“Why should I? If the heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone, why should not the Fetherhoughtonians do the same? Oh, I’d be willing, as the bishop says I ought, to deliver them from their ignorance: but what would I deliver them to?”
“It is a question,” Fludd said. “But now, what is this problem you have with the devil? How can it be that your belief in him remains?”
“Well, I saw him,” Father Angwin said, rather curtly. “He hangs about the parish.” He was silent for a moment, recovering his manners. “My dear boy, could I prevail upon you to drink that cocoa? I see you have stirred it up, and then taken no further interest in it. I wouldn’t wish you to provoke Agnes on your first night. She believes cocoa is good for priests.”
Fludd picked up his cup. “What did he look like?”
“The devil? He was a little man in a checked cap. He had one of those round faces, apple-cheeked, you’d say.”
“And you had never seen him before?”
“Oh, I’d seen him many a time. He comes from Netherhoughton. He keeps a shop. A tobacconist, he is. But don’t you understand, Father, how you can look and look at a thing, perhaps all the days of your life, without knowing its true nature at all? Until one day light dawns?”
“I would not say in this instance that it was light. I would say it was darkness.”
“That afternoon,” Father Angwin picked up his own cup and inspected its contents, “that afternoon, I say, I was walking about the church grounds, making my circuit around the convent and the school, just having a think to myself. And there the fellow appeared to me, just bobbed up from nowhere, and raised his cap. He smiled at me— and by God, I knew him.”
“How did you know him?”
“It was his smile … his horrible jauntiness … the little tune he whistled.”
“Anything else?”
“Perhaps the smell of sulphur. It stank out the afternoon.”
“Sulphur,” said Fludd, “may be taken as definitive.”
Agnes put her head around the door. She cleared her throat. “Are you finished with the tray?” The rest of her appeared. “It’s bedtime,” she said. “We keep decent hours, Father Fludd.”
“Agnes,” Father Angwin said, “Father Fludd is not obliged to go to bed just because you are going.”
“It’s not a matter of obligation,” Agnes said. “It’s a matter of seemliness. I’ve already locked up, hours ago.”
“Good,” Father Angwin said. “If there is anything we want, we shall get it ourselves. Father Fludd, I daresay, knows how to boil a kettle.”
Miss Dempsey went out and double-checked the big bolts on the front door, rattling them as she did so; not in protest at being sent about her business, but as a counter to the deep calm that had fallen on the house. The storm was over. When she looked through the kitchen window, she could see that the trees still swayed, but only a little, like polite dancers on a crowded floor. And any noise they made was lost to her, shut out by thick stone walls and the evening’s events. She touched her lip, fingering the small flat protuberance there. She turned off the light and went up to bed, leaving the dirty cocoa cups in the sink; departing from the habit of a lifetime, feeling that her life was somehow altered. It was true that the curate had not spoken to her, apart from an exchange of pleasantries, a few words when she brought in the sausages. But there was a whisper at the back of her mind, and only he could have put it there: I have come to transform you, transformation is my business.
The two men sat on, talking through the night. Soon it came, the peevish dawn. The fire fell to ash. Father Angwin felt his way upstairs in the dark, his hand against the wall. He had an hour or two before he must be up to say Mass. He lay down, removing only his shoes, and fell at once into a deep sleep.
When he woke up, he did not know what time it was. His mouth felt dry, there was unaccustomed sun outside the window. He lay thinking, not caring about anything very much. It seemed possible—probable, even—that he had dreamt Father Fludd. The details of their conversation were remarkably clear, but he found that he could not call the young man’s face to mind. Bits of it he could get: an eye, the nose. He could not somehow fit it together. It seemed possible that Fludd was some composite figure he had got out of his imagination; perhaps he had fallen asleep before the fire.
He sat up, rubbed his palms over his face, put the heel of his hands into his eyes and rubbed them, stroked his chin and thought of shaving, conversed mentally with his empty stomach and promised it a digestible coddled egg. Then, in his stockinged feet, his shoes in his hand, he crept down the passage and pushed open the door of the curate’s room.
It was not empty. Fludd was in bed and asleep. He lay on his back, staring sightlessly at the ceiling, and his reserved, almost severe expression forbade Father Angwin’s close inspection. The room smelled of incense. Father Fludd wore some kind of old-fashioned nightshirt, starched and with a ruffled collar; it was a pattern that Father Angwin had never seen before, and immediately it excited his envy.
He turned away and tiptoed from the room, closing the door softly behind him; though it did not seem to him, as he remarked later, that an earthquake would have disturbed the curate. He looked like a bishop upon his catafalque; immediately this image occurred to him, Father Angwin thought bishop, bishop, we had no discussion of the bishop last night. His name was not even mentioned. If Fludd is a spy, I am ruined; but would any spy sleep so soundly? Then he thought, I am ruined anyway.
And there was the housekeeper, downstairs, about her morning round, and singing once more—Miss Dempsey, he thought, had conceit of her voice—to impress that oblivious, motionless, waxen image in the room behind him. He wondered, for an instant, whether he should return and take the curate’s pulse. But no: if Father Fludd was in the habit of dying during the night, that was a matter for himself. A fragment came back to him from last night’s conversation; had not the curate quoted Voltaire? “It is no more surprising to be born twice than to be born once.”
Father Angwin put out a hand, to steady himself. He was overwhelmed with hunger; he felt quite giddy and faint. I must persuade Agnes, he thought, to forgive me my trespasses and let me have two eggs. She was in the kitchen now, pursuing in her uncertain soprano the theme of the martyrdom of St.
