November 1332
For over a year Christine waited at her home. The bishop’s court did not summon her, but Father Peter informed her that the bishop, true to his word, had petitioned the Pope for her re-enclosure. These months she spent in caring for her nephew, the child she had helped bring into the world. She watched tenderly as the wet nurse suckled him. It was, she knew, the last intimacy she would share.
Although the rhythms of the village embraced his household, William was subdued, despite the fact that the justification of his word and the restoration of his self-respect had been important to him. His wife Helene was sad, but pleased to have her family around her. Christine’s brother was a support, too. But, above all, Christine loved the baby, and William hoped deep in his heart that she would stay. He did not want further change in his life. True, the new lord displayed due respect by ordering furniture to be made for a bedchamber at Vachery Manor, but the outside world had intervened too much in his once well-ordered life.
It was raining hard when Father Peter came to the door. The priest seemed to be full of his own self-importance because he was bearing a very important letter, although the essence of its content had been unofficially sent from Guldenford a few days before.
William welcomed him warmly. “Come in, Father Peter, and dry yourself by our hearth.”
“Thank ’ee, Will,” said the priest, letting his sodden hood fall on to his shoulders. Sitting on a stool by the open fire, despite his excited state he could not resist casting a covetous eye over the pork roasting on the spit.
William did not ignore the silent request. “Will you honour this home and join us in our meal?”
“I will most gladly, but pray let me read to you all this letter.”
The whole family assembled within the minute to hear the first letter William had ever seen.
The priest looked with concern and affection at Christine, while playing to the gallery in his hour of triumph. “Aye, Christine. Good it be to see you in a womanly robe, but I can tell you that your habit should be readied.”
The family members all stood while the priest raised the document in the air.
“I have here a copy of the response to the bishop’s petition on your behalf. It is in best Church Latin.”
“Tell us in our speech,” said William impatiently.
The priest assumed a self-important stance, holding the letter with both hands, his arms fully extended. Allowing a few seconds for a dramatic pause, he said, “It begins thus: ‘John, by divine permission Bishop of Winchester, to the Dean of Guldenford; we greet ye with grace and blessing.’”
He explained in detail rather than translated the intercession of the Bishop of Winchester with the Pope.
“This part of the letter speaks of our Christine. This is from our Holy Father. Heavens be praised, a letter from the Lord Pope about a humble villager here in Shere.”
The priest was clearly relishing his role as papal emissary.
“Read it, Father,” said Helene, almost unable to contain herself.
The priest nodded with exaggerated dignity. “‘Our sister Christine, an anchoress of Shere, in your diocese, has by humble confession shown us that whereas at one time, as is known to ye, choosing enclosure in the life of an anchoress, she made a solemn vow of continence, promising to remain in that place. Now forswearing’-that is ‘leaving,’ William,” he said with a gentle smile as he looked up at the frown on the carpenter’s face-“‘forswearing this life and conduct that she assumed, she has left her cell inconstantly and returned to the world. Now, with God’s help, she has humbly petitioned us that she may be treated mercifully by the Apostolic See.’”
The overawed family looked at each other and, in turn, Father Peter glanced individually at each person in the room before continuing. “Her transgressions have been forgiven, William. Aye, Christine, the Pope himself has given you absolution.”
Helene started to cry, while young William clapped his hands.
“Now, let me try again-by your leave, Christine,” said the priest, a little less portentously, “but this is learned Latin. I have laboured in the church an hour or more to comprehend the words before I came to this house.
“‘Therefore, we who strive for the salvation of the souls of her and all mankind with fervent longing, wishing to take care of her soul send ye, according to the rules of the Church, absolution for her, by authority of the Lord Pope, from the excommunication usually promul…promul…’” Father Peter coughed nervously and tried again: “‘Promulgated against such persons. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, in the manner of a good father of a family rejoicing in the finding of a lost sheep, the said anchoress shall come humbly to ye within the space of four months from this our order that she shall re-enclose herself in the same place, lest by wandering any longer about the world she be exposed to the hunger of the rapacious wolf and, which Heaven forbid, her blood be required at your hands.’”
Christine sat down, and covered her face with her hands. The priest cast a quick glance at her before returning to the complexities of the document: “‘After she has been re-enclosed there and has for some time conducted herself in worthy manner, and after she has made salutary penance in proportion to her sin, she will be accepted wholly into the Church. If these requirements be not met then she will lapse into the sentence of excommunication, and this present dispensation shall be absolutely of no moment.
“‘Given at Avignon, the sixth day of the Kalends of August, in the sixteenth year of the Pontificate of the Lord Pope.’”
The priest’s chest swelled with pride: “This is the Lord Pope speaking to us. Well, speaking to us through the Bishop of Winchester and then the Dean of Guldenford, but it is about our Christine-our sister again in the Church.”
Father Peter then translated the attached letter by the Bishop of Winchester, enjoining the Dean of Guldenford to guard against Christine being torn apart again by the attacks of the Tempter.
“This was given at Farnham, the tenth day of the Kalends of November in the year of Our Lord 1332.”
The family and the priest sat in silence for a full minute.
William was the first to speak: “We all thank our bishops for their pleas to the Lord Pope. I thank ’ee Father Peter. We will talk of this during perhaps one of our last family meals together with Christine. Father, will you take food with us now? Will you sit with us for our humble meal? And will you say a prayer?”
“Aye, with pleasure, but I will ask Christine to say a prayer over the bread. The Lord Pope has honoured her, not me.”
Christine looked at the priest in horror. “It is not right, Father,” she said. “I cannot lead a prayer in front of a priest, and fully ordained at that.”
“Do what the Father says, Christine. He is honouring our house. I have lost one daughter, but I have regained another.”
The priest laid both his hands on William’s shoulders, and said solemnly: “No, Will, the Church has regained your daughter. She will return to her cell, and, with the Pope’s blessing, for her natural life. Thanks be to God. Amen.”
Christine now felt elated, justified and proud, but also a tinge of fear crept into her heart. The Pope himself had granted her absolution, but Hell’s torments would be doubled were she to leave her cell again. For his part, William thought of the coldness of her stone cell, not the fires of damnation.
John, Bishop of Winchester, was reluctant to officiate at the re-enclosure. Only three or so years earlier he had conducted the first such ceremony in the whole of the Suthrige, the district later known as Surrey. These were strange times indeed, he thought, as he made the arduous journey to Shere. Winchester ruled the richest diocese in all England, and he was a busy man, with much to do in his own palace. He did not like to travel far at his age, and, with only four armed escorts, he fretted about the wild robbers who roamed in the woods. The Pope, however, had sanctioned the re-enclosure, and so it had to be done.
Father Peter had readied St. James’s church and himself for the visit of the sternest of bishops. In deference to the superior status of Winchester, the senior clerics of Guldenford had been invited to witness the re-enclosure, but not all were expected to attend, although Abbess Euphemia had declared her intention to see the re-sealing of the godly woman.
Christine’s family and all of the village were preparing, too, for an act ordained by the Holy Father himself. Simon could not attend; he would break out in tears, just like Mistress Anna, he told William, and the carpenter understood well the lover’s pain.
The night before the ceremony, Father Peter organised a small feast to honour the bishop’s visit. John of Winchester was a guest of Vachery Manor, as the new lord had been eager to sanction Christine’s respectability; William and Father Peter had sought and gained his permission for the ceremony. One feast was held for gentlefolk at the manor, and another for the villagers near the church.
Scot-ales were plentiful, although not so abundant as to induce drunkenness, but Noah Flood, whom everyone called Ark, became intoxicated on two ales and mocked the riches of the Church by dressing up as the village “pope,” pretending to grant special indulgences to the revellers. A visiting pardoner rebuked him, and swore that no holy favours or relics would be sold in Shere for a year, whereupon the villagers threw the pardoner into the Tillingbourne. The wet and angry pardoner threatened to complain to the bishop, but Father Peter interceded, soothed the man, and prevented any disruption of the episcopal ceremonies.
Meanwhile, Christine had been summoned to the manor to speak to the bishop. It was troubling for her to retrace her steps along the Stations of the Cross she had endured those years before. Wearing her new habit, the gift of the Abbess Euphemia, she was led by the chamberlain to the bishop’s rooms.
The Bishop of Winchester, tired after his long journey, made it plain that his spiritual counsel would be brief. Previously his patience and kindness towards Christine had been stimulated by her usefulness in the bitter legal conflict with FitzGeoffrey. Nevertheless, he had honoured his promise to assist with a papal indulgence, no small matter when letters to Avignon could take many months, if the messengers survived the journey.
Bishop John told Christine to kneel at his feet.
“My child, the Holy Father has been bounteous in his mercy,” he said with due reverence to Avignon, but also a marked irritation because he had a cold and, ever concerned for his health, had been forced to leave his apothecary behind in Winchester.
He sneezed loudly before continuing, “You must know that this indulgence is rare. If you repeat your crime against God, excommunication is inevitable. A second transgression of this kind will make you a heretic. It will affront God and the Papacy, as well as make a mockery of my two visitations here. You can seek out God, or you can face the stake and flames. It is a simple choice which should cleanse your mind of worldly thoughts, of family, of village. Your duty is to God, not man. Compare your eternal life with a score of years wallowing in the mud and dirt of the hovels of your kin. Have you comprehended this, with no doubt?”
Christine, kneeling, spoke humbly: “I have, my lord bishop. I cast aside all, except the Holy Mother Church. My life is devoted to the final mortal ecstasy of finding oneness with God, if it be granted me by faithful prayer and constant devotions.”
The bishop made the sign of the cross: “Then so be it. You will spend the night alone in prayer at the altar of St. James’s. In the morrow I will find you on your knees and lead you to your cell, with all the rites. May God be with you.” He dismissed her in haste, and went to join his host for a supper of roast swan and heron.
Christine returned to Ashe Cottage for a final simple meal with her family. All were quiet over the bowls of soup and bread, followed by salted mackerel. All too soon for Helene, her daughter stood to embrace her. Then Christine enfolded herself in the arms of her brother and father. Her nephew, Margaret’s child, was asleep in a rough wooden cot. She would not wake him, but she bent over to kiss his little hand as Helene held back her tears. William escorted his daughter to the church as a full moon bathed the stone in celestial light. They held each other, but did not speak.
William, seemingly frozen in the moonlight, watched through the church door as Christine walked to the altar and prayed before it on her knees. He gazed on his first-born for long minutes, as the wind fluted through the willows that formed an ostentatious honour-guard for the stream’s passage through the church grounds. A movement in the graveyard suddenly caught his eye: a roe deer had wandered from the Hurtwood. It stood motionless, staring at the carpenter. The deer remained stock-still for a few seconds, then bounded away.
William looked back through the church door at Christine’s devotions, and waited until he could bear no more. If only my daughter had the freedom of that deer, he thought.
Christine prayed throughout the vigils of the night. She asked God to grant her the courage to overcome her fears and doubts. She had been tempted once into breaking her vows, and she could not immediately ignore the maternal urges that her baby nephew had aroused, but this craving would pass from a worldly body cast off when the secular life was renounced for the glories of the Holy Ghost. She prayed for forgiveness for leaving her cell, and for all those who had sought the help of bishops and Pope on her humble behalf.
Because she had been again in the tangible world, among the trees and wind and sun and, above all, people, Christine had lost the sense of being surrounded by the unseen; her material senses had been overwhelmed. In her cell, her previous isolation had refined not only her imagination but also her hearing, which had become very acute. In midsummer she had listened to the song of the grasshopper, at first soft, then gradually louder, stopping quite suddenly before the creature restarted its cycle. In the long evenings in her cell she had paused in her prayers to heed all God’s creatures, especially the nightjars. She had often eavesdropped on the “co-ic” call of the male to its mate; afterwards she would wait for the churring sound of the unpaired males. Then, in the first week of September, the nightjars would fly southwards to unknown parts of the earth, and she would cherish those sounds deep within herself until the birds resumed their courtship in the spring.
In her renewed confinement she would hone her senses once more, and learn again how to transform the mystical nuances of enclosed life into the blessed touch of the hand of God, though she knew that it might be many years before she could personalise the external rhythms of nature into an immanent relationship with Him.
Duval stopped typing and went to the bathroom situated next to his ground-floor study. He felt a little weak. When he denied Marda food, he usually fasted himself, and when he punished her, he had to punish himself. There was no need for a cold bath, he told himself. His third bath of the day would be a hot one; he could think and plan in the luxury of hot soapy water.
He needed to prepare his mind because he had an unwelcome appointment and he did not like meeting strangers. Above all, he did not like Americans, particularly ones who kept pestering him with letters, and he wondered whether he was doing the right thing in agreeing to meet this one.
In fact, Professor Irvine M. Gould had written only three letters; formally couched by the standards of Harvard, but irritatingly intimate according to the conservative norms of English address. The third letter had arrived that morning, and it had begun “Dear Michael.” Duval was appalled at the man’s presumption.
Gould was a medievalist who had initiated a somewhat one-sided correspondence with the priest on the subject of fourteenth-century mysticism. Duval had persuaded himself to answer the second letter, tolerating the foreigner’s interest because it was a mutual one: Christine the anchoress. The professor’s letters had been opaque, but had sufficiently piqued Duval’s interest for him to agree-provisionally-to meet this interloper; “if you come to England,” the priest had blithely written. And now the damned man had actually pitched up in Surrey.
Distrustful of such types, Duval needed time to work out what he would say to the pushy American who had somehow bamboozled him into conceding a meeting. He had two hours before the appointment, which was to take place in the Angel Hotel in Guildford.
Despite his agitated state, Duval was hungry and looked forward to eating that night. Strangely, he thought of meat, even though he had been a vegetarian for many years. He had always regarded his aversion to meat as a symbol of his inability to kill. He reproached himself for this regression, as well as his own nervousness, as he paced up and down his study in a bath towel. Surely he, Michael Duval, was a world authority on anchoresses, and certainly the unchallenged expert on Christine. Nevertheless, the tension forced him to set out early.
Duval parked near the recently completed Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, but did not get out of his car immediately; he sat there thinking, waiting to make a precise entry into the hotel. His Morris shone under the lights of the car park as though it were new, but it was a neon illusion: the car had not been properly cleaned for months. Once he had been fastidious in caring for his possessions, not least his body, but his clothing was beginning to look worn. Members of his congregation had commented to each other that their priest was looking a little seedy, certainly pale and thinner, and perhaps even somewhat scruffy. One had observed a certain wildness in those cold, blue, mesmerising eyes. Duval, however, had not noticed any change in himself.
Punctual to the minute when he walked into the hotel foyer, he asked the receptionist for Professor Gould, then spoke to the man himself, using the phone on the cramped reception desk. The American visitor said he would join him in the small lounge, “the one decorated with reproduction hunting prints.” Duval sat alone in the lounge for a few minutes before a gangly, bespectacled figure with a full beard marched down the stairs, strode up to his table and asked, in an unexpected southern drawl, whether this was indeed Father Michael Duval that he was finally meeting.
Shaking hands, the two men sized each other up. The American’s round spectacles and beard gave the impression of an identikit inhabitant of the ivory tower, while the tweedy jacket with leather elbow patches hinted at what later became apparent: the American was a passionate anglophile. For his part, Gould noticed that the priest was ill at ease, so he determined to be as friendly as possible, despite what he sensed as intellectual suspicion or even rivalry. That, at any rate, was the impression he had garnered from their brief correspondence, but maybe Duval would be more relaxed face to face.
The professor suggested dinner in the hotel. As they sat down in the empty restaurant, Gould explained that he was spending most of a sabbatical leave from Georgetown University in his beloved England. He had already visited the country home of Lewis Carroll, who, as the Reverend Charles Dodgson, had preached at the Saxon church in Guildford. The two enthusiasts of church history soon jettisoned all pretence of small talk: within five minutes they were becoming animated by the concepts of the new Guildford cathedral. Gould admired the original designs by Edward Maufe while Duval did not, although their disagreements were politely academic.
Eventually, the priest asked Gould about his current research.
“Well, I’ve spent a lot of time in France in recent years, pursuing my work on the Inquisition…”
Duval cut in: “You speak French?”
“Not too well, but I’ve worked damned hard on being able to read medieval French and Latin. They look after their archives over there almost as well as you folks do here in Guildford.”
“But what has the Inquisition got to do with English mystics?” Duval asked, a little cautiously. “Surely the Inquisition was a continental affair which hardly ever risked a trip across the water to England?”
The American nodded. “True, of course, but a large number of English people and Frenchmen living under English rule in France were taken by the Inquisition.”
Duval side-tracked the professor into a discussion of the Inquisition’s methods, a diversion eagerly followed until Duval commented: “Innocent IV’s Bull Ad Extirpanda approved of the use of bodily torture only in Italy, professor.”
“Yes, that’s true, Father…”
“Please call me Michael,” the priest said, a little too self-consciously.
“Oh, I’m ‘Irv’ to everyone back in Georgetown. Yeah, that’s true, Michael, but by the end of the thirteenth century some form of physical torture was employed by the Inquisition throughout Europe.”
Duval did not like to be contradicted, but he struggled to keep up the facade of professional charm and let the American develop his point.
“Initially, of course, inquisitors were not allowed to torture, but you’ll remember that in 1256 Pope Alexander IV gave them the right to absolve one another mutually and grant special dispensations to their colleagues, so it was all hunky-dory. One inquisitor could torture and then his companion could absolve him. No guilt.” The professor’s eyes twinkled over the top of his spectacle frames.
“But torture was not as widespread as anti-Catholic propaganda would have us believe,” insisted the cleric. “The records of torture are very limited. Libraries are stuffed full of records of patient attempts by the clergy to persuade people to recant, and there is little evidence to support your assertion.”
The professor was too decent to suspect Duval’s hypocrisy. He could not know that the priest’s intellectual sophistry was in utter contrast to the primordial drives of Duval’s debased secret life in the cellar; nor how easy it was for the very intelligent to lie, to separate the soul from the body, the mind from the heart, that very denial which was at the centre of Duval’s existence.
So the well-meaning academic took his collocutor at face value, continuing the debate in all sincerity. “Ah, Michael, you can’t argue a posteriori that the absence of such documents from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries means that the inquisitors were more lenient. The verbal ingenuity displayed in the records to gloss over repeated torture suggests that it must have been common practice…”
“No, I don’t agree, Irv.” Duval’s use of the Christian name was obviously strained. “Usually the mere sight of the instruments of torture was enough to extract confessions of heresy.”
The professor would have been interested in debating the quality of the records, but Duval chased off after the instruments of the Inquisition: “I am sure you know that there were six main methods.”
Gould knew the methods, and felt no need to discuss them. He thought he showed this in his face.
Duval, ignoring the hint, began to pontificate: “The ordeal by water entailed a prisoner being forced to swallow a quantity of water, either by means of a funnel or by soaking a piece of silk or linen jammed down the throat. When the prisoner’s nose was blocked, and water was dripped continuously into his mouth, it could result in blood vessels bursting. Lenient treatment involved about two and half pints, and severe about five pints. Not very pleasant, I should imagine.”
Gould fingered the menu, another cue which the priest either missed or deliberately ignored. Duval pressed on: “The ordeal by fire demanded that a prisoner was tied so that he could not move, and his feet were placed before a roaring fire. Fat was applied to his soles and they would be fried until a confession was obtained.
“The strappado was very common, of course. Prisoners, regardless of gender, were stripped to their undergarments and then had their ankles shackled and their hands secured firmly behind their back. The wrists were tied to a second rope that ran over a pulley in the ceiling. The poor heretic was hoisted about six feet above the floor, sometimes with iron weights attached to the feet, and left hanging there from wrists tied behind the back. And this was the gentle version of the strappado. The rack and the wheel were also popular. The stivaletto, or brodequins, were often used in Italy. Nasty way of crushing the bones, sort of an early type of vice.”
The priest’s delivery was rapid, almost staccato. He was obviously excited by the topic, thought the professor, who tried to look interested.
“The point I am making,” Duval continued relentlessly, “is that I have researched the details in some considerable depth. Yes, there was torture, but not as much as the critics make out, and then only after non-violent investigations and trials which sometimes went on for years.”
Gould was becoming increasingly bored by the rehearsal of information he knew in detail and cared little to talk about, but he understood fellow medievalists: too enthusiastic for their own good. Since Duval insisted on projecting his skewed history of the Inquisition, Gould tried to manoeuvre him into more contemporary interpretations.
“I still maintain,” the professor said confidently, and a little provocatively, “that the six-hundred-year Catholic onslaught on supposed heretics killed between eight and ten million people. The last victim, you know, was hanged in Valencia in 1826-the Spaniards were always the most bloody-minded about what we might today term genocide. They targeted forcibly converted Jews and Muslims throughout Spain. And in Italy, remember, the Vatican turned a blind eye to the Nazi holocaust. But what I find curious is today’s lesser-known inquisition, the current persecution of dissident Catholics, even in the USA…”
Duval interrupted him: “You are indulging in poetic licence. I thought America was the home of the free.”
Gould smiled. “I’d like to think that, but the fact is the Vatican has simply renamed the Inquisition the ‘Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.’ They don’t burn heretics any more, but they use anonymous reports-you would call them ‘delations’-to silence anyone, especially theologians, who advocates or even discusses anything contentious, such as artificial birth control, for example.”
Duval became slightly prickly. “I am not a theologian, but a simple priest with an interest in Church history; I am not privy to the intrigues of the modern Vatican.”
Gould smiled tactfully: “Nor am I.”
The professor was keen to move on to Duval’s knowledge of the self-mortification techniques of English mystics. He did not know very much about herbal purgatives, and in the priest’s single letter, as well as in one or two of his published articles, Gould had been impressed by the evidence of Duval’s apparently encyclopaedic knowledge of the properties of medieval herbal cures.
Gould’s mention of herbs prompted a long monologue, until finally he interrupted Duval’s flow: “Michael, I don’t believe that mystics used leeches for other than medical reasons. It couldn’t be seen as any form of self-mortification. But there were one or two recorded examples of self-branding with a crucifix mark on the cheek.”
Duval’s face lit up. “Self-branding! Very interesting, Irv. I have never heard of that.”
Gould asked the priest to cite evidence for his assertion that some anchorites habitually drank their own urine. He argued that there were only a few indirect non-clerical references to such practices. “Seems to be going a bit far, old boy,” Gould said in deliberately mock-English fashion.
“Not at all, Irv. Even Gandhi, a regular imbiber of his own urine, quoted the example of the English mystics.”
The hotel dining room was now almost empty, a condition perhaps not unrelated to the outre dinner conversation of the two enthusiasts, whose historical passion had increased the volume of their debate. Their conversation eclipsed their own meal, which was not discussed except for a few words about Duval’s vegetarianism.
The evening drew to a close with a port. The priest decided that the occasion had turned out better than he had expected. Gould’s private opinion was that the priest was a harmless and eccentric, if overenthusiastic, medievalist, although he could readily understand another scholar’s passion for the period. Finally, they discussed Duval’s research on the Anchoress of Shere, but Gould sensed that the priest was being deliberately cagey. After all, the kind of interpretative history in which Duval was engaged was not recognised by academia.
Gould explained that he was busy writing a paper on English anchoresses of the period, and hinted that he had discovered some new information about Christine Carpenter. Duval, although intrigued, was too proud to admit that the American might know more than he did on his specialist subject, but it was enough for both men to agree to meet again.
Shaking hands to say goodbye, the professor asked whether Duval would look at the almost-completed draft of his paper on Christine.
“I’ll look forward to that,” said the priest. Duval, however, was not looking forward at all to anyone contradicting his personal vision of Christine. He very much doubted whether the American would be able to add anything new to his long obsession, and he could not have tolerated any changes to his vision of the anchoress.
On the drive home, Duval thought of Marda. She would not change his vision of Christine. She would be made to fit what he already knew…over the following weeks and months and perhaps years.
The American medievalist took up lodgings in the White Horse, close to St. James’s church. Gould mentioned these arrangements to Duval, who immediately confined his pub visits to the William IV, up in the woods, away from prying foreigners.
In the evenings, amid the relaxed atmosphere of the White Horse bar, the American got to know a number of villagers by name as well as one or two commercial travellers who sometimes stayed in a nearby guesthouse. It was in the bar that the professor bumped into an earnest, strong-looking man in his mid-twenties. The earnest young man and the American soon realised that they were both making it their business to get to know the area; in their own way both men were searchers. After three or four evenings the two outsiders became drinking companions.
The well-built young man with the slightly affected upper-class accent had only recently become a “regular.” In the last few weeks he had visited the bar nearly every night for supper, because it was a convenient watering-hole around the corner from his flat-although it wasn’t really his. He dressed in regulation mufti for an army officer: cavalry twill trousers, check shirt and a sports jacket.
Captain Mark Stewart had taken special leave from his regiment in Germany. His commanding officer had been very understanding: “Do what you have to do,” the “old man” had told him. And he would, since Mark Stewart was not the sort of person to give up. He had insisted, for example, that he and his father should keep up the rent on Marda’s flat. He would use it as a base to find out where she was because he would never accept that Marda was dead…not until he found her body.
There were less than two years between the siblings, but he regretted that they had not been closer. He had gone off to Sandhurst when he was eighteen, and had spent most of the last five years away from Britain in Cyprus, Hong Kong and Belize, the ragged bits of empire that clung to a country which seemed to be shrinking as fast as that infamous pound in Harold Wilson’s pocket.
In Shere, the army officer had gone out of his way to court the locals. His charm helped, especially with the younger women. The Guildford police, however, had been politely non-committal. “We have missing persons all over the place, sir. They often pop up in the most unexpected places. We’re doing our best,” the sergeant at the police headquarters had told him. Annoying variations on the same theme he had heard about a dozen times.
The officers in the tiny Shere police station were more sympathetic, however. Constable Ben McGregor was a fifty-eight-year-old Scot who looked older. He was popular in the village for his friendliness, but his distracted manner prompted some to suggest that his retirement would be a minor blessing. Still, there was little crime in Shere, and McGregor’s friends put that down to a shrewd nosiness that was disguised by his vagueness. McGregor promised the army officer that he would “look into it.” He did, and while his seniors in Guildford brushed the case aside, the constable not only sniffed around the Tillingbourne valley, but also in his own-slow-time started to check on the records of women who had gone missing in Surrey. McGregor found his task almost impossible, however: the records were in a hopeless mess. Nonetheless, he would keep at it, but time was short and his intuition and long experience might be more effective, he decided. He was an honest plodder in the best traditions of the Surrey police.
Marda’s parents had started to badger the police three days after they last heard from her. She had always rung them just before and after her trips to France, and they were expecting her to arrive at their house with the new car she was so excited about. When they heard nothing, her parents contacted Jenny, her friend in Guildford, and then her employers. Finally, they rang the police in Shere. A week after Marda’s disappearance a detective came to their Woking home, asked questions and took away two recent photographs. Marda’s friends were questioned, but nobody had any information. It was two weeks before the Stewarts phoned West Berlin, where their son was on temporary attachment as liaison officer with the Americans. Captain Stewart immediately sought special compassionate leave.
He had now spent over a month searching in Shere and Guildford. He had used up most of his savings in expenses and to pay for printing leaflets displaying Marda’s photograph. His father had contributed a reward of?5,000 for any information leading to her discovery. At first Mark Stewart called at the police stations in Shere or Guildford almost every day, but it was down to every few days now. The police were becoming mildly irritated with his amateur sleuthing, although they didn’t display much emotion beyond, at times, polite exasperation.
Mark Stewart did not swallow the police theory that Marda had unexpectedy gone to France and disappeared there. He’d spent a week in Bordeaux and talked to Marda’s former boyfriend, as well as her colleagues in the wine trade, but had found nothing. He knew Marda better: she would have phoned home before going abroad. He was convinced she was in England, probably in Surrey.
The only lead anyone had found was the possible identification by a bus driver, who remembered her pretty face from various trips but couldn’t pinpoint when he had last seen her. Marda’s Guildford friend, Jenny, had provided very little information except to list their haunts in the town. Mark had spent about half his time in Guildford, but he had a gut feeling, born of the cavalryman’s overweening self-confidence, that Shere itself was a better target for his search. He had called at nearly every house in the village and at the surrounding farms, but nobody had any idea of Marda’s whereabouts. A few, especially in the shops, recognised her photograph. And one or two loyal customers in the White Horse also remembered the attractive young woman. Since the pub was also the centre of village gossip, Stewart reconciled himself to spending most evenings there.
The officer had little in common with the locals, so he was pleased to bump into the companionable, if slightly offbeat, American.
Deep in the cellar, Marda applied herself to her studies. Intellectual pursuits meant light, food and something to occupy her mind; anything was better than the hunger, the cold and the empty darkness. Even talking to him was better than nothingness; even his conversation was better than being alone, thinking of the ghosts of those who had been tormented in the other cells.
Marda retreated more and more into herself. Often she thought she was becoming insane, laughing loudly, then immediately crying with rage and fear. After a bout of utter misery, Marda was sometimes surprised by the strength of her own inner resources. She wondered whether resourcefulness was like exercising a muscle: would it grow and develop? Was it something she could use again, more easily, when she was free? Or was it a finite quality: would the strength that she had acquired be subtracted from resources that she could no longer draw on in the future?
The cinema of her mind played back old films, and she tried to remember lines from her favourite films and television dramas. She could sometimes conjure up the face of her grandmother, who had died when Marda was ten; she longed for that sense of warmth and security generated when the old woman had read her stories about Winnie the Pooh or tales from Beatrix Potter. In the dankness, she struggled to remember smells and tastes from her youth: marzipan on cakes, the hint of sherry in trifles, bacon sizzling in the mornings. She rehearsed all the little chores she would do in her flat, the exciting projects she could undertake at work. Then the fear and hurt would overcome her imagination and memory; at other times boredom blanked out everything. The boredom was occasionally relieved by random flashes of memory, but they could degenerate into waking nightmares of the dead girl in the next cell. Gradually, she learned how to control the nightmares and to use them, to turn them into plays and stories of her own construction.
Perhaps Duval sensed her new strength and his diminishing control, or perhaps he feared that madness might overcome her because-for whatever reason-he relaxed the harshness of her regime. Her cell was often lit for five or six hours a day. She was granted a small table and chair-the table could accommodate her books-and a small washing bowl when she wasn’t studying. Every lesson, if it went well, would result in some favour: a coverlet, a pillow, and, most important, heat. It was probably early November; she had been imprisoned for a month by her reckoning. He would never tell her what day it was, and laughed at her requests for a newspaper.
“Read God’s word, not the manifestos of Satan,” he said. He also called newspapers “the Devil’s dung,” and she wondered whether he had ever been the target of a press investigation.
Initially he left her grille open and passed through an electric extension cable for a one-bar electric heater. Five or six hours’ warmth helped. In the long hours of darkness, however, the cold stone soon stole away the heat. When the electric heater was removed, sometimes abruptly because of some theological mistake she had apparently made, she shivered beneath her blanket. She would construct a little tent and hide inside, helplessly smelling her body odour and her unwashed clothes.
She tried harder in her studies, and was allowed a change of clothes: fresh underwear and a clean habit. She wondered if the dead girls had worn them. Probably, but she had no choice if she wanted to live. Without them she would die of cold. After what she estimated to be five weeks, Duval gave her a small paraffin heater. It made the cell smell like a garage, but it gave her warmth.
Sometimes she received two full meals a day. The meals were eccentric mixtures, often heavily spiced and containing tastes and foods she could not identify, but generally the end result was palatable. Occasionally she would get only bread and water, as punishment for offences she could not fathom. Duval sometimes explained her alleged transgressions; at other times he would simply tell her to pray for understanding.
Yes, she prayed. Duval explained how to use a rosary, and she prayed to God with a will, fingering the beads he gave her. Some of her newfound faith was a disguise donned for Duval; part of it was to relieve the boredom. A little of it, she half-understood, was real. To avoid growing to hate herself, to hate the animal locked in a dark cage, she decided to search for God, or at least to try to comprehend what God’s love might mean. She suspected that religious mania could result from long solitary confinement, but she reasoned that a measure of real faith would help her. Total immersion in religion was madness, his madness.
She began to realise that he was also a prisoner-of his own perniciously distorted vision-but in the darkness something had to fill the vacuum. After prayer, God seemed in fleeting moments to be a presence, not just a set of ancient beliefs. She understood the hypocrisy impelling her search for religion, but time hung around her neck like an albatross, and the possibility of God, the possibility of His intervention, might help to lighten her burden. She remembered her brother saying: “There weren’t many atheists in fox-holes in the Great War.” Now she, too, was at war-with the evil that lived upstairs.
When things went well, Duval would empty her portable toilet every day, but sometimes he would refuse for a few days. Occasionally her requests for food or an extra blanket were met with polite agreement; at other times they seemed to anger her captor. She could never work out whether it was simply the moods of a deranged man or some genuine “fault” on her part. She did realise that she was being manipulated into his version of submission, so she would simulate her version of meekness.
She tried to adjust to his Jekyll and Hyde personality. At times he was polite, almost shy, and very controlled, but he was also subject to fits of intense anger. She wondered if Duval contrived the fits to frighten her into submission. Was there a conscious split between a volcanic core and the role-playing of the outwardly charming persona? At times he seemed possessed with almost medieval religious passions, and then in a second or so he would assume the mantle of a harmless country cleric.
She tried to appease his various moods, and to keep her requests to the minimum necessary for survival. Sometimes he offered her something she had not asked for. An exercise book was her first such gift. She started to keep a diary, secreting a few pages at a time in the small air vent above her bench. The diary was her only psychological contact with the outside world. Sometimes she wrote brief notes to her friend Jenny, sometimes to her mother, and occasionally to Mark. She had not corresponded regularly with him before, and she regretted that bitterly.
She pleaded with Duval, on one of the few occasions she had really begged, to phone her parents to say she was alive. But he ignored her request.
Later she asked whether she could write a note to them. She explained that he could post it anywhere in Britain, just a note saying, “I am alive. Please remember I’ll always love you.” She knew that her parents would be enduring mental agony, not knowing whether she was alive or dead. When she tried to insist, he kept the light off for two days.
She half-consoled herself by thinking that he could have agreed and simply burnt the letter.
She tried to find some meaning in her imprisonment: “At least I am learning something new-I didn’t know my Bible at all before,” she kept repeating to herself. Now she had read almost half of it. She tried to maintain some dignity, some independence, even though her whole world was controlled by that “pious, hypocritical maniac,” as she dubbed him in her first diary entry.
She tried to understand him, but he was so reserved, so secretive. On matters religious or historical he would hold forth, but he wouldn’t say anything about himself, and was even evasive if she enquired about his dog. She asked whether the dog could come down to spend a few hours with her in the cellar, and also mentioned that she could baby-sit Bobby if he went away. She genuinely wanted the dog’s company, but also wanted to guarantee that Duval would return to her cell. She had panic attacks when she thought that he would just leave her, forget her, punish her, as he had Denise. She reckoned that he would not starve the dog as well as her. She tried not to think of the fate of her predecessors, forced to fast to death.
Whatever happened she would live. She would make herself interesting to him: a good pupil, lively and, given the circumstances, fun. He would be interested in keeping her alive. But the trouble was her sense of fun did not match his. He had a twisted sense of humour. He liked intellectual jokes, but sometimes her half-intellectual ones backfired. She was always dancing on theological eggshells.
She tried to engage him by preparing a written question: “If Christ did die for our sins, dare we make His martyrdom meaningless by not committing those sins ourselves?” It was half a question and half an attempt at a witticism, but it angered him.
He ignored the requests regarding the dog, but once or twice, when Marda had really worked at her lessons, Duval brought Bobby down to the cellar for a while. The sheer touch of another creature brought her unimaginable joy. And Bobby made such a fuss of her; he seemed to empathise with her plight. Dogs knew about these things, she told herself.
She couldn’t understand why Duval never touched her. She didn’t want him to, dreading it as loathsome, but the fact that he seemed to go out of his way to avoid any physical contact made her wonder whether he was sexually repressed. She laughed when she first thought of this. “Of course he’s repressed-he’s a Catholic priest,” she said to herself in a loud whisper.
He needed order, and seemed strict and harsh about minor things. He was offended by the smell in the cell, and she wanted more than anything to have a bath, but this he would not allow, even though he himself seemed obsessed with bathing. She could hear the water running from his bath sometimes five or six times a day, because the waste and overflow pipes from the bathroom ran somewhere along the cellar corridor. So he was pernickety, to put it mildly. And although Marda did not have the intellectual background to apply Freudian insights or terminology, her shrewd instinct told her that, besides order and cleanliness, he demanded control. His fear of touch implied fear of love. Perhaps he could love only when he had total control and power over the object of his love. No, she decided, he cannot love; he can only control.
She tried to understand his mentality, because this knowledge might keep her alive that little bit longer. Celibacy could never be easy, but perhaps it had been easier when sex in public was taboo; now it was everywhere. Sex seemed to have been discovered in the 1960s, so maybe now it was that much harder for him. Perhaps he was a homosexual who, unlike some of his fellow priests, intended to remain chaste.
“Keeping women in bondage must be his kick” were the blunt words she entrusted to her diary. Duval’s earnestness in his religious instruction seemed either to contradict or to confirm that; she wasn’t sure which. On some days he spent three or four hours talking, teaching, instructing her in theology, and she had learned a great deal. Her rationale was straightforward: the more she learned, the more Duval would be losing if he let her die. Religion was her investment in her own future.
Perhaps she was going insane, but she also took some pleasure in acquiring new knowledge about a world she had never thought about before. She was an eager student because she had no distractions, except constant fear, and cold and hunger on occasion. The utter and comprehensive boredom of total darkness was a powerful incentive.
When she had started working in France, she had wondered what it would have been like to go to university. She often thought about it. And Duval may have been a killer, but as a teacher he was good. She started talking aloud to herself: “Good? A good teacher? Am I going mad? I’m captive to a monster. I’m not a student. I’m studying to fill my time. To keep my sanity.”
Yet, despite herself, she started to enjoy learning. It was her only contact with the outside world. The Holy Land was a lot more rewarding than the dank nothingness of her cell. Her studies allowed her to escape from her fears for a while. And Christ’s thoughts were usually healthier than her own morbid ones.
For the first lessons he spoke through the grille. Not only did this feel awkward, but the lessons were short. The longer the lesson, the more warmth, food and light. He seemed to want to be invited in. Marda sensed that she was not facing an immediate physical threat from him, not unless she really upset him by trying to escape, perhaps. She also wanted him to appreciate the discomfort of her cell, if he could be moved by such things.
She said, “Michael, why don’t you come in and we can speak face to face? I would prefer to sit upstairs, but until you trust me can’t we at least try to be civilised down here?”
She was trying to exercise some control over him. He understood that, but he accepted her co-operation. “All right, Marda,” Duval said gently, “but we will go through the handcuff procedure, at least for a while.”
Reluctantly, Marda agreed. She sat on the bench with her left hand cuffed, while he sat on the single chair that he had placed as far away from her as possible.
“Mmm. It is chilly in here,” he said, as if he was reading an actor’s line. “Do you mind if I turn up the heater a little?” He seemed shy, almost nervous. “I shall get you some more paraffin tonight…You have no objections to my smoking a pipe?”
“No.”
“I do not approve of women smoking cigarettes. You smoke those French cigarettes, if I remember correctly.”
Her eyes twinkled. “I do like to smoke Gitanes. My brother used to tease me, and said I was going all Brigitte Bardot on him. Is there…is there any chance of a pack or two? It might help to relieve my…my tension. And help me concentrate on my studies, of course,” she said almost coquettishly.
“I will consider it,” he said, lighting his pipe. The aromatic Dutch tobacco filled the room, and she noticed that he had a habit of breaking his matches in two and then putting the pieces back in the matchbox.
“I like that tobacco, Michael, and not just because it smothers some of the paraffin smell.”
He ignored her small talk. “All right, Marda, let’s discuss your knowledge of the Catechism again. I have mentioned that once you know enough, we could start the process of your confirmation. We’ll have to adapt a bit because I cannot really ask the bishop to come here.”
Marda almost said, “Can I go to the bishop, then?” But she knew well enough by now that he didn’t like what she would call “smart-aleck” comments. She sometimes overreached herself in her attempts to spar with Duval, to keep lively a conversation with someone she knew to be far better educated than herself. It was very hard.
“Let us run through some of the basics,” he said slightly impatiently. “What is faith?”
She replied eagerly: “Faith is a supernatural gift of God, which enables us to believe without doubting whatever God has revealed.”
“Good. That is word perfect. How are you to know what God has revealed?”
“I am to know…to know…what God has revealed by the testimony, er, teaching, and authority of the Catholic Church.” Marda looked a little embarrassed by her hesitation.
“There is no problem with a stumble. It is knowing and understanding. That is what counts. This is not an elocution lesson.”
“Michael, may I interrupt? You have a wonderful voice. Did you learn to speak that way or was it something God-given?” Marda would never have used that adjective before. She did it unconsciously. With a start, she realised her vocabulary was altering.
“I was born with it.”
“Where?”
He seemed reluctant to concede further information, then suddenly blurted out, “Not far from here…” And then again, he said, “Not far from here. Not far from here…”
A curtain descended and blanked out his motor functions and his speech; his eyes were glazed. Marda remained absolutely still, while Duval, triggered by some past trauma, explored his inner being.
Although he tended to live in the past, both professionally and personally, Duval did not talk about his own history. To anyone. He didn’t even like thinking about his upbringing. At first he had tried to forget the whole business, then he attempted to change reality: Duval rejected, then falsified, most of the emotional experiences of his childhood. And he had eventually come to believe these lies as fact.
Especially, Duval tried not to think about his father, who was cold and authoritarian towards him when he was young. He had been attached to his mother, and had some fond memories of his childhood before the tragedy of his sister’s mental illness and eventual suicide. After that he grew away from his mother. His conversion to Catholicism caused the final break in an already emotionally estranged family. The Church became his mother, yet although he loved Catholicism, he also hated parts of it.
Duval recovered almost immediately from his brief reverie, but even if it had lasted for eternity, he would never have fully recognised the element of destructiveness in his complex Oedipal relationship with his Church, which to him was both a protective and persecuting goddess.
Duval seemed not to notice that both he and Marda had been silent for over a minute. She had learned to remain very still and quiet when occasionally he slipped into these almost catatonic states.
“But enough of me. Let us get on,” he said in a normal voice, as though he were in the middle of an Oxbridge tutorial.
Silence again ensued as he fiddled with his pipe for a few seconds.
“I will ask you a personal question before we carry on. You have an unusual name. What does it mean?”
“Oh, Michael, you don’t want to know…”
“Yes, I do. Please tell me.”
“Well, it’s the name of a mountain pass in Somalia. My father served there during the war and he just liked the sound of it.”
“How very noble of him.” Duval smiled. “Yes, it’s a pretty name, and it sounds like ‘martyr.’ That’s what I thought when I first heard it…‘And the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.’ Isaiah, chapter thirty-five, verse one.”
He stopped himself and his voice became a fraction sterner: “Now the Apostles’ creed. How does mortal sin kill the soul?”
Marda was disconcerted by his gloss on her name, but she could not allow herself to be side-tracked; she had to be ready: “Mortal sin kills the soul by depriving it of sanctifying grace, which is the supernatural life of the soul.”
Marda did not want to ponder on mortal sins like murder and possibly get lost in a blind alley where she would have to confront him. “And of course a venial sin is an offence,” she said, “which does not kill the soul, yet displeases God and often leads to mortal sin…”
She looked up at him. “You have told me a lot about the soul, Michael.”
She tried to use his name often; it bred a familiarity, a touch of friendship. You don’t kill your friends, Marda thought. Did the others try to be friends, too? Or were they all too “difficult,” as he put it? Was she less brave than the rest or simply wiser? Or nicer? She kept wondering.
“If the soul’s immortal, Michael, how can sin kill it?”
He answered the question, not very satisfactorily thought Marda, but she wouldn’t dare say so. He also tried to explain that the invisible part of the human being, the soul, was not restrained by Einstein’s laws of space and time. But he did respond eagerly and in depth, so Marda assumed that it was a good question. The longer the answer, the better the question was her rule of thumb. She had learned that without going to university.
He asked her to define “hope”; then she was asked to explain “prayer.”
Marda replied quickly. “Prayer is the raising up of the mind and heart to God…is that right?”
Duval sucked on his pipe and nodded.
Marda was sincere in wanting to learn all about prayer. There was no dissimulation here. Duval seemed to know most of the time if she was acting, so she was always trying to play double bluff, and therefore sometimes not even admitting things to herself in his presence.
“Good, good. Now the Ten Commandments.”
Marda rattled them off. She slowed on “Honour thy father and thy mother” but only slightly, and then only marginally speeded up on “Thou shalt not kill.” She was learning as much about diplomacy as theology.
“Are you saying grace before your food?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. She risked direct lies occasionally.
“Another aspect of the Christian’s daily exercise, then. How should you begin your day?”
She scratched her ribs and wondered if she had lice, but no emotion showed in her reply: “I should begin the day by making the sign of the Cross as I wake up in the morning and by saying some kind of short prayer, for example, ‘O my God, I offer my heart and soul to You.’”
Duval seemed pleased. “You are learning quickly. In a few weeks we can get you to confirmation stage, and then on to taking part in Holy Communion. I will also explain penance and absolution.”
“Michael, speaking as someone who knew so little about religion, I am grateful for”-she was going to say “your time,” but she stopped herself-“for your patience, but may I ask what level I am supposed to reach?” She wanted to say something about the fact that, to her knowledge, there had never been a female Pope, but that would certainly have come into his definition of facetiousness.
“I will explain more later. Perhaps first I will show you some of the history I am writing. Not quite yet. It needs some editing, but it is the story of a woman’s purification, and I hope it will make things clearer.”
Marda didn’t push him.
In these “seminars,” as he called them, he soon dispensed with the handcuffs. Initially he locked the door behind him and watched her carefully, but as the weeks passed, and she made no attempt to escape, he grew more relaxed. There had been no “removal of privileges” for at least ten days. He seems to like me, she thought.
Marda’s cell was tolerably warm. She had light for up to twelve hours a day, and an extra towel. Her little library had extended beyond the Bible and Lives of the Saints-she had enjoyed particularly a history of the Crusades and a book of religious poetry. In the dismal dark world she inhabited, Hopkins’s “Glory be to God for dappled things” took on a very special meaning, of hope for light, literally, in the future. She desperately wanted to get out, of course, and above all to reassure her family, but somehow she didn’t think Duval intended to kill her. She tried to find out what he really wanted from her. Was he simply trying to convert her? Secure one good Catholic conversion before he died or…What if something did happen to him? If he were knocked over by the proverbial bus or had a heart attack? No one would find her. She would starve.
She started trying to keep a little store of food at the end of the bench, but one night she awoke to find a scratching sound next to her ear. Instinctively covering her face with her hand, she felt the brush of damp fur across her arm as something scuttled off her bed.
Marda screamed. She hated rats.
She wondered whether someone, in years to come, would find her, dead, with a rat sitting on her skeleton.
Marda tried to brush aside such terrifyingly negative thoughts; she would think constructively. Yes, she would find its hole, and block it when she had some light, but she would keep her little food store. She would make a small bag and hang it from one of the grilles of the air vent when it was dark, then hide it each morning. She didn’t want him to have the slightest suspicion of her plan.
Plan? I should be thinking of a plan to get out, she said to herself.
She estimated that in a few days-maybe, maybe, please-he would allow her to go upstairs, but first she would ask if she could walk in the corridor. Meanwhile, she did some press-ups on the bench during the long dark hours, to tire herself because she was sleeping so badly. She fretted about her physical deterioration.
She had asked Duval for a mirror to see what she looked like, to see how pale she was.
“Such vanity is entirely unnecessary,” he had said dismissively.
“Will you tell me then how I look, after so long down here?”
He had said she looked just fine. But what else could he say?