Part IV: Grayling
The cathedral close was silent, still with the crystallised calm of a night gripped by frost. The limes that lined the paths held their rigid twigs stiffly, fringed with rime, no wind to make them stir. Each blade of grass beneath was a silent dagger, pointing to a black sky filled with un-twinkling stars. Much earlier there had been one or two figures hurrying about their business, well wrapped up, now the only signs of life were the cracks of light leaking from between the tightly closed shutters of the deanery.
And above this silence there spun music. Even out here, kept from the house by bolts, bars and shutters, and the mystical safeguard of the threshold that was stronger than them all, the small perfect tone carried to him, golden-light on the cold, black air.
The song ended and there came a ripple of polite but appreciative applause. Angelus decided to stretch his legs – experience had taught him that the dean’s wife liked to hold the concert up with tedious introductions for each song – and he tensed and leapt up to the parapet fronting the deanery, strolling along it and looking down at the next house along.
The little house was tiny, crammed into a corner of the close between the Queen Anne stateliness of the deanery and the medieval alms-houses where twelve aged but respectable paupers of the city were lodged. Its own age was indefinable, plain red brick without variation or adornment, but the walls were bowed with age – this had been the house for the organist of the cathedral since before the deanery was a brash new addition to the close. A little curl of smoke drifted up from its chimney and vanished into the moonlight.
Angelus could see down into the back garden of the organist’s house now. Two strips of grass, crisp with frost, stiff bushes of lavender bordering a path, a washing line, blackcurrant bushes against the far wall. Angelus gently dropped onto the roof of an outbuilding to give himself a clear view into the window of the first floor room. It was a bedroom with a narrow brass bed just wide enough for two and beside it an old fashioned wooden cot, pink, floral-pattern china on the washstand, a razor strop and a straw summer hat hanging behind the door.
From the deanery, another song started up.
Angelus jumped down and prowled around the edge of the outbuilding towards the one light showing from the ground floor of the organist’s house. Angelus leant, silent, into the shadow of the outbuilding’s wall. Through the curtains he could see a woman – the organist’s wife. The boy’s mother. She was thin, her hands red against the whiteness of the sheet she was endlessly hemming. She had the fairness of the boy, his narrow, pointed face, but in her, the lines were pinched, with white streaked into her golden hair, and when she stooped over the baby waving its limbs in the basket beside her she looked tired. She scooped the baby up and pressed it to her breast, swaying a little from side to side although it was making no sound. Indeed Angelus had scarcely ever heard it cry – as if the only noise permitted in that house was the endless shades of music.
The woman carried the baby towards him and, cradling it gently, she reached and opened the little window, pushing the casement wide. Then she lifted the baby up, the woolly shawl wrapped close about its form, and she smiled. ‘Do you hear that, baba?’ she whispered. ‘Listen – that is your big brother. He is singing tonight for the Dean and all the great ladies and gentlemen of the city. Can you hear?’ She craned forward a little more, the smile on her face lighting up her thin, tired features. So still was the night that he could feel her breath stirring the air just a few feet from him, and if he concentrated very closely he imagined he could almost feel the tiny spectral gasps of the baby itself.
If she leaned forward just a little more she would break the threshold and he could snatch them both in an instant. Rip the baby’s throat out in front of her eyes. Leave her bruised and bloody body, red in the frost for the morning sun to find.
And over the rooftops twirled and sparkled the sweetness of the boy’s singing.
‘Yes,’ his mother said, ‘that is James.’ She shivered and stood back and pulled the casement shut, settling the baby back in its warm nest of woollens. Smiling and murmuring to it as she turned to put a little more coal on the fire.
James. His name was James. Angelus felt as if the name had sent a bolt of electricity into his chest.
The song ended, giving rise to an eruption of applause with more feeling behind it than the earlier ones. There was a sense of finality and Angelus quickly bounded back up onto the roof, working his way over to the alms-houses from where he could lean out over the close.
Sure enough, a few minutes later two figures appeared at the kitchen door of the deanery, and hurried the short way down the path, James reaching up on tiptoe to lift the bolt of the gate and hold it for Ashworth. As he closed the gate again he lingered for a second, looking back, and Angelus longed to know what he was thinking.
‘Hurry up now, James. It is late,’ Ashworth called back. ‘You should be in bed.’
‘Yes papa.’ James came quickly.
Angelus craned far out, the stone finial of the gable cold and hard under his hand, the cross at its tip buzzing beside his cheek as he strained forwards almost to the point of falling, and then James was inside. Angelus sighed and settled back on the roof, hunkered down on his heels. He had not been able to discover any position from which he could see into the tiny window up in the eaves, so he must be content with his own imagination. A small room, he had decided, little more than space for the narrow bed. There would be no toys, no story-books, nothing to indicate a child lived there except the pair of small shoes tucked neatly side by side under the bed, and hanging on the back of the door a satchel filled with sheet music.
The flickering light of a candle appeared and Angelus edged forward, drawn to the thought of a small form kneeling to say prayers, then jumping into the bed. The light went out and still he waited. Beyond those walls a small body was relaxing sweetly into sleep after a long hard day. The cold of the night sank into his own ancient frame, blood deep, bone deep. Tonight he felt very old.
He thought about music – the steady progression of notes to an inevitable conclusion. And with a soft plump he dropped to the ground, smiling. With great care he picked three daffodils from the dean’s garden and laid them on the worn stone step of the organist’s house, then retreated, leaving a trail of footprints in the frost on the path.