But Ezekiel held out a hand. “Wait, Gideon,” he said, and there was a vibration of authority in his voice that made Gideon’s skin prickle. He’d grown to hate it, coming from his father, and Zeke had inherited it whole.
Then, so had he. And there were differences. Zeke’s commands were undermined these days by a rasp of humour: his little boys cried out with joy at the sound of him, not fear. As for Gideon himself, he could boom and roar at villains when the need arose, but that was a job skill, not a conviction that he was right and the rest of the world lost in a desperate state of sin.
And he had to admit, there was a luxury in stepping back, standing down and letting Zeke do his thing. Gideon was exhausted, here at the end of Clem Atherton’s road, almost as tired as poor Lee, who had taken his arm and was leaning against him, watching Penyar with a what-fresh-hell expression on his face. “It’s all right,” Gideon said, giving him a squeeze. “I don’t think this one’s our problem. Your parishioner, I believe, Zeke?”
“Too right,” Zeke growled, striding ahead to meet Penyar halfway. “I’d hate to think, sir, that you’d been demeaning the dignity of your years by spying on business not your own from behind a wall!”
The old man came to an uncertain halt. Then he drove his stick into the ground and stuck out his chin. “Who says it’s no business of mine?”
“What business would a God-fearing chapel-goer like yourself have with a bunch of infidels in a field?”
“I’m here to see justice done, Minister Frayne, even if you’ve thrown your lot in with the infidels. They took a man and murdered him in this field, and no matter how hard your brother and his fancy lad look for ways to make that any less of a sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance—”
“Wait just one moment, Mr Penyar.” Enlightenment, and a kind of wicked joy, was dawning over Zeke. He threw Lee a look across his shoulder. “Fancy lad, eh? I bet you haven’t heard that one in a while.”
Lee chuckled. “Might even be a first.”
“The trouble with all this rhetoric of yours, sir, is that I am ten years older than my brother, and unlike him, I have the clearest memories of my father’s ministry. He spoke with a kind of bitter pride about Lamorna, and the work he’d done there. I was being forced to learn a little Cornish language at school—not that I took much of it in, because he’d taught me by then that English was somehow God’s native tongue—and I remember laughing behind his back, because one of the names he kept mentioning meant chicken, or chicken-head to be exact.” Zeke shook out the skirts of his cassock, in much the same spirit as Gideon had put on and straightened his cap. “That’s right, sir. Penyar. It stuck in my mind.”
The old man retreated a couple of steps. “What of it? The pastor and I were good friends. Why should he not mention my name?”
“You weren’t a friend. You were one of the souls he thought he’d saved down here, a brand snatched from Granny Ragwen’s burning. You were here that day, weren’t you, and not hiding out behind a drystone wall, either. You were one of the circle!”
“One of the...” Penyar lost a breath, turned an alarming shade of puce and thrust his stick further into the soil. “How dare you tell such a lie of me?”
“You were one of them, I tell you. Oh, you were glad enough to have their love charms—my father always did say he never understood why a dry stick like you got such a fine woman for a wife—and you came out here and danced as willingly as anyone else around their Beltane fires. But when poor Clem Atherton laid hands on another man in front of you—”
“He lay with a man as with a woman! How does that fertilise the fields?”
“There’s more than one way to be fertile, and a thousand ways to be loving and kind, all of which you seem to have overlooked. You’re a child of your times, Reginald Penyar, and I hold this in my mind when I judge you, but—”
“Judge me, will you?” Penyar had lost his temper now, and was in that fine state of indignation where confessions got made. “Your father made his judgement too, and on the side of God. He pursued and punished these wrongdoers. He broke that old hag’s coven, drove it underground, cleansed it from the face of God’s earth, and rightly too. I saw the error of my ways, and so I was forgiven.”
Zeke drew himself up. His face had become a mask of absolute disgust. “Oh, shit, no,” he said, making Penyar’s mouth drop open. “My dad did all that? And... he spared you, because you brought the tales to him.”
“They were no tales. They were—”
“Be quiet, you old fool.” He swung round to face DI Lawrence. “Christine, Lee’s told you the truth—all of it, even to the slaughter of this poor traveller.”
Lawrence rubbed summer dust out of her eyes. “It still was a slaughter, Ezekiel.”
“No-one’s denying it. And I can’t put right any of the harm of the past. I didn’t even know until now why Lee asked me to come here today, but I do now. I have to counteract my father’s actions by preventing further harm. My church is subject to the laws of man, and that’s as it should be. But there’s been no wrongdoing here. You know it.”
“I do know. But—”
“But I’m here!” Old man Penyar gave a small, triumphant leap, jerked his stick out of the soil and pointed it at each of them in turn. “I’m here, and I’ve heard it all, and I won’t let Clem Atherton lie easy. It was all as much his fault as the coven’s, unrepentant sinners though they are. Suicide’s a sin as well! That’s what the man came here for—to lie down under Granny Ragwen’s blade and let her take the burden of his life from him.”
Zeke shook his head. “Even you can’t say that without making it sound like a good thing.”
“What? I did not. It was a wicked thing. Your father taught me to bear witness, and I’ll bear it wherever I have to, so long as I stop you and this so-called inspector from burying this crime away from God’s own light of day.”
“Not quite sure I understand, Mr Penyar,” Lawrence said, not visibly ruffled by the insult. “If you felt so strongly about this, you could’ve turned the coven in at any time. You knew where Atherton was buried.”
“Ah, but I didn’t! The coven withdraws, woman—the coven withdraws.”
“Prior to the... What did Lee call it? The Great Rite?”
“Yes! Granny Ragwen sent us away, all but Nate. For all the perversion and sin of it, she’d have let it happen. She said just what you did, Minister Frayne, about fertility and how the fields would answer, or something would. She said afterwards that Clem had left and gone on his way. But there was freshly-turned earth in the field here, and I knew. I knew!”
“But you were part of this coven. Aren’t you worried about your own reputation, if you decide to run around the county bearing witness?”
“Who can prove it? Senile old men and women in care homes, and officers of religion and the law who’ve lied so much already that their reputations are besmirched, their word worth no more than handful of sand in the wind. A disgraced priest and policewoman, seeking to redeem themselves by bullying and persecuting a frail old man!”
“Bloody hell,” Gideon interrupted thoughtfully. He was still wearing the scarf Lee had put around his neck—the scarf that had belonged to Michael Joseph Grey, and then to Clem Atherton, and then to... “You really do have it in for us, don’t you?”
“Why shouldn’t I? Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”
“And so said old Pastor Frayne, too, which turned out to be more of a problem.” Gideon shot his brother a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry, Zeke. He was a good man in many ways.”
“I know that. I know where he was bad and where he was good, and I’m starting to know the same about myself, thanks to you and your, er... your fancy lad.”
“For God’s sake, Ezekiel.” Shaking his head, Gideon unwound the scarf. He handed it to Lee, who was seeing what he had seen—the appearance of two figures in the gateway to the field. Who was realising as Gideon had realised, and suddenly, painfully understood. “Never mind the vengeance for now, Mr Penyar. You said Granny Ragwen sent the coven away, all but...”
“All but Nate,” Penyar repeated, nodding ferociously. “He’d have lain with man as with woman any day of the week and twice on Sundays, if he’d had his way.”
“Jonathan... Nate, to his friends. Oh God, Lee—Nate Pascoe was Jonathan, wasn’t he?”
“Still is.” Lee raised a pale face to Gideon. “I’m sorry, love. But it wasn’t my secret to tell.”