Bones and Silence

Agonistes. If Lucifer could fall, why not a minor canon?

It was time for a dutiful wife to come to the rescue.

She said, 'Won't the market stallholders object to their customers being turned into an audience?'

Horncastle turned his cold gaze upon her, no simper now deflecting the straight line of those lips.

'Monday is not a market day in normal circumstances, I think you'll find. When it happens also to be a Bank Holiday, it seems more than ever unlikely that there should be any commercial activity, wouldn't you say, my dear?'

The heavy sarcasm, though hardly novel, still had power to bruise. Chung, sensitive to drama, stepped in swiftly.

'Hasn't he told you that we finalized our timetable at the meeting, Mrs Horncastle? That's a man for you, thinks we're all psychic! Well, we're going for the first week in June, which has the feast of Corpus Christi in it, that's the traditional time when these Mysteries were performed, and also this year it happens to be the week of the Spring Bank Holiday which means we can use the holiday Monday for our grand opening procession without getting snarled up with all the usual commercial traffic. So, this way everyone's happy, Church, holiday-makers, shop-keepers, historians and traffic cops!'

'It must be gratifying to make so many people happy,' said Dorothy Horncastle, smiling wanly.

She's really rather pretty, thought Chung. Ten minutes with the Leichner box, an auburn wig to match those eyes, plus a rich red gown with a fret of mourning black lace at the throat, and she'd make a perfectly presentable Olivia. Instead, unmade-up, her fine features skeletally honed by the biting wind, her hair invisible under a shapeless wool hat and her body unguessable under a shapeless tweed coat, she looked like a Village Thespians' shot at Mother Courage.

They moved on, entering the narrow skein of mediaeval streets which curled around the cathedral. Chung modified her pace so that she came between the Horncastles and modified her tone also, talking earnestly of her desire to recapture those days when the spiritual and temporal were inextricably intertwined and the Church was the one true centre of civic life. At the same time her eyes were taking in every detail of the winding cobbled ways flanked by close-crowded shops and houses whose timbered gables often threatened to meet overhead. And through her mind's eye, heavily screened so that not the slightest verbal hint should slip out to give the Canon pause, ran pictures brimming with colour and excitement of the great pageant wagons rumbling over the cobbles, heralded by music and dancers and trailing a long wash of jugglers, tumblers, fire-eaters, fools, flagellants, giants, dwarves, dancing bears, merry monks, cut-price pardoners, knights on horseback, Saracens in chains, nubile Nubians ... At about this point in his solo session, her university mediaevalist had demurred but she had silenced him with a cry of, 'Shit, man! This show's for your person-in-the-street. Ask yourself, do they want it authentic, or do they want it fun?' And then had won his cooperation by squeezing him well above the knee and laughing, 'OK. So maybe we'll hold the Nubians. That make you happy?' And, as she squeezed again, he could not but agree that it did.

And now they came into the cathedral close and everything changed. Little of the mediaeval had survived the 'modernization' of the eighteenth century when Wyatt the Destroyer's internal restorations had been mirrored and magnified in a ruthless external clean-up of what even antiquarians had had to admit was an ecclesiastical slum. A fourteenth-century deanery had been spared because the eighteenth-century dean had simply refused to move his large family, and a row of Jacobean almshouses had presented a similar logistical problem. Between these and a scattering of other survivals had sprung up new buildings in styles ranging from neo-classic domestic, through romantic picturesque to Victorian Gothic; and by one of those coincidences quite beyond the wit of architects and planners, the result was a delightful and harmonious meld. Nothing was here to provoke a Prince.

The close was entered through a granite gateway in a sandstone wall, and though the old wooden gates had long since vanished, there was still a sense of being admitted, of passing from the hectic and neurotic atmosphere of modern life into a balmier, more restful air.

Chung made a mental note to get the gateway measured. She wanted her procession to be fun, and she didn't want it to end in farce with a pageant firmly wedged between the pillars. She had hold of the Canon's arm now to steer him along her reconnoitred route while at the same time permitting him to imagine that it was his expertise which was showing her the best way. This was not easy as the best way could hardly be said to involve the cathedral close at all, since Charter Park, the proposed site for the daily performance of the Mystery Plays, lay as far to the west of the market place as the cathedral lay to the east. Chung had justified her diversion on ecclesiastical grounds. The grand opening procession must be seen to embrace the sacred as well as the profane.

Her real reason, however, was that she had no intention of staging her production in the Park, which was broad and flat and bounded by a main road and a canalized river, providing a choice between a static background of gloomy warehouses or a moving one of double-decker buses.

Her chosen site was much closer at hand. On the far side of the cathedral and belonging to it stretched an expanse of green and pleasant land, dotted with old trees and sinking down in a shallow valley before swelling up once more to a natural vallum where remnants of the city's mediaeval walls could still be seen. More substantial than these stood the ruins of St Bega's Abbey from which had come much of the impetus and, after its closure, some of the material to enlarge the small Anglo-Norman cathedral into a huge Gothic edifice which could hold its own against any in the land.

This was the setting Chung lusted after.

They had arrived at the great building itself. She paused and craned her neck to take in the soaring bulk of the lantern tower.

'It's incredible,' she said. 'How did they do all this without machines?'

'They had something better. They had God,' said the Canon.

It was a good feed. She looked at him appraisingly and said, 'And that's all you need? I think I'm getting close to finding mine. Canon, would it be possible to climb the tower to get a bird's eye view of things?'

Horncastle hesitated but his wife inadvertently came to Chung's aid. Pointing across the road to a tall gabled house as narrow and forbidding as the Canon himself, she said, 'I thought as we were so near home, a cup of coffee perhaps . . .'

'Dorothy,' said the Canon testily, 'I have pledged myself to advise Miss Chung this morning. In an hour's time I have an important luncheon appointment at the Palace. I hardly feel that taking coffee in my own parlour would be a fruitful way of filling the intervening period. If you would follow me, Miss Chung.'

He headed into the cathedral. Chung smiled apologetically at his wife and said, 'Another time, huh?' before following.