Evensong: Tales from Beechbourne, Chickmarsh, & the Woolfonts: Book Two: Te Lucis Ante Terminum

By GMW Wemyss

The Woolfonts are the most peaceful and placid – some say, the most chocolate-box – villages in the West Country, if not in the whole of the UK. Or ... they're meant to be. Of course, that doesn't take account of the eccentricities of the villagers, from the humblest to the highest; or of all the ungentlemanly balls life can bowl.

The year began in flood and spate. Teddy Gates, the Celebrated Hipsta Chef and proprietor of The Woolford House Hotel, newly the local councillor, fell prey to a cross-party stitch-up at his colleagues' hands, over social housing; now the duke, ably assisted by the indispensable Mr Viney, is cunningly working to get him out of his jam. By nobbling the MoD and the Defence Estates. There are plans to resurrect the old Cottage Hospital. Snook, the world's most useless sexton, waxes odder by the day. The High Church Rector, Fr Paddick –, and Mr Mirza, the English master at the Free School – are becoming stressed by the well-meaning support of friends, family, and neighbours who don't grasp the concepts of chastity, celibacy, and obedience. The Breener, now married to the Hon. Gwen, is in for a delightful shock. Edmond Huskisson is letting his activism get the better of him. The future prospects of Canon Judith Potecary, in Beechbourne, have the Dean, the Archdeacon, and the Bishop on wires. Sher Mirza's uncle (and Charles duke of Taunton's old right-hander and fellow OE), the Nawab, is facing a succession crisis.

Then tragedy strikes the duke's family, with knock-on effects on the duke's own health, even as Fr Noel Paddick's constitution buckles under various strains. It shall indeed want a village – well: three of them, and the adjoining parishes, and the market towns, and the little hamlet of Woolfont Parva, and the whole of the Deanery – to Keep Buggering On and win through, and resolve every crisis at the last. Not least by putting some very special old soldiers in the new build of social housing: with a right Royal assist.

The old beloved characters and scenes return in this second instalment of GMW Wemyss' Village Tales; a few old faces depart and new, arrive; and at the end, the Woolfonts once more can say, This was their finest hour.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bapton Books
• Release date: Oct 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311001535

GMW Wemyss

Parliamentary historian, chronicler of Titanic’s sinking and Churchill’s ascent, annotator of Kipling and of Kenneth Grahame: GMW Wemyss lives and writes, wisely pseudonymously, in Wilts. Having, by invoking the protective colouration of tweeds, cricket (he was a dry bob at school), and country matters, somehow evaded immersion in Mercury whilst up at University, he survived to become the West Country’s beloved essayist; author or co-author of histories of the Narvik Debate, the fall of Chamberlain and the rise of Churchill, of 1937 – that year of portent – and of the UK and US enquiries into the sinking of Titanic; and co-editor and co-annotator of Kipling’s Mowgli stories and Kenneth Grahame.

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BOOK TWO: Te lucis ante terminum

Evensong:

Tales from Beechbourne,

Chickmarsh,

&

the Woolfonts

GMW Wemyss

Bapton Books

About the Author:

GMW Wemyss lives and writes, wisely pseudonymously, in Wilts. Having, by invoking the protective colouration of tweeds, cricket (he was a dry bob at school), and country matters, somehow evaded immersion in Mercury whilst up at University, he survived to become the author of Cross and Poppy: a village tale; of The Confidence of the House: May 1940 and of Sensible Places: essays on time, place & countryside; co-author of The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays & Observation; The Bapton Books Sampler: a literary chrestomathy; When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic; '37: the year of portent; and of the forthcoming history, The Crisis: 1914; and co-editor and co-annotator of The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated, and The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults).

This is the second novel in the Village Tales series.

The omnibus edition comprises the two parts, also issued separately, of this title: Part I, Nunc dimittis, and Part II, Te lucis ante terminum.

Mr Wemyss' Twitter account is @GMWWemyss. The Twitter account for Bapton Books is @BaptonEditor. The partners in Bapton Books maintain a Tumbler presence, to be found at baptonbooks.tumblr.com; the Bapton Books website is at www.baptonbooks.co.uk.

Other books by GMW Wemyss

from Bapton Books

baptonbooks.co.uk

Village Tales:

Cross and Poppy (the first volume in the series)

Evensong: Part I: Nunc dimittis & Omnibus Edition

Bapton Books Annotated Classics (with Markham Shaw Pyle):

The Complete Mowgli Stories, Duly Annotated

The Annotated Wind in the Willows, for Adults and Sensible Children (or, possibly, Children and Sensible Adults)

Bapton Books History Selections:

The Confidence of the House: May 1940

When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic (with Markham Shaw Pyle)

'37: the year of portent (with Markham Shaw Pyle)

Essays:

Sensible Places: essays on time, place & countryside

The Transatlantic Disputations: Essays & Observations (with Markham Shaw Pyle)

The Bapton Books Sampler: a literary chrestomathy (with Markham Shaw Pyle)

Freedom, Fascists, Fools, & Frauds: Bapton Books Position Papers and Other Critical Pieces, 2011 – 2014 (with Markham Shaw Pyle)

Other fiction:

Crafts and Assaults: Two Uncanny Tales for the Season (with Markham Shaw Pyle)

Forthcoming:

The Crisis: 1914 (with Markham Shaw Pyle)

The Annotated Kidnapped (Robert Louis Stevenson) (with Markham Shaw Pyle)

Britain by the Slice (in two volumes):

From Samphire Hoe to Saunton Sands (vol. I)

From Kinnaird Head to Dancing Ledge (vol. II)

Copyright © 2014, 2015, 2016 by Bapton Literary Trust No 1 (for GMW Wemyss)

All rights reserved

Smashwords Edition

Book design by Bapton Books

A note to the reader: it is the aspiration of this imprint, small though Bapton Books be, to have as few errors and literals – 'typographical errors', misprints – as occur in any average Oxford University Press publication (which, alas, in these thin and piping times, gives us a margin of perhaps five or ten). Any obliging corrections shall be gratefully received.

One chapter of this work has already appeared in substantially the same form in Crafts and Assaults: Two Uncanny Tales for the Season, Bapton Books 2014.

This revised electronic edition corrects certain literals which occurred in the conversion of the authoritative typeset text. Bloody ligatures...

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BOOK TWO: Te lucis ante terminum

Evensong:

Tales from Beechbourne,

Chickmarsh,

&

the Woolfonts

the same being Village Tales recording the events of some few months in the District, to which are appended a series of recollections of interesting events having to do with the villages and district, their landmarks, and the persons of principal consequence therein, both present and historical

GMW Wemyss

Bapton Books

Contents:

About the Author

Other books by GMW Wemyss

For mine eyes have seen

Credo

Lord have mercy upon us: 'From lightning and tempest; from earth-quake, fire, and flood'

Grant us thy salvation

Bless thine inheritance: O all ye Beasts and Cattle, bless ye the Lord

We, being defended from the fear of our enemies

Our time in rest and quietness

For aid against all perils

An Anthem: 'In Quires and places where they sing'

Grace at this time with one accord

Desires and Petitions

Grace; Amen

Te lucis ante terminum

Postlude: Author's Afterword

Coming in 2016, in the third Village Tale

For mine eyes have seen

Some decades prior, Ben Salmon – Sir Bennett Salmon RA, if one insisted (despite his own wishes) upon pomp – had removed to the Woolfonts in his seventies, with the sole aim of painting the downs and the countryside until he died: which he had done rather later than he'd expected to do, dying only in the year prior to that of Crispin's death.

It had been, that settling in the Woolfonts years before, a rejection of the glitter of London, yes; but also of its febrile and frenetic pace: for there had been things enough in town to paint, and not all of them bold and sharp and modern. There had been the skies that only London possessed, infinitely changeable, yet peculiar always to the city, and immemorial also: the skies of London that had been specially and uniquely London's even when its skyline had been of spire and steeple all compound, when Old St Paul's had dominated it before ever Christopher Wren had been born to a Wiltshire clergyman far from town. There had been the secret scenes, untouched by time, of streets that followed tribal tracks or marked the Romans' surveys, of mews and lane and railing mellowed by time's smoothing hand and of chaste Georgian fronts which might conceal mediaeval footprints – or a railway cutting; there had been the Thames, a torpid pewter snake in Winter, a twist of misted sinuousness in smoky Autumntide....

And the Woolfonts? The Woolfonts, once seen as he'd been motoring through the West, glimpsed only through the accident of his having taken, rather bloody-mindedly, a deliberate detour from the trodden ways, in pique at the stream of ungodly traffic? He'd seen them but once, prior to his leaving London to dwell in them, and somehow they had never quite left his mind. He knew a few other artists who'd known them, or known of them, mostly old men and women of his own age and something of his own kidney, and even these had thought them – when they thought of them at all, which was commonly only when he chanced to mention them, testing their memories against his own – they, even they, had recalled them as chocolate-box, artificial, saccharine, twee. The sort of thing Munnings did, they'd said, when he was truckling to dukes and that sort. Hopelessly vieux jeu.

Yet the scenes he'd seen and remembered had niggled at him, annoyingly, for years, rather as a contrary opinion from an otherwise respected barrister should have annoyed – for years – his father, the solicitor in his sober broadcloth. And it had been rather more than a niggling annoyance to Ben to know that his peers – so far as he had any, for he knew to a nicety just how good a painter he was (even if he, also, was – not always quietly – dismissed by the splash-makers as hopelessly vieux jeu) – had seen them so differently, and dismissively. And a resolution had grown in him, as the years mounted, to take on that landscape and that light, hand to hand, no seconds, to the death. If his vision had been faulty, he wished and meant and wanted to learn how and why, and that meant grappling with the landscape. For the painter is always Jacob, and whatever he may paint, he is wrestling the angel, no holds barred. And if – as Ben rather more than half, indeed, rather more than three-quarters, suspected – he had been right in his seeing into and reading into the Woolfonts, and his fellows had been wrong, blinded by a too-ready acquiescence in the conventional unwisdom and its cavalier dismissals.... Either the Woolfonts truly were chocolate-box and twee; or they weren't. Either his judgement had been wrong – which was unprecedented, if he were quite frank – or it wasn't. And there was only one means of establishing the matter. If the Woolfonts defeated him, then he should be forced to accept that he'd felt the twitch of his tether. If he could – and he made certain he could – capture them, show them to be more than the postcard which the superficial had labelled them as being (and had, by labelling, dismissed them): well....

And he was, after all, getting on a bit. If the Woolfonts were to defeat him, if he had reached the twitch of the tether, then they'd l'arn him his limitations and he'd humbly accept that new knowledge. And if not: if his eye were as keen and his hand as sure as ever: then, by drawing back the veil, he'd learn something new – and l'arn those who'd misjudged them, and him.

One did not, of course, simply remove to the Woolfonts. It wasn't a case of ask and have. So he had asked, to have; and he'd wisely bypassed the Taunton Estate Office – although he was well aware they'd treat him with the grave courtesy which they accorded to every enquirer – and gone straight to the top. In fact, he'd gone straight to the most pleasurable of his clubs, and sought out the most savage, if the most entertaining, of his brother members. Artists, always at a remove from life, mediating it through their chosen medium, are by nature subtle folk and sly.

'Do you?' Charles Taunton – Charles Templecombe, he'd been then, his father yet alive and not yet wholly senile, and himself not yet recalled away once more to the wars, to leave all business to his useless brother – Charles, even in his earliest middle age, had had a way of raising one eyebrow that left Sir Bennett – for all that he preferred to paint rather landscapes than portraits – restraining an urge to find a palette and a brush. 'You really wish to.... It's not London, you know.' There was a solicitous note of warning in his tone. 'But I suppose you of all men, so long as you've your vision and your fine motor control, shan't ever be bored, anywhere. Of course we should love to have you – and be honoured, frankly, to have you – as a neighbour. You're a widower. Who's your heir?'

'My nephew Lew.'

'Right, yes. Married, I believe, two children, and – something in the City, isn't he. Mm. Well. If you don't object to a provision for our right to repurchase if you or he should decide to sell up? Freehold, then, I think. We can certainly come up with – how much house are you wanting? And do you garden, at all? I can think of three places with decent light, offhand.'

'Then I should like the one with the cosiest space proportionate to the most studio room and a good North light.'

'Right, then, my dear fellow. Come down Sunday week and stop with us for a few days, and we'll get you sorted.' Charles had smiled. 'I'm afraid that – taking the District as a whole, and including Beechbourne and Chickmarsh in it – there'll be even with your presence rather less than a minyan about.'

'I am not observant, my dear Charles.'

'No; but there's not ten Spurs supporters in the District, either, and I happen to know you've a sentimental attachment to Tottenham, despite your distaste – which I share – for stereotypin'. So far as I care for footer at all, and the Premier League with it, I'm by way of shouting, COYS! at intervals myself: although one is obliged to applaud impartially Pompey, Bristol City, Salisbury City, Swindon – Town and Supermarine – and Shaftesbury Town, if one dwells in the Woolfonts. And sometimes Gillingham, now I think of it.'

Ben had winked. 'The burdens of noblesse upon a cricketing peer....'

'Quite. And you shall as part of our bargain paint the Woolfonts Combined CC first XI in action, I warn you.'

This had made them both chortle: one of Ben's – or, rather, one of (drumroll) Sir Bennett Salmon RA's – most celebrated Academy paintings was 'Lord's: The First Innings: The Ashes', after all.

'To be perfectly serious, though,' said the courtesy marquess of Templecombe, in tones that justified that proem, 'you'll not not fit in because you're Jewish, or a painter, or clever. There's no anti-Semitism in the Woolfonts that I know of, and I do rather tend to find these things out, or, rather, our people do, and tell one. I'm afraid there is perhaps a bit of philo-Semitism in the District, and I'm guilty of it myself on occasion, although I try not to be: its results are much happier than the other, but it is at the end the same error, indeed, sin: that of treatin' people as groups and abstractions rather than as individuals. It may be a benign prejudice, but it's a prejudice all the same.

'The problem,' complained Charles, 'is that – well, take my case. The number of bad or untrustworthy or simply unpleasant Jews I've known can be counted on rather less than the fingers of one hand; whereas the number of contemptible goyim I've known is roughly asymptotically equal to the whole of the gentile population, my own communion included. And you needn't look at me like that, we've both Latin enough to know that both words mean the nations, the peoples – damn it, that's rather the whole damned problem, isn't it, that one word is disfavoured, and its synonym, passed, based on nothing more than derivation.

'At any rate, you'll not face prejudice on that account – or I'll know the reason why, and hell shan't hold me. You shall possibly face a certain distance because you're a townie to your – impractical in the countryside, you want wellies instead – boots. Tell me honestly, old boy: What possessed you to decide to retire – in the one sense, not the other – to my – our – stretch of country?'

Ben had put his head to one side. With his snowy quiff and bright, artist's eye, it had made him, as well he knew, look birdlike. 'I saw the Woolfonts once, many years ago. It has never left my mind's eye, for all that other artists dismiss your country as too pretty to be authentic. I am an old man, now, and I wish to come to grips with it. I wish only to paint the downs and the country 'round until I die.'

Charles had nodded. 'Then – if I may suggest? Thank you – then you want to begin by paintin' the first XI, and one other picture. And that on board, not canvas. By the time you've painted a new sign for the Boar, you'll be in clover and in with us all: one of us.'

*****

So it had been, too. Ben had taken a superb Queen Anne house in Crucis, and set to work – not least or last upon a new sign for Mr Kellow down the Boar, which it had amused him to execute in the style imagined by Chesterton's Gabriel Gale and Miss Sayers' Hugh Farren – for Ben had had an exquisitely balanced sense of irony (not least in referring to Chesterton, always, as the most disappointing of his fellow graduates of the Slade). That, and his canvas of the 'Invincibles' of the famous Woolfonts Combined XI humiliating Hants CCC itself in what was a charity 'friendly' only in name, had been his entrée to his new world, even as not dissimilar early paintings had once been his entrée into critical fashion and the Academy.

*****

He had lived. He had learnt. And he had been spared to see his vision accepted, and the Woolfonts disinterred from the artistic graveyard of 'chocolate-box'. Time had seemed to slow, there, and what he had hoped might be a lustrum of sere age was much more by far. And still there were days, and even yet there was more of the Woolfonts and the downs to wrestle with, to burrow into, to capture and subdue – by Winsor & Newton, by oak, ash, and thorn! (And what a relief it had been, Puck or no Puck, Old England or no – Charles had infected him with a renewed enthusiasm for Kipling: again with the same caveat, on both sides, which one applied to GKC and DLS – to know that he had only to go to Crane Street in Salisbury or to Shaftesbury High Street for colours and canvas: the Woolfonts were not, after all, blessed be the Name, quite so far off the trodden ways as all that, after all.)

He had learnt, also, the ways of the countryman and the villager: the slow musings, the quiet and unceasing curiosity about neighbours (for what else was there to divert oneself with?), the careful way in which it was made sure that nothing hurtful or scandalous came to the ears of those who might be wounded by it, though all the parish might ring with it – though in his latter years he was dismayed to see some signs of that's changing. He had learnt, also, that, far more even than in those close circles which had been his portion and in that overgrown collection of villages which was London, everyone's private lives and follies and foibles were a public property, and almost all were enfolded in a rough charity which insulated them: from Lady Douty's sourness and selflessness to Charles' temper and tricks of speech and allusion, from Mr Kellow's enthusiasms of old and Mr Penny's horror of sprouts (which was not the easiest path for a greengrocer, poor man) to, as the years passed, young Teddy Gates' and young Edmond Huskisson's passions, punctuated as they regularly were by blazing strops and as-heated reconciliations (Emily Lane, Teddy's sub-manageress at The Woolford, had, it was generally agreed, seen things humankind was not meant to see, and an eyeful at that, and much more than once).

He had been on hand when young Sher Mirza had come to the District (and had known, as had everyone else, of his one-off with Kit Trowbridge before either had made it back from Bristol: and, like everyone else, had said not a word); he had been there, well before, when The Breener had arrived, as well, and – like everyone else – had been rejoiced by The Breener's gusto for living life and proclaiming it liveable. Like everyone else, he had foreseen that Gwen Evans and The Breener should eventually wed; unlike anyone else – although everyone else thought someone wanted to do it – he and he alone had itched to paint (for all that he preferred to paint landscapes rather than portraits), as he and he alone could, Sher's portrait: that young man was too beautiful to live, really, and far too beautiful not to be immortalised....

And he had been there when Fr Paddick had arrived.

*****

Within a year of the new Rector's being installed, it had become something of a tradition that Noel and Sher dine – when possible – on Friday nights with Ben, in Crucis. On some State occasions, Charles joined them; but in the main, it was but the three of them, reflecting quietly upon the week – and every other subject beneath Solomon's proverbial sun.

There had been much laughter and teasing. Once, in the midst of a discussion of art history and Hellenism and Winckelmann and All Sorts, and the tropes of artistic representation of – as dear old K had always called it, with audible Initial Caps – The Nude In Art, Ben had pointed out, slyly, that even had they been graced with the ducal presence, Noel only should have – he presumed – alone represented the uncircumcised: which had taken both of the lads aback, until Ben had explained that Charles was of an age when even peers descendant of the House of Stuart followed the fashion brought over by the Hanoverians. 'I was at a school on the Embankment – then; it's on Queen Vic Street now. I'm an Old Citizen. But I had a cousin go to Eton,' chortled Ben. 'Danny was wont to observe that, in the changing rooms, you never knew whether a new boy was a Jew, or a member of the peerage, or a Nawab's son.'

Sher had simply shaken his head. Noel had chuckled: 'I imagine you've painted enough genitalia by now that they're simply objects.'

'And sometimes objectionable ones, dear boy. At least it meant that when I married, I was not slated for a Ruskinian shock. They did insist upon figures at the Slade in my day: no wonder I prefer landscapes.'

And there had also been the time Ben had sighed and laughed at once, when the news from abroad was slightly worse than usual, saying, 'Of course there'll never be peace in the region. Your people, Sher, knock off for Friday; we all know what day is the Jewish Sabbath; and you Christians, Rector, take Sunday as yours.... How can you ever solve a millennia-old problem, working a four-day week?'

Ben knew, quite as well as did Sher and Noel, that this regular dining could be and was regarded by no few of their neighbours – approvingly – as a shining example of interfaith unity: which caused Ben much merriment. 'I am,' said he, 'an Englishman. Just that. So are you, and you. I happen to be Jewish by ethnicity; in religion … I am one of Disraeli's sensible men, I never tell. If it were not for Sher, here, I would not be keeping kosher at this meal any more than at others – if ever he misses, my dear Noel, you and I are having ham, or perhaps prawns, or what the Americans press upon us as a cheeseburger.'

'Ben....'

'Oh, very well. You're right: we mustn't disappoint our neighbours.' Ben – being an RA – was always sly; and he had a lesson to impart.

Noel said as much. 'Ben.... You're being subtle again.'

'Of course!' Ben laughed openly at Noel's expression of fond exasperation. 'It is the way of all my tribe –'

Sher shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

'Ah! Ah!' Ben wagged a finger at him, after the manner of his father Godfrey Salmon, the solicitor. 'I am of course speaking of artists. A people who live life at a remove, and always subtly and sidewise and slyly. But there you are: we must not disappoint the stereotypes and presumptions and the expectations of our neighbours, even if we must thus mislead them as I misled you just now: which was my point.

'Because, my dear young friends, you must, surely, realise that – although I have you to dine because I like you, and both of you have an eye, and I, an ear, and painters and musicians ought to dine together often – I'm having your new organist Dr Campion to tea on Wednesday, Noel – well. What matters in country districts, I have learnt, isn't what is said, it is what is thought; and it isn't what is said, it is what is left carefully unsaid. There are no private lives in the countryside: everything is public property. And the wise will leave undisturbed the more flattering preconceptions and misjudgements of the people.'

'That,' said Sher, who was after all English master at the Free School, 'is certainly Disraelian.'

'I am always happy to be thought that: it is so much better than being conceived as Shylock. Or Fagin.

'Do you know, both dear Edmond, and that horrid woman in Beechbourne – canon me no canons, my dear Noel –, actually severally and without coordination asked young Peregrine and dear Jules why they had not converted their civil union to a marriage under the Act?'

'They didn't.' Sher was without interest in Judith Potecary's activism, but Edmond … well, one never likes to see a friend make at once a fool and a nuisance of himself.

'They did,' sighed Noel, who'd heard all about it, in extravagant colours, from Charles. 'Huzza – bless the man – all but demanded it, and Judith, if not demanding, also instructed them as Huzza had: that it was their duty to Set An Example, I suppose for the Lower Orders, so-called. Sometimes that side of the argument do revert to the sort of attitudes one associates with the most savage of the old gentry, even whilst wrapping themselves in the Red – or rainbow – flag. Got a very dusty answer, too, the both of 'em, I'm told.'

Ben delighted in such stories – and in knowing (and telling) them in far more detail than anyone else. 'My dear boy! They were both treated with the greatest politeness: poor things. Told in so many words that that was all very well for persons who were not persons of title, but it was right out for peers and the heirs of peers, and one must think of the property, after all, and not make a confusion in the muniments.'

Sher, who could easily imagine the look that must have been on Edmond Huskisson's face at that earnest and solicitous response, put his napkin over his face and shook with guilty laughter. He did love Edmond like a brother, but....

'You may well laugh,' said Ben, merrily. 'But you might also consider how one might point the moral and adorn the tale. Everyone's private lives here are public property.... Of course, you do have Rose James.'

Noel nodded. 'We are, carefully, never wholly alone, Sher and I – I mean, in terms of mortal ken, let alone being compassed about with the usual cloud of witnesses in the Scriptural sense.'

Ben carefully did not ask, as he'd have liked to do, if this were solely a prophylactic against gossip, or was also a precaution against giving way to overmastering passion if ever they were alone.

'I make a note,' added the Rector, 'of all our meetings and their duration, and not because I aspire to be the Kilvert de nos jours. And there is no better defence against scandal than curtain-twitching neighbours.'

'I'm tempted,' grinned Sher, 'to say something about Pepys-ing Toms, but I shan't do.'

Ben toasted him with a smile. 'And yet....'

Sher spoke with abrupt directness. 'Everyone still thinks we're shagging.'

'In fairness,' said Noel, equally frank with their discreet friend, 'were it not for our regard for each other's conscience....'

'Oh, my dear young friends! Very few people think you're having a bang. Physically. They suspect – rightly or wrongly, and it's no business of mine – you are shagging like bunnies in your minds. The fact remains,' said he, carefully not looking to see if there were any blushes, 'it is a perennial topic of speculation – and not, I think, of prurient speculation. You must be prepared to go through your lives in this cloud of witnesses, amidst perpetual interest in your lives and loves – and most of it cheering-on the prospect that you do eventually become physical lovers, I may add.

'You are young. You, Rector, are as yet new to the District; you, Sher, little less so. And your – friendship – is yet a fairly new thing. I am old; and, old dog though I am, I have learnt new tricks, the trick of how one's rural neighbours think. I know that whatever you may do, it will be for good, for I know you, and you are good men. But you've a starkish sort of row to hoe in very stony ground, you know, and there'll always be this question, this interested – and I think fond – speculation, so long as you both, ahem, may live. Indeed, until death you depart.'

They'd not revisited the matter in the months remaining to Ben, months to the very last graced with his weekly dinners; and well before those months were told and tolled, Ben's wisdom had been proved and vindicated, for there was always a slight undercurrent of speculation, without salacity, in the community, and a sense that most of their neighbours did hope they should find a purely carnal happiness in one another, so long as no one ever spoke of it and no one did anything in the street to frighten the horses. And there were a few who had the rank and right to pose the question outright, as Ben had foreseen – and had warned them against.

Yes: they'd miss him, terribly, that wise and sly old gentleman with the painter's seeing eye. For he had died at the last, as all men must, found dead by a rambler upon the downs he had so loved, on a green and gilt afternoon of May Day soft with colour, white with mazzard-blossom and softly gold with beech and oak-catkins. His brush had been in his hand, a hand sure to the last: as attested by the just completed canvas on the easel before him. The duke had replied, to some conventional fool who'd said the old boy had had 'a good, long innings', that he, Charles, had been hoping for a ton, and indeed, with luck, 'Nelson', 111, not out; that it had not been so, the duke thought and said, was so damned unfair as to attach a suspicion of spot-fixin' to the blasted result, damn it all.

Yet he had left them his wisdom and his counsel in what time Noel and Sher had had his friendship; and he had left them something more, as well, as they learnt when the solicitor came down. It was a canvas (for all that Sir Bennett Salmon RA had preferred to paint rather landscapes than portraits), a 'conversation piece', with three figures in the candlelight 'round a table after dinner: in the background chiaroscuro, Ben himself, a self-portrait which caught, in the candle's light, the twinkle in his eye, luxuriating over port and pippins; and in the foreground, far more distinctly, his guests, Sher and Noel, Sher a trifle nearer the viewer's plane: Sher and Noel, like clothed, modern Sistine Ignudi, only more beautiful yet, as in life they truly were. Sly to the last, Ben had given it a title that adverted the viewer to the three Abrahamic faiths – there represented as ranked in order of historic foundation, background to foreground – breaking bread in peace and amity; and, as such, it hangs, on loan, in the Crucis Village Hall. Yet Rector and schoolmaster, duke and dairy farmer, publican and ploughman, Lew Salmon and Gwen Maguire and Dr Emily and the Headmaster and that young fool Silverthorne down the shop, all know it to be what it is, a gift of a portrait of two young men who might never do more than shake hands, but who were wholly in love with one another only a little less than they loved God and their honour.

Loved they not honour more.... What matters in country districts isn't what is said, it is what is thought and known without saying; what matters in country districts isn't what is said, it is what is left carefully unsaid.

Credo

Memorable sermons – the sort of sermons which are given individual names, are reprinted and remembered and known to thousands – are commonly thought the province of American Protestantism: Jonathan Edwards' sermons; those of a Billy Graham. Yet this is not so. The 'Fire Sermon' is of course not Christian, let alone Protestant; Islam is replete with famous khutbahs; S Bernard called literal Crusades into being, and Wulfstan's Sermon of the Wolf to the English resonates in history yet: and Bernard of Clairvaux and Archbishop Wulfstan were, of course, Roman Catholics in an age before the Reformation was even conceived of. In the Counter-Reformation, Fr Piotr Skarga SJ rebuked the nobility of Poland in a sermon that is to Polish history what Patrick Henry's speeches are to American.

And the C of E, even the comfortable old C of E, may claim the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes which Eliot quarried for poetry even as he had quarried the Buddha's 'Fire Sermon', and the poetry in sermons that was Donne's portion and a heritage of English letters for all time.

Above all, naturally, there is the Sermon on the Mount; and there is Paul's Areopagus sermon, in the formative years of the Faith.

Of all those whom one might not expect to give out a sermon after the order of Wesley or Chrysostom or Gregory Nazianzen, Noel Paddick was surely towards the top of the list – although his parishioners were beginning to come 'round to the realisation which his ecclesiastical superiors had long since reached, which was wholly to the contrary. If, in Andrewes' phrase, 'Christ is no wildcat' – a proposition with which the Anglican Communion might be thought rather too much to agree, content to regard God as a placid, sleeping tabby upon the hearth, to be stroked after tea and given a string to play with – then certainly no one in the Woolfonts, save perhaps Mr Viney, the duke, the other churchwardens, The Lads, and Noel's curate, had until recently thought of Fr Paddick as a tiger of wrath, or a wolf to the English. As a puppy, perhaps, but no wolf, although he was just that; as a British Shorthair, a Jovial Feline asking hopefully for a cheeseburger (with chips, please), and not the sleek and panther-like thing he was.

No one was even yet quite prepared for what came to be called 'The Northern Soul Sermon', preached upon what might at first have seemed an uninspiring text, and upon the day after Crispin's funeral.

'Today,' said Fr Paddick, musingly, 'this Second Sunday after Trinity, we are called to mind and hearken: to mind and to hearken not least to one of the Lessons appointed at Evensong, the story of Ruth.

'Ruth was a woman of Moab, who had married into a Jewish family living in Moab during a famine in Israel. When the family returned to Israel, she and her sister-in-law went with them to the frontier between Moab and Israel.

'Her mother-in-law, Naomi, was widowed. Then Ruth and her sister-in-law Orpah had been widowed, also in the land of Moab. The family which returned to Israel, or set out to do, was a family of widows.'

Charles had made certain that, mourning or no, the Family were on Church Parade. Even Connie.

'At the frontier between Israel and Moab, Naomi urged her daughters-in-law to return to Moab, to their own fathers' families, who could care for them and support them. She was now a widow, she reminded them, unlikely to remarry and unlikely to bear further children to support them all in their age. For their own good, she urged them, they should go back into Moab, with their own people.

'After all, said Naomi, they had dealt fairly with her and with those now dead, and kindlily: and she asked that the Lord bless them for it. They were yet young; they could marry again, and have peace and prosperity in their own land amongst their own people, and be honoured and cared for as they deserved.

'They mustn't, she told them, sacrifice their own futures simply for her sake; they had already gone above and beyond their duties under the Law, and God, surely, should reward them for that.

'Orpah listened and obeyed: the word of her mother-in-law, even though she and Orpah were now widowed alike, was as law to her. This was a very creditable thing, and meritorious in her. And so, representing the Law, Orpah embraced Naomi one last time, and went her way back to her people.'

It was, after all, the day after Crispin's burial; and there were lessons to be underscored: as Fr Paddick was now to underscore them.

'There is more in this world than law: for which God be praised and magnified. The last thing any of us wish to have given to us is justice, our strict deserts. For who then shall survive?

'Orpah was blessed, for she was obedient to the Law, and gave more than was required by strict legality.

'And what of Ruth?

'Well, what says the Epistle of this Sunday? Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?; and, this is his commandment, That we should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us commandment. And he that keepeth his commandments dwelleth in him, and he in him: that is the Epistle. And what does the Gospel tell us this day? That a great man prepared a feast, and – a lot of ingrates they must have been – those who had accepted his invitation, when called to dinner, all declined. As is sometimes the case with great men –' no one mentioned the duke, of course, but they all thought of him at once – 'he wasn't having that, and got a trifle tetchy. And he rang for his butler, and he said to him … what? He said, Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind. And the servant said, Lord, it is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room. And the Lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled – perhaps he didn't wish to offend the cook, who had worked very hard.

'Which brings us back to Ruth. Law – justice – had bade Orpah to accept her mother-in-law's words, and turn back, and go home to Moab. But – thank God for his goodness! – there is more than law in this world. There is equity. There is mercy. There is loving-kindness, as we translate the Hebrew: chesed.

'That is the difference between contract, in which both parties agree to terms, for mutual advantage, with a trade of benefits and penalties; and covenant. In this of all districts, full as it is of men and women who have served in HM Forces, in this of all counties, I need not labour the nature of a Covenant.

'This is the difference between the Laws of Cricket, and the Spirit of Cricket; between rules-lawyering … and sportsmanship, and what is and is not cricket.

'Ruth did not stand, as Orpah did, for Law. She represented, she was given the Grace to represent, chesed; and equity, and mercy, and the loving-kindness of covenant, in its mutuality and mutual sacrifice.

'Behold, thy sister-in-law is gone back unto her people, and unto her gods: return thou after thy sister-in-law. And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.

'That is the story of Ruth. A great deal of tosh has been talked of it, which I shan't trouble us with. And its importance is not least in this, that Ruth, who married Boaz in Israel, became thereby the grandmother of Jesse, who was the father of King David. She figures, that is to say, in the ancestry of the House of David, to which House both S Joseph and the Blessed Virgin belonged.

'Yet if we read it, as we ought, with the Epistle and the Gospel of the day, we see it plain. The Creator – as Maimonides rightly said – embodies chesed. He is righteous because, having given the Law, he gives also a covenant of loving-kindness, and grants equity, and shows mercy to the weak. And we are called to do the same, by covenant.

'As today's Collect reminds us, we must fear – venerate, reverence – as well as love the Lord; and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. But it is only a beginning. For with that, follows more than law and strict justice: there follows also mercy, covenant, chesed.'

It had been unfair to suggest that Fr Paddick's sermon had, thus far, been over anyone's head, or without interest; it had certainly been topical enough in light of the recent funeral; but it had not made most of them sit up in the pews … until now.

'The relation of Ruth to Naomi is the relation we are called to have with God, as individuals and as his Church. It is a symbol we do well to heed.'

The last but one major parish event, prior to Crispin's homecoming and death, had been concerned with preliminary planning for the fête and for the Village Concert, with all which these things implied, not least as to music.

'We dread the fire, and rightly. We are brands snatched from the burning. True. But there is another fire: the Refiner's fire, which only what is dross in us need fear: the fire and the rose, the knot of flame, the flames of the Holy Ghost on Pentecost, Whitsun, the tongues of fire; the flame and the rose that Eliot saw. We are redeemed from fire by – yes. Fire.

'What does Ruth say to Naomi, that we must say to God? She says, I ain't goin' nowhere, unless I go with you –'

Mr Kellow sat up with a jerk; then again, Mr Kellow, joint first and pegging level with the duke, was the best versed in Northern Soul in all the three parishes.

'– and that is what we must say to God, gladly, eagerly, in surrender and joyful surrender. Tomorrow's promised to no one, after all: this night may our souls be required of us. We must say to God that we will go at his bidding anywhere on the map, Cricklade to Chicago. We must acknowledge – what? That he is the fire, and we are ready to burn, willing to burn: hearts afire, or candles that cannot be put out, even as were Latimer and Ridley. He is the fire and the flame, the Refiner's fire, and we are ready to burn, like the bush which burned and was not consumed when he spoke to Moses. Tomorrow is promised to no one: but our love must be promised to God, as his is to us.

'Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: I ain't goin' nowhere, unless I go with you. That is our covenant with God, through Christ, Our Lord, as prefigured for us by the woman of Moab who was brought into the people of Israel and begat in generations David the King and through his line, Our Lord himself in his incarnate Person.'

Mr Kellow was by now not the only congregant forcing himself not to hum the old tracks.

'Our love for God must not be a … tainted love. We must not refuse to attend the feast to which we have sent acceptances; we must feed and care for the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind – we, ourselves, as Christians, individually and as the Church, not some government department. We ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? When we see need, what must we do but to respond, saying, I'm on my way?'

Mr Kellow remembered the 'three before eight' perfectly.

'We must be ready: tomorrow's promised to no one, but we must remain caring, we must burn with God's love, long after tonight is over. We must open the door to our hearts – he stands at the door, and knocks – and if we and God are to say to one another, in chesed, as a covenant such as that which Ruth made with Naomi and, through that, with the God of Israel, Do I love you (indeed I do) – and how sweet it is to be loved by God – , then we must give loving-kindness to our brethren, to the poor and the injured, to the stranger from Moab – and we, being each of us poor and injured, impoverished and lamed by sin, must accept graciously and with – God's – Grace the loving-kindness we are offered and stand in want of.'

Most of those in the three parishes had become exposed to Northern Soul only by the duke's eccentric enthusiasms, and then – once he had The Lads down, and Noel not least – through the occasional benefit performance by The Fonts; but Mr Kellow, apprenticing in Bilston when young, had known that scene well, down the Catacombs.

'Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren; we are to keep his commandments, and how? By feeding the poor; by making covenant with the widow for her support; by chesed and by caritas, agape. It is love, after all, which keeps lifting us, higher and higher. By doing mercy and equity as well as justice. There must be chesed with brit: even as faith without works, action, expression, must be a dead thing. There must be a covenant underpinned not by advantage and offer and counter-offer, do ut des, but by chesed, a covenant of loving-kindness, HaBrit v'HaChesed, as exemplified for us by Ruth and Naomi. We must keep faith with one another and with God, in such a covenant. For we must, whether as the Church by law Established or as persecuted Christians in the catacombs, always, always … Keep The Faith.'

It was all Mr Kellow could do to stop the Pavlovian response of a raised fist.

*****

'No, damn it all,' said the duke. 'A perfectly simple stone in the churchyard – none of this damned granite or marble – no one reads Dearmer any longer, it's appallin' – and a proper, restrained memorial in the church itself. Damn me, Chickmarsh stone's the best stone in the country, ain't it? May as well use it, damn it all. As for the rest, in terms of a legacy to the poor of the parish, I am taking care of that.'

Charles – naturally – had his way, supported by the children and not opposed by Connie, who really quite wished to forget the whole thing. And the monumental mason – and, weighing at twenty stone three of thews and muscles, Mr Bob Tower the younger was assuredly that, in all senses – followed His Grace's preferences (which he quite agreed with, knowing Crispin of old).

Nor had it escaped the duke's sardonic and sour attention that his brother had died on the ancient ferial date, the dies religiosus, of the Quinquatrus Minusculae, a festival of Minervan wisdom, and, as the ides, the Feast of Jove, and just after – June being June – the Matralia, which the Romans had observed as a standing reminder for the matrons to look after orphaned nieces and nephews: which was an irony, if you liked.

Hic Jacet

Crispin Leonard George Valentine Gilbert Fitzjames-Holles-Clare-Malet

Dominvs

Mag: Dilton:

N. VII ante diem Kalendas Octobris MCMLXIV

Ob: Idvs Ivnias MMXV

Domine, refvgivm

And in the church itself, a similar remembrance:

Orate pro Anima

Crispin Leonard George Valentine Gilbert Fitzjames-Holles-Clare-Malet

Master of Dilton

qvi obiit Idvs Ivnias MMXV

late of this parish

It is a holy & wholesome thought to pray for ye dead

*****

'Ah. Noel. Do sit down. And forgive my having you in with all this: I do know there's a good deal going on. But of course I couldn't put this off, much as I should have wished to do: it is that time, you know.

'How are you finding the Woolfonts, now they've been shaken up in the time since you arrived?'

'Well,' smiled Noel upon his Bishop, 'Your Lordship will appreciate that I can't very well compare them to what they were before I arrived.'

'No, you couldn't, could you.' Bishop Chubb smiled back, with a smile which suggested he was deprecating his own folly in posing the question on that ground. (He had long since given over attempting to have Fr Paddick address him simply as 'Bishop', let alone as 'Stephen'.) 'Young Paul Campion, I trust – and hear – is giving great satisfaction?'

'He's a blessing.'

'Excellent.' The Bishop sighed. 'Noel.... You managed to reconcile me to Charles Taunton, and contrariwise. That was a blessing, if you like. All the same – well. His paths and mine have not much lain together. The Archdeacon … well, Archdeacon Philips went through Hawtreys, Eton, and Oxford with Charles, but, in a sense, knows him too well, and thus less well than do I. I'm not asking you to violate confidences, I hasten to add, or to act as a spy, and I know quite well I'd get a very dusty answer of you if I did do. The fact remains, you know him as well as anyone, save, perhaps, Mr Viney.

'And he's certainly made a number of changes in the Woolfonts, which, so far as they affect your benefice, are legitimately my business – and that of the Diocesan Mission and Pastoral Committee.'

Noel's brow cleared. 'Ah.'

'Indeed, Ah. I don't pretend to know Charles as well as I might: too many lost years, and all water under the bridge in any case. And – the man seems to have no other setting than "full speed ahead, never mind merely full ahead". There are times he's rather … American. As witness this planning application business, and now the actual building –.'

'I think,' said Noel, carefully, 'Your Lordship must consider his position. Which, so far as I know it from what he has said, not in confidence, and from my own observations, also not in confidence, is this: that, in the case of getting Cllr Gates out of a tight spot, he felt it necessary to move before the General Election. And, I strongly suspect –,' Noel and his Bishop exchanged matching, faint smiles – 'to provide against any appeal against the application to the DCLG, whether before or after the General Election.'

'Nobbled them,' murmured the Rt Revd Stephen Chubb.

Noel passed the remark in discreet silence. 'As to all his other projects for the good and the benefit of the community – and you must admit that they are – he also has reason.'

The Bishop interrupted Fr Paddick there, politely but implacably. 'Noel, let us be frank. I admit Charles has done a power of good. My concern is necessarily limited, formally, to its effects on your numbers, and the size and population of the benefice; actually, I am concerned equally for you, for Fr Campion, for your flock, and indeed for Charles, who, surely, is pushing himself rather too hard and trying himself rather too high? Especially in this hour, with his grief yet raw. I've had a peptic ulcer, and I assure you, Charles wants not to give himself one.

'When Mary and I first came here, I was warned – by Dean Blanchard, most notably – that I was to set my watch back by several decades when I went into the Woolfonts; and experience, personal experience, justified that warning to me. And, no, I'm not speaking of liturgical style or AEO or any of that. In distinctly secular terms, the Woolfonts were, and have remained – apparently to the satisfaction not only of Charles, whose preferences this rather reflects, but of all the inhabitants –, a sort of survivor of an England, indeed very specifically and particularly of a part of the West Country, that was, long since, and is no more – and in some ways, although it's not a pastiche, never was.'

'Precisely: as I was telling Your Lordship.'

The Bishop blushed, faintly. 'And I broke in. I'm sorry; do go on.'

'My Lord, there's no apology wanted.'

'Go on all the same, my dear Noel.'

'Very well. What we must consider, My Lord, is this. From the Great War to the 1970s, there was no duke at Wolfdown. The Trustees, and one cannot fault them for it, necessarily kept the Estate ticking over, and as far unchanged as possible.

'Then Charles' father succeeded, and whether you regard the interim period as a dormancy or an abeyance, it was called out, and in the Old Brigadier's favour. What Charles' father might have done as the times changed, I don't know, and I doubt even Charles does. He was certainly, on the one hand, both His Grace and the Old Brigadier; on the other, he was a brigadier on the Retired List who had attained to that rank by being innovative and notably clever, by all accounts, embracing the new and helping to modernise the Forces.

'Unfortunately, as Your Lordship is aware, his last years were clouded by dementia and old age, and for – from one perspective only – rather too long.'

'Yes; and Charles Taunton – well, Templecombe, then – being absent Somewhere Overseas, Crispin took charge, if you can call what he did … well. I'm interrupting again, and I'm speaking ill of the newly dead; and I mustn't do either. Go on.'

'Lord Crispin was, yes, running the Estate in Charles' absence. On Charles' return.... If one puts oneself in his position, it does make sense. Until the past week or so, there was at least a likelihood that Crispin should succeed his brother. Charles knew that perfectly well. The Trustees had left things in suspended animation; then his father had not had the opportunity to do all he might have done or wished to do; and, with the risk that rather Crispin than Rupert might succeed at any moment, if Charles were run over by a lorry or what have you....'

The Bishop blinked, as one seeing sudden light; and then nodded. 'Charles, then, even against his own inclinations, resolved so to effect changes and modernisations, and swiftly, that neither the Estates and the villagers, nor Rupert, could be much harmed if he died and Crispin succeeded him. To, speaking frankly, put it beyond Crispin's power to cock things up.'

'That is how it seems to me, My Lord. Charles is a man of considerable energy, yes: by temperament. But change is not grateful to him; and speed is not always what he desires – well, if he's not driving or riding or hunting or playing polo, at any rate. He is after all both an angler, and a former Int Corps officer: he may chafe at the necessity, but he understands and is willing to employ exquisite patience when it serves his ends. I suspect that, once he has finished putting his current dispositions through,