The Fabric of Sin

‘Your plasterer.’

‘I call her that. We’re converting this barn at Monkland, see. We’re in a caravan on the site.’

‘That’s not far for me. It’s just I thought you might find it easier to explain the problem in situ,’ Merrily said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘You couldn’t spare the time?’

Another silence; no owls even. She waited.

‘I think you’re gonner have to come here,’ he said. ‘We don’t plan to go back, see.’

‘To the Master House.’

This was what he was ringing to tell her? That they weren’t, on any account, going back to the house?

‘That’s correct,’ he said.

She had the feeling that he was working to a script and whoever had written it was standing at his shoulder. She felt another question coming and hung on for it.

‘I was told you … you were the Hereford exorcist.’

‘More or less.’

‘And you’ll have the, um, full regalia, is it?’

‘Regalia?’

‘We’d like it if you came with all the regalia,’ Felix Barlow said. ‘The full bell, book and candle, kind of thing.’

‘Oh.’

‘If that’s all right with you,’ Barlow said.

3 Fuchsia

She was beautiful and shimmery in the mist. Like one of those exotic birds that weren’t supposed to migrate here. Greens and blues in her dark, tangly hair, skin like milky coffee. She stood by the long green caravan, in her pink-splashed overalls and her turquoise wellingtons, calling out when Merrily was close enough for the dog collar to show.

‘Will you bless me?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘In the old-fashioned way, please,’ she said. ‘That is, with all due ceremony?’

From the field gate, through the lingering mist — a keen hint of first frost — she’d looked as young as Jane. Close up, you guessed she was nearly thirty. Still not Merrily’s idea of a plasterer.

‘I’m serious.’

‘I can tell.’

Merrily looked into eyes which were startlingly big and round, like an owl’s, and widely separated.

‘It strengthens the aura,’ the woman said. ‘Isn’t that right?’

‘I’m sure it must be.’ Merrily parted her woollen cloak to expose the cassock, hemmed with mud now. The full regalia could be a pain. ‘But would it be all right if we talked first?’

‘I just wanted to ask you while Felix wasn’t here. He’s not religious.’ The woman turned away and moved back to the caravan. ‘Fuchsia,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Fuchsia Mary Linden.’

Which meant that her parents had been either gardeners or big fans of the Gormenghast trilogy. Following her into the caravan, Merrily’s money was on Gormenghast.

* * *

She felt tired again, had a lingering headache. She’d awoken a good hour before dawn, her body all curled up, tense with resentment.

Never her favourite negative emotion, resentment. Most times it came hissing like poison gas out of inflated self-esteem — they can’t treat me like this. Seldom objective, never exactly Christian and hardly (thank you, Jane) the Way of the Doormat.

At six a.m. she’d been hugging a pot of tea, Ethel the black cat on her knees, in the frigid kitchen. Watery sunlight eventually seeping into the windows before the mist had blotted it up.

The more she’d thought about the Duchy job, the more senseless it had seemed. She was expected to desert the parish — and Jane and Lol — for up to a week to address some embarrassment in an empty house?

An empty house. That was the other point. No family life disrupted there. Nobody’s sanity at risk. Was there, in fact, anything more on the line than the reputation of the Bishop of Hereford as a faithful servant of the monarchy, and the professional judgement of the Duke of Cornwall’s land-steward?

Merrily had put on her pectoral cross and knelt, in her bathrobe, on the cold stone flags and prayed. And listened.

The result had been inconclusive.

It was a substantial, professional caravan, with a living room and a good-sized kitchen area, copper pans on hooks conveying weight and a sense of permanence. Twin doors at the bottom of the living area suggesting a separate bedroom and bathroom.

The walls of the living room were lined with oriental rugs, and there was a wood-burning stove, lit, the sweet scent of apple logs mingling with the sweeter fumes of cannabis. Fuchsia kicked off her wellies, picked up a rubberized walkie-talkie.

‘I’ll call Felix. He’s over at the barn. Have a seat, please, Merrily.’

Shrugging off the black woollen cloak, Merrily made a space for herself between tumbled books on one of the fitted sofas. She could see the barn, its bay agape, through the window opposite and the goldenbrown mist. The window behind her framed the church tower across the rutted field and the lane where she’d left her car. Monkland was a main-road village on the way to Leominster; this was the first time she’d penetrated its hinterland.

‘So the barn’s going to be …?’

‘Our home. It’s supposed to be finished by now.’ Fuchsia prodded at the walkie-talkie. ‘But that’s what it’s like with builders, Merrily, they fit in their own projects between jobs. If a builder’s home looks like some wretched hovel, that means he’s doing very well.’

The ephemeral beauty didn’t include her voice, which was quite slow. And loud, in an uncontrolled way, like a child’s.

Merrily folded the cloak over her knees, less puzzled now about why it, or the cassock, had been necessary. Why Felix Barlow, though not religious himself, had thought traditional priestly attire would be appropriate.

The walkie-talkie cackled and Fuchsia said, ‘She’s here, babes,’ and clicked it off. ‘He’ll come now, Merrily. He was getting a bit frazzled and he needed to work with his hands to calm himself down. Felix has problems talking about the non-physical. Which is very odd because he’s really perceptive, and buildings speak to him.’

‘How do they do that?

‘They send him information, communicating what they were and what they can be again. It’s like dowsing. He feels it in his muscles — the needs of the stone and the oak. Well, in some buildings, anyway.’

‘What about the farmhouse at Garway?’

‘The Master House had been left to rot.’ Fuchsia was wrapping her thin arms around herself as if to crush a shudder. ‘And it wasn’t complaining. Houses know when they’ve gone bad.’

‘And this is what it said to Felix?’

‘This one didn’t speak to Felix, Merrily,’ Fuchsia said. ‘It spoke to me.’

‘I see.’

‘And now my aura’s permeated with darkness.’ Fuchsia opened her arms. ‘Can you see?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Some priests can. Not the man at Garway, he was no help at all, but there was a very good guy in the place