News from Norfolk

“What — what is it, exactly?” asked Pamela, her voice suddenly hoarse. Having glimpsed the thing on the floor, she recoiled from it. Yet at the same time, she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” replied Liam, slightly crouched, hands on his thighs, still struggling to catch his breath. “It’s fu —” 

And then there was a pause, although whether this was because Liam was still gasping — or, possibly, because he suddenly remembered that he was standing in the sacristy of the church, hence rapidly self-censored — remains unclear. 

“It’s — it’s flipping, flipping heavy!”

“It’s also quite remarkably dusty.” This was Magnus. Magnus, at any rate, was his name, although everyone in the village called him the Colonel behind his back. 

On that particular October morning, Magnus happened to be wearing a pinafore, and carrying a dusting-cloth. It was this, perhaps, rather than his habit of taking charge of problematic situations, that caused him to bend down. Using the cloth, carefully and methodically, he cleared away thick cobwebs from the item at their feet. 

From the door to the steps leading up to the room over the chancel, there came a draught of cold, damp air, and with it a musty smell, redolent of unused places, darkness and very great age. 

Pamela shivered. With bony hands she drew her mauve cardigan more tightly around her, and pushed an errant strand of grey hair back into her untidy bun. Turning, she closed the door perhaps more emphatically than she had intended. “That’s better,” she said to no one in particular, as if to justify the loud noise, although in truth her action had made very little difference, at least as far as the musty smell was concerned.

The men, meanwhile, were still regarding the object on the ground. Now that Magnus had scraped away the largest and most insistently sticky of the cobwebs, the large block of stone was, at least, a little easier to examine. 

“Is it a sort of water-spout?” hazarded Liam. “Look, you can see it has a mouth, there. Well, a sort of a mouth. But what’s that?”

“It’s a horrid old thing!” pronounced Pamela, fastidiously. She grimaced. “Why did you bring it all the way down from the tower? You’ll only have to take it back up again.”

Magnus, in contrast, was transparently delighted at the discovery. The history of his parish church was almost his favourite thing about it. Ignoring Pamela, as he so often did, he thumped Liam on the back, causing the much younger man to catch his breath. “By Jove, you’re right, you know. It’s a gargoyle! Well done for spotting it up there, Liam. Good lad!” 

Liam, though, was still face-to-face with the thing on the floor, his strangely innocent-looking eyes exploring every inch of its surface, trying to figure it all out. “What is it, though? I mean, what’s it supposed to be?”

“Is it a lion?” suggested Magnus, relishing the prospect of many long happy hours researching the iconography of lions in the churches of medieval East Anglia. “It looks a bit like a lion.”

“It does, but I was wondering about a Green Man,” replied Liam. “Could it be a Green Man, like the ones down in the nave?”

“It’s not very green, though, is it?” objected Magnus, reasonably. Magnus didn’t want to discourage Liam, whom he very much liked — he was also, it must be said, pleasantly surprised that Liam had even heard of Green Man carvings — but at the same time, he was certain that Liam was wrong. “Surely it needs leaves and that sort of thing to be a Green Man. I don’t see any leaves. Those wavy things there, and there — they can’t be leaves. Are you sure it isn’t a lion?”

“It’s a man.” Pamela, who had backed into a corner, was still glaring at the thing on the floor. “It’s a man with a moustache. Look, that’s a moustache, and those are eyebrows. Big wavy eyebrows. I don’t like it. There’s something not right about it. And it stinks, too. Argh, it’s too musty in here for me. Sorry, I’m leaving!” 

And with that, the elderly woman pushed past them both and marched, her cardigan pulled around her narrow shoulders, her hard little footsteps angrily staccato, all the long way back to the parish office, right at the far end of the nave, under the west tower. The two men, standing in the sacristy, listening, eventually heard the door to the office slam closed, very loudly, behind her. 

The sound echoed all around the silent church, reverberating, bouncing off the old stonework of the nave and echoing through the vaulting of the chancel, for quite a long while afterwards.

***

The church didn’t have a rector. It hadn’t had a rector for more than three years. It was, in other words, in what people like Hector termed “an Interregnum”. So long, in fact, had it been in an Interregnum, that even people who weren’t at all like Hector found that the word “Interregnum” now tripped quite casually off the tongue, as if it were a central and consistent feature of the life of the parish — which, in a way, it now very much was. 

Only recently, Liam had confided to Pamela that, having put up with these years years of the Interregnum, he’d almost forgotten that it was normal for churches to have actual rectors, rather than retired local clergy or random visiting clergy, to carry out the tasks that rectors normally assume — at which point Pamela agreed, sotto voce, in a cheerfully conspiratorial tone, that in some ways, managing the parish office was actually much easier when there wasn’t a rector to interfere with the smooth running things, so that it was an ill wind that blows no good, at which she herself laughed, perhaps a little too loudly. Magnus, in turn, had a history of finding the rectors in his home parish quite annoying, so had long since adopted a fatalistic indifference towards the arrival of any new incumbent, as he was only going to fall out with them anyway. 

As for Hector, it was an open secret in the parish that he quite enjoyed the Interregnum, for all sorts of reasons, and was in no hurry to welcome a new incumbent. 

Hector, as he’d have told you within a few minutes if you’d ever had the chance to meet him, was the grandson, albeit in the maternal line, of an archbishop of Canterbury. Despite having enjoyed a reasonably successful career selling luxury goods of various types in the Far East, from which he had retired a decade or two before, Hector nonetheless clearly felt himself far better suited to the role of a minor prince of the church, a frustrated desire more or less satisfied by the happy accident of serving as acting head of the PCC during what seemed, by now, a potentially infinite Interregnum. 

In this, Hector had little competition. His fellow churchwarden was a meek little woman, a recent incomer, strongly committed to the correct arrangement of flowers, yet with little evident hinterland. The PCC, now that Magnus had yet again resigned from it, was staffed exclusively with people who wished to avoid legal trouble, minimise discussion, and to have their meetings finish by 7 pm sharp. 

So it was with Hector, now, that the great decisions of the parish lay, if only because there was no one else willing to take them. 

Should the parish hold that popular and indeed lucrative monthly breakfast in the back of the nave, even though it made the church stink of sausages for many weeks afterward? Should they keep the churchyard primly manicured, or allow it to become a haven for wildlife, simply ignoring the fact that at least a few local families would slyly turn up to strim their own patches when no one was looking, giving the overall scene a patchy, faintly moth-eaten effect? 

Also what, if anything, should the PCC do about the long-standing problems with the chancel, the vaulted stone ceiling of which continued to moult vast quantities of limewash, and sometimes mortar, too, into the floor beneath, and indeed not infrequently onto the altar itself?

This last point explains, by the way, why Liam had been sent up into the little room over the chancel in the first place, which is where he had found the gargoyle. There was a theory that some longstanding ingress of rainwater was responsible for the falling limewash. Recent, the diocesan architect had queried whether the structure of the vault itself was actually being weakened by some resulting failure of the mortar. 

When Hector had sent Liam up to check the room that morning  — it had rained heavily in the night — Liam had found no dripping water. He had, however, finally decided to carry down the block of stone that had been puzzling him for months. 

Liam knew that the Colonel, whom he liked and respected, would be cleaning the chancel that day. He felt that the Colonel might wish to see the stone object, and might perhaps be able to tell him more about it. This was the reason why he had man-handled the heavy stone block all the way down the steep, narrow, winding stone stairs. Liam had always been impulsive, but these days his impulsiveness ran, at least most of the time, in similarly wholesome, constructive, positive channels.

Hector found Liam mildly unsettling. He was not, as he might have put it himself, accustomed to dealing with people from Liam’s sort of background. Also, he didn’t like the fact that Liam so obviously admired the Colonel, whilst appearing indifferent to Hector’s own, clearly far greater significance. 

Finally, Hector was alarmed by Liam’s rather innocent, unfiltered, vociferous, genuine love of God.  

Strange to say, given the amount of time and attention which he now devoted to the affairs of the church, Hector had never paused to consider whether or not he believed in God. The question had simply never arisen. It was as if, somehow, the Church of England were a club for which he had been put up at the moment of his birth. Hector’s grandfather, let us recall, had been archbishop of Canterbury! Surely that was enough? 

***

Magnus and Liam decided, after some further discussion, that the gargoyle, if that was what it was, would remain in the sacristy until someone with the requisite authority determined what to do about it. 

At that point Liam, who was the sexton, departed to carry on with what he he ought to have been doing, which was preparing the church for a funeral that afternoon. Meanwhile Magnus, still sporting a pinafore over his tattersall shirt and worn cords, and weilding a dusting cloth, resumed his tidying tasks. 

Magnus was not, in fact, the sacristan, as the church, which had within living memory been very Anglo-Catholic, still titled the role. That honour belonged to Magnus’ great friend and long-time neighbour, Petronella Stitchwort. A decade or so earlier, however, Petronella had departed on a fortnight’s holiday in Bangor, where her sister lived, and had asked Magnus to deputise for her, loaning him her pinafore and duster. Now, even though the duster had long since worn out and even the pinafore required replacement, Magnus had never stopped deputising. It passed the time, especially after his late wife’s death. 

So it was, then, that once a week, rain or shine, Magnus carried out all the required sacristy tasks: topping up the little Tupperware container of wafers for Sunday communion, making sure that no one had helped themselves to the bottle of sickly-sweet communion wine, and of course polishing the faintly hideous late Victorian chalice until it positively shone. As a former military man, he was good at polishing things, and he knew it. 

Magnus’ least favourite task was filling the plastic “candles” with lamp oil. The oil smelled foul, the tops of the “candles” never fit properly, and he invariably ended up with lamp oil all over his big, clumsy, rather arthritic hands. 

Much better was the main project, which involved hoovering the chancel, dusting the stalls — the church had a fine set of late medieval misericords, poached from some neighbouring parish by an Anglo-Catholic incumbent on the eve of the Great War, and set into the rather plain chancel, two rows on either side, giving the place the comfortingly familiar air of a tiny Oxbridge college chapel — and, of course, sweeping up all the debris that had fallen down from the chancel ceiling. 

Magnus, who could boast no previous experience of housework — even when his wife had still been alive, there had been a woman from the village who had come in to “do” for them — found this process curiously soothing. He was, by nature, a methodical man, who enjoyed going through a set of tasks in the right sequence, doing them all well. This process, somehow, conferred order on a chaotic world. 

“The trivial round, the common task, will furnish all we ought to ask …” This is what Magnus hummed to himself as he polished amid a fragrant haze of Wood Silk, vaguely remembering a hymn from his school days, which he had enjoyed. 

Magnus was not entirely sure he believed in God. His military career had provided him with plentiful evidences of the bleakness of the human condition, which his not-entirely-happy marriage had only served to confirm. Still, he loved his school, his regiment, and his village. Here in the chancel, alone, patiently hoovering fallen limewash from the strip of sickly blue-green carpet that dressed the steps leading up to the altar, he felt not only useful, but also very near to all these dear, familiar things. 

Meanwhile in the sacristy — a long, slightly cluttered room tucked away right at the east end of the chancel, behind a stone screen just to the east of the altar — the gargoyle lay on the carpeted floor, next to some rarely-used high baroque brass candlesticks brought back from a holiday in Majorca by some long-dead parishioner, a spare brush for the hoover and a long-abandoned umbrella that had come to rest there an unknown number of decades previously. The gargoyle’s huge, bulbous eyes gazed up sightlessly at the chancel ceiling. What had once been its mouth gaped. The cool air of a mid October morning played, for the first time in many years, across its blunt, almost brutal features. Unseen, something was changing. 

***

“Whose funeral is it?” Liam was sprawled comfortably on a chair in the parish office, a mug of tea in front of him, spilling Jaffa cake crumbs onto the floor.

Pamela’s parish office, housed beneath the huge west tower, was a little oasis of gemütlichcosiness amid the cold, lofty, variously medieval grandeur of the rest of the church. This explained why Liam and others so often gravitated towards it. Pamela’s spikiness notwithstanding, there was something cosy and maternal about this space she had created. 

The office, being small, was rather cluttered. It contained many filing cabinets, the massive old chest of drawers in which vestments were stored, registers and ledgers, and a vast desk, surrounded by a penumbra of cheap plastic office chairs. On the desk sat a computer with a very large screen, a tin full of biscuits, and also photos of Pamela’s grandchildren. The walls, only recently repainted in a sunny yellow, were covered with charts that afforded Pamela total oversight of the day-to-day life of the church: everything from future christenings, weddings and funerals to the rota for the flowers, over which there was constant and apparently irreconcilable low-level bickering. 

On the wall, overlooking all of this, was a framed photograph of HM The King — although below it, propped on a case of communion wine, there was also visible a framed photograph of the late Queen, old and very much faded, which no one had yet felt quite ready to put away. 

Magnus, who had popped into the office to collect more communion wafers, paused, curious as to the answer to Liam’s question. 

Unable to remember the name, Pamela picked up one of the ledgers. “It’s an older gentleman. Not local. Well, he has links with the village, apparently —” And then with that, she read out a name. Magnus and Liam, though, both shook their heads.

“Sorry, never heard of him,” said Magnus. He liked to think that his family had presided over the village since the dawn of time, although in truth, Pagets (that was the name of his house) and its accompanying land had only come to his grandfather through andistant and also slightly discreditable cousin, about whom very little was generally said in family circles. 

Pamela and Magnus looked at Liam, who shook his head. “No idea,” he admitted.

“Well, that’s who he is, anyway,” pronounced Pamela, decisively, shutting the ledger again, as if its abrupt closure somehow settled matters. “Plenty of people coming along, too, to judge from the calls about whether there’s anywhere to park.” Pamela had only arrived in the village a couple of decades earlier, hence sometimes felt insecure in her lack of local knowledge. “Hector signed it off. Nothing to do with me.” 

 At the mention of Hector’s name, Magnus indulged in a wry smile, although Liam simply nodded. His guileless quality, however inadvertently, could sometimes feel like a reproach. “Well, hopefully there will be a good crowd.” Liam gulped down the last of his mug of tea.

“Terrible church, this, for funerals,” opined Pamela, who was enjoying the company, and wished to prolong the little gathering. “It’s just so big. Without a good crowd, people just rattle around, don’t they? If it’s only a few dozen it ends up looking meagre.”

Liam nodded. “You can tell them all to sit up at the front, but they don’t. They spread themselves around. And the hymns sound rubbish, too! Really thin. Embarrassing, really.” 

 “No use doing it without a good crowd. Might as well use that little chapel at the crematorium and be done with it.” 

For a moment — a long moment — the three of them fell silent, each contemplating whether they, personally, would be able to draw the requisite “good crowd” to merit a full-blown funeral in a large medieval parish church, and if not, what the alternative strategy might possibly be. The effect was a depressing one. 

Magnus, who loathed self-pity, was the first to recover. “Ah well, I’m sure you’ll put on a good show for this poor old chap, whoever he is. Who’s taking the service?” 

Because the parish was in an Interregnum, there was always great curiosity as to who would take any given service, the pool of local talent — retired clergy, for the most part — being at once surprisingly wide, yet also extremely various. 

“It’s Father Crispin,” said Pamela.

At this, there was a collective expression of relief. None of the three of them would have been badly-behaved enough, quite, to criticise other contenders, but with Father Crispin, they all knew the service was in safe hands. 

Father Crispin, far from being a retired clergyman, was the chaplain of a nearby public school. During this endless Interregnum, he had sometimes volunteered to help with services in the parish. 

Pamela liked Father Crispin because he was young and handsome.  Liam liked him because he was genial and never complained about minor glitches the way that some clergy did. Magnus liked him because, although he was so very young, in his tone and manner he somehow evoked the school chaplains of Magnus’ own early days, who had, at a deep level, persisted as his model for how faith in action ought to look, sound and operate. 

The three of them contemplated, with a silent shared gratitude, this happy turn of events. 

And then, satisfied, they got on with their tasks. Pamela was researching, online, new curtains for her guest bedroom. Magnus made his way home, planning to return later in the afternoon, after the funeral, to re-filled those wretched sodding candles. 

As for Liam, he changed into his respectable-looking black suit, which he kept in a cupboard in the parish office, and then once more paced out the distance between the trestles for the coffin at the east end of the nave, and then did so yet again, slightly neurotic about the idea that the trestles might not be set quite straight, as if failing in this would somehow constitute some more profound failure of faith or devotion. 

In the sacristy, meanwhile, a beam of late October sunshine had worked its way through the thick coloured glass of the tall lancet window, and fell right across the face of the gargoyle, still lying there on the carpeted floor — blind and mute and insensate, of course, being made of stone — yet also warm, now, and flushed with the generous daylight, for the first time in many long years. 

***

We shall pass quickly over the funeral. Suffice to say, it was all that such an event ought to have been. 

The flowers from the harvest festival that had taken place the week before remained fresh and vivid, hence fit to be re-used, with a little judicious editing, for the funeral. The trestles could not have been placed more perfectly to support their eventual solemn burden. The organist, Mrs Plott from the Coop, played with great conviction and seriousness, albeit perhaps a bit more largo than entirely suited the capabilities of the congregation during the less familiar hymns, of which there were, thankfully, only a couple. The car park proved more than adequate to the demands placed upon it. The morning’s rain had not rendered it muddy. 

There was also, as had been hoped, a very good crowd. 

The wake was held in the smarter of the village’s two hotels, which had been booked out for that purpose. Once the hearse had purred smoothly away down the hill, the last of the mourners had departed and the church was once more returned to its normal state, a sort of pleased, “at ease” air settled upon those who remained, as happens after a successful drinks party or happy weekend visit. 

“Well, I think that went off rather well, don’t you?” asked Father Crispin, adding his signature to some sort of register in the parish office. “Very good eulogy, I thought.”

“Oh yes, indeed, Father!” exclaimed Pamela, with some warmth. She had, as ever, attended the service, and was still soigné in the smart black dress she kept for such occasions. For it was surely, as she invariably argued, far more practical to do this than to go home for a few hours and then come back again — but it also had to be said that Pamela rather liked funerals, as long as they were done properly. “An excellent eulogy — it really brought him to life. Figuratively speaking, that is!”

She and Father Crispin chortled pleasantly, yet somehow also respectfully, over her little witticism. Liam, meanwhile, had already changed back into his normal working clothes, and was tidying away stray orders of service. 

Father Crispin stepped out into the nave. “Liam? Thank you for doing such a wonderful job with the church, as ever.”

Liam positively glowed with pleasure at this praise, although in truth it was well-deserved. Also, he cannot have known that the tone adopted by Father Crispin was precisely the encouraging one he would have used with some Year 5 boy just returned from a fortnight’s rustication and intent on turning over a new leaf. Liam blushed. “Just doing my job, Father.”

“Oh, but your attention to detail is superb. It makes it so much easier when everything is set out thoughtfully. By the way — I popped into the sacristy earlier. What on earth is that remarkable thing on the floor?”

 “You saw it! I found that in the little room over the chancel, Father, when I was up there the other day, checking for leaks in the roof, and brought it down so that you and the Colonel could have a look at it. The Colonel reckons it’s a gargoyle. What did you think? How old do you think it is, Father? Is it medieval? What should we do with it?”

“It’s certainly medieval, I’d have thought. It may well have come from the old nave — the one that existed before the rebuilding in 1400, or whever it was. It’s an odd looking thing, granted, with those huge bushy eyebrows and the gigantic moustache. It’s got — quite a presence. Is that what I mean? I suppose it is. Don’t tell, will you, but I’ll admit to you that I felt a bit odd, alone in that little room with it. Isn’t that silly of me? What a ridiculous priest I am! It’s right behind the altar, anyway, so I don’t expect it can do much harm, really. I shouldn’t worry about it too much if I were you. Maybe it could do with a splash of holy water, if there’s any trouble. If it plays up, give me a shout. Well, I’ve an RE lesson to take in forty-five minutes, so I’d better tootle. Once again, thanks enormously — you’ve been superb!” 

With a quick farewell to Pamela, Father Crispin departed from the church, his cassock and cape swirling in his wake with all the glossy dark drama of a rook’s wing, waving theatrically, then breaking into a jog as he set off down hill. He was indeed, still, very young, but not really, when it came right down to it, either a ridiculous or indeed an inattentive sort of priest. 

Elsewhere in the church, something was changing — perhaps had already changed — but Liam, who found funerals both exciting and sad, had set his heart on another cup of tea with Pamela, and a chat about the eulogy and what the widow wore and whether there was a bit of tension, somehow, amongst the various step-children, so for the moment, at least, he didn’t think anything more about the sacristy, or what might or might not be happening there. 

***

As acting chairman of the PCC, Hector received the news before anyone else did. He was, as it happened, on his way up to the church anyway. He had no particularly urgent reason to visit the church that afternoon, but all the same, he like to call in several times a week — sometimes several times a day — just to make sure that all was as it should be. 

If Magnus sometimes, just out of Hector’s hearing, made in this context references to dogs pissing on lamp-posts to mark their territory, Hector was none the wiser. 

Pamela, too, did not always seem to welcome Hector’s appearances within the inner sanctum of the parish office. Hector was aware of that. Actually, it was quite hard to miss. For instance, on the frequent occasions where he left his papers and files there on purpose, she always cleared them away, and then pretended she hadn’t seen them, or that she didn’t remember where she had put them. Well, that was out of order, clearly! Yet the only effect of that realisation was to make Hector all the more determined to assert his rights to the desk in the corner, the one usually covered with boxes of old parish notes for recycling, which certainly wasn’t Pamela’s sacred domain, whatever she might think to the contrary. 

On his way up the hill, though — because the church, tall and majestic, was located on a little eminence above, and now at some distance, too, from the centre of the sprawling village — Hector heard the ping of a message on his ‘phone and, as much out of the ingrained habit of his working life as anything else, stopped by the long dark yew hedge to read it. 

The message was from the area dean. 

The parish, at long last, had a new rector. 

Hector caught his breath. He was glad, in a way, that the news had come to him while he wasn’t in company. He required to get the measure of it, to find a way in which to frame it as anything other than a highly personal tragedy, a sort of betrayal on the part of the church he had served so tirelessly these past few years — to make an accommodation with this dark bolt from the blue. Yet he had enough self-knowledge, just, to realise that this would not happen straight away. He needed a moment to think. 

Of course, as acting head of the PCC, Hector had known perfectly well that the candidate in question had recently been offered the role of rector, with the bishop’s blessing. But so had two other chaps (well, one of them was female, but no matter, that wasn’t the problem, really) and they’d both got cold feet and withdrawn from the process. What had happened before might, surely, have been expected to happen again. 

It was hardly a secret that the parish maintained, in all sorts of circles, the reputation for being a tough gig. The last few incumbents had, each of them, lasted only two or three years at most — one had actually given up holy orders immediately afterwards! 

No one was really sure why this was the case. On paper, the parish sounded delightful. It was located in a lovely part of the county, and blessed with inhabitants who, although largely elderly, were also active and, not to put too fine a point on it, mostly rich, too. Indeed, there were many churches in the diocese that very much envied them, not only their handsome, apparently well-maintained church, but also their fully-staffed parish office. They could casually afford things of which other churches could only dream: a catering kitchen at the west end of the nave, a first-rate sound system, recording equipment that could be used for livestreaming services, as well as for weddings and funerals. Nor was there ever any shortage of eager volunteers. 

Yet there was also something about the village — about the parish — that wasn’t entirely happy. It wasn’t easy to explain what this was, exactly, but the evidence of it was plain to see. No incumbent stayed in place for very long. 

It was as if the church, somehow, didn’t really want a rector at all — any more than Hector, Pamela or even Magnus did. But now, again, they had a rector. 

Slowly, painfully, Hector left the shadow of the yew hedge, and started to make his way up the hill again, conscious as he did so of a rising tide of antipathy — of pure self-righteous anger — swelling within him. It only needed some little provocation, now — any little, inconsequential, vaguely vexing thing — to set it all alight. 

***

 Pamela shut down the computer. She tidied her desk. She then checked the surface of Hector’s desk for anything she could tidy away — preferably into the bin, although on this occasion she found nothing but a crisp-packet left by Liam. Poor young lad — she was sure he didn’t eat properly at home. She resolved to bring him a jar of bullace jam that she had made earlier in the summer. But as she prepared to leave, she was distracted from happy contemplation of this act of generosity on her own part. 

Later, Pamela would say that she had a bad feeling as she left the church that evening — a feeling that something was amiss. 

Nor was this purely wisdom after the fact, either. Pamela genuinely did feel out of sorts, and uneasy — although if someone had stopped her on the way out and asked her how she felt, and why she felt that way, she wouldn’t have been able to explain the vague sense of dread that had been hovering about her, intermittently but ineluctably, ever since her visit to the chancel early that morning. 

In truth, Pamela did, sometimes, have intuitions that turned out to be correct. She attributed this to the influence of her mother, who had been born in rural Ireland, believed in fairies and ghosts, and indeed could tell stories about both that would make your hairs of your head stand on end. 

It was not her mother’s fault, or at least not entirely so, that Pamela’s approach to God was a transactional one. Put bluntly, when things were bad, she made many demands upon God, sometimes backed up with vows she knew perfectly well that she was unlikely to keep. The rest of the time, she largely forgot He existed. She was kind and thoughtful, but also too busy, most of the time, to think very far outside the ambit of her own little troubles and dramas. 

All the same, Pamela loved her job in the parish office. It was, in many ways, the best thing about her life. 

Of course she loved her husband, whom she had married when they were both in their teens — almost 50 years ago, now. But he was often ill, invariably bad-tempered, self-centred and tiresome. Her children, all adults now, patronised her furiously unless they wanted something from her — money, free child care, that sort of thing — which she, being soft-hearted, invariably provided. She adored her grandchildren but saw them less often than she would have liked. When she did see them, she thought them rather badly brought up, although she said nothing, because she realised that it was by no means her place to do so. 

The parish office gave her, for the first time in years, something approaching power and authority. It gave her a space that was hers, and hers alone. It gave her a community of people who deferred to her, wished to win her round, who sometimes made a great fuss over her and told her how splendid she was. 

If, then, she feared the advent of a new rector, this was in no small part because she suspected that he would take one look at her advanced age — possibly also the cost of her employment, which was not trivial, even for a wealthy parish — and farm her role out to one or more younger volunteers. And then what? Well, she would sit at home with her husband, bickering, until one or both of them finally got around to dying. It was as simple as that. 

Pamela put on her coat. She picked up her bag. She could spin it out no longer — it was time to go home. She left the parish office, locking the door behind her. 

Turning, she looked up through the weak late afternoon light towards the east end of the church. The Colonel was still about, she knew — he was going to re-fill the candles, he had told her that earlier — and of course Liam was there, too. Liam would lock up the church for the night, as usual. She felt a sudden surge of warmth towards them both — the Colonel, because despite his lordly ways and foul temper, he was indisputably a gentleman, and Liam, because he was so young and somehow unguarded, almost like a child, even though everyone knew his story, which of course was surprising in so many ways. 

Pamela almost, almost said a little prayer for them both. 

As for that gargoyle, though! For just the tiniest fraction of a second, it was as if she smelled once more that horrible smell from the sacristy, earlier that day — that horrible, foetid, gut-churning smell — that rank stench of dark places, graveyards, crypts, death, corruption — heaven only knew what else. What, she found herself wondering, would her old mother have made of that gargoyle? It didn’t bear thinking about.

Unthinkingly, she crossed herself, and stepped out into the fresh clean cold of the autumn evening. 

***

Magnus slipped the key into the lock of the sacristy door. Like all of the church keys, it was a copy of a copy — perhaps, in fact, even more indirectly related to some notional original Ur-key — so that it fit very badly. There was a knack to making it work. It took Magnus a few moments to be able to turn the key. 

Was that the wind outside? The wind had come up that afternoon, after a wet start and then a brief sunny interval. 

There was certainly a rumbling sound somewhere nearby. Yes, it was almost certainly the wind. 

 Magnus pushed the door open. The sacristy, which had no artificial lighting, was darker than the main body of the chancel, even though, as it was only behind a stone screen, both spaces were open to the same vaulted ceiling above. 

At first, Magnus could see nothing — or, rather, he could see something that couldn’t really be right, which was sort of motion within the dark, strangely airless little room. But what was moving? Nothing, self-evidently. He stepped inside, leaving the door open. 

His project, that late afternoon, was to replenish the oil-filled candles that had been used on the altar during the funeral, so that they could be used again first thing on Sunday morning. Filling them that day meant that Magnus would not have to think about them again until next week was, itself, far advanced.

As we have already seen, Magnus didn’t particularly enjoy putting oil into the candles. It was a fiddly job, the oil got all over his hands and, in any event, despite being more of a Prayer Book man than a high churchman, he would somehow have found wax candles more satisfactory. 

Oil candles seemed rather a cheat. They weren’t very traditional, were they? There was something quite Hectorish about them. Still — Magnus had a task to do — a duty to fulfil, and he’d do it. He went to open up the cupboard where the oil was stored. But in doing so, he had to step around the gargoyle. 

The great lumpish thing was still lying there on the patterned carpet, although Magnus must have slightly mis-remembered where Liam had set it down. Or perhaps Liam had moved it a little? Magnus had remembered, somehow, that it was near the candle sticks, not the cupboard with the oil. Not that any of this mattered, particularly. 

Still, as he more or less stepped over the thing, he paused to look at it. It really was a very strange piece of carving. Now that the cobwebs had been cleared away — Liam must have come back and cleaned the thing more thoroughly — the stone was remarkably white, at least for an object that had once presumably been mounted on the outside of the building. The white of the stone was a slightly greyish white, oddly luminous in that dark little space. Its nose was flat and brutish, its cheeks so very swollen, its pupil-less eyes so bulbous and almost troublingly sightless. 

And then there was the strange, intricate, flourish abundance of those thick wavy eyebrows, the thick wavy moustache — and then the mouth worn away to nothingness, as raw and ugly as an actual wound. 

 The greyish pallor of that stony flesh, the bloated features, the weird truncation of the jaw must have reminded Magnus, who had in fact seen active service in the Province, back in the day, of something unpleasant — or perhaps it was the smell in that room — but all of a sudden he felt quite faint, and more than a little nauseous, while a terrible roaring thundered in his ears. 

Holding onto various things along the way, he made his way out into the chancel. Collapsing onto one of the sedilia located just outside the sacristy, he sat for a moment with his head in his hands, breathing deeply, waiting for the roaring sound to stop. He wondered vaguely where, if he actually had to vomit, he should direct his efforts. It was hard, sitting next to an altar, to think of a good place to vomit. 

“You all right, Colonel?” 

Liam, evidently gravely concerned, was running up from the nave. 

“You all right? Do you think you need to lie down?”

“Argh, no, bloody silly of me, it must have been something I ate for lunch — leftover pheasant — felt a bit odd in there, took a bit of a funny turn.” Magnus smiled weakly at Liam, trying to sound brighter than he in fact felt. “It’s a mite airless in there, somehow. Not to worry, lad, I’m right as rain, really. It must have been that pheasant at lunch. Tasted a bit rum. Should have chucked it out, more the fool, me. Just needed to take a breath or two out here.” 

With some effort, Magnus hauled himself up from the seat. “Right, where were we? I was going to refill those candles for Sunday morning.”

“You go home, sir,” said Liam, unthinkingly. “I’ll do the candles. I need to do a few odds and ends here anyway, just to sort things out for Sunday. Put the trestles away, that sort of thing. You go home and I’ll finish up.”

“I’ll not hear a word of that, young man,” insisted Magnus, throwing everything he had into sounding jovial, even though something was still lurching in the pit of his stomach. “Those candles are my responsibility, and I’m bloody well going to fill the sodding things!” And then, more gently, “although it’s obviously very kind of you to offer. Thank you. That’s kind.”

“Well, all right, sir, but if it’s all the same with you, I’m going to finish putting these odds and sods away while you’ve got the door unlocked.” 

Liam had clearly decided that he was not going to leave the Colonel’s side until he was finished. Magnus understood this. As this was precisely what he himself would have done, had he been in Liam’s position, he couldn’t find it in his heart to do anything other than accept it. Or perhaps he simply didn’t want to be in the sacristy alone. 

Taking a deep breath of the relatively fresh air in the main part of the chancel, Magnus once more went back into the sacristy. He realised, thenm that he must have been feeling pretty ropey when he’d first entered the little room, as the gargoyle was, very clearly, not in front of the cupboard where the oil was stored — it was over near those awful high baroque candlesticks. Well, that was a relief, at least. 

Magnus extracted the oil from the cupboard and approached the candlesticks, which held the appalling oil candles — four of them — which he would now need to re-fill. 

“Did you notice it?” exclaimed Liam, brightly, popping his head round the door. 

“You moved it back?”

“Moved what?” Liam looked puzzled.

“The gargoyle. You moved it back over here.”

“I ain’t moved it since I brought it down, Colonel,” said Liam, in a tone of such immaculate innocence that Magnus believed him entirely. “I ain’t touched it. No, I meant the altar. Did you notice?”

“Notice what?”

“The plaster. There ain’t any of it come down during the funeral. Funny, ain’t it? Old Mrs Plott was banging out the hymns like anything — they even had “All People That on Earth Do Dwell”, you know that one always makes the pews vibrate, those low notes always bring down great chunks of the limewash, sometimes the plaster too — but there’s not a thing come down. Not even the tiniest little flake.” Doubt suddenly entered Liam’s face. “You didn’t sweep it away, did you?”

“No, not since this morning.” Magnus was pouring the oil into the first of the four candles, conscious that his hands were not only cold, but also very unsteady. 

“Well, there’s a first for everything, I guess. It’s strange, though.” Liam vanished again, back into the chancel. 

Looking up at the lancet windows, Magnus could see that the light outside was starting to fail. Certainly, it was increasingly dark in the sacristy. As he had sometimes done before when he was in a tough spot, he imagined to himself what he would do when all this was done, when he was back at home, in his own kitchen, far away from the church, which seemed, at that moment, far less of a sanctuary than it usually did. 

Perhaps he would have a medicinal glass of brandy. Perhaps there would be something on the telly, something light-hearted that would take his mind off all of this. At worse, he’s watch old Dad’s Army episodes — quite a few of them.

Fortified by these pleasant thoughts, Magnus had got as far as filling the third candle when he heard a voice out in the nave. He grimaced when he realised that the voice belonged to Hector, whom, as we have seen, he heartily disliked. 

Hector was, characteristically, regaling Liam with officious advice about how to put away the trestles, remove the sound equipment — not that the church remotely needed sound equipment, but Hector had at one point thought it ought to have sound equipment, so it did — and replace the desks for the choir. Hector sounded irritable. Listening to him, Magnus was aware that he, too, was growing more irritable by the moment — so much so that he spilled a great slick of lamp oil down the front of his pinafore, and  then, before he could stop it, onto his fawn-coloured corduroy trousers. Magnus, as befits a former soldier, swore loudly and lavishly at this. 

The result was that Hector, pompous and officious as usual, peered into the sacristy, then entered the little room. 

“Oh, are you still here, then? Also, Magnus, I’m not sure it’s quite the thing to swear here, right behind the altar. It’s just a bit — well, I’m sure you can do better. Try not to do it again.”

“Oh do fuck off,” replied Magnus, crisply. “I came back to fill these candles for Sunday. I’ll be away in a minute. Right, see you later, then! Goodbye.” 

But Hector’s attention had been caught by the gargoyle, even though he must have struggled to see it in the general gloom. 

“What’s that?”

By now, Liam had come into to the sacristy too. “It’s a gargoyle,” said Liam, excited to be conveying this important news to Hector. “It was in the little room overhead here. I saw it a few months ago, but this morning I brought it down so that the Colonel could look at it. Well, the Colonel and Father Crispin. I thought it was a Green Man, but the Colonel thinks it might be a lion. It’s incredibly heavy. I wonder how old it is? It looks as if it’s been up there forever — maybe for hundreds of years. Maybe someone put it up there and just forgot. Father Crispin saw it earlier. He thought that maybe it came from the old nave, before it was rebuilt in 1400? But could it really be that old? Father Crispin thought it could. What do you think?” 

Hector glared at the gargoyle, indistinct in the failing light. Then he glared at Magnus. Only after that did he reach the point of turning to glare at Liam. 

“I think you’re going to have to take it back upstairs. It — whatever it is — can’t stay here, lying in the middle of the floor like that.”

Magnus made a wordless but undeniably derisive sound that was nearly, but also not quite a proper laugh. Looking from the gargoyle to the centre of the room, and back again, he gazed contemptuously at Hector. 

“Hardly the centre, I’d say. More the edge, really. Don’t worry, not everyone is gifted with spatial reasoning.” 

Liam, who for highly personal reasons found this sort of thinly-veiled male aggression frightening, tried to suppress the urge to giggle — tried, and failed. He burst into laughter, which, in turn, made Magnus laugh — a low, deep, not entirely good-natured laugh. 

This only enraged Hector further.

“It’s not funny!” insisted Hector. He really was working himself up into a state now. “In the first place, I don’t know what this thing is, or why you brought it down from that place up there, but you shouldn’t have done it. It’s not your job to go ferreting around in odd corners of the church, finding things and moving them around, willy-nilly, and then leaving them lying about where anyone might trip over them or have some sort of accident —”

“I hardly think ‘anyone’ is the right word, Hector,” said Magnus, his normally clipped tones now verging on an ironic drawl. “How many people have a key to the sacristy? Two, I think? And of those of us who do, how many every set foot here? It’s not exactly Charing Cross station, is it? I’m looking around for the hordes of pedestrians, but I’m not quite seeing them, somehow.”

“Now you’re just  being unhelpful, Magnus, and you know it. You shouldn’t have encouraged Liam.”

“You are talking to us like naughty school boys, Hector.” 

This comment had the effect of making Liam start giggling once again, in an increasingly mirthless, helpless, faintly hysterical sort of way. 

Magnus, meanwhile, persisted. “I simply do not see what harm this gargoyle is doing in the sacristy. It’s a rather good gargoyle, really, don’t you think? Now that Liam’s gone to all the hard work of hauling this wretched thing downstairs, surely the right answer is to leave it here for the time being? We can ask Bertie what’s-his-name from Norwich to come up and have a look at it, tell us how old it is, that sort of thing. You know, that chap from the diocese who said that the chancel vaulting was sound. He’d know about it, wouldn’t he? You could put it in the nave for visitors to admire.”

“Admire? Who would admire that?”

“I don’t see what’s so wrong with it. It smells a bit odd, I’ll grant you that, but then it’s been up in the dark, damp room for a very long time. Once it’s out in the fresh air for a few days it’ll be fine. I say we should leave it down here.” 

“You can say it all you like, Magnus, but it’s not really your call, is it? Liam, take that thing upstairs at once.”

“What, now? But it’s almost dark.” 

Liam looked appealingly at Magnus, as if for support.

 Hector noticed this, of course. He was already angry — he had been angry even before he had seen the gargoyle — but there was something in Liam’s manner, or perhaps something in the atmosphere of the room, that moved him to absolute fury. 

“Liam! You’re the sexton. You’re employed by the parish. You are not employed by Magnus, who, if I may point out the obvious, has no official role whatsoever here. I am telling you to carry that ghastly thing back upstairs — right now. If you don’t want to do it, I am sure we can find another sexton. I’m not joking.”

Once more, Liam looked to Magnus. “Sir?”

This time, though, Magnus’ voice sounded almost gentle, although in truth, behind that ‘almost’ there lurked a dangerous amount of barely-controlled fury. 

“Better do as he says, lad,” said Magnus. “Do you want me to help you?”

“No sir, don’t you worry — I know about your knee, the bad one, and anyway there ain’t hardly room on those stairs for one of us, let alone two. I’ll do it.”

“I’ll wait for you, then,” said Magnus. “You go do that, and I’ll close up once you’re done, and we can leave together.” 

Slowly, with a huge amount of effort, Liam stooped, put his arms around the large block of stone, clasped it to his chest — and then raised it up. Staggering, he got as far as the heavy oak door that led to the upper room, which Magnus had swiftly opened for him. And then, step by painful step, Liam vanished into the darkness. 

“And you, Hector, can absolutely fuck yourself right off, out of this fucking church, this very minute, or I am fucking coming after you. I’m not joking, either.” Magnus was still speaking very gently, almost tenderly, which somehow made it all sound far worse. 

Hector, having proved his point, decided the time had come to make a tactical retreat. As he stomped down the main aisle of the nave, towards the exit, he didn’t pause to wonder why the wind was so loud that evening, or so insistent, or why it made such odd sounds, a sort of irregular jagged wrenching noise, the scraping of one very hard thing against another, the like of which he had never heard before. 

***

Liam knew himself to be a very bad Christian. Unlike everyone else who has featured in this narrative, he had not been brought up in any kind of faith whatsoever. His family life had been chaotic and violent. He had left school promptly at age 16, and home swiftly thereafter. No one had tried to coax him back. 

A brief career in the infantry had ended very ingloriously, under circumstances which Liam had once, in one of those moments of impulsiveness, confessed to a surprisingly sympathetic, understanding Magnus. “Well, you’re not the first, and you won’t be the last, either,” he had said to Liam, crisply, before changing the subject. 

The next phase of Liam’s life was perhaps best summarised in Liam’s frequent admission, in all sorts of contexts, to anyone who would listen, that he “ain’t been no angel”. He had gone to sea, then tried to make a career on land. 

Various relationships had ended tempestuously. Low-level criminality was a constant subtext. So, too, were evident mental health issues. 

His family, though, had what was called “a bad name” in the village, so few there really expected any better of Liam. There was a general feeling that his story would, as those of many of his family had before him, end badly. The only real question was whether or not he would leave the village first. 

It was at that point, surprisingly, that Liam had found God. 

The first meeting was casual, fleeting — apparently inconsequential. Liam, staying over with yet another girlfriend, had accidentally picked up religious tract that had been put through the door alongside the cheap pizza delivery adverts and Liberal Democrat campaign literature, and read a very few lines about Jesus. 

It was a little thing, to all appearance, but the words of the Gospel somehow stuck with him. He then, again more by accident than design, had a conversation with a street preacher in a nearby market town. He ended up going to a prayer meeting. From there, it all spiralled, spiralled upward, until his life had become a very different thing indeed, so surprising that even Liam himself struggled to believe it. 

So it was that in his late 20s, he had been confirmed in the Church of England, largely straightened out his life (at which point, had he been present, the Colonel would have opined that none of our lives are ever as straight as all that) — and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, found a job that he not only loved but that he performed, as even the doubters soon came to admit with varying degrees of grace, very well indeed. 

Yet despite this — or perhaps because of it — Liam remained painfully aware of his limitations as a Christian. He was often, even now, riven with doubt. It was in vain that Magnus, for instance, tried to explain to him — having heard this in someone else’s sermon a very long time ago — that everyone, surely, feels a bit of doubt now and then. Also, Liam didn’t behave perfectly all the time. He often felt himself very unworthy of his current role, let alone of salvation. 

The Interregnum had been a particular challenge for Liam, because it exposed him, not only to differing and sometimes mutually contradictory versions of clerical practice, but also, perhaps even more alarmingly, the wildly varying critical reaction to such differences on the part of his fellow parishioners. Liam was still so surprised by God that he cared very little about the niceties of how the altar was dressed, what the celebrant did or didn’t wear, exactly which order of service was used and what, exactly, was wrong with all the above. 

It was this eager innocence, in fact, that allowed him to enjoy his conversations with Father Crispin as much as he had those with the tattooed, pierced, denim and heavy metal t-shirt clad street preacher. 

It was Father Crispin who had pointed out to Liam the Green Man carving in the nave, told him stories about a few of the saints depicted in the very good Clayton & Bell windows, and reminded him that the worship of God had been carried on in that very place, on that very same spot, for more than a thousand years. “Isn’t it wonderful that you’re now a part of that?” 

Liam had said nothing, but those words had mattered to him more than Father Crispin might have imagined. 

Well, he was glad that Father Crispin had seen the gargoyle, at least, and that the Colonel had also admired the gargoyle. That was something. As for Hector, Liam bore him no particular resentment. So new was his faith, so sure was he that he was the least amongst the Christians there, that it literally would not have occurred to him to think that Hector had perhaps been silly, proud or indeed wrong. 

And now here Lia was, struggling up the narrow, winding, uneven steps in total darkness, straining to lift and move that massive block of carved stone, as the wind wailed and screamed above him. He could see nothing in front of him. He knew there was little enough behind him, if he should lose his footing and fall. The space in which he heaved and shoved and shouldered the stone was damp, close — airless, yet also haunted by that terrible, dank, foetid smell, that seemed to reek of every bad, unforgiveable, terrible thing that was better off left forgotten. 

The spiral stairs went on forever. Very soon, Liam lost all sense of time and space. There was only another stair, and another slippery stair, and another stair beyond that. 

His knuckles had been scraped raw by lifting the carved stone, which sometimes seemed almost to push back at him, to lurch and strain in his arms, as if it were a living thing, struggling against him. The muscles in his back and shoulders burned with pain. He had scratches on his face where the stone had somehow contrived to lash out at him. 

The absolute dark of those stairs seemed determined to push him back, to prevent him from ever reaching the top. 

Somewhere down below, he could hear the Colonel calling up to him, but he couldn’t quite hear what he was saying — and he didn’t have the breath to answer, either. He heaved the stone up yet  another stair, hoping it wouldn’t slip back this time — throwing the whole weight of his slim body against it. 

Now the Colonel seemed to be singing a hymn, unless Liam was imagining the sound. Why would the Colonel do that?

Never, though — not for a moment — did it cross Liam’s mind that he wouldn’t do what he had promised to do, and take the gargoyle back up to the little room over the chancel, and leave it there where he had found it. And in due course, this is  precisely what he did. 

Returning down the stairs, Liam emerged back into the relative brightness — because there it was only normal dusk, not absolute, unrelenting, almost supernatural darkness — of the cluttered, narrow, yet wonderfully familiar and welcoming sacristy, where the Colonel sprang forward and enveloped him in the manly, reserved equivalent of what would, in any other context, be a sort of impulsive embrace. 

“Good man! Really, I was a bit worried about you up there. That Hector … don’t get me started. No, really, don’t! Maybe another time, when the dust has all settled a bit. Right, let’s get out of here, lad. We’ve had enough of this place today.”

Liam thought the strange sounds he heard were simply the effect of all that heavy lifting. He felt light-headed. Everything seemed faintly unreal, from the way that the Colonel bustled him out of the sacristy, to what seemed the almost endless process of locking the sacristy door with the long, ill-fitting key, to the walk through the chancel, towards the ornate and somehow always slightly dusty rood screen, down into the nave. The Colonel had an arm around his shoulder, and was all but dragging him along, making conversation just for the sake of it, talking nonsense, encouraging and sustaining, none of which he could hear properly because of that endless, odd, roaring noise that thundered in his ears. 

It was then, just as the two of them had almost reached the door that led out to the church porch and to the churchyard beyond, that something made them turn — and then they saw it happening, right there as they watched. 

The vaulted ceiling of the chancel seemed to lurch, then its shape began to change — and then, with a sound that neither of them would ever forget, a large portion of the vault failed, and collapsed, raining large blocks of ancient stone onto the floor of the chancel below. The chancel roof had come down. 

***

They were standing in the churchyard, all of them together, as the wind — always particularly brisk, there on top of the hill — tossed the autumn leaves hither and thither at their feet, rattling the bare branches down near the road, so that they all pulled their coats and jackets more closely around them, and stood a little closer together in the weak morning sunlight, as if for safety. 

“It was a great blessing,” said the soon-to-be rector, “that you’d left the chancel precisely when you did. It could have been so much worse.”

“Praise the Lord!” said Liam, vehemently, his wide blue eyes even wider and more ingenuous than usual. He hadn’t been quite the same since the vault had come down. Everyone had noticed this. But he’d been praying and reading scripture with the soon-to-be rector, which had helped. 

“Indeed,” said Magnus, dryly. “Quite a piece of luck, that.”

They were watching as the conservation builders — the reassuringly expensive ones from Norwich, kitted out in hi-vis and with a remarkable array of specialist equipment at the ready — worked to make the site safe. 

It seemed likely that, with the right precautions, the nave might be usable again within a week or two. This, too, was a blessing, as it meant that the service of institution could go ahead as planned. As for the chancel, though — that would take months to repair, at the very least — perhaps even years. 

Hector, standing with them, smiled as he reflected on this point. It was to him, of course, that the campaign to fund the repair work had been entrusted — and, as we all know, it is far, far easier to raise funds for a partially collapsed thirteenth century chancel than it is for dreary things like heating or the parish office, let alone the parish contribution to the diocese. Dinners, a charity concert, an auction — the possibilities were endless. Truly, reflected Hector, the Lord works in mysterious ways!

Pamela, too, was smiling silently to herself. The soon-to-be rector not only seemed a very nice young man — energetic, positive, appreciative, all those sorts of things — but also showed every sign of wishing to leave the mysteries of the parish office very firmly entrusted to those who already understood them, which was, of course, how it ought to be. 

For Magnus, however, gratitude at his own lucky escape was tempered with a faint twinge of sadness. It would not, of course, now be possible to do the Thursday sacristy tasks for a very long time, as the sacristy was now a building site, covered in fallen masonry. He would, he knew, miss those peaceful hours, pottering away harmlessly in the church. Those tasks had, at the very least, passed the time. 

Still, the soon-to-be-rector, despite being manifestly at the ‘happy clappy’ end of the spectrum — committed to Common Worship, or worse! — seemed a decent enough chap, in his way. Perhaps he would be all right in the end. 

Magnus, incidentally, had been lured back onto the PCC, since his dear friend and neighbour Petronella Stitchwort had taken to spending more and more of her time in Bangor. He had been put in charge of creating a new guidebook to the parish church. This, at least, pleased him. The previous version had been produced by Hector and, needless to say, was absolute errant nonsense from beginning to end. 

What of the gargoyle? 

Magnus would, later, come to wonder about this. Indeed, in due course, he actually went so far as to ask the builders about it. But no matter how often and how casually he enquired, no one knew anything about any gargoyle. Nothing remotely resembling the gargoyle had been found anywhere amid the wreckage of the collapsed chancel, amid the ravaged kneelers and relatively intact misericords. There was nothing like a gargoyle at all.

Perhaps the gargoyle had simply been smashed up in the fall? That, certainly, was the most obvious explanation — and also the one most suitable for Liam to hear, should he ever think to enquire about this, although Magnus rather hoped that he would not. 

And what, finally, of the soon-to-be rector? 

He had known that this was destined to be his parish from the first moment he had set eyes on it — the dignified old church, the productive and gently rolling countryside stretching out in every direction around it, the pretty yet down-to-earth village — even his more or less tractable or truculent parishioners, with all their flaws and foibles. 

Standing there in the late October sunshine, stroking his generous moustache, looking out upon his little cure of souls from under those generous, wavy eyebrows, he regarded these — his parish and his people — and found them all good.