Rollo lived at the Hall, sleeping on a straw bed on the dais between Sir Hugh’s and Magda’s leather-curtained beds, though it was said, mostly by Milly, that Rollo spent many nights at the priest’s house. Old Sarah, who was always in and out of the priest’s house, looking after him, so she said, informed villagers that Rollo and Father John often sat together in his house speaking of God and the Virgin and holy things and Rollo tried to teach Father John to sing – ‘And sometimes I join in too,’ Old Sarah added with a smirk, and she denied there was any other association between the two men, but among the villagers other rumours were muttered. Old Sarah, they said, didn’t understand a thing. She was senile wasn’t she? Hadn’t she told several people she was an angel and flew to heaven every night? But on the other hand, Milly, with her poison-loving mind, would invent any evil story and spread it around if she could.

Father John was proceeding with Mass. He had used for some mysterious purpose the board with the large red A on it and had laid it carefully on the altar again with more mysterious words intoned in a sort of monotonous sing-song – which usually made Rollo twist his face in his beard. The sacred bread was broken up smaller and Tim Rockwell and another, smaller boy – one of the Hunter boys from Goose Farm, Marion thought – were taking it round in flat baskets to all the congregation. There was a scuffle somewhere, and hoarse boyish whispers of ‘Your fault’, ‘Wasn’t, you knocked me,’ and Rollo’s sudden severe shout, ‘Silence, boys!’

Meanwhile Father John, having faced his audience and intoned some more strange words with both his hands raised, turned back to the altar and started pouring his ‘wine’ from a narrow-necked jug, a very dear possession, into the little horn vessel that was the communion cup. He always held the jug high so that all could see the crimson liquid falling (and today the sunlight caught the colour in ruby sparkles), and so know that proper wine was being used in this vital ceremony. His hands were cold and there were numerous splashes on the altar cloth.

As she watched the ceremony, Marion’s thoughts went back to Margery’s recent death and burial. ‘She has gone to be an angel,’ Father John had told her, a thing he said to all parents of dead children. She had been uneasy at this remark at the time and her uneasiness increased as she looked up to the two angels painted in brown lines on the wall above the altar. They were at the top left side of a large picture of the end of the world, where half the people were falling headfirst and naked into Hell, and the other half were going up top left, all in white shifts with their arms up. The painter, whoever he had been, had not done the details well, and a bump on the wall had spoilt his drawing of one of the angel’s faces, giving it a nasty sneer, and some damp had come through the other angel’s face so that half of it had fallen away in a powdery smear. Father John sometimes said he must get a ladder and put it right, but he did not know how to. No one realised that Gib, the miller’s son, could have repainted it, least of all Gib himself. Marion had not been comforted by the idea that Margery could now be an angel.