Agnes:
As men go to a banquet,
As bride to meet her groom;
So thou with joyous footsteps
Didst haste to meet thy doom.
The soldiers wept in pity,
The headsman blushed for shame;
One sigh alone escaped thee.
’Twas Jesus’ sweetest name.
FOUR
That afternoon, Father Fludd undertook a parish tour. Father Angwin conducted the curate to the front door. “They may ask you into their houses,” he said. “For God’s sake don’t eat anything. Be back before dark.” He hovered, anxious. “Perhaps you shouldn’t go alone?”
“Don’t fuss, man,” Fludd said.
Father Angwin felt the weight of his responsibility. He had taken to the boy; the topic of the bishop lay uneasily between them, but since so far there had been no communication from that quarter, Father Angwin assumed that Fludd was not much in favour. He imagined that the bishop would be disconcerted by Fludd; that he would feel threatened by his scholarship, and affronted by his way of getting to the heart of a matter. No doubt, then, the parish was to become a dumping ground; Fludd was a discard, like himself.
“Here,” he said, “take this umbrella. The glass has been falling. There was a halo around the moon. It will rain before evening.”
Fludd accepted the umbrella; the two priests shook hands formally, and then Fludd strode out downhill.
On the carriage-drive, he met a bunch of little wild-looking children. They had scabs on their knees, and their heads were shaved to deter lice. Each one of them clung on to the neck of his misshapen jersey.
“We saw an ambulance, Father,” they said. “
“But you haven’t got collars,” Fludd said.
“Where they would be, if we had,” the children explained; and one small girl said, “We have to make do.”
“I see,” Fludd said. “Well, I hope you see a white dog soon. Do they do this all over the district?”
“Not in Netherhoughton,” the children said, after some thought; the girl added, “The ambulances don’t go up there.”
Fludd was curious. “Who told you that you must do this?”
The children looked at each other. They could not remember being told. It was a thing that they had always known. A few of them said, “Mother Purpit.” The little girl said, “God.”
Father Fludd passed the school gates, and soon the rough track ceased to be the carriage-drive and became Church Street; there were cobbles underfoot, and high hedges, grey in aspect, leaves drooping. Through their gaps he glimpsed fields, hummocks of coarse grass flattening in the wind. He stopped to examine a leaf; he wetted his finger and passed it over the surface, which felt greasy, with an overlay of fine grit. He licked his finger; it tasted of soil and smoke. Below him he saw the mill chimneys of Fetherhoughton, like pillars for stylites, or the towers on which heathens place their dead.
In Upstreet, matrons with baskets over their arms stood in knots, and interrupted their talk to stare at him as he went by. He raised a hand; half-greeting, half-blessing. He turned off into Chapel Street, the ground climbing steeply again; he pictured himself knocking at each of these doors, making himself known. At number 30, a woman was kneeling in the open doorway, whitening her step with donkey stone. He stood and watched her, uncertain whether to speak; then, thinking himself without manners, strode on. A little way ahead of him other doors opened; housewives appeared and, with a big heave of their elbows, hauled on to the pavement buckets of soapy water. Head first, crouching, they intruded into his view like dogs coming out of their kennels, and set to work with their scrubbing brushes. Their flowered pinnies were secured tightly, taped round their middles and round again. Each placed to hand her donkey stone: some palest cream, some mushroom colour, some a deep butterscotch, others as yellow as best butter. Their elbows jutted as they scrubbed, their jerseys rolled up beyond the joint; he saw their fine, bluish skin, the labouring swell of their slack abdomens, the tops of their heads with the fading hair.
He pitied these women. Several of them, Father Angwin said, had lost their husbands in the Council House Riots of the previous year. The site of the riots—razed now—seemed to smoke still in the afternoon air; and where the men had fallen, each asserting his right to the fat of the land, impromptu crosses were stuck in the rubbly ground. “Either they should have built houses for all of them,” Father Angwin said, “or none at all.” Last night he had spoken of those days as his worst in Fetherhoughton: the gangs of muttering, mutinous women, handbags filled with kitchen knives and bottles of paraffin; the misspelt placards on the church door; and finally, one summer afternoon, the call to say that the constabulary had moved in, that there were casualties, that the fire brigade was on its way.
Opposite the site of the riots stood the Methodist chapel, a lowbrowed, red-brick building; it was from within its door that the first wave of rioters had burst, with their anti-Papist battle-cries. Father Fludd accorded it a searching glance, then set out across the Methodist graveyard, where some of the Protestant fatalities had been laid to rest. He vaulted the low wall and found himself on Back Lane; he turned right, up the hill towards Netherhoughton.
Back Lane was hardly alive to his presence; a couple of women came out and leant in their doorways, watching him with impassive faces, and one of them called out that he might come in and she would brew tea. Remembering Father Angwin’s warning, he raised his hat to her, courteously, and showed by a gesture that he must hurry on. “Turn back,” the woman said and laughed scornfully; then went in, slamming her door.
Soon the houses ran out; the street narrowed, became a lane. There was a good three-mile tramp, Father Angwin had told him, around the loop of unfrequented road that would take him towards the hamlet and the moors. And no shelter, not a house or a tree, simply the moors on the traveller’s right hand, and on the left unfenced fields that had once been allotments. It was the railway workers who had rented them, for here you were not far, as the crow flies, from Fetherhoughton’s small branch-line station. Besides growing vegetables, some of them had kept hens, even an occasional pig. But the coops and sties were empty now and damply rotting. The raiding parties had come down from Netherhoughton and carried off the spring greens, and at last the men had grown weary of patching and mending their fences, and replanting what was torn out. They had abandoned the site, and told their wives to frequent the Co-op greengrocers; the fields were reverting rapidly to their waste-ground character, and the only sign that the railway men had once been there was a red spotted kerchief, tied to a crumbling fence pole, and whipping defiantly in the breeze.
