Pudding
By Friday noon the low corner of the churchyard had stopped moving, mostly, and I was under a bench in the church porch, having got in flat to the wall, one eye out, as one crosses a ballroom in a stolen hat, while the vicar had his back turned. Holy ground does nothing. Whatever his grandmother told him, it is merely ground that has been told to behave, and it holds a duke under a pew with the same indifference it shows a verger.
I shall give you Thursday in one breath, because it does not deserve two. On Thursday the blood dug. She dug all day beside thirty Christians, in a corner of mud, with a spade belonging to the bowls club, and when the coffin was got back into its hole she stood at the foot of it with her face like a boiled ham, and the vicar wept on the lid, and I listened for the click of a witch's act going home, and heard nothing. Digging is digging. Any fool may dig, and thirty had. In the night the school field grew swans. Nothing came of them.
On Friday I had a plan, and I felt it was a very good one. A witch's act is a service to the town that only a witch would trouble to do, and the blood troubled to do nothing she was asked to. What I proposed, therefore, was to find her an act, and walk her into it by the nose, and say nothing until it was done. I would not call that a lie. I would call it a duke at his work.
The vicar had brought her into the porch to get out of the drizzle, and he stood before the notice board with his hands knotted and a sweet going round in his cheek, and read her a plaque out loud.
"In thanksgiving for the town delivered, December two thousand and thirteen, and in memory of those lost on the marsh at Saltings."
He crunched.
"Delivered," he said. "I'm so sorry. It's the word. Delivered by whom? We never put a name on it. We were so grateful, and so ashamed, that nobody did, and I've often thought that if a town is delivered by a person of a certain sort, then one has put, in a Christian porch, alongside the Lord's, a, a." He looked at the ceiling. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Exodus. I didn't mean it of your aunt. It was a general observation. About theology."
"Right," said the blood.
"And have you found it? Her book. The ledger. Everybody says she kept it. I wondered whether you'd let me see the names. Just the names."
"No," said the blood.
"Which, no you haven't found it?"
"No I wouldn't."
He took this like a slap he had been expecting. Then it came out of him sideways, like a drawer when somebody wants something at the back of it. He did not look at me, because he did not know where I was. He looked at the blood's boots.
"The cat, I mean," he said. "On Sunday. Was it, did anyone say, was it in the garden?"
I spoke from under the bench. I did not plan to. A question that has been waiting three hundred years to be asked ought to be answered with dignity.
"It is my garden," I said. "I have never needed an invitation."
The vicar flinched at the floor, and the blood said, without looking down, "He says it's his garden. He says he's never needed an invitation."
"That isn't an answer."
"No," said the blood.
He looked at the bench for rather a long time, and I put my whole self into the wall. But a man of his courage looks under nothing, and after a while he took out the paper bag, and the porch filled with the sound of a man feeding himself out of fright.
We went out by the lane, and there was the Range Rover on the verge. I smelled it first, new leather and a great deal of money, and under that a man who has put on aftershave for himself. He got out in boots that had never been wet and came across the grass with a clear folder in one hand and the other already out.
"Jess. Terrible, this. Gavin. We met. Flood. Cat stuff."
"Three twenty-five," he said to her. "That's the new number, and that's me being sentimental. I'll leave the plans with the landlord of the Lamb, Saturday, noon, no pressure. At the end of the day, that's a lot of money for a lot of mud."
"I'm busy," said the blood.
"I can see that," said Gavin, and went, with a wave. A man who leaves his plans with a landlord, I concluded, was a man with a plot.
"Do you want me to sit on his car?" I said to the blood.
"No."
"I should like to."
"I know you would."
It was ten past one when I found the act.
The blood went to get her car out of the back lane, because the water was on its way back and she did not intend to be left in a lane again, and there in front of it, nose first in the dyke with one back wheel in the air, stood the parish car.
The Church of England owns a small white Fiat, and owns it in the same sense that it owns its God: it is shared, it is borrowed, and nobody has ever been entirely sure that it will start. It sat across the lane like a drunk across a pavement, and the blood's taxi was behind it with no way round.
"Move it," said the blood to the vicar.
"I'm so sorry," said the vicar. "I can't. The keys. I dropped them on Thursday, in the lane, I was carrying a board. I've been looking since. In the water, I think."
I did know. I had gone along that lane on Thursday evening on business of my own, and there had been a smell in the brown water by the dyke like nothing else in the town: brass, and a bicycle clip, and an old boiled sweet with a hole in it, and a great deal of a man's fear, going slowly cold. I sat on the wall.
"On your left," I said to the blood. "In the water. Four yards, by the black stone."
"Where?"
"Left. No. Left. Your other left, madam. The one with the thumb on it."
She was half blind with the swelling and she was cross and she did not argue. She went along the edge of the lane with her trousers rolled up and her face turned sideways, and I called it. Left. Left. A little more. Down. She went down on one knee in the brown wet, in her boots, with her sleeve up to the shoulder, and put her arm in, and felt about, and her face changed.
"Got something."
She brought it up with the water pouring off. It was a ring of keys, with a little plastic fish on it, and she held it out at arm's length to the vicar without a word.
He wept. I had thought he had finished, but there was a good deal left. "Oh, thank you," he said. "Oh, Miss Crowle. God bless you. I'd given them up for lost." He took them in both hands. "I can't think what to say."
"Move your car," said the blood.
He moved it. It started on the third go, with a sound like a man being sick, and backed out of the dyke, and he drove it up the lane and away, waving out of the window with his whole arm.
I sat on the wall and listened, with my ears pricked and my whole spine, for the click, the little cold turn in the back of the head, like a key in a lock. I listened for a long time.
Nothing. A dead tooth in a dead jaw. The pumps, and a moorhen.
"Did that count?" said the blood.
She had got up. She was standing in the lane with her arm dripping and her face turned toward me, the one eye looking through its slit, and I did not wish to say it. "No," I said.
"I found his keys."
"You did."
"In a flood. With one eye. On my knees. With you giving it all that, left, left, your other left."
"You found them to move a Fiat."
"I'm a taxi driver. I move things."
"It has to be on purpose," I said. "Knowing. You have to mean it as ours."
"I didn't know it was one."
"No."
"You didn't tell me."
"I told you they were on your left. Every word I said to you was true."
There was a silence in the back lane in which a wren might have been heard going through a hedge.
"That's cheating," she said.
"It is selective."
She looked at me. She looked at the keys' empty place in her hand. I have seen a number of people discover that they have been used, for good ends, by a better mind than theirs, and they all do the same thing, which is to be angry at the better mind. She was angry at me. I looked at the dyke.
She did not say a word to me until it was getting dark, and we were at the gate of the cottage, with the water ticking against the tyres and Mo's light going on next door. Then she got out of the car, and stood in the middle of the track, and shouted.
"I found a key!" she shouted at the sky. "It was lost! I found it! That's the job! That's your whole job, isn't it? It was a thing and it was lost and I found it! What else do you want?"
The sky did not say. The dyke ticked. Somewhere out over the fen a bird, startled, went up and made a noise like a gate.
On this occasion I was on her side. I said, "Hear, hear." I said it to the dyke, because she wasn't listening.
She came back and sat on the wall next to me, which she had not done before, and sneezed, and did not move. We looked at the drove together.
"I'll look at his plans," she said, at last. "Tomorrow. At the Lamb. It's only a look."
"That is treason."
"It's a pub."
"It is treason in a pub, madam, which is the oldest kind."
"Nope," she said, in a tired voice, and went to the car.
A little after six, before she shut the doors, the man in the bowls club blazer came down the drove with his cap in his hand and set a thing on the wall in front of me, wrapped in greaseproof paper. It was a pork pie, small, from the butcher on the high street, whose pastry I will defend against any bishop, with a seam of jelly between the filling and the crust that wobbled and held. I ate it in the dark, slowly, and when I had finished I looked up at the kitchen window to tell her, and the window was dark, and I washed my face instead.
At eleven the church clock struck, four minutes late. My teeth went, low at the back on the right, like a dropped plate in another room, and I knew where it was, as I know where my own dinner is: the allotments, behind the school, in the black flat ground by the dyke where the town grows its leeks.
I did not go. I sat on the wall with my paws under me.
Somewhere out there, a mile away in the dark, I heard a shed leave.