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.

The Jester's Bell, Part One

Moonlight filtered down through burning rafters. Publican Jim Reed struggled to lift the erstwhile roof-beam from his midsection, but it had fallen over not only his abdomen but also his left arm. Both were crushed. Ivory splinters toured arteries, scratching corridor walls. He heard the celebratory laughter of Father Clemence and his retinue of townspeople petering out as they discarded their torches on the other side of the hillock. Reed grappled at the beam with his remaining arm, but only managed to shift it so that it crashed down on the lower section of his left lung. He felt something bubble, and then give way, and his torso housed a breaking dam. Reed began to wheeze, the blood he spat singeing in the crackling flames.

His eyes moved from the encumbering wood up to the moon, and he whispered something under his breath, something much like the words that, in being much too holy, had provoked Father Clemence’s parochial crusade. He looked to his right side then, along the floorboards, and towards the iron trap door that steamed like a griddle beneath conflagrating kegs. Reed smiled at the sight. Death came and froze the irony his face .

By morning, the flesh under Jim Reed’s nose had charred to the bone, making that smile even wider.

…………………….

The eleven thirty-four Virgin Pendolino to London Paddington moved more quickly on the outside. Inside they sipped lattes, occasionally looking out at fields that they would never roam. Megan McColl and Leo Campbell were due to alight at Chippenham before getting the bus to Castle Combe, where they had decided to share a quiet and romantic weekend in fourteenth century pubs and in castles and in other assorted quaint and pretty things. The mini-break would remind them that there was a history outside of themselves, and one that hadn’t all been composed of blood and guts and forced hierarchies, at that: from the looks of the brochure, it was a place that would reassure them that some of the nation’s past had actually been rather lovely. Both Meg and Leo had forgotten whose idea it was to go there.

Meg was reading ‘Pride and Prejudice’ again. Leo had forgotten to bring a book, and his iPod had run out of battery. Initially she was glad about this, because he had always been too cheap to buy headphones of quality and so a tinny reverberation of whatever Bruce Springsteen song he happened to be listening to – and it would definitely be a Springsteen song, as he never listened to anything else - would always infringe upon her relaxation like an adolescent bluebottle. She discovered, however, that the alternative was much more frustrating.

“Which bit are you at?”

He had been asking her that every five minutes, as if he was acutely familiar, on an incident-by-incident level, with every event and emotion in Elizabeth Bennett’s life, and wished to be reminded of each and every one. This literary equivalent of punching someone in the arm whenever you see a yellow car punctured her personal experience of the narrative so unceasingly – the word “the” seemingly qualified as a yellow car - that after an hour she wanted to throttle his neck and throw his pathetic gropings at connection onto the oncoming rails.

“She’s just met Wickham,” she relented.

“Isn’t he the one who dates her older sister? ‘Courts’, I mean.”

Evidently, he wasn’t as familiar with it as she’d thought, and was just bored. This was not something to be welcomed: she had head the adage that ‘only boring people get bored’, but the person who had come up with that one had never met Leo, who had a tendency, whenever ennui struck, to become – in his own eyes, at least - cloyingly, overwhelmingly interesting . She leant over and brought her bag into her lap, and proceeded to fumble within, scrambling for mp3s, praying to the relationship gods that there would be battery power.

“No,” she said, trying hard not to make it sound like the “fuck you” that permanently-holidaying courage would have provided. “That’s Bingley. And she marries him.”

“Bingley, that’s it.” He beamed suddenly. “I remember. I liked him. He was cool.”

She found herself at very risk of starting to hate her favourite book, which was now soiled by his banal textual commentary. Thankfully, at that moment, her fingers clasped around the cold surface of her iPhone and she was free. She told him she was tired, and was going to sleep the rest of the way. She told him she could read the Austen, if he wanted.

Leo didn’t want to read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ again. He didn't particularly enjoy reading books, let alone rereading them: the only reason he was familiar with that one is that, at a time when he still thought it germane to do his homework, she had said it was her favourite. She had read that book five times since they had started seeing each other two years ago, and he got the distinct impression that each time she read it he receded further in her eyes from the ideal that its landed gentry promoted. She seemed unhappy with him again and he could not understand why. A few months ago, this would have angered him, or caused him to worry about how to rectify the situation, but now he did not want to understand why. Situations like this now only left within him a dull tension that was bearable and would only deteriorate were you to fiddle with it further, like an old television with which one has made a compromise: accept the mild interference on the image, because if you start to play with the aerial any more you’ll lose the picture entirely. He would let her sleep now, and make sure to do something charming later to resolve the situation and save the weekend. He started to think about what this adorable act could be (should the situation call for it, he was, if he didn’t mind thinking so himself, always rather good at being adorable), but, petulant that it was again left to him ameliorate matters, he resolved that he would leave thinking it up on the bus from Chippenham. If she was still visibly irritated when she woke up then he wouldn’t bother, anyway. Right now, all that Leo wanted was to look out of the train’s window and to not think about it. He sighed, wondered if that was possible, and wished his iPod hadn’t run out of battery. He could really do with listening to ‘Born to Run’ right now.

 ............................

The village was quiet in a manner that justified the tour guides’ decision to label it serene. They ambled through the old square as a quaint sun shone past spires overhead. They had to amble; there wasn’t enough square to facilitate walking. There was a lot of thatch, though, and a few of pubs and tea shops. That was something they could see themselves doing: a blog had told them that they were supposed to like tea shops. Still, the overwhelming quietude of the village exposed other, less welcome silences, and they grew uneasy with one another. Leo lamented the lack of a Nando’s, in an attempt at compensatory charm for earlier. That only made things worse: unbeknownst to him, his river of charm had run dry a long time ago, and unveiled to Meg a bedrock of overwhelming conceit. Seeing as it was still eleven in the morning - the taverns were out of the question - they decided to sit down at the tables outside a tea room facing the Market Cross. They hoped the blog was right.

Each ordered an earl grey, both (mistakenly) thinking that it was the others favourite. When it arrived, they chinked their cups, and smiled at one another, dappled attractively by the beams refracted off mottled stonemasonry. There was a moment or two where nothing much was said. It was a rather prolonged moment. Meg was loathe to say ‘this is nice’ - that would be as much of a death-knell as bringing out the iPhone - so she delved forthwith into her bag, rifled about, and pulled out the stapled-together printouts she had pertaining to ‘The Prettiest Village in England.’

“I was thinking we could look at the church after this.  Apparently it has some rather lovely stained-glass windows.” She was hoping he’d fail to observe that she had never cared about stained glass windows before in her life.

He looked away from the indeterminate point in space that had been occupying his attention: “Where’s that?”

She regarded the printout, looked right past him, and pointed. “It’s right there.”

It really was right there. Where else would it have been?, they both asked themselves. There wasn’t a lot of town in which it could be.

“Sure, I guess,” he said, before resuming his previous ocular engagement.

She scoured to find something that would interest him further, resenting the fact that she once again had to do so. After a couple of minutes she felt she had reason to interrupt his activity once again.

“Apparently this place we’re staying tonight is haunted!”

“Yeah?” His eyes lit up.

They both loved ghosts. Things that had died and found within or without themselves the supracosmic wherewithal to actually come back fascinated them. They had discovered this shared enthusiasm a few months ago, and it had facilitated the most passionate, lengthy, and cod-philosophical conversation they had shared since the early days when they were still wrapped in each other’s illusions and their eyes were filled with smiles. During this talk, a rekindling felt immanent. Eventually, however, and before that connection could be consummated, something in the conversation had caused them to  stop, and they had been left agitated, awkward and unable to sleep. The accusatory silence had confused them both at the time, but its hidden meaning was beginning to dawn on them: that night they had exposed their shared desire for their relationship to come back, and in doing so they had betrayed the reality of its current state.