The Anchoress of Shere, page 4
Sir Richard strode dramatically to Christine as she lay frozen on the bench. He kneeled in full concern and knightly grace. “Christine, be strong. If I hear that you have not recovered well, I may have to summon you again. I will hear from the doctor how you progress. Farewell.”
Father Peter, named after the Rock of Christ, helped Christine stagger to the door while cursing Sir Richard under his breath. The girl appeared to be in a trance, her consciousness swamped by agony.
The priest was outraged by his lord’s cruelty to Christine and disdain of the Church. Speak to others of the crime he could not, but Christine would be his charge. Prey sometimes he was to temptation, yet the pure remnant of his vocation would tend to her. All this he swore to God and to himself.
Christine took to her bed and remained there in fevered silence. Apart from murmured requests for a little food or drink she did not speak to family, doctor or priest. Soon the fever worsened with the leeching. The wedding was postponed, for the presence of Christine’s betrothed aggravated her illness.
William the Carpenter tried to seek out the priest, but Father Peter skilfully avoided being alone with him. Eventually, he had no choice: William had waited outside the church door for hours.
Eschewing his normal deference, William struck at the heart of the matter: “What has FitzGeoffrey done to my daughter?”
Throughout the difficult interrogation, the priest lied and lied to protect his stipend and his shame. He counselled William not to question their lord, warning of his famous temper.
“Damn his temper, Father. A judge to hang him is the course if I find that he has harmed my girl.”
“Hush, man. Fear his sword then if you despise his anger. His sword is the law, remember.” The priest reached out to touch the man’s arm, but William recoiled.
“Pray for Christine instead. Intercession with a mightier Lord is better counsel, Will,” said Peter with utter sincerity.
William grew even angrier at the failure of the priest to look him in the eyes. “If Christine dies, I will kill that knight with my own hands…”
The priest finally accepted the challenge of the carpenter’s frenzied gaze. “Your hands may be the strongest in this valley, but they are useless without a sword in them. Sir Richard has killed many men by the sword, and he has armed followers. You have nothing. Hold your temper, Will, and pray.”
The carpenter managed to contain his anger as, with one final contemptuous look, he turned and walked away.
Father Peter prayed in earnest, both at Mass and at Christine’s bedside, as she slipped in and out of consciousness.
William called a healer from Netley, who at first said that she had had a fit and that it would soon pass. When it did not, the local man summoned from Guldenford a wizened sage who administered a potion concocted from rare mushrooms; he also covered her upper body with an ointment made from juniper berries. For three days many such remedies were applied, but without effect, and finally he resorted to his rarest medicines: borage for ailing lungs, and mastic for heart palpitations.
When Christine did not respond to even these powerful potions, the Guldenford sage, with some insight, announced, “Christine is suffering from what the old monks call accidie, a sickness of the soul, where nothing has meaning, and all days seem the same, in an endless string of pain…until death. Sadly, this is the worst case I have seen, and I fear I can do no more; a priest is best.”
He returned home, and left Christine to endure her inevitable fate. Soon, her pale face grew white and mottled like speckled marble. Her breathing became erratic and heavy gasps rattled in her throat. All her courage and joyful independence, every fibre of her being, had evaporated, and so had her will to live. Even the instinct of inhaling and exhaling had almost been lost. Finally, after a month of suffering, Father Peter was brought in to perform the Extreme Unction, the final sacrament.
Duval rewarded himself with a large brandy for creating a scene of which he could be proud. He was sufficiently self-aware to realise that many critics might describe his style as stilted, his characters as two-dimensional and his subject matter perverted, but he knew they would be wrong; he did not want the fripperies of style to mask his essential search for truth. Evil had to be exposed, and his writing was his absolution, the way for his soul-perhaps-to pass through purgatory. Heaven, he sometimes suspected, was not waiting expectantly for him.
III. The Vision
Father Michael Duval had thought long and hard about the yin and yang of good and evil, of heaven and hell. Just as capitalism needed the concrete enemy of the Soviet Union and could not survive long without its polar opposite, so too this corrupt world could not explain its own troubles without the existence of another. For two thousand years, the “other” had been heaven or hell. Duval had no truck with contemporary popular variants such as interplanetary aliens. Science fiction was just that-fiction. Duval preferred to read the Catholic fiction of enlightened cynics such as Evelyn Waugh. In Put Out More Flags, the priest had underlined the following: “It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilised taste.”
From an early age Duval had been fascinated by the mechanics of religion-the liturgy, hymns and sacred accoutrements-without personally embracing the supposed final moral purpose: a heavenly calling. No matter how much he tried, his spirituality was rooted on earth and in the past, not in some heavenly future. That is why he hated the Vatican’s tampering with the traditional Latin Mass.
Perhaps Duval’s vision of the future had been corrupted by his own past. He was a scion of an old landed family. At sixteen he had converted from sullen High Anglicanism to ardent Catholicism, shifting his head and his heart from Canterbury to Rome. In doing so, he left behind a family already riven by his sister’s miserable death in an asylum. Long before she died, he had prayed to his Anglican God to alleviate her suffering, but his unanswered prayers drove him to what he considered was a fervent, more serious religion, with a far more resplendent heritage, far greater mystical reach and, most importantly, a proven connection to the Almighty.
A little surprisingly, he had chosen to live in Shere, which had a long Anglican tradition. In the past the well-to-do local families had favoured the dissolution of the monasteries and had shared in King Henry’s spoils. Later, many had sided with the Parliamentarians in the civil war. The area secured influence because Shere had once possessed an important water-mill, one of eight along a waterway which had supported five industries-corn milling, gunpowder manufacture, iron furnaces, weaving and tanning, an impressive array for what was just a large stream rather than a river, and only eleven miles long. The Tillingbourne also gained a reputation for its famous watercress, but generally the poor, sandy soil preserved the poverty of the small farmers. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been kinder to the neighbouring industrialists, and to the large and wealthy landowners who landscaped much of a valley which the English traveller William Cobbett called “one of the choicest retreats of man.” Shere marked the halfway point of the Tillingbourne, which rose from springs on the southern flank of Leith Hill, the highest point in southern England, and flowed past the beautiful villages of Gomshall and Albury to its confluence with the River Wey near Guildford.
By the mid-nineteenth century, much of the manufacturing base had been eroded, and the rural population, often untouched by the commercial wealth of the river, had stubbornly maintained their almost feudal traditions. As the mills closed, many in upland wooded areas might have agreed with Cobbett’s claim that the valley had produced “two of the most damnable inventions that ever sprang from minds of man…the making of gunpowder and banknotes.”
When the railways arrived, Shere flowered as a retreat for bohemian Londoners, especially artists, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the woodlands of the once remote Surrey hills had been discovered by a rich London merchant class. They came in search of seclusion, but felt close enough to the diversions of the city; and so the grey roofs of grand new houses began to disturb, here and there, the flow of forest green. When Duval arrived in 1962, the largely unspoiled medieval character of the village was attracting motorists and day-trippers and even the occasional foreign tourist. The outside tables of the White Horse Inn, in the centre of Shere, were always full in the summers when the first “yeah, yeah, yeahs” of the Beatles could be heard, sometimes too obtrusively, from the portable radios of young people sitting by the river.
Duval lived in an old secluded rectory near Tyler’s Cross, about half a mile outside the village centre. Catholic priests nearly always lived in a church house, close or directly adjacent to their parish churches. If it were a large and important church, especially in an urban area, the clerical accommodation would involve a group of priests tended by a full-time housekeeper. Unusually, the bishop had granted Duval special permission to live in Shere, on the basis that Duval had inherited the house from his aunt and no Church money had been involved in any purchase; perhaps even at this stage, the priest’s eccentricity warranted special indulgence or perhaps an isolation which would permit the ambitious bishop some room for manoeuvre when it came to denying responsibility, a chance to distance himself from his awkward subordinate.
Duval appreciated this freedom, because he found it very difficult to live cheek by jowl with others, especially other priests. And he was fond of his home in the former Anglican rectory; a Catholic inhabitant was a redemptive act in itself. The house, which Duval had renamed Hillside, had been built in the 1840s and enlarged in 1859 to include a spacious wine cellar and a large attic. Externally, the house was a hotchpotch of styles: part of it was robust Victorian red-brick although the stables, incorporated into the main structure, suffered from a mock Tudor timber-frame exterior, while the out-of-place Doric porch affixed to the main door was thankfully hidden in ivy. Hollyhocks and nettles as tall as a man filled the garden.
Neglecting the outside, Duval had busied himself with extensive rebuilding of the interior, particularly the unusual cellar which he had spent over a year modifying with his own hands. It was entered from a heavy wooden trapdoor in the kitchen. Twelve steps led down to a narrow corridor. On each side of the corridor, forty-three inches apart, stood three doors with small grilles. At the far end of the passage Duval had secured to the stone wall a six-foot-high crucifix, lit by two lamps at its base.
To his few acquaintances, Duval’s life was very staid, his interests appearing to revolve around his part-time work at a run-down Catholic church in Guildford, a good six or seven miles from Shere, and his writing in his spare moments. He was recognised as an Oxbridge scholar, but was considered somewhat lax in his pastoral duties, partly because he refused to live in the parish he served. That, at least, was the gossip in his dwindling congregation. They knew he was not a favourite of the bishop. Some thought the problem stemmed from an arcane theological dispute, although nobody in his congregation had been able to pinpoint anything too unorthodox in Duval’s often passionate and occasionally obscure sermons. None of his flock had ever got close to their priest, but some of the younger female members of the congregation had suggested that they found his sporadic house visits uncomfortable, a touch too familiar; nevertheless, no formal complaint had been taken to the bishop. Still, Duval’s superiors suspected that he was an odd fish, so allowing him to live out of the parish had some advantages.
Duval had no actual pastoral duties in Shere itself. Apart from the normal pleasantries in the village shops, few villagers knew much about him. At just over six feet, Duval stood erect and athletic, and his mildly pock-marked face made him appear, to some females, as attractively world-weary and interesting. An actress manque in the village had commented on his deep, cultured voice.
“He sounds like Richard Burton,” she had insisted.
“Speaks like heaven,” replied her companion in a mock Welsh accent.
When Duval had first appeared in the village, one or two of the bridge-playing, charity-organising elite had thought to invite him to their soirees, and some of the bored local housewives had turned their heads at the early-middle-aged, good-looking man with the distinguished grey at his temples. He seemed rather mysterious, but when it was rumoured he was a Catholic priest, perhaps even a defrocked one, the matchmakers forgot him. That was the way Duval wanted it, because he did not deliberately court attention. He had Surrey family connections, twice removed, but they were all prominent Anglicans, and those who shared his Norman surname were strangers. He had no friends, only acquaintances.
Duval always made a point of changing out of his clerical clothing before he returned from Guildford to Shere; he preferred to adopt the uniform of a country squire-buff corduroy trousers, highly polished brown brogues and a tweed jacket. For a while, when he first arrived, old Mrs. Malthus who lived in Pilgrim’s Way had worked for him as a part-time housekeeper, but when she died Duval had not looked for a replacement.
He was on nodding terms with the landlord of the White Horse. Once or twice a week, the priest would enjoy a solitary pint of beer in the back bar. The landlord would sometimes ask about Bobby, Duval’s border collie, who would curl up under the table in the corner of the low-ceilinged snug. Occasionally Duval would visit the other village pub, the Prince of Wales, but he shied away from the good-hearted friendliness of the drinkers there.
Duval walked Bobby for at least an hour every evening. Starting from Hillside, which stood at the end of a narrow dirt track, he would usually follow the bridle-path to Church Hill. From there he would take the footpath, crossing the Tillingbourne on the tiny bridge, and then traverse Upper Street, making his way towards the steep North Downs.
Other times he would wander around Shere interpreting the history of the village’s timber-framed houses. To the practised eye, Shere exhibited scores of architectural treasures: the seventeenth century had been preserved well enough, but Duval enjoyed the occasional Regency flourishes and the pomposity of late Victoriana. The historian in him always smiled at the replica timber-framed shop in Middle Street, designed by the young Edwin Lutyens to fit in with the adjacent houses, hundreds of years older. The quaint fire station, the fragile wooden footbridge across Upper Street, the gentle meanderings of the stream along Lower Street and the ducks near the stone bridge by the Square; for Duval, Shere was an England which the so-called “swinging sixties” were threatening to engulf.
In his walks, Duval always included a visit to St. James’s, an anchor in a disturbing world. The church stood a mere hundred yards from the White Horse via the lych-gate, another piece of Lutyens, but it had to come before alcohol in his perambulations; that was his observance of a daily piety-duty before pleasure. Although St. James’s church dated from the twelfth century, the Domesday record demonstrated the existence of a previous Saxon church in what was then known as Essira. It was “held” by Queen Edith, wife of Edward the Confessor, so the dutiful Norman accountants had recorded in 1087. The basic structure of the present building was completed about 1190, in the initial Early English style. Duval had researched the church in detail, believing St. James’s to be the finest example of this rare Transitional church architecture. The fundamentals of the exterior had changed little, although the internal arrangements had been altered during the Reformation. Duval, of course, disdained these refurbishments as defamatory. Like all medieval churches, St. James’s had not contained seats, only a stone bench set into the walls for the old and lame. The great Lady Chapel, with its twelfth-century arch, deep mouldings and clustered shafts of Purbeck marble, had been filled with common pews. The centre of worship in the Reformation had been shifted from the altar to the pulpit-from God to man-but, with the Catholic revival of the 1830s, the focus moved back to the altar.
Duval also disliked the West Gallery, erected by public subscriptions in the 1740s for the poor of the parish. What did they know of architecture? It had completely skewed the proportions of the church. In 1848 the rood window had been renewed, but it was a poor reproduction of an Early English original. The Victorians, however, did deserve credit for restoring the brasses. And they had introduced a barrel organ, which Duval thought was an amusing touch. New bells had been added as well as a robed choir, very High Church and very revolutionary for the late Victorian period.
The church had survived the Second World War untouched although flying bombs fell near Shere. The real enemy had not been the Luftwaffe but the deathwatch beetle: many of the oak beams and rafters had needed to be replaced. After the war the spire had been reshingled with Canadian red cedar and, to renew much of the stonework, Ewhurst sandstone had been taken from local quarries in the surrounding Hurtwood. Duval approved of the recent refurbishment of the oak altar and the flamboyant design of the three frontals, and was pleased that, for the first time since the Reformation, the church boasted a carved figure of its patron saint.
Duval knew on exactly which day in 1871 the clock had been installed in the steeple, and that it had an eight-day, dead-beat escapement, gun-metal gear wheels and a copper dial measuring four feet six inches. It now read precisely 7:10 p.m. The date, which of course the clock did not display, was 17th August 1967.
The clock was still going well, but Duval knew he could not say the same of his writing. Standing attentively a foot from the north wall of the chancel, he peered into the quatrefoil of Christine Carpenter’s cell. He never prayed formally for inspiration, but every visit to this place renewed his dedication to his study and encouraged him to continue with the revisionist history of his anchoress. The black holes in the wall were a window into the past. Her past. It was almost as if it were not his invention, his imagination, his creativity, but her will and her energy that spurred him on. But now he was suffering from writer’s block: his soul had not sensed Christine’s presence for a long time. Was her purgatory over, he wondered. Had she ascended to blessedness in the heavens? This spiritual block had happened before, Duval reminded himself. His muse had slipped from her prison in the wall. Just for a while.
