The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (8 page)

Laying-on of hands, by the minister, in the context of a normal service or Eucharist was also accepted, as were Services of Penance, underlining the healing benefits of forgiveness.

Merrily looked up Canon Llewellyn Jeavons in the phone book. There was a Jeavons L.C.D. at Suckley.

Mad
, Huw had said, without explanation.

She knew where Suckley was – a rambling hamlet not far over the Herefordshire border and not far at all, in fact, from the Frome Valley where Lol Robinson was still living out of suitcases in the granary at Prof Levin’s recording studio.

Merrily sometimes caught a frightening image of herself in twenty years’ time. It was in sepia: this small, monklike person in the bottom left-hand corner of the huge old vicarage, hunched over the desk. Dark. Chilly. Cramped. Very much alone.

She saw it quite often these days. Sometimes it was so detailed, and yet so stark, that it was almost like an engraving.

That night, building a fire of apple logs in the sitting-room inglenook, Jane said, ‘You don’t make fires like this when I’m not here, do you? Like last weekend, for instance.’

‘I was busy.’

‘I think you probably didn’t come in here even once. I could almost smell the damp.’

‘Saturday night, I wrote the sermon. Sunday night, we had the service and then the Prossers came to tell me about Ann-Marie. Wasn’t really worth it afterwards.’

The paper and the kindling flared yellow. Jane, on the hearthrug in her jeans and an overstretched white sweater, looked like a little girl again. Seventeen now – scary.

‘It’s just...’ The kid positioned a small log over a mesh of thorny kindling. ‘I like this job. I like Stanner Hall. You get to meet people – different kinds of people. I just don’t like to think of you all alone here. Like everywhere dark, except the kitchen and the scullery.’

‘I’ve got the cat. And, of course—’

‘Let’s keep Him out of this,’ Jane snapped. ‘The point is, in under two years I’ll probably be gone, whether it’s university or... whatever. But I might be gone for like... for good. And you’ll be kind of lodged down in that scullery like the last Jelly Baby in the jar, writing your sermons into the empty night.’

Actually, it was going to bed that was the worst time: putting out the bedside light, knowing that the attic apartment directly above you was empty. Thinking of all the empty rooms and all the people who had been and gone. Jane’s dad, long gone.
Jane’s dad
– that was how she thought of Sean now, as though Jane was the best thing he’d done in his foreshortened, corrupted life.

Biting her lip, she stood over Jane and bent and kneaded the kid’s shoulders. ‘Two years is still a long time.’

‘I used to think that, but it isn’t.’ Jane looked up at her. ‘You’ll be nearly forty then. Have you even thought about that?’

‘Too old for sex?’

Jane pulled away. ‘Stop it.’

‘It was a joke. How
are
things at the hotel?’

‘Don’t change the subject. You’re here in this mausoleum, on your own every weekend, and Lol’s twenty miles away with no real home at all, and he can’t get near half the time because of
appearances
and the Church and all that hypocritical bollocks. I mean, if you were gay – if you were a lesbian – nobody would—’ Jane broke off, blushing, probably remembering a certain misunderstanding.

‘
And
there’s the question of restarting Lol’s career,’ Merrily said. ‘The album out in March, the chance of a tour...’

The kid smiled maliciously. ‘And groupies.’

‘Do they
have
groupies any more?’

‘Just trying to inflame the situation. Groupies and Lol doesn’t arise.’ Jane looked up again, an apple glow on her face. ‘But you have to do something soon. Face it, most people know about you and him now, anyway.’

‘Yeah, but cohabiting in the vicarage might just be a step too far. And I don’t think he’d want that anyway. Now that he’s finding his feet.’

‘You’re so... unimpulsive. You piss me off sometimes.’

‘It’s what I’m here for,’ Merrily said.

Later, just before nine, she left Jane in front of the TV and slipped away to the scullery. On the blue blotter on her desk, next to the sermon pad, was a folded copy of the property section of the
Hereford Times
. Just above the fold, an advert, encircled, said:

It could be the answer. Tomorrow, she’d call the agent. Tonight, she lifted the phone and tapped in the number of Canon Llewellyn Jeavons.

So he was mad. Maybe she could use some of that.

4

T
HE PINES WERE
matt black against the blood-orange sky when Jane was walking up the hotel drive. Friday, late afternoon, and here it came again – that shivery anticipation, her senses honed as sharp as the air, as the cold tide of night swept in towards the Border.

The Border. It was
right here
. She could actually be standing on it now. The hotel was in England, but the rocks it was named after were in Wales. And here, where the track divided, was where it all coalesced in a burst of sunset.

Letting her school case and her overnight bag slip to the ground, Jane stopped at the fork. The independent working woman, on the Border.

Two witches’-hat towers were prodding up between the ragged pines. Stanner Hall was Victorian Gothic, therefore more lavishly Gothic than the original. And from this distance, at least, it looked like it belonged here, if only as a piece of skyline, on the Border. And the Border, like all borders, was more than just a political division; it was about magic and transformation, a zone out of time where things normally unseen might, for tiny, bright moments, become visible.

Some part of Jane felt this to be true and responded to it. Christianity would be like,
Turn away from the dark... shun the numinous... take no pleasure in the nearness of other spheres
. Which was why Jane reckoned that she was always going to be a pagan at the core. OK, maybe she’d mellowed a little towards Mum’s faith, but it didn’t go far enough. It had no sense of place.
This
was the holy land.

Looking up the left-hand stony track that led to the top of the mysterious Stanner Rocks, she stood for a moment, feeling the night beating in like heavy, downy wings. Then she picked up her bags and took the right-hand path between the gateposts of Stanner Hall, these sculpted stone buttresses against the trespassing woods. Most of a foxhound was preserved on the top of the left-hand post, its muzzle pointing rigidly at the sky as if it was about to begin howling. On the right-hand post only the paws remained. Nothing here was completely intact. The sign at the bottom still said STANNER HALL HOTE

Are we talking about
The Hound of the Baskervilles
?
Voices from last Sunday.
Rather disappointed that none of this came up during the weekend.

‘... That, ah, probably deserves more than a single weekend.’

Can of worms... can of worms...

Well, she’d read
The Hound of the Baskervilles
years ago when she was quite young. Hadn’t liked it much, always managed to avoid the films on TV. At school, when she’d raised the issue, Clancy had said, ‘Yeah, I think there’s some local connection,’ but she didn’t seem interested.

Tonight, Jane and Clancy had come off the school bus at the usual junction, at the end of the Kington bypass, but Clancy had gone off down the Gladestry road, to the farm. Clancy said her mum was coming down heavy on the subject of homework – like, it had to be done on Friday night or the kid didn’t get out on Saturday. Changing schools so often, she’d fallen behind, and this was her last chance to pull back. So Jane had been seeing more of Clancy’s mum than Clancy and now, when she lugged her bags into the courtyard of Stanner Hall, here was Natalie, leaning against the open kitchen door, massaging a mug of coffee.

‘Hi, Jane.’

This warm, pithy voice travelling easily across the darkening yard. It was a voice that Jane imagined blokes finding very sexy. Nat, too. She was quite tall and supple, with high pointy breasts inside her black jumper. She had dense, shaggy hair, the colour of dark tobacco, and she was... well, very beautiful, in this enviably careless way.

‘Clan
has
gone home, Jane?’

‘She was certainly heading that way.’

‘Hmm,’ Nat said doubtfully.

Clancy had shown up for the first time at the beginning of this term. She was only about a year younger than Jane, but actually two years behind her at school – which, not surprisingly, had left her isolated, with no real friends. Jane, who knew what it was like being the new kid, had realized that Clancy’s situation must be a whole lot worse, having to take lessons with little children. She’d gone out of her way to talk to Clancy at lunchtimes, and they’d become mates, kind of. Which was what had led, indirectly, to the offer of regular weekend work at the hotel where Clancy’s mother was receptionist, barmaid and the person who made this joint seem halfway professional.

Nursing her mug for warmth, Natalie came out into the yard, smiling in a bruised kind of way and raising her eyes to the purpling sky.

‘Like the Fall of fucking Troy in there today, Jane.’

The earthy talk was one of Nat’s contradictions. Treated her own daughter like a kid and was old-fashioned about stuff like bedtimes and homework and pubs, but she’d address Jane like a real mate, a colleague. Nat had clearly been around, and not only in hotels and restaurants.

‘Unexpected guests?’ Jane looked over at the car park and saw Jeremy’s old Daihatsu 4×4, which Nat must be using, and Ben’s MG, and that was all.

‘If only,’ Nat said.

The letter was crinkly and discoloured, and some of the print had smudged. Amber flattened it out on the baronial island unit, slid it across to Jane and switched on the halogen spotlights.

‘I had to dry it on the stove. Ben threw it in the sink on his way out.’

‘Oh.’ Jane looked at the letter but didn’t pick it up. ‘It’s OK to...?’

‘Please do,’ Amber said. ‘Otherwise you’ll spend the rest of the night wondering why he’s drinking too much and smashing things. Anyway, you’re one of us now.’

Jane felt a grateful blush coming on. She picked up the letter. It was printed on what she guessed to be very expensive, fine-quality vellum, and it was brief and kind of shocking.

Jane let the letter fall to the island unit. ‘PP? And it’s not even signed by anybody. That’s like... deliberately insulting, isn’t it?’

‘No, it’s... probably just careless.’ Amber’s doll-like face was squashed-in with strain, her hair pushed back over her high forehead.

‘Amber, the bastard blatantly led Ben to think you were going to get the conference. I heard him.’

Natalie pushed the letter away with a forefinger. ‘He was hardly going to say
that
to Ben’s face, was he?’

‘Yeah, but he...’ Jane felt personally hurt, remembering the way that Ben had forced himself to smarm the guy.
That’s terrific, Neil
.

‘Perhaps Kennedy had pressures we don’t know about,’ Amber said. ‘There’s nothing we can do, anyway.’

‘You did say Ben knew other members of this outfit, though, didn’t you? Maybe he can find out what the real reason is.’

‘That probably
is
the real reason, Jane. They don’t believe the story. They think we’re pulling some scam.’

Jane sat down on a wooden stool. ‘I don’t really understand what that’s about –
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. When I read the book, it was set in Devon.’

‘Dartmoor.’ Amber leaned over her corner of the island, elbows on a double oven glove with burn marks on it.

‘The Grimpen Mire.’ Jane shuddered. In the book, a wild pony had been sucked to its death in the bog; she’d hated reading that. She’d probably been about twelve. She’d hated what happened to the hound, too. She might have wept at the time. And, anyway, it was all a con. You were led to believe it was going to be supernatural, and it wasn’t. ‘So like, is there some suggestion that Conan Doyle wrote it here?’