“Now what’s going on?” he wondered aloud, and wound down the window to peer ahead. The sergeant, having secured the desired effect, rolled ponderously alongside and stooped to the obvious inquiry. The car was new, along with George’s recent promotion, and country members of the constabulary had as yet no reason to associate a pale grey VW 1500 with the deputy head of the County C.I.D.
“Shan’t be keeping you more than a few minutes, sir…”
He did a double take with admirable equanimity, and continued in the same tone and the same tempo: “Well, well, I see I caught a big one. How are you, George? And Mrs. Felse, ma’am… we haven’t seen you up this way for quite some time. How’s the boy?” Sergeant Moon was a very old acquaintance, and but for the remoteness of his chosen solitude, now apparently becoming rapidly less remote, he would have ranked as a close friend.
“Fine, thanks, Jack!” Dominic was away in France with his fiancee, as it happened, recovering, he said, from post-examination exhaustion and pre-life cold feet, and considering for the first time entirely seriously and for the first time with trepidation, what he was to do with himself and his career. “How about your own family? Well, I hope?”
Sergeant Moon acknowledged the inquiry gravely; his wife and daughter were well. “You don’t find us much to do up here, or you’d see more of us,” George said. At the time this was a strictly truthful statement, but somebody somewhere was certainly listening, and took malicious note.
“Ah, that’s right,” acknowledged Sergeant Moon, leaning a sharp blue elbow on the VW’s roof. “Crime, by and large, we don’t go in for. A bit of riotous behaviour now and again, that’s about it. Sin, now, sin’s more in our line.” The distinction was clear, thoughtful and comforting. The sins of Middlehope were time-honoured, the contrivances of an enclosed community still governed by pre-feudal sanctions, and generally speaking the sinners were disciplined by their own society and did not totally shirk responsibility for their acts. The sergeant knew where the law ought to restrain its hand and leave older laws to function, with profounder humanity and sounder common sense. “Today,” he said, “we should be whiter than snow. We’ve got company.”
“So I see,” said George. “What exactly is going on?”
“You haven’t been reading the ecclesiastical news and notes, have you? We’ve got the bishop, no less. Look out, here he comes!”
And here he came. The church, a square-towered conglomeration of seventeenth- and nineteenth-century renovations on the poor remnants of a very ancient foundation, lay on the left of the road, half-screened by old trees and ringed by its crowded graves. To the right, on the other side of the road, was the nineteenth-century vicarage, three-coloured brick with dozens of gables and mock-Gothic windows, a pretentious and unmanageable mess. It had, however, a generous and well-stocked garden with plenty of fruit trees. Towards this green shade the bishop took his unhurried way. He was undoubtedly impressive. All the women watching from windows, doorways and pavement touched their hair and smoothed their dresses at the sight of him. The word that entered George’s head was “bridled.” The word that entered Bunty’s was “blossomed.” Six feet tall and something over, fragile and ascetic as a primitive saint (and every bit as durable), with a fleshless face honed into an incredible refinement of benevolence and beauty, and longish silvery hair framing it, the bishop paced slowly along the flagged path, his frilled sleeves falling back from emaciated hands, posed exquisitely in the frame of the lych-gate for half a dozen photographers who materialised surprisingly out of nowhere in particular, and flowed majestically across the road towards his promised vicarage tea.
“If you’re going to do a thing,” observed Sergeant Moon approvingly, “I like to see it done well. These hearty modern clerics don’t know they’re born.”
“But what’s he been up to?” George wanted to know.
“Re-dedicating our south door. Hadn’t you heard? It’s been hung somewhere in the cellars of the Abbey ever since the dissolution of the monasteries, and now they’ve been clearing up the old place in the hope that the National Trust will take it over, they wanted to put back the things that were pinched, and get everything in order. Done a very nice restoration job on that door, so they tell me.”
The vicar, walking behind his bishop, was half a head shorter and about three times as wide, a burly young man with a round, ingenuous face and muscles befitting a wing three-quarter. A late shaft of sun bounced from his red hair like singed fingers recoiling from a burning bush.
“You’ve got the press on the run,” said George. “I never thought a door could bring in so many cameras!”
“It’s said to be something special, all right. The experts got the word, apparently. The thing’s never been on view before, you see. Nobody writes up the Abbey, not these days.”
“Nor the family?” said George curiously. “I take it that’s the squire following on?”
“Don’t mention that word here, George, we’re allergic to it. Even if they used it at all, it would be about old Thwaites who bought up the Court fifty years ago—and if they used it about
“The lords of shop and bank are coming, by the look of your housing plans,” said Bunty.
“Let ’em come, they’ll learn. But, yes,” he said, returning to the little procession which had just reached the vicarage gate, “that’s Robert Macsen-Martel and his mother. Don’t see her often these days. He works for Poole, Reed and Poole, in the estate office—talking of historical ironies, though I know we weren’t. Sells expensive little gimcrack houses all round what’s left of his own—and after all, they’ve been there best part of nine centuries. God knows how they stuck it out, they never were wealthy. Probably the best they ever did was out of that dissolution business, when the monks got kicked out. Count for nothing now. Never will again. Never
It was an epitaph; and there was something about the two figures now vanishing into the vicarage garden that suggested that even the epitaph was an afterthought, long after the event of dissolution.
The old woman was exceedingly tall and ramrod erect, a residue of desiccated flesh shrunk tightly to attenuated bones, and draped with old-fashioned and shapeless tweeds of no particular colour. Under an ancient felt hat, worn dead straight on lank grey hair drawn into a bun on her neck, the long, narrow, aristocratic face looked out with chill disapproval at the world, as though she had ceased to expect anything good from present or future.
“She looks,” said Bunty thoughtfully, “like that bronze bishop at Augsburg—the one with the bad smell under his nose.”
“Bishop Wolfhart Roth,” said Sergeant Moon understandingly. “Now you come to mention it, so she does.” And it was entirely typical of him that he should be able to haul out of his capacious memory not only the face but even
