The Western Wind Read online

  ‘Well, maybe that’s what he was doing then, on the morning of his death. Throwing his money in the river.’

  I stooped to collect the blankets from the floor, folded them without care and made a new pile of them. He might come to Oakham and act the sheriff and make scandal, but it was too much that he also knocked our blankets to the floor, blankets hand-spun with ancient distaff and spindle, maybe the last distaff and spindle in the whole country, and woven and foot-fulled by women with stiff ankles and bad backs and a bit of charity in their hearts.

  ‘And therefore,’ the dean continued, prodding the roll of papers inquisitively at the air, ‘if Newman wasn’t at the river for love of the bridge, and if he isn’t one for toppling, and if he wasn’t likely to be in the river looking – what did you say? – at the underside of the bridge, then won’t the archdeacon, if he has half a wit, consider that an accident seems less likely, and still want to know why the man was there? At that time of the morning too. These aren’t my questions, Reve, they’re the archdeacon’s, which I will have to answer. So grant me patience. The archdeacon could ask me, for example, if Newman could have been meeting someone there, at the river. What will I say? I’ll have to say I don’t know, and then he’ll ask me what I do know. Well, I – we – do know that Townshend holds those good grazing lands at West Fields, don’t we, and we know Newman would have seized the chance to buy them. So,’ he shrugged, his upturned face lucid and almost beatific with self-love, ‘who knows? Maybe Townshend invited him down at that early, clandestine hour to take a look, to walk out some boundaries, to talk costs and yields. And, well, brought Newman to the edge of that rushing river and – you know what I mean to say. We do also know, after all, that Newman and Townshend had their disputes.’

  ‘Which exist largely in your head,’ I said.

  ‘If you wish.’

  The dean’s bravado fell in a strange motion in which he tucked the records back up his sleeve, turned and took again to pressing his hands along the blankets behind him with an absorbed motherliness. Peculiar man. As if his nastiness had made him downhearted. His small, smooth hands folded and pressed and folded the topmost blanket. Without turning to me he asked, ‘What do you say, Reve?’

  ‘That you’ve made some great leaps of logic.’

  ‘Better for logic to leap than stumble.’

  ‘Have you asked Townshend where he was that morning?’

  ‘He says he was tucked up in bed. His wife agrees.’

  ‘Then we must believe them.’

  ‘Must we?’

  I watched him without moving, then said, ‘Are you entering into a courtship with those blankets?’

  He looked up. His hands stilled, then lay flat. ‘You seem tired and in need of some company,’ I said, and he did, in that moment, look paper-skinned and forlorn, all lucidity gone. ‘Why don’t I drop by to see you later, we could sit by the fire a while. We’ve had no time to be friends.’

  He jerked his head towards me as if in shock at that word, friend. ‘I don’t have much fireside time, I’m here to investigate – ’

  ‘A death, I know, but if you tell me when you’ll be done with the day’s investigations, I could bring a bit of goose, some wine?’

  He laughed – one short Ha. ‘Goose,’ he sneered. ‘No, I wouldn’t like to deprive you.’

  ‘Then tell me when you’ll be back and I’ll leave some wine inside your door, waiting for you.’

  He looked up towards the narrow window. ‘As long as I have light I’ll be out, and maybe beyond. I don’t need wine.’

  I smiled at him mildly as if in admiration of his tireless, futile, dawn-til-dusk efforts to save Oakham from itself. ‘Then I’ll come as long as it’s light, leave the unneeded wine, and I’ll be gone before you’re back. You won’t even have to see me.’

  He stood in front of me with his hands awkwardly on his thighs and gave a dismal, short nod. Was it the wine that lured him, or could even he not resist an act of kindness? When he opened the door and went out, he had a good look at who might be in the nave. Carter was the only one. The dean shuffled past him and away. I was barely across the nave and in the booth before Carter entered and knelt with all the hurry of youthful anguish.

  ‘Benedicite.’

  ‘Dominus.’

  ‘Confiteor.’

  And Carter was away: ‘Father, Father, Father. I killed Thomas Newman, hear me, forgive me – ’

  ‘Cannot forgive what you haven’t done – ’

  ‘Hear me, forgive me.’

  His voice was churned and soft with grief. He spoke of the neighbourly favours he’d done since Newman’s death on Shrove Saturday, to try to atone for his guilty stake in that death, a guilt that was entirely imagined. How can you know it’s imagined? came the dean’s insinuation. How? Because I know Herry Carter as if he were my own son, and he loved Newman as if Newman were his own father: that’s how. A man cannot do something that’s completely outside his own nature any more than a horse can fly.

  There was nothing I was more sure of in all this world than Carter’s innocence – yet he believed he was guilty, because love is like that. When my own mother died in a fire that I couldn’t have stopped, I blamed myself for not stopping it; I blamed myself for the world not being entirely otherwise. If I’d not failed her that time as a child, and that time and that time, and not angered my father, not done this thing or that thing, life might have been different and the fire might never have happened. Love thinks like that. Love in the face of death is a torment.

  Carter reeled off his list of good works: he’d filled a hole in old Norys’s wall, swept out others’ houses for Lent, laid new slate on the porch roof (and fallen, and received a worrying gash in front of his ear for his efforts), finished Fisker’s harrowing, given the few eggs he had to his neighbour, paid for miserable Mary Grant to have her corn milled, helped mend the milk cart that had come to blows with the road the day before, and lugged the churns back up to the manor, and helped fill them once more with milk, and delivered the milk to those who needed it.

  ‘Too much, Herry Carter, first help your family.’

  I could find no other way to explain: you didn’t kill Newman, though you suppose it. ‘Can we always save those we love?’ I asked.

  ‘I disappointed him.’

  ‘Disappointing a man isn’t the same as killing him.’

  ‘I wasn’t good enough.’

  ‘You mean, you didn’t replace the child he lost.’

  ‘Though I tried.’

  ‘But failing to be a replacement for his dead child isn’t an act of murder.’

  Perhaps he didn’t hear me; he began on his good deeds once more – Norys’s hole, Fisker’s harrowing, Mary Grant’s corn, the milk churn, the porch roof.

  ‘All men and women stand for themselves,’ I said, over the top of him, ‘and reckon with God.’

  And God decides, I thought, and the airborne spirits do their cunning worst with whatever’s decided. If God decides a man’s life is ready to end, the spirits – if numberly enough – arrange for it to end horribly. Where in this crowded field of force and influence is there an opening for boys like Carter to sway fate?

  ‘There’s no body,’ he said. ‘What if he’s still alive?’

  ‘You wonder if he’s alive, while insisting that it was you who killed him.’

  ‘But there’s no body.’

  What a dextrous thing was a man’s mind, straddling two opposite truths at once, as if flitting between dreams. It wasn’t like Carter to flit and confound himself; he was a simple man whose thoughts went in short, straight lines. I worried about the gash in front of his ear and that he was shivering – though that stopped suddenly; both of us had gone mute. A lull, the rain hushing against the window.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he whispered, defeated, ‘I’ll go and see about what we’d do to clear that tree from the river.’

  I nodded to myself, closed my eyes. He meant the tree that had fallen at West Fields. This was th
e one penance I’d asked of him, he thought a penance for murdering Newman, I meant only penance for falsely confessing to his murder. What did it matter, so long as it was a penance he found sufficiently dangerous, cold, bleak and thankless; one he could do at the river, which was the almost certain scene of Newman’s death; something that could make him feel he was punishing himself, until he’d punished himself enough.

  ‘Very well,’ I said, though anxious now at the notion of him cold and bleak. ‘But be careful, will you?’

  When he got up to leave I asked if he’d made this false confession to anyone else – his wife? Our friend John Hadlo? He said no. I told him he mustn’t. Mustn’t. And that I’d left some goose-meat for him, wrapped in muslin on my table, he should go and help himself – the flesh would speed the healing of his head wound. He muttered that he wouldn’t take it, didn’t want it, wanted forgiveness, not goose. Wanted to die of his wound, if it was punishment from God. That would be some recompense for Newman’s life. At that he left.

  ‘Confiteor?’ I said, because although I hadn’t heard another person enter, somebody was there – the presence of breath and the unmistakable filling of space, where flesh took over from stone.

  There was no reply, so I said it again, and then once more. ‘Newman?’ I said, before I had time to consider it. No reply, but something shifted; I wouldn’t say I heard as much as felt the shift, as though something unseen had moved closer to me. I insisted, ‘Newman?’

  Then his voice came at half-strength, not a whisper but a full voice that had scant force, as if coming from behind several screens. ‘Help me to move through. Pray for me.’

  What reply could I give? This was no plea, no order, nothing but a fair request, as if he were asking me to help lift a pail. I smelt the odour that was all his own – a sharp blossomy soap, a hint of horse, a tinge of mint which he liked to chew. Wine, too, in that smell. The slight wheeze in his breath from a defect of the lungs he said he’d had since birth. I jolted forward to look through the grille and found the space empty.

  On the Lord’s Prudent and Timely Use of the Wind

  ‘DO YOU REMEMBER a wetter winter, or a winter that left more things to decay and die? Do you remember more animals washed into the river? More men, women and children sick and dead? More food wasted to damp and mould? You know that the vapour from these decaying things causes air rife with malicious spirits.

  ‘You ask why our good God has let our earth become so decayed. You ask: why hasn’t he protected us? I’ll tell you as best I can: the Lord tests us. When he sorts the pure from the impure, he might leave some of the impure on earth in his great mercy, to punish and strengthen us. The tiny remaining sinews of a rotted pig, the residue of sin in the souls of dead men, a trace of blood from the entrails of a diseased lamb, the cord of an unbaptised newborn, the urine of a woman with bilious fever, the airborne fleck of poison from a man dead of chin-cough.

  ‘Our Lord, the great sweeper and clearer, swerves his broom around these impurities and is careful to leave some dust. After all, if he left the earth always clean and perfect for us, what responsibility would we have for our own lives? Wouldn’t we become lethargic and overly dependent on his goodwill, like lazy children on their parents? So he sweeps, but not in every corner. These impurities left out from heaven or hell are no longer of his creation but instead become unearthly spiritual vapour, enemy of our earthly flesh.

  ‘This vapour hangs upon us heavy and corrupted, and gets populated with spirits that are far from well-willing, and so it becomes the terrible Night Air: vapours and spirits mixed. Organic and spiritual at once. It enters our lungs and hearts and souls, and causes more death, disease, decay, degradation, despondency and despair, and so the cycle continues until we, us small men and women, find our own human strength to banish it.

  ‘How many ways can I tell you this truth: the Lord tests us. What will you do, he asks, about this spiritual vapour, these vaporous spirits, this Night Air? Will you choke, or rise up? Will we rise? How will we rise? If we come, all of us, during Lent, to confession. If we sweep our floors and sluice them with water, if we wash our bodies, if we cut our hair, if we tend our creatures, if we come to Mass and take the host and pay our tithes and offer our prayers and do no wrong, then the Lord will deem it that we’re ripe for his love and have earnt salvation. He needs to see us make some effort. Perhaps then he’ll match our efforts with his own, and set the sun ablaze to dry up decay, or send in a fast wind to blow the spirits to sea.

  ‘A fast wind? you ask. The last thing we need is a north-easterly bashing at our roofs and blowing our brassicas diagonal and downcasting our animals. But listen: I have here a treatise, On the Lord’s Prudent and Timely Use of the Wind. It divulges how wind can be sent by the Lord not to punish, but to save us from corrupted vapours and reward us for our good work. Think how the locust plague came in on an easterly wind and, at God’s fitful command, was blown out on a westerly – for the wind is God’s breath, and through it he speaks to us. I am praying to him to ask if he’ll send a sign to show that better days are coming, and I’ll suggest a wind to see off the foul Night Air, and though it’s not right to be pedantic with God, I’ll ask if this once it might be a wind from the west, as per the locusts. That’s my prayer, which I ask you to join me in.

  ‘Be faithful! If the wind is the breath of God, what can it not do? A good westerly would help blow Thomas Newman’s soul through, clean out of this world and safely into the next. We must all show the Lord, now and during Lent, that we’re worthy of his favours. We must keep our bodies clean and our floors sluiced and our animals tended and our hair cut and our tithes paid and our sins trivial and quickly confessed. We must remember Newman in our hearts and do good deeds in his name. No meat to pass our lips, and our prayers should come often. We must love each other; we must draw close. We must show our esteemed dean that we’re a courageous and virtuous parish, us in Oakham. That we’ll do our best to please God, that we’ll worship at his feet. Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum.’

  Amen, they said to this sermon, and obligingly an unseen and sourceless wind caused the flames of the two candles at the altar to bow dangerously deep. Some low, muffled flatulence issued somewhere from the crowd of bodies in the nave. Then they moved restless to the door, and against their motion the dean progressed salmon-ish upstream.

  ‘On the Lord’s Prudent and Timely Use of the Wind,’ he said, and took from the pulpit the pamphlet I’d held up, which didn’t, as he knew, have that title. It was only my priest’s manual, over-thumbed and with faded Latin. ‘This is your treatise?’ he smirked and, when I didn’t reply, smirked some more. ‘Quite the holy crook, aren’t you?’

  ‘I know what I said was true, about the wind, the vapours, even if it’s not written in a treatise.’

  ‘You’ll have to hope none of them learn to read Latin and catch you out.’

  I took the manual under my arm. ‘It’s our job to give them hope.’

  ‘They need more than hope,’ he said, watching the retreating huddle of hemp and jute and matted hair. ‘They need a miracle. And a wash. They stink of ale.’

  He shrugged and wandered away through the nave, which now held only a few who’d stayed behind for confession. It had been a full congregation, even if it had shuffled and whispered and chattered; at least nobody had slept. In other parishes they did. The dean reached the door. ‘Into that salving wind I go!’ he called, and he opened the door to the same wet and motionless air that had been stagnating about us for days.

  Night Air

  I STOOD IN the middle of the church. Its emptiness was rare. There was no confession queue, nobody muttering a prayer in the nave, nobody gossiping in the porch. The displays of wedding flowers on the chancel pillars were beginning to die, and even as I stood a witch-hazel frond fell, and its entirely soundless meeting with the ground added a new depth to the silence. I locked the door from within, c
rossed myself and lit candles.

  I’d abandon the last sitting for confession; who’d come now in the rain? And besides, I had no strength left to be encouraging, and a terrible fear of what would appear at the other side of the screen. I took the last of the rosaries from the nail and left it on the floor with the others, then stood in the tawdry light of the west windows.

  Thomas Newman had been in this church, alive and as well as any of us can be, only three days before. Friday late evening, when the church air was thick with the smell of wintersweet. He’d come, as he always did, to pray before the painting of Mary and her crucified son, which he’d brought back from Italy and placed at his own altar next to the Townshends’. Every day he’d light candles for his lost family and for the sick of the parish, and leave one or two shillings. Always he’d pray and sing from his gilt-clasped primer that lay open in his hands.

  On Friday he was wearing his green shirt, I remembered that. A special shirt unfit for the fields. A plain tunic, an old fur collar, plain dark gores over his shoes. Only the shirt and gores suggested he’d been to a wedding that day. He looked tired as we all did, because we’d spent a cold day in the barns with a wedding feast while the rain fell, and it was an effort to keep warm. Then, when the bride and groom had gone to Bourne, we’d been left with the carcasses of chickens and bowls of stew to clear up, the milk puddings, the honey strewn from its dishes into cups of ale, everything sticky, everything damp. That’s what Newman had come from, and so he looked tired and like he needed a fire to sit by.

  That Friday, then, what had he done precisely after Annie’s wedding, when he came into the church? I went to the south entrance to tread his path. He’d walked there, across the nave, and knelt in front of the Virgin; I knew that, not only because he always did, but because I’d joked with him: ‘You make a handsome couple, you and Mary.’ Which in that moment they did – his devoted weariness, her rested strength. And he replied something like, ‘But she settled for that browbeaten old cuckold Joseph instead.’ And I: ‘The prerogative of women, to always choose the lesser man’, to which he smiled, and bowed his head.