the length of the wood. But it was good, thick blackthorn. Blackthorn was best. He was lucky to get it, because there wasn’t much of it growing around Withens.
Then Alton frowned at the sight of a stain on the stick. It looked like a splash of red wine. Like communion wine, perhaps? But surely not at the altar of St Asaph’s.
With a sudden burst of energy, he swung the stick through the air, as if striking at something around head height. He had to imagine the noise and the impact. But the physical action, the rush of air, and the movement of the muscles in his shoulders all made him feel good, even exhilarated. He wanted to do a little jig on the stone flags, to open his lungs and let out a shout of joy. But this wasn’t the place or the time.
‘Death and renewal. Winter and spring. The darkness and the light.’
Though his voice was still quiet, it carried the entire length of the church. The sound bounced off the dusty stone lintels and the dark oak roof timbers. The word ‘light’ seemed to return to him in the cool air with a different note, sharper and more peremptory, as if it had been spoken by someone else. Alton swung the stick again, listening to the swish of its movement through the air. The sound was almost like music, a distant whisper of otherworldly voices, sighing for the coming moment, for the time to be right.
‘The beauty and the sorrow, death and renewal. The powers of light and new life.’
Alton wasn’t even sure that the Church of England fitted naturally into the landscape in this part of the country. Perhaps Withens needed something more muscular and rugged, more in tune with the cycle of the seasons and the implacability of nature. Perhaps it ought to be able to call on something more in keeping with the preoccupations of those wretched men who had been the first to live and die in Withens - the men killed and maimed in their
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hundreds building the tunnels. The men no one had cared about.
He had wondered about that when he first came to the place and had learned about its history. It had been the prosperous traders and landowners who had subscribed to build St Asaph’s, as an act of charity. But it was the blood of the ordinary working men that had consecrated the landscape.
Now he was getting too absorbed in the past again. It always made him feel depressed. He swung his arm once more, trying to work out what it was about the acoustics that made his voice sound so unfamiliar.
The darkness and the light. The light.’
Sometimes, it seemed to Alton that the entire area might be on the verge of reverting to paganism. Only the previous year, the May Day bank holiday festivities in the town of Glossop had culminated in the burning of a wicker man. Alton had thought this was the sort of thing that only happened in films, and when he had first read about it, he had an uneasy frisson. But he reassured himself that these things were most likely done for the benefit of the tourists these days. There couldn’t be any real belief involved in the rituals, could there? Yet local residents in Glossop had written their bad memories in envelopes and attached them to the wicker man, so they would be carried away by the flames. Superstition, that’s all.
His feelings were even more confused by the fact that the ritual had taken place at the Glossop Labour Club. Not only that, but events leading up to the burning of the wicker man had included an opening ceremony conducted by the local member of parliament, along with a pie and pea supper, a coffee morning and craft fair. For the children, there had been a short-story competition, a summer pageant, and a bouncy castle. All these were things that in other areas were associated with church fetes.
There were times when he felt as though he was trying to fight back more than the encroaching nettles and bracken in his churchyard. Now and then, a dark shadow seemed to fall across his day to-day reality, and he had a vision of himself battling against something just as insidious and persistent, and just as impossible to defeat.
Alton held the stick up to his face and squinted towards the tip. The stain on the wood was dark and had soaked deep into the grain of the blackthorn. Its shape was rather like a map of Derbyshire - a long trickle running away to the north, where it
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pooled into a smear at the Yorkshire border. He nodded with satisfaction at the image. The village of Withens was somewhere in that smear that was border country, a lost and forgotten speck in miles of empty peat moor. And St Asaph’s sat on the edge of the jj
village, gradually disappearing in a mass of encroaching under-f>
growth, like the burnt-out Ford Fiesta on the grass verge at the top of the road. In most Peak District villages, there would be a committee whose aim was to win the Best-Kept Village competition, and they wouldn’t have rested until they had got the abandoned car removed or the churchyard cleared. Not in Withens, though.
All the members of his congregation were either old, or strange. Often both. Services were held at St Asaph’s only every alternate Sunday. Most of the elderly residents of the bungalows came, and a few people made the journey from Hey Bridge. But not many others. For the modern generation, attending church was a cause for suspicion. To admit to being a Christian was like confessing to a social problem.
But then again, attending church didn’t make you a Christian, any more than standing in a garage made you a car.
Sometimes Alton felt sorry for St Asaph. The saint had carried hot coals in his cloak to warm his master, without burning himself or his garments, which had proved his holiness, or so it was said. But carrying hot coals wasn’t much to be remembered for, was it? Some people would suggest it was a foolhardy thing to do.
But if anyone who wasn’t holy enough tried to carry those hot coals, they would certainly be burned.
Ben Cooper looked up the road past Waterloo Terrace. He had been planning to call at the church in Withens to see if the Reverend Alton was around. He wanted to ask him about the Border Rats, and maybe to get a look at Craig Oxley’s grave, if he really was buried at St Asaph’s. Cooper had started to feel that everything he was told by someone in Withens had to be double checked.
But he had noticed there were cars outside the Quiet Shepherd, and people around the doors of the stone garage where he had seen the clay-covered wooden boards. What was going on at the pub now? Well, the only way to find out was to go and see.
It was only when he saw the baskets of flowers being brought from the cars and the petals being pressed into place in the clay
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that it dawned on Cooper what he had been looking at on his previous visit. Like many local people, it was something he had taken for granted for years, and had never bothered to wonder about the details of how they came about.
He recognized Marion Oxley, who glowered at him, but carried on with her work filling in blocks of colour with blue hydrangea petals in outlines that seemed to have been created with rows of black coffee beans.
‘You’re making a well dressing/ said Cooper.
