CHAPTER 6
Hreodwater, England
The Lodge was bright with salt light, but under that, it was dim as far as ordinary light could go.
There were a few candles in little groups here and there, the overflowed wax sealing them to the mantelpiece and the corner of the desk.
Catching both kinds of light were the spines of the books on the shelves and, much more strangely, hanging by their straps from hooks along the wall, about twenty instant cameras.
All of them were closed up in cases that at least looked like solid silver. There were even silver lens covers.
“Oh, come on,” a voice behind him said. “You can’t be an indoor snail. You won’t like it.”
Avelyn looked around and realized he had walked straight past a man who was leaning close to a sash window.
Right where the window would crush it if he pushed the lower pane down was an interested snail, peeping over the window ledge.
Hreod snails were fun. They spun their shells from salt rather than calcium, so they were luminous.
The man blew gently on the snail’s face. It pulled in its antennae, but only a little bit, and looked like it was scowling.
“Why don’t you pick it up?” asked Avelyn, who had never seen a human lose an argument with a snail before.
The man looked anguished. “I’ve tried, but he’s really glued on, and I don’t want to hurt him—oh.
” He straightened up, surprised, and when he saw Avelyn, his expression opened.
Avelyn was surprised too, because he’d expected the staff here to be Hreod.
The man was from the Outside. “Is there any chance you’re Avelyn Brocken?
” He got it right on his first try, Ah-vel-inn, which hadn’t happened in Avelyn’s whole adult life.
Usually everyone started as if they were trying to say aviary.
“If you’re not, it’s possible I’ve mislaid someone from Rome, and you’ll need to excuse me while I panic and organise a search party. ”
“I am,” Avelyn said, glad someone was here, and that it was a someone who was nice to snails, and that they would be speaking in English. “Am I in the right place?”
“Oh, thank God,” the man said, and broke into a smile that was pure relief. “I’m Jericho, I’m the dean. Welcome to An El.”
Jericho didn’t look like he belonged to now.
If someone had said that somewhere in the abbey was a portal to an arena in the fourth century, where there was a puzzled lion and conspicuously no Jericho, Avelyn would have believed them.
He was wearing normal clothes, a shirt with the sleeves turned back and a grey waistcoat with a purple button, but even so, the overwhelming impression was of a saint who was meant to have been martyred but who had absconded and swiftly completed a course on hotel management in an effort to blend in.
And—seeing him made Avelyn’s heart jump. It was happy recognition. He waited, trying to trace how they knew each other. He had been in the abbey for a total of three days before Father Li took him to Rome, so that was a narrow window, but . . . he hadn’t met a man who looked like a saint.
Christ, but he was terrible with Outside faces, even now. Probably he was thinking of a painting.
Avelyn leaned over the desk to shake Jericho’s hand. “I’m sorry I’m so late. The flight was delayed, and then there were train strikes . . .”
“Not at all.” Jericho marked something off in a ledger, still exuding relief. Of course: he’d lost one priest this week already. “Are you tired? Do you just want to go to your room, or can I talk you through a few things?”
Actually, Avelyn was flooding with that euphoria that came from not having any more planes to miss, any more trains to lose, or any more ferrymen who might not realize he was trying to get their attention.
He’d made it through from Heathrow to King’s Cross, he’d remembered how to saddle a horse, he’d not had an embarrassing breakdown on the walk down to An El.
The world was lovely, Jericho was lovely, and in all honesty, he would be happier down here talking to someone than holed up alone in a room.
“Talk me through,” Avelyn said.
“Oh, right,” Jericho said, looking pleased. “I was just about to make some hot chocolate, would you like some?”
“Immediately,” said Avelyn. He wouldn’t be able to taste it properly—he couldn’t taste the difference between tea and coffee and hot chocolate, or even just a cup of hot water unless he concentrated—but hot drinks were psychological.
They meant you had arrived, and you could sit down for twenty minutes.
Jericho waved at two armchairs near an iron stove. As Avelyn sank gratefully into one, Jericho took down a little bronze pan from a hook and poured in grated chocolate, and milk from a glass bottle. It began to steam straightaway. Avelyn smiled. There was a soothing ritual if ever there was one.
“The kitchen saved you some dinner, if you haven’t eaten,” Jericho said.
“There’s usually someone there right up to midnight, but there’s a set of cupboards with things free for anyone—bread and cheese and apples, that kind of thing—if you’re an out-of-hours kind of person. I’ll take you over in a minute.”
“Oh, thanks,” said Avelyn, who hadn’t expected anything that generous. At home, if you missed dinner, tough: Sister Francesca went home at eight, that was that, and if you wanted anything afterwards, you could contemplate the great benefits of fasting.
Jericho managed to communicate just with his eyelashes that he thought Avelyn could do with less fasting, which was fair.
Between Sister Francesca and the blandness of food generally, Avelyn was a wraith, even in the flowing tailoring of a Jesuit soutane.
He liked it, though. If you were in holy orders, it was useful to look strange.
“Usually, meals come after services,” Jericho continued.
“We’re on monastery time, so we’ve got breakfast after Lauds, lunch after Terce, dinner after Vespers, and a horrifying post-Matins snack time at four in the morning for people who don’t value their health.
You don’t have to do any of the services, by the way—you’re here to work, no one’s expecting to see you in the middle of the night.
And I don’t need to tell you about Hreodwater, do I?
I don’t think anything has changed since you lived here. ”
“No, it’s all coming back, unfortunately,” Avelyn said. The hymn for the King was still singing around his head. And part of his euphoria was the ras.
“Unfortunately?” Jericho said, and Avelyn blinked, because he hadn’t expected to be listened to that closely. Between Father Li and Latin radio and his class of fifteen-year-olds, Avelyn was used to saying things mostly for his own amusement and being eight-tenths ignored. “You don’t like it here?”
“I—have a bit of a strange relationship with Hreodwater. I ran away with a priest when I was sixteen, and he smuggled me illegally into Italy because he said God told him to.”
Jericho turned all the way around. “Did it work out?” he asked.
Avelyn’s brain stalled. He was a priest. He was invisible: people spoke to the collar.
Priests were interchangeable, that was the whole point.
He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had found him personally interesting.
He met Jericho’s eyes for longer than he should have, trying to find something he could have misunderstood.
Jericho paused. “I mean . . . I am indifferent to your uninteresting history. I’m just making this hot chocolate. What do you mean, I’m nosy? I don’t know why you’d even say that.” He looked worried.
“No, no, I understand,” Avelyn said, starting to laugh.
No Netflix down here. “It worked out beautifully. For me, I mean. He had hell to pay, but he claims not to mind.” Given the Freddie-Mercury-and-the-Pope situation, Avelyn still hadn’t come to a decision about whether or not Li was lying about the message from God.
The way Jericho smiled then, it was as though they had known each other for years, and for years, he had been wondering what had happened. “I’m glad.” He meant it. It wasn’t just a thing he was saying.
“Do I know you?” asked Avelyn. “I’m terrible with faces.”
“No,” Jericho said, but he looked away at exactly the wrong half-second.
“I think that’s a cunning lie,” said Avelyn, intrigued.
Jericho looked alarmed. “No . . .”
“Yes, and it will be weaselled from you eventually, but I stopped you mid introductory talk,” said Avelyn, who liked a long-term project, and some weaselling practise.
Jericho gave him an unexpected, calm tilt of the head. “My anti-weaselling precautions are thorough, but feel free to try.”
Avelyn put his hands together, delighted. He hardly ever had willing victims.
“Anyway,” Jericho said, turning back to the stove again, “I’m also the doctor. Good idea to have a medic down here permanently because people arrive with all sorts of terrible problems. Any medical things you need to tell me about?”
“No,” said Avelyn, “just one of those million-day coughs everyone gets since the pandemic.”
“Oh, that’ll go away here in a couple of days.”
“It will what?”
“I know it’s odd, but it will,” Jericho said mildly. “Small things clear up quickly here.”
“Well, great,” said Avelyn, hoping that was true. “Actually I don’t remember ever getting a cold before I went to the Outside.”
“No, Hreoda are medically very boring. I was excited when Covid happened, but nobody got it. Researchers write to us every now and then and ask if they can poke around, but they change their minds when I explain about the electricity.”
“And about the people,” said Avelyn.
“The people are lovely,” Jericho said, but there was a hint of strain.
“You must realize that isn’t true,” said Avelyn, thinking what a fabulous time he was going to have grinding Jericho down to admitting he was a normal person with homicidal ideations like everyone else.