Fabric of Sin Read Online Free PDF Page B

locally?’
    ‘A woman we talked to said it wouldn’t be a surprise. Said it hadn’t been a happy house.’
    ‘Who was that?’
    ‘Has a smallholding, edge of the hamlet. Sells free-range eggs and honey and herbs. Mrs Mornington … Morningside. Something like that.’
    ‘And the reason you won’t go back now is purely …’
    ‘See it from my position, if you can,’ Felix said.
    Fuchsia came down the caravan steps then, wearing what looked like a bridesmaid dress with a bodice of white lace. The colours in her hair were like streaks of oil rainbowed in dark water.
    Merrily felt a flicker of unease and glanced at Felix, but he was gazing across at Monkland church with its halo of gilded mist.
    Pity this wasn’t the church they were using. She had no history here.
    Felix turned and saw Fuchsia and swallowed.
    ‘Looks so much like her now it scares me a bit.’
    ‘Her mother.’
    ‘Aye.’

5

Who is This?
     
    T HE LAST TIME Merrily had been inside the Church of St Cosmas and St Damien, somebody had sacrificed a crow on one of the altars.
    These things happened, just occasionally, after a church had been decommissioned by the C of E, left to fade into film-set Gothic.
    Lifting cloak and cassock to climb into Felix’s silver truck outside the caravan, she was remembering the crow’s entrails arranged like intricate jewellery on the right-hand altar. It was a church with two of everything – twin chancels, twin naves – with a pulpit in the middle.
They might see this as representing a dualism
, Huw Owen, her spiritual director, had said at the time.
Left and right, darkness and light
.
    This was in the very early days in Deliverance, and she’d blown it, been unable to handle the necessary cleansing of the church. Emotionally exposed at the time, her senses still snagged on memories of a fairly sickening job in the old General Hospital. Feeling clammy, palms itching, and then the explosion of coughing … and Huw, supervising, ordering her out.
    This was when she’d been advised to burn the vestments she’d been wearing, and she’d done that, in an incinerator behind the vicarage. Burned everything, except for …
    Oh God
.
    … This cloak, the same heavy, woollen, cowled cape that she’d worn here on the night of her humiliation. Because it hadn’t been at the General Hospital, it had seemed OK not to burn it. After all, they weren’t cheap, these cloaks, the female clergy still a minority market.
    But – never dismiss coincidence – it was better not to take it in. She began to unlace the cloak as the truck bounced down an eroded lanewhere torn shards of tarmac were crumbling like piecrust into the verges and Fuchsia’s voice came cawing from the back seat.
    ‘Are you High Church, then, Merrily? Anglo-Catholic?’
    ‘Oh, well, I’ve never been one for labels, Fuchsia. You adapt … compromise where you can.’
    Mix-’n’-match. Pick your own. Anything works now, in the new, flexible C of E.
    ‘Do you have a statue of Our Lady in your church, Merrily?’
    ‘No. But I’ve thought about it.’
    ‘We have two in the caravan, now,’ Felix said bitterly. ‘One’s above the bed. Makes you feel a bit queasy when you look up and the moonlight’s full on it.’
    ‘I also like to go to the cathedral in Hereford,’ Fuchsia said. ‘When it’s fairly quiet.’
    Merrily turned to look at Fuchsia, rocking in the narrow rear seat, her hair centre-parted, one hand holding a cream woollen shawl together at her neck, the other steadying the canvas zip-bag on her knees – the Deliverance bag. She’d asked if she could carry it.
    ‘When it’s quiet, Merrily. When there’s nobody to say I don’t
belong
.’
    ‘Why would you think you don’t belong?’ Merrily said. ‘Nobody has to sign anything.’
    ‘I’m neither one place nor the other. That’s how I feel.’
    ‘I see.’
    Everything had turned around. This was no longer just about an empty house with a presence. Now there was a human