Sacrament

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll have Adele heat up some soup for you. Just make sure you stay under the blankets. And take your pills.’

As she exited she threw her son an almost fearful look, the way Miss Hartley had at school. Then she was gone. Will swallowed the pills. His body still ached and his head still spun, but he wasn’t going to wait very long, he’d already decided, before he was up and out. He’d drink the soup (he’d need the sustenance for the journey ahead) and then he’d dress and go back to the Courthouse. With his plan made he got out of bed again to test the strength of his legs. They didn’t feel as unreliable as they had a little while before. With some encouragement, they’d get him where he needed to go.

III

Though Frannie wasn’t sick, she suffered a good deal more than Will had the day after the night in the Courthouse. She had managed to smuggle Sherwood and herself into the house and upstairs to clean up before they were seen by their parents, and had entertained the hope that they were not going to be questioned until, out of the blue, Sherwood had begun to sob. He’d been thankfully inarticulate about what was causing him to do so, and though both her mother and her father quizzed her closely she kept her answers vague. She didn’t like lying, mainly because she wasn’t very good at it, but she knew that Will would never forgive her if she let any details of what happened slip. Her father simply grew cold and remote when his first fury was spent, but her mother was good at attrition. She would work and work at her suspicions, until she had them satisfied. So for an hour and a half Frannie found herself quizzed as to why Sherwood was in such a state. She said they’d gone out to play with Will, become lost in the dark, and they’d got frightened. Plainly her mother doubted every word, but she and her daughter were alike in their tenaciousness. The more Mrs Cunningham repeated her questions, the more entrenched in her replies Frannie became. At last, her mother grew exasperated.

‘I don’t want you seeing that Rabjohns boy again,’ she said. ‘I think he’s a troublemaker. He doesn’t belong here and he’s a bad influence. I’m surprised at you, Frances. And disappointed. You’re usually more responsible than this. You know how confused your brother can get. And now he’s in a terrible state. I’ve never seen him so bad. Crying and crying. I blame you.’

This little speech brought the matter to an end for the evening. But sometime before dawn Frannie woke to hear her brother sobbing pitifully again, and then her mother going into his room, and the sobbing subsiding while quiet words were exchanged, and then the weeping coming again, while her mother tried – and apparently failed – to soothe him. Frannie lay in the darkness of her room, fighting back tears of her own. But she lost the battle. They came, oh they came, salty in her nose, hot beneath her lids and on her cheeks. Tears for Sherwood, whom she knew was the least equipped to deal with whatever nightmares would come of their encounter at the Courthouse; tears for herself, for the lies she’d told, which had put a distance between herself and her mother, whom she loved so much; and tears of a different kind for Will, who had seemed at first the friend she needed in this stale place, but whom she had, it seemed, already lost.

At last, the inevitable. She heard the handle of her bedroom door squeak as it was turned and her mother said:

‘Frannie? Are you awake?’

She didn’t pretend otherwise, but sat up in bed. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Sherwood just told me some very strange things.’

He had told everything: about going to the Courthouse in pursuit of Will, about the man in black and the woman in veils. And more besides. Something about the woman being naked, and a fire. Was any part of this true, Frannie’s mother wanted to know? And if so, why hadn’t Frannie told her?

Despite Will’s edict, she had no choice but to tell the truth now. Yes, there had been two people at the Courthouse, just as Sherwood had said. No, she didn’t know who they were; no she hadn’t seen the woman undressing, and no, she couldn’t be certain she would recognize them again (that part wasn’t entirely true, but it was close enough). It had been dark, she said, and she had been afraid, not just for herself but for all three of them.

‘Did they threaten you?’ her mother wanted to know.

‘Not exactly.’

‘But you said you were afraid.’

‘I was. They weren’t like anybody I’d ever seen before.’

‘So what were they like?’

Words failed her, and failed her again when her father appeared and asked her the same questions.

‘How many times have I told you,’ he said, ‘not to go near anybody you don’t know?’

‘I was following Will. I was afraid he was going to get hurt.’

‘If he had that’d be his business and not yours. He wouldn’t do the same for you, I’m damn certain of that.’

‘You don’t know him. He—’

‘Don’t answer me back,’ her father snapped, ‘I’ll speak to his parents tomorrow. I want them to know what an idiot they’ve got for a son.’

With that he left her to her thoughts.

The events of the night were not over, however. When the house had finally become quiet, Frannie heard a light tapping on her bedroom door, and Sherwood sidled in, clutching something to his chest. His voice was cracked with all the crying he’d been doing.

‘I’ve got something you have to see,’ he said, and crossing to the window he pulled back the curtains. There was a streetlamp outside the front of the house, and it shed its light through the rain-streaked glass onto Sherwood’s pale, puffy face.

‘I don’t know why I did it,’ he began.

‘Did what?’

‘It was just there, you know, and when I saw it I wanted it.’ As he spoke he proffered the object he’d been clutching. ‘It’s just an old book,’ he said.

‘You stole it?’ He nodded. ‘Where from? The Courthouse?’ Again, he nodded. He looked so frightened she was afraid he was going to start weeping again. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’m not cross. I’m just surprised. I didn’t see you with it.’

‘I put it in my jacket.’

‘Where did you find it?’

He told her about the desk, and the inks and the pens, and while he told her she took the book from his hands and went to the window with it. There was a strange perfume coming off it. She raised it to her nose – not too close – and inhaled its scent. It smelt like a cold fire, like embers left in the rain, but sharpened by a spice she knew she would never find on a supermarket shelf. The smell made her think twice about opening the book; but how could she not, given where it had come from? She put her thumb against the edge of the cover and lifted it. On the inside page was a single circle, drawn in black or perhaps dark brown ink. No name. No title. Just this ring, perfectly drawn.

‘It’s his, isn’t it?’ she said to Sherwood.

‘I think so.’

‘Does anyone know you took it?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

That at least was something to be grateful for. She turned to the next page. It was as complex as the previous page had been simple: row upon row upon row of writing, tiny words pressed so close to one another it was almost a seamless flow. She flipped the page. It was the same again, on left and right. And on the next two sheets, the same; and on the next two and the next two. She peered at the script more closely, to see if she could make any sense of it, but the words weren’t in English. Stranger still, the letters weren’t from the alphabet. They were pretty, though, tiny elaborate marks that had been set down with obsessive care.

‘What does it mean?’ Sherwood said, peering over her shoulder.

‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it before.’

‘Do you think it’s a story?’

‘I don’t think so. It isn’t printed, like a proper book.’ She licked her forefinger and dabbed it on the words. It came away stained. ‘It was written by him,’ she said.

‘By Jacob?’ Sherwood breathed.

‘Yes.’ She flipped over a few more pages and finally came to a picture. It was an insect – a beetle of some kind, she thought – and like the writing on the preceding pages it had been set down exquisitely, every detail of its head and legs and iridescent wings so meticulously painted it looked uncannily lifelike in the watery light, as though it might have risen whirring from the paper had she touched it.

‘I know I shouldn’t have taken the book,’ Sherwood said, ‘but now I don’t want to give it back, ‘cause I don’t want to see him again.’

‘You won’t have to,’ Frannie reassured him.

‘You promise?’

‘I promise. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Sher. We’re safe here, with Mum and Dad to look after us.’

Sherwood had put his arm through hers. She could feel his thin body quivering against her own. ‘But they won’t be here always, will they?’ he said, his voice eerily flat, as though this most terrible of possibilities could not be expressed unless stripped of all emphasis.

‘No,’ she said. ‘They won’t.’

‘What will happen to us then?’ he said.

‘I’ll be here to look after you,’ Frannie replied.

‘You promise?’

‘I promise. Now, it’s time you were back in bed.’

She took her brother by the hand and they both tiptoed out along the landing to his room. There she settled him back in his bed, and told him not to think about the book or the Courthouse or what had happened tonight any more, but to go back to sleep. Her duty done she returned to her own bedroom, closed the door and the curtains, and put the book in the cupboard under her sweaters. There was no lock on the cupboard door, but if there had been she would have certainly turned the key. Then she climbed between the now chilly sheets and put on the bedside light, just in case the beetle in the book came clicking across the floor to find her before dawn; which possibility, after the evening’s escapades, she could not entirely consign to the realm of the impossible.

IV

i

Will consumed his soup like a dutiful patient, and then, once Adele had taken his temperature, collected his tray and gone back downstairs, quickly got up and dressed. It was by now early in the evening, and the sleety day was already losing its light, but he had no intention of putting his journey off until tomorrow.

The television had been turned on in the living-room – he could hear the calm, even tones of a newscaster, and then, as his mother changed channels, applause and laughter. He was glad of the sound. It covered the occasional squeak of a stair as he descended to the hallway. There, as he donned scarf, anorak, gloves and boots, he came within a breath of discovery, as his father called out from his study demanding to know from Adele where his tea had got to. Was she picking the leaves herself, for Christ’s sake? Adele did not reply, and his father stormed into the kitchen to get an answer. He did not notice his son in the unlit hallway, however, and while he whittered on to Adele about how slow she was, Will opened the front door and, slipping through the narrowest crack he could make so as not to have a draught alert them to his going, was out on his night-journey.

ii

Rosa didn’t conceal the satisfaction she felt at the absence of the book. It had burned up in the fire, and that was all there was to say in the matter. ‘So you’ve lost one of your precious journals,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’ll be a little more sympathetic in the future when I get weepy about the children.’

‘There’s no comparison,’ Steep said, still searching the ashes in the antechamber. His desk was little more than seared timbers, his pens and brushes gone, his box of watercolours barely recognizable, his inks boiled away. His bag containing the earlier journals had been beyond the scope of the fire, so all was not lost. But the work-in-progress, his account of the last eighteen years of his vast labour, had gone. And Rosa’s attempt to equate his loss with what she felt when one of her brats had to be put out of its misery made him sick to his stomach. ‘This is the labour of my life,’ he pointed out.

Then it’s pitiful,’ she said. ‘Making books! It’s pitiful.’ She leaned towards him. ‘Who’d you think you’re making them for? Not me. I’m not interested. I’m not remotely interested.’

‘You know why I’m making them,’ Jacob said sullenly. To be a witness. When God comes, and demands we tell Him what we’ve wrought, chapter and verse, we must have an account. Every detail. Only then will we be…Jesus! Why do I bother explaining it to you?’

‘You can say the word. Go on, say it! Say forgiven. That’s what you used to say all the time. We’d be forgiven.’ She approached him now. ‘But you don’t really believe that any more do you?’ She gently reached up and put her hands to his face. ‘Be honest, my love,’ she said, suddenly soft.

‘I still…I still believe there’s purpose in our lives,’ Jacob replied. ‘I have to believe that.’

‘Well I don’t,’ Rosa said plainly. ‘I realized after our fumblings of yesterday, I have no healthy desires left in me. None. At all. There won’t be any more children. There won’t be any hearth and home. And there won’t be a day of forgiveness, Jacob. That’s certain. We’re alone, with the power to do whatever we want.’ She smiled. That boy—’

‘Will?’

‘No. The younger one, Sherwood. I had him at my titties, sucking away, and I thought: it’s a sickness to take pleasure in this, but Lord, you know that made it all the more pleasurable? And I began to think, when the child had gone, what else would give me pleasure? What’s the worst I could do?’

‘And?’

‘My mind fairly began to spin at the possibilities,’ she said with a smile. ‘It really did. If we’re not going to be forgiven, why try to be something I’m not?’ She was staring hard into his face. ‘Why should I waste my breath hoping for something we’ll never have?’

Jacob pulled his face from her hands. ‘You won’t tempt me,’ he said. ‘So stop wasting your time. I have my plans laid—’

The book’s burned,’ Rosa snapped.

‘I’ll make another.’

‘And if that burns?’

‘Another! And another! I’ll be the stronger for this loss.’

‘Oh, so will I,’ Rosa said, her features draining of warmth, so that her beauty seemed, for all its perfection, almost cadaverous. ‘I will be a different woman from now on. I will have pleasure whenever I can take it, by whatever means amuse me. And if someone or something gets a child upon me I’ll fetch it out of m’self with a sharpened stick.’ This notion pleased her. Laughing raucously, she turned her back on Jacob, and spat into the ashes. There’s for your book,’ she said. She spat again. ‘And there’s for forgiveness.’ Again she spat. ‘And there’s for God. He’ll have nothing more from me.’

She said no more. Without looking to see what effect she’d had upon her companion (she would have been disappointed; he was stony-faced), she strode out. Only when she’d gone did Jacob let himself weep. Manly tears; the tears of a commander before a broken army or a father at his son’s grave. He didn’t simply grieve for the book – though that added to the sum – but for himself. After this, he would be alone. Rosa – his once beloved Rosa, with whom he’d shared his most cherished ambitions – would go her hedonistic way, and he would take his own road, with his knife and his pen and a new journal full of empty pages. Oh, that would be hard after so many years together, and the work before him still so monumental and the sky so wide.

Then an unbidden thought: why not kill her? There would be satisfaction in that right now, no question about it. A quick slice across her pulsing throat and down she’d go, like a felled cow. He’d comfort her in her final moments; tell her how much he had loved her, in his way; how he would dedicate his labours to her until they were finished. Every nest he rifled, every burrow he purified, he would say: this is for you, my Rosa; and this; and this, until his hands, bloodied and yolked, had finished with their weary work.

He pulled his knife from his belt, already imagining the sound of its swoop across her neck; the hiss of her breath from her throat, the fizz of her blood. Then he went after her, back towards the Courtroom.

She was waiting for him; turned to face him with her pet ropes – what she liked to call her rosaries – cavorting around her arms like vipers. One leapt as he approached her, finding his wrist with the speed of her will, and catching it so tight he gasped at the sensation.

‘How dare you?’ she said. A second rope leapt from her hand, and wrapping itself around his neck caught hold of his knife-hand from behind him. She flicked her eye and it pulled tight, wrenching the blade back towards his face. ‘You would have murdered me.’

‘I would have tried.’

‘I’m no use to you as a womb, so I may as well be crow-bait, is that it?’

‘No. I just…I wanted to simplify things.’

‘That’s a fresh excuse,’ she said, almost admiringly. ‘Which eye is it to be?’

‘What?’

‘I’m going to puncture one of your eyes, Jacob. With this little knife of yours—’ She willed the ropes to tighten. They creaked a little. ‘Which is it to be?’

‘If you harm me, it’ll be war between us.’

‘And war’s for men, so I would lose? Is that the inference?’

‘You know you would.’

‘I don’t know a thing about myself, Jacob, any more than you do. I learned it all watching women do as women do. Perhaps I’d be a very fine soldier. Perhaps we’d have such a war, you and me, that it would be like love, only bloodier.’ She cocked her head. ‘Which eye is it to be?’

‘Neither,’ Jacob said, a tremor in his voice now. ‘I need both my eyes, Rosa, to do my work. Put one of them out and you may as well take my life with it.’

‘I want recompense!’ she said, through her perfect teeth. I want you to suffer for what you just tried to do.’

‘Anything but an eye.’

‘Anything?’

‘Yes.’

‘Unbutton yourself.’

‘What?’

‘You heard me. Unbutton yourself.’

‘No, Rosa.’

‘I want one of your balls, Jacob. It’s that or an eye. Make up your mind.’

‘Stop this,’ he said softly.

‘Am I supposed to melt now?’ she replied. ‘Get weak with compassion?’ She shook her head. ‘Unbutton yourself,’ she said.

His free hand went to his groin.

‘You can do it yourself, if that’ll make you feel any better. Well? Would it?’

He nodded. She let the ropes about his wrist relax a little.

‘I won’t even watch,’ she said. ‘How’s that? Then if you lose your courage for a bit nobody’s going to know but you.’

The ropes loosed his hand completely now. They returned to Rosa and looped themselves around her neck.

‘Go to it.’

‘Rosa…?’

‘Jacob?’

‘If I do this—?’

‘Yes.’

‘—you’ll never talk about it to anybody?’

Talk about what?’

‘That I’m not…complete.’

Rosa shrugged. ‘Who’d care?’ she said.

‘Just agree.’

‘I agree.’ She turned her back on him. ‘Make it the left,’ she said. ‘It hangs a little lower, so it’s probably the riper of the two.’

He stood in the passageway when she’d gone and felt the heft of the knife in his hand. He had commissioned it in Damascus, a year after the death of Thomas Simeon, and had used it innumerable times since. Though there had been nothing supernatural about its maker, some authority had been conferred upon it over the years, for it grew sharper, he thought, with every breath it took. He would be able to scoop out what the bitch demanded without much trouble; and after all, what did he care? He had no use for what he now cupped in his palm. Two eggs in a nest of skin; that’s all they were. He put the tip of the blade to his flesh, and drew a deep breath. In the Courtroom, down the passageway, Rosa was singing one of her wretched lullabies. He waited for a high note, then cut.

V

Will didn’t attempt a short cut back to the Courthouse, but took the road down to the village. At the intersection there was a telephone box, and he thought: I should say goodbye to Frannie. It wasn’t so much for friendship’s sake as for the pleasure of the boast. To be able to say: I’m going; just as I said I would; I’m going away forever.

He stepped into the box, fumbled for some change, then fumbled again (his fingers chilled, even through his gloves) to find the Cunninghams’ number in the out-of-date directory. It was there. He dialled, prepared to disguise his voice if Frannie’s father came on the line. Her mother answered, however, and with a hint of frostiness brought her daughter to the phone. Will got straight to the point: swore Frannie to secrecy then told her he was leaving.

‘With them?’ she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.

He told her it was none of her business. He was simply going away.

‘Well I’ve got something that belongs to Steep,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘It’s none of your business,’ she countered.

‘All right,’ Will said. ‘Yes, I’m going with them.’ There was no doubt in his feverish head that this was so. ‘Now…what have you got?’

‘You mustn’t say anything. I don’t want them coming looking.’

They won’t.’

She paused a moment. Then she said: ‘Sherwood found a book. I think it belongs to Steep.’

‘Is that alt?’ he said. A book; who cared about a book? But he supposed she needed some memento of this adventure, however petty.

‘It’s not just any book,’ she insisted. ‘It’s—’

But Will had already finished with the conversation. ‘I have to go,’ he said.

‘Wait, Will—’

‘I haven’t got time. ‘Bye, Frannie. Say ‘bye to Sherwood, will you?’

He put the receiver down, feeling thoroughly pleased with himself. Then he left the relative comfort of the telephone box, and set out on the track to Bartholomeus’ Courthouse.

The fallen snow had frozen, and formed a glittering skin on the road ahead, upon which a new layer of snow was being deposited as the storm intensified. Its beauty was his to appreciate, and his alone. The people of Burnt Yarley were at home tonight, beside their fires, their cattle gathered into sheds and byres, their chickens fed and locked up in their coops for the night.

The mounting blizzard soon turned the scene ahead of him into a white blur, but he had sufficient wits about him to watch for the place in the hedge where he’d previously gained access to the field, and, spotting it, dug his way through. The Courthouse was not visible, of course, but he knew that if he trudged directly across the meadow he’d reach its steps in due course. It was harder going than the road, and his body, for all his determination, was showing signs of surrender. His limbs felt jittery, and the urge to sink down in the snow for a while and rest grew stronger with every step. But he saw the Courthouse now, coming out of the blizzard. Jubilant, he wiped the snow from his numbed face, so that the blaze in him – in his eyes, in his skin – would be readily seen. Then he started up the steps. Only when he reached the top did he realize that Jacob was in the doorway, silhouetted against a fire burning in the vestibule. This was not a piffling blaze like the one Will had fed: it was a bonfire. And he did not doubt for a moment it had living fuel. He could not see what, exactly, nor did he much care. It was his idol he wanted to see, and be seen by. More than seen, embraced. But Jacob did not move, and a terror came upon Will that he’d misunderstood everything; that he was no more wanted here than at the house he’d left. He stopped one step short of the top, and waited for judgment. It did not come. He was not even certain Jacob had even seen him.