Twelve Drummers Drumming (7 page)

A
s the purest joy seized his heart, Tom grasped for an instant—and, really, for the first time—the sensations of Lazarus’s sisters as they beheld their adored and freshly animated brother: the astonishment, the thankfulness, the unquestioning, unalloyed happiness. For what greater gift could God bestow than the return of a loved one from the shadow of death? Lisbeth was alive.
She was alive!
It had all been a horrible mistake. Oh, there would be time to settle later with the authorities—the police, the doctors, the undertakers—for their foolish imperceptions. How could they not have seen that she had been merely asleep, breathing shallowly, the victim of some wicked spell? How fortunate that she had awoken!
Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap
. It had been the insistent, persistent tapping that had torn him from his place of grief and sent him flying to her coffin to spring the lid. She had looked up at him dreamily, guiltily, as if caught napping when she should have been at her surgery, but yielding easily, laughing, to his eager embrace, greedily matching his barrage of kisses, as if it had been the first time they had made love. And then, just as he bent further to lift her from her confinement,
darkness dropped like doom upon the earth. Lisbeth was vanished from his arms.
Tap tap tap
. The sounds came again, only this time muffled. The air, sickly warm and redolent of dust, grew close and he gasped, struggling for the breath of life against an alien presence now pressing along his face. He sensed, but could not see, his arms flailing and thrashing as he spun downwards, downwards into an abyss.

And then, just as there had been darkness, now there was light. A bit of it, at least, peeking through soft hairs that grazed his eyelashes. Tom widened his eyes and stared dully past the blurry boundary towards the bedroom wall, which was flushed with morning’s first sun. He freed one hand from under the covers and pushed Powell—or possibly Gloria; he still couldn’t tell the difference—away from his face. He breathed in sharply, then jerked his head up to see the cat regarding him with a kind of diabolical fixedness.
Go away, spawn of Satan
, Tom ordered the cat telepathically, hoping the creature’s peanut brain would pick up the signal. Apparently, it did not. Powell—it was Powell; a quick glance at his vulgar backside confirmed the feline’s sex—climbed his chest and circled it. Tom dropped his head back and began absently stroking the nesting cat, grateful that no dead bird had been desposited this time on the duvet. The tapping noise coming from the ceiling—Madrun writing her daily letter to her deaf mother on some confounded ancient typewriter—had a peculiar resonance. The dream! He had been dreaming of Lisbeth once again, dreaming that she was alive. He groaned, and wiped sleep and tears from his eyes. Only Mary and Martha had been vouchsafed the return of a loved one from the grave, if you were inclined to literal interpretation of scripture.

He allowed the tapping overhead to lull him, savouring the few sweet moments before the urgencies of living would triumph over the pleasures of a fluffy duvet and a warm cat. In such moments, when he was actually in it, he was glad he hadn’t made the effort to get rid of the bed, as he had intended. It was only when he was out of it, in his dressing gown or passing through on some small errand,
and happened to glimpse it, that its sheer buggery grandiosity violated his sense of priestly propriety. Elaborately carved, heavily draped and canopied, it was a bed a Stuart monarch might disport in. Or die in, if he could keep his head attached to his neck. How Giles James-Douglas had got the thing into the vicarage in the first place was a wonder, but getting it out, Tom realised after a few enquiries, would have exacted the patience of several folks, notably Mrs. Prowse, who had an evolving relationship with novelty. The drab (by comparison) bed he’d bought with Lisbeth went into one of the vicarage’s four other bedrooms, which, along with the three bathrooms, a drawing room, a breakfast room, a dining room, a boot room, a conservatory, and a cat flap, constituted a home rather more grand than the one they’d had in Bristol. He sometimes felt that it was obscene that he should be living in such comparative splendour; that he should be letting out rooms to refugees or homeless. The square footage was better suited to vicars in ages past who had wives, half a dozen children, and a servant or two. Not to a man, one child, and a housekeeper.

Giles James-Douglas had had a sizeable private income. While the Church had been busy for decades cashing in on rural property prices and selling off the rambling vicarages and rectories built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leaving its clergy in brisk, modern little houses, in Thornford Regis, the vicarage had been passed over by the angel of downsizing. James-Douglas had bought the vicarage outright from the Church. In his will he had returned it to the Church so long as it remained the residence of the incumbent vicar, leaving sufficient monies to maintain the extra upkeep for so large a residence, and so long as it remained the residence of one Madrun Prowse, housekeeper, upon whom he had—it was rumoured—lavished a generous bequest.

It was probably one of the more unusual property arrangements in the Church of England, but the consequence was nothing if not agreeable. James-Douglas had been a dab hand at interior decoration and he hadn’t been averse to creature comforts of the latest innovation,
including installing, in his final year, a shower in the en suite with remarkable capabilities. Too busy and too pinched in the pocketbook to give much thought to their four walls, Tom and Lisbeth had lived for years in a hodgepodge of family discards and Habitat knockoffs. When he went to do a recce of the vicarage at Thornford, Tom decided it was hardly worth integrating very much of their old tat into the splendour, even if it meant feeling faintly like they were living in an upmarket bed-and-breakfast. At least, he thought, glancing drowsily over at his newfound curate’s egg next to the clock on the side table, there were the things of sentimental value.

The rhythmic tapping continued from above. Whatever did Madrun find to write to her mother
about
every day? Village life seemed rather inconsequential, he thought, and then smiled, glad it was so. He let his eyelids drift downwards. So good to have found the curate’s egg at the fête …

The egg!

Only the cat kept him from sitting bolt upright. Instead, he stared unseeing into the golden moonscape of Powell’s cold eyes, reliving—again!—the aftermath of discovering Sybella in the vandalised drum. He remembered his own surge of dread as he jerked his head back from the drum’s slashed membrane, forced to quickly gather his wits, as he had been forced to gather his wits when he had stumbled upon Lisbeth’s body. The panoply of the county’s emergency services making its way to Thornford’s village hall the day before had had a horrible familiarity. Now, as he sank back against the pillow, he found himself praying that this tragedy would have an un-extraordinary cause and a swift resolution. He recognised his prayer as selfish and shameful, unattached to Colm’s profound loss, but the thought of his life, and his daughter’s, being haunted by another unresolved death, and so soon, and so near, felt almost unbearable.

“Anything worth noting, Mrs. Prowse?” asked Tom as lightly as he could muster, hoping to keep the breakfast conversation off the previous day’s events. He and Miranda were seated at the centrepiece of the Aga-warmed kitchen, a lovely old scarred oak table. Madrun was standing by the sink, newspaper in hand.

“The Duchess of Gloucester, Patron, St. Peter’s Trust for Kidney, Bladder and Prostate Research, attended a private view of ‘Firm Favourites: Highlights and Recent Acquisitions from the Fleming Collection’ at the Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, London W1,”
Madrun recited from the Court Circular in
The Daily Telegraph
, adjusting her glasses, which hung from a chain around her neck. She frowned a little.

“What’s a ‘prostate’?” Miranda piped up, slipping a piece of ham to Powell—or, possibly, Gloria—who was circling the legs of the Windsor chairs with a kind of mad lust.

Madrun peeked over the top of the paper.

“It’s a tiny little organ, sort of around where the kidney and bladder are,” Tom replied, sinking his fork into a slice of quiche, a dish he thought much too rich for breakfast.

“Oh. What does it do?”

“Not much.” Tom reflected how true this was in his case, since Lisbeth’s death. “It’s like … an appendix. Sort of excess to requirements.”

“Will it burst? Emily’s appendix burst last year and she had to go to hospital.”

“Prostates never burst. It’s not something you will ever, ever have to worry about.”

Miranda appeared to digest this information. “Is Sybella where Mummy is?” she asked abruptly, regarding him solemnly with her green-flecked eyes—her mother’s eyes.

“Yes,” he replied. He had been expecting questions and was surprised—and a little concerned—that none had come sooner. Had she been brooding? By the time the fête had ended late the previous afternoon, with the police sealing off the village hall, it had got
about that not only had someone died inside, but that that someone was young Sybella Parry. On his instructions, Madrun had hustled Miranda back to the vicarage shortly after the Twelve Drummers Drumming had completed their performance, but somehow the knowledge that Sybella had not been merely sleeping in the drum had filtered into the child’s consciousness, though she had said nothing about it at supper (the fête’s welly-tossing and china-smashing events intrigued her more), and nothing as he got her ready for bed (her new Alice Roy book was her preoccupation).

“Yes, she is,” he added for emphasis.

“A good place?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think Mummy will like Sybella?”

“I think your mother will find Sybella great fun.”

Miranda nodded sagely. “I liked her. She always said hello to Emily and me when we saw her in the road. One time she took me and Emily to see Uncle Alastair when Emily got really badly stung by a wasp.”

“All the way into Torquay on her Vespa?”

“To Westways. It was a Saturday. Uncle Alastair was home.”

“Oh. I see. That was nice of her.”

“I liked her nails.”

“Promise me you won’t paint yours black.”

Miranda splayed her fingers on either side of her plate. “Green?”

“Something in a pink shade, perhaps.”

The exchange reminded him that Sybella’s black-lacquered fingernails had been the first of her attributes that had caught his eye. Fourteen months earlier, on their first visit to Thornford—and their first visit to the Waterside Café—she had handed him menus. As he looked up from his seat, his eyes had travelled to the cascade of black hair, flat as if it had been ironed, then to the black eyes, which were lined with kohl so that they resembled burn holes in a bedsheet.

“I like your earrings,” Miranda had exclaimed artlessly about the magnificent silver hoops that dangled from Sybella’s lobes. Sybella
had responded with an uninterpretable grunt, flipped her hair back with an actressy gesture to reveal a series of smaller hoops slinking up the cartilage, took their order, and ignored them for the next forty-five minutes. They were only tourists, after all.

A year later, a day or two after he and Miranda had moved into the vicarage, they paid a second visit to the Waterside. He was a little surprised to see Sybella still waitressing there—given the transience of such jobs and Liam Drewe’s reputation as a difficult boss—but he was pleased to see restraint in her makeup and jewellery, though her ears were still a pincushion. Her face had a golden glow, as if from a week in the sun. She’d turned her attention immediately to Tom:

“I’d love it if you’d saw me in half sometime.”

Having heard that one before, Tom responded, “Lengthwise or widthwise?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Sybella tapped her cheek, her lacquered fingernail like a flickering beauty spot. “Let me think about it.”

“Do so. And we’ll think about what we’re going to order.” Tom had said this with a hard smile, though he was half amused. He didn’t mind the flirtation—priests got their fair share of it—but he was uncertain of the provocation, the childish showing off, from someone in her late teens who, despite the cosmetic affectations and the near anorexic figure, was clearly no longer a child. Sybella’s breasts, he couldn’t help noticing, strained the man’s white shirt that she wore as a kind of server’s uniform. She caught the direction of his glance and smirked. “I’ll come back when you’re ready,” she said, exposing her lovely pink ear once again.

Tom had felt vaguely caught out, exposed both as a mere man—poor, dumb thing with more brains in his trousers than in his head—and as a charlatan—someone who was merely posing as a priest. Yes, before he had felt the call, Tom had been a professional magician. The Great Krimboni he had been, purveyor of the illusory arts to all and sundry, particularly those who would pay. Close-up magic had been his trade, not stage illusions like bisecting attractive
females or causing the Home Secretary to vanish in a puff of smoke. He still did the odd trick or two, but by and large, he’d taken to heart Saint Paul’s line about childish things, putting them away, and so forth, though he wouldn’t have voiced that to some of his old magician cronies who still sent him the occasional email. Clearly, Tom’s priesthood held no interest for Sybella. She’d probably Googled him when news of his appointment circulated through the village. Anyone might have done so.