Midwinter of the Spirit

shrine.’

‘Look.’ Jane pushed her dark brown hair behind her ears. ‘It’s the power of place. If you’d erected a burger-bar here, people would still have been cured. It’s all about the confluence of energies. Nothing to do with the fancy tomb of some overprivileged, corrupt…’

She stopped. A willowy young guy in a Cathedral sweatshirt was strolling over.

‘It’s Mrs Watkins, right?’

‘Hello,’ Merrily said uncertainly. Was she supposed to recognize him? She was discovering that what you needed more than anything in this job was a massive database memory.

‘Er, you don’t know me, Mrs Watkins. I saw you with the archdeacon once. Neil Cooper – I’m kind of helping with the project. It’s just… I’ve got a key if you want to have a look.’

While Merrily hesitated, Jane looked Neil Cooper over, from his blond hair to his dusty, tight jeans.

‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘Cool. Let’s do it.’

Under the window, a fourteenth-century bishop slept on, his marble mitre like a nightcap. But the tomb of his saintly predecessor, Thomas Cantilupe, was in pieces – stone sections laid out, Merrily thought, like a display of postmodern garden ornaments.

There were over thirty pieces, Neil told them, all carefully numbered by the stonemasons. Neil was an archaeology student who came in most weekends. It was, he said, a unique opportunity to examine a famous and fascinating medieval tomb.

Jane stood amongst the rubble and the workbenches, peering around and lifting dustcloths.

‘So, like, where are the bones?’

An elderly woman glanced in through the door, then backed quickly away as if dust from the freshly exposed tomb might carry some ancient disease.

Jane was prepared to risk it. She knelt and stroked one of the oblong side-slabs, closing her eyes as though emanations were coming through to her, the faint echo of Gregorian chant. Jane liked to feel she was in touch with other spheres of existence. Nothing religious, you understand.

‘Sorry,’ said Neil. ‘There aren’t any.’

‘No bones?’

Hands still moving sensuously over the stone, Jane opened her eyes and gazed up at Neil. He looked about twenty. An older man; Jane thought older men were cool, and only older men. It was beginning to perturb Merrily that the kid hadn’t found any kind of steady boyfriend her own age, since they’d arrived in Herefordshire.

Neil glanced at Jane only briefly. ‘What happened, Mrs Watkins, is some of the bones were probably taken away for safekeeping at the time of the Reformation. And some were apparently carried around the city during the plague in the hope they might bring some relief, and I expect a few of those didn’t come back. So he’s widely scattered, although part of the skull’s supposed to be back in Hereford, with the monks over at Belmont Abbey.’

Jane stood up. ‘So it was like completely empty when you opened it, yeah?’

‘Lot of dust,’ said Neil.

The side-slab was divided into six sections; on each a knight in armour had been carved, their swords and shields and helmets and even chain-mail fingers crisply discernible, but all the faces gone – flattened, pulped. It didn’t look as if time was entirely responsible.

‘So, in fact,’ Jane said, ‘this great historic, holy artefact is like an empty shell.’

‘It’s a shrine,’ Merrily said.

‘Of course, that’s one of the continuing problems with the Anglican Church.’ Jane smiled slyly, before sliding out the punchline. ‘So much of it’s just a hollow shell.’

Merrily was careful not to react. ‘We’re delaying you,’ she said to Neil Cooper. ‘It was good of you to let us in.’

‘No problem, Mrs Watkins. Drop in any time.’ He smiled at Merrily, ignoring Jane.

Jane scowled.

‘I expect you’ll be around quite often,’ Neil said. ‘I gather they’re giving you an office in the cloisters.’

‘Nothing’s fixed yet,’ Merrily said, too sharply. ‘And, anyway, I’d only be here one-and-a-half days a week. I have a parish to run as well.’ God, she thought, does everybody know about this? So much for low-profile, so much for discretion.

‘Look in anytime,’ Neil repeated. ‘Always nice to see you.’

‘The trouble with older men,’ said Jane, as they left the Cathedral, ‘is that the cretins seem to fancy even older women.’

As they walked into Broad Street, the rain dying off but the sky threatening more, Merrily noticed that Jane seemed taller. A little taller than Merrily in fact, which was not saying much but was momentarily alarming. As though this significant spurt had occurred during the few days they’d been apart: Merrily experiencing weirdness in Wales, Jane staying with trusty villagers Gomer and Minnie, but returning to the vicarage twice a day to feed Ethel the cat.

Merrily felt disoriented. So much had altered in the ten days since she’d last been to the Cathedral. Ten days which – because the past week had been such a strange period – seemed so much longer, even part of a different time-frame.

She felt a quiver of insecurity, glanced back at the ancient edifice of myriad browns and pinks. It seemed to have shrunk. From most parts of the city centre, the spires of All Saints and St Peter’s were more dominant. The Cathedral had long since lost its own spire, and sat almost modestly in a secluded corner between the River Wye and the Castle Green and a nest of quiet streets with no shops in them.

‘Tea?’ Merrily said desperately.

‘Whatever.’

The late-afternoon sky was a smoky kind of orange. Merrily peered around for cafes, snackbars. She felt like a stranger, needing to ground herself.

‘The Green Dragon? They must do afternoon tea.’

Jane shrugged. They crossed towards Hereford’s biggest hotel, nineteenth-century and the longest facade on Broad Street.

‘So you’ve learned about Thomas Cantilupe at school?’

‘Only in passing. He didn’t figure much nationally. Nothing that happened in Hereford seems to have made much of a difference to anything in the big world.’

Useless arguing with Jane in this mood. The kid had consented to come shopping, a big sacrifice on a Saturday; it was now Merrily’s task to tease out of her what was wrong, and Jane wasn’t going to assist. Tiresome, timehonoured ritual.

They found a window table in the Green Dragon, looking back out on to Broad Street, the Saturday crowds thinning now as the day closed down. Sometimes November could bring a last golden surge, but this one had seemed colourless and tensed for winter. Merrily was aware of a drab sense of transience and futility – nothing profound. Maybe just wishing she was Jane’s age again.

‘Cakes,’ she said brightly.

‘Just tea, thanks. Black.’

Merrily ordered two teas and a scone. ‘Worried about our weight, are we, flower?’

‘No.’

‘What are we worried about then?’

‘Did we say we were worried?’

The bored, half-closed eyes, the sardonic tuck at the corner of the mouth. It was pure Sean – as when Merrily was trying to quiz him about some dubious client. You don’t see your daughter for a week, and in the interim she’s readmitted her father’s soiled spirit.

Merrily tried again. ‘I, er… I missed you, flower.’

‘Really?’ Jane tilted her soft, pale face into a supportive hand, elbow on the table. ‘I’d have thought you had far too much to think about, poncing about in your robes and practising your Out, Demons, Out routine with the soul police.’

‘Ah.’