Sir Humphrey of Batch Hall

Chapter Two



Some hours later, while his wife struggled to light the Rayburn which sulked in the kitchen of the rectory, and which only a week ago she had let go out now that it was officially summer, the Reverend Cutler was in his study, where bronchitic mice wheezed and sang behind the wainscoting and browsed the nibbled shelves of Parish Register, Crockford’s Clerical Directory and rows of Ecclesiastical Law.

He was on the telephone, wearing a pained expression and mittens, knitted for him by one of his volunteers. The rector had inherited damp, over three hundred years of it in the house, and on days like this the Norman masonry in St Swithin’s next door ran with it. The rector, no longer young himself, felt it in his extremities.

Once there would have been a small army of local artisans at hand to put things right, and the cellars stocked with tithes from the farms of the valley and hung with estate game, and gifts of port and Madeira. Now, in a house which cost considerably more than his stipend to run properly, he kept the coal they had to be careful with in the wine cellar, and wore his mittens when it rained.

The rector, sitting at his desk, where he’d been putting the finishing touches to his wedding address, with its stern twin themes of duty and responsibility, shifted in his chair. He had taken a call from one of his small band of parochial helpers, a woman who always had something to say, and who was now busy saying it, this time about the church fête, planned as part of the day’s celebrations on Taddlebrook Leasow.

The Rector’s mouth opened and closed again on an attempt to suggest that, given the weather, there almost certainly would not now be a fête, or, for that matter, anything else planned al fresco for the day.

His shoulders slumped despairingly, as barely without pause she moved on to the necessity of the right positioning of her white elephant stall. His head went back and he gazed up at the ceiling with a small doleful smile, a martyr to damp and patience.

And then his gaze shifted to the study window, and he blinked.

New to a part of the country which made up its own weather, and having, only an hour ago, been assured through the authority of the BBC that the rain was widespread and in for the day, it took some moments for it to sink in that out there, on a rectory lawn in Batch Magna, the rain had stopped, and the sun had come out.

And shining above it, sitting as solid as a croquet hoop in the sky, was a rainbow.

The rector put the telephone down on the voice on the other end, and walked across to the window, slowly, wonderingly, as if beckoned. He had been hoping for a sizeable contribution from the fête for the church and rectory damp-course fund, and he looked with gratitude at what he had so miraculously been given.

A Scot by birth, whose first act of his incumbency had been to remove the Popish touch of blue velvet curtains from behind the altar, and whose God still faced north on Sundays, when in his soul a grey rain fell again on granite, the rector allowed himself, for one brief, giddy moment, to believe that the God who had followed him from childhood had relented, and smiled on the church and rectory damp-course fund.

The rector abandoned himself to the idea again later, when bumping into Miss Wyndham on the way round to the church, the full peal of eight bells ringing the changes, bell on joyous bell spilling from a tower from which the Stars and Stripes shared the day with the cross of St George and the red dragon of Wales. Voicing the thought to her diffidently, and with an abrupt giggle, the sun, climbing in a blameless blue sky, warming him like an extra schooner of sherry.

Miss Wyndham, her thoughts elsewhere, looked startled.

Miss Wyndham’s thoughts had been elsewhere since getting up at first light to try the mauve outfit on again, and then the royal blue, then the mauve, and then the blue again. Invited to sit in the reserved front pews with members of the two families, she had been dithering in anticipation all day.

“When it rains like that here before six in the morning, Rector,” she told him with a touch of impatience, her hat, which matched the royal blue outfit she’d finally decided on, and which bore a confection of silk flowers, ostrich feathers, pressed chiffon and hat-pins, wobbling, “it always stops before eight. And in the summer the sun always comes out by ten. Always!” she insisted, on a sudden, high note of gaiety, and already on her way again, quivering as she had been quivering all day at the thought of what waited ahead. Quivering and humming, and erupting now and then into loud, vague bursts of song, sudden flights of sheer pleasure.

Even Mrs Medlicott, standing outside the packed church with a group of village ladies, had to admit that Sir Humphrey had made an effort. Although it wouldn’t have surprised her in the least, she made it known, had he turned up wearing his baseball cap and one of those ghastly shirts of his. Both the bridegroom and his best man, Phineas Cook, were in morning dress, with black silk toppers and yellow chamois gloves. But they all agreed that Phineas Cook looked the worse for wear, which in their experience was nothing new. He lived on the river, on one of the houseboats, and it was common knowledge what went on there.

And then a whispered discussion of some of the things that had gone on there lately was interrupted by the arrival of the bride and her father.

They had been driven to the church on the black and gold wagonette John Beecher kept in his coal yard in the village. John, who, as Joint Master with Clem of the Chase, was in his Master’s pine green coat, with silk topper, had put both his pair of Welsh cobs on for the day, combed, plaited and beribboned, their coats brushed to a gloss, short legs picking up the pace smartly as they did a tour of the village first, the harness streaming with white ribbon, the sun melting in yellow pools on the polished brass.

And when Clem’s father handed down his daughter, even Mrs Medlicott approved of this Clem.

The other Clem, the one usually dressed in stained riding breeches and a man’s shirt, the one who rolled her own and knocked back pints of Sheepsnout cider, and arm-wrestled the men in the public bar of the Steamer Inn, when she wasn’t wielding a siding knife among the gore in the back yard of the kennels, butchering dead farm stock for the hounds, that one was immediately forgotten.

This Clem carried a delicate bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley, and was wearing, it was said, the wedding gown first worn by her grandmother, in Edwardian net with ruched ruffles and flounces and a swagged skirt. The diamond tiara from that time had long been sold to help patch up the Wroxley finances, but the lace veil was the original, Clem nervously moving it from her face like hair as she made her way on her Father’s arm towards the open church door, where Ffion Owen, her chief bridesmaid, waited, face frozen with stifled giggles, and glancing now and then with lowered eyes at a group of village lads standing, laughing and nudging each other, along the top of the churchyard wall.

Clem’s head-dress was secured by a circlet of flowers, and the church was scented with more wild flowers, Ffion’s Mother, Annie, had seen to that. Added to those from the florist in Church Myddle, on window sills and chancel steps, and around the altar, were vases and urns of flowers from the hedgerows and fields, dog roses and honeysuckle, and flowering grasses, sedges and meadowsweet from the banks of the Cluny, with more flowers, small posies of them, tied to the pew ends, as if she had wanted to bring as much of the valley, as much as summer, in as she could carry.

The organ notes of Mendelssohn died, and Humphrey stood with Clem in the jeweled light from the east window, under a hammerbeam roof with owls and otters carved into its timbers, his family’s history running through the names around them on stone, brass and marble on the lime-washed walls. And on a 17th century high tomb, where the alabaster figure of the first baronet, Sir Richard Strange, lay in plate armour with his sword and his shield of arms painted on his breast, his hounds and children gathered below him, and his Welsh wife Hawis by his side.

“Wilt thou,” the Reverend Cutler addressed him, “have this woman to thy wedded wife …?”

Humphrey grinned and shifted his large frame. “You betcha!” he couldn’t wait to get out, grinning it at Clem.

The rector looked pained.

“Sir Humphrey ...?” he prompted.

“Humph,” Humphrey said automatically.

And then, realising, “Sorry! I do. I do. You betcha I do!”

And the bells that rang out for Sir Richard and Lady Hawis, rang out for Humphrey and his bride, rang from hillside to hillside, as the couple stepped out of the ancient dimness into sunlight and a shower of confetti and rice.