Behind her lurked the shadowy ruins of a stone church, below which, Huw said, lay the mortal remains of the former Joseph Leycester Lyne.
‘Builders buggered up the church foundations,’ Huw said. ‘Monastery were a better job all round. Good enough for Eric Gill a couple of decades later. Still intact.’
They walked back towards the wooden crucifix, by the track, at the side of a field.
‘Big charisma?’ Merrily said. ‘Father Ignatius?’
‘He had rich followers. Raised a fair bit with his evangelical egomaniac’s grand tours. A national celebrity in the late nineteenth century, preaching all over the country, collecting donations and a body of followers who’d become the monks of Capel-y-ffin. And displaying his miraculous powers.’
‘Healing?’
‘On a Christlike level,’ Huw said.
There was a pause. One of those pauses in time. Somewhere above the clouds, an invisible plane ploughed an aerial furrow through a different world and Merrily felt momentarily disoriented.
‘I don’t bloody know!’ Huw threw up his hands like the white lady. ‘I don’t bloody know, Merrily. Is it all a sham? I don’t know.’
But clearly cared. Blimey. She took a step back. How often these days did Huw express this kind of emotion?
‘Truth is,’ he said, ‘this place has been obsessing me, on and off, for years.’
‘You’ve never talked about it.’
Huw let his arms fall.
‘We all need a private hobby. I were still a kid in Sheffield when I first read about this, in one of me mam’s old books. Haunted me, at first – I’d’ve been about eight. Scared the life out of me. But it stayed with me. I suppose it were one of the reasons I came back – the fact that I’d been born within half an hour of… a mystery. A big mystery.’
He told her a story dating back to 1873 when Ignatius and his followers had been helping to build the monastery. Part of the work had involved lifting huge crates of stones, by means of pulleys, sixteen feet above the ground. One of the crates had unbalanced, tossing all the stones on top of one man, crushing him to death. When the body was pulled out it had been described by a witness as a distorted mass of pulp.
‘So Father Iggy gets summoned,’ Huw said. ‘And an Inner Voice which apparently spoke to him several times in his life instructs him to fetch a bottle of Lourdes water. There’s a circle of folks around the body which parted when Father Iggy returned… and he found himself face to face with the Silence which is unlike all others for it embodies the suspended breath of two separate worlds.’
‘Are you quoting, Huw?’
‘Face to face with silence? Would I come out wi’ that? If you must know, it’s from a great slab of overwritten hagiography, The Life of Father Ignatius, by his fan club secretary, one Beatrice de Bertouch. I’ve read all six hundred-plus pages twice and some bits seven or eight times. Which is why I know some of these excruciating slabs of hyperbole off by heart.’
He sounded angry that all this had not been documented by someone more reliably objective.
‘Sorry,’ Merrily said. ‘Go on.’
‘The Monk had come to act,’ Beatrice says, not to pray. He was, at that crucial moment, God’s active and irresponsible instrument.’
‘Irresponsible?’
‘Happen closer to the truth than Beatrice intended. She’s a bit short on irony. She explains how Iggy kneels down by the corpse, sprinkles it with the water from Lourdes and then – speaking slowly and emphatically – he gives it the full Lazarus. After which, Beatrice says miracle was accomplished. One single and mighty thrill seemed to sweep through every fibre of the shattered frame. And the next instant he’s back on his pins.’
‘Well, yes.’ Merrily starting to see what he meant. ‘If this guy had been a distorted mass of pulp, this is even bigger than Lazarus. I’m guessing the full story only emerged when he’d been back on his feet for some time and all the bloodstained stones had been removed from the scene.’
‘This job’s making you a cynical little bugger, isn’t it?’
‘Under the tutelage of a master.’
‘Aye. Anyroad, there’s a few more stories like that, from when he were on tour. Fair bit of newspaper coverage at the time. If it was a scam, it were well handled.’
‘Surely too sensational to be widely believed,’ Merrily said. ‘Even at a time when spiritualists were manifesting ectoplasm behind lace curtains. Which I suppose brings us to the big one.’
Feeling regretful, Merrily bent and touched the chalky robe. The statue of the white lady was gazing beyond her, through lidded eyes. The sky looked full of rain.