Someone had mowed the graveyard grass recently, and there was the smell of the sweet cuttings in the air; some of the swaths had fallen and dried on the pathway. I could not hear my own footsteps until I trod on the stone of the church porch and, shifting the crematorium’s casket carefully into my left hand, groped for the big iron ring of the south door.
It opened readily. Ashley (it seemed) was still secure from the contagion of the world’s slow stain; we had never locked our doors; and please heaven we might never need to. Inside the church it was almost dark. The smells, familiar as childhood, met me as I went in and shut the door behind me; old dusty hassocks, wood gently warping in the scent of the beeswax and turpentine still used by Miss Marget the church cleaner, like her mother and her mother’s mother before her. The smell of left-over Easter lilies rather past their best. The smell of hymn books and dead candles.
I didn’t touch the light-switches. I walked slowly up the centre aisle towards the faint glimmer of the east window.
I had come tonight with the casket, instead of in the morning when the Vicar expected me, because there was a kind of vigil I wanted to keep first. I would leave the casket overnight in the church where all the Ashleys had been baptised and married and buried, and where my father’s memorial stone would stand with the rest; then in the morning – early, early, when there was no one to see – I would come and scatter his dust. So much I had decided for myself, and it seemed right.
But now that I was here, alone in the dark church, there was no more self-deception possible. I had not come just to keep vigil. I had come for something of my own. I wanted, with a queer uncomfortable mixture of longing and guilty hope, to try with all the strange power that I knew I had in me, to see if here, in the place where the Ashleys came from and returned to, I could open my mind to whatever message Jonathan Ashley’s maimed brain had tried to send me. ‘Tell Bryony . . . tell her. My little Bryony be careful. Danger.’
When I was halfway up the chancel, I paused. There were ways and ways of trying to talk with the souls of the dead, and here, I knew suddenly, darkness was wrong, smacking of things which a church should not be asked to house. I would light the sanctuary lights. Feeling somehow absolved of what I meant to do, I took the casket up to the altar steps and laid it there. Some faint residue of light from the east window showed the great jars of lilies, ghosts full of fading scent. These, I knew, would have come from the Court. Rob and the Vicar, between them, grew them each year for Easter . . . Again, familiar as the cot-blanket of childhood, the place wrapped itself about me. I stepped back, re-hooked the cord across the chancel rail, and went to the vestry where the switches were.
This door, too, was unlocked. I pushed it open, fumbled on the wall beside it, found the switch, and pressed. Nothing. I flicked it again. Nothing. Tried the other three on the board, and with each one, nothing.
All this took only a few seconds, but I suppose my mind was preoccupied, so I took in, but failed to register, that the vestry was as airy and as full of tree sounds and rookery sounds as the churchyard itself. Also, that the papers on the Vicar’s table were lifting in the light breeze. Even as I noticed them, one or two drifted to the floor. Simultaneously another movement caught my eye, sending the blood out of my heart with a contraction as painful as a blow. The outer door of the vestry stood open, and against the darkness beyond it, another darkness moved. A tall figure, robed. Then the door shut with a click of the Yale lock. The papers subsided with a rustle to the floor. The only sound was the tick of old wood settling in the night, and the chime of the clock in the church tower telling the three-quarters. Only the papers on the floor, barely seen in the dimness, affirmed the truth of what I had seen. The open door, the vanishing figure, seemed no more than the negative of some dream still printed on the retina as one opens one’s eyes from sleep.
I swallowed hard, and willed my heart beats to slow down again. A robed figure in a darkened church? Absurd. They had a word for the silly penny-dreadful, didn’t they? Gothic, that was it. Robed nuns and ancient houses and secret passages, the paraphernalia of melodrama that Jane Austen had laughed at in Northanger Abbey, and that we had all laughed at when the psychical research people had investigated Rob Granger’s spectre in this very church. My spectre would, of course, be the same as his; any robed figure leaving a church vestry and locking it after him was reasonably likely to be the Vicar. And the dead switchboard? No doubt Mr Bryanston thought it safer to turn off the mains at night. And probably, I thought, as I reached for the main switch bar, which was certainly up, he would come back when he saw the lights go on.
I had left all the switches on, vestry, chancel, altar floods, organ steps. When I pressed the bar down, the whole east end of the church leaped into light. I stood for a moment, listening, but could hear no sound of returning steps. I picked the papers up from the floor, and took a quick look round the vestry. No sign of any other disturbance. I laid the papers on the table, beside a neat pile of books that looked like parish registers, and weighted them with an ink bottle. They were accounts, I noticed; no doubt parish accounts left here for the next council meeting. I waited for a little longer, listening, but there was no sound. I switched out all the lights except the altar floods, then made my way back into the dimness at the west end of the nave, and sat down. The lights bloomed softly on blue carpet, and bistred lilies and the gilded heads of the angels that held the hammer-beams. Slowly, the silence settled back like dust.
There are parts of one’s life that are, and ought to remain, private. What passed then between me and whatever else was to be spoken with in the dark of All Hallows’ Church is my affair. I believe I had had some idea that trying to open my mind’s powers here would sanction the act, but the Hallows themselves apparently didn’t see it like that. In the way I had known it before, in the way I wanted it now, nothing came; nothing but silence.
Till, just as I got to my feet and started for the vestry to put out the light, the vestry door opened and a robed figure entered the church.
The Vicar. As I had thought, the Vicar, a prosaic figure in his cassock, with his spectacles glinting in the light. It didn’t stop me jumping half out of my skin before I registered who it was and went sheepishly to meet him.
‘My dear child! It’s you! I understood you were coming over in the morning. I saw the light just now when I went into my study, and came across to see who it was. Did I frighten you?’
‘You did give me a start. I’m sorry I dragged you out again, Mr Bryanston. I hope you don’t mind my coming here this evening? I’m coming back in the morning, as I told you, but I – I wanted to leave the casket here overnight. I was going to call and tell you, before I went back to Worcester. Do you mind?’
‘Of course not. Come whenever you like, the church is never locked.’
He took his spectacles off and began absently to polish them on his cassock sleeve. He was a man comfortably into his middle sixties, with curly grey hair thinning back from a high forehead, a rounded face with the fresh skin of a child, a long upper lip and a habit of looking over his spectacles down the arch of his nose. He had long-sighted grey eyes distorted by the thick lenses of his goldrimmed glasses. He had been at Ashley as long as I could remember. He was a widower and, it was hinted, lived a good deal more peacefully since the departure to a better world of his ambitious and lively wife. Mrs Bryanston had seen Ashley merely as a stepping-stone to preferment and a town living or a place in the Close, and thither, with the relentless efficiency of an earth-mover, she would have transferred her gentle husband, who asked nothing better from life than what he found at Ashley and his other parishes of One Ash and Hangman’s End. But fifteen years ago he had buried her in the churchyard, and now he would no doubt be a peaceful permanency, plodding happily from church to garden and back again, gently delivering Sunday after Sunday an address from notes on suspiciously yellowed pages, and keeping the who
le parish supplied with seedlings grown in the Court gardens, of which he had the run. He and my father had got on very well together; they seldom discussed anything more spiritual than chess, but I had heard Daddy say that Mr Bryanston’s faith was the kind of rock on which any Church could be built. At any rate, the Vicar suited Ashley as well as Ashley suited him.
He was talking now to me, with an ease quite unlike Mr Emerson’s hesitant kindness, about my father’s death. Comfort, you might say, was his profession, but he had a way of offering it, not as if it were his daily stock-in-trade, but as if he really cared, not only about my father, which I knew, but about me. To me – as indeed it had been to Daddy – church-going had always been so much a part of country life that it was something one never even thought about, as much a part of Sunday’s order of the day as the ritual sherry before lunch (which also invariably included the Vicar): the Church’s feast days and holy days were ways to chalk the year off on the calendar, so that Michaelmas was the time of bonfire smoke and purple flowers and getting one’s woollies out again, and Easter was lilies and spring cleaning, and Lady Day was high time to prune the roses. But now, coming with trouble in my hands, I saw a little of what was behind the sober yearly ritual. There were things one grew away from and, I knew, would never again see one’s way to believing, but I listened and felt the better for knowing that the Vicar believed as literally as might be in the resurrection of the dead.
‘You said you were going back into Worcester for the night?’ he asked finally.
‘Yes, but I’ll be here again in the morning. I’ll come first thing, so that I won’t get in anyone’s way.’
‘You won’t do that, my dear. Come as early as you wish; you’ll want the world to yourself, I have no doubt.’ He fished a thin old half-hunter out of a pocket and peered at it. ‘Dear me, you’ve just missed a bus. I shouldn’t have kept you so long . . . The next one doesn’t go for an hour and a half. Perhaps you’d like to come across to the Vicarage? I don’t know what Mrs Henderson has left for my supper, but no doubt we could stretch it a little.’
‘That’s awfully good of you, but no, thank you, Vicar. I wasn’t planning to catch the bus anyway; my Lambretta’s at the farm, and I’m going across to get it now. They’ve got it stored for me in the barn there.’
‘Ah. Well, take care. The roads get busier every day, and it’s dark already. Dear me, and it will soon be summer, will it not? If you see Rob will you tell him that I’ll be down in the old orchard tomorrow, not in the greenhouse? I must finish the spraying before it’s too late.’
‘Of course. Well, thank you for everything, Vicar. I’ll go out by the south door. If you want to put the main switch off again, don’t wait for me. I can see quite well.’
‘Main switch?’ He looked about him vaguely, as if the thing should be to hand. ‘What do you mean? Why should I put it off?’
‘I thought you had, just before I got here. You mean it wasn’t you who was in the church when I arrived?’
‘Certainly not. I haven’t been over here since about three o’clock. When was this?’
‘About an hour ago, I suppose . . . I came in the south door and went up to the vestry to put on the altar lights. The main switch was off, and there was someone just leaving. I didn’t see who it was, but I thought it must be you.’
He was looking puzzled. ‘No. It might have been one of the churchwardens, I suppose, but why should he turn the mains off? How very extraordinary. I suppose you’re quite sure the main was off?’
‘Certain. And there’s another thing I’m sure of; if it wasn’t you in the vestry, then whoever was there didn’t want to be seen. I’ve a feeling he threw the switch when he heard me at the door, to give himself time to get out and away without being recognised. I thought it was you because you’re the most likely person, and besides, I think he was wearing something long, like a cassock. You haven’t suddenly acquired a curate, have you?’
‘No, alas. I suppose it might have been one of the choirmen, coming back to pick up something he’d forgotten after Service yesterday . . . But why should he be wearing his cassock, and why turn out the light? It would hardly have mattered if either you or I had seen him.’
‘I may have been wrong about the robe. It really was only an impression; it was pretty dark. Perhaps it was just one of the churchwardens. He was carrying something – I’m quite sure of that.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘It’s hard to say. A box, perhaps, or it could have been a book, about the size of those registers on the table.’
‘I can’t see any reason why one of the wardens should come for them. They’re not the Ashley registers. I only brought them over from One Ash after Evensong yesterday. I promised to do a search for a Canadian who wrote to me about his forebears, but I have not had time to look at them yet . . . And there again, the main switch, I really cannot see why . . . Dear me, it’s beginning to look like a real mystery, isn’t it?’
He was looking so worried that I tried quickly to reassure him. ‘I don’t suppose it’s anything at all, really. I may easily have been mistaken.’
‘Let us hope so, my dear, let us hope so. All the same—’ turning decisively back to the vestry – ‘I’d better take a look to see if anything has been touched. The church safe . . . perhaps it could be a temptation. But surely, no one at Ashley . . .’
He paused in the doorway of the vestry and looked carefully about him.
‘I had a look round when I put the light on.’ I spoke from behind him, looking over his shoulder. ‘It all looked tidy except for those papers, and some of them were on the floor. But that was the draught from the door. I put them back, but you’ll probably find them out of order.’
‘No matter, no matter.’ He went to the table and glanced through them. ‘All here. And the registers, too . . . eleven, was it, or twelve? There were some from Hangman’s End, as well. I shall have to check them. But really, there is nothing there of interest to anyone. And nothing else even disturbed. The cupboard . . . yes, that’s all right. And there was nothing in this drawer but pencils and so on, and there is my spare cassock still hanging by the door, so that was not what you saw . . .’
He turned finally, with reluctance, to look at the safe. ‘Well, let us hope not . . .’
But when he stooped over the big clumsy metal cupboard the look of anxiety deepened. I saw him fingering some scratches near the lock. ‘These, would you say they look new? It’s so hard to tell. Unless something happens like this to make you look closely, you don’t notice the marks that your own keys make every day. I’m afraid we had better look inside.’ He reached into his cassock pocket and pulled out a ring of keys.
‘I suppose you keep the Communion plate in the safe,’ I said. ‘Anything else?’
‘Nothing that anyone might want to steal. Only our own registers. And the Communion plate itself is of very little value – thought value, as always, is relative. The plate we use now is quite modern, as you probably know; it was your father who suggested that we lodge the old plate in a safer place than this, when the prices went up so steeply, though I doubt if anyone else would have realised how very valuable the old church silver was. Did you know that the chalice and paten were Elizabethan, by John Pikenynge, and the alms-dish even rarer? 1534, I believe, with the maker’s mark of a basket. The ones we use now, though pleasant enough, are not – ah,’ as the safe door swung open, ‘thank God.’
He said it as if he meant it. I was looking over his shoulder. It certainly looked as if nothing had been touched. The back of the safe was stacked with registers, and some baize wrapped shapes stood in line in front of these. ‘Exactly as I always put them,’ said the Vicar, counting. ‘Yes, yes, all present and correct. He didn’t try the safe at all, or else he found the lock too much for him. I prefer to think – I do think – that his visit was an innocent one. Yes, indeed, that is almost certainly so. We live in sad times when one can entertain suspicions on such slender grounds.’ He shut the
safe, locked it, and got to his feet. ‘However, this is a lesson to me. I cannot bring myself to lock the church, but perhaps I will – yes, I think I must – lock the vestry. And I shall do so straight away. There. Perhaps you’ll come out this way after all . . . Dear me, it’s really quite dark now, isn’t it? Can you see your way to the farm?’
‘Yes, thank you. And don’t worry about it, Vicar, I’m sure you’ll find it was one of the wardens, or someone quite harmless like that. May I come and see you in the morning? If you’re in the apple orchard, I’ll see you anyway, when I go to the cottage. I’m moving in tomorrow. I’ll give Rob your message.’
‘Thank you, my dear. God bless you. Good night.’
Ashley, 1835.
Seeming a long way off, the church clock chimed the three-quarters. He glanced at the gilt carriage-clock on the bed-table. It was fast. Five minutes.
He fidgeted about the room, fretting like a spurred horse. His foot struck one of his father’s books, lying with the papers, where it had fallen. He stooped, and began mechanically to collect the scattered things together. The book, lying spine uppermost, showed the name Juliet, glinting in gold. He slapped it shut, and, straightening, stuffed book and papers together in the table drawer, and shut it.
The sound was sharp, final. The old man was dead. His father was dead. He was Ashley now, Nicholas Ashley, Esquire, of the Court. Now, he thought, it will soon be over and done with. If each of us, in our own ways, can find the courage.
But habit made him twitch the curtains closer over the shuttered windows, to hide even a glimpse of the candlelight.
5
O Lord! I could have stayed here all the night To hear good counsel.
Romeo and Juliet, III, iii
The buildings of what had once been a fine home farm lay about a hundred and fifty yards beyond the churchyard. The quickest way to get there from the church was by the lych-gate, and through a corner of the Court gardens. I made my way carefully along the pitch-dark tunnel of the yew walk. I was conscious of my empty hands. The black yews smelled unbearably sad, sharp and smoky; frankincense and myrrh, memory and grief.