Bill had called Swinley a village, but it was really more of a large farmstead surrounded by a cluster of satellite cottages and outbuildings hidden behind tall hedgerows and the coats of their own ivy, and separated from each other by a patchwork of small fields. There was even a church steeple rising from the midst. Beyond and above it reared the slope of another steep hill, wooded for the most part but bare where trees gave way to heather and the tumbled mass of a granite outcrop. Swinley appeared to be perfectly ordinary, probably unchanged since the time of Shakespeare, except that as he wandered its narrow lanes looking for someone to whom he could present himself, he saw no sign of people at all. Even in winter there should have been someone working the fields. He decided to make for the church: if the village had a centre it would be there, though if Bill had been telling the truth that the inhabitants of this place worshipped something other than a Christian god, he did wonder what kind of a church it would be.
Again, perfectly ordinary, as it turned out. According to a noticeboard by the lychgate this was The Church of St Mark’s in the Parish of Swinley. Mark’s, he thought. Moccus. Now more than ever he suspected that this whole affair was nothing more than the brain-fever of a man no saner than the rest of the madmen. He saw weathered stone, lichen-spotted headstones, and a stout oak door standing open to the church’s porch. From inside he heard a woman’s voice singing – not a hymn, but something with lilt and sparkle, something about a sailor and his bonnie bride.
The deserter entered. In the porch a waxed jacket hung above a pair of muddy wellingtons, and the singing, soft though it was, was picked up by the building’s vaulted interior so that it seemed to come out of the very stones. As he opened the inner door the coolness of stone and the warm smell of furniture polish and old carpet folded around him. He saw ranks of darkly gleaming oak pews and a pulpit, a paraffin heater doing its best against the chill, stained-glass windows, and the singer, in the process of polishing the pulpit’s brass fittings, turning in surprise.
She was young, with dark hair wound up in a chignon, and wearing a pair of bib overalls like a munitionette. Cool blue eyes regarded him with the kind of still, silent appraisal that reminded him oddly of how the boar on the path had watched him. He could well imagine how he must look to her: a scarecrow of a man, dripping wet, in a threadbare suit. ‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What do you want?’
Before he could reply, a fit of coughing wracked him, and when he could catch his breath replied, ‘My name is Everett. I’m looking for the followers of Moccus. The, uh, the Farrow.’
She at least did him the courtesy of not feigning ignorance. ‘Oh are you, now? And what makes you think you’ll find them here?’
He told her a highly selective tale of how he had met Bill and what the other man had shown him. ‘He must have been from here,’ the deserter finished. ‘Did you know him?’
‘Come with me,’ was all she said. She bundled her cleaning things into a bucket and edged past him down the aisle to the door, where she looked back to see that he hadn’t moved. He’d just noticed that there was something very odd about the images depicted by the stained-glass windows. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Are you coming or not?’
‘Sorry, yes.’ He shook himself and followed.
‘You look like you could do with a cup of tea and a hot meal, if nothing else. My name is Ardwyn.’
She led him out through the churchyard and to a neighbouring cottage – an ancient and rambling building with a humpbacked thatch roof and a chimney of granite. In the yard outside they passed an absolutely huge man with a slab of a jaw chopping wood, with whom Ardwyn stopped to have a few quiet words before leading the deserter on. The wood-chopper watched him pass with a frown of distrust.
‘Afternoon, chum,’ the deserter nodded.
The big man responded by baring his teeth in what could never have been mistaken for a smile. For a start, he had far too many of them; they crowded his mouth like headstones and looked more like tusks than human teeth.
‘That’s Gar,’ said Ardwyn. ‘He doesn’t speak much.’
‘I can see why.’
Everett was ushered into a kitchen with a ceiling so low that for a moment he was in the cellar again and Potch the cook was at the table with his knife, taking the meat off a man’s shoulder, and the deserter swallowed against the sudden rolling hunger in his guts and clenched his eyes shut, and when he opened them again Potch was gone, replaced by a middle-aged woman in an apron, chopping nothing more contentious than parsnips.
‘This is Mother,’ said Ardwyn. ‘Tell her what you told me.’ So while Ardwyn busied about pouring tea and setting a plate of bread, cheese and, cold ham before him, he told the older woman the same story. She quizzed him closely on his description of Bill, nodded and said, ‘Now tell me the rest of it.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Yes you do. You’ve just described my son and told me that he died bravely and honourably in the trenches, but Bill wasn’t his name. His real name was Michael.’ Ardwyn was weeping with her arms tightly crossed but her mother’s eyes were dry, her voice calm and steady. She might weep for her dead son but not now, not in front
