The Fabric of Sin

‘Who was that?’

‘Has a smallholding, edge of the hamlet. Sells free-range eggs and honey and herbs. Mrs Mornington … Morningside. Something like that.’

‘And the reason you won’t go back now is purely …’

‘See it from my position, if you can,’ Felix said.

Fuchsia came down the caravan steps then, wearing what looked like a bridesmaid dress with a bodice of white lace. The colours in her hair were like streaks of oil rainbowed in dark water.

Merrily felt a flicker of unease and glanced at Felix, but he was gazing across at Monkland church with its halo of gilded mist.

Pity this wasn’t the church they were using. She had no history here.

Felix turned and saw Fuchsia and swallowed.

‘Looks so much like her now it scares me a bit.’

‘Her mother.’

‘Aye.’

5 Who is This?

The last time Merrily had been inside the Church of St Cosmas and St Damien, somebody had sacrificed a crow on one of the altars.

These things happened, just occasionally, after a church had been decommissioned by the C of E, left to fade into film-set Gothic.

Lifting cloak and cassock to climb into Felix’s silver truck outside the caravan, she was remembering the crow’s entrails arranged like intricate jewellery on the right-hand altar. It was a church with two of everything — twin chancels, twin naves — with a pulpit in the middle. They might see this as representing a dualism, Huw Owen, her spiritual director, had said at the time. Left and right, darkness and light.

This was in the very early days in Deliverance, and she’d blown it, been unable to handle the necessary cleansing of the church. Emotionally exposed at the time, her senses still snagged on memories of a fairly sickening job in the old General Hospital. Feeling clammy, palms itching, and then the explosion of coughing … and Huw, supervising, ordering her out.

This was when she’d been advised to burn the vestments she’d been wearing, and she’d done that, in an incinerator behind the vicarage. Burned everything, except for …

Oh God.

… This cloak, the same heavy, woollen, cowled cape that she’d worn here on the night of her humiliation. Because it hadn’t been at the General Hospital, it had seemed OK not to burn it. After all, they weren’t cheap, these cloaks, the female clergy still a minority market.

But — never dismiss coincidence — it was better not to take it in. She began to unlace the cloak as the truck bounced down an eroded lane where torn shards of tarmac were crumbling like piecrust into the verges and Fuchsia’s voice came cawing from the back seat.

‘Are you High Church, then, Merrily? Anglo-Catholic?’

‘Oh, well, I’ve never been one for labels, Fuchsia. You adapt … compromise where you can.’

Mix-’n’-match. Pick your own. Anything works now, in the new, flexible C of E.

‘Do you have a statue of Our Lady in your church, Merrily?’

‘No. But I’ve thought about it.’

‘We have two in the caravan, now,’ Felix said bitterly. ‘One’s above the bed. Makes you feel a bit queasy when you look up and the moonlight’s full on it.’

‘I also like to go to the cathedral in Hereford,’ Fuchsia said. ‘When it’s fairly quiet.’

Merrily turned to look at Fuchsia, rocking in the narrow rear seat, her hair centre-parted, one hand holding a cream woollen shawl together at her neck, the other steadying the canvas zip-bag on her knees — the Deliverance bag. She’d asked if she could carry it.

‘When it’s quiet, Merrily. When there’s nobody to say I don’t belong.’

‘Why would you think you don’t belong?’ Merrily said. ‘Nobody has to sign anything.’

‘I’m neither one place nor the other. That’s how I feel.’

‘I see.’

Everything had turned around. This was no longer just about an empty house with a presence. Now there was a human dimension, complicating matters in a way the Duchy of Cornwall wouldn’t have anticipated.

… There are a few advisers I can call on, if necessary. But that’s usually when there are people involved who might have problems — psychological … psychiatric?

Like an apparently intelligent woman with the manner of a small child — repeatedly clutching your name like a mother’s hand in a bewildering department store.

‘I’ve thought of joining the Catholic Church, Merrily, but they haven’t got the old churches any more, and I like the old churches. Especially St Cosmas and St Damien. It’s open all the time. I can go in at night … at dawn, whenever.’

‘And what do you do there?’

‘Just sit there. It’s a place of healing.’

‘How long have you felt you needed healing?’

‘Oh, it’s not for me. It’s for my mother.’

‘You … won’t remember your mother.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘But you were only a baby, when she …’

‘I’m sure I do remember her. Part of her’s in me, isn’t it?’

‘Have you … ever tried to find her? Maybe the internet?’

‘I did once. There was another Mary Linden. It just got confusing.’

‘Would you like me to … include your mother in the prayers?’

‘It’s too late, Merrily.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘I just want you to make my aura strong, please,’ Fuchsia said.

The mist was low and white among the pines around the little sandstone church. There might have been a proper village here once but it barely qualified as a hamlet now. A couple of dwellings sat fairly close, one of them a farm.

The church of St Cosmas and St Damien had a squat body and a timbered bell-tower, and its churchyard was raised like a cake stand. Supported by the Churches Restoration Trust, it apparently held just one service a year.

Felix left the truck at the side of the track and locked it. With the sun muffled like a coin in a handkerchief, Merrily, uncloaked and chilly, opened the gate into the churchyard.

‘Perhaps we should tell someone we’re here.’

‘Nobody ever disturbs me.’ Fuchsia handed her the bag. ‘They probably take one look at me and think I’m a mad person.’

Shouldering the bag strap, Merrily saw Felix wince.

‘Look,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll stay outside, yeah? Explain to anybody who shows up.’

‘You sure?’

His look confirmed it. Merrily nodded, and Fuchsia drifted ahead of her, like a ghost in the mist, around the church to the arcaded wooden porch.

Is this safe? After several recent cases of exorcism turning up the jets under something combustible, you were forced to ask.

But this wasn’t an exorcism; Fuchsia knew enough not to be asking for it. She’d wanted a blessing which