The Jester's Bell, Part Two

Ida Lippitt washed little Joshua with the same cloth and in the same basin that she used to clean their pots and pans. Then she took the baby out and wrapped him in the softest towel that they owned. Upon removal from the water the bundle began to cry a little, so she laid his head on her shoulder and patted his back.

She heard a fumbling at the door and then it flew open, exposing their home to night. Her husband Daniel stumbled in, tired from the forge and filled by the tavern. He flung his boots into the corner and his body into a wooden chair, which promptly buckled, and ran his hand over the rivulets in the oak table. He pulled a hip flask out of his pocket and swigged back some additional strength. Then he sat still. Ida tentatively edged towards to her husband now, concerned but loathe to ask what the matter was, lest his fists provide the answer.

She put the hand she wasn’t using to burp the baby upon the other’s shoulder. He turned with a start to look at her, as if he had only just realised that he was not alone in the room. She started too. There was noise in his eyes. The baby began to cry loudly. He shouted that she had better make that thing put a sock in it soon or else he would have to and he would be sure to use more than a sock.

She knew that the past few weeks had been hard for him. The only mason in the village, he had been commissioned by Mr. Reed to help him design and construct a stairway for the Bell. Daniel had set to work with gusto: Reed’s pub itself had been a strangely designed beast, widely commented upon for proportions so oddly accommodating that it seemed to make space for any conceivable grouping or occasion. This idiosyncrasy meant that the project would be no ordinary commission: it offered Daniel, finally, an opportunity to be recognised as something more than a mere artisan. He had come home excitedly night after night with talk of unconventional treads, ornate risers and curlicued nosings, descriptions that were born in technicalities but blossomed into something more, imbuing him with a new youth, so excited was he about the chance to create.

However, as the weeks had passed, Ida began to infer that the project was souring; Daniel was now coming home irritable: he had become contemptuous of the publican’s despotism, his lack of familiarity with masonry, and his seemingly willing ignorance of economic limitations for which Daniel was having to compensate. Her husband was now captious, volatile. Then there had been a final falling out between the two  men, triggered by something about which Daniel had been unwilling to speak. He had started to drink more and had become increasingly violent. To make matters worse, his dealings with the apparently  sacrilegious necromancer now meant that nobody else would hire him, and so bread was becoming harder and harder to win. Ida bore the bruises of the town’s wrath.

He had had not been present at last week’s burning. He had sat at this same table, his head in his hands, for hours and hours, as if any movement of any kind might incriminate him in the eyes of some higher power. Since that night his irascibility had morphed into something more ineffable and paralysing, accompanied by an almost evangelical desire for silence, so that the slightest noise would set him off headlong into storms.

Tonight, though, Daniel Lippitt looked at his wife and tears streamed down his face and he asked her if they might leave Combe for ever. She nodded, not hoping but somehow knowing that leaving would change everything for the better.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In the section on haunting, located on the final pages, the pamphlet evinced a desperate attempt complicate what was the glaringly uncomplicated thatch and stonemasonry of the town the impression, giving Meg and Leo the impression that its publishers had realised the first four pages had done all that they could do, that that wasn’t quite enough, and that something else was probably necessary. The most notable paranormal event revolved around the apparition of a lugubrious centurion which had been sighted on the stone bridge to the north of the town. Leo crossed his legs and reclined against the wicker chair, closing his eyes to the light of the sun that had shifted out from behind the large willow tree which loomed over the village’s eastern side.

“I don’t know”, he said, his voice confident in the midday shine. “There’s something about Roman ghosts that isn’t that scary. You know? I mean, they’re blokes in skirts who speak Latin. Very public school. Plus their swords won’t work anymore, ‘cause they’re made of ectoplasm. So even though they’re right on display there – it really calls attention to how useless they are. What you really want it creepy monks or nuns or kids - that stuff’s just better.”

She scanned her eyes over the pamphlet, frustrated not only by his reluctance to make an effort, but also, more annoyingly, her agreement with his reasoning. She quelled herself, volunteering to steer the day onto a brighter course. “What about the church, then?” She could hear the affected singsonginess in her voice, but persevered nevertheless. “We’ll go and look at the church and then we’ll go somewhere else and have something to eat. It’ll be one by then, at least.”

“A pretty late lunch, then.”

He had seen through her plans for the desperate time-serving that they were. She resented that. She wanted to balk. Over the past couple of months, Leo had begun to openly flout the cardinal rule of maintaining an unhappy relationship, which is that you never acknowledge the relationship's unhappiness. She glowered at him with a disdain, but saw that it was in vain: his eyes were still closed. Savouring this opportunity, she flipped him the bird. He didn’t notice that.  Meg smiled.

Then she stood and walked over to his chair. Standing behind and over him, she put her arms on his shoulders and moved her face over his raven thatch to kiss him lightly on the forehead. He opened his eyes, looked up at her and smiled, though not before letting slip an expression that betrayed surprise.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get penitent.”

They walked along the cobbled market square in the direction of the spire, taking in the cottages with their framed windows peering out from 14^th century stones onto the sprinkling rivulet that trickled through and beneath the centre of Combe. It was, they had to admit, remarkably pretty.  Megan, cheeks suffused with sun, was suddenly buoyed. She turned to her boyfriend and smiled, “We could live in a place like this one day.” The accompanying vision promptly caused her soul to retch. Leo didn’t say anything at all. They entered through the oaken door into the smooth quiet within.

It was a humble edifice, closer in scale and atmosphere to the open-plan ground floor of a show-cottage than a place of worship: the nave was about twenty feet long and the transept, which was about eight feet away from the entrance, was little more than two small cupboards adjoining the main body of the building, their doors taken down in the interest of space. A cobwebbed chancel glowered over a paltry altar. The space was dotted with posters and donation-boxes, garishly decorated with solicitous potpourri. Access to the aisle on the east side was blocked off by a colourful display promoting the local Sunday School. This mass of discordant finger paintings and drawings of stick men had been created by children who would one day grow to be desperate to leave Combe: upon returning for holidays, they would probably not happen to caarrying any change so as to provide the donations necessary to keep the anachronism afloat. The church struck Leo as little more than a tourist attraction, a spectacle of unimaginative conservatism rather than a devoted perseverance of faith. He wandered away from Megan to indulge these thoughts, affecting an air of contemplation he hoped would impress her.

Stood in front of the altar, Meg felt pressed by competition with Leo into some manner of reflection. She made a sudden scramble within for some kind of meaning, a significance that had always – she now realised - had been somewhat absent. Her parents had been religious, yes, but she had never really understood the fuss. She only really now was able to put her finger on the ramifications of that slow-burn process. Presently inside ‘the house of God’ she could not help but feel outside it, could not for the life of her refrain from mentally putting it in scare quotes. Where was her altar? This question crashed around her. An abyss promptly opened, and something inside her crumbled in a collapse that registered as a physiologically palpable event. For the first time, she became certain that whatever this thing was that people throughout the ages have labelled the soul not only physically existed – it was apparently just behind the left lung, lower down, right above the guts – but that it also functioned as a sort of petrol pump, and that it was filled with an essence that could be exhausted at any moment. Looking up and down, side to side, she frantically scoured for something to plug the emetic: her soul was about to shit itself. Her gaze whipped over across the floor towards Leo, occupying himself by examining something at the north side: no. She raised her eyes up to the stained glass windows at the back of the apse and glared at sunken-eyed holies saving themselves for later. She understood then that she had herself been guilty of the same folly.

She felt as if she was about to fall, and worried about her body smacking down against the stone. Something might break. She put her arm to the wall to steady herself.

She composed herself and walked past an ornamental faceless clock in the nanthex and over to her boyfriend to see what he was looking at. Leo had assumed a pensive attitude, slowly scratching the barely post-pubescent hairs on his lower chin hoping to qualify them as a beard. He stared intently at a stone tomb, with a monument in the image of its incumbent knight, horizontally serene, carved into the stone wall.

“You see how his legs are crossed?” he asked her.

She nodded. They were, and she did.

“That’s what they do to show that the person fought in two crusades.”

She turned to look at him, impressed: she would never have bothered to learn anything like that. This brought on a wave of guilt, and she regretted the copious wells of hate that she had filled in the name of what was essentially a rather harmless young boy. She realised, suddenly, that she would have to end the relationship soon. The wells were overflowing, and she did not want to drown them both. She would not do it this weekend – that would turn all of this into a real horror story – but soon after. A week after they returned, perhaps. Knowing that she would have to do this, and assuming that it would crush him, she felt even more guilt, and blurted a kiss onto his cheek. His features once again registered surprise, though he was quicker this time to obscure it, smiling back with something approaching charm. He promptly wandered off to look at the faceless clock, as if wishing to leave their interaction on a high note. She turned her attention back to the tomb. She simultaneously envied the dead man’s belief and felt contemptuous of its purpose. She looked to his face, granted relaxation through effigy, and noticed a small placard nailed to the wall to the left of his head, the view of which Leo had previously blocked:

"Sir Walter de Dunstanwille, Baron of Castle Combe, who died in 1270. In the window above the tomb you can see the arms of the Scrope family who held the Manor of Combe for over 400 years. His crossed legs indicate that he went on two crusades."

She quietly laughed to and at herself.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

That night, in the Keeper’s Lodge, they lay in bed and neither of them could sleep because of what they each thought were completely different reasons.

To Meg’s mind, one had always felt more than the other. Originally it had been she, though sustained exposure to his listlessness had tipped the scales in the other direction, inversely buoying the desires of this boy who always so wanted what he could not have. The untenability of the situation saddened her. She scoured her mind for memories, wondering if there had ever been a point in time when they had faced each other eye to eye, level across a long seesaw plank – and, if there had been, whether either of them had realised at that moment that it was actually happening.

All of her kind feelings towards him were now suffused with melancholy and regret, neither of which were particularly arousing. Nevertheless, they were now on a romantic weekend away in the country, and he would probably want some. She would have to rebut him, and that would make him resent her. She felt him nibbling her ear, something he did that she had never told him she found sexually exciting in any way. She wondered how long it would be after she said no that he would fall asleep so that she could sneak off into the bathroom and calm herself down in the only way that was left to her now.

 “Can we not tonight?” she asked, playing the get-out-of-jail-free card.

Leo’s face registered something he wasn’t very proud of, but he masked it quickly enough that he hoped she didn’t notice, and kissed her quickly on the forehead. It was a gesture which once spoke of affection but had by now calcified into an acknowledgement of abstention. He turned to face the other wall, and began to count the months since this had started happening. She had started to say that she had a headache, or was too tired. This continued for so long that it had risked beginning to appear as though she might have a rather serious medical condition, so she had simply stopped coming up with such excuses. Tired of arguments, he resigned himself because he had always respected her disinclination to lie. Silence was a more comfortably indisputable truth. So Leo dozed off, thought steadily melting into calmer dark. At one point he was woken slightly by the light being turned on in the en suite. He took advantage of the empty bed to see to himself.

This was a moment that, for Meg and Leo, qualified as a shared experience.