The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

A shocking cinematic image flared unconjured in her mind: the heavy old service revolver clunking on the floor as Hattie’s head exploded, blonde hair snaking with blood and wet brains, and a splatting on the walls and—

What was it like to have killed? To have done — publicly, without hope of concealment — the one thing you could never reverse, put right, make recompense for. One way or another, your life was over, wasn’t it?

No more tally-ho, no more whoop-whoop.

She felt for the handle of the bedroom door, catching an acrid waxy smell. Furniture polish? The cold clawed through her chunky sweater as though it was cheesecloth, and she thought of Robert Davies lying here in a fever, Hattie hauling the bedclothes from his sweating body. What had Hattie felt like as she carried the service revolver up here? How had she known it was loaded, unless she’d loaded it herself? So was this an outcome that had always been at the back of her mind? Because it really wasn’t a woman’s way of suicide, was it, to blow all your beauty to fragments?

Jane’s hand found the doorknob, cast-iron and globular, grasped it angrily, turned it and went into the bedroom, standing there panting out some kind of mixed-up defiance into the darkness.

Only, it wasn’t dark at all. Hattie Chancery’s room was delicately rinsed in ochre light.

Jane’s senses swam.

She saw a mustard-shaded oil lamp standing on a dressing table of polished oak in front of the central window with its floor-length purple velvet curtains. The light lured a dull lustre from the gilt frames of pictures on the flock wallpaper.

The polish-fumes seared her throat. This was wrong; everything was wrong, many years wrong. She reeled back against the door and it closed behind her with a heavy thunk and an efficient click. The triple mirrors on the dressing table reflected a high, claw-footed bed, and a woman’s figure rising.

And Jane just screamed, high and piercing, like she never had before, at least not since she was very little, as she saw, in the middle mirror, a broad face, with thick fair hair piled up and twisted and eyes that were small and round and pale like silverskin onions.

25 Shifting Big Furniture

The White Company was a band of English mercenaries formed by Sir John Hawkwood in the fourteenth century, best known for its campaigns in Italy. It was also a firm supplying bathroom-related fluffy goods through mail order and two fancy-dress historical recreation societies.

Close to the bottom of the first page, Google finally identified the White Company as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic historical novel, and Merrily clicked on it.

Motley group of English mercenaries led by Sir Nigel Loring… assiduous attention to historical detail…

Nothing, however, to suggest that the novel in any way reflected the central obsession of Doyle’s last two decades.

In under an hour, she’d gathered a mass of background on this: Sir Arthur’s tireless tours of Britain and America, promoting his conviction that spiritualism would alter mankind for ever by making life after death a scientific fact. His blind defence of obvious fakery. His insistence that he’d spoken, at a seance, with his son Kingsley, a victim of the Great War, and his brother Innes. His belief that his sister Annette, over thirty years dead, had communed with Jean, Arthur’s wife, through automatic writing. Eventually, Arthur had acquired his own high- level spirit contact, Pheneas, a scribe from the Sumerian city of Ur, dead for over four thousand years.

A kindly, decent, deluded man.

In the snow-padded silence of the scullery, the phone went off like a burglar alarm. Two phone lines had become a necessary extravagance. Merrily plucked it up, wedging it under her chin while tapping on next, for Page Two.

‘Ledwardine Vic—’

‘Vicar?’

‘Alice.’

‘Vicar, will you be in if I comes round later on?’

‘I… yeah, sure. Wear wellies, though, Alice, because I haven’t bothered clearing the drive.’

‘With Dexter,’ Alice said.

‘Oh.’

The digital clock on the desk said 7.18 p.m. The snow had turned the apple trees outside the window into cartoon wraiths. Page Two came up, with its highlighted words: white, white, white…

‘Sorry I’ve been so long getting back to you,’ Alice said, ‘My sisters, they said yes, they’d like to have the Eucharist. Dexter, he en’t so sure.’

‘He’s with you now?’

‘Does two nights a week in the chip shop.’

In a steamy chip shop? With asthma?

‘I en’t letting him go back to Hereford tonight — what if he got stuck in the snow and he couldn’t breathe? How would they get him to the hospital? Will you talk to him, vicar? Will you make him see some sense?’

‘Well, you know, I’ll… I mean, I can try and explain, but I don’t want to—’

‘’Bout half an hour, then?’ Alice said.

On the screen, near the top of Page Two, it said:

The White Company. Established to further the mission of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to prove that the spirit world is an incontestable fact.

Oh.

‘OK,’ Merrily said, ‘fine.’

Replacing the phone with one hand, she clicked the mouse with the other, watching a bulky figure fading up: sagging white moustache, pinstripe suit, watch chain, watchful eyes. Encircling him, like some tragic Greek chorus, other faces less defined — misty faces blinking on and off, like faulty street lamps, in shades of white and grey. And then:

The White Company

welcomes you

Walter was this fat and beaming old git, with a moustache that curled. His wife, Bella, might have been his daughter: turned-up nose, big hair gathered on top of her head. And the kid, this flat-faced kid clutching her hand, could have been Walter’s granddaughter.

In fact this was Hattie Chancery, apparently the earliest obtainable photograph of her. It was on the wall next to the door, one of four framed photos in here: Walter and his family in the garden — Walter, formal in wing collar, and his wife Bella in some kind of flouncy crinoline. Also, two scenes of what, presumably, was the Middle Marches Hunt hounding some poor bloody fox into a badger set. And, over the bed, so she might see herself reflected in the mirror when she awoke… the adult Hattie.

‘Where did they get them?’ Jane’s voice was still unsteady. Shock, it seemed, could carry on pulsing through your body for whole minutes afterwards. Already she was despising herself, but that didn’t take it away.

‘On loan from the museum at Kington.’ Natalie lay on her back on the claw-footed bed, smoking a cigarette. ‘A deal. Ben found a really old washtub and stuff like that in one of the outhouses and donated it all. The pictures can go back after this — we’ll get them all copied when the snow goes. But Ben thought the originals might give off the strongest vibrations.’

‘For Hardy?’