Page 86 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘No other priest? Nobody knows,’ she said. ‘There was no sufficiently healthy person until Aquila.’ She looked around, worried. ‘It should all have been maintained as you left it.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘Are the pipes functioning properly?’

‘So far,’ he said, wondering why she was talking to him as if they were in an official report for Lima. ‘I’ve got spares if they’re not. Or I had.’

‘No one’s disturbed anything,’ she said quickly. ‘But I’m not sure it was ever inventoried, so perhaps a few items might have, you know, over the years . . .’

‘I think it’s all here.’ He stopped, because it had occurred to him, piecemeal, that she wasn’t being lofty at all. Her tone was wrong for that. The language had changed. There was more Spanish in it. ‘Is that coffee?’

‘It is.’

He took down a pair of cups and rinsed away the dust, and shared out the coffee between them. It steamed, but he couldn’t feel the heat of it. He couldn’t tell if he’d burned himself.

‘You’d better eat, before it goes cold,’ she said, nodding at the stew in front of him. It was rich. They must have been doing well.

‘I’m sorry, I’m not hungry.’ Breakfast had been seventy years before, but only an hour ago.

‘You should eat it anyway. You’ll be hungry in a minute.’

‘Why?’

She nodded at the window, to the overgrown courtyard outside. People were starting to gather there in twos and threes. More were coming from over the bridge.

‘You’ve seventy years of baptisms and confessions to do.’

He had to eat slowly, because his taste had changed, or rather, faded. It was barely there.

‘I’m Inti,’ she said, and his eyes must have caught on her for too long, because she twisted her nose. ‘I know. I didn’t select it. My mother wanted a boy.’

‘Raphael.’

She nodded as if she already knew that.

He pushed his hand over his wrist without meaning to. He kept feeling spider webs. But his knuckles had gone red; the water must have been hotter than he’d thought, which meant at least that if there were any leftover spiders, they were cooked. He tried the coffee. It tasted bizarre now that he couldn’t tell at once if it was hot or not, but not bad. It was strong enough to taste, at least.

‘What’s your boy’s name again?’ he asked at last.

‘Aquila. I think he might be concealed in your woodshed. He wants to come in but he’s terrified of being accidentally rude. Have I been accidentally rude?’ she added.

‘No.’ He set the coffee aside. ‘Right. Let’s go out and see what we can do with everyone. But I’ll need Aquila to help me. I don’t know their names.’

He’d always felt impatient when old people waxed lyrical about it, but it was easy to spot people’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and it was unsettling. There were eyes that never changed, deformities, and that was unremarkable, but there were other things that had swept down the lines too. There was a girl who spoke with her hands just like her great-grandmother, despite never having met her and her mother having nothing like the same style. He had gone out expecting strangers and some were, because a good third of them were altar children or the sons and daughters of altar children, but in the main it was a colony of ghosts.

By the time he had met everyone who wanted to be met, it was late. He locked himself in, although he never usually held with locking a church. With his back against the door he looked around at the room. It was all the same: the ladder up to the loft, the kitchen, the stiff side door into the chapel. But it wasn’t the same, either. The roof had been repaired twice and needed it again. There were books on the shelf behind the ladder that weren’t his. They were in English. His heart bumped into his diaphragm to think of Harry coming back to an empty church, but when he opened them, the Ex Libris notes said that they belonged to someone called Charles Backhouse. There must have been expeditions here; Harry had said there would be. It needled that they had been put up in the church, but then, they had left it all as they had found it and it wasn’t as though there was a nice inn and coach house in town.

In the deep silence, the clockwork in the pollen lamps clicked. So did the wood in the stove. The windmill rope creaked around its pulley and under it was the roar of the wind in the forest. The winter must have been long already, because there was almost no pollen in the air.

For a long time he looked down at the letter without touching it. Harry had told him about Heligan. Somewhere in a churchyard on that side of the Atlantic were familiar bones.

Or here they were, in this place. Somewhere was another church – his – where Harry was cutting up pineapples, but it was too far gone. Harry had kept sailing while he had stayed still and there was no tacking ahead to find him again, no catching up, and there would have been no waiting, the current being too strong. He had fallen too far behind.

Not able to sit any more, Raphael went upstairs to fetch the Indian cotton and laid it out on the table. With all the pollen lamps lit, there was enough light to unpick the stitching on his waistcoat. After a few hours it was all undone and he lifted out the worn-out old lining to lay it over the cotton as a pattern. It was complicated, but he had always mended things and it was only a matter, really, of cutting straight, and an obsidian knife was as good as a scalpel. It was light outside before he had finished, but he did finish. Once he had he went straight out, because there were people he had promised to see and, even if there hadn’t been, it seemed best to muck in. It would pass the time.

TWENTY-NINE

The Caravaya whitewood forest