“But he was cured, was he not? In the end.”
“What cures melancholy, Father Fludd?”
Fludd said, “Action.”
At midnight, Fludd went out alone. It was cold, clear, still; a dried-up half-moon was skewered against the sky. The upper air was full of snow, the year’s first. He could hear his own footsteps. He let his torch-beam loose among the trees, then brought it back to his side, as if it were a serpent he were training.
The old wooden doors of the garage were quite rotten. They should have been painted, he thought, with some kind of wood preservative, if they were to withstand the Fetherhoughton weather. There was a key somewhere, but he had not wanted to advertise his intentions by asking for it. He stood back and gave the door a good kick.
Sister Philomena sat up in bed—quite suddenly, as if she had been given an electrical shock—and her hair—what there was of it—rose on the back of her neck. She threw back the covers, put her feet on the chilly floor. When she stood up a pain darted through her joints, as if her bones were filed sharp.
I am a wreck, she thought. Her ribs and shoulders still ached from Purpit’s recent assaults. She went to the small attic window and peered out. Not an owl: no nightbird, no storm, no lightning flash. She did not know what had woken her. Her window was at the back of the convent; beyond lay the slumbering moors, unseen but always present, like the life of the mind. The thought of the moors made her shudder. What anarchy in Heaven the day those moors were made.
Miss Dempsey fumbled, and found: her candlewick bedspread, her knees, and her dressing-gown, draped decorously over the end of her bed. She pulled it towards her and, still sitting up in bed, wriggled her arms into it and fastened it across her chest. The room seemed more than usually cold.
The brass-belled alarum clock said ten past twelve. Are they still down there, carousing, she thought? Is that what woke me, Father falling over?
If he has fallen over, she thought, he will need another cup of cocoa, and strong admonition. That young little devil doesn’t seem to have a need of sleep, or else he sleeps so sound in the few hours he takes that it does him more good than it does the rest of us.
Miss Dempsey eased her feet into her bedroom slippers. They were the standard Fetherhoughton sort, with a nylon-fur ruff of powder blue. They made no sound as she passed along the corridor and set them on the stairs.
At the foot of the stairs, she stopped and listened. But there was nothing to hear: not the expected murmur of voices, nor the snoring of Father Angwin fallen asleep in his chair. She sensed at once that she was alone in the house, and this sensation was enough to send her, despite the cold and her state of undress, hurtling out of the front door and into the night.
A dry leaf touched his cheek. Father Angwin stood quivering, a fox at bay. Waking suddenly, he had scrambled from his bed and had pulled on his clothes, armed himself with the presbytery’s other torch, and taken the stairs two at a time, impelled by he hardly knew what; and I said I was paralysed, he thought, I told Fludd that soon I would need people to carry me about. He heard the dull grate of metal striking stone; then nothing more, but a soft sound of funerals, earth falling on earth with its familiar hiss.
Yet not the sound of funerals, but anti-funerals. He approached the broken ground, the private graveyard that he had mentioned to Philly in the confessional, which he had offered for the use of her Protestant bones.
Fludd, he saw. Elegant back bent. Digging. Digging like an Irishman. And as he watched, the curate stepped back, and with a cavalier gesture, holding his spade at chest height, tossed the soil and gravel over his left shoulder.
“Holy God,” Father Angwin said. He approached the excavation, his black feet sliding on the frosty ground. He flashed his torch-beam into the hole. “Would we have such a thing as a second shovel?”
EIGHT
Torches were not enough; and when they had debated what to do, Father Angwin took from his pocket the key of the sacristy and handed it to Philomena. “But I am not sacristan any more,” she said. “Purpit took it away from me.”
“Tonight is not an ordinary night. These are extraordinary circumstances. Agnes, go with her. Open the top cupboard, on the left. You’ll find half a dozen old candlesticks. Bring some of the big tall High Mass candles, you know where they are. We’ll plant them around the place.”
“I have household candles,” Agnes said.
“Don’t waste time,” Father said. “Off you go.”
In the church porch, Philly gave Miss Dempsey her hand, feeling that she should somehow be the stronger of the two. The door into the church opened with its customary groan, like a jaded actor falling back on proven effects; and they made their way together up the centre aisle, over the familiar stone flags, mouths open slightly, swallowing in the darkness. There was a moment when Miss Dempsey disappeared; Philly’s stomach squeezed tight in sudden terror, and she clutched at the empty air. But the housekeeper was only genuflecting; she bobbed up again, with a whispered apology, and they moved closer together and tiptoed on.
In the sacristy they spoke, short and to the point; Philly got up on a chest, and unlocked the cupboard, and found what Father wanted. She handed down the candlesticks, one by one, and Agnes grappled them to her bosom and jiggled them to herself with an upraised knee. Philly jumped down and chose six candles from the box, running her fingertips over the arches of creamy wax.
When they returned, Father Fludd was leaning on his spade; Father Angwin, like a sprite, sat cross-legged on the ground. He jumped up, “
Philomena knelt on the ground by the hole Father Fludd had made and put out one finger, experimentally as if the earth were water and she were going to bath a baby. Below the loose surface the soil felt heavy, saturated. She felt something move, against her finger: as it might be, a worm. “Oh,” she said, pulling her hand away: the refinements of the convent parlour. “Worm,” she said.
“Don’t frighten me,” Father Angwin said.
Fludd said, “We see devils in serpents. We see serpents in worms. They are things within our common experience.”
