Holy Disorders. Edmund Crispin

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СКАЧАТЬ if there was ever such a concentrated, vehement, and (by the standards of the day) well-justified persecution in the history of Europe; there were daily burnings on the cathedral hill, and, that curious feature of most witch trials, free confessions, given without torture, by some hundreds of women that they had had intercourse with the Devil and participated in the Black Mass. After a few years the commotion died down, as these things will, and left nothing behind but the blackened circle cut into the hillside and the iron post to which the women had been tied for burning. There were no further disturbances in Tolnbridge, of any kind; and by 1939 the town seemed to have settled down into a state of permanent inanition.

      So at least Geoffrey maintained, in more forcible words, on his failing to get a taxi at the station. What he is actually recorded to have said is ‘What a damned hole!’

      Now this was unjust, and Fielding, looking down past the cathedral at the roofs of the old town and the estuary beyond, felt it to be so. However, it was obviously not the time for argument. Geoffrey was smarting not only with physical pain (this had by now considerably abated), but also with a considerable mental irritation. There are limits beyond which human patience must not be tried; after a certain point, the crossword puzzle or cryptogram or riddle ceases to amuse and begins to infuriate. This point, in the present affair, Geoffrey had long since passed, and his last escape, far from leaving him pleased, maddened him with its pointlessness.

      ‘What I cannot understand,’ he said for the tenth time, ‘is why, when they had me exactly where they wanted me, without a chance to resist or cry out, they didn’t bang me on the head and shove me overboard.’

      Fielding regarded gloomily an aged porter who was prodding tentatively at a trunk in the hope, apparently, of provoking it to spontaneous movement. ‘Perhaps they were interrupted,’ was all he said.

      ‘You can’t be interrupted when you’re locked in a lavatory.’

      ‘Perhaps they found you were the wrong person and sheered off.’

      ‘The wrong person!’

      Fielding sighed. ‘No, it’s not likely. Their organization seems very good,’ he added with a sort of melancholy satisfaction. ‘Unless you imagined all that.’

      ‘Imagined it,’ said Geoffrey, nettled. ‘Of course I didn’t.’

      ‘He wasn’t just asking you the time?’

      ‘The time! You don’t follow people into lavatories and bolt the door simply in order to ask them the time,’

      Fielding sighed again; he breathed out lengthily and noisily. The discussion, he thought, could not profitably be continued. ‘Is it far?’ he asked.

      ‘Yes; very far,’ said Geoffrey, annoyed at being thus crudely unseated from his hobby-horse; he thought, too, that he perceived the animal being led away. But something else had occurred to Fielding, for he turned abruptly and said:

      ‘Those letters.’

      Geoffrey looked at him in silence for a moment, and then searched his pockets. The letters were gone.

      ‘Very thorough,’ said Fielding drily. ‘When they found you were coming here despite their warnings, they decided you shouldn’t have any clue to the machine they were typed on.’

      ‘So that was it. Damn. But it still doesn’t explain why I wasn’t knocked out.’

      ‘When you’re organizing a thing like this, you can’t give your agents a free hand to do whatever emergency dictates. Besides, this fellow may not even have known what was going on. I expect he was told simply to get the letters from you, and when you fainted there was no need to use violence.’ Fielding whistled gently. ‘They’re fairly thorough.’

      The heat had grown somewhat less. Peace had made off, presumably towards the Precentor’s house, in another direction. The woman with the rug and the young clergyman had long since disappeared. Looking at his watch, Geoffrey found that the train had got in only seven minutes late. He and Fielding started off down the station hill, Fielding carrying both bags, and Geoffrey the inescapable butterfly-net. On their right stood the cathedral, serenely beautiful. The great rose window in the south transept glowed momently at them with a rich, red beauty, and the gulls wheeled and screamed about the slender octagonal spire.

      The medley of tobacconists and second-rate pubs huddled round the station soon gave place to a rather dreary street of small villas; and this in turn to the squalid, beautiful houses of the old town. A little beyond the boundary of these two worlds they turned off to the right, and shortly arrived at the wrought-iron gates of the clergy-house, which had been built in the eighteenth century to replace the old clergy-house adjoining the north transept; this being now used for storing lumber, holding choir-practices, and other miscellaneous and untidy purposes. The gates, suspended on either side from pillars of soft, lemon-coloured stone, opened upon a depressing vista of shrubs and lawns, bisected by an overgrown gravel drive which curved round to the front-door, skirted the house, and led out beyond the extensive kitchen-gardens on to the cathedral hill itself. Geoffrey entered these regions with circumspection, peering intently at a withered laurel as though he expected it to contain springs, nets, and lime for his discomfort.

      In this realm of celibacy, the first thing they heard was a girl’s voice. ‘Josephine!’ it called; then with more force, and a tinge of irritation: ‘Come back!’

      There was a sound of running footsteps, and a young girl, plainly the object of these cries, came panting round the side of the house. She could not have been more than fifteen, and she was long, thin, and trembling, with curls of bright gold, tangled and disordered. Her face was red, not only with effort, but also with perceptible anger. She stopped short on seeing the strangers, and after staring at them for a moment, darted off into the shrubbery at one side, whence the diminishing rustle of innumerable graceless plants marked her retreat.

      They toiled towards the portico, a little shaken by this welcome, and suspecting, with some dismay, a domestic upheaval. They had not gone more than a few steps before the owner of the voice they had heard appeared also, in unenergetic pursuit. And this at least, Geoffrey thought, was not what one expected to find on cathedral precincts – a girl of about twenty-three, as dark as the other had been blonde, with blue, humorous eyes, a tip-tilted nose, red lips, and a slim, loose-limbed body. Her dress, though rich and sober enough, and her high heels gave, Geoffrey thought, a faint suggestion of the courtesan. Not that he objected to this. Having little experience of women, he classified them, a priori as it were, as either amateur prostitutes or domestic helps, and anyone not fitting snugly into one of these categories left him confused, suspicious, and uncomprehending (this masculine failing is commoner than perhaps women imagine). Certainly in this case a touch of the hetaera, the Lais or Phryne, was present; but there was also a practicality, self-possession, and intelligence which softened and diffused the impression.

      Fundamentally, Geoffrey was afraid of women. His endeavours to categorize those he had met as either courtesan or domestic had led to dismal misunderstandings, since he had never known anyone remotely resembling either kind. He also laboured, as a result of reading books, under the delusion that every unmarried woman he met was hunting, with all the tricks and subterfuges of her deadly and mysterious sex, for a husband, and congratulated himself inwardly upon hair-raising escapes from several women who in point of fact had never even considered marrying him, and who had merely used him as a convenient temporary paramour and offered him the honourable courtesy of the sex, a good-night kiss at the end of an evening enjoyed at his expense. Beyond the age of thirty, he had gradually shunned acquaintance with these puzzling beings. Consequently, he approached this new example of the species with a trepidation СКАЧАТЬ