The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

‘Why wasn’t your wife healed?’ Merrily said.

Jeavons lifted both hands from the cat, held them in the air. Sat there in the white room like a bare rock on a beach freshly washed by the tide. Was the answer one he couldn’t accept? Had he been forced to conclude, in his suffering, that her faith — her faith in him, Lew — had been insufficient? Was that it?

He opened out his hands, a candid gesture.

‘It was because I didn’t understand, at the time, that there was more than Catherine in need of healing in this particular instance. I didn’t know… I didn’t know about the healing of the dead.’

8 At Home With the Vaughans

Jane was kind of tingling now. Antony Largo had demanded, Where’s the contemporary dynamic? Where’s the now drama? And now he had his answer: there was a totally worthwhile mystery here, deeper than the Grimpen Mire, subtler than phosphorous paint, and panting for telly. Jane carried the excitement with her, through the uncoloured, wintry churchyard to the door of the church of St Mary the Virgin.

There were quite a few churches hereabouts dedicated to Mary — a sign of Norman origins, according to Mum: the conquerors emphasizing to the conquered that they had the support of the spiritual big-hitters. From the plateaued churchyard, you had a wide view of the Welsh hills above the English town and the beginning of Hergest Ridge, a peninsula into Wales. The sky had closed in now, the clouds tightening around the sun, reduced to a hole at the end of a grey-walled tunnel.

‘Used to be a Norman castle up here,’ Ben said. ‘Soon abandoned, though. It’s thought the church itself was providing community defence against the Welsh by about the thirteenth century.’

‘People shut themselves up in the church?’ Jane looked up at the squat tower, with its stubby steeple.

‘The tower was separated originally from the main body of the church,’ Ben said. ‘It has walls a good six feet thick, apparently.’

‘Now I won’t have to buy the guidebook,’ Antony said, as they followed Ben inside. ‘Thanks.’

Jane had never been in here before; she’d been expecting stark and utility, and she was surprised at the size of it and the luminous, grotto-like darkness, the way the stained glass bestowed this old, rosy warmth. So different from the frigid dining hall at Stanner, although Ben said some of the stained glass had been put in around the same time. Heavy Victorian restoration, then, but it had worked: there was a big window with generous reds and oranges and warm blue and, opposite it, high up in the west, a tiny circular one with a white dove fluttering out of crimson.

The age of the place was underlined for visitors by a big modern white plaque listing all the ministers of Kington, beginning back in the days when parishioners would be putting the six-foot walls between them and the marauding Welsh.

Hugh Chabbenor………..1279

Rhys ap Howell…………..1287

John Walwyn……………..1313

Ben was strolling around in the tinted gloom with his hands behind his back. ‘All this was far more spectacular in the Middle Ages, we’re told. Wall paintings… ornate screens.’

Antony was shaking his head, slipping Jane a wry smile that maybe contained just a touch of affection for Ben. Perhaps he was at last getting into Ben’s groove, finding the motivation, feeling the dynamic.

There were only the three of them in here, or so it seemed as Ben led them back towards the door, past a table with guidebooks and magazines on it. He stood there facing them. Jane could tell that he was in Holmes mode again, a sheen on his domed forehead, the curly hair around it absorbed into the dark. Ben was excited.

‘Well… can you see them yet?’

‘Huh?’ Jane looked around.

‘Such a sense of drama,’ Antony murmured.

He and Jane were standing by the font, to the left of the entrance. Ben stepped to one side, extending an arm into the body of the church, to their right. From the side of the chancel nearest to them a different light, a colder light, was washing between the bars of a wooden screen from a stained window beyond. This window was full of blues and whites and a thin gold, and the light was hazy.

Jane was aware of a separateness — light, colour, mood — about that whole area, evidently a side chapel. And then she saw two heads together, from behind, an alabaster couple lying on a hard white bed, the wooden screen its headboard.

‘May I present Thomas,’ Ben said softly. ‘And Ellen.’

It was one of those still, hollow moments. The heads conveyed a superiority, an arrogance, an hauteur. Jane hadn’t noticed them before, and now they were all she could see: two effigies on a spectacular, off-white tomb, at ease with their backs to the pews and to the door, confident of their place in the medieval Church of St Mary the Virgin and in history.

‘At home with the Vaughans,’ Ben was saying. ‘Cosy, isn’t it?’

The double tomb came up to Jane’s chest. On the side nearest to her, eight anonymous carved figures, some of which might have been monks or even angels, stood behind their shields, to protect the remains inside.

Black Vaughan, in fact all white now, was nearest the altar, his effigy’s praying hands projecting from its alabaster chest, its face bland and clean-shaven.

Jane noticed right away that below the feet of the effigy was a dog.

It was a disappointment, however: too small to be any kind of hound, unless the fifteenth-century monumental mason had reduced the scale to make it fit onto the tomb. A life-size hound would have spread over the whole width of it and under the feet of the woman.

Jane thought Vaughan’s own feet seemed too big, like cartoon feet. ‘It’s like he’s wearing Doc Martens.’ She giggled. ‘For like giving the peasants a good kicking?’

Irreverence was compulsory in this situation — the way these arrogant bastards had always claimed the place nearest to God. Like they honestly believed God was naive enough to fall for it. But as soon as she’d spoken, she was sensing disapproval, unsure of whether it was coming from Ben or she was projecting it to Black Vaughan. Or his lady.

The lady might have been beautiful; it was hard to judge from a tomb. She wore a long gown with a girdle, her slender arms bared in prayer. On her pillowed head was a small cap. Fashionable? Probably. Coquettish? Maybe not. Her face was solemn, but what would you expect?

‘What does it mean that they’re praying?’ Jane said. ‘I mean, like, are they praying for mercy because of all the corruption in their lives, all the people they shafted? All the peasants they exploited?’

‘Comely wench, though,’ Antony observed. ‘Nice body. What’s her name again?’

‘Ellen.’ Ben stood at her feet, his hands clasped in front of him as if he was about to join the Vaughans in prayer. ‘Ellen Gethin. Also known as Ellen the Terrible.’

Antony tongued his top lip to conceal a smile. ‘I trust that disnae mean she was terrible in the sack.’

Jane grinned nervously. Ben frowned. ‘It was because she killed a man.’

Antony tilted his head. ‘Is that a fact?’

‘She came from a village called Llanbister, over the border in Radnorshire. Had a younger brother, David, of whom she was very fond. He was killed in a sword fight with his cousin, John Hir — a row over an inheritance. Ellen was shattered and bent on revenge. She was a strong woman. A formidable woman.’

‘Looks maybe taller than her man,’ Antony noted.

‘Described as having masculine strength.’

‘Sexy, though.’