Hill of the Angels by Sue Mayfield

Author:Sue Mayfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SPCK
Published: 2016-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Grace

Father wears black now. He looks like a tree in winter. The hole where the stained glass used to be is boarded up with planks so that the church – once flooded with jewelled light – is gloomy and dark. All brightness is gone. There is no colour. There are no candles. Nothing sparkles or shines. When we sing, we sing without musical instruments. Everything is stripped bare and unadorned, as though we were in mourning.

*

In the year that I am fourteen we celebrate Easter on a glorious spring day. In the churchyard there are bright buds and fresh tips of new grass poke through the soil. But inside the church I am reminded more of the tomb than of the glories of the risen Christ. Father, going through the motions of the Mass, has a great weight of sadness about him, as though a heavy chain were wound around his heart.

*

Our garden is abloom with apple blossom and lilac. I pick some and set them in a jug in the parlour. Mother is sewing there. She smiles when she sees the flowers.

‘Those are pretty, Grace,’ she says. ‘They lift my spirits.’

I am glad to have given her joy. Mother’s sickness is long past now and her belly swells and ripens like fruit. Her skin has a lustrous glow, as though the baby growing inside her has made her flesh happy. I know that the child is to be born at harvest time. We will carry him to church for baptism like a sheaf of corn. Father and Mother and Margaret and Martha and Ellen and I.

I go into the garden and pick some more blossoms. The apple flowers are rosy white and delicate as baby’s fingernails. The lilac – beaded with rainwater and fat as bobbins of wool – are purple, the colour of the amethyst that I have seen about Lady Hallam’s neck. Walking through the gate into the churchyard I take the flowers into the church and put them on the altar. I think that God is pleased with them – that they cheer him, as they cheered my mother. That their wetness and the richness of their colour give him joy. I leave them there and tiptoeing through the sanctuary I climb the pulpit steps. I am alone in the church and there is a deep dusty hush. I stand in the pulpit, my hands resting on its cool marble rim and wonder what it feels like for Father to stand here. Many of the congregation, since the Roundheads came, have taken to heckling Father when he preaches. Made bold by the presence of soldiers, their tongues – silenced for so long by the presence of the King’s army – now flap like laundry in the wind.

‘God is love,’ I say to the absent congregation. The words drip from my lips as refreshing as dew.

I am still standing in the pulpit, staring at the empty space, when the west door opens. Afraid at being caught here and thought irreverent, I duck down so that I am concealed by the pulpit’s walls.

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