“I should say it’s off!” he said. His face went in an instant from the color of curds to a blazing shade of beetroot. “It’s desecration! Those who are asleep in the Lord are not to be rousted from their graves for the idle entertainment of a pack of vacant villagers.”
Vacant villagers, were we? Well! We shall see about that!
“I understand you’ve put a stop to it,” I said.
“The bishop has put a stop to it,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height—which was fairly substantial—as if he were wearing the bishop’s miter on his head and gripping the bishop’s crosier in his closed fist.
“And not only the bishop,” he added, as if a clincher were needed. “The chancellor, too, is dead set against it. He has withdrawn the faculty and forbidden the disinterment. The archaeologists have been sent packing.”
“Forbidden?” I asked. I was interested in the word, and not just because it had an amusing sound.
“Strictly forbidden.” He said this with a note of doomsday finality.
“And who is the chancellor?” I asked.
“Mr. Ridley-Smith, the magistrate.”
Mr. Ridley-Smith, the magistrate? I thought.
Cassandra Cottlestone’s father had been a magistrate, Daffy had told me, and as such, was able to move heaven and earth—to the extent even of having his suicide daughter buried in consecrated ground.
“That would be the Ridley-Smiths of Bogmore Hall,” I said.
Everyone knew about the Ridley-Smiths of Bogmore Hall, at Nether-Wolsey. They were the subject of stories that had once been whispered behind elaborate paper fans, but were now likely chattered about over cigarettes in the ABC Tea Shop.
I had heard, for instance, from Feely’s friend Sheila Foster, about Lionel Ridley-Smith, who thought he was made of glass, and his sister, Anthea, whose pet crocodile had eaten a chambermaid.
“That, of course, was before the First War,” Sheila had said, “when chambermaids were thicker on the ground than they are nowadays.”
And didn’t Miss Pickery, the librarian, have a married sister, Hetty, who lived in Nether-Wolsey?
Hetty had suffered what Miss Mountjoy, the former librarian, had once referred to as “a tragic accident” with a sewing machine. And what was it Miss Cool, at the confectionery, had contributed to my storehouse of knowledge about the mysterious but absent Hetty?
“… the Singer, the needle, the finger, the twins, the wayward husband, the bottle, the bills …” she had told me.
That, of course, had been almost a year ago, but with any luck, Hetty would be more than ever on the lookout for someone who was willing to babysit twins.
“Yes, that’s right,” Marmaduke Parr said with a sniff. “The Ridley-Smiths of Bogmore Hall.”
And before you could say “antitransubstantiationalist,” Gladys and I were speeding along the narrow tarmac on our way to Nether-Wolsey.
By hook or by crook, by fair means or foul, I would make Chancellor Ridley-Smith eat his words. Strictly forbidden, indeed!
To the south and west of Buckshaw was a crossroads, its left arm being, by way of Nether Lacey, more or less a backroad to Doddingsley. To the right was St. Elfrieda’s, and beyond it, a little farther to the south, lay Nether-Wolsey.
I saw at once, as I approached, that it was not the prettiest village in England. Not by a long chalk. Even the trees looked tired.
The most notable landmark was an ancient butcher’s shop huddled among terraced houses, its gray, unpainted boards sagging like a wooden drape, giving the place the pallor of the undead. In the flyblown window hung an odd arrangement of sausages, tied into strings and loops, and it took me more than a few moments to realize that they spelled out rather distastefully the word MEATS.
A bell tinkled as I opened the door, and then, except for the buzzing of a solitary fly in the window, the shop fell back into silence.
“Hello?” I called.
The fly buzzed on.
A glass case stretched halfway across the back of the narrow room, and in it were stretched out various slabs of raw meat in a grisly display of red, white, and blue that made my stomach wince.
Behind the counter, mounted in an ornate wrought-iron stand, was a roll of pinkish butcher paper. A length of heavy string dangled handily down from a small wire cage fastened to the ceiling.
At the rear of the shop, in a corner, stood a bloodied butcher block, and behind it was an open door which obviously led to the area behind the shop.
“Hello?” I called again.
There was no answer.
I edged round the glass case and stuck my head out the door.
The garden was littered with empty wooden crates. A reddened tree stump was obviously being used as a chopping block whose victims came from the chicken coops beyond.
As I stood there not quite knowing what to do next, a tiny woman in a skirt, blouse, and bandanna emerged from the largest chicken coop, gripping a large brown hen by its feet.
The bird hung struggling upside down, its stubby wings flapping helplessly.
As she placed its neck on the block and reached for the hatchet, she spotted me in the shop’s open doorway.
“Go back inside,” she said. “I shall be there directly.”
Her bare spindly arm raised the polished blade.
“No! Wait!” I heard myself saying. “Please …”
The woman looked up, the ax poised.
“Please,” I said. “I want to buy that bird … but I want it alive.”
What on earth had come over me? Although I didn’t mind dead humans—in fact, in some ways I delighted in them—I knew in that instant I could not bear the thought of harm coming to any other creature.
It hadn’t been all that long since I had been attacked in Bishop’s Lacey by a maddened rooster, and yet, in spite of that bloody free-for-all, my protective wings seemed at this very moment to be sheltering every chicken in the universe. It was a most peculiar feeling.
“Alive …” I managed, my head spinning like a toy top.
The woman put down the hatchet and flung the bird away from her. It flew—actually flew!—across the yard, made a half-decent landing, and began pecking at the hardened earth as if nothing had happened.
I knew that if Daffy were here, she would have said “Curfew shall not ring tonight.” This particular hen, at least for now, would live to cluck another day.
I had saved my first life.
Is there life after death for chickens? I wondered. Given the prospect of the ax, the plucking, the seething pot, the heat of the oven, and the gnawings of our hungry teeth at the Sunday table, it seemed somehow unlikely.
And yet … and yet, in spite of all that, perhaps there really was the reward of a heavenly roost somewhere above the bright blue sky.