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of talking with God in His house.
    But I knelt and the stone was cold and I thought of Gabby with my coat on him, shivering, I don’t know why. And I told God of my thoughts and fears and that if I was going mad to spare me with a quick dying. And I asked God if He could whitewash all my thoughts like the soldiers had covered over the old paintings that I had known as a boy and a man. But thoughts were not on walls but ran like deer and the smell of whitewash mocked me.
    The church whispered back my mumblings, and I was afraid lest someone might hear, and looked all about me. But it was deathly empty. I wished idolatrously for the statues and pictures still to be there, and the coloured glass they had broken through with poles and stones and their guns.
    All in one day, with the parson and some of the village cheering in the graveyard. But my thoughts would not be smashed and covered so easy. They were deer running through the forest, and I prayed hard that God might save me.
    For I never thought of Gabby as leaving that farm. In all my thoughts I could not see him crossing the yard and knocking the noses of the cattle and striding up the hill with his rings sewn into his pocket, jingling. To set hisself up. I could not see that, however hard I furrowed my brows and bit my lip and sat silent with the bells and the wind all round me out on the scarp. And even in the empty church with its whitewash smell like old rivers I could not see him leaving the farm.
    And when I saw him there it was only through the parlour door with me shaky on a broken wheel and his arm shining with buttons in its red cloth. And the cloth would always run with blood as the arms did on that field after the business at Newberry when to walk across it was to lift clouds of flies from the arms.
    And there was Anne and Thomas Walters in the shadows, and Anne’s crumbling teeth round my arm like a dog’s that is mad, that was really her hand.
    So I shook my head and said that if there was blood that it should come out so as I could know my guilt in sending him down there into his judgement. And the church whispered back exactly my own words that I had said loud when there was a footstep behind me at the door and it was Anne, staring at me turned round to look at her.
    I shook my head but she didn’t go. There was mud on her boots from the rains. She walked into the middle and I stood with my heart swallowing itself.
    She was like the Virgin statue, with the hair all about her neck, and her hair crow-black and wet from the rains.
    She stood as still.
    ‘I’ll be going,’ I said, as best I could.
    ‘Not on account of me,’ she said. ‘You called me, did you know that?’
    She was a witch.
    ‘I was talking to God,’ I said, and made the sign of the cross.
    ‘Talk to me,’ she said, and she held my arm, but softly.
    ‘This is the house of God,’ I said, but didn’t take my arm away. I was afraid, and a little mad. She was panting and her coat was open.
    ‘William,’ she said.
    She began to cry.
    Frankly, she had a smell about her that was not healthy.
    ‘God will forgive thee,’ I said, ‘if you confess and you don’t need no parson to do it with the church an open house for sinner and saint alike.’ She hadn’t gone to the sermon last week for that was it, as I remembered.
    ‘He done nothing for me,’ she said.
    ‘That were no reason to kill him,’ I said, before I’d thought it.
    She went as white as the statue then, before it was burnt.
    She pushed her hair back into her shawl, for it had dropped right in front of her eyes.
    She walked away and nodded me to follow. I was afraid. I had my knife in my belt and I asked forgiveness for thinking of it. We walked up behind the church onto the downland and up into Bailey’s Wood from where you could see my grazing, the other side of our river, rising up against the sky. The rains had stopped. My thoughts were shouting in my head and I held it but then she stopped in a little clearing