The Mezzotint Chapter 3 Harriet

After Creest left the village hall he decided to take the longer route home following a brook that straddled the northern perimeter of Greeven.  After a mile, where the stream swings away in a series of loops and bends toward open countryside, Creest headed back toward the village across a small open field, the far end of which sat the back gate leading into St Helen’s Church grounds.

He often meandered lazily for a while after art classes, emptying his mind of its superfluous detail as if he were leaving a paper trail of his thoughts behind him.  This afternoon Creest’s mind was a squall, replete with the images and sounds that Hope had irradiated despite their quite transitory dialogue.  He had even lifted a fallen willow branch, a slim rather than substantial limb, from the bankside and wheeled it around his head as if testing the strength of his biceps, suddenly conscious that he might embarrass himself if Hope’s piano was, in any way, too heavy.

Stepping into the churchyard he began to read the names of the gravestones.  It was an exercise he hadn’t undertaken since his arrival.  Creest was not a saturnine fellow at all but it was a way of assimilating, a way of clothing himself in the village history, albeit in his own divergent manner.   He stopped abruptly noticing a legend etched into one of the stones he hadn’t noticed before.  It simply read:

“Hope lies here”

An odd coincidence, he thought, this manifestation after his discussion with Greeven’s newest resident.   At once he felt light-headed as if he were going to faint but recovered, using the headstone to rest upon.

Suddenly a large shadow moved across the stone and Creest span around as precipitously as his old hips were capable of doing.  There was nothing except the meadow before him.  A bird perhaps, he considered, unconvinced.   He looked back at the stone and was astonished to discover the legend now read:

“Samantha Felice.  

A Dear Daughter

Taken from us too soon

Born 13^th April 1956 – Died 13^th April 1964”

Creest leaned in toward the stone angling his viewpoint, considering that the sun’s glare may have obscured the words he’d read a moment earlier; so he knelt down, awkwardly, in front of the marble running his fingers over it, feeling for the words now, obstinately refusing to accept that what he had seen was only a conspiracy between an elevated emotional state and decrepit eyesight: nothing.  The only lettering visible was the Felice epitaph.  Glancing down he noticed a plastic flower lying prone across the dry mud at the base of the marker.  The forlorn object seemed out of place to Creest.  Whilst he wouldn’t claim to know every Greeven living in the village he was certain he hadn’t come across that surname since moving here.  Who would have left such a paltry offering and when?  Just then a drop of blood hit one of the petals.  He looked upwards toward the sky as if expecting the beginning of some biblical plague and immediately censured himself for such a ridiculous reaction.  The second drop hit the stem before Creest figured it out.  He turned over his right hand to find a small scarlet bubble on the top of his index finger.  He touched the wound and could feel the splinter just below the surface.  He put his finger in his mouth to suck away the blood and scratched away at the cut attempting to remove the stone sliver.  The shrill sting cutting into his flesh made his eyes water.  Through the glaze he thought he saw the gravestone turn the colour of blood and rocked back on his arches.  It was then that the hand landed on his shoulder.        

‘Christ!’

The Vicar looked amused, despite the blasphemy.

‘No, merely his servant’

The Vicar smiled adroitly as if privy to a celestial joke beyond the ears of this layman.  He was as genial looking as most vicars.  Creest wondered if men of the cloth naturally progressed or aspired to this state as they aged.  He was bald on top but retained a healthy brush of brown hair that rolled around the sides and back of his head, like a huge bowling ball rolled into a hedge. 

‘Vicar, are you touting for business?’

‘No need; that particular line is, naturally, reliable in a place like Greeven’

‘I’m not surprised if that’s how you greet your brethren’

‘An apt place for one to give up the ghost so to speak, though making a habit of it would, no doubt, displease our local undertaker’

‘Sad isn’t it?’

‘It’s a Church graveyard, not the comedy club’

‘I take it that’s on Sunday’

‘Come along – I don’t mind a heckler or two - you did once’

The two shared a second of silence, enough for each to garner a collective respect for the other.  The onus was on the vicar to respond to Creest’s initial observation.  His gentle blue eyes registered the memory.

‘I knew them, the Felices.  Originally French, I believe, hailing from Carcassonne near Toulouse.  The little girl, Samantha, or Sam, was six when they first moved here.  I was 18 and had just crossed the Rubicon’

Creest shrugged his shoulders, the vicar continued

‘I had given my heart and soul to God’

‘So you’ve been installed here all your life?’

‘Installed!  You make me sound as if I were a washing machine’

‘Well aren’t you – metaphorically speaking?’

‘I think you rather overestimate the consciences of the villagers.  Are you looking for forgiveness professor Creest?’

‘Maybe; when did you come back?’

‘I’ve been vicar here these last twenty years.  Like many of us I’ve seen quite a bit of the country and, of course, there were the obligatory missionary sojourns as well.  It was on my last trip, a six month stay in Sierra Leone that I contracted an unhealthy dose of malaria and was shipped home.  I was convalescing, oh somewhere in Sussex, when the previous incumbent of St Helen-in-the-Wold fortuitously, God forgive me, swopped the pulpit for one of these.  He’s lying just over there ’

Then the vicar grimaced as if he were absorbing a strident pang somewhere deep in his gut.  When he spoke his voice had lowered an octave.

‘Sad case’

‘A young man then, your predecessor?’

‘Oh no, no, I was referring to Samantha’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Officially? – Accident due to depression - the truth? - she committed suicide’

‘She took her own life…an eight year old…on her birthday?’

‘Tragic seems so poor a description’

Creest looked down at his hands.  They were quivering.  Then, suddenly, his back straightened as if someone were tracing an icicle along his spine.

‘Why?’

The vicar placed his hand on the gravestone and stroked it as if he were consoling the long dead girl. 

‘Would you mind awfully if we repaired to my sacristy?  I would prefer to relate this terrible history in more congenial surroundings’

Creest agreed and within moments they were both ensconced in a small but comfortable chamber behind the church altar and both with a small glass of porter.  There was a small desk with a candlestick atop positioned centrally and an armchair tucked into the recess.  Another chair sat against the far wall which incorporated a small bookcase which contents seemed perfectly suitable to their surroundings.  The vicar proffered Creest to sit down and continued his narrative.