Chapter 14 The Broken Escutcheon

The bell went on Friday while Verity had her hands inside a broken multipoint door lock, and she came out to the front of the shop with a screwdriver behind her ear and found the vicar of St. Winnow's standing on her mat with a tea towel in his hands and an expression of deep embarrassment. "I've broken the church," said the Reverend Osbrand. The Reverend Osbrand was new, four months in the parish, fifty and gentle and still learning that a country town is not a place where you can do things quietly. Verity liked him, mostly for the way he apologised to furniture. "You can't break a church," she said. "You can only deepen its mystery. What's happened?" "The vestry door. I locked it on Wednesday, and today the key won't turn at all, and I am terrified I have somehow ruined a lock that is older than my entire family." He held up the tea towel, and inside it, wrapped like something valuable, was a small brass escutcheon, the shield plate that sits around a keyhole. "And this was lying on the step. Which I do not understand." Verity took the escutcheon and turned it in her fingers. It was old, and it was hers in the sense that mattered, because the little shield was stamped at the back with her father's mark, the C and the C, and the screws had been taken out neatly and not torn. "Somebody's unscrewed your escutcheon," she said. "That's not damage, that's housekeeping. Come on." St. Winnow's stood on the higher side of the square with its tower like a thumb, and the churchyard was full of leaning stones and one enormous yew that had been older than the church and would outlast it. Before the vestry, the Reverend took her the long way, through the church itself, because a man who has just admitted he has broken a building wants you to see the parts that still work. The inside was cool and dim and smelled of stone and candle smoke, and the light came through one long window in a bar of pale colour that lay across the floor like a rug nobody had the heart to move. "There," he said, and showed her the north wall, where the memorials went back three hundred years in slabs of grey and white marble, and there among the Ledgers and the Cootes and the Quarrells was a smaller plaque of pale stone with a name on it, and the name was Wexford, and below the name were two dates and no line of praise, which in a church is a strange thing to leave out. "I looked it up," the Reverend said, quietly. "When you asked me about the family. The parish register has an Arthur Wexford, born here, married here, and no burial, because he was buried in the county ground, I think, and the register has one line for a daughter who was christened and a single line for a woman who was married away, and that is all this church knows about a family that lived a mile from the porch for sixty years." "Nothing about the fire." "Nothing about anything difficult, Miss Callender. The register was written by three vicars, one after another, and none of them wrote a word about the fire, and I have been reading it for two weeks and I cannot decide whether that is silence or shame." Verity looked at the plaque a while longer. A town keeps its records in a great many places, in ledgers and registers and shop books and the heads of old women in markets, and not one of them had a word to say about the night the mill burned. That was not the absence of memory. She had spent a month learning that it was the shape of memory, which is a thing that leaves an emptiness exactly the size of itself. They went round to the vestry, and Verity knelt on the path and looked at the door, and the lock was fine, quite fine, and the reason the key would not turn was that somebody had left a folded strip of paper in the keyway, wedged so that the key met it and stopped. She teased it out with a pick. On the paper, in the spaced careful printing she had come to know, were three words. *Look behind you.* Verity turned round. On the low stone wall by the vestry door sat a cloth bundle, tied with garden string, and inside were four things laid out in a row like a small and patient exhibition: the brass bell from the tea room, the empty damson jam jar, washed and dried and with its lid set neatly on top, the photograph of the mill from Tabitha Osgood's cellar, in its frame, with the glass polished, and a boy's pencil drawing on the back of a bank envelope, the house and the wheel and the three stick people holding hands under a crooked chimney. Under them was a fourth thing: a small envelope, not sealed, and inside it a single sheet in a handwriting that was old and steady and not the careful printing at all. *Miss Callender. These were never mine to keep, only mine to see. I am putting them back where they belong and I am going to finish what I started, and I would like you to be there when I do, because my mother would have liked you and I have nobody else in this town to tell.* *The mill house. Tomorrow night, midnight. Bring the key with the heart and bring your father's ledger if you have it, and I will show you what a town does when it decides that nothing happened.* The Reverend Osbrand read it over her shoulder and went very quiet, and then he said, in the grammar of a man who had taken Holy Orders precisely because he was afraid of the world, "That does not sound like a thief." "No," Verity said, folding the letter into the pocket of her coat, beside the page torn from the ledger and the tag with the heart. "It sounds like a person asking for a witness." The Reverend Osbrand looked at the bundle on the wall and the polished photograph and the washed jam jar, and then at Verity, and he did the small brave thing that frightened men do when they decide to be useful. "Whatever this is," he said, "you'll need someone who can say the church porch was open, and who saw what was left on the wall, and who can swear to the time. It is not much, but it is what I have, and I have been four months in this parish wondering what I am for, and I would rather like to be for something." "Then come to the shop tomorrow at ten," Verity said, "and I'll tell you what I know, and you can decide whether you still want to be for it." He nodded, gravely, as though she had handed him a duty, which, in a way, she had, and stood in the churchyard with his hands full of tea towel while she walked back down through the leaning stones and out into the square, where the market was packing up and the lamps were coming on and somebody had chalked a new price on the baker's board. The bundle stayed where it was for an hour, and then the Reverend Osbrand carried it inside and locked it in the vestry safe, wrapped in the cloth it came in, and wrote on the outside of the wrapping, in the neat hand of a man who believed in records: *Found on the church wall. Handed to Miss V. Callender.* It was, all things considered, the first useful thing anyone had done about the matter in a month, and it was done by a man who apologised to furniture. ---