Saint Christopher and the Gravedigger Read online

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  NOTE FROM THE CATHERINE COOKSON ESTATE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE FOR CATHERINE COOKSON

  ‘Humour, toughness, resolution and generosity are Cookson virtues… In the specialised world of women’s popular fiction, Cookson has created her own territory.’

  —Helen Dunmore, The Times

  ‘Queen of raw family romances’

  —Telegraph

  ‘Catherine Cookson soars above her rivals’

  —Mail on Sunday

  ‘Catherine Cookson is an icon; without her influence, I and many other authors would not have followed in her footsteps.’

  —Val Wood

  ALSO BY CATHERINE COOKSON

  The Kate Hannigan Series

  Kate Hannigan

  Kate Hannigan’s Girl

  The Mary Ann Stories

  A Grand Man

  The Lord and Mary Ann

  The Devil and Mary Ann

  Love and Mary Ann

  Life and Mary Ann

  Marriage and Mary Ann

  Mary Ann’s Angels

  Mary Ann and Bill

  The Mallen Novels

  The Mallen Streak

  The Mallen Girl

  The Mallen Litter

  The Tilly Trotter Trilogy

  Tilly Trotter

  Tilly Trotter Wed

  Tilly Trotter Widowed

  The Hamilton Series

  Hamilton

  Goodbye Hamilton

  Harold

  The Bailey Chronicles

  Bill Bailey

  Bill Bailey’s Lot

  Bill Bailey’s Daughter

  The Bondage of Love

  Other Fiction

  The Fifteen Streets

  Colour Blind

  Maggie Rowan

  Rooney

  The Menagerie

  Fanny McBride

  Slinky Jane

  Fenwick Houses

  The Garment

  The Blind Miller

  Hannah Massey

  The Unbaited Trap

  Katie Mulholland

  The Round Tower

  The Glass Virgin

  The Nice Bloke

  The Long Corridor

  The Invitation

  The Dwelling Place

  Feathers in the Fire

  Pure as the Lily

  Blue Baccy

  The Invisible Cord

  The Gambling Man

  The Tide of Life

  The Girl

  The Cinder Path

  The Man Who Cried

  The Whip

  The Black Velvet Gown

  A Dinner of Herbs

  The Bannaman Legacy

  The Moth

  The Parson’s Daughter

  The Cultured Handmaiden

  The Harrogate Secret

  The Spaniard’s Gift

  The Black Candle

  The Wingless Bird

  The Gillyvors

  The Maltese Angel

  My Beloved Son

  The Love Child

  The Rag Nymph

  The House of Women

  The Golden Straw

  The Year of the Virgins

  Justice Is a Woman

  The Tinker’s Girl

  A Ruthless Need

  The Obsession

  The Upstart

  The Bonny Dawn

  The Branded Man

  The Desert Crop

  The Lady on my Left

  The Blind Years

  Riley

  The Solace of Sin

  The Thursday Friend

  A House Divided

  Rosie of the River

  The Silent Lady

  Non-Fiction

  Before I Go

  Our Kate

  Let Me Make Myself Plain

  Plainer Still

  Her Way

  Children’s Books

  Bill and the Mary Ann Shaughnessy

  Matty Doolin

  Joe and the Gladiator

  The Nipper

  Our John Willie

  Mrs Flannagan’s Trumpet

  Go Tell it to Mrs Golightly

  Lanky Jones

  Rory’s Fortune

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2017 The Trustees of the Catherine Cookson Charitable Trust

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477823910

  ISBN-10: 1477823913

  Cover design by Lisa Horton

  We wish to thank The University of Newcastle upon Tyne for the picture of Catherine Cookson used in this book. While every effort has been made to trace copyright sources, Amazon Publishers would be grateful to hear from any unacknowledged copyright holders.

  Chapter One

  The crossroads were under repair and a big red board proclaiming DANGER—ROADWORKS AHEAD brought the cortège to a halt. The cars following the hearse drew close together and waited in dark solemnity until six other cars, in colours varying from red to pale primrose, were waved on their careless, heedless way with never a thought for ‘the poor swine’ lying there. So was the private comment of Broderick McNally as he stopped his drill in deference to the dead. He showed this deference by standing with head bowed and one hand, palm outward, behind his back, while the other supported his machine.

  With the signal to go, the funeral procession wended its way tentatively past Mr McNally on the narrow piece of road he had left them, and not until they had gathered speed, as if in a hurry to reach their destination, did Broderick speak. ‘There goes another one for Gascoigne to shovel the muck on. Oh, it’s happy he’ll be the day,’ he remarked caustically.

  The man at his side, leaning on his shovel, laughed and said, ‘You don’t like Gascoigne, Broderick?’

  ‘It isn’t that I don’t like him,’ said Broderick, bringing his drill between his feet again, ‘but some way or another I seem to get under the man’s skin and sour him. That’s not saying we haven’t been good neighbours for the past sixteen years… though, mind, he’d have me out of me house if he could the morrow, the pigheaded old swine, and all on account of me nationality. Aye, would you believe it? An’ his old mother’s worse than him, if that’s at all possible. But, mind, for the rest of the family you couldn’t find a nicer.’ A grin spread over Broderick’s large, flat, red countenance and, bending forward, he whispered, ‘And I’ll tell you somethin’.’ His lips went close to the other man’s ear and the effect of the words pouring into them caused the man’s eyes to stretch.

  ‘You don’t say?’ he exclaimed.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Well, I’d like to see the end of that.’

  ‘You will, please God and His Holy Mother.’ Broderick nodded once before pressing a lever and the noise that followed only allowed the two men to smile at each other by way of communication. The repair of the crossroads between Battonbun and Downf
ell Hurst on one road and Biddleswiddle and Befumstead on the other, was once more under way.

  Downfell Hurst cemetery supplied the needs of the four villages and was commonly referred to as ‘Fell Bottom’, because that was where it was placed geographically, clustering at the foot of a fell. In attendance at the burials in the cemetery there would be either of two Reverends: the Reverend Collins, who ministered to Battonbun and Biddleswiddle; or the Reverend Bailey, who ministered to Downfell Hurst and Befumstead. Then there was Father Stuckly, who saw to the passing over of the scattered Catholic fraternity, and a Mr Hope, who was also a Reverend but no one used his title because he saw only to the laying aside of, as the gravedigger John Gascoigne summarised them, ‘the neither one thing or t’others’.

  But whatever their denomination, the dead were the dead and were all the same to John, or at least they had been up to this last month or so. Before that, he had thrown the dirt onto them with the comment, and this to himself, that ‘such was life’ or, when feeling very talkative inside, he might add, ‘When their number’s called, even the deaf hear.’

  But this was before he had witnessed the accident at the crossroads.

  He had heard the screams as far away as the back cemetery gate and when he had reached the scene it was to see a woman running around half-demented and splashed all over with blood. And two cars looking like one, so closely were they tangled, with a dead man lying in the middle of them. The only things that were left whole from either car were two dangling effigies. The three-inch figures, identical in pattern, stared at each other from their scaffold of tortured iron and the sight of them had raised a comment in John’s mind. ‘All this mess,’ he had thought, ‘and them never touched.’

  That was John’s first acquaintance with St Christopher.

  The second time was when young Steve Morton ran his motorcycle at a telegraph pole. He no doubt thought it was the lesser of two evils, the other being a head-on collision with a very merry car driver. But it hadn’t worked out that way, for Steve had died, in spite of the St Christopher medal dangling from a chain around his neck.

  The third meeting had come about through Mrs Wheeler, who helped her man to run a smallholding up Biddleswiddle way. You would have thought anyone would have been safe enough feeding chickens in a field, and that with a rail round it. But no, this time one of the St Christopherites had brought his car over the ditch, through the railings, over a hen cree and onto the petrified woman. Mrs Wheeler had got off with a broken leg, but Mrs Wheeler’s broken leg had cost the driver of the car his neck, and around it was a medallion of… that bloody Saint, as John called him.

  This last meeting with the Saint had set John’s mind working.

  John was a man of few words and many grunts and one of his grunts could express a volume. He had a variety of them which he adapted as the situation arose. But they all seemed to express his view on life, the principle of which was, ‘you leave me be, and I’ll leave you be’; except perhaps in the case of his neighbour, Broderick McNally, and at odd times his own mother. These two people alone had the power to turn John’s grunts into words, and the words were such that they never failed to set the sparks flying in both quarters, even if along different lines.

  John had lived for over sixteen years in Downfell Hurst, and with regards to the village—that was fast becoming a town with its blotches of new bungalows that created controversy, especially among the residents who took pride in tracing their ancestors back for 300 years—John took no part. When there were meetings to protest against this or that erection, no one said, ‘Are you coming along, John?’ for they knew it would be useless. Even such a colossal event as the visit of a Member of Parliament to the Downfell Hurst Church Hall tomorrow, who was coming to answer questions on the proposed revolutionary scheme to turn the disused chapel into a cinema to supply the four villages with films at least twice a week, evoked no response from him. Either to the one side—who asked, with dramatic gestures, could any suggestion be madder with television aerials going up like nine pins all round the countryside—nor to the other: the more youthful members of the community, who said, ‘We don’t want to be born and live and die inside four walls, we want to get out.’

  ‘Out’ for them, apparently, meant going to the pictures and sitting in the dark, which of course was different to the dark of the front room where they only rubbed shoulders with the family. This section wanted a darkness that licensed them to rub shoulders with a stranger, or better still, with the love of the moment. They wanted to sit in a darkness that was different; a darkness through which new worlds flicked before their eyes and of which they could take their choice—a new world twice a week.

  No, not even this interesting battle stirred John. One might think that John never pondered, but he did. He was thinking and pondering all the time; not about coffins and graves and funeral services, these were everyday things and became monotonous, but about things that went much deeper. So deep that he wasn’t always conscious of thinking; so deep that he often became lost in a maze that was so filled with questions, there was no room for the answers.

  But that was John up to the first time he became aware of the St Christopher effigies and medals. To the outside world he remained the same, but John knew that he was no longer the same. For now there was a battle raging inside him, a talking battle, and his opponent was a man in a long robe with a staff in his hand.

  This was the man who, up to a comparatively few years ago, had been an obscure saint, but who was now a power that was creating a mass superstition the like of which had not been known since the Dark Ages, or so reasoned John. And he saw this saint as something more terrible than anything in the Dark Ages, for then people could be forgiven for thinking that even a piece of wood touched by a wandering friar held enough power to alter their destiny. But the wearers of the effigy today were no longer souls petrified by the vast unknown; they were educated and supposedly enlightened people. But despite this, the superstition had flooded high schools, grammar schools and colleges, and had bemused not only the scholars but those who taught them.

  This subject had hit John with such intensity that he could no longer remain unaware of his deeper thinking. He became so much aware of it, in fact, that he was worried by it and therefore he was determined to do something about it.

  This breaking out of his cocoon did not surprise John, for being the least introspective of men, he had not been aware that he lived in a cocoon.

  At this particular moment, John was standing out of sight of the cortège as it came through the cemetery gates, but it wasn’t out of his sight, and as he looked at what he termed the latest victim of this St Christopher racket, he muttered, ‘Something oughts be done about this,’ and he nodded once to himself in answer. ‘Aye it should that.’

  John had never spoken aloud to himself before. This was a momentous event.

  Florrie Gascoigne had painted her kitchen doors yellow and the walls mauve. She had pink-patterned curtains on the oblong window and thick, serviceable, coloured crockery on the delft rack. She liked the effect and considered it the bonniest kitchen in the village. It was an old-fashioned kitchen and was large enough for the table to be in the middle and this offered a double service. The food was prepared on it and eaten off it, and now Florrie was moving back and forward between it and the gas stove, which stood cheek by jowl with the modern water-heating range. She was setting the table for the evening meal in between keeping an eye on the pan on top of the stove, which she stirred at intervals.

  At the sink below the window stood her second son, Frankie. He was nineteen and worked on the buildings, and he was a talker. Frankie was always talking. He was an observer of life but so voluble was he that he didn’t allow his observations time to sink any deeper than the skin. It would appear that he took them in through his eyes and they slid down the back of his nose and out of his mouth in one motion. He was ‘the talker’ of the family, and as he could not possibly have inherited this from either parent
the obvious suggestion was that he took after his paternal grandmother. Frankie didn’t take to this suggestion because he didn’t take to his grandmother.

  Sitting on the couch was Linda, reading Woman magazine. Linda was plump, with the transitional curves of a seventeen-year-old, and pretty. She took after her mother not only in looks but in character, for her manner, like Florrie’s, held some restraint and a suggestion of secretiveness, which didn’t help her in her job of selling things in Twait’s drapery shop.

  Then there was the eldest son, Arthur, but he wouldn’t be in until eight o’clock tonight, it being Friday. He always worked late on a Friday getting the last batch of dough ready for the ovens in the bakery.

  Florrie knew almost to the minute when each member of her family would walk in through the back door, and now she turned from the stove, looked at her husband, gave a small smile and made the usual remark of ‘Another one over?’ as he came into the kitchen.

  The evening procedure was that John would walk the three steps from the kitchen door to the cupboard where the work clothes were kept and there deposit his coat, and on the journey he would answer his wife with the syllable ‘Aye’, and from the inflection that he gave to his reply she was able to judge the quality of his day. But tonight he didn’t answer her with the brief ‘Aye’ and her head came round sharply to him when he repeated her words with heavy stress. ‘Another one over,’ he said. And now he brought her mouth agape with the addition of ‘Aye, and completely over for some folks.’

  Florrie, spoon held in mid-air, continued to gape and Frankie, too, gaped. If his father had rolled into the kitchen paralytic drunk, he could not have looked more amazed. His father’s reply, especially at this precise point in the evening, amounted almost to loquaciousness. Frankie often considered that his father was the most suitable man in the world for the post of gravedigger, for he was dead mute most of the time. Then just as he was getting his mouth to close and his tongue was flicking preparatory to questioning his father’s last remark, his grannie entered the kitchen from the hall.

  Old Mrs Gascoigne was like nobody but herself. Her white hair was so sparse that it had its work cut out to cover her head. On some parts of her scalp it failed to do this, and patches of grey-pink bareness showed through. It would appear that she had no cheekbones for her eyes lay flat upon her face, the skin dropping from the lower lids direct to her upper lip, which was short and curved inwards. But it was her chin that drew a newcomer’s attention. Looking at it sideways, they would have sworn that her jaw was dislocated for the whole of her chin and the lower lip protruded a good half-inch beyond the flat surface of her face. Her nose was of no account, for it was lost in the no man’s land between the remarkable chin and two round, hard, blue bullet eyes. After looking at Gran’s face, no one bothered to look at her figure, of which there was little to remark on anyway, being just a bone structure on which she hung her numerous out-of-date blouses and skirts. Gran was seventy-nine and looked ninety, but she had the clout-clipping tongue of a harridan of twenty. It was to her only son’s advantage that in looks, personality and approach to life he in no way resembled her.