The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

their need to nurture, he was said to have spent weeks in Holloway prison and had corresponded with Myra Hindley, the moors murderess. After Women of the Midnight, Antony never seemed to have been out of work, but he didn’t seem to have done anything since that had been quite as massively acclaimed.

It was becoming clear that Ben had known exactly what he was doing — connecting with old triumphs — when he’d introduced Antony to Hattie Chancery.

‘Hattie Chancery,’ Gomer said, lighting up. ‘Her was as big as a cow. Her could skin a rabbit with her teeth. Her could ride all day and drink strong men under the table.’

‘Really?’

‘Prob’ly not, but it’s what we was told as kids. “Eat up your sprouts, boy, else Hattie Chancery’ll come for you in the night and put you under her arm and take you away.” You woke up in the night, bit of a creak, it’d be Hattie Chancery on the stairs.’

‘This was while she was still alive?’

‘Sure t’be.’ Gomer nodded. ‘Master of the Middle Marches, see, for years. The hunt, Janey. Used to year ’em galloping up Woolmer’s pitch of a Saturday, hounds yowlin’ away, but the loudest of all’d be Hattie Chancery. Like a whoop, whoop in the air, urgin’ on the fellers. Hattie Chancery: whoop, whoop.’

Gomer leaned back in his chair, into the smoke from his ciggy and the clouds of his childhood.

‘Was that unusual,’ Jane asked him, ‘having a female hunt master in those days?’

‘Was round yere. But Hattie, her was a dynamite horse-woman, and had this authority about her. Big woman, see. Weighed a fair bit, in later years. Drank beer. Pints. Big thirst on her.’

Jane knew girls at school who drank pints, but that was more about sexual politics than big thirst.

‘You still gets huntswomen like that now, mind,’ Gomer said. ‘Loud. I remember folks used to jump in the ditch if they yeard Hattie’s car comin’ round the bend from the pub at Gladestry. That was a fact — into the bloody ditch, no messin’, and they’d year her laughing like a maniac as her come beltin’ past, well tanked-up, all the windows down. No big drink-driving thing in them days, see. Least, not for the likes of Hattie Chancery.’

Jane was surprised that Gomer could remember so far back, but she supposed you did when you got older; it was just the more recent events that became a haze.

‘What about the husband?’

‘Robert? Kept well out of it, Janey. Never hunted. Couldn’t ride, for one thing — they reckoned he had an injury from the Great War, but I also yeard it said he had a bit of a distaste for all that. For blood. Bad time, they reckoned, in France, and he come back a changed man: quiet, thoughtful, never talked about what he’d seen. Son of a doctor in Kington, Robert was. Good-lookin’ feller, caught Hattie’s eye, and that was that. Her was young, eighteen or so, when her married Robert. Hattie’s ole man had died by then, and so Robert come to Stanner. Hattie wouldn’t never leave Stanner. Brought Robert back like a bride. That’s what they used to say. Like a bride.’

Jane sipped her tea, forming this picture of Robert as some kind of poetic Wilfred Owen type, sickened by the horrors of the trenches. Maybe even a Lol type.

‘Serious mismatch,’ Gomer said. ‘Went wrong early, got worse.’

‘You ever see him?’

‘Mostly, he stayed round the house and the grounds, but I seen him once or twice. Every now and seldom he’d go for a walk on his own, along Hergest Ridge, with a knapsack. And I was with my ole man this day — I’d be about seven — and we seen Mr Robert, and he give me an apple. And I remember my ole man watching him walk off, head down into the wind, and the ole man sayin’, “Poor bugger.” Always remember that. Poor bugger.’

‘So how long was that before…’

‘Oh, mabbe a year or two. ’Course, there was a lot o’ gossip ’fore that, about Hattie and her men.’

‘She had other men?’

‘Oh hell, aye. Any number, you believed the stories. Any number. Good-lookin’ woman, see. Golden-haired and statuesque, like. There was tales…’ Gomer looked into his cup, cleared his throat. ‘Like, you’ll’ve yeard how a new huntsman gets blooded, from his first kill. They reckoned the Middle Marches had its own… test. For a new boy. See if he was up to it, like.’

‘What — up to Hattie?’

‘Her was said to be… I suppose today you’d have a name for it.’

‘Generous?’

‘Nympho,’ Gomer said. ‘Appetites like a feller, my mam used to say — not to me, like, but I overyeard her and Mrs Probert from the Cwm once. Well, naturally, after her done what her done, they all had their theories. More like a feller. Used to get in fights in the pub. Smash an ole pint glass, shove it at you.’

‘She glassed people?’

‘All kinds of stories went round after her killed Robert. Stories I wouldn’t rush to repeat.’ Gomer sniffed, stirring his tea, ciggy in his lips. ‘Not to a young woman.’

‘Oh, Gomer.’

‘Janey, it was gossip. We was kids. Young boys. ’Sides, it was five or six years after her was dead I yeard this. Durin’ the War. Young lads talkin’, the way young lads talks at that age.’

Jane had an image of Gomer in adolescence: thin as a straw, hair like a yardbrush.

‘Gomer, I’m like… seventeen, now? You know?’

Gomer stirred the dregs of the tea in the pot and filled his cup with it — tea like sump oil. ‘It was Stanner Rocks,’ he said. ‘Used to take ’em up Stanner.’

‘Men?’

‘Funny place, see. Scientists now, they reckons it’s down to what they calls a Standing Wave. Meteological stuff. Gives it a rare climate up there, like in Italy and them places. Nowhere like it, ’specially not on the edge of Wales.’

‘Mediterranean.’ Jane nodded. Ben had gone on about it, bemoaning the fact that the rocks, with their odd climatic conditions and their rare plants, didn’t belong to the hotel. A national nature reserve now, so you had to have special permission to go up there, which meant Ben couldn’t even build it up as a tourist attraction.

‘They din’t know the scientific stuff then,’ Gomer said, ‘but everybody said it was a funny place, what with the Devil’s Garden where nothing grew — just thin soil, more like, but they always called it the Devil’s Garden. Soil’s that thin on them ole rocks that in a good summer you’ll have a drought up there as kills off half the trees and the bushes. See, what—’

‘And she used to take men up there?’

Gomer sucked the ciggy to the end, carefully extracted the remains. ‘Boys’ talk. No matter what the weather was like, see, you’d always find a warm spot on top o’ Stanner.’

‘Like for sex?’

‘Bloody hell, Janey! Can’t get to it fast enough, can you?’

‘Sorry.’

Gomer drank his tea. ‘Her’d make ’em go right to the edge. Right to the edge of the rocks. The cliff edge. Hundred-foot drop or more, onto stones. And her’d have ’em right on the edge, more ways than one. Whoop whoop.’

‘Oh.’

‘Boys’ talk, Janey. Stories, that’s all.’

‘So like, did you know anybody who…?’

Gomer stared into his teacup; it was empty.

‘Gomer!’

‘Pal o’ mine — his older brother. He was one.’

‘And what happened?’

‘Men wasn’t experienced back then, Janey, not quite the same way they are now. Her gets him… overwrought.’ Gomer’s face went dark red. ‘And then, when he can’t think proper, her’s got him hanging half over the edge. Thought he was gonner go over the top and he… he din’t care, see. Din’t care if he went over or not.’

‘Bloody hell, Gomer.’