The Western Wind Read online

Maybe it was God’s rebuke for her worship of a fraudulent shrine, for praying to the tooth of some old butcher or brewer. Though an overstated rebuke for a small sin, I couldn’t help but think. Or maybe she’d done something there about which God was truly enraged. Now what was she – a child still? The shrivelling of her body had turned her into something else at once uglier and more seductive, something gruesome and dangerous that men long for in their loins, though their hearts are repelled. The devil in us all wants death. I prayed for myself quickly and silently.

  ‘Bring your hand here,’ I said, gesturing to the hole Carter had made in the grille when he snapped the hazel. She did so without question. The hole was just big enough for me to reach my fingers through and hold her fingers, to stop her tugging at herself. ‘Were you brought food today, and bedding? Did the boy come and sweep out the rain?’

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed, ‘yes’, as if all that were of no use to her.

  ‘Did you manage to eat some bacon?’

  A hiss: ‘The bacon ate me, Father. From the inside, to punish.’

  Her hand was cold, yet apparently she yelled at night as if on fire. It’s the most spiteful of diseases that says one thing and does another. I squeezed her fingers, which were bent as old branches; I was sure they were more bent than they’d been the day before. Her whole condition seemed sorrier, madder, altogether deathlier.

  ‘Sarah,’ I murmured.

  She came to me, or I to her, each day of Shrovetide, as Carter had, and confessed to a death she had no part in – perhaps out of lunacy, perhaps because being hanged for a murder was better than rotting slowly in agony. I had nothing else to say. It was as good as being bound in rope – the one thing I could do was forgive, but I couldn’t forgive what hadn’t been done, and she and Carter wouldn’t confess to anything else. So they went away still burdened and troubled while I sat here in the dark, burdened myself by forgiveness that Jesus had entrusted to me to give out to those who needed it, while those who needed it walked away. It made me heavy and helpless. It caused my back to buckle.

  ‘You did not kill anyone,’ I said. Words rushed from her, Killedhimkilledhim, ownhands, rippedhim, bithim, me death me yes. Clawed him, stabbed him, axed him. Outside, that chanting. I didn’t know how they could repeat the same chant for so long, so loudly, so keenly, and the stupidity of it angered me. The more she muttered, the faster and wilder, the more I repeated myself slowly. ‘You did not kill anyone.’

  With my free hand I crossed myself once and twice. It felt like death wasn’t far from her but I couldn’t say why; some survived this burning disease, and she was young – but she stank of death. The air around her was musty and thick. I didn’t know what to say to save her, and no confession manual would help. Jesus gave his life and, in doing so, the Treasury of Merit overflowed with forgiveness, overflowed. We’re men standing at an endless heap of gold while the poorest walk away.

  ‘You are forgiven,’ I said at last, since it no longer mattered what she’d done or not done, or what reprisal God sought in riddling her body with disease; in a day or two or three she’d probably be in her grave, soil in her mouth and eyes and her skin at last cool and sallow. At the knowledge, my hand tightened around hers and gripped, and the hands no longer knew which way the comfort went. ‘You are forgiven,’ I repeated, this time loudly, since the church, but for us two, was at last empty.

  Or so I thought – and yet when I’d drunk the last of the beer and closed my eyes and rested the candle on my lap to hurry through Vespers prayers, a voice at the other side of the screen startled my heart to my mouth.

  ‘Father.’

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘It is very difficult to do the right thing in this life. I once had a friend – or should I say, an ally – who did something I knew was wrong, and for days I pretended not to know, and resolved to defend him if asked.’

  ‘Is that you?’ I said.

  But he didn’t answer, and I didn’t need him to. This wretched dean. I’d heard enough of his voice these last few days, and he brought with him the smell of Newman’s soap, which he’d washed with that day, after sleeping in Newman’s bed. The expensive white soap from Venice, not the black soap we had here. The good feather-bed that wasn’t his to sleep in.

  ‘Have you come to confess something?’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ he said, ‘I eavesdropped. But I understand that eavesdropping is a sin that’s easier to forgive than others, coming as it does from curiosity, which is the beginning of faith.’

  ‘All sins depend on intention.’

  ‘Ah, well then, that’s even better. All I intended to do was stand in line waiting for confession, but,’ he knocked on the oak screen, ‘not such thick doors at this place.’

  I looked down at the candle flame, which seemed to rush up at me, infernal and infinite, no longer a single flame but a world of fire, dreadful and beautiful.

  ‘You see, I overheard the servant girl’s confession earlier,’ the dean said. ‘Which was diverting, wasn’t it? Townshend arguing with his wife, tying her up? I wonder what they argued about? They say Cecily Townshend is very upset about Newman’s death. More upset than most.’

  ‘You’re forgiven your sin. Say five Our Fathers. Please, go. I’m tired.’

  ‘Be brief, be brutal, be gone. Isn’t that how it goes at confession? Bring them in, send them out. No need to listen to what they say.’

  ‘What do you want?’ I said.

  ‘Tell me about Ralf Drake.’

  ‘What about Ralf Drake?’

  ‘He was in love with your sister, your sister and Newman were close, so I’m told. A rivalry, I wonder?’

  ‘Your aim is wild,’ I said, entirely embittered by now. He was a man flinging stones at birds with his eyes closed.

  ‘Yes.’ He let out a breath into the darkness and his yes sat as a hush in the air; the silence curdled around it. Then his face came to the grille, a glint of eye and not much else, that smell of soap. ‘At least I’m trying to take aim, unlike you. Until today I was merely confused – today I’m suspicious. Nothing adds up: a man drowned but we don’t know why or how, his torn shirt on the rushes, his body, apparently, in the crook of a fallen tree, yet seen by nobody who can prove it, and then strangely gone. Your parish all sinful and superstitious and muttery. And you, the one person who might show guidance? You turn away as if it’s not happening.’

  ‘Don’t you see there’s nothing to be suspicious of? And Ralf Drake. Ralf Drake! Suspicion is corrupting your better sense.’

  ‘Townshend, then,’ the dean said, his mouth still at the grille.

  ‘We’re back to that.’

  He disappeared from the grille and sat deep into the shadow of the booth. I could see nothing of him. ‘You want to protect Townshend, because you feel sorry for him, but in my opinion a priest needs higher motives than pity.’

  ‘I feel neither way about Townshend, he’s just a man.’

  ‘Can’t you accept that nobody in this parish has more reason to see Newman dead?’

  For the first time in this exchange the dean’s voice rose and thinned. I leant back against the wall. My pity was almost with him, desperate foolish man, building and rebuilding accusations from the same bent truths, just as the stoopers were trying to build furrows out of sludge.

  ‘Newman came here a freeman with one field to his name,’ the dean said, ‘and ended up with two-thirds of the parish. Do you think Townshend liked him for that?’

  If we killed those we disliked, I wanted to say – but I let the rest of the thought alone.

  ‘And then there’s the fact of Mrs Townshend – ’ he said, his voice more languorous and cunning. ‘What could she have done to drive her husband to such unkindness and anger?’

  I sat up. ‘Perhaps you’d be better to give up with this,’ I said. ‘After all, some could say that the man who takes up in a dead man’s house the very day he dies, and who gains respect from finding the murderer, might be the murderer himself. Who’s
to say your hand didn’t push Newman under? It’s no secret you were wary of him.’

  He gave a laugh that was falser than any I’d heard. It extinguished his candle, so that the only light he had was the little of mine that made it through the grille. He flapped and fluttered, and the tin candle-holder clattered on the stone. Then quiet.

  But how could I be at any peace myself when I knew that he must also have been lingering outside while Sarah confessed, and heard what she’d said? And perhaps – worse still – what Carter had said. If he had, I knew he’d be unable to refrain from telling me, so I waited. I didn’t have to wait long; I heard the excitement of his silence, his breath cupping at the back of his throat til finally it spilt.

  ‘That diseased girl says she killed him.’

  ‘Sarah.’

  ‘Sarah.’

  ‘Anybody can see she’s mad with sickness,’ I said. ‘Furore detentus. And weak. Too weak to stand up most of the time, let alone grapple with a man in a river.’

  ‘I agree, but she did confess.’

  My eyes closed briefly against what he might say next. If he’d heard Carter’s confession, it would be much harder to argue it away as empty ranting; Carter wasn’t mad, though grief-stricken, and was there this very morning to find the shirt, and could have killed another man – though Newman was as good as his father, and was loved as one.

  ‘It seems to me,’ said the dean, from whatever composure he’d gathered in the darkness, ‘that we need a murderer by tomorrow, and if you won’t back me up in offering Townshend, then my only choice is to accuse the one person who has confessed to it. What else can I do?’

  The one person. Only the one. So he hadn’t heard Carter’s confession? My relief was such that I didn’t notice at first what he was saying. Then, alas, I noticed. Someone had to be offered by the morning, Townshend or Sarah, and the choice in that was mine. Townshend, the lord of our parish, even if no great man. A bad man of business, a worse husband, but not a murderer. Even if he was, Newman wouldn’t have been one of his victims, Newman was the only thing keeping a roof over his and Cecily’s heads.

  But Sarah, dear Sarah, my sister’s closest friend. The noise outside filled the silence within; the beating and singing and chanting, the pelting of stones against the fragile, barely paid-for glass.

  As if he’d been privy to my thoughts he added, ‘I could throw in Ralf Drake if you’d like a wider choice. Less scandalous if a dung-slinging boy’s found guilty, the whole thing could be cleared up quicker.’

  ‘Cleared up? You mean one of my parish tied to a stake and burnt.’

  ‘Tomorrow’s Ash Wednesday, what better day to do it?’

  I didn’t know chills travelled down spines except in sayings, but one found my spine and snaked down, and met an outbreak of sweat at the base.

  ‘Ralf Drake has no part in this.’

  I’d gone forward, my own face to the grille now, and was met swiftly by the dean’s eyes, a glint of candlelight catching the sheened skin on his nose. ‘This being what?’

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said, and put my hand to the lattice, ‘but we don’t have to persist. What if you tell the archdeacon that Newman’s death was self-murder? And if self-murder, nobody else can be blamed.’

  ‘What a credulous man you must think the archdeacon is, if you change your story at the last moment from accident to suicide and expect to be believed.’

  ‘Those who knew Newman would be able to see he was his own murderer, I’m sure of it; he – he was a – a man of dark moods. He wasn’t a happy man.’

  ‘If every unhappy man jumped in a river, this village would have very few living men, and no dry ones.’

  I curled my fingers around that lattice. But swallowed my words, and made ready to reason, to pacify, to flatter.

  ‘In your wisdom,’ I said, ‘on Saturday, you issued a pardon, in the hope half the parish would come for confession before Lent, so that we could confirm nothing suspicious was to be found. They’re a good parish, good penitents, you could tell the archdeacon. And here we are, with Lent on us, and about seventy of this parish have confessed, well over half. Aren’t you pleased?’

  ‘I was wrong, perhaps their eagerness to confess only speaks of being riddled with sin.’

  So you change the rules of the game! I went to say, then heard how risible this was, to even think of the dean’s scheming as a game. Yet he had. He’d told me to bring the parish to confession to show how faithful and repentant they were, then when they’d come, he’d said they must be guilty – and so I sat, stunned, in this cleft stick he’d whittled, and felt each heartbeat imprint against my chest those two names: Sarah, Townshend, Sarah, Townshend. Sarah. Sarah? Townshend. While the dean sat cool and firm.

  ‘You’re a fair man – ’ I said, and he curbed me by pressing his palm against the grille. My nose and lips almost touching it. I backed away.

  ‘You’ve failed to keep a grip on this parish, Reve. You have a village of people who are no better than livestock. You should thank me for helping you bring them under control.’ He rose from kneeling, if he’d ever been kneeling, and I heard him scratch about, taking the remaining rosary from the nail, which he pushed through the grille. ‘Confession’s over,’ he said; he fumbled with the curtain, the dropped candleholder finding his foot, skittering across the stone. ‘Make your choice and let me know what it is in the morning.’

  Sarah had been cowering all that time in the porch, in the corner, her neck twisted in pain. I took her at first, by lamplight, for an old woman. The dean had gone, perhaps by the north door. She said, ‘Not safe out there, Father.’

  ‘You must get out of Oakham,’ I told her. It was a rough whisper, and instantly regretted. For in telling her to escape, and if only one of the dean’s chosen pair was left in the morning, wasn’t I now making my decision? Hadn’t I just condemned Townshend to death? She only nodded as if she’d do anything I asked without question, and I, disturbed by this trust, stood.

  I let her wait in the darkness while the stones assailed the door. The wind that flung at the east window was the punishment of failure, since I’d asked for it from the west and it was not from the west; what hope of saving my parish, if I attracted that much scorn from him up above – that he should go to the trouble of sending a wind, and send the wrong one?

  When I unlatched and pushed the church’s outer door a little, the raining stones stopped and a new chant punched the air – JohnReve, JohnReve – and as I emerged to them a cheer went up. A continuous circle of shadows holding wind-thrashed torches, and a mass of shapes that bloated and narrowed. Masks that reared into impossible shapes of griffins and dragons and leafless trees, in the woozy lurch of flame. Leviathan one moment, then demon, then friend. A child lengthening into the fleeting form of a hare. I had just enough wits to see Sarah, who’d broken free of the porch, running out through the circle, under joined hands, and away. Barely a human, no more than a spectre. And then it seemed that another body came from the spot Sarah had vanished into, a shifting shape running towards me with the large head of a pig. I cried out with a sound that came from a pit in my gut, a place I’d not even known existed. Then the circle disbanded and they rushed inwards with a hollering that was possessed and joyful. My shoulders were clasped, my head gripped by blind fingers, and a mask placed over it whose weight jarred my head forward. I knew it was a mask by its stench of animal-gut and mud and the slenderest sweetness of grass – the pig’s head, the hare, a unicorn, an owl? It was heavy enough to be the head of a real bear. I saw, through the ill-placed eyeholes, only the flashing of darkness and flame. I thought I saw the great laughing mouth of Townshend, and beyond him, watching him, the dean – his small, sober face half-hidden by his hood, a cold, pale waning moon. They began to spin me round to a feverish clapping, and I stumbled over my feet. Blind inside my own disguise, baffled and frantic. They were chanting my name as if they wanted me to do something, but I couldn’t act – we behave according to the creatures we are, and
I had no notion of what creature they’d made me become.

  Day 3

  The previous day, Shrove (also Collop) Monday

  Goose, cooked

  THE DAY STARTED rainless and tender. When I got up and went outside to empty my bowel and fetch in water, the horizon wasn’t entirely dark and was forming a streak of distinct and kindest pink; a sun rising to greet us. It was more comforting to me than the blood-red stain of a usual winter sunrise, and the sky was spacious enough to make way for the inrush of a cleansing wind, much needed, long absent. Today, perhaps? I took a bowlful of water from the flooded bucket.

  There’d been so much rain that I’d failed to notice the coming on of things, things that were now, even in this frail light, speaking out. I noticed how the stark branches of the rowan and hazel that shielded my toilet were pocked with new buds. How the birds were venturing song into the half-darkness, and how hopeful and strident they were in their preparations to make families. How newly, secretly fertile might be the ground, though it sloshed in places ankle-deep with water. How adventurous the air seemed. I wanted to walk for miles. There were clouds, but not threatening or many, and the stars were dimming.

  My shoulder forced the swollen door. Inside I drenched a piece of wash lint with water and showed it a scrape of soap, then, still cassocked, scrubbed what was reachable. I was famished, the brief famishment I always had when I woke up. As if, each dawn, my body was petulant about rising again and threw a newborn’s rage – feed me! It was a feeling that was always eased quickly with a mouthful or two of bread.

  But there was a thing to do. A thing that had pressed on me so much in the night that I’d found a way to forget it. I went outside again, to the back of the house, where it waited near the wall. A goose, hacked clean of head and legs but otherwise just as it had been in life. It’d performed the miracle of being outside all night wrapped only in sackcloth, without being devoured by fox or dog. Sometimes you’re given a gift you don’t want, or you can’t use, one that’s too much. I was grateful to the Townshends, it was a good gift; a young small goose – but not a good gift when Lent fasting was one day off. As a rule I ate only as much meat as could be afforded, and even then only as much as God allowed, which was never as much as I wanted. But Cecily Townshend had asked that I shared it with nobody, and how could I eat a whole goose myself in one day? It would’ve been easier if a fox had helped me out; I’d fully expected that one would.