The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

‘No big deal, vicar. Well, mabbe now it is, but it din’t used to be when farm life rolled along with no distractions, no form-fillin’, no ministry inspectors on your back.’

‘You’re saying—?’

‘Boy’s what we used to call a natural farmer. In the ole sense. A quiet farmer. Goin’ quietly on.’

Gomer turned left, and the many-tiered lights of a transcontinental lorry came into view, like a remote cocktail bar. Merrily pulled out her cigarettes and lighter.

‘My ole mam,’ Gomer said, ‘her’d never leave part of an onion in the house. Use the lot, else throw the rest away, or put him on the fire. First new moon in May, my ole feller used to set about the nettles. You done it then, the ole nettles’d stay down. And they wasn’t that superstitious, see. Just that most folk, they’d have one or two things they’d stick by.’

‘Mmm. I count magpies, I’m afraid.’

‘Jeremy’s family, they knowed the lot. Why you never watches a funeral through glass. Why it en’t right for a woman to come in first on Christmas Day, ’less her slept there the night before, and definitely not if her’s wearing new shoes. Boy growed up with all that. All of it. Most youngsters, it gets to the stage when they rebels against the ole ways, only Jeremy’s dad died when he was young, and he took over the farm when he was n’more’n a child. Took on the farm, took on the traditions. Small world, no distractions. Found he had a… haptitude. You followin’ me, vicar?’

‘Go on.’ Remembering her Herefordshire grandad, his relationship with apple trees.

‘Danny d’reckon it was like it was all talkin’ to him: the ground, the trees… the stock. He sees stuff some of us mabbe don’t notice, and it tells him things. Sounds like ole wallop, don’t it?’

‘A touch pagan, maybe.’

‘Oh hell, no. Big churchgoers, all their lives, the Berrows. That’s why Danny said could you come, take care of things now.’

‘I see.’

‘He…’ Gomer hesitated. ‘He never was good with people, see, Jeremy. Church services scared him. But he’d go on his own, see, when the church was empty, take bits of stuff for Harvest Festival when nobody was about. Time of the Foot-and-Mouth, he’d be there every morning and every night, on his own — not for long, mind, just slipping in quietly. And the Foot-and-Mouth stayed well away from The Nant. The Berrows ground, see, always been in good heart, never no chemicals.’ Gomer gave Merrily a quick glance. ‘I en’t specifically implying nothin’ by this, vicar. Boy went quietly on, that was all.’

‘You said he… knew things, without having to be told.’

Again, Gomer didn’t offer a direct answer.

‘Danny was over there earlier. Boy’d already brought his sheep down, cleared his track. So when he phones to ask if Greta can take this kiddie, Clancy, for the night, Danny knowed straight off some’ing was wrong. The woman always took the kiddie back to the farm at night. Then her went back to Stanner herself if her had to work late, like doing the bar.’

‘So she’d stay the night, but she wouldn’t have her daughter stay there.’

When Merrily had asked Jane if Clancy worked at the hotel too, at weekends, Jane had said Natalie wouldn’t allow it because the kid was so far behind at school. Natalie was very strict about homework and early nights. Odd really, Jane had said, because she certainly wasn’t the Victorian-parent type.

‘But, Gomer, Jeremy must have known that Danny would be suspicious and go rushing up there. And that Danny would have the means to get through the snow.’

‘Likely the boy wanted to be sure it was Danny found him, ennit?’

‘Oh.’

Gomer switched off the wipers, and Merrily saw that the snow had almost stopped. You could see low cloud now, shifting like smoke, the pale suggestion of a moon behind it. They crested a hill, and there was Kington: a snug medieval snow-fantasy tucked under the white wings of the border hills. With its brave twinkling of Christmas lights, the town looked small and cosy; the hills didn’t.

There were no visible lights in the Welsh hills. Sometimes, from outside, Wales loomed like a threat. It all relaxed once you were across the border, down in the pale, quilted pastures of the Radnor Valley. All the threat was in the space between.

‘It’s a… strange kind of place, isn’t it? This valley. Hergest… Stanner… the, erm, Hound.’

‘They don’t talk about it, none of it, you know that. Not the local people.’

‘No.’

Not even whimsy for tourists, she knew that much. Hergest Court, long since relinquished by whatever remained of the Vaughan family, was apparently tenanted most of the time, but never promoted as a visitor attraction. When you thought about it, very little of anything here was for the tourists.

‘Temptin’ fate, see,’ Gomer said. ‘You asks people, they’ll give you, Ah, load of ole wallop. But they en’t gonner tempt fate, all the same.’

‘But, if the Vaughan family’s long gone…’

‘Temptin’ fate,’ Gomer mumbled, almost angrily. ‘You don’t do that.’

‘Gomer, tell me one thing: you see any basic connection between the legend of the Hound of Hergest and the stuff you were telling me about the other night — whatever’s been killing this guy Dacre’s sheep?’

Gomer grunted. ‘Has it?’

‘Has it what?’

‘Been killin’ sheep. I en’t yeard of any, save for Dacre’s. And Sebbie…’ Gomer paused, chopping down to second gear. ‘Sebbie’s losin’ it, big-time. Fact.’

They came to the traffic island on the edge of town: an iced cake, uncut. Chances were nobody would get in or out of town tonight. The truck creaked around the island and on to the bypass via a shallow gully down the middle.

‘Losing it how?’ Needing a firmer handle on this before she went into the Berrows farm.

‘On the booze. Givin’ out daft sentences on the Bench. Makin’ a spectacle of ’isself in the pubs. Family thing, I reckon. Mabbe it all comes down to wassername… genetic. Only, you feels it’s in the ground, too, weighing it down like clay. Two attitudes to the ground, see, vicar: either you goes quietly on, tendin’ and healin’, like Jeremy Berrows, or you goes roarin’ over it, like with the hunt. Whoop, whoop.’

‘Domination.’

‘Makes you feel like you’re in charge, I s’pose. I wouldn’t know. Mabbe it’s just about noise and blood. All I know is, there’s what feels like a terrible rage buried somewhere in this valley. You take the tale of ole Black Vaughan — mad as hell, turnin’ over market carts. The Hound in the night, the bull in the church. Blood and noise all around. Yere’s Sebbie Dacre, Master of the Middle Marches: blood and noise. Like his granny. And in the middle of it all, this little farmer goin’ quietly on, little island of calm. Can’t be easy. Mabbe Jeremy, mabbe he was yearin’ all the noise and blood poundin’ in his head, gettin’ closer and closer, until he couldn’t take it n’more.’

‘Maybe someone should’ve…’

‘Sorry, vicar?’

Rural stress came in many forms, most of them unrecorded, unrecognized by psychiatry.

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Merrily tightened Lol’s long scarf. ‘Are we nearly there?’

With the lights of Kington behind them, they’d followed the bypass into a harder, lightless landscape, ranks of snow-caked conifers forming on the hazy edges of the headlight beams.

‘What have they been shooting at, Gomer? Do you know?’

She’d been here many times, and she knew that when you turned the corner and cruised down into the Radnor Valley, the landscape and your spirits usually lightened. Only tonight they wouldn’t be turning the corner.

‘Likely shadows,’ Gomer said. ‘Shootin’ at shadows.’

At first, Jane had thought like, Wow, the enterprise, the bravado, the spectacle.