The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

‘You can’t—’

‘I mean, to kill him. Kill Dacre. And I don’t really know where that came from. All I do know is how perilously close you came to killing them both.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Erm, earlier tonight, Jeremy—’

Brigid Parsons stood up so suddenly that she knocked over the coffee table and both cups. ‘What’s he done?’

Bliss and Alma exploded into the room, followed by two male uniforms.

45 Fatalist

It had stopped snowing again, but this only made the air seem colder and the sky darker. Alice was breathing up at it — a damp, soughing sound, like the wind through rotting leaves.

Alice was birdlike, but she was soaked and felt like dead weight as Lol waded through the orchard under the snowlagged limbs of apple trees that he never saw until it was too late, because he’d had to leave the Maglite behind on the tomb, along with Alice’s shoes buried in the snow.

It seemed strange that, when some snow-fuzzed twig scraped her cheek, she didn’t wake up struggling and flapping, cawing at him, outraged. He wondered if she would ever wake up again and what state she’d be in if she did, how much of her would be functioning. Salt and vinegar on that, is it, lovey?

Or would the chip shop be under new management? Get ’em served and on to the next one, don’t give ’em too many chips neither.

Lol stopped.

At the edge of the church’s own orchard, the rhythm of Alice’s breathing had fractured, the indrawn breath suspended like a roller-coaster car pausing on a peak before clattering into the long valley, and he thought, Christ, she’s gone.

He didn’t know any more about strokes than what the condition looked like. He didn’t know whether the schizophrenic woman in the psychiatric hospital had lived or died, only that they hadn’t seen her again.

Oh… God. Alice’s breath shuddered back into the night, Lol quivering with relief.

The vicarage formed in front of them, lightless, just a different texture of night. Beyond it, you ought to have been able to see sporadic lights in the hills, but there was nothing there, nothing to convey space or distance.

Lol’s hands and Alice connected with the wicket gate into the vicarage garden. He had trouble with the latch, had to put Alice down in the snow. Felt her sinking, but what else could he do? He was so soaked and freezing in his Gomer Parry sweatshirt that he could hardly pick her up again.

He carried Alice through the gate, across the lawn to the path that circuited the house and then round to the front door which, without a key, he’d left unlocked. He backed into it.

Completely black in here. Too risky to try and get her upstairs with no lights. Lol carried her into the kitchen, where the old Aga snored but where there was no sofa, not even a big chair. He was feeling for heat with the backs of his hands, holding Alice up. He knew there was a rug on the floor to the side of the stove, before you reached the window.

He found it with his feet and lowered her, and roughly rolled up his parka and pushed it between her head and the wall. Stood up and felt his way to the refectory table where there were chairs with cushions you could pull out. Collected four and took them back to where Alice lay, a small pile of clothes with a noisy pump inside. He began feeding two cushions behind her head against the wall.

Alice moaned, and he thought her hands moved.

‘Alice?’

He felt her falling forward. Keep her head up. Don’t let her swallow her tongue.

Alice said, ‘Whosat?’

‘Alice,’ Lol said, ‘if you can hear this, it’s… She wouldn’t know him. ‘I’m getting a doctor, OK? You’re safe.’

‘Wangohome.’

‘You’re safe.’

But she was still as crispy-cold as a sack of peas out of the deep-freeze.

‘Pummedown. Dexer, pummedown.’

‘Alice, I’m going to ring for some help. Just—’

‘Dowannago.’ A hand clawing at him, unexpectedly strong. ‘Pummedown, Dexer!’

‘He’s not here, Alice. It’s OK. Dexter’s not here.’

But almost as he spoke, he knew by the drifting odour of sweat and something else that he couldn’t define — a gross swelling in the air — that he was wrong.

Left alone again, Brigid and Merrily gathered up the crockery from the burn-scarred carpet in front of Ben Foley’s sour, hissing fire of green softwood. Merrily got out her cigarettes. There were only two left in the packet. She placed it on the arm of Brigid’s chair. Brigid’s face was candle-white.

‘Why didn’t I… think?’

‘Danny’s with him,’ Merrily said. ‘You know Danny — he’ll stay there all night.’

‘Can’t stay for the rest of his life.’

‘And would you have?’

‘Given the chance,’ Brigid said. ‘I thought we were meant, right from the beginning. The one thing I could never forgive my dad for was intercepting Jeremy’s letters. And — even worse — he found some way of stopping my letters to Jeremy getting out. I still don’t know who he persuaded, or how he did it.’

‘Because you did what you did soon after coming here?’

‘And he found out about Hattie. He didn’t believe… anything. And yet he obviously convinced someone that any correspondence from the area of Stanner would not be healthy.’

They sat for a while in a pool of quiet. Brigid didn’t touch the cigarettes. The bulb in the standard lamp went dim and then stammered back to life.

‘If the power goes, they’ll probably handcuff me to the banisters at the bottom of the stairs.’

Brigid found a crumpled tissue in her jeans and roughly stabbed at her eyes with it. She stared into the dismal fire, and Merrily thought of the everlasting furnace in Jeremy’s living-room range and was startled when Brigid said, ‘I never changed a thing, you know. He kept on at me to move things around, have brighter colours, impose me on The Nant, but I never touched a single ornament.’

‘Did you want to?’

‘Every day.’

‘But better it looked as though you’d never been there at all? If you weren’t permitted to stay.’ Merrily took a breath. ‘Why did he do it?’

‘It’s not for me to…’ Brigid dug her fingers into her forehead. ‘He thought he was doing it for me. That’s all I want to say.’

‘People couldn’t get their heads around it — you and Jeremy.’

‘People are crass and stupid and superficial. Educated townies, with weekend cottages, tend to venerate country folk.’

‘Touching, isn’t it?’

‘Always venerating the wrong ones. Never people like Danny Thomas and that little guy, Gomer. Certainly never Jeremy Berrows. Always the loud bastards, who know everything and nothing.’

‘Sebbie Dacre.’

‘And the old Mistress of the Hunt.’ Brigid looked up. ‘I can feel her, can you? Over there, where that bookcase is — that’s where the shelves were, where she kept the trophy stones for Robert