cloth and sop up those tears. I will summon the priest and he will compose you before you go.”
Christine still did not move. Sir Richard picked up her discarded gown and propped her up on the bench. Pulling up her arms, he dragged her clothing over her. Christine slumped trembling back on the bench and, lying on her side, hunched her ravaged body into a foetal ball. In her trauma she prayed silently to God for strength. The sin of Sodom, she knew, was like murder and oppression of the poor, sins which cried to heaven for justice. Her love of God and family had been despoiled by hurt, and anger, and fear. And vengeance. All these emotions ran around her brain like screeching demons.
Sir Richard walked to the antechamber door and called to the priest: “Father, this maid has been bad afflicted by the dropsy. She began to foam and shake and I tied her to the table for the moment in case she did me or self a hurt. I have tended her with wine. Take her with you and pray for her…Call my doctor to her home and leech her well. Charge me all the potions. For her wedding day she must be strong. I will call for a horse and wagon to help her on her way. Be sure my kindness in this event is announced to all who wish to know, and that you were present for all the stages of this fit.”
Father Peter thought, but could not say, “To Christine it must have been the Stations of the Holy Cross.”
When the priest entered the room and saw the prone figure of Christine, an immense anger welled up inside him. The murder of his patron was his first thought, followed immediately by his concern for Christine. He started to rush to her, but Sir Richard raised the flat of his hand to stop him. The priest ignored him, but the crusader’s powerful sword arm propelled the priest to the floor.
Sir Richard strode dramatically to Christine as she lay frozen on the bench. He kneeled in full concern and knightly grace. “Christine, be strong. If I hear that you have not recovered well, I may have to summon you again. I will hear from the doctor how you progress. Farewell.”
Father Peter, named after the Rock of Christ, helped Christine stagger to the door while cursing Sir Richard under his breath. The girl appeared to be in a trance, her consciousness swamped by agony.
The priest was outraged by his lord’s cruelty to Christine and disdain of the Church. Speak to others of the crime he could not, but Christine would be his charge. Prey sometimes he was to temptation, yet the pure remnant of his vocation would tend to her. All this he swore to God and to himself.
Christine took to her bed and remained there in fevered silence. Apart from murmured requests for a little food or drink she did not speak to family, doctor or priest. Soon the fever worsened with the leeching. The wedding was postponed, for the presence of Christine’s betrothed aggravated her illness.
William the Carpenter tried to seek out the priest, but Father Peter skilfully avoided being alone with him. Eventually, he had no choice: William had waited outside the church door for hours.
Eschewing his normal deference, William struck at the heart of the matter: “What has FitzGeoffrey done to my daughter?”
Throughout the difficult interrogation, the priest lied and lied to protect his stipend and his shame. He counselled William not to question their lord, warning of his famous temper.
“Damn his temper, Father. A judge to hang him is the course if I find that he has harmed my girl.”
“Hush, man. Fear his sword then if you despise his anger. His sword is the law, remember.” The priest reached out to touch the man’s arm, but William recoiled.
“Pray for Christine instead. Intercession with a mightier Lord is better counsel, Will,” said Peter with utter sincerity.
William grew even angrier at the failure of the priest to look him in the eyes. “If Christine dies, I will kill that knight with my own hands…”
The priest finally accepted the challenge of the carpenter’s frenzied gaze. “Your hands may be the strongest in this valley, but they are useless without a sword in them. Sir Richard has killed many men by the sword, and he has armed followers. You have nothing. Hold your temper, Will, and pray.”
The carpenter managed to contain his anger as, with one final contemptuous look, he turned and walked away.
Father Peter prayed in earnest, both at Mass and at Christine’s bedside, as she slipped in and out of consciousness.
William called a healer from Netley, who at first said that she had had a fit and that it would soon pass. When it did not, the local man summoned from Guldenford a wizened sage who administered a potion concocted from rare mushrooms; he also covered her upper body with an ointment made from juniper berries. For three days many such remedies were applied, but without effect, and finally he resorted to his rarest medicines: borage for ailing lungs, and mastic for heart palpitations.
When Christine did not respond to even these powerful potions, the Guldenford sage, with some insight, announced, “Christine is suffering from what the old monks call accidie, a sickness of the soul, where nothing has meaning, and all days seem the same, in an endless string of pain…until death. Sadly, this is the worst case I have seen, and I fear I can do no more; a priest is best.”
He returned home, and left Christine to endure her inevitable fate. Soon, her pale face grew white and mottled like speckled marble. Her breathing became erratic and heavy gasps rattled in her throat. All her courage and joyful independence, every fibre of her being, had evaporated, and so had her will to live. Even the instinct of inhaling and exhaling had almost been lost. Finally, after a month of suffering, Father Peter was brought in to perform the Extreme Unction, the final sacrament.
Duval rewarded himself with a large brandy for creating a scene of which he could be proud. He was sufficiently self-aware to realise that many critics might describe his style as stilted, his characters as two- dimensional and his subject matter perverted, but he knew they would be wrong; he did not want the fripperies of style to mask his essential search for truth. Evil had to be exposed, and his writing was his absolution, the way for his soul-perhaps-to pass through purgatory. Heaven, he sometimes suspected, was not waiting expectantly for him.
III. The Vision
Father Michael Duval had thought long and hard about the yin and yang of good and evil, of heaven and hell. Just as capitalism needed the concrete enemy of the Soviet Union and could not survive long without its polar opposite, so too this corrupt world could not explain its own troubles without the existence of another. For two thousand years, the “other” had been heaven or hell. Duval had no truck with contemporary popular variants such as interplanetary aliens. Science fiction was just that-fiction. Duval preferred to read the Catholic fiction of enlightened cynics such as Evelyn Waugh. In
From an early age Duval had been fascinated by the mechanics of religion-the liturgy, hymns and sacred accoutrements-without personally embracing the supposed final moral purpose: a heavenly calling. No matter how much he tried, his spirituality was rooted on earth and in the past, not in some heavenly future. That is why he hated the Vatican’s tampering with the traditional Latin Mass.
Perhaps Duval’s vision of the future had been corrupted by his own past. He was a scion of an old landed family. At sixteen he had converted from sullen High Anglicanism to ardent Catholicism, shifting his head and his heart from Canterbury to Rome. In doing so, he left behind a family already riven by his sister’s miserable death in an asylum. Long before she died, he had prayed to his Anglican God to alleviate her suffering, but his unanswered prayers drove him to what he considered was a fervent, more serious religion, with a far more resplendent heritage, far greater mystical reach and, most importantly, a proven connection to the Almighty.
A little surprisingly, he had chosen to live in Shere, which had a long Anglican tradition. In the past the well- to-do local families had favoured the dissolution of the monasteries and had shared in King Henry’s spoils. Later, many had sided with the Parliamentarians in the civil war. The area secured influence because Shere had once possessed an important water-mill, one of eight along a waterway which had supported five industries-corn milling, gunpowder manufacture, iron furnaces, weaving and tanning, an impressive array for what was just a large stream rather than a river, and only eleven miles long. The Tillingbourne also gained a reputation for its famous watercress,
