Page 19 of Giving Up The Ghost
CHAPTER 5
JULIAN
Reverend Barnworth was exactly what I pictured when I thought of a country vicar. Rosy-cheeked, plump, smiling and looking just one step removed from wandering off into a field to check his turnips, Nigel (of course his name was Nigel!) Barnworth gave such an enthusiastic handshake I thought, for a moment, I might lose a digit or two. “It’s not often I get to speak with a fellow history aficionado!”
“Well, he’s definitely that,” Ezra murmured, bending to peer at a small tabletop diorama—one of many in the reverend’s front parlor—depicting Jesus overturning the tables at the temple but made from tiny taxidermy mice.
Jesus and the moneylenders were mice. Not the temple. That would be too gruesome to consider.
I had the feeling the good reverend might be sublimating something.
“You’re a professor you say? Come in, come in, what am I doing making you stand in the doorway like this!” Barnworth continued, ushering us deeper into the vicarage sitting room. It was only a mile from the church itself, just on the back of the property on the other side of the churchyard. It had, we’d been informed, once been the caretaker’s cottage but some natural disaster or other had rendered the original vicarage uninhabitable in the eighties, and no one had bothered to do much about it. Reverend Barnworth didn’t seem to mind, bustling about the tiny cottage as he pressed tea upon us and rattled on about the history of St. Swithin’s existence as a former Catholic church turned C of E establishment.
Oscar and Ezra both had very carefully studied expressions of polite interest on their faces, but I knew in my bones the troublemaking schoolboys they had once been weren’t far beneath the surface. Taking tea with a vicar, surrounded by his odd hobby of using tiny dead mammals in dioramas—oh, wait, no, there was a larger display featuring a mid-sized perch as Moses, from the look of things—was testing the limits of their adult behavior modifications.
Finally, Barnworth settled on a horsehair-stuffed armchair that was likely older than my grandmother, perching on the edge as if ready to flutter off at any moment should we so much as suggest more sugar might be nice, or perhaps a fresh cup is in order. “Now. To the business at hand, as I’m sure you lads have better things to do than sit about with an old man on his day off! You were looking into the old records for the parish, particularly some unusual burials?”
“Yes.” I set my cup down and pulled out my phone, bringing up the list of names I’d culled from the binders. “I was recently, ah, given the opportunity—” Oscar snorted here, and Ezra elbowed him, barely able to stop his own smirk from overtaking his features. If Barnworth noticed, he pretended not to. “I was given the opportunity,” I continued in a slightly louder tone, “to examine historical documents ranging in dates between the seventeenth and early twentieth century. They included some handwritten records of family burials which indicated not everyone was welcome on hallowed ground.”
Barnworth sighed and set his own cup aside then. Rubbing his shiny pate with his fingers, a remnant of an old hair-ruffling habit I guessed, he gave me a rather abashed look. “It’s a sad fact that, until fairly recently, superstitions held sway over people, especially people of faith. They’d substitute these fearful imaginings for any sort of understanding of how life—and sometimes death—worked. It was, and still is for some people I suppose, easier to believe that a person who was too different from you was, say, possessed by some devil or other. Or a run of bad luck wasn’t due to the vagaries of nature but something you could control and change with a charm or, in other cases, the right sort of prayer.”
“That’s a very pragmatic view for a man of the cloth,” Oscar murmured. “I’d have thought you’d be all in favor of prayer.”
Barnworth gave him an assessing, head-tilted look before he replied with carefully weighted words. “It’s less the beliefs of a reverend than the knowledge of someone who has been alive quite a long time. And also,” he added with a soft smile and a wink, “I was a psychology major in uni.”
This made me chuckle. “What we’re wondering, as the records I’ve seen are pertaining to one specific family, is if there are others from the community who were similarly treated and why.”
Barnworth’s gaze became shrewd. “I suppose this is because this one here is a Fellowes then?” He nodded in Oscar’s direction. “Don’t look so startled—I recognized you from your show,” he chuckled at Oscar’s startledmeep. “My verger, Jane, and I are big fans.”
“Ah, well.” Oscar fussed with the position of his cup on the sauce, cheeks charmingly pink. “I’m not one to presume.”
Barnworth’s smile widened. “An admirable trait. So many with even the slightest bit of fame seem to think they’re owed the world. I have one parishioner who was on one of those home and garden shows years ago—the one where they refurbish old houses and make them all sad and gray inside—and he seems to think that makes him the second coming of George Clooney, which, given that Mr. Clooney is alive and well and probably in Italy, is certainly a feat. Now.”
He stood suddenly, smacking his palms against his thighs. “I think I have just what you’re looking for. Keeping in mind, most of this is on the parish’s cloud server thingy, and it’s part of an effort by the National Church History Board to consolidate the historical data about the rural churches. But there’re a few things I can show you in the meantime and arrange access to the database for you.”
He hurried from the front parlor, and we could hear him rummaging in a backroom, humming to himself as he gathered whatever he’d been looking for. “You alright?” I asked Oscar.
He nodded. “Dandy. Just tired. That sofa wasn’t the best bed.” He glanced at Ezra, who gave him a tiny nod. Some unspoken communication passed between them that, thanks to the hurried steps of Barnworth returning, I had no time to question.
“It is another unfortunate truth that, even now, the idea of witchcraft or idolatry has a strong hold over some faithful. And that was even more prevalent during previous generations.” Barnworth set a cardboard archival box down on the table between the chair and sofa, carefully opening it to reveal a stack of handwritten letters, brittle and yellowed with time. “These date from around the late eighteenth century,” he murmured, tone becoming serious. “The oldest missives are actually at Cambridge right now, but they’ll be returned to us after Easter.”
He sounded proud of that fact, so we all murmured appreciatively, making him beam with pleasure. “Now. Let me see…”
The rustle of old paper, the smell of dust and ink… It was like a little trip home for me. I’d always been more comfortable in a library or in my office surrounded by my work than I was around people, but I’d learned early on to put on a good show. Glancing up at Oscar and Ezra, I saw them both looking on with some interest, Oscar leaning into Ezra’s side and Ezra absently patting his hand. They hadn’t been in one another’s pockets for almost two months now, thanks to Ezra spending so much time with Harrison and Oscar and I being together nearly every day. I had thought they were okay with it, but it looked like they were making up for lost time, their natural tendency towards affection with one another bleeding through in the vicar’s sitting room. “Are you okay?” I asked Oscar again. The vicar didn’t look up, but his movements faltered, his attention momentarily diverted.
Oscar nodded. “Of course. I’m interested to see what my family got up to!” He flashed his on-camera smile for Barnworth. It did its job, assuring the reverend all was well and Oscar was in a good mood. Ezra, though, pursed his lips, silently calling bullshit on his best friend.
Barnworth’s letters and documents reinforced what we already suspected: those buried outside the hallowed ground had been accused of a range of sins including witchcraft, fornication, atheism, being an outsider, ‘unnatural tendencies’—all four of us made similar noises of annoyance at that—and being poor…
“It seems,” he said with a delicate cough, “the Fellowes and their associated family members who are buried outside of the churchyard itself were largely accused of witchcraft and devil worship, or they were executed. But where it getsinterestingis that, at St. Swithin’s, our, ah, unhallowed dead as they used to say, were buried outside the churchyard on the north side of the gates, in a special plot set aside for them.”
Oscar nodded, solemn.
“But! The Fellowes and their, er, fellows?” He shuffled the papers carefully, pulling up a fragile sheet covered in spidery handwriting, the ink long ago oxidizing to a brownish tint rather than what had to have been black at one time. “They’re not among those in that plot but rather on the eastern side of the yard, in this little circle of standing stones. One of my predecessors, Reverend Godfrey Epsworth, mentioned it in his memoirs which were, much to his chagrin, never published. The man was a prolific memoirist.” He sighed. “I know more about what he had for breakfast every morning from March 1, 1821, to June 23, 1879, than can possibly be good for me.”
I gingerly accepted the proffered document, peering at the cramped writing. Barnworth quietly indicated the passage in question, and I strained to read it. “It’s difficult for me to make out, but he’s mentioning some old local superstition about witches,” I murmured. “And trying to quiet the dead.”
“It seems the Fellowes clan was the subject of some deeply held local fears,” Barnworth sighed apologetically. “We have some other documents that have already been scanned in, but they, along with a few others, are mentioned as being some sort of local soothsayers or the like. But when one of them would die, some of the locals and whoever was in charge of the church at the time would make sure they were buried in those stones and not the other plot.”
