cabin-boy. On Sir Richard’s sinister side sat Bathsheba, the most unsettling Scantlebury of all.
Bathsheba Scantlebury was one-and-twenty. She was her father’s daughter, and clearly destined for the Scantlebury bulk, complete with the squinting Scantlebury eye and perhaps even a wen upon the snorting Scantlebury snout. But not yet. Bathsheba was still beautiful—or if not precisely beautiful, then nonetheless keenly desirable, in an ill-tempered sluttish up-against-the-cowshed sort of way. She had a gaze that pinned you wriggling to the wall, and a curl to her lip that said: “I know what the world is like, and what it wants in its filthy black heart—and more than that, I know you.”
I gripped the sides of the pulpit and continued, like a mariner in his cockpit gazing down upon a troubled sea.
“You say to me, ‘Mr Beresford, I have looked high and low—I have looked within and without—and I have never seen the Devil, no not once.’ Well, I’m afraid I must reply that this is very bad indeed. For if you don’t see the Devil, what it almost certainly means is, he’s already got you.
“For the Devil is a busy man, my friends. The wide world is his hunting-ground, and all of humankind his quarry. So when he passes a hardened sinner, he exults: ‘This one is already mine— pass on to the next!’ A grasping man of business, extracting the last mite from a widow? ‘Pass on.’ The man and the woman eyeing one another, aglow with the secret fires of lust? ‘Well done, my good and faithful servants—you’ll join me soon enough, and my flames are everlasting. Pass on!’ So take no solace when you cannot see the Devil, and never suppose that he has forgotten you. For the gates of Hell are gaping wide, and the Devil is forever rising up.”
I shot a swift guilty glance upwards to Bathsheba Scantlebury. Her own eyes had widened slightly—for damn it all, these infernal musings had provoked a certain agitation down below, and the Devil was rising up indeed. The pulpit hid this from most of the congregation, but Bathsheba in the elevated Scantlebury pew stared down from above. And she had seen.
Oh, Lord. I could hear my voice growing constricted, and sought refuge in shrivelling images.
“Once the Devil has risen up, he will not rest until he has dragged you down. And what does it mean, to be dragged down by the Devil? Well, let me tell you. You are sealed in your coffin, and plunged head downwards into the Pit. And this Pit is like a mine shaft, except far narrower, just wide enough to accommodate your coffin, which in turn is so close that your face presses up against the wood, so tightly that you cannot draw a single breath, even if there were air to breathe in Hell, which there is not. There you are, pinioned upside-down, suffocating in the stench of the unquenchable sulphur flames—and yet ice-cold, a cold that gnaws into your very pith and marrow, for the flames of Hell generate no heat, but a cold so intense it cannot be conceived.
“And there’s worse to come. After an age of agony, there comes an instant of hope. You hear a scraping sound above, and a voice crying, and your poor heart leaps with the thought: ‘They’ve come to fetch me out of this!’ Your coffin gives a lurch and a shudder and a grind, but the cry you heard was not the angels winging to deliver you. It was the sinner next in line, who has just been loaded in on top. An endless line of sinners, each one atop the last, each one forcing you six feet deeper down that suffocating shaft.
“And now comes the worst of all. You realize: you are utterly alone. God has turned His face from you—now, and for all eternity. God has forgotten you ever existed. He has let you go.”
I had shaken them. I could see it in the faces staring back at me: some of them slack-jawed, a few of them frankly appalled. Even Sir Richard blinked, and shifted his bulk uncomfortably. I could have continued. I could have told them: trust me—it’s true— I know. I’ve read my Calvin and my Dante, and a hundred hellfire evangelists beside. What’s more, I’ve looked into my own heart, and understood what I deserve. I felt the prick of tears, and there was a moment—there really was—when I might have fallen to my knees, and wept, and confessed my sins to God and the people of Porthmullion, and vowed to walk the paths of righteousness all the days of my life.
But Bathsheba Scantlebury was staring down at me. Her head was cocked appraisingly, and her lip said: “Oh, you dog—I know you.”
The Devil stared straight back at her, and twitched.
I SHOULD NEVER have been a clergyman in the first place. That should have been my brother. Tobias was two years younger, a boy who could pray for hours at a stretch, and who would utter things like, “God sees the little sparrow fall, but He trusts in you and me to mend its wing.” He nursed wounded birds in his bedchamber, did Toby, keeping them in a little box beneath a picture of Our Lord holding a lamb in his arms. Our Lord had a tiny sad smile on his face—you know the smile I mean. He smiles because he loves us, but he is sad because so many of us are damned and just don’t know it yet. Late at night, passing by, I would hear the sweet earnest murmur of brother Toby entreating Our Lord to forgive me. Toby was in short a sanctimonious little horror. But just as you were on the verge of ducking him in the pond, he’d finish all your chores and disappear before you could thank him, or else ask you why you were crying and impulsively give you his new compass, or perform some other such act that would send you slinking away with a withering sense of your own selfishness, and the deeply discomfiting realization: my God, he actually is good, isn’t he?
In this he took after our maternal grandfather, an ineffectual but beloved provincial vicar who occupied pride of place in my mother’s personal canon of saints. So when Toby announced—at the age of three—his vocation for the priesthood, it was a day of rejoicing for my mother, not to mention a vast relief to me. Now that Toby’s chubby hand had taken up the torch, I was free to follow my own true nature, which much more closely favoured our father. He was a provincial solicitor—we lived on the outskirts of a bleak Midlands industrial town, whose belching smokestacks fed my child’s intuition that Hell’s Gate was just beyond the next hill. More to the point, my father was the second son of a second son, a man of feckless charm and determined demons who frittered away a modest patrimony in a sequence of ill-conceived initiatives. After each catastrophe he would plunge into drink, proceeding through fury to despair and tearful encomiums to self-slaughter, before staggering back to his feet in the renewed conviction that something grand might turn up next week.
But my brother never took up holy orders. A chill gripped Toby on the evening of his fifteenth birthday, and he withdrew to his chamber under the sad watchful gaze of Our Lord. By morning the chill had become a racking cough, and by nightfall a fever that made the doctor shake his head in gloomy resignation. Toby departed at dawn, brave and devout, actually whispering with his last breath: “Don’t cry, Jack. Look—my angel’s come—he’s reaching out to take my hand.”
Well, this is quite the legacy to leave your older brother. I was seventeen at the time, and had almost settled upon the Law as a suitable career for a young man with decent intelligence and keen material expectations, but no particular gift for application—my father’s son, in other words. But now the weight of maternal hope had nowhere else to fall. My poor mother was sufficiently distraught to clutch at any straw, even the belief that I might make a clergyman after all—so how could I say no, with the flowers still fresh on Toby’s grave? Besides, I was genuinely haunted—and have remained so, all my life—by the look on my brother’s face as he struggled to lift his hand towards his angel. It was a look so radiant that it could make even a wretched Doubter half-believe that it was true—that Toby’s angel was there—and more, that there was a second angel in the room, reaching out to Toby’s brother and telling him: “This is your destiny. Put down your nets and follow me.”
So. You conjure consolatory dreams of deanships and bishoprics, which soon wither in the reality of a third-class degree from Oxford and a family with no money and less influence. Finally the Future presents itself in the form of a seventy-pound-per-annum curacy in the outer reaches of Cornwall. And what do you do then? Why, you do your best.
MY BEST IS WHAT I was doing on the afternoon of that fateful Sunday.
I had spent an hour or so alone after service, despairing over failures and inadequacies, and dreaming of escape. Today’s dream