Clerical Errors Read online

  CLERICAL ERRORS

  THEODORA BRAITHWAITE NOVELS

  CLERICAL ERRORS

  UNHOLY GHOSTS

  IDOL BONES

  HOLY TERRORS

  EVERY DEADLY SIN

  MORTAL SPOILS

  HEAVENLY VICES

  A GRAVE DISTURBANCE

  FOOLISH WAYS

  CLERICAL

  ERRORS

  D. M. Greenwood

  Ostara Publishing

  Copyright © 1991 D. M. Greenwood

  The right of D M Greenwood to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

  First published in 1991 by Headline Publishing

  ISBN 978-1-906288-09-9

  A CIP reference is available from the British Library

  Printed and bound in the United Kingdom

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to the real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Published by Ostara Publishing

  13 King Coel Road

  Lexden

  Colchester CO3 9AG

  To my mother and father in gratitude

  Contents

  1 Scenes from Clerical Life

  2 Alternative Religions

  3 Office Practices

  4 Cathedral Offices

  5 Clerical High Life

  6 A Dish of Herbs

  7 Pastoral Pleasures

  8 Thine Adversary the Devil

  9 Earth Has Got on Earth a Dignity of Naught

  10 Earth Upon Earth Has Set All His Thought

  11 Earth Out of Earth Is Wonderfully Wrought

  CHAPTER ONE

  Scenes from Clerical Life

  The Dean adjusted his World War Two sidecap on his bald head, wriggled his fingers inside his khaki mittens, gripped the handles of the heavy wooden wheelbarrow and broke into a trot to keep up, as it led him down the garden path towards his beloved compost heap. His fat, black labrador bitch waddled after him, smiling.

  Julia Smith, on her way to be interviewed at the diocesan office, saw him and wondered whether she should say good afternoon to a cathedral gardener. She compromised by smiling at the wheelbarrow. For the fourth time in fifteen minutes she glanced at her watch. At the same moment the pleasant light baritone of the Cathedral clock in its newly restored frame tolled the three–quarter. One forty five.

  ‘Canon Wheeler is in residence this month so his diary is rather full,’ his secretary had said. But he could spare her twenty minutes on Friday afternoon. ‘He would be obliged if she were to attend at two’ had been her precise words. Julia had relished that ‘obliged if she were to attend’. Was that, then, how they communicated with each other in the Church of England? And what, she wondered, would the Canon be like? In his sixties, desiccated, with a sensible wife and the correct number of children or even grandchildren? What exactly was a ‘Canon’? What did Canons do? Julia was nervously aware of how little she knew about the Anglican Church. She quickened her pace past the light honey–coloured west front of the Cathedral and for a moment its beauty sedated both her nervousness and that misery which was her constant, almost physical, companion.

  On the other side of the Cathedral’s west door, Mrs Thrigg, with a hoover, industrial model, was running its nozzle over the famous St Manicus tomb to which until quite recently, circa 1520, pilgrims had come to be healed: mental derangement had been the saint’s particular concern. Mrs Thrigg swung the nozzle to and fro over the decorously pleated stone cassock of the recumbent saint. It paused a fraction of a second longer than was necessary in the area of the stone girdle and then darted away towards the neatly stylised beard. In and out of the ringlets went the nozzle, round his austere chaps, to end with a triumphant hiss down the mitre. Mrs Thrigg switched the instrument off with her foot, propped herself up, sweating and panting, on the cold stone and in a friendly fashion massaged the bare marble toe of the venerable old man. There were times when she felt a fellow feeling with him.

  In St Manicus house opposite the north side of the Cathedral, in his office no bigger than a good sized cupboard, Ian Caretaker ground his fourth Celtique since lunch into the ashtray and massaged his ears with his hands to keep out the baritone of Canon Wheeler’s well–taught voice as it seeped up from downstairs through the partly open door.

  ‘If you didn’t know Wheeler was such an ignorant ass that voice would convince you.’

  ‘What would it convince you of?’ inquired his companion in an exact, donnish tone. She was a slim woman of about twenty–seven who wore a deaconess’s cross round her neck. Not without grace – for standing up she was six foot one – she uncoiled herself, took up a couple of files and edged carefully round the lethal metal points of the filing cabinet. She had no difficulty in clearing the waste paper basket as she slid back the door of the attic room.

  Ian answered her belligerently. ‘That’s his trick, don’t you see? He doesn’t have to be convincing about anything. He’s just convincing in general while the sound is switched on. If you can switch the sound off and merely watch the face and figure, you get the full blast of his bogusness.’

  ‘Most uncharitable,’ said the deaconess grimly and, with a swish of her blue skirt, was gone.

  ‘Canon Wheeler will see you now,’ the light cultivated voice of the immaculate secretary said graciously. Julia, who found herself sweating, thought the secretary added ‘if you would step this way’ but she wasn’t sure. She pushed her fringe of fair hair off her forehead and prepared to follow the slim back and trim heels of the secretary. In her dark–green shirt and brown linen skirt, Julia looked a good deal cooler than she felt: at nineteen this was the first time she had been interviewed for a job. Rising from the low wooden bench in the black and white marble paved hall, she mounted the shallow–stepped staircase as it curved up to the first floor.

  The heavy panelled door with its brass lock swung open and Julia saw what looked to her like a stage set, so perfect was it in every detail. The room, a double cube with four sash windows facing her, had a light filigree Adamesque plaster ceiling, a later addition but one which admirably fitted it. Very far away to her right, over several acres of silvery lilac rug, was an enormous desk. On the wall behind it hung a 6 foot–square painting of the flaying of Marsyas, a contemporary copy of the Masaccio. Below the painting was the splendid figure of Canon Wheeler, his darkbrown hair cut that morning in London, his light–grey silk suit and white shirt supporting an Oriel College tie. He wore a clerical collar when it was appropriate to do so and not when it was not. Interviewing a second secretary was a secular occasion. He knew about such matters.

  Julia was quite pretty. This was apparent to Canon Wheeler when she was a quarter of the way down the first cube. As she approached, he rose elegantly to his full height of six foot three. Had she not been pretty, he would not have got up.

  ‘How very good of you to come so promptly,’ he said, his voice full tenor now rather than baritone.

  Julia allowed her eye to rest for a moment on the display of Italian pornography behind Canon Wheeler’s chair. By some trick of positioning the Canon seemed to be part of the picture; indeed, he stood in for Marsyas. Julia smiled, blushed, bowed her head but said nothing.

  She’ll do, thought Canon Wheeler and, having decided on that, he saw no reason to waste time asking tedious questions about shorthand speeds or past experience which might have involved him in listening to answers. Instead, having indicated that she might sit down, he launched into the lecture he was preparing for the Chapter meeting that evening on the necessity of hiring a new appeals fund secretary for the Cathedral restoration fund, particularly since the Diocesan Secretary was on a business studies co
urse and the Cathedral Comptroller had recently died – Canon Wheeler’s tone managed to suggest someone was to blame for this.

  Though she did not quite see the relevance of the speech to the present situation, Julia, practised in receiving the opinions of others, gave him her full attention. She was appreciative, deferential.

  The code words fell from the Canon’s lips. ‘High–powered … highflyer … immensely able … professional competence … amateurs … a bit out of their depth … the Bishop … Lord Cumbermound.’ Canon Wheeler’s peroration effortlessly suggested the total ineptitude of everyone else with whom he had to deal and his own incisive efficiency.

  Julia nodded like an old friend. Whilst engaged in this bit of playacting, she gradually became aware that seated unobtrusively to Canon Wheeler’s right with her back to the window was a tall woman in blue wearing a cross round her neck, who was not listening to Canon Wheeler. Indeed she was looking at Julia in a detached but intent way which Julia suddenly found rather frightening. Every now and again she made a note on one of the files which she had propped on her lap. Julia speculated nervously as to who she could be. Not a secretary. Perhaps an assistant, a second opinion on her suitability? She dare not, however, remove her attention for too long from Canon Wheeler.

  ‘Well now,’ said Canon Wheeler at last with immense kindness, ‘we’ve asked you a great many questions. I wonder if there is anything you’d like to ask us?’

  Julia thought of questions she would like to ask about duties and hours, pay and holidays. She drew breath.

  ‘I think you’ve covered everything very fully,’ she murmured.

  ‘Jolly good,’ said Canon Wheeler jovially. ‘We’ll expect you, then, on Monday. The office hours are nine to five but I like my secretaries in a bit earlier to get a head start. Shall we say eight thirty?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Julia, then added, ‘Thank you.’ She wondered about adding ‘sir’, decided it might sound ironic and so did not. She need not have worried. No flattery was too gross, no praise too lavish, no hyperbole too lofty, no deference too servile, as Ian Caretaker was wont to intone in his favourite litany, for Canon Wheeler.

  As she backed out, Julia heard the burble of a very modern telephone in the adjacent office and the voice of the expensive secretary, nicely poised between deference and contempt, saying, ‘Canon Wheeler’s office.’

  Archdeacon Baggley gazed down the huge staircase of the Archdeaconry in alarm. Above him the Soane lantern cast interesting lighting effects, even with the crude afternoon sun of early July; below him was the polished greenish–brown stone floor of the hall, with its four doors very tall and dark against the white panelling. The telephone pierced the silence. The Archdeacon crept downstairs, hugging the very edge of the carpet treads. He scurried across the stone floor, deferentially skirted the tall long–case clock, grappled with the majestic door, scanned the enormous bare room and darted towards the marble fireplace. The caryatids which supported the mantel shelf did not smile at him. The Archdeacon felt himself to be a small man in more ways than one, and never smaller than when trying to inhabit his large handsome house, or when trying to reach his telephone on the high mantel shelf.

  A little breathless, he raised the heavy old–fashioned black plastic to his ear a second after it had ceased to ring. With relief (no demand was to be made on him), with disappointment (an opportunity for interaction with a fellow human being was lost), he dropped the receiver back on to its rest.

  ‘Dick?’ His wife’s voice was far off. He heard it gladly.

  ‘Duckie?’ he answered and trotted across the hall to the bottom of the stairs. Happily he mounted towards the beloved voice. When he was half way up, the telephone began to ring again.

  A minute later, in the Cathedral’s crypt office another phone rang, a modern sound, incongruous amongst the stunted arcading. Before it had completed its first ring, a white–gloved hand raised the receiver.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘After Compline.’

  ‘As you wish, my lord.’

  Gently the receiver clicked into place once more.

  Julia heard the scream and felt first embarrassment and then a tremor of fear. She had entered the Cathedral in search of a quiet spot to collect herself after the strenuous attentiveness of her interview. She felt exhausted and headachy. Now she had got the job (what job, what would she be expected to do?) she wondered whether she really wanted it. Was any organisation which would employ her worth working for? Still, she couldn’t exactly choose. She had precisely no office experience, just a three–month crash course at a secretarial college which had supplied her with barely adequate shorthand and a reasonable forty–a–minute for typing. She had had the idea that the Church might provide a fairly gentle introduction to office practice. Just in case, Julia thought morosely, she had to spend years of her life at it.

  The Cathedral into which she had wandered calmed and refreshed her. She had, she realised, never entered an English Cathedral before: a childhood in Australia had given no opportunity; an adolescence in the English midlands no inclination. Her eye followed (she learnt from the guidebook) clerestory to triforium and then was carried up the pale gold walls toward the narrow springing stone ribs of the roof. Tiny blue and gilt bosses joined the spokes like punctuation marks. Julia sat wedged against a tubby pillar and rested content in the coolness and the silence. This at least was something tangible which the Church could offer her. She began to feel that this holy place might perform its ancient healing work on her too: comfort for her immediate and particular misery, regeneration from a fragmented and awkward childhood. All might come right in this place.

  So Julia had reflected. Hence the scream, when it came, failed to register. But it was repeated again and again with greater shrillness and violence. Now, as she heard the screaming turning to hysteria, she shuddered at the way in which the high note connected with the pain in her head. Her instinct was to run out of the building but somehow it did not seem possible to leave a fellow human being in such distress. No one else was about.

  The screaming was coming from the St Manicus chapel off the Cathedral’s south aisle. With measured and reluctant haste Julia turned in its direction, some ancient inhibition preventing her running in church. As she came round the corner, she saw a fat middle–aged woman holding on to the edge of the font at the back of the chapel. The hose of a vacuum cleaner was coiled round her feet like the serpent at the foot of a tree of life. The font, Julia registered numbly, was of white marble, floridly carved. On the edge of its ample basin was a large round object which she at first took to be a parcel. A moment later she realised that what she was staring at was a man’s severed head. She was hardly conscious of the tolling of the single bell which signalled the call to three fifteen Choral Evensong.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Alternative Religions

  The immense sky became first silver and then pale washed–out blue as the sun rose behind Medewich Cathedral’s east end, warming the splendid glass of its lancet window. It was difficult, at first sight, to understand why there was a cathedral at Medewich at all. It stood on low–lying meadows beside the Mede, surrounded by fens for ten miles in three directions. The founder, St Manicus, in the twelfth century (his statue came two hundred years later) had taken refuge there from the civil disturbances of the time. Driven from his property by his relations, he had, for a time, lost his reason and thought he heard voices. Wandering in his demented state, he had arrived one day at the hamlet of Medewich. There, amidst its dank and mosquito–infested ponds, his voices vanished and the madness departed. In gratitude, he built a small chapel with his own hands, the St Manicus chapel, and, framing his own rule, lived the life of a monk.

  In time, others had joined him and the house became an established centre, famed for medical cures, especially of the insane. However, in his seventieth year, Manicus had had his head chopped off by a madman whose delusion it was to consider himself an executioner. His
fellow monks, lamenting his demise, buried Manicus and his head in the chapel and were not at all surprised when various miracles of healing were reported. A literary monk with journalistic gifts and a nice Latin style turned out a neatly phrased piece of hagiography and sent it off to Rome. Various interests combined (the Earl of Medewich and Markham knew a sound thing when he saw it) and Manicus was canonised a mere ten years after his appalling end.

  Pilgrims had come with their money and madnesses and a cathedral had been built. Manicus, though never a bishop, came to be regarded as one, hence his later statue which showed him mitred. After the Reformation, though madness had doubtless not disappeared, pilgrims did. In the eighteenth century, local interests combined with Dutch expertise to practise elementary and expensive draining techniques which had rendered some of the surrounding land less boggy. Otherwise Medewich’s remoteness had preserved both Cathedral and town from every appearance of modernity until, in the nineteenth century, the Earl of Medewich and Markham of the time had lured the railway across his land with a view to conveying fish more speedily from the coastal harbour of Narborough to the London market. A station had been built at Medewich and the unspoilt charms of the Cathedral, with its bizarre legend and curious atmosphere, had attracted its share of late nineteenth–century antiquarians. At that time too, the barracks, the lunatic asylum and the prison had all been added. Designed, the first two in an austere classical style and the asylum, in the Gothic taste, by a pupil of Street, they stood within sight of each other to the north of the town, looking down on the Cathedral, a holy trinity dedicated to order, sanity and retribution.

  Julia woke with the rising sun from unhappy dreams and gazed towards the lunatic asylum. She had refused the sedatives which she had been offered by the young doctor called to the chapel. Called to do what? Julia wondered. Hardly, surely, to issue a death certificate for the head. She had spent what seemed like hours answering police questions in the vestry of the Cathedral before refusing the offer of a police car home. She had walked back in the late evening through the silent, handsome town to her lodgings up the hill. There, slipping into and out of nightmares in which the identity of the severed head had grown more and more familiar to her, she had lain until dawn.