The Cure of Souls

Charlie, we’ve got a problem here, you must be able to see that.’

‘And possibly a solution,’ Simon St John said.

‘Dad?’ Annie Howe struggling to sit up. ‘What the hell are you—?’

‘Stay where you are, girl,’ Charlie said softly. ‘Everything’s all right.’ He looked down at Merrily. ‘She been attacked?’

‘Not in the way you think, no. In the way I think – do you know what I’m saying?’

‘I don’t know, Merrily, her clothes…’

Lol was there. ‘I think it’s pretty obvious she took them off herself, Charlie. The things we saw strewn across…?’

‘I’ll fetch them,’ Sally Boswell said.

Merrily came to her feet. ‘Charlie, I swear to God. I swear to you that this is not some scam. She was in the kiln just now – on her own. The wrong place at the wrong time. Charlie, it all comes down to that place.’

‘I was simply’ – Annie shook her ash-blonde head in irritation – ‘taking a final look round before we handed the keys back to…’ She looked vague for a moment. ‘Before we handed over the keys to S–Stock’s solicitors. Is there some water? If I can just have some water…’

Merrily said, ‘Charlie, I don’t have time to explain. You have got to—Please trust me.’

‘Look,’ Annie Howe said, ‘where’s the fucking car?’ She finally sat up. ‘Get these people—’

‘Stay where you are, Anne.’ Charlie’s jaw was working from side to side. ‘You’re naked, girl.’

‘What are you—?’ Annie Howe rose up suddenly, and Charlie Howe stepped to one side so that Annie was in the full sun.

There was a moment of silence, and then she started to scream, her head tossed back, eyes squeezed shut against the blast of light. Her spine arched in a spasm, her white breasts thrust towards the sun, her mouth opening into a big, hungry smile, as if—

In the instant that the screaming turned to laughter, Merrily was down by Annie’s side, both hands on her burning forehead. The eyes opened once, a flaring of panic and outrage under the sweat-soaked white-blonde hair.

It wasn’t all sweat, though. The top must finally have come off the flask inside, because the airline bag, where Annie’s head had lain, was soaked now with holy water.

Rebekah, Merrily said calmly, somewhere deep inside herself. Listen to me.

For an instant, hugging the Lady of the Bines, in all her persons, absorbing their coarse, racking sobs, she found the core – or maybe the core found her. The coin spun in the air and stayed in the air, caught in a confluence of sunbeams, and kept on spinning, bright new copper.

She could do this.

St Paul said: Put love first.

That simple: bypassing fear and revulsion, the heaving aside of a great concrete slab of personal resentment, ignoring even the stunning irony.

Behind her, Simon St John stood quietly, made the sign of the cross in the air above them.

Love is patient. Love is kind and envies no one. Love is never boastful, nor conceited. Love keeps no score of wrongs. There is no limit to its faith, its hope and its endurance.

Merrily felt her hands becoming very warm, warmer than the skin beneath. She was in a void, an emptiness that was infinitely vast and yet also movingly intimate. She didn’t understand. She didn’t have to understand. At some point, the words came automatically, from the final verse of the old Celtic anthemic prayer.

Let them not run from the love that you offer

But hold them safe from the forces of evil

On each of their dyings shed your light…

– ONE – Love Lightly?

‘TWO,’ PROF LEVIN said over the phone. ‘Let me get this right. You’re showing me two songs?’

Tomorrow, the legendary producer was returning home for a few days. Tom Storey’s slow disembowelling of the blues, he said, was making everyone close to clinically depressed; they needed a break. This was costly, sure, but if Storey had any real need to worry about expense he’d be recording at Knight’s Frome.

Lol sat on one of the packing cases in the kitchen. It was almost dark. The sky was lime green in the north, and there were great banks of cloud. A storm was coming on and it was very humid.

‘I suppose, if I was being honest,’ he admitted, because this was a night for complete honesty, ‘I’d have to say the last verse of the first one needs rewriting. And I might have to dump the second one altogether, on account of it… Maybe it wasn’t my place to write it, not really.’

There was a long silence.

Prof said, ‘So, basically, just half a song, correct?’

‘Hopefully. I’m really sorry, Prof.’ And he was. He should feel ashamed. He had a lot of work to do.

‘It’s that bloody Boswell guitar,’ Prof said. ‘I knew it would be cursed.’

‘Oh, no,’ Lol said quickly. ‘No curse. I don’t think so. Probably no curse after all.’

No need, surely, for the burning of the Boswell vardo to become any kind of issue – although Al had told Lol that maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after, he would not be over-surprised to wake up in the Lower World with a whole lot of explaining to do. He insisted he was taking nothing for granted; he would be grateful for each fresh day with Sally and the ponies and Stanley the donkey. He was grateful, too, obviously, to the drukerimaskri – if he’d had to borrow a place in which to be found dead, he hadn’t particularly wanted to borrow it from Adam Lake.

So, Lol wondered, had he actually encountered Rebekah as he sat in the hop-yard under the midday sun? Had he, in fact, journeyed to the Lower World?

These were not questions that a gaujo had any right to ask, Al had said sternly. But, well, if the little priest had managed to retrieve the Romany soul of poor Rebekah, he would not deny having performed a little essential groundwork.

Al smiled: gypsies lied.

‘I’ve been thinking about you, Lol,’ he’d said finally, leaning on the fence around his paddock, watching Stanley browse the buttercups. ‘You and this thing about the Frome. This rootlessness, this having no home? As you may have gathered, we Romanies prefer to see this as a benefit – no estates, no cities, no cathedrals.’

‘But I’m a gaujo,’ Lol pointed out.

‘In which case,’ Al kept on smiling, ‘consider it the first stage in your personal development.’

Walking away, in the sunset, Lol had observed Sally coming down from the museum to meet Al. She wore a long, white dress, embroidered around the bosom, wide and flouncy at the hem, and at least forty years out of fashion.

Prof said, ‘The other thing – and I want the truth here, Laurence, no placatory bullshit – has that insane bastard been near the place?’

‘Who?’

‘Who? Stock, of course! The impossible creep who claims he’s being haunted out of his home. If you recall, around the time I was suggesting you should be thinking about producing at least four fresh songs, I also gave express instructions that Stock should not be admitted to the premises while I was gone, yes?’

Lol sighed. ‘You don’t read the papers much, do you, Prof… when you’re working?’

‘I don’t read the papers at all. I don’t read the mail. I don’t read menus, either, because when I’m working,