A death in the parish, p.1
A Death in the Parish, page 1
For Martin
Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Maps
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Acknowledgements
Extract from Murder Before Evensong
Also by The Reverend Richard Coles
Copyright
Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise; that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.
Ephesians 6: 1–3
1
Audrey Clement did not flinch when half a bread roll, thrown with force from one side of Lord de Floures’ dining table to the other, just missed her.
In the silence that followed she pretended to study the monogram on her dining plate – a ‘de F’ entwined by a circlet of flowers; whether the eyebrow she slowly raised was the result of that study or a silent comment on the interruption was uncertain.
Sunday lunch at Champton House was not going as everyone had hoped. At the head of the table the host, Lord de Floures, looked up as Audrey looked down, his fork – laden with a thick slice of pink venison – paused between plate and mouth. His eyes narrowed.
The missile had landed harmlessly on the parquet floor and skidded like a duck landing badly on a frozen pond. Imperfectly smothered sniggers rose on both sides of the table as it came to a halt.
‘Joshua, please. Lydia, don’t encourage him …’ said Sally Biddle to her teenaged son and daughter, but that only made them snigger more. She gave a look to her husband, Chris.
‘You can’t take them anywhere!’ he said in a jocular tone of voice (Audrey winced at that) and got up from the table to retrieve the roll. He was tall and coltish, like a distance runner, with hips that were too far forward and skinny shoulders that his blond curly hair almost touched. He was older than he looked from his dress and manner, like a primary school teacher in a progressive London borough.
‘Do leave it,’ snapped Lord de Floures. ‘The mice will have it if the housekeeper doesn’t.’
‘All right for some!’ said Chris, looking around the table for signs of comradeliness, or even an indulgent smile. ‘The housekeeper!’
His lordship blinked, then returned wordlessly to his meat, its juices by now dripping onto his regimental tie, as bloodstained and frayed as a battle standard. Daniel Clement, Rector of Champton, Audrey’s son and cohabitee at the lovely Queen Anne rectory at the edge of the park, coughed gently and attempted to change the subject.
‘The venison is excellent, Bernard.’
‘Bit tough, don’t you think?’ said his lordship. ‘Don’t know if that’s down to the cook or the keeper.’
‘I remember once,’ said Audrey, ‘your father and I were having Sunday lunch in a restaurant … I think it was Norfolk, yes, Brancaster … and it was not very busy, quite quiet, when suddenly a lady started to choke. The dining room fell silent – aghast – and, without thinking really, I got up, grabbed her round the waist from behind and heaved and heaved. And then this piece of beef simply flew out of her mouth and hit the opposite wall with a thwack like a squash ball. That was tough. This venison is really very good.’ She turned to the bread-throwing boy. ‘You would have enjoyed it, I think, dear. Ballistically speaking.’
Joshua Biddle did not know what to make of that and looked back at her blankly.
Then his sister said, ‘Sorry, I keep thinking of Bambi,’ and pushed her plate away.
‘We’re vegetarians,’ mumbled her brother.
Bernard’s eyes narrowed again, then with a little shrug he went back to eating his lunch.
Daniel exchanged a look with his mother. This was not good. The new associate vicar the bishop had forced Bernard to accept, by adding the parishes of Lower and Upper Badsaddle to Champton St Mary, had not passed the Sunday-luncheon test. His children were uncivil, his meat was declined, his welcome curtailed.
Around them, hung on the walls of the Rudnam Room, where smaller family lunches were served, were two dozen paintings of magnificent shorthorns, as unlike real cattle as apostles in mannerist art. Their virtues – of pedigree, bulk and potency – distorted their appearance, so they looked as unlikely as minotaurs standing in the park with the house in the background, tended by cattlemen who seemed as subservient to them as to the then Lord de Floures. Farmer Hugh, as he was known, also larger than life in the paintings, looked over them proprietorially, protectively, like a football chairman his new foreign signings.
‘Have the deer been here … long?’ asked Sally, a little desperately.
‘Long?’ Bernard thought about it. ‘There has been a deer park here for centuries, probably since my Norman ancestors settled here, but most of what you see now’ – he waved his unfreighted fork at the window – ‘are descended from sires and hinds we were given by the Duke of Bedford in my great-grandfather’s day. I think he gave us a pair of everything – sika, muntjac, Père David’s – after we gave them some of our girls.’
‘Does?’
‘Daughters. For their sons to marry.’
‘It’s all about pedigree, then?’ said Chris, a comment in which Audrey detected a note of challenge.
‘Yes,’ said Bernard, ‘in a way. Bloodline. So you have some idea about what you’re going to get.’
Silence.
‘Sounds a bit feudal,’ said Chris.
‘Well, it would.’
Audrey changed the subject.
‘Mrs Biddle, or is it—’
‘Sal, please.’
‘… or is it the Reverend Mrs Biddle?’
‘Oh, I suppose it is. But I’m a deacon.’
‘Deaconess?’
‘I think we say deacon now, Audrey. And I’m not stipendiary, like Chris. I volunteer.’
‘Not quite two for the price of one, then?’ said Bernard, whose interest had been stirred by a possible economy of scale.
‘Well, of course I’ll help out,’ said Sally, ‘but I’m not a priest, so it’s limited.’
‘Not yet,’ said Audrey. ‘Don’t you think it will come?’
‘I suppose so …’ Sally looked a little uncomfortable at being invited into a conversation she did not want to have. Daniel wondered if there was dissent in their clerical ranks.
Audrey, in her musing-aloud voice, said, ‘It just seems a little quaint, now we’ve all got used to a female prime minister, that we can’t have women vicars.’
‘Priests, Mum,’ said Daniel. ‘Women cannot – yet – be ordained as priests.’
‘You look like a vicar,’ said Bernard pointedly. ‘More than some men do nowadays.’
Sal had made the most effort to dress suitably for lunch at Champton, in the serviceable Laura Ashley dress she wore for the Clergy Wives’ Lunches at the Bishop’s Palace, when that distinguished prelate’s wife sought to encourage the spouses of the lower clergy in their distaff ministries.
‘Thatcher’s a man,’ said Lydia Biddle. ‘A man in drag.’
Audrey grimaced. ‘I don’t think so, dear. She can be a bit pantomime dame, but she’s made it to the top; a woman in a man’s world.’
‘She’s no feminist. That’s what I meant.’
‘Lady vicars’, mumbled Bernard, ‘before we know it. How long, Mrs Biddle, before you’re up at the altar as well, waving your hands about, hocus pocus, and all that?’
‘I like being a deacon, actually. It’s a very valuable and important ministry in its own right.’
Audrey raised an eyebrow. ‘Church of England communion lady?’
‘It’s so much more than that …’
‘But you can’t … what’s the word, Daniel?’
‘Preside.’
‘What about you, Audrey?’ Chris interjected. ‘Has home and hearth been enough for you?’
‘Oh, I had a little job before I met Daniel’s father.’
‘What sort of jobs did well-brought-up young ladies do before marriage and motherhood claimed them?’
‘I was a nurse. At St Thomas’ Hospital. During the Blitz.’ She smiled brightly, enjoying a moment of triumph.
Mrs Shorely, housekeeper at Champton, appeared in a doorway. She was in her sixties, slight and rather fragile-looking, but she ran the house with an expert and unflexing rule. ‘Are you done, m’lord?’ she said in her customary tone (flat, with just a hint of irritation), and without waiting for an answer she began to take the plates from the table. She put one down with the faintest ‘tsk’ when she saw the thrown bread roll with its skid of crumbs on the parquet floor and went to retrieve it.
Joshua and Lydia sniggered again.
The Rudnam Room, which took its name from the de Floures’ estate in Norfolk, while not the largest or most splendid in the house, was still large enough to have an echo. Every sound had a short delay, so a laugh overdubbed itself, a dropped fork ricocheted around and a comment took time to release its energy. Daniel sometimes wondered if the Whiggish salons of the 1700s had produced such memorable conversation, so aphoristic and quotable, not only because of the wit of the participants, but because of the acoustics too. Those who are used to such places trim their speech and deportment accordingly – and those unused to them are so metimes wrongfooted by the unexpected patterns of sound and silence.
The young Biddles’ sniggers hung in the silence like a puff of smoke, as Mrs Shorely bent down, over-laboriously, to scoop up the missile.
‘Will you have dessert now, m’lord, or will you wait?’
‘Right away, Mrs Shorely, thank you. And coffee in the library.’
‘Very good, m’lord.’
Mrs Shorely padded away, glancing with a faint suggestion of implacable judgement at the Biddle children as she went.
Bernard broke the silence.
‘You’re settling in, Mrs Biddle? Vicarage satisfactory?’
‘Oh, it’s far too big for us. Heaven knows how we’ll be able to maintain it. Or heat it.’
Daniel winced. The vicarage of Lower Badsaddle was one of the finest in the diocese of Stow, a neat and quietly splendid Georgian box built by Smith of Warwick for a clerical third son in 1730.
‘It is not in good repair?’
‘A bit neglected, actually,’ said Chris. ‘The windows need a bit of attention, and I guess the diocese wouldn’t put in double glazing.’
‘Couldn’t,’ said Audrey, ‘it’s listed; but I sympathise, there’s a hell of a draught in our drawing room when the wind whistles in from the Fens. But that’s what woollens are for, isn’t it …?’
Daniel thought of his predecessor, Canon Dolben, who had the central heating removed from his cottage after he retired, for it made him feel ‘like a hothouse orchid after thirty years in the rectory’.
‘… but the estate is very good at sending someone to paint the woodwork or fix a gate when it needs doing.’
‘Ah,’ said Chris, ‘who do I need to talk to about that?’
Bernard interrupted. ‘A matter for the Parsonages Board in your case, I’m afraid …’
‘Oh,’ he said, disappointed, ‘but with you as patron of Champton St Mary—’
‘And only Champton St Mary. You see, the Badsaddles were added – lumped in – with the benefice by the bishop as a cost-cutting exercise. Naturally, he is not the only person who has to cut costs.’ Bernard said all this without looking up from his place mat, which showed a rather plain nineteenth-century engraving of the house. ‘And here’s Mrs Shorely with our pudding.’
The sound of Mrs Shorely’s approaching footsteps, faint but getting louder, filled the uncomfortable silence that followed.
‘Just leave it on the table, would you, Mrs Shorely?’ said Bernard, and the dish, hot from the oven, was placed before him with a jug of custard to the side.
Bernard served – apple and blackberry crumble: ‘Our apples too. The custard is courtesy of Mr Bird.’
Audrey passed the bowls along and the jug of custard followed – its skin, she noted, as wizened as a St Tropez grandame’s face.
Daniel, at Bernard’s request, took the bottle of Sauternes, premier cru, from the sideboard and poured a glass for his mother.
‘Mrs Biddle?’
‘I won’t, thanks, we don’t really take wine.’
‘Take wine?’ said Bernard. ‘What an odd way of putting it – makes it sound like cod liver oil …’
‘Perhaps it’s your livers you’re thinking about?’ said Audrey.
‘I don’t like the taste of alcohol,’ said Chris Biddle. ‘I never have.’
Bernard looked at the wine in his glass – golden, luscious – and swirled it once so it left a syrupy tidemark. ‘I don’t think I could live without wine.’ He took a mouthful and sat back in his chair, savouring it.
‘Oh, look, there’s Honoria …’ said Audrey brightly.
The Hon. Honoria de Floures was riding in the park. She had declined her father’s last-minute invitation to lunch and taken out her favourite horse instead. It was a lively chestnut mare with a flaxen mane and tail, and even in clothes and kit she had put together from spares in the stables, Honoria managed to look in every sense coordinated as she trotted past.
‘… Doesn’t she look marvellous! I could never get the rhythm, the bounce in the saddle. It’s like a yo-yo. I could never get that either.’
‘She makes everything look effortless,’ said Daniel admiringly, and his mother for a moment wondered if he might sigh like a swain.
He quoted a song instead.
‘Surely you see My Lady
Out in the garden there,
Riv’ling the glittering sunshine
With a glory of golden hair …’
‘It’s red hair, Daniel,’ said Audrey, who found it hard to resist an opportunity to slacken his sails. ‘She’s starting to look quite the countrywoman. Wasn’t she here only last week?’
‘She comes up quite often now,’ said Bernard. ‘When she’s not at work. My daughter,’ he added for the benefit of the Biddles; ‘she lives in town. She has a job.’
‘Oh, what does she do?’ asked Sally.
Bernard thought about it for a moment and then said, ‘I don’t really know. Something to do with a hotel.’
‘She’s an “events planner”,’ said Audrey. ‘She plans … events, like grand weddings or … corporate launches …’ The phrase sounded freshly minted on Audrey’s lips. ‘She’s the reason Daniel is here.’
‘How so?’
‘I was at St Martin’s Kinnerton Square in town before I came here,’ said Daniel, ‘and Honoria works at the Motcombe next door, so we got to know each other negotiating the often highly unreasonable demands of Belgravia’s brides.’
‘Like what?’ asked Chris Biddle with the heightened tone of interest one cleric shows another when they start to talk shop.
‘Oh, it was all about the reception. The church part was a picturesque prelude to it, on a par with the flowers and the canapés. If we gently asserted the law – or the sacrament – they were sometimes rather taken aback. Not everyone.’
‘It can’t have been a big parish …’
‘No, tiny, the size of a stamp.’
‘So, why so many weddings?’
‘Lovely church, posh Belgravia, handy for the grander hotels.’
‘But how did so many couples qualify to get married there?’
The law permitted only those resident in the parish, with one or two exceptions, to get married in the parish church.
‘We took a rather … latitudinarian line over the qualifying criteria.’ There was a silence, and Daniel felt a blush rise in his cheeks. ‘A custom established in the incumbency of my predecessors, you understand.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Chris.
‘Yes,’ said Audrey, ‘in the registers half the marriage couples gave the vicarage as their address. More overcrowded than one of Mr Rachman’s slums.’
Daniel winced. ‘It was a bit more complicated than that, Mum. Often they were from families who had London houses in the parish, or once had London houses in the parish, so there was a connection …’
‘The only connection, I seem to recall you saying, was from their bank account to St Martin’s. A roaring trade!’
Daniel glanced at Chris, who said nothing, but there was a slight air of a grimace about him.
It was Lydia who spoke. ‘How C of E, bending the rules for the rich and privileged.’
‘It’s weddings, dear, not subjugating the poor,’ said Audrey. ‘Wouldn’t you want to temper rigour with discretion under those circumstances?’
‘It’s actually the law,’ said Chris, ‘and tempering rigour with discretion is a breach of it.’
There was an awkward pause, and Daniel said, ‘We just adapted to circumstances. Like mission priests, only in darkest Belgravia rather than Africa.’
‘Are you saying Belgravia is like Ethiopia?’ asked Josh, with undisguised scorn.
‘No, but I was in Belgravia, not in Ethiopia.’
Audrey spoke up brightly. ‘Well, Jesus said feed my sheep and this sheep is ready for coffee. In the library?’
Bernard stood up and led the way – his guests falling in behind him – from the table of plenty through the Great Hall, so grand, so splendid. The Biddles paused and looked around a little self-consciously, trying to resist its magnificence.
The Biddles had been in the new joint benefice of Champton St Mary with the Badsaddles not even a fortnight, arriving at Michaelmas, which falls at the end of September. It is a time for ends and beginnings, as England shifts from summer to autumn, a time of the turning of the leaves, of a faint presage of winter in the early mornings, of blackberries and conkers, of new academic and legal terms, and of a return to work after holidays. In the Church calendar it commemorates the battle of the devil with St Michael the Archangel, a cosmic bout in which the battalions of heaven are mobilised and Satan is vanquished, cast into hell by the fiery sword of truth and righteousness – a triumph often seen in stained-glass windows with a winged warrior, in unaerodynamic armour, trampling a sort of dragon beneath his spurred feet.
