in St Kea’s there was a little frisson of dark satisfaction. Mine was a congregation composed primarily of labourers and fisherfolk. Cornish labourers and fisherfolk to boot, dour and stolid men and women who quite liked the idea of their neighbours being Judged, especially if they should also be Found Wanting.
“Now, I have met with those,” I continued, “who maintain that the Devil does not exist. They say to me, ‘surely the Devil is just a story, made up to frighten children.’ And what do I say to this? I say: ‘my friend, if you don’t believe in the Devil, then I’m not sure I believe in you. For if you looked at yourself closely—if you looked down deep in your heart—I suspect you’d see a devil soon enough.’”
I happened to be looking straight at Sir Richard, Bart., as I said this, which was unfortunate. Sir Richard, Bart., had awakened with a snort and a fart a moment or two earlier, and he was a man who felt perceived insults keenly. The Scantlebury pew was curtained and carved and raised above the rest to balcony level, for the Scantleburys were the local aristocracy—which is to say that they were a clan of inbred horrors descended from smugglers and pirates. Sir Richard’s great-grandfather was the notorious Reeking Scantlebury, a freebooter equally noted for his rapacity and his contempt for personal hygiene. He married Black Bess Timberfoot, a twenty-stone one-legged pirate queen who was known for flaying her captives alive and feeding their vital organs to her parrot, Beaky Norman. From them are descended the present generation of appalling pig-farming gentry.
Granted, I’m supplying one or two details of my own here. Such as the parrot, and the pirate queen, and Reeking himself. As you come to know me better, you will learn that I have a vivid imagination, and an instinct for the dramatic. Still, many Cornish fortunes did indeed begin in smuggling, and these guessed-at details would go a long way towards explaining the present occupants of Scantlebury Hall. Sir Richard was a man of porcine bulk and ponderous self-regard, sitting like a champion boar amidst his brood. On his right scowled the son and heir, Little Dick, half a head taller and even broader athwart. Beside Little Dick was young Geoffrey: a pouting thing of twelve or so with a head of yellow curls, proof that the breeding of sons is not as exact a science as the breeding of Dorsetshire Saddlebacks, and that even the saltiest sea-captain may sire the occasional 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
