The Hollow Saint

The Tomb Beneath the Church The two men from the parish had brought the wrong ladder. It was a small matter, but Reverend Josias Elphick had spent much of the morning trying to prevent small matters from becoming large ones, and he was tired of being asked to decide things that anyone with a little sense might have decided for himself. ‘The steps are sound,’ Gervase Kett said. He had one boot on the lower rung, demonstrating it. ‘They won't reach the wall if you stand it where you've put it.’ Kett looked up at the carved stone above the chancel arch, then down at the ladder as though the fault might have developed in the timber while they were speaking. ‘We can turn it.’ ‘You may turn it. You may not lean it against the glass.’ A labourer behind them made a sound which might have been a cough. Kett called for the ladder to be moved, and it was carried sideways through the empty nave, striking the corner of a pew along the way. Josias waited until it had cleared the communion table before he followed. Three weeks earlier he had hoped to preserve the old church by agreeing to have portions of it altered. From the chancel the compromise looked less satisfactory than it had in the rectory, where he and Kett had laid the commissioners' demands upon the table between a dish of cold mutton and a leaking candlestick. They had agreed to remove the painted figures from the north wall, the wooden image above the arch and two damaged carvings in the screen. The windows were to remain. So was the screen itself, for the moment, and the raised table, and the brass fixed to the floor before the south stall. Kett had made a list; Josias had signed beneath it. A man sent to inspect the work had called the list insufficient but had eventually accepted it on condition that nothing was delayed. Now there were tools laid upon the flagstones where people ordinarily knelt, and the likeness of the Virgin looked down from its niche with one hand broken from the wrist. Josias had been staring at that empty hand more than he cared to admit. ‘They will come back, you know,’ Kett said quietly, when the labourers had gone to fetch a longer length of timber. ‘If they think we are playing with them.’ ‘The men have their instructions,’ Josias said. He took the folded list from his coat and checked the items again, though he knew them well enough by now. ‘There is no excuse for taking down the screen.’ ‘Some will say you've made us do too little. Others will say I've made us do too much. Neither side will pay the men.’ ‘How much have you promised them?’ Kett named the figure. Josias knew how much the parish had set aside for the roof and counted what would remain after the labourers had been paid. ‘For the whole day,’ Kett added, seeing where his attention had gone. ‘They have been here since eight.’ ‘That is generally how a whole day begins.’ Josias would have smiled on another morning. As it was, he told Kett to put the expense in the churchwardens' account, where at least somebody might one day understand why it had been incurred. At the north door Temperance Wivell had arrived with two women from the outlying cottages. She stood without taking off her cloak, hands folded over the ends of a basket handle. Temperance had objected at every public meeting, not because she favoured the old images but because she believed the rector had no right to negotiate away the parish's say in its own church. ‘Master Elphick. Are you truly allowing them to take down the screen?’ ‘No. The screen remains. I told you so on Sunday.’ Josias moved aside as two men came through the door with a plank between them. They slowed their pace to listen. ‘They have been striking it,’ Temperance replied, and pointed with the basket handle to the raw wood that had been exposed along the carving’s edge. ‘The carving fastened to it. There is a difference.’ ‘You may explain that difference to the wood when it falls.’ One of the labourers, holding an iron bar, paused at her voice. Josias crossed the chancel to show her where the men had been instructed to work. The bar was to lift the wooden backing from a narrow stone recess, and the screen would be supported while the fixing was loosened. Temperance listened and inspected the splintered edges, then suggested a smaller tool might do less damage. Kett sent somebody to fetch a chisel. Josias stayed to watch. When the carving finally came free, it carried a slice of crumbling plaster from the wall behind it. A darker course of stones lay beneath, poorly fitted and newer-looking than the masonry around them. The labourer holding the chisel pressed his thumb against one of the joints. Mortar fell in dry crumbs. ‘That was never meant to show,’ the labourer said. He drew the chisel back, leaving a pale notch in the mortar, and waited for Kett to decide whether to continue. Kett took the chisel from him and tried it at the edge of a stone. It shifted with surprising ease. Behind it was darkness, deep enough for the point of the tool to disappear. ‘Leave it,’ Josias said. The men stopped. Kett remained crouched, his sleeve white from the plaster. He held the loose stone in place with one hand. ‘What do you suppose is behind it?’ he asked. ‘Something that has stood there without troubling us for a great many years.’ ‘There's a void. The stones above could come down if we leave it disturbed.’ The labourer was already examining the joint to either side. Josias could see that Kett was right about the damage: the chisel had not created the opening, and the backing had given way before anyone had applied much force. Yet to leave it exposed was to invite another inspection, and perhaps the removal of the whole arch by men with less interest in sparing the building. ‘Take away only the stones that have worked loose,’ he said. ‘And put boards underneath before you touch another one. I want to know what is holding up the wall.’ Temperance had followed him as far as the screen. ‘You're agreeing to more work.’ ‘I'm trying to prevent the wall falling upon whoever attends prayers tomorrow.’ ‘Then begin by moving these people out of the way.’ Josias told the women to wait beyond the crossing. Temperance stayed just long enough to make it clear that she was doing so at her own pleasure, then went and drew her companions away. The first two stones came free into Kett's hands. A labourer shone a lantern through the gap. Beyond the new opening the wall sloped down into a low chamber, hardly more than an arm's length beneath the chancel floor. It had been filled around its edges with compacted chalk and rubble. At its centre lay something long and rectangular, enclosed within dressed stone. ‘A burial,’ Kett said. Josias looked at the ends of the slab and the worked corners. He had seen graves opened when the soil shifted or a foundation required strengthening; he had never found one sealed behind a wall. He asked for the lantern and knelt with care, placing his free hand on the stone so he could lower himself without slipping. A coffin lay inside the vault. It had been set on short stone supports above the earth, and beneath a loosened lid of oak there showed a strip of dark metal. The oak seemed impossibly sound, though its edges bore marks of swelling and old damp. Dust lay thick enough that the light showed every place where something had touched it. ‘Nobody opens it until we know whether this chamber is safe,’ Josias said. Kett backed out and sent for the carpenter's struts from the yard. The chamber was so cramped that only two men could work at a time. They cleared the fallen mortar, wedged timber beneath a loose stone at the far end, and tested the roof with more caution than they had used on the image. By the time the carpenter pronounced it steady the women had gone home and several other villagers had come to see why labourers were walking in and out of the church with so much chalk on their clothes. Crispin Orbell, the parish clerk, appeared carrying his spectacles in their case. He had been summoned to witness the find, a task he plainly thought might have waited until he had finished copying the names for the next poor-rate collection. He listened while Josias described the chamber, then lowered himself far enough to look into it. ‘Older than anything in my book,’ Crispin said. He held his spectacle case clear of the chalk dust with one hand and steadied himself on the floor with the other. ‘Possibly,’ Josias said. ‘Put down what you actually saw. We can ask about its age afterwards.’ Crispin climbed out and stood for a moment beside the opened wall, examining the coffin and the stones that had covered it before returning to his book. The carpenter offered to leave the coffin as it was until somebody from the town could examine it. Kett pointed to the split oak lid and the stones already removed. If the vault were closed again and someone later accused them of concealing a papist relic, all four men would be answerable. Josias knew that Kett's concern had weight. He also knew the distinction between viewing a buried object and disturbing the person buried within it, and for some while he could think of no action that satisfied both duties. ‘We shall lift the lid enough to see what is here,’ he decided. ‘Nothing more, unless the chamber is about to fall. Crispin, make a note of every person present.’ The iron straps were fixed with pins driven through the oak. One had rusted away; the other retained a broad head blackened by age. The men eased it free with a narrow wedge. When the lid finally loosened, they fitted a rope beneath its near edge and took the strain from opposite sides of the opening. For several moments it did not move. The carpenter bent to check the rope, found a corner held beneath the stone lip, and told the others to pull towards him rather than upward. The lid moved sideways, stopped, and moved again. A low groan came from inside the coffin. The labourer nearest the opening let go of the rope. The carpenter cursed as the weight shifted into his hands, and Kett caught the lid before it dropped across the coffin. From below came a brief scraping sound. Josias heard it clearly, though he could not tell whether something had moved beneath the oak or the timber had rubbed against the inner stonework. ‘Hold it,’ he said. ‘Do not let it fall.’ He took the lantern and knelt at the opening. Inside lay a man in the remains of a priest's garments, his hands crossed low upon a chest so narrow Josias thought at first the bones must have collapsed. But the skin covered the face and hands, grey-brown and drawn tight, and tufts of dark hair remained at the temples. One cheek was puckered and blackened. The stole lay twisted beneath the elbows, its embroidered pattern almost wholly lost. The man had been dead for generations, perhaps centuries, and yet he had not fallen apart. ‘God preserve us,’ the carpenter whispered. Josias leaned closer. There were marks upon the inside of the lid. The lantern cast them into relief: long, ragged scratches, some running straight with the grain, others crossing one another in a confusion of short gouges. They were deepest at the place where a man might raise his hands if shut inside. Kett saw them too. ‘Those could have been made before they put him in.’ ‘They could,’ Josias said. The scratches continued down the inside wall of the coffin. On the nearer board a cluster of shallow cuts ended in a darkened stain. Josias held up the light, waiting for his eyes to make sense of them. There were four lines together and a fifth set apart, so nearly the marks of fingers that he found himself withdrawing his own hand from the opening. A labourer offered to fetch a surgeon. Kett said a surgeon could do nothing for a dead man, but might tell them why he had remained so strangely preserved. The carpenter wanted the lid shut and the stones replaced. Josias heard them all, then looked again at the rotting supports beneath the coffin. The near end had tipped against the vault wall. If they tried to push the lid home without straightening it, they might split the entire box and spill its contents. They worked a sling under the coffin and lifted the near end clear of its failing support. It was an awkward business in the confined chamber. Josias stood outside with the rope looped about his forearm and watched the carpenter guide the boards through the gap while Kett braced them from below. The corpse shifted inside when the far end rose. One of its crossed hands slid from its place upon the chest and rested against the side. Then the church bell rang. The first stroke was so loud that the men released the sling together. The carpenter knocked his head against the masonry and came out swearing. Above them, the great bell rang again, though it had been left silent for weeks on account of a weakened fastening in the tower. Josias had ordered the rope tied off himself. He stepped back into the crossing and looked up, expecting to see someone foolishly swinging on it. The rope hung where he remembered, secured above a wooden peg. It did not move. A second bell answered from the east. A third sounded to the north, thinner and more distant. Josias tried to distinguish the strokes, but they came at once, rising and falling over one another until he could no longer tell how many churches were ringing. Kett hurried towards the porch. Crispin remained close to the vault, spectacles slipping down his nose as he tried to write with the paper balanced upon a hymn board. ‘Crispin, leave the writing until the bell has stopped,’ Josias told him. ‘There may be somebody in the tower, and I want to know before a crowd gathers underneath.’ ‘I have the hour.’ Crispin closed the book around his pencil to keep his place, though he plainly thought the account would suffer if they all abandoned it at once. Josias went outside, leaving Crispin to mark the page. A man might have slipped past them to the bell chamber, whatever Josias had seen of the tied rope. The churchyard was bright with afternoon light. Along the lane beyond the gate, people had stopped in their work: a woman with a wooden tub set against her hip, two boys dragging brushwood, a man beside a cart. All were looking towards the tower. The bells continued in a disorderly peal, and the sound from the farther villages seemed to move through the air without pause. Humphrey Larkham came up the lane from the common, carrying a hooked staff. He had been helping with a damaged boundary hedge and still had green twigs caught in his sleeves. He looked first at the tower, then at Josias. ‘Who's got up there?’ ‘Nobody, so far as I know.’ ‘Then send somebody to find out.’ ‘The rope is secured. I've seen it.’ Humphrey frowned. ‘Briarfen's ringing too. I heard theirs before ours.’ ‘Briarfen?’ ‘And the little church towards Fenstead. The one that's shut.’ He shifted the staff under his arm. ‘There isn't a rope in that tower. Hasn't been since winter.’ As they spoke, the woman with the tub set it on the ground and crossed herself. Josias saw the gesture and remembered that she had been one of the people who wanted the images removed. Others came from the lane and stopped just inside the gate, listening without speaking. In the distance someone was shouting for a child to come home. The first of the bells stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The others fell silent within moments. The sudden quiet left Josias aware of Crispin approaching from behind, his shoes crunching in the gravel. ‘The body is still where we left it,’ Crispin said. ‘Kett has the men putting a board over the opening. He wishes you to come.’ Before Josias could answer, a man came through the churchyard gate from the road to the south. He had walked hard, his shirt open at the neck and his cap twisted in one hand. Josias knew him as a tenant of the miller two fields away. Behind him was an older woman who could scarcely keep pace. They both stared at the chancel door. ‘What have you done?’ the man demanded. ‘There has been an accident in the church,’ Josias began. ‘No one has been hurt.’ ‘It wasn't meant to come out.’ Josias waited, thinking he had misunderstood. The older woman pressed past her companion. ‘You opened his place. You ought never to have opened his place.’ ‘Whose place?’ She was breathing hard and needed a moment before she could answer. When she did, she looked bewildered by his question. ‘His. The one below.’ Humphrey moved between them and the church door. The miller's tenant struggled to explain what he meant, but the words came out in scraps: the bells, the stone below the church, a warning he had always known. He could not say who had told him. His mother, he thought, then admitted that she had died when he was small and had never spoken of such a thing to his knowledge. Others began arriving, one or two at a time and then in a little group from the eastern footpath. A woman from near the old quarry demanded to know why the rector had let him out. A farmhand from the northern fields said he had heard the same warning in the bell before he understood that there was a bell at all. Temperance returned, this time without her basket. She listened to the two newcomers and asked each separately what he had seen. Neither had seen the vault. Neither knew who had been buried there. ‘They cannot all be inventing the same thing,’ she said to Josias. ‘I haven't accused them of inventing it.’ ‘You've asked them questions as though you think they have.’ ‘I am asking because they claim to know what I have only just discovered.’ ‘Then perhaps you should have asked before you uncovered it.’ Josias turned to the others. ‘Who told you there was a man under this church?’ No one answered at once. The older woman began to cry, quietly and angrily, wiping her face with the edge of her sleeve. At length the miller's tenant said, ‘I don't know. I knew we mustn't let him out. That's all I know.’ Kett appeared at the door and called for two men to help brace the board over the vault. His voice brought a fresh murmur from the crowd. Humphrey took the staff from under his arm and set it across the path, asking those nearest to keep the way clear. Josias did not want armed men guarding the church against its own congregation. He went through the gate nonetheless and instructed Kett to leave the dead man undisturbed until morning, with the church secured and witnesses present. ‘And the bells?’ Crispin asked, following him inside. ‘I shall ask every sexton to account for his own.’ ‘There's no sexton at Fenstead.’ Josias stopped long enough to look at the clerk. ‘Then someone must go and look at the bell itself.’ He entered the church while an argument about the bells continued beyond the open doors. Inside the chancel, the men were holding a board over the dark mouth of the vault, and the old rope lay slack beside them where the coffin had been raised.