The Western Wind Read online

  In the church, candles burnt at Newman’s altar and on the floor all around. I took off the pattens and let myself into the little dark box; I sat. I blew into my hands to keep them warm, and rested my head against the oak screen. After a while I must have fallen asleep, given the fact that I woke up – not a deep sleep, or restful. I cupped my hands in front of my face and blew into them to warm my nose.

  I came out of the booth as six bells chimed, and saw that the dean was kneeling at the altar giving evening prayers.

  ‘John,’ he said, without looking up. Which meant he wasn’t surprised by my appearance, which meant he’d known I was in the box – presumably from the pattens outside. Still John, though; that surely bode well. ‘Not much in the way of confession? Where’s your queue of penitents?’

  ‘I expect many don’t know the pardon’s there yet.’

  ‘You’re right, I’m sure.’

  ‘And they’re shocked, and mourning, distracted.’

  He stood but didn’t turn. Then he walked to Newman’s altar and he still hadn’t shown me his face.

  ‘What are all these?’ he asked, picking up and putting down the trinkets, the charms, the cuts of cloth, the acorn, the dice, the twigs, the bees.

  ‘They’re offerings for the dead,’ I said, though he must have known, because there was nothing uncommon about them.

  ‘Would you say Thomas Newman was quite an influence on your village?’ he asked.

  ‘He owned most of the land – ’

  ‘I mean on the villagers themselves.’

  ‘He had many friends – ’

  ‘I mean, in matters of the spirit.’

  Now he turned round, and his face was as it had ever been – merciful enough, no sign of a smirk or reprimand.

  ‘I just spent an enlightening half-hour up at the house of Morris Hall,’ he said, ‘and I admit to being confused. A group of them there – they had Newman’s lute and were trying to play it, to hear, they said, God in it. To hear news of Newman’s death and how long he’d been assigned in purgatory. Then, extraordinarily, they began shaking the thing, when none of them could get any meaningful music from it. Shaking it, in the hope the Lord was inside.’ His frown was deep and genuine. ‘Why would the Lord be in Thomas Newman’s lute?’

  ‘They seek,’ I said, evenly and without giving air to the wave of anger the dean’s news brought – not at the lute-shakers but at Newman, who’d filled their heads and hearts with false hope and then died, and left me to the consequences. ‘It seems strange to you,’ I said, ‘dealing with parishes that are more worldly, that have more to give to the dead than acorns and leaves. But they seek the Lord everywhere, in everything. It seems crude to you, but it’s all they have.’

  ‘I’ve seen parishes as poor – poorer, even. That’s not my concern. My concern is that you, their priest, are here, with God at your side, waiting to take their confession, while they are there, shaking the lute of a dead man in the hope God drops out. Have you let them go astray? Find holy authority outside of you? In Thomas Newman, in his music, in their gifts to him of twigs? Why aren’t they asking you about his stay in purgatory?’ He paused, exhaled. ‘Have you a candle?’

  I got him one from the vestry and he lit it and placed it at Newman’s altar, in the holder of one guttering and due to go out.

  ‘Two things,’ he said. ‘I’ve decided, while I’m here, to search the houses of all in Oakham, not so much to find something that disputes his accidental death, but to prove there’s nothing to be found. At least I hope – although we both know it can be surprising what you discover, when you wander into somebody’s house.’

  There it was, though only an edge of it and nicely dressed and given with the slightest of smiles, but there it was – the reproof, the acknowledgement: I saw you with that woman. There it was, the sourness of spirit I’d remembered in him from the last time we met, something in his temperament that didn’t mean well and couldn’t help itself, though it wouldn’t speak out plainly. I crossed my arms, I nodded. If he wanted to search the houses, he could. He’d find nothing.

  ‘The second thing – no small thing. Wouldn’t it be consoling to have a sign from above? Rather than shaking a lute to find out if Newman’s in or out of purgatory, wouldn’t it be helpful to have word from God himself? Something that isn’t hysteria or superstition, trinkets or charms.’ At which he picked up the acorn half, appeared to squint inside it. ‘A positive sign, from God. That’s what would be good. If a man, woman or child moves promptly through purgatory, what better way of knowing they neither carried heavy sin themselves, nor died bearing the sins of others? What better proof of Oakham’s wholesomeness if all its people die well and hotfoot it to heaven? What firmer proof to take back with me to the archdeacon? What better proof that Oakham is worth my efforts to save it?’

  Down went the much-scrutinised acorn, carelessly replaced on the altar’s edge, left to roll off and land with a sweet tap at his feet.

  I asked, ‘Proof of what kind?’

  ‘I don’t know, Reve, that isn’t for us to decide. But aren’t the scriptures full of signs from God? How am I to know what sign he’ll deign to send.’

  Reve, now, not John any more. What a face he had, which barely moved yet held, in its creases around the mouth and along the brow, irritation, anger.

  At the sound of voices calling in the road, he jerked his head up like a newt detecting threat, then made to hurry from the church. I hurried after. When we came out onto the road, it was to the tail end of a group of running bodies whose cries were vanishing into the dusk and fog.

  ‘Go after them,’ the dean said. I gaped, I fear. If he wanted a chase, why didn’t he go after them? But there was nothing in his two-footed hands-on-hips stance that conveyed a man about to get swift on his legs. I turned in the direction of the runners, which was down towards Old Cross, and broke into a kind of trot.

  ‘You’ll catch them up by Monday at this rate,’ he called. ‘Go!’

  The trot extended into a lope, skirts hitched. I wasn’t wearing my pattens, so any mud and wet would go straight through my shoes. Much to resent in that prospect; if the dean so wanted to know where the villagers were going, it should be his feet that got mired. Besides, I’d lost them by then and could only follow the voices, which came impossibly from everywhere. At Old Cross I went down the track that led to West Fields, since the voices seemed stronger that way. My feet were already finished, no point trying to skip around ruts and potholes and newly sprung streams. It was only when I came near the birch copse that I began to see movement again, and hear voices more distinctly. That of Ann Otley, goading and feisty, saying something about the copse.

  ‘Ann,’ I called and then, seeing others, ‘Morris Hall, John Mersh – ’ Also Joan Hall, Piers Kemp, Paul and Simon Brackley, John Green, Jane Tunley, Richard Prye, Adam Lewys, all gathering near the opening of the copse. ‘What on – ?’

  ‘We thought we saw the form of Thomas Newman, Father,’ said Ann Otley, ‘and we chased it down here. We think it went in the copse.’

  Her look was bright and salacious; she was panting.

  Much as I wanted to, I didn’t indulge this theory by looking in there myself. I said nothing.

  ‘It was emitting a curious sound, Father, an unearthly moaning.’

  Nodding all round, except Jane Tunley, who looked less sure. It was only my head that managed to shake.

  ‘Newman trapped between worlds,’ said Morris Hall.

  ‘Unshriven, unblessed,’ said Morris’s wife, Joan.

  ‘No corpse to put into the ground, so it’s bolting free,’ said Adam Lewys.

  ‘Might only be half-dead, and headless,’ was Piers Kemp’s offering.

  I did now look in at the copse, which was a den of low fog and ghostly birches slender and damp. No man, no soul, no headless devil, nor sound of one.

  ‘Who saw it?’ I asked.

  ‘Jane Tunley,’ said John Green.

  ‘Adam,’ said Simon Brackley
.

  ‘Mrs Otley,’ said Jane Tunley, while Ann Otley pointed to Richard Prye.

  They eyed me, the ground, the copse. Their bodies were vague accumulations of greys and browns against a veil of white that was thrown in all directions; Jane Tunley’s red woven brooch seemed the only definite thing in the world, every other shape and hue could be bartered with – something reckoned down to nothing, nothing reckoned upwards to something. It was a day that made ghosts of everyone.

  ‘All of you, go home,’ I said.

  ‘Father.’

  ‘Go home.’

  I turned from them, towards West Fields, as if to set off in search of the spectre myself. I heard their murmuring and bemoaning, and their reluctant retreat. They were spooked and skittish, and no surprise. In my time in Oakham we’d never once had a death that didn’t yield a corpse; without a body to bury away, safe, in the ground, it was as if the dead were too much in limbo and prone to be plucked by the devil, or as if they were hiding and might jump out.

  I went into the copse. How could it be that these trunks were so fine and papery and silver in summer, when in winter’s wet they ran dark as tough leather? Each spiked dead branch housed in it a soft soul. To think summer lived somewhere in its memory; that it could summon a leaf of green from a miserable sepia knub. The horse tails tied to the branches were soddenly clumped and the yellow velvet, so joyous when it went up in summer, hung heavy and burnet. Fog, the dripping of damp from branches, the mulch of winter undergrowth – but no man.

  But I stooped, because there was something on the ground that wasn’t earth or mulch, but a lump of cloth poorly scattered with leaves as if for cover, and I knew what it was. I hurried to it, picked it up. Newman’s shirt. So this was Carter’s notion of hiding – stashing under a sprinkling of five leaves. Unless of course he’d hidden it well and it had been dug up; the ground around it did look disturbed – but of course it would, since to bury was to disturb the earth. I dug a more concealing hole with my hands and buried the shirt properly, then piled leaves on top of it, then smoothed the pile to look like something naturally occurring.

  I stood, washed my hands off in a puddle and made my way towards the river, though unsure why. (Thoughts raced, in that restive, dipping and swooping way of wrens: perhaps it had been Newman trapped between lives after all, come to claim his shirt. But no, because he hadn’t claimed it; and besides, nobody had actually seen Newman, they’d only taken each other’s word. If it had been a real un-Newman thing they were chasing, I might see it – it could only have gone this way. If they hadn’t been following anything real, what scent, instinct or fate had led them to the birch copse? And what fortune had led me to follow them, and find Newman’s shirt before they did.)

  At the river, nothing, at least as far as could be seen through the fog. I walked along the edge of the flood through swampish ground until I reached the crowding of bulrushes that were so tall in the summer, and now stood only half an arm’s length out of the water. That’s what they seemed to be: arms reaching. In the dusk and dank of the riverside they were hopeful; I’d never seen them that way before, or thought twice of their existence.

  A sound, an ungodly cracking, which I thought at first was thunder, but was coming from low levels and not high, and was anyway too harsh, raw and near, the sound of splitting. I’d have crossed myself if I’d been able to move. As it was, only those parts of my body that went without my consent continued to work – breathing, heart beating, ears hearing. It was the crack of breaking bones, and an otherworldly creak that made even my breathing struggle to keep on. Then, in the wake of that sound, an almighty splash.

  I ran back upstream a few paces to where it was. Indistinct but distinct enough, through the fog, a tree lying felled in the river.

  Bulrushes

  NIGHT STOLE IN, but so stealthy and inchwise who would notice? Then it was installed on us heavy, and listless, and black. There was some coming and going in the road and a scrimmage of sorts between Gil Otley and his brother Rob, over how they’d divide up the bit of land adjoining theirs – some thirty selions of fertile till belonging to Newman. Soon enough they stopped and went indoors; drinking began. There was leftover wedding brew that had been shared out among households, and they’d eat well enough for one more night on slices of beef, boar, chicken and goose; cabbage tossed with bacon; pears stewed with honey.

  I ate, and cursed the pallid John Endall for thieving my sister and her furniture. There was nothing more solitary than having no kin and only one chair. I placed on the table in front of me the cross I kept by my bed, rough and Jesus-less – you could ask for more from God when Jesus wasn’t there, reminding you of what he’d already sacrificed for you and what you hadn’t sacrificed in return. You could venture a small request:

  Tell me what to do.

  Newman is dead, I petitioned. Herry Carter is frothing with the desire to confess to killing him, I myself have lied, the dean has asked for a sign from you and expects nothing less, Oakham is a low-hanging cherry waiting to be picked. This day has been long, blundering and not good. Tell me what to do.

  I imagined myself some days hence at a roadside partway to Bruton, or further still, whispering into the musty hood of a travelling friar, because who else could I confess to now, and what would befall me if I didn’t? I was asked to shrive one of my parish before death, and I didn’t, I pretended to be asleep. I practised saying it, and it sounded tawdry and bare to my own ears. Some elaboration: He was an important man, who died a bad death. If I’d shriven him, he might have died a better one, or not died at all, and then the rural dean would have little or nothing to sniff at, would have stayed for a half-hour, a nibble of Oakham cheese, and gone.

  But no; that small word if was tawdrier still, a gateway to all manner of heavens and hells. It would be better to start not with what might happen, but what did happen – to begin with the end and journey backwards, like kicking against a current, away from the rock against which you’ve washed up and out to the open waters, the waves the intentions that carried you in. Not the sin, but the intention behind the sin – this is God’s interest. Not where you washed up, but the waves that washed you there.

  Your priestly duties will strain you, I was told in my training. You’ll feel like a bow whose string is pulled back and back until your flex is used up and you feel you can’t flex more. Then you’ll be held, taut and tested, and you’ll wish for the string to go slack. But if you wait, you’ll learn that this flexing is in order for the arrow to fly, which is the part of you that belongs with the Lord and is directed towards him, finely fletched and shooting fair. How can the arrow fly without the strain of the bow?

  I opened the Bible; full of signs from him and not short of miracles. There was really only one I wanted to ask for, and I searched for it to find the vulgate words, those being his preference. Please Lord, I said aloud, if you send a sign, I’ll know you’re with me – how else to know this straining isn’t in vain? There: the Lord, through Moses, blows away the plague of locusts with a wind; ventum ab occidente, a wind from the west. Vehementissimum, strong, strongest. The strongest west wind, to blow away the locusts. I looked up at the white, sheepish fog through the window. The air was so thickly flocked and spirituous. A thin-capped mushroom had found life in the sawn crevice across my table. Amazing audacity; I picked it out.

  If the journey from my house to the privy outside was short enough to be done before finishing a rapid Paternoster, it was long enough for me to feel elated (a strong west wind to blow away the spirits) and then defeated (he’d never do it, it was too big a sign, bound to fail; ask for something smaller, have the humility of a man), then doubting (if I was the strained bow, how could I also be the fletched arrow?), then elated again (was it possible, a strong west wind?).

  The fog was clearing at last. When I was finished at the privy I let my skirts fall back around my feet and walked out of my croft, across the road, through the churchyard, to the back of the church where the fields
rolled away upwards towards the boundary Oakham shared with the Bruton parish. I imagined a pair of monks coming over the brow there, and then the pair became a pack, the pack an army, and I wondered if the dean could be wrong. Weren’t the monks our brothers?

  Yet I’d never felt as small as I did then, nor as faintly made, like the first marks of an etching – nor had Oakham ever filled my heart more, nor made it more heavy with worry. There was no way now of telling the dean about my part in Newman’s death, and nobody else for me to confess it to, except one of those friars on the loose. The shame in that, for a priest to go whispering at the roadside to a hooded crook, and hand him a few coins for a forgiveness unsanctioned.

  My breath steamed in the cold air. Sarah would be shivering in front of a fire by now with her shawl swaddling her, or lying in bed in fear of what the dean had seen, or else in fear of death. She was dying because she was a pawn in the Lord’s testing of me, dying in order to prove my faithfulness to him – in light of that, it seemed not so daring to ask him a favour, or otherwise so daring that you had to ask him, since nobody else could grant it. Would you send that western wind, to blow away the spirits and as a sign that Newman’s soul has gone across and as a sign that you aren’t disappointed in me, and would you send it while the dean is here? And if that’s too much, Lord, or if you can do it but not in the time I ask, then will you send another sign of a more modest type?

  I stood quite still, and fully frozen. The back-and-forth call of two owls sharpened the night. The dean wanted a sign – a sign must be delivered. Imagine, the sound and softness of that wind, meeting my face and neck in the same way soothing hands might, blowing high and low across Oakham’s fields. It was then that I thought of the velvety blackness of the rushes rising like arms through the fog, and of how those arms signified the worshipping arms of the people, and I thought of my mother and Moses and her irrational faith in me.