The Perfect Sinner

Something quite like tiredness came over her then and she pulled over at the next service area. Wiltshire felt like a safe distance away and, after she’d unloaded her bitter-smelling coffee and pallid sandwich on to the most remote table, she rummaged in her bag for an address book just in case it showed she had a forgotten best friend somewhere. Instead, she found the stack of post that she had stuffed in there on the way out of the flat and, for want of anything better to do, she started opening the envelopes.

It was mostly dross, bills, junk mail, one wedding invitation from a colleague she didn’t much like and an invitation to speak at an Institute of Strategic Studies seminar, but there underneath was the other letter she had accidentally swept up with the rest, the letter she had left unopened before she went away to America, waiting for a right moment to open it, a moment which might never arrive.

The envelope was handwritten and postmarked Devon. It bore her old address in Fulham and someone had crossed that out and forwarded it, which, a whole year since she had moved, was the sort of miracle she would prefer not to happen. She stared at it for a long time before using a table knife to open it as if something inside might lunge at her fingers.

‘My dear Beth,’ it said, and she really had almost forgotten how to read his handwriting. ‘I know you are very busy these days, but I wonder if you might be able to come down to see us soon. It seems such an age since we talked and there is a lot to talk about. It is very beautiful down here at the moment. The flowers are out around the Ley. Eliza misses you. She would be glad to see you. She had a postcard, I know. Ring the Turners if you can come. They’ll give me the message. All my love, Dad.’

Tainted sanctuary. An invitation to the one place where nobody would go looking for her, the place nobody knew about. An invitation to the last place she wanted to go. There was no other hiding place in prospect but even then it was the most reluctant of decisions.

The motorway ended at Exeter and the endless stream of traffic heading towards Cornwall and the south-west tip of England clogged both lanes of the A38. Absurdly, she had to stop and check the map to be sure of her way. She had owned her own car for four years now and it was the first time she had driven down this way.

Below the teeming A38, Devon bulges down to the coast and that bulge is known as the South Hams. It is marked at first by miniature rounded hills, wearing clumps of trees as toupees on their very tops to stop the wind blowing the soil away. Further south, towards the coast, a gentle oceanic swell of ridges prepares you for the real waves ahead. Signs of tourism are all too plain on the larger roads that skirt around it, but in the middle of it all, inland from Start Bay, is a less trampled area of fields, lanes and not much else which retains some of the utter remoteness of past centuries.

Beth was not in a mood to be charmed as the hedges crept in on her and slowed her pace. She was a London driver to the depths of her soul, carving others up and expecting to be carved up in her turn, always ready with the quick hand gesture and always reacting in fury if she was given one first. The road from Totnes to Kingsbridge began to test her patience. With blind corner after blind corner, crests and hidden dips, there was nowhere to overtake for miles, The Dartmouth turning took her on to a road which was little better, but when she took the long-forgotten right turn signposted to Slapton, even the white line in the middle of the road disappeared.

It was a warm afternoon and she was driving with the window down, but the scent from the high banks bordering the road only made her feel uncomfortable and out of place. She hated the way the banks pressed in on her as if she were going down an ever-narrowing trap which might not allow her the space to turn around and escape again. After a mile or so she came up behind a small, silver Nissan which was being driven with quite unnatural caution. On the infrequent straight sections the driver, a very old man, would speed up to nearly twenty-five miles per hour, but when confronted by anything approaching a bend, he would slow to fifteen, restrained it seemed by his equally old wife who could be seen waving her hands in the air at any sign of a hazard. Once and only once the road straightened and widened enough for Beth to try overtaking, but the old man had no idea that she was behind him and pulled into the middle of the road as she began to pass. Neither occupant showed any response to her horn-blast so she added deafness to the list she was compiling of their characteristics and fell back in behind them again.

After a very long time and a fairly short distance, they came to a road junction where the couple in front, missing their chance to pull out, waited instead for a very slow tractor to pass in front of them. The tractor was followed by a long line of cars. When the road cleared, they still showed no sign of moving. She waited a little longer and gave another peep on her horn. There was no response. She got out, walked up to the other car and looked inside and her heart thumped. The man and the woman inside were indeed extremely old. They also looked quite dead, their heads lolling forward and their eyes closed. A series of irrational possibilities came to her. Had she killed them? Had her hooting given them both heart attacks? Could their exhaust be leaking? Maybe the carbon monoxide had been blown away by the wind until they stopped, then the inside of the car had filled up with a lethal dose. She took her courage in both hands and opened the driver’s door, and that was when the driver woke up.

‘Hello,’ he said with a puzzled smile, ‘can I help you?’

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘Were you asleep!’

‘Asleep? No, no. Oh. Oh dear, yes, perhaps I was.’ He looked around and seemed to find nothing particularly unusual in that. ‘I think we must have been having a little nap. Been for a walk you see. Did you want something?’

‘You’re in the middle of the road.’

‘Bless my soul, are we? I’m so sorry. Did you hear that Em? We’ve been asleep. In the road.’ Em showed no sign of waking.

‘Look I’m in a hurry,’ said Beth. ‘Can you just pull over and let me by.’

‘Let me see, yes, of course, of course,’

Beth got back in her car and the car in front started to move, but instead of pulling over, it meandered off again in the same direction as her and she swore viciously. Then it occurred to her that it really didn’t matter. She couldn’t have been in less of a hurry. No one knew she was coming and she didn’t even want to arrive. It was just that there was nowhere else to go. As the road became still narrower, the car in front suddenly put on an unwise burst of speed and shot off out of sight, suggesting that some physical need more urgent than sleep had overtaken its occupants. Beth didn’t speed up. The lane she was now driving down, and it was no more than that, should have been intensely familiar. She had walked it a thousand times in her childhood when it had been the lane home, but that didn’t help. She recognised it as if someone had spent many hours describing it to her, not as if she had lived there for two thirds of her life. Adding to that feeling of disjuncture, she caught a momentary glimpse through a gap to her right of something genuinely unfamiliar, a large house down in the valley below the road where she had no memory of such a place. Then it was too late for unfamiliarity because she was coming down the hill. Slapton, steep, cramped Slapton crowded in on her, and there ahead, looming over the cottages with its squadrons of rooks flying around the ivy wrappings of its derelict battlements, was the dark tower which was all that remained of Slapton Chantry.

The main road was a twisting gulley running down between stone walls as the village came rushing in to smother her, and when she finally found a tiny gap to squeeze the car into, she sat in it and waited for the courage to do what came next.

The front door of Carrick Cottage opened straight on to the road and the flaking blue paint on the door was just as it had always been. Beth looked to the side and saw the same frayed blue curtains. She put her finger to the bell, then hesitated and ran her hand up and down the stones beside the door until she found the gap where the key used to be hidden. It was no longer there. No one else needed it these days. For a moment she was the child who had lived there, but only for a moment. She rang the bell just as a stranger would.

The man who came to the door was not at all as he had always been. He had changed so much that for a moment she thought he was someone else. He was two stone lighter than when she had last seen him, but despite that he had put on far more years than the calendar showed. He looked at her as if he were equally bemused.

‘Beth?’ he said, ‘It’s Beth!’ and she saw a gleam of moisture appear immediately in the corner of each eye.

‘Hello Dad,’ she said and, being unable to kiss him, she put out both her hands and took his as they stared at each other.

‘I didn’t think you’d come,’ he said, ‘being so busy.’

She wondered if he still read a paper, if indeed he had any idea that the hounds were baying at her heels.

‘Yes, I’ve come,’ she said. ‘Can we go in?’

‘Can you stay for tea?’ he asked as if he expected her to disappear again at any moment.

‘I was hoping to stay a bit longer than that,’ Beth replied, ‘if that’s all right.’

He nodded. ‘That would be nice. Your room’s all ready, just in case.’

Beth suppressed a feeling of irritation.

He went into the kitchen and she heard him filling the kettle. It still made precisely the same sound it had always made, the tinny drumming of the water into thin metal. He had always filled it through the spout with the tap on full. She heard him light the gas.

Nothing had changed inside the house. The parlour was a dark place with split leather armchairs and the old prints of clipper ships on the walls. She crossed over to the bookshelf to distract herself from her discomfort. There were all the bird books and the botanical guides, but there also, to her astonishment, was a spine she knew well, her own little book from last year, The Opportunity of Crisis. It was in her father’s political section sandwiched between Will Hutton’s The State We ‘re In and Christie Kilfillan’s Last Chance, as if keeping matter and anti-matter apart.

He came back in from the kitchen and caught her looking at them.

‘I thought I’d better read what you had to say,’ he said quietly and sat down. ‘Won’t be long. The kettle takes a minute or two.’

She almost said, I know that, kettles are the same everywhere, but she bit it back. ‘What did you make of it?’ she asked instead, caught between a reluctant pride in his interest and a flash of anticipatory irritation.

He thought. He had never minded waiting to get his words right and that had stretched out the hours of Beth’s childhood often to breaking point. ‘It’s a great achievement to write a book,’ he answered in the end. ‘You feel passionately about it. I admire passion.’

‘But you don’t agree with what it says.’

‘You wouldn’t expect me to, would you?’

‘I suppose not, but surely you can see…’

He held up a hand. ‘There are other things to talk about first,’ he said. ‘The world can wait until after we’ve had our tea.’

She stood there and watched him go back into the little kitchen. That had always been their relationship, him doing the job of both parents and her doing the job of one child. Until she’d left.

He came back with two mugs. Hers had a picture of an otter on it, which was no surprise.

‘You’re still not on the phone then,’ she said.

‘No need. The Turners take messages. Peggy bangs on the wall if it’s urgent.’

‘Is it often urgent?’

He looked at her as if trying to detect sarcasm. ‘We had an injured egret down in the marsh last week.’

Beth wasn’t entirely sure whether an egret was an animal or a bird. For the first time, a part of her found something valuable in the relentless simplicity of his life. Her mobile was switched off and nobody could reach her. Not one single person in the outside world had any idea where she was. No one outside Slapton even knew she had a father. Here she could be safe while she sorted everything out. London political gossip wouldn’t reach down here. Her own father didn’t even know exactly what she did, who she had been working for.

That was when, looking down into his tea, he said, ‘Tell me, love. How bad is it with this man Livesay?’

CHAPTER FIVE

There is a chapel in the town of Ghent which owns a toe-bone of Saint Paul in a fine gold reliquary chest, and if you go to pray there, you may ask the priest for a twenty day notice. I went there alone as soon as I had seen to my men in their lodgings. The door had sagged so it caught on the sill and shook as I pushed it open, letting out a miasma of rotting cloth. Inside, it was very dark with only two candles burning and I didn’t see the priest sitting waiting at the confessional until he challenged me with a quavering voice.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded in the Flemish which I knew a little, and then in slower and imperfect French. ‘Are you a pilgrim? You don’t look like one.’

He probably thought I was a robber.

‘Tonight I’m a pilgrim,’ I answered, also in French. He stood up, held up one of the candles and looked doubtfully at my style of dress.

‘You have no scallop shell,’ he remarked.

‘I am not only on a pilgrimage,’ I said, ‘I am on the King of England’s business, but I intend to stop for prayer at wayside shrines along my way. I have come here to pray to your relic of the blessed Saint and to ask you for a certificate.’

That seemed to reassure him. ‘Do you need confession?’

Thank you, no. I have a priest with me. I make my confession to him.’

‘Have you sinned since your last confession to him?’

Had I sinned since the morning? I searched my memory and I couldn’t come up with anything immediate, so I said what I have always said when a strange priest asks me that.

‘Father, there is a sin I fear I have not yet confessed, the full weight of which is gradually becoming clear to me. Because I do not wish to confess less than the totality of that sin, I must wait before I ask forgiveness for it.’

He peered at me and in the dim light I could see his lips moving. He reached for a paper and held it out. It struck me he hadn’t understood a word of what I had just said.

‘I asked,’ he said doubtfully, ‘because tomorrow is our festival and if you come then I will give you forty days not twenty.’

‘Can I have twenty days now and another forty tomorrow?’ I asked, looking at the paper he had just given me.

He looked doubtful. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘It is one or the other.’

I gave it back to him reluctantly, thinking I would regret my action if I died that night. Forty days would take my sum of indulgences to a total of more than two thousand days. For a moment, my heart lifted at the thought of nearly six years less in Purgatory, then I remembered how much faster time moved there and I thought how many, many more certificates I would need to make much difference. My six years certificates might win me six years in the time of this world, but that would only be a few minutes of relief in the time they follow in Purgatory.

I gave him five coins for five candles and said I would be back in the morning, then I returned to the Boar’s Head Inn and joined my men sitting down at the long tables. William Batokewaye was on the far side of the room, with several women at his table. He told me once that he was a priest when he was in England but that it was a precious burden best left safe at home when he was travelling. I have known him for too long to question that, apart from wondering whether, even in England, he could be regarded as entirely priestly, but at the centre of that man is something so solid, so true, that I do not feel qualified to judge him. He believes he will be forgiven and I hope he is right because I would not wish him to pass an age in Purgatory. When he dies, there will be masses said in my Chantry for him, though he does not know it.

The food came in those huge chafing dishes with the boars’ heads at each end for which the Inn was named. Lentils in a spiced sauce and three different meats with spitted duck shredded over the top of them all. The fine gentlemen from Genoa didn’t like it. I thought it was excellent. When I’m travelling, I’m on campaign and when you’re out there scouring the countryside, you’re grateful for anything that keeps your belly button away from your backbone. The squire was getting the worst of their complaints and doing his best to explain to the landlord what they wanted to eat. It wasn’t going to get him anywhere. I knew the landlord, Garciot, from old times, and no one had ever got the better of him yet. Before he bought the inn with the proceeds of his ransoms, he’d been one of John Hawkwood’s men for many a year. Hawkwood always said Garciot scared him stiff and, coming from Hawkwood, that was saying something. They lived for fighting, Hawkwood’s bunch, but they always knew what was right and wrong. You might well call them mercenaries, and it was true that they fought for money but they wouldn’t take that money from just anyone. They lived by a tough set of rules, but they stuck to them.

The evening ran its predictable course. The Genoese persisted with their complaint. Garciot stared at them without expression, then he took their food away and came back with something that looked almost the same but smelt far, far worse. He winked at me as he put it in front of them and I wondered what he could possibly have added to it out of sight in the kitchen to make it quite so repugnant. He excused himself for a moment to deal with the two Brabanters at the end of the table who had been making a drunken nuisance of themselves. He held the larger of them off the ground with one hand, while he patted his pockets for dinner money with the other, then he put one under each arm and showed them how to fly into the street. After seeing that, the Genoese managed to eat a surprisingly large amount of whatever it was on their plates and left to go to their rooms as soon as they could get away.

My men went about their own business, drifting towards William’s table while Garciot came and sat with us, the squire and me.

‘What are you doing, travelling with pants-wetters like those?’ he asked.

‘King’s orders. King’s affairs,’ I replied, not wanting to encourage him. Familiarity is to be expected when you’ve spilt blood together, but it wasn’t for me or for him to question the nature of the business my sovereign had charged me with.

‘I hear the King’s in his dotage,’ he answered, ‘watching his debts mount up, piling jewels on to this ugly mistress of his and letting the upstart John lord it over the country.’

The squire stiffened and, unbelievably, I saw his hand go to the grip of his sword.

‘Enough, Garciot,’ I said, and I thought I had said it quite quietly until I saw how many turned to stare.

He raised a hand quickly. ‘My apologies, Sir Guy. While he commands your loyalty, he is still a great king.’

He turned to the squire and whispered something. The squire’s indignation drained out of him. My hearing is still sharp, but the room was full of the noise of feasting men and when Garciot had gone off to see to his guests I demanded to know what he had said.

‘Nothing bad,’ said the squire quickly.

I wasn’t sure I believed him. Garciot was certainly capable of a final sarcastic quip. ‘Then what?’

‘He told me I should study at your feet and mark every word you spoke.’

Oh really. ‘Are you sure that’s what he said?’

‘I don’t lie, Sir Guy.’ For a short, fat studious man, he suddenly looked quite fierce.

‘I’m sure you don’t. Please excuse my bad manners. It’s just that I will not tolerate people abusing our king.’

He nodded. ‘And I won’t stand for people abusing my lord Lancaster.’

I didn’t show my amusement at the thought of him in hand-to-hand combat with Garciot because he so clearly meant what he said. The fight would have been over before a man could sneeze.

‘You have a high regard for Lancaster?’ I enquired.

That was who Garciot meant by his ‘upstart John’. King Edward’s youngest son, born only yards from where we now sat in Ghent and therefore known as John of Gaunt, as his mother, a Hainaulter, called the town. I wouldn’t have wanted to upset the squire further, but privately I had some sympathy for Garciot’s opinion. John had lately styled himself ‘King of Castile’, which seemed to me to be coming it a bit rich. He was never a man who had much understanding for those below him and I couldn’t fully forgive him for that slaughter at Limoges.

‘I had the highest regard for his Duchess.’ The squire sounded sad. He crossed himself, giving a deep sigh. ‘I wrote a poem to her.’

The beautiful Blanche. I thought of her and joined him in his silence because whenever I had seen Blanche I had thought immediately of Elizabeth, who had the same hair and the same forehead, but who shaded Blanche like a cathedral choir shades a tavern singer. I still long for Elizabeth every single day. We did not have enough time together. I know this life on earth is only our qualification for whichever place comes next, and I would not fear my time to come in Purgatory if it were just for myself. I deserve to suffer. No, what I cannot bear is the thought that I might spend an aeon there, locked away from her. Even worse is the other possibility that, through our sin, I might meet her there.

They sang her mass every day at Tewkesbury just as they would be singing it now at Slapton. I prayed that would work.

In the years we had together, right up until the end, she had a way of looking at me which suspended time and conscious thought so that we would gaze at each other in private delight. From across a room our souls could still embrace.

‘Sir Guy,’ said the squire, a little hesitantly, jerking me back to this noisy inn.

‘Yes?’

‘I would not wish to upset you or intrude upon you in any way,’ he said, waving a hand for another jug of wine, ‘but I have a great desire to hear men’s stories, and there is still so much I want to ask you in particular.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because I know that what the landlord said was right. Whenever I have heard your name spoken, it has always been with respect and trust. I want the chance to hear the story of great events told without having to worry about discerning truth and falsehood in the telling.’

‘Oh now be careful, young man. My memory is sixty-five years old. All memories are changed in the use and the retelling. I cannot guarantee you truth.’

‘I will take the risk.’

‘We have a long way to go,’ I said, ‘and precious little other company worth the name.’ It was clear we both felt the same way about our Genoese companions, and my archers, all fine fellows, were men of few words. ‘Ask what you want.’

‘When did you first meet this priest?’ he asked, staring over at William who was singing vigorously in the crowd of girls.

‘On the twenty-seventh day of August in the year thirteen hundred and forty six, just after the middle of the night.’

‘And you question the power of your memory?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘That is a fuller answer than anyone could expect. Where was it?’

‘In the Valley of the Clerks.’

‘I don’t know of it. Where is it?’

‘It is some two hundred yards below the windmill on the down-slope of the plateau beside the village of Crécy-en-Ponthieu.’

‘Oh.’ He made a face. ‘That valley. Stupid of me. The great battle. Do you still remember it well?’

Remember it well? I thought of it almost as often as I thought of Elizabeth.

‘It’s an old tale and well-known,’ I said. ‘Were you born then?’