The Snares of Death (19 page)

‘It's not a good road. Only two lanes, and very winding,' he explained, groping on the floor for his dressing gown. ‘But there won't be much traffic on a Sunday morning, and if the weather conditions are good – I suppose we can do it in under forty-five minutes. Maybe less.' He sank back against the pillows. ‘Five more minutes in bed, then?' he suggested hopefully.

‘I'm afraid not, darling,' Lucy smiled, snuggling up nonetheless for one last kiss. ‘I don't want you getting us killed – not today, anyway. We can always come back later, you know.'

Somehow they made it to Walsingham on time. They spoke very little on the way: it took all of David's concentration to keep his eyes on the road. He was abundantly, astonishingly happy, happier than he'd been since . . . since Brighton. That thought cast a slight shadow on his happiness, and brought with it the need for confession: he wanted no secrets between them now.

‘There are things that you don't know about me,' he began.

‘Not now,' Lucy interrupted gently, her face turned towards him, ignoring the fresh, tender-green spring morning. ‘Not today. Some time we'll have to talk about it, but not today.'

‘But if you knew . . .'

‘No,' she said. ‘None of it matters. Not now. Not today.'

When they reached the narrow, cobbled streets of Walsingham, she turned her attention out of the window at last. ‘What a quaint place! What's so horrible about it, David?'

‘Oh, wait until you see the Shrine. Then you'll know. Or take a look at these shops.'

It was not yet the high season for pilgrimage, so the streets were relatively free of people. Walsingham was a picturesque village, rich with history. It was nearly a thousand years ago, in the year 1061, that a woman named Richeldis had had a vision in this place: a vision of the Virgin Mary, instructing her to build a replica of the house in Nazareth where the Annunciation had taken place. A Holy Well sprang forth on the spot, the house was built – by miraculous means, the legend said – and for several hundred years this shrine had been a centre for pilgrimage, in England second only to Canterbury. A large abbey had also been established, primarily to care for the thousands of pilgrims to the shrine. Henry VIII had, of course, seen to it that the shrine was destroyed, along with the abbey, at the Dissolution; ironically, he had several times been to Walsingham as a supplicant pilgrim, praying that his wife Catherine of Aragon might conceive a son.

In the twentieth century, after lying in ruins for nearly 400 years, Walsingham experienced a rebirth. A Roman Catholic shrine was established at the Slipper Chapel outside the village, where pilgrims had once left their shoes so that they might walk the last mile barefoot. And in the 1930s, the Anglo-Catholic Vicar of Walsingham built the Anglican Shrine church, with a new ‘Holy House' built to the dimensions of the medieval one, surrounded by fifteen chapels.

The main street of the village was narrow, with ancient buildings crowding the pavement on either side; most of them were now profitably engaged in selling souvenirs: postcards, cheap medals, rosaries, painted statues, icons, prayer cards, and even bottles for water from the Holy Well, which the Anglicans now claimed inside their shrine.

‘Yes,' said Lucy, looking at the shopfronts. ‘I'm beginning to see what you mean. A bit tacky, isn't it?'

David nodded. ‘Here's the Abbey, on the right.' All that was visible from the street was a tall, protective stone wall. ‘And the pump, on the left. That's where the protesters congregate, at the National Pilgrimage.' He pulled into a large car park, nearly deserted. ‘And now we'd better fly. It's twenty-five minutes past eleven.' Taking her hand, he guided her quickly down another narrow street and through a door. ‘We'll take a short cut through the pilgrim's hospice, instead of going through the Shrine church,' he explained. In a moment they were in a large garden.

The Chapel of All Souls was a free-standing building in the garden, behind the Shrine church. David and Lucy found seats just before the priest, a plump, elderly man, waddled to the altar.

‘Well, thank goodness that's over,' David smiled. The Mass had ended, he'd said his prayers for Lady Constance, and they were once again out in the sunshine.

‘Do you have to come every year?' asked Lucy, knowing that in spite of his protestations he undoubtedly would.

‘I think she would have liked me to. On her birthday, and on her year's mind – the anniversary of her death – which is the Feast of the Assumption. We'll see. I'm not making any promises at this point.' He shook his head, but he continued to smile.

‘Can we go into the Shrine church now?'

‘The weather's so nice – why don't we walk around the garden first? Look, here's this horrible sepulchre.'

Lucy peered inside the black, bunker-like object; inside was a near life-sized replica of Jesus in the tomb, grotesquely gory. ‘Ugh. Why didn't you warn me?'

‘You need to experience Walsingham in all its awfulness. How about these Stations of the Cross?'

They were large, and garishly painted, fixed at intervals around the perimeter of the garden. ‘What's that big thing in the middle?' she asked.

‘It's an outdoor altar. They can do Masses outdoors, and at the National Pilgrimage they give Benediction from there,' David explained.

As they walked around, they gradually became aware that they were being watched. A young fair-haired priest, tall and handsome in a black cassock, seemed to be staring at them. After a moment he approached with hesitation.

‘Excuse me,' he said diffidently. ‘Aren't you Lucy Kingsley?'

‘Yes . . .' She scrutinised the man; he didn't look familiar. Perhaps he'd been at the gallery yesterday, out of his clerical garb, she decided.

The priest smiled in relief. ‘I thought so. You probably don't remember me. I'm Stephen Thorncroft – you were married to my Uncle Geoffrey.'

‘Stephen!' Lucy exclaimed, delighted. ‘Of course I remember you! You were at the wedding – you must have been only eight or ten at the time!'

‘That's right.'

‘You've grown up!' Impulsively, she embraced him. ‘But how did you recognise me, Stephen? It was such a long time ago.'

He smiled at her. ‘I may have grown up, but you haven't changed very much at all. You made quite a big impression on me, you see! You looked like a fairy-tale princess that day – I thought that you were the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.' He was slightly embarrassed but sincere.

‘Flatterer!' Lucy laughed.

‘No, I mean it. And you talked to me that day, too – remember?'

‘Yes, at the reception,' she recalled.

‘We sat in the corner and talked for the longest time. You didn't treat me like a child – you talked to me as though I were a grown-up. That really impressed me.'

Lucy smiled at him, remembering. ‘I didn't feel much like a grown-up myself that day,' she explained. ‘I was really nervous, and hardly knew anyone there. You were non-threatening. I enjoyed talking to you.'

David stood off to the side, feeling totally superfluous. How ironic, he thought, that on this of all days, when all he wanted was to be alone with Lucy, it should be her odious ex-husband's nephew who should intrude.

Stephen continued, ‘So, what have you been doing with yourself for the last . . . oh, it must be seventeen or eighteen years!'

‘Something like that. It's a long story. Painting, mostly.'

‘I was sorry when . . . well, you know. When . . .'

‘When Geoffrey and I were divorced? I should never have married him, Stephen. I was just too young. I didn't know what I was doing.'

‘I'm sure that Uncle Geoffrey's not an easy person to live with.'

‘That's true,' Lucy agreed.

‘He was married and divorced twice after you, you know.'

‘Yes, I'd heard that.'

‘And for the last few years –' Stephen smiled wryly. ‘Well, he's stopped bothering with the formalities. He was here to see me a few days ago with . . . a most extraordinary young woman.'

Lucy bit her lip and tried to keep a straight face. ‘Oh, really?'

‘Yes. She was very young. American. And she had the most unlikely name: Tiffani.'

‘With an “i”,' David muttered humorously under his breath; they didn't hear him.

‘And you?' Stephen asked hesitantly. ‘Have you remarried?'

As Lucy shook her head, David interposed, ‘Not yet.'

‘Oh, I'm so sorry,' she said quickly. ‘I've been very rude. Stephen, this is . . . the man in my life. David Middleton-Brown.'

Stephen appraised David as they shook hands. ‘Lucky man,' he said.

‘Yes, I know.' David put a proprietorial arm around Lucy.

‘Could I invite the two of you to come for a drink?' Stephen asked. ‘At the College? I wish I could ask you to stay for lunch, but they don't cater for any extras, I'm afraid.'

‘Yes, that would be very nice, wouldn't it, David?'

‘I wouldn't say no to a sherry,' he admitted.

This must be the place Tiffani had told him about, David realised as they entered the dining room. But it was far from the baronial hall that she had described to him, however inarticulately. It was in fact a converted medieval tithe barn – a cowshed, he said to himself with scorn. The furnishings were on a large scale, but they all appeared to David's expert eye to be not quite right in one way or another: a knob missing here, or a handle there, spoke of discarded, rejected, second-best furniture, probably given or bequeathed to the College by those who had no further use for it. And the paintings on the walls were truly hideous – mainly bad copies of seventeenth-century Italian religious paintings, the worst that the Counter-Reformation had to offer. He recognised one that Tiffani had described so colourfully, a simpering St Agatha proffering her bell-like breasts on a platter. There was a large and murky Assumption of the Virgin, and a copy of a Caravaggio, the original of which hung in the National Gallery: Salome receiving the head of John the Baptist, his mouth open in shock and his stump bleeding on to the silver platter. Charming subject matter for a dining room, David reflected. At one narrow end of the room stood a large sideboard with an almost matching pair of candelabra on either end; above it hung the other painting that Tiffani had mentioned, the conversion of St Hubert with a hunting scene in the background, dogs viciously ripping the flesh of a stag. The massive sideboard with the huge painting above, placed as it was, could almost have been an altar, David mused humorously: an altar to food.

The oblong table which filled the centre of the room was long and solid, though none of the chairs surrounding it matched it or each other. ‘I see that you've taken Dr Grantley's admonitions to heart,' David remarked with a smile.

Stephen laughed. ‘Yes, he hated round dining tables, didn't he?'

‘I believe that he said that a round dinner table was “the most abominable article that ever was invented”.'

‘That's absolutely right,' confirmed the elderly priest who had celebrated Mass earlier, joining them. He raised his eyebrows, perched like furry caterpillars above his deepset eyes. ‘ “Democratic and parvenue”, wasn't it? Used by “dissenters and calico-printers”? I like a man who knows his Trollope.' The old man's voice was mellifluous, but his cassock was theadbare and bore marks that looked suspiciously like gravy stains, and when he smiled his teeth were uneven and none too clean.

Stephen introduced them to Father Owen Osborne, who then drifted off in search of a drink, but they were shortly joined by another young priest, darkly handsome. ‘This is Father Mark Judd, my colleague and friend.'

Mark Judd smiled charmingly, his straight white teeth a great deal more attractive then Father Osborne's. ‘This is certainly your week for visitors, Stephen. Your uncle with his . . . friend . . . on Friday, and another two today!'

Stephen nodded as he supplied them with sherry. ‘Mark really hit it off with Uncle Geoffrey,' he explained to Lucy. ‘Uncle Geoffrey's going to help him with something.'

‘Geoffrey being helpful? That doesn't sound very likely.' Lucy rolled her eyes, pushing her hair back from her forehead with a graceful gesture. ‘What's in it for him?'

‘I appealed to his professional pride,' Mark laughed. ‘And his curiosity. He was looking at the paintings in here, and I told him about all the ones we're trying to flog off at the church where I've been working. I said that we desperately needed some expert advice about valuation, and where to go to get the best prices. He offered to come and have a look, and give his opinion.'

‘Mark has been looking after a parish during a long interregnum,' Stephen explained. ‘Now the new incumbent is having a clear-out.'

‘To say the very least!' Mark amplified. ‘It was quite a spiky place, in an old-fashioned sort of way. And the new Vicar is none other than Bob Dexter, Mister Evangelical.'

‘
The
Bob Dexter?' David asked in surprise.

‘You've heard of him?'

‘Of course. He is, as you say, Mister Evangelical. He seems to be in some sort of competition with Tony Higton as to which one can write the most letters to the
Church Times
, and give more speeches at General Synod! But what on earth is he doing here? I thought that he was very well established in the London area, with a real power base there. Why would he come to rural Norfolk?'

‘I think he probably thought it would be a challenge, to be right on the doorstep of Walsingham, so to speak,' Mark speculated. ‘He's always been very active in the protests, you know.'

‘Ah.' David nodded. ‘What is he like? Is he as frightful as he comes across in his letters and on television?'

‘Every bit,' confirmed Mark. ‘He's inflexible, arrogant and dogmatic. Ruthless, and without a sense of humour. But he has a great deal of personal charisma, somehow. And I have to admit to a certain amount of admiration for someone who's willing to stand up for his beliefs the way he does. And for someone who's prepared to do whatever is necessary to get what he wants – or what he thinks God wants.' He paused, glancing provocatively at Stephen. ‘
And
,' he added, ‘anyone with a daughter that pretty can't be all bad, eh, Stephen?'