The Triple Goddess (60 page)

The devil lady paused as the wave of information sank into the sand of the fellow’s brain. ‘It’ll keep them out of mischief, and give them something to look forward to in the evenings. You can start ordering the beer from the brewery, Fuddle’s of Woozeley, isn’t it?, right away on my account; and make sure you charge everyone threepence ha’penny a glass for it, no exceptions, and no credit or hard-luck stories, or there’ll be another Devil to pay for you as well as them.’

The Local Yokel rubbed his scalp again, more vigorously this time to stir up the lice and stimulate his brain, and guffawed. This was a middling good one. ‘Oh ho ho, mum, Oi see ye lik to jape, but Oi dunnow ’boud dat. Hob don’t touch a drop of ale, not since last ship-sharin’, his missus seed to dat, such a jawbation ’e got from Herself! Anyhows, the inn idn’t an inn no more, it only serves dat Frenchy grape stuff and Frenchy food.’

Fixing the hayseed with a basilisk stare, the devil lady sidled up close and lifted his bristly chin with the ivory handle of her riding-crop. She flinched at the unpleasant compound of odours he exuded, of sweat and mossy teeth and unwashed clothes.

Wrinkling her nose, she lowered her voice. ‘Now then, I’m not in the habit of repeating myself. Do as I say and do it stone cold sober or it’ll fare the worse for you. My man will be round tomorrow to formalize the arrangements. A very good day to you.’

Releasing his skull, the DL adjusted her hat with both hands and twizzled on a slim polished black riding boot. She clambered aboard her now sulking steed with as much dignity as possible, kicked him viciously in the sides and tugged the reins to get him moving in the other direction back home. Hob gawped after her. His jaw had dropped as soon as the support was removed, and his slack mouth was drooling. He, like the estate agent, was mesmerized by the devil lady’s tail as it forked in a valedictory flourish over the stallion’s rump.

Having dismissed the bumpkin from her mind, and being satisfied that her business was concluded, the DL was surprised to hear the clump of hobnailed boots behind her. Pulling up, she half turned in the saddle and curled her lip as Hob laboured up. Waiting impatiently for him to speak she surveyed him through heavy-lidded eyes, as though he were one of the piles of manure with which the Street was bespattered, and to which Elagabalus had just generously contributed. A muscle in her cheek twitched, and she drummed a tattoo with her crop on her tightly fitted calf. There was another question coming, she could tell.

‘B-beggin’ your ladyship’s pardon for to be troublin’ ye again, but...’ Hob was already cursing himself for bandying further words with her. He had not said as much in weeks.

‘What is it now? Come on, spit it out. But even if I had all the time in the world, which I do for worse and worse, I can’t see why I should waste any more of it on a wittol like you.’

‘Mum, not to be beatin’ the devil round the gooseberry bush, Oi was wantin’...par’n me for makin’ so bold-like...to ax if mebbe ye be one of dey devils Parson tells us about in church. Ye know, the devils who roastses sinners in Hell. Ye doan’t seem lik a farisee to me, but it fair queers me what ye might be, an Oi’d lik to know afore it drives me a-milkin’.’

The devil lady’s eyes widened with interest. She turned the back of her left hand towards her, flat like a woman rather than as a man would bend the fingers, and examined her fingernails as if she were thinking of giving her manicurist a piece of her mind.

Her tone became silken. ‘Oh they do, do they? I’ll be demned if they do...that was a joke, man, treasure it. Well, yes, I am indeed one of those devils and not a
farisee
or fairy. An important devil, too, in my way, or used to be, though I say so myself and there are many who would disagr....’ The DL registered her own surprise at the confession, but put it down to the novelty of her position. ‘And since I’ve acquired this accursed property, and all within it, in fee and title it would behove you not to question my authority.’ The DL dismissed the state of her cuticles from consideration. ‘Now
adone-do
and
dorm off
, villein, before I lose my good humour.’

As she departed she could not resist rounding for a Parthian shot. ‘Better the devil you know, though, eh? Take my word for it, better the devil you know!’ And with her most fiendish laugh she departed, rather too fast on her
rafty
and contrary mount, leaving Hob to ponder his encounter and the extraordinary change in his fortunes.

Chapter Three

The strangest village I have ever known:

At the Post Office, butterflies for stamps;

In the pub a horse, eyeing the brasses.

On the Street, rabbits in waistcoats;

On Sunday, before church, a flock of sheep

Arrive over a stile from the field

Where, in an old iron bath, the shepherd

Was soaped and scrubbed by his two dogs.

At my house birds fly down the chimney

And make themselves at home in the larder;

As I leave, the cats run in from the garden

And slam the door, locking it against me.

*

Soon after the devil lady had been comfortably installed as Lady of the Manor in the elegant Georgian edifice of the Rectory, now the Old Rectory, her optimism as to her prospects was given a considerable fillip when she was further advised, by an unusually competent member of staff at the Infernal Infocentre desk, that a Lord or Lady of the Manor had powers that extended considerably beyond those of estate management. Although the fine print in the documents that were faxed to her had not come through clearly on the Rectory machine—getting recycled print cartridges from HQ was like pulling teeth—the sum and substance of the matter appeared to concern something called the Advowson, or Right of Presentation, by which she as feudal lord and Patron had the right
to appoint a minister of her choosing to the ecclesiastical Living
on her estates. According to
Leviticus
: “And all the tithe of the land, whether of the seed of the land, or of the fruit of the tree”, and
Deuteronomy
: “the tithe of thy corn, of thy wine, and of thine oil, and the firstlings of thy herds and of thy flocks”, the Church was
entitled to tithe most religiously the goods and produce of the glebe land in the parish. Just as a goodly parson might endeavour to keep his parishioners’ souls intact, an ungoodly one, after taking ten per cent of each parishioner’s worldly goods while he was alive, could also be influential in the relocation of one hundred per cent of his soul after death.

The devil lady’s gleanings came to her as manna did not usually come from Hell, and she rubbed her hands with glee. At her age and after the ignominy of failing as a mover and shaker of souls in London, the intelligence could not have come at a more opportune moment. It was almost too bad to be true. All that interested the DL was that, since she had had the foresight already to give the vicar the bum’s rush, there was a vacancy for the position, and filling it was going to require careful deliberation and handling. For in Hell, Anglican or Church of England souls were as prized as sheeps’ eyeballs in Mongolia. Greatly chuffed, she took this as auguring well for her prospects. With glee she contemplated the notoriety and credit at HQ she would gain for curbing this village to the bit of her authority, as one might a horse, and milking it of its souls, as one might a milchcow.

What the devil lady did not know was that the Infocentre’s information regarding Patronage was out of date.
Nowadays, when clerical vacancies arose in the parishes, diocesan bishops preferred not to appoint a new rector but to retain the freehold and confer the lesser title of Priest-in-Charge (an office affording so little remuneration that a church mouse would have turned it down) of the ecclesiastical Benefice, which operated within a rural Deanery under the aegis of the diocesan bishop, a suffragan or deputy bishop, and an archdeacon.

The DL’s village was a tightly knit community, closed to the outside world. It had never lost the anonymity that so suited it in the past as a base for smuggling, when barrels and chests by the score of spirits and luxury goods were brought over the beacon on the downs from the coast. When a boat made a successful night landing from France, while officers of His Majesty’s Customs and Excise, acting on a false tip-off, were known to be patrolling further down the coast, and its untaxed cargo was being unloaded on the beach, by the light of a full moon—hence the term moonshine—a rider would be dispatched to the crest of the hill on a white horse. This was the signal to the villagers waiting below on the landward side that they should make ready. The merchandise would be brought down and stored in secret rooms, behind false walls and in any number of other ingeniously contrived hidden places, while the frustrated revenue men, who always arrived on the scene too late after discovering that they had been duped, huffed up and down the Street in a fruitless effort to locate the contraband. By which time the residents would be getting well-oiled in the inn, congratulating themselves and singing such ditties as were celebrated in Kipling’s
Smuggler’s Song
:

Five and twenty ponies,

Trotting through the dark
¾

Brandy for the Parson,

’Baccy for the Clerk;

Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,

Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

It was at the scrag-end of the village
¾
the analogy was appropriate, for the hills were crawling with sheep and there was no shortage of mutton
¾
farthest from the DL’s residence that sat the church the devil lady had been shown by the perfidious agent. It was as if it had seceded from the world, or made a mad dash to escape before being apprehended, put in the stocks, and pelted with rotten fruit.

Reflecting...or perhaps, given its Saxon origins, being responsible for...the unpredictable disposition of its natives, the village’s down-at-heel church was charming when the weather was clement and it was in a good mood. The rest of the time it was as temperamental and ornery as could be. Although, like the Rectory, it was a listed building, the Church did not consider itself responsible for its upkeep, and its fabric had deteriorated badly over the centuries for lack of public subscription. Nothing much ever got refurbished, and when some patching-up had to be done for safety reasons the residents were curiously dissatisfied, as if they had preferred it remain untouched. As did the institution of the Church because, whenever anything was proposed, it insisted on a “Faculty”, or ecclesiastical permit, being sought, which was a process so protracted that it might be preceded by the super-glaciation of Hell.

Ironically, when a public fund-raising Appeal raised an astonishingly substantial amount of money, from the closet atheists who wished to pad their résumés
just in case
and earn the right never to have to go to church again, and the contractor went professionally bust but flushly with the funds to a new and Mediterranean life...the faithful were relieved. The church was a symbol of themselves, and synonymous with family, the BBC, and the State Pension and National Health Service. As the building decayed so did they, and when bits of it fell off or collapsed they debated hotly for years how the place might be restored with the greatest love and care, without ever intending to do anything about it. Attendance at popular events, such as Harvest Festival, Easter and the Christmas carol service, had nothing to do with religion, when believers, agnostics and atheists alike attended elbow-to-elbow without it occurring to any of them how anomalous such behaviour was. These occasions were enactments of pagan ritual, and no more remarkable than the annual barn dance and summer fayre. Church was an invitation-less party where everyone was a guest with no obligation to reciprocate hospitality; a place to keep an eye on the neighbours, talk about those who were absent, and sieve for nuggets of gossip.

Wealth was abundant in the region and some very tidy sums and valuable, even by urban standards, properties had been passed down from generation to generation in the established families. The size of these heritages was never manifested in personal or sartorial appearance, which was quite misleading as a guide to wealth, and it was a mistake to try and judge the net worth of an individual by his or her grooming or attire. Here the style and quality of one’s garments were of no consequence. It was enough for people to know that one was rich in order to command their respect, and the less clean and dressy the better because it did not show the others up. The safest assumption was the opposite of the obvious. The toothless tramp slumped on a broken-down wall mumbling to some scabby mutt was not a vagrant: he was the area’s biggest landowner and was worth a bundle in Old Money. One could be a millionaire and live in a barn with an outdoor toilet and electricity from a generator rather than off the National Grid, and keep chickens—and some did—for all the locals cared. The old-timers did not go in for central heating, reliably piped water, and gardens with flowerbeds and manicured lawns. They lived in draughty and insanitary mansions, drew water from a well or a pump, and grew their own organic-by-default vegetables. They ate off five-hundred-year-old tables that were carved with the initials of their ancestors and covered in tobacco burns and coffee rings. Their balded carpets and rugs, if they had any at all, were shagged with dog hair. They drove rusty old bangers with treadless tyres. They stoked and riddled ancient furnaces to keep the temperature above freezing in winter, never went on holiday, were never ill, and they blew their noses on leaves of hard Bronco toilet paper.