The Fever of the World, page 28
They’d come out of the night, the old man driving across a footpath and the grass. Mrs Watkins was more important to more people than she’d acknowledge. Including the DI, who Vaynor figured he’d be reporting to in a few minutes’ time at Gaol Street.
The phone quivered in his left hip pocket and he switched it off as he loped back into the hospital.
He guessed it would be bad news for somebody.
‘No,’ he murmured unprofessionally. ‘Please, no.’
Merrily’s eyes were closed.
Her head felt numb. But her mind was moving.
In it she saw the virus.
It was yellow and it swirled.
And smiled.
It had a distinctly human smile, this virus. It knew exactly what it was doing.
She heard a mobile phone ring, then was hearing Darth Vaynor, in the ward entrance, saying, ‘Yes.’ Then his voice suddenly acquired a different tone. ‘Oh,’ he said, flat-voiced. ‘Thanks for telling me. I think I’d better come up and confirm it.’
After a long pause, he said, ‘Some other police and medical experts will be with you soon. Don’t let anybody else into the ward… and please don’t let anybody touch Mrs Portis’s body.’
50
Work
IT WAS THE first time Vaynor had seen the DI with his feet up on the desk, his mouth and nose covered by one of the new NHS masks that it was rumoured would soon be compulsory to try and stop the spread of infection.
Bliss pulled his off with a snap of elastic.
‘Not gonna make our job any easier, Darth, when every bugger in every bank’s got one of these on.’
‘Branches are being closed down so fast these days that there’ll soon be none left to rob, anyway,’ Vaynor said.
He started to say something else when Bliss held up a hand and lowered his shoes to the floor of the CID room.
‘You seen Royce?’
‘Not since last night. When I don’t think they were exactly together, in the normal sense.’
‘Complex situation,’ Bliss said. ‘But did it actually lead to another murder?’
‘Do we have forensics, boss?’
‘Nothing yet. But I got them techies focused as soon as you told me what the churchwarden had become aware of.’ Bliss stood up. ‘You’re a clever lad. You know what I’m after. I want some evidence that his ankles were tied together after rather than before.’
‘After he was dead?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Something to prove he didn’t tie his own…?’
‘I’m not…’ Bliss paced a slow circle. ‘I’m not gerrin’ too optimistic about this. Royce Portis has had a lorra luck since you and him were at school together. And there’s no way we’re gonna prove he arranged for his old man to come off that cliff. But one murder’s all I need. If I could prove he had a hand in drowning the feller who frantically shafted Mrs P after Peter’s funeral…’
‘You don’t think you will?’
Bliss sat down.
‘Can’t see it. What do you think?’
‘Sorry, boss, but I don’t think Royce Portis was as clever as Mrs Portis.’
‘He’s still alive, though.’
‘Yes, there is that to consider…’
‘And she was killed…’
Bliss smothered a smile.
‘By the virus. She was killed by the virus,’ Vaynor said.
Bliss thought about it, wiping his eyes, not looking at Vaynor.
‘Unlike you,’ he said. ‘I’m norra doctor.’ His voice intensified. ‘And don’t you ever friggin’ dare repeat this to anybody. But I’d say she was also killed by Mrs Watkins.’
Bliss walked over to the window. A mist was thickening over Gaol Street.
‘Inadvertently,’ he said. ‘But think about it.’
51
Learning to die
IT MUST HAVE been two weeks before Sophie told Merrily about her first visit to Hereford Cathedral after being discharged from hospital. She said she’d been standing close to one of the cylindrical cast-iron heaters in the cathedral’s main aisle. They were monolithic, those heaters. They made a statement. They said, You will be warm. As if God had ordained it.
‘I’d come to associate them with a comfort you could count on,’ Sophie told Merrily. ‘Reminds me of when I was a small child.’
In a thick, grey cardigan and two scarves, Sophie was hunched into her fireside chair. Then she was suddenly sitting up, stiffening, looking devastated. She said faintly that she’d always been aware of the cold even as a small girl, snuggling into her mother’s long, woollen skirts in the winter. She remembered evening dropping like a cloth over the suburban village where she grew up under the blue glow of its first street-lamps.
It wasn’t winter now, it was full spring, but the cylinders were full of the sort of dead cold that got into you permanently. The cathedral was still warm, Sophie said, but learning to die, because death was coming.
‘I’m sorry…’ Merrily said hesitantly to Sophie. ‘This is about a bad dream you had?’
Her first visit since leaving the hospital. It was nearly dark in the street outside, and all the lamps in the room were out.
‘And then, what I was seeing… Sophie reached out towards the faint redness in the grate. ‘There were people all around me. Moving. Men in long overcoats. And women in—’ She blinked. ‘But women don’t often wear hats any more, do they? Not like this. Not even twenty or thirty years ago. And they were steaming…’
‘The hats?’
‘The people. Cold was coming from them and drifting in the air… as if they were made of steam. Do you know what I—?’
Merrily didn’t fight the shiver, didn’t like the way this was going – Sophie didn’t habitually do spooky except when she needed to convey something genuinely upsetting.
Merrily asked, ‘Did you… touch any of them? Brush against them?’
‘I should have, shouldn’t I?’ Sophie said. ‘But I was repelled. And so kept my distance. I felt only this cold steam, as if I were reaching into a refrigerator where bodies are stored, and the people were…’
‘Ghosts?’
‘Not real. I prefer to say that.’
Merrily was beginning to wish she hadn’t come. She might simply have accepted the Archdeacon’s message that Sophie was getting better, was at least over the worst. Who knew how long her illness could last or what mental damage it could inflict? Sophie still hadn’t admitted she’d only been having a bad dream. Or any kind of dream. She said she’d walked up the street, no more than a hundred yards, and passed through the Cathedral’s rear entrance.
And she kept repeating details.
‘These people… this congregation… came from the last long period when the cathedral was getting completely filled up as many times as there were services. When big congregations had gathered there in winter to find…’
‘Warmth?’ Merrily said. ‘Spiritual warmth?’
Leaning back into the heavy cushions of Sophie’s sofa. She’d been into the cathedral this morning to dust the deliverance office because nobody else would be doing that. It had felt slightly cold up there and looked derelict.
‘When was this?’ She asked. ‘The 1980s?’
‘Seventies, I’d say. Or earlier. Do you understand what I’m telling you?’
‘I… I’m not sure. This was a kind of… daydream?’
‘It doesn’t really matter,’ Sophie said. ‘It was happening then, in the seventies or whenever. The same kind of hats. The same… faces. And now it’s happening again. The Cathedral returning to the old days. Remembering… before the end comes.’
‘You knew these people… as individuals?’
‘Not all of them.’ Sophie stared into the growing greyness of the sitting room. ‘Some of them,’ she added falteringly, ‘are actually still alive. Like the estate agent who sold Andrew this house. He became known as a rock-climber and now has a shop just round the corner.’ She leaned back, as if she was pulling herself together. ‘But I’m an old woman.’
‘No,’ Merrily said softly but desperately. ‘No, you’re not.’
The greyness hardened; Sophie had never talked this way before the virus. And whatever it was dragging behind it.
52
The fever
MERRILY FED ETHEL, the vicarage cat, then walked out into the village street. It was late afternoon, and Ledwardine was deserted. This was a Sunday outside the main holiday season, lockdown still in force and the church, like Hereford Cathedral, closed down. Its tower edged into view, an admonishing raised forefinger. Even empty, disused old buildings had to be maintained… or…
It hadn’t taken long to replace Goodrich Court by the original green fields, the remains of its castellated walls rapidly snatched away by villagers with their wheelbarrows. Merrily envisaged them swarming like ants over the smoking ruins. The Court had only been a century old and starting to fit into its landscape when its time was up.
She saw the collapse, kept hearing its interminable groan.
How, in the end, would Meyrick feel? And Wordsworth, whose favourite castle survived? Wordsworth who won.
He had won, hadn’t he?
She saw the poet walking the fields again, his consciousness seized by his surroundings then powerfully plucked away by a swooping peregrine falcon just as he was seeing into the life of things.
If this be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft —
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beating of my heart,
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye…
Greyness hardening on all sides. The Wye heavy with pollution. The fever of the world, inflicting a massive unbalance which might never be corrected.
Her memories of those moments down by the Wye and the QueenStone were increasingly confused. She didn’t remember being driven to the field or walking to the stone. Had it been simple madness… or the onset of the fever of the world?
There were stories in the Sunday broadsheets about the damage to the Church hastened by the virus. Not huge, scary, prophetic stories, just inside-page leads hinting at the beginning of the end, indicating that the Second Millennium would be the last.
It had been forecast since the last century. Even in places like this, vicars who retired weren’t being replaced. Villagers who’d do it for nothing were always around. Pretty soon they wouldn’t remember the days when people got paid for leading appeals to an increasingly multi-gendered entity they couldn’t be sure had ever listened. When there was at least one person in every parish who was paid to try and explain to people why it was worth maintaining an inner life… seeing into the life of things. What life?
The destruction had been speeded up by the pandemic. No better time to rid the collapsing Church of clerics who took the paranormal too seriously.
Took me back many years, to the days of Lampe and Cupitt. Huw Owen. Long before your time, lass… Back in the 1970s, when understanding the Unseen and, when necessary, facing up to an active evil, were still accepted as part of the Church’s job. Now t’Church is groping for credibility in an increasingly secular society by reducing what it admits to believing in. Demonic possession… that’s become a mental health issue… They’ll consign us to history.
Then he’d asked her, Can I take it you still want to go on peering into the Unknown? Listening to folk who think they’re getting glimpses of the Unseen… I need to get this right. You’ve a decision to make and this is the time to make it.
And she asked herself, Do I get to make that decision?
Huw said, If the Church is reducing your role, prior to phasing it out, who’s left to assist parish priests facing summat genuinely iffy?
She didn’t know. Upmarket news outlets claimed the Church was becoming more ‘liberal’, but it was the wrong word. In its attempt to save money the Church was only becoming more constrictive, run by a handful of centralised bureaucrats who looked out for themselves and their mates.
In the empty street, Merrily gave in to a slow shiver. Like most involuntary reactions, it made her head hurt and she again felt stone denting it and cold hands tight in her hair. She was finally avoiding mirrors reflecting the encrusted slash on the left cheek below the black tunnelled tracks to her eyes. But was still hearing Wordsworth’s line about the fever of the world, as if the poet had been projected across the years to watch the 250th anniversary of his birth obliterated by a dark virus that crossed continents.
And had made Sophie think of herself as an old woman. She wasn’t yet a link in the chain of death that may have begun with Peter Portis, whose memorial in the window of his shop in Ross’s Corpse Cross Street had implied he’d not just gone but had been taken… by the rocks he thought he’d known, thought he’d conquered.
No inquest would ever reveal if his daughter-in-law called him down from them.
‘This is out of our hands.’ Lol was suddenly there beside her in his clean but very worn Alien sweatshirt, his left hand closing around her quivering shoulder. ‘We just have to save what we can.’
She felt a warmth as they stopped at the church gate. It dissipated as she saw that two family graves had been opened ready for victims of the virus. That would be this week’s work in Ledwardine for Merrily and Gomer Parry.
Gomer who, she’d now learned, had probably saved her life. Had kept going back to the QueenStone, four nights, then five, because he instinctively knew how important the stone was to young Janey.
The vicar had made him tell her about the long nights he’d spent down near the stone he’d first driven to for Alfred Watkins’s grandson. Then with Janey. Then on his own, sitting, often sleeping, in the ole LandRover. Until one night he’d seen a grey car coming through the trees and felt this was it. And then – he wasn’t stupid, he was an ole feller, no question, and he knew his limits – he pulled out his phone, which, like him, was too old to be all that smart as folks called them now, and he rang up, not Janey, but… young Laurence. And the boy had come out directly, bringing Janey with him – like he’d have a choice – and Gomer had seen a woman in his headlights and started his engine, and the woman had gone buggering off, fast.
He didn’t know the vicar had been there, too. Not then.
*
‘There’s never really a satisfactory end to anything,’ Lol said softly, as Venus – perhaps the year’s last evening Venus – appeared between the chimneys of the Black Swan.
She spun to face him.
Why not?
But she stayed silent.
Everything in Ledwardine was silent.
An old woman across the street near Jane’s shop lowered a red apple from her mouth and glanced at her.
‘We’ll just end up clinging to one another,’ Merrily said to Lol. Or Lol said to Merrily; she didn’t register which of them had spoken. She started thinking of the cathedral that would keep on raising money to hold its medieval masonry together and the Bishop who, like all other bastard bishops, would make sure he held on to his episcopal status.
The old woman’s glance had become a stare. The face behind the apple was the pagan face of Lucy Devenish, who Jane would often claim to have seen.
But not the diocesan exorcist, who surely never saw these things. No sooner had she registered this illusion than the stare vanished with the rest of Lucy Devenish, leaving Merrily squeezing Lol’s left hand with a hot urgency.
‘And maybe we’ll keep on clinging,’ she said.
NOTES
The following books were consulted.
Mary Andere, Arthurian Links with Herefordshire (Logaston Press, 1995)
Geoffrey Ashe, The Ancient Wisdom (Macmillan 1977)
Jonathan Bate, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World (William Collins)
David Bentley-Taylor, Wordsworth in the Wye Valley (Logaston Press, 20021)
Jason Bray, Deliverance (Coronet)
Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (Yale, 2009)
Rosalind Lowe, Sir Samuel Meyrick and Goodrich Court (Logaston Press, 2003) The only book on this character, who Ros sometimes admires.
Edmund J. Mason, The Wye Valley (Hale)
Arthur Mee, The King’s England: Herefordshire (Hodder and Stoughton)
Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: the early years, 1770–1803 (Oxford, Clarendon Press)
Gary St Michael Nottingham, Foundations of Practical Sorcery (Avalonia, 2004)
George Peterken, Wye Valley (Collins)
Susan Peterken, Landscapes of the Wye Tour (Logaston Press)
Tamzin Powell, The Witches Ways in the Welsh Borders (Airheart)
Anne Ross, Pagan Celtic Britain
Ward Rutherford, The Druids & Their Heritage (Gordon & Cremonesi, 1978)
Elizabeth Rees, Celtic Saints: Passionate Wanderers
Graham Robb, The Ancient Paths (Picador)
Mithu Sanyal, Rape: From Lucretia to #metoo (Verso 2019)
R. H. Stavis, Sister of Darkness
Bryan Walters, The Archaeology and History of Ancient Dean and the Wye Valley (Thornhill Press)
Alfred Watkins, The Old Straight Track, The Ley Hunter’s Manual and Alfred Watkins’ Herefordshire, introduction by Ron and Jennifer Shoesmith, (Logaston, 2012)
Francis Young, A History of Anglican Exorcism: Deliverance and Demonology in Church Ritual (I. B. Tauris, 2018)
Stories in this novel are also covered in Merrily’s Border (latest edition) by Phil Rickman, with photography by John Mason. Most locations and landscape features in the novel can be seen in this book.
The different attitudes to Wye Valley castles by Wordsworth and Sir Samuel Meyrick were explored in an excellent article by the playwright and TV writer Julian Mitchell – ‘Goodrich Castle: antiquity and nature versus thingummies’, which can be found online.
