FIC: Evensong on a Thursday in ordinary time (PG-13, Gen) Part II
Title: Evensong on a Thursday in ordinary time
Author/Artist: ???
Prompt: Prompt 49: 'Dudley really wants to help his kid with homework. It's just a little hard when the subjects have names like Herbology and Charms and Transfiguration.'
Pairing, or gen: Gen-ish.
Rating: BBFC - 12A to BBFC - 15.
Warning(s): 1662 BCP, see Book of Common Prayer 1662; Anglicanism; antiquities; astronomy; Betjeman; Blake; Book of Common Prayer 1662; Book of Exeter, the (Codex Exoniensis); Browning; buildings, listed; charms, Anglo-Saxon; choristers; Countryside Code, the; Cranmer; Darke (arts, but not the sort you want to worry about); Donne; Elgar (arr. Cameron); Eliot; Ellerton, Jno; Evensong, obviously (do keep up, please); gardening; Gardiner, H Balfour; geography; geology; gods, false (interpretatio germanica); Gray; Hooker; Hopkins; Howells; Hymns Ancient & Modern; Johnson, Dr Sam; Larkin; Latin (birder's); Latin (gardener's); Latin (trots); Longbottom, shrewd, kindly Neville; Naylor, Edward; Old English literature; Parry; politics, County council, PCC, and Vestry; Potter, Harry; Potter, James, the Elder; Potter, James, the Younger, the young rip; Radcliffe, Philip; railways, model; roses, old; RSPB, the; runes, Anglo-Frisian; Scholefield, Clement; 'Solomon and Saturn'; Stanford; Sumsion; war memorials; Weasleys, in their multitudes.
For those interested, the service music, so far as it is available online and I can find it, is as follows: Prelude: Master Tallis' Testament (Howells); Psalm preludes (choral): Howells, Set I, Ps 34 v 6; Responses: Philip Radcliffe; Psalm (set): Beati quorum via (Stanford); Magnificat: Stanford in G; Nunc dimittis: Stanford in G; Lux æterna (Elgar / arr Cameron); Te lucis ante terminum (HB Gardiner); The day thou gavest (St Clement, Scholefield); Final responses: Naylor; Postlude (choral): Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace (SS Wesley); and Postlude: Meditation on 'Brother James's Air' (Darke).
Word count/medium: Just a trifle more than 13125 words, I'm afraid.
Summary/Excerpt: Rum sort of place, Elstead; rum sort of place, England: Dudley reflects upon fatherhood, upon St James's Day.
Author's or Artist's notes: I am obliged to far greater writers (Cranmer not least, and the Usual Poets, Blake well to the fore); and I am obliged here specially to my editors.
I am further obliged to St James's Church, Elstead; Elstead CC; Elstead PCC; Waverley Borough Council; Surrey County Council; Surrey CCC; Surrey Wildlife Trust; Sir Charles Villiers Stanford; Herbert Howells CH; Philip Radcliffe; Edward W Naylor; Sir Edward Elgar and J Cameron; HB Gardiner; Harold Darke; the Revd Clement Scholefield (and, let's not blink the fact, Sir Arthur Sullivan); and Samuel Sebastian Wesley; The Surrey Hills Society, Registered Charity No. 1125532, Ms Joanne Tollow, Warren Farm Barns, Headley Lane, Mickleham, Dorking, Surrey RH5 6DG; The Friends of St. James's Church, Elstead, Charitable Trust, Registered Charity No. 1088231, Lord Strathalmond, Trustee, Holt House, Seale Road, Elstead, Godalming, Surrey GU8 6LF; and the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum.
Of these, I should particularly obliged if any reader who is diverted or at all pleased by this meagre story were to make a contribution to the parish; its charitable trust; the Surrey Hills Society; the Surrey Wildlife Trust, Registered Charity No. 208123, School Lane, Pirbright, Woking, Surrey GU24 0JN; or the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum Endowment Trust, Registered Charity No. 1084969, Mr Maurice Pollock, Singleton, Chichester, West Sussex PO18 0EU.
All the good bits are due to good editors (B and M and L of the P and a tyger rampant argent). The failures are mine own.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all associated characters and settings remain the intellectual property of JK Rowling and her associates. We are very grateful for permission to play with them.
PART I
Evensong on a Thursday in ordinary time
Part II
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The kingdom, the power, and the glory
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Old is old England, ancient of days, and all things begin and end in Albion's ancient Druid rocky shore. What we call the beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning: the end is where we start from, with runes scrawling, sprawling, coursing unreadably upon an illegible stone. That is where we start, Dud found: we die with the dying: see, they depart; and we go with them; we are born with the dead:
see, they return, and bring us with them, in that moment that is all moments, of infinite duration, time in time out of time, the moment that is the time of the yew in Peper Harow churchyard, with its chill fingers down-curled, and the time alike of the dusty rose twining in the rain-beaten arbour of the cottage garden. For the moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration, and all things begin and end in Albion's ancient Druid rocky shore. The end is where we start from.
That St James's Day, that Thursday Evensong in ordinary time those years previous, all time being ordinary and redeemed extraordinary, is where we start from, Dud knew. Home is where we start from; and the end of all our exploring is to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time, to return again through the unknown, unremembered gate, the half-remembered half-familiar, and find our almost-instinct wholly true. No Summer midnight of danced figures around a bonfire, the rural measures treading to weak pipe and little drum, but the ordained ordinary, meet answers and neat interiors, doctrinal, dry, and sound: this was the answer returned, the counsel given. Even so late as that, there had been in Dudley the last, lingering fear, that Harry's world, Aunt Lily's world, Millie's and Elspeth's parents' and little Harriet's world, was eldritch and uncanny, all Asia in the Edgware Road, moved by dæmonic, chthonic Powers: the fear that, beneath the kindly, English forms of kinsmen, stirred that which incontinently should communicate with Mars, converse with spirits; haruspicate or scry, release omens by sortilege, or tea leaves; fiddle with pentagrams or dissect the recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors; explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams….
The end was where they started from, and in the beginning was the end, and the end, its beginning; and all things, Dud now knew, begin and end in Albion's ancient Druid rocky shore.
Elstead was a clubbable place. By that long-ago St James's Day, although they'd not yet been urged up a few pews to their present place, the Dursleys had been, were, accepted and well-regarded neighbours, as incomers went: in large part because, as incomers, they had not gone, but rather stayed, and rooted themselves. Elspeth was admired and respected, and feared as she was liked; Dud, liked and respected and admired, quietly. Harriet was a universal pet; and Harry and Gin and their brood and all the Weasleys, and the rest of the Wizarding Great and Good, were regarded favourably by the parish when they descended upon the village from time to time: kindly Arthur, motherly Molly, staunch Ron and bluestocking Hermione; Andromeda, as grand as Justin and infinitely less diffident with it; that incorrigible and incorrigibly donnish humorist, Teddy….
The Astronomy Club welcomed him, with Wing Commander Callingham as his sponsor (and if they talked more PCC and vestry politics, and cricket, than celestial navigation, no one minded in the least); and several fellow members of the Gardening Club, who with Dud and Elspeth threw open their gardens yearly to the NGS Open Days in aid of charity, were members also, not only of the Rambling Club and the Pony Club and the Conservative Association, but of the RSPB and the local Antiquarian Society: for they, like Dud, liked to pause in their rambles to stop and look at the flowers and the birds … and the barrows and sarsen stones, tumuli and holy wells, that starred and adorned the country 'round, upon their rambles.
Father, gardener, and birder, increasingly content as he waxed increasingly a countryman, Dud put down roots, and learnt soil and earth, strata and landscape, spring, well, and river; and learnt also trackway and road, ford and bridge, hoard and barrow, the impress of generations upon the countryside: the trees they had venerated, the constellations they had watched, the fields they had hedged 'round, and the tombs they had builded.
What he had commenced to aid his daughter, he followed after for his own delight, between Thursley and Thundry Meadows, from the Devil's Punchbowl to Tuesley to Peper Harow and the Harrow Way, his own way of pilgrimage through intersecting moments, time past in time present, the Thunderer prefiguring St James Boanerges, the knot of rose and flame. Albion.
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Radcliffe's Responses: Open thou our lips
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By the next St James's Day, between Harriet's first and second years, Dud had found his feet, and moved slowly and steadily, like the sun on its diurnal course, towards his goals. Harriet had taken of him his quiet enthusiasm, for runes and the stars as for green, growing things and the beasts of the field; and as the ivy climbed the ash, and the sun, the ivy, so also they went up and about the heaths, in sun and beneath the moon: the full- and fair-rigged ship is not made to lie in harbour, but to explore. It had been Harry who had said - not to Dud, and thus more memorably - that 'Dudley's understood early what too bloody many understand late, if at all: that the greater part of a parent's teaching is when he's not teaching, by intent, at all'; and Dud had done his damnedest to live up to that praise.
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Psalm (set): Beati quorum via
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On that first memorable St James's Day when Dud had bethought himself of Harry's counsel, so now: Stanford's setting, Beati quorum via. So they were, to be sure: he'd done a good deal of walking since that day, had Dud, Harriet innocent and attentive at his side, and they had walked with care and lawfully: always leaving gates as they found them, attending to others and their rights, observing the Countryside Code. Plimsolls in the Summer, galoshes in the wet. Blessed are they that walk in the way. And it was lawful England they walked and rambled in, stratum upon stratum, leaf upon leaf, a country long builded by slow accretion and by precedent, obedient to Law, whose seat is the bosom of God and whose voice, the harmony of the world; to whom all things in heaven and earth do homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power. As below, so above: the dance of the stars was grave and ordered in measure, righteousness saluting peace with a decorous kiss; and the dancers above, mirrored in the dancers beneath, a dignified and commodious sacrament betokening concord: for the dancers are gone under the hill, they are dancing still though their dance be stilled forever, and the light and the music within barrow and tumulus are always at the edge of sight and hearing: the whisper of running streams, and Winter lightning; the wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, the laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy.
And they had learnt together to read the runes he could not cast, and scry the stars he could but name and not know the magic of, and he and his daughter had been content, and Dame Elspeth contented in them. And when the season was apt, time in time interpenetrate, in Betjeman's beloved Surrey highlands, the highlands of the Home Counties, they would all go together, to pull amidst the heather the wild mountain time unseen, in days of infinite duration, soft evenings, no end, but addition, outwith time's covenant, never and always, now and in England.
He who runs may read; they who ramble, read closely. It is a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything. For even gardened Surrey has its bird-watching colonels, velvet thatch, pale drifts of wide-cascading primrose; and man has been long upon the land.
Ask and receive; seek and find. All things begin and end in Albion's ancient Druid rocky shore; and the end is where we start from.
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Psalm: In aeternum, Domine: … thou hast laid the foundation of the earth, and it abideth
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As then, on that memorable Feast of St James, so now: the same psalms and lessons appointed, on a Thursday Evensong in ordinary time.
On that occasion, when Dudley had first thought to ask Harry's advice, as Harriet readied excitedly for school, too soon, enthralled by a prospective separation her parents dreaded and dared not show disquieting, there had still resounded, half-heard, the echo, the half-remembered half-familiar almost-instinct, wholly true, of the preceding Sunday's lectionary. The Fifth Sunday after Trinity, in a year of Easter lateness: that the course of this world may be peaceably ordered by thy governance; all of one mind, having compassion one of another: love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous; so was also James, and John, the sons of Zebedee, which were partners with Simon….
Elstead had been as Elstead was and should be, half-hidden, set apart. Elstead, like Elspeth, abided. Bells, pouring sound through bare bough and branch, pealing centuries of Evensong, over cottages alike fruitful of births and coffins, sea-wave heaths and country lanes … and deep within history and under earth, a responding tone, harmonic, heard in bone and blood and not upon the airs of hearing and the mortal ear. Sanctity does not depart - never does it depart - however the sanctified place be overrun with trippers sedulous of guidebooks' advice, sequacious of Approved Insights. The tourist nor the bestial army can destroy it, and even in denial there springs from it the renewal of the world.
It had been with trembling and fear, a numinous awe beyond mere mortal affright, that the Oldest Ones and the Next Eldest had found this place, Greensand and Wood, way and path and temple, Elstead and Peper Harow, holy ground; and men, after, found it so beyond comprehension, reason not being wanted to place here Thor Thunor, thunderous, and Hel the Hidden, and Tiw One-Hand the Glorious, Invictus, that was Týr, the Northern Mars, the Ares of the Teutons. Accident is design; design, accident in a cloud of unknowing; generations have gone into the wood to seek a treasure and borne back but an inconsolable memory of the I AM of the Oaks of Albion: for who should seek riches must carry those riches with him on his journey, so soon as he sets out.
Dud had never been a scholar; knowing Hermione, he was content not to have been. Yet in the end, he, simply by being a father, came to scholarship and more than scholarship: to wisdom and not only to learning. As Harriet went through school, she and he together left a record, and more record - a wort here, duly catalogued in their name by Neville; an antiquity there, published learnedly by Millie - that outshone that of not a few headmistresses.
The land abides, as it has ever abided.
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The First Lesson: Therefore now amend your ways and your doings
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It came, Dud reflected, of knowing - at last - one's own limits, and feeling the twitch of one's tether. He could - he had - put Harriet in the way of knowledge, but he could not follow her in the uses to which Witches and Wizards might put it.
It came, Dud reflected, of knowing - at last - one's own limits, and feeling the twitch of one's tether. He had been right beyond reason in calling upon Harry's aid and expertise; and it had paid off handsomely.
There was no magic in him - for which Dud tended to be grateful, to the point of privately including a proper gratitude for that particular mercy when he tottered over, upon occasion, to Mattins. He had long since amended his way and his doings, else he should never have asked Harry's advice, nor, quite possibly, been given it. There was no magic in him; but there had been fortune undeserved. He knew he should never be, in arts magical, Salomon cyning; yet Saturnus could he be to daughter Harriet, and Socrates, teaching by questioning.
It had been on a ramble towards the tumuli of Charleshill: a summer morning, after Mattins (Dudley's one complaint against Morning Prayer was that on major feasts, one was forced to plough the very arduous furrow of the Athanasian Creed in place of the Nicene), clear and bright. Harriet was soon to begin her fifth year at Hogwarts. Yaffle and stock dove haunted the wood beyond the meadows and mere. In the slow working of soils, wind and storm, rain and heat, sun and snow, a resurrection had come at last. It was the corner of the chest or casket that first showed, to be, as Dud ruefully admitted, damned nearly stumbled over, and assuredly merely stumbled upon.
In the steady, slow, sprung rhythm of the years, the Dursleys of Elstead, Elspeth, Dud, and Harriet, had prospered. It was known that the Bulstrodes, in adjacent Hants, Had Money; Harry had quietly and subtly seen to it that it was understood that the Evanses had had money also: a subterfuge that he did not care for - it had been the Potters, after all, who'd rather more richly done - but that he felt necessary, for Dud's sake. It had been a doddle: Elstead knew that Dud and Harry were cousins on their mother's side, and Elstead knew beyond cavil that Dud was a Decent Chap and that Harry was a high-flying officer (Int Corps, the village rather thought). What was more, Elstead firmly believed- in consequence of the natural Muffliato that has evolved to shield the odder Wizarding names from Muggle ears - that, if Dud had married a Bulstrode, Harry had married a Wellesley (and one whose welcome old buffer of a father, much loved when he stopped in Elstead for a day or two with Harry, visiting Dud, had been christened 'Arthur', at that). Consequently, the prospering of the Dursleys was not looked at askance, as the prospering of senior trust and eleemosynary administrators quite commonly otherwise was, it being presumed in such cases that someone'd had a hand in the till.
In the steady, slow, sprung rhythm of the years, the Dursleys of Elstead had prospered, by neighbours un-begrudged. The Dursleys of Sloe Cottage, fanatical gardeners, had bought the adjoining cottages and their gardens over the years, these being also Grade II gems, and the combined cottage gardens of Sloe, Crab, and Elder Cottages, on the Thursley Road near to Elstead Green, were a local point of pride and all but a public amenity.
In the steady, slow, sprung rhythm of the years, the Dursleys of Elstead had prospered; and after Dud had satiated himself as best he might upon the village cottages and cottage gardens, he'd bought a farm out Tilford way, just within the parish boundaries, past Charleshill and Normanswood, Westwards of Thundry Meadows and the Three Barrows. Cross Mead Farm as well as the cottage gardens threw itself open to the punters for the NGS show-days, and both its gardens and (to Elspeth's despair: she blamed Arthur, far more than Nev, for this) its G-scale railway, the Sheephatch Light Railway in the Southern's chrome green, cream, and buff, were something of a parish attraction.
On that Summer morning, as sheep and cattle, cockerel, pony, and dog, all added a burden to the avian part-song of hedgerow, field, and wood, Dud and Harriet had not yet left their own bounds, at Cross Mead Farm, when they made their discovery. Dud, to tell the truth, had been meditating upon the modelled hoardings and adverts of his garden railway layout (Bovril, Virol, and Woodbine; Fry's chocs and Sunlight Soap; Guinness, Shell petrol, Brooke Bond Tea) when they'd all but literally stumbled upon their find.
Harriet had, naturally, always accepted that her father was simply her father as she had known him since birth; and Elspeth, though not unaware of Dud's past, had only really known him in the first flush of his unexpected maturity, and after. Vernon and Petunia had had little to do with him since that maturation, which they disapproved; only Harry knew Dud wholly, when it came to it, and after Harry, George, a bit, Nev, Ernie, and Ron, Ginny, and Molly and wise old Arthur, who'd become in a way Dud's surrogate parents as they'd become Harry's. It rather embarrassed Dud that he'd been who he'd been, when young - a trait he shared, with a certain mutual and rueful understanding, with Malfoy, and with Greg, and indeed with George: reformed bullies tended to spot one another readily - and it embarrassed Dud the more that Harry so clearly admired the reformation he'd managed. Yet Harry knew, and occasionally quietly remarked upon, what Dud knew and preferred to ignore, that Dudley Dursley had done rather a good job in becoming who he was. Given his head, and, still more, given a chance at rebelling against Vernon and Petunia, Dud had turned to, with a will; and if he refused to credit his own abilities, and capacity for learning, Harry insisted upon gently reminding him from time to time (which, Dud considered, was damned obliging of him, if rather discomfiting). Dud recognised, without stating it openly, what Harry was not above stating, privately, that much of Dud's childhood had been spent - wasted, really - in a futile attempt to find something and do something his parents should finally disapprove and fail to palliate and excuse. It is not, actually, reassuring to a child to realise, if inchoately and instinctively, that his parents should merely blame the lorry driver were he run down in the street whilst mafficking about without any discipline. It had been only when he'd ceased to be a pet - and with the same latitude given him as is granted any four-legged beast that perisheth - and a doll, that his parents had finally ceased to indulge him, and he'd become a person in his own right, defined by their disapproval and his opposition to their folly.
The result, although Dud deprecated it, had been that, given something that interested him and that was certain to annoy his parents (who, as Harry was not beyond pointing out, eminently deserved every bit of it), he was capable of a riper scholarship than he himself could credit in him. From seeking to make himself at least capable of assisting his daughter in her peculiar studies, Dud had come to no small knowledge of the Anglo-Frisian runes of the insular fuþorc, and late Old English as a result; equally, he knew his astronomy and, as a gardener, his herbs, if not magical Herbology, and Nev did not scruple to bring queries to him.
If any Muggle-cum-Squib were destined to discover, with a juvenile Witch, the Cross Mead Treasure, it was Lily's nephew, Harriet's father, Harry's cousin.
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Magnificat: He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts; He hath put down the mighty from their seat : and hath exalted the humble and meek; He hath filled the hungry with good things : and the rich he hath sent empty away
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Being a thoroughly conventional and law-abiding man - a parish councillor and a county councillor, in fact, and a churchwarden to boot - Dud's first, instinctive reaction, once he'd made certain that he was yet on his own lands, was to ring up the local PC and get on to the coroner, to sit upon treasure trove, and to have the council send 'round whoever liaised with - well, with English Heritage, he supposed, ultimately, after the FLO for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, dozy bugger, had been alerted: whoever did the antiquities and the excavating, surely those jacks in office should know that much, at least (Dud had no very high opinion of local government, having been exposed to its innermost workings).
His second and wiser thought was to get Cousin Harry there as quickly as possible: for even as his own wits were working, slow and sure, towards the same realisation, Harriet had gasped. 'It can't be real, can it? It - it could have been made yesterday,' said she; and she was right.
Little enough of the find could as yet be seen. Yet what could be seen was remarkable: sea-ivory, cunningly carven and wreathed in runes - they could see a Rad-rune, 'R', and the S-T-R sequence after, sigel-Tiw-rad, Sun and Týr and ride, through the mud and mould, and Dud had a sudden (and, as it happened, entirely correct) suspicion that the word was Rome-chester; and the sea-ivory panels, runed and carven in half-glimpsed depictions, were clasped and bound in Anglo-Saxon metalwork, niello, bright silver, red gold, and gold-and-garnet cloisonné…. And all, all, as fresh as if new from the maker's hand.
Dud could not say were it an Enchanted Muggle Object or a work of magical hand, but it was clearly something Harry's people and the Ministry wanted to look at, sharpish. He smiled as Harriet dashed back towards the old farmhouse, butter-blonde braids flying, a pink and white streak against field and copse and the none so distant prospect of the half-timbered, galleted brick and Bargate stone farmhouse beneath its hipped roof: Harriet healthy and fleet, slim, urgent, and full of life, the child of his heart whose childhood and youth had been so blessedly different to his greedy and swinish own.
Dudley smiled, remembering that long-sped Summer, when, as on this latter St James's Day, he had listened as now, as so often since, to the Magnificat: and its setting, as on that first memorable St James's Day that had put it all in motion, and as so often since, Stanford in G.
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The Second Lesson: But he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty
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The land abided: Elstead and Cross Mead Farm, the Greensand and the Downs, Weald and river. Good ground, receptive of the broadcast seed and bringing forth its bounty in its season.
The ground had been long prepared, hallowed and harrowed for later seed: sacred to the Oldest Ones, and to the laughing Celts with their bold swords, long hair, and shining torques; sacred to the gods of Rome and to the Saxon gods, Hel and Týr and the Thunderer, a preparation and amendment of the soil, an enriching marl, to prepare it for the good seed, where in time the myth and parable of Thor Thunor in his thunders should give way to the good corn and rich tilth, the good seed and proper bounty, of the true St James, Boanerges, the Son of Thunder, and his Master whom he followed and for whose dear sake he suffered martyrdom and was gloriously crowned thereby.
And this bounty that had thrust forth from the sown ground on that Summer's day, the Cross Mead Treasure, was the least of the treasures, fruits of the kindly earth, that Dud reaped. Harry had come, and Luna, Hermione and Teddy Lupin; Draco and Scorp and Al, Unspeakably; Tony Goldstein in his learning and expertise, and tiny, wizened Flitwick in sere age, to marvel and to pronounce upon it: a treasure unlikely, far inland from the usual sites of recovered runic inscription and rich work; jewelled and golden, silvered and ivoried, a work of astonishing craft. Bind-runes for a Christogram; panels of Christ treading upon the beasts, lion and dragon, asp and basilisk - and the basilisk properly depicted as only Wizards knew it in its proper form - super aspidem et basiliscum calcabis conculcabis leonem et draconem; and of Christ, recognised as judge by the beasts of the Wilderness, blessing them, hart and hind, bear and boar and their mates, wyverns male and female, lion and lioness, the Peaceable Kingdom, recognising him and honouring him as iudex æquitatis; bestiæ et dracones cognoverunt in deserto salvatorem mundi; and the Hymn of Cædmon, 'Nu scylun hergan / hefænricæs uard', 'Now honour we Heaven's guardian', soaring like the earliest Anglo-Saxon hymnody it was.
And within it, uncorrupted and unmarred, rings, agate and gold and niello, runed with aerkriu charms, remedies from the Leechbook of Bald, or with loricas, or with verses of the Psalter or proleptic protections from the Lacnunga: prophylaxes against wens or bleeding, against dwarfs and against elf-shot, Witching pains, Wið færstice; and marvels of hardstone carving in personal adornment; rich gold and fine silver…. (Dudley could not help recalling to his mind one of Wg Cdr Callingham's last attendances, before his death in sere age, at the local history society, when aerkriu charms had been discussed. Even then, spry and wry to the last, the dear old lad had knocked them with a succession of ever wilder and funnier puns about the Royal Heptarchy Air Force and its runic aircrew.)
It was unquestionably a combination of Wizarding work and Enchanted Muggle Objects, bespelled to remain in earth without loss or wear or decay, and wholly within the remit of the Ministry of Magic. What the Muggle coroner sat upon, in the end, was its transfigured geminal copy, a facsimile not suspiciously unworn and incorruptible; and although Dudley could not very well decline its value when it was declared treasure under the Treasure Act 1996 - there was enough gold and silver for that, and the rest, associated objects - he could and did donate most of the amount awarded by the Treasure Valuation Committee to worthy charitable uses in the parish.
Harry's only comment, with a smile, and privately, to Dud alone, had been, 'Aren't you glad you decided to get up your runes for Harriet's schooling?'; and Dud, with an embarrassed grin, was, really. He felt then and after a sudden sympathy and pity for Vernon and Petunia, who had never known, nor deserved to know, the joy of having one's child be justly proud of one.
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Nunc dimittis: LORD, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace : according to thy word. For mine eyes have seen : thy salvation
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In the steady, slow, sprung rhythm of the years, Dud, if less intimately and less often than Harry, whose career it had been in part, had seen and heard and attended enough Remembrance Days and village funerals to have Elgar's variation, 'Nimrod', off by heart; and it never failed to move him when the Nunc dimittis was Stanford in G, which so curiously echoed it, in mysterious consonance: as on that long-ago St James's Day; as this evening, on St James's Day once more.
In the steady, slow, sprung rhythm of the years, Dud had seen his salvation; and seen depart in peace so many of those he had come to love: Arthur, and then Molly, who had been to him the parents that Vernon and Petunia had not; Elspeth's parents; dear, tart, canny Minerva; Muggle friends and neighbours, great and humble alike. And even those who had departed in violence - Ginny; Malfoy's late wife; Nev's first and Luna's first - had departed in peace, certain and sure as the turning years, when it came to it. Thunderous James Boanerges, the first of the Apostles to be martyred, had died by the sword; yet he had departed in a peace hard-won to his nature, who had once wished to call down brimstone and the fire of Heaven upon a Samaritan village (really, Dud reflected, not for the first time, Uncle James Potter had been far too aptly christened, and young James Sirius, well, that was simply asking for trouble, wasn't it…).
Yet in the steady, slow, sprung rhythm of the years, the land abided, learning lasted, and the dead were never wholly gone, for they were never wholly forgotten. Dud didn't pretend to be well-versed in the book of the words, and was content that the communion of saints remain rather a mysterious concept to which one assented without prying too far, but he made ruddy well certain that Arthur, for instance, was not and could not be forgotten, so long as Harriet and Simon and their son, named for Arthur as his all but great-grandsire in all that mattered, lived and moved and had their being. Young Artful mightn't be a Weasley by descent, but by gum, he'd a deal of Arthur in him, somehow. The stars in their courses could read that rune plainly.
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Credo: I believe in the Holy Ghost: The holy Catholick Church: The Communion of Saints: The Forgiveness of sins: The Resurrection of the body, And the Life everlasting. Amen
The Lord's Prayer: in earth, As it is in Heaven
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Life lasted, in Elstead, Dud reflected, as the land abided; and as for the forgiveness of sins….
He could read the runes, if he could not cast them; and identify the stars that did not speak to him. Or, rather, they did speak to him, as to all gardeners, in season and out, orderly and sure.
Martock broad beans; skirrets that the introduction of parsnips had sent out of fashion long ago; the Pink Fir Apple maincrop potato: the land abided, and after all the tumult and the excitements of the new, it was the heritage varieties, the heirlooms, some so long in the land that the Anglo-Saxons had known them, that lasted. Well: one couldn't very well be a gardener and not realise what work was and meant. You might learn to recognise a rune, but that wasn't reading an inscription. You might know one constellation from another - although few enough folk even in the country now did, the silly buggers - but that alone didn't tell you when to plant and when to harvest, now, did it. Ground had to be tilled more than once, and with each season it changed, improved if you'd the faintest ruddy glimmering of what you were about, deepened and enriched itself….
Reforming oneself - earning absolution and forgiveness by actual penitence: a mere form of words simply wasn't on - was a lifelong process, like bloody dieting. Haymaking and harvest…. You set out to be able to do something more than sit there like a stock when your child wanted help with her revisions for school, and you simply had no choice but to forge on, fare forward, a voyager with her; and in each end was a beginning, and the end was where you started. And in the end, you were renewed, just as was the abiding, kindly land.
And every St James's Day was the same, and wholly new, end and beginning, Evensongs in ordinary time, time interpenetrate, time past in time future in time present, time out of time, its own season.
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Radcliffe's Responses: Make thy chosen people joyful; bless thine inheritance; give peace in our time, O LORD
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St James's Day then and now, and all the St James's Days between, and all that should come after: this was the rhythm of the world and life, sprung rhythm, recurrent and recursive and ever new. You set out, Dud knew, to do one thing, and it burgeoned, and the only prospect one ought to expect was the unexpected. You set out to better things for your child and your lady wife, your family, connexions, and neighbours, and you entered unexpectedly and without at first knowing it upon your inheritance, to augment and pass on in your turn, a treasure you never anticipated and that moth nor thief could assail.
'"Saga me for hwylcum þingum heofen sý gehatan heofen?"
'"Ic ðe secge, forðon he behelað eal ðæt him be úfan bið."'
'"Say me why is heaven called heaven?"
'"I say you, for that it conceals all that is above it."'
Elstead, Hele-stead of old, the hidden place, the concealed steading that beheleth all, had been set aside for them, even as the treasure had waited in the earth for them. The Potters were Wessex to their bones; for all their removal elsewhere, the Evanses were Welsh of the Welsh; the Weasleys were autochthonous of the West Country; and Dursley was a Gloucestershire town, between the Cotswold Edge and the Severn Vale, where Tyndale was born and Shakespeare taught; yet somehow, here, in Elstead, not far from his wife's people's long home, Dudley, with Elspeth, had found and established his inheritance, in the Saxon lands of the Southern Realm; a rural hiddenness in the Home Counties, no lost Elysium of once-rural Middlesex, the last stronghold and redoubt of the Middle Saxons, 'South the River', where little streams and youthful rivers heard the call and seduction of Thames afar and hastened, heeding, heedless, to lose themselves in those dark waters and thence in the insatiate sea. Pilgrim's Way and Harrow Way, all roads had led him there, to make and find his home, which should be Harriet's after him, and young Arthur's in time, an end and a beginning.
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The Collects: … as thine holy Apostle Saint James, leaving his father and all that he had, without delay was obedient unto the calling; Give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give; Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee
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The end is where we start from. In mine end is my beginning. Dudley knew that the inheritance he'd found and built was found and built, founded from the beginning and builded disposedly, to be passed on: as it ever is. Whatever a father does, good or ill, the child must and shall and does leave it behind for her calling, a light in darkness that beckons to a peace that the inheritance of the world merely does not give. Cousin Harry had been forced early to that realisation, as Uncle James, that Son of Thunder, and Aunt Lily, light and peaceable and dangerous to foes, had realised it; as Harriet was realising it, and Young Artful; and, far across the country's breadth, thunderous Jamie and clever Al and cunning little Lils…. To enter upon one's inheritance is to surrender it, and forsake it for whatever destiny and calling beckons one through the darkness to peace and light. The stars do not govern, nor write a doom; to know the runes is not to read the future, but rather to be prepared to write it anew, one's own story. He'd learnt that at last, if he'd learnt anything; and he had learnt what he had learnt by teaching it. He looked over at Harriet and Simon and young Arthur as he sat back in his pew, the lights in his and Elspeth's on-drawing eventide, the peace unobtained by the world alone and freely given.
It had been a good, long time since that other St James's Day, an Evensong in ordinary time; and the time between the times had been redeemed from time. It had been a kindly Providence that had prompted him to seek Harry's casual advice, from which so much had come.
The long fall of light lengthened. Elstead, hidden and set apart and consecrated, an inheritance lost if gripped too tightly and found when set aside for the calling, abided. Time redeemed from time, in pattern of timeless moments, with the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling…. In my beginning is my end; the end is where we start from.
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Anthem: Lux æterna
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Say what you liked, Dud considered, of the dear, creaky old C of E, there was genius in these St James's Day Evensongs: Stanford in G and the echo redoubling of Elgar's and Cameron's Lux æterna, the regular anthem of the patronal services. There was never an ordinary time, all time redeemed extraordinary. The music of ten thousand funerals and of peace, of Remembrance at the Cenotaph, and of all the saints and the slow fall of evening that was the dawn of eternal day: Lux æterna luceat eis, Domine, cum sanctis tuis in æternum, quia pius es. Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
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Prayers: Most heartily we beseech thee with thy favour to behold our most gracious Sovereign; … and all the Royal Family; Send down upon our Bishops, and Curates, and all Congregations committed to their charge, the healthful Spirit of thy grace
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A people without history is not redeemed from time. It was Dud's opinion, private and not so private - indeed, roundly and forthrightly expressed as churchwarden - that, although it seemed to be a prayer the Almighty wasn't eager to grant, it couldn't hurt to keep praying for bishops and clergy, as God knew the silly buggers were in want of it. So far, Divine Providence hadn't conspicuously answered the request, but it did no harm to keep trying.
The Crown, on the other hand - well, Dud, although his neighbours couldn't get him to stand for Parliament if they begged him or indeed fixed their bayonets and prodded, knew, more than most hon. Members, let alone councillors, what pains a considerable number of good folk had been at to preserve the constitution and the monarchy as part of it. Cousin Harry alone, and his Aurors…. Blast it all, it mightn't be what other nations wanted, and fair play to them, but it was his and his countrymen's choice, not lightly to be set aside. Crown and Church together, in the Muggle realm and in the unseen magical, had been warp and woof in the weaving of Britain, drawing threads that stretched far back in time out of time, from the petty kings of the Celts and the Oldest Ones before them, through the imperial possession of Rome, to the Saxon kings and the successors of Norman William. The land abided, and it had abided long a monarchy, and so it should, so long as the people chose; and Dud, whose inheritance it was that he purposed to pass undiminished to Harriet and Arthur and such heirs as Arthur should get, was staunchly determined to maintain it so. My soul, Dud thought, and by gum there <>is a country with its sentinel, all skilful in the wars, and a country whose armies are countless and whose king, unseen, and it was an Englishman's part to defend both realms, in whatever station he might be called to, and vow him to his country. He wasn't Cousin Harry, but he did rather think he'd done his part, over the years, and, what was more, Cousin Harry rather clearly thought he'd done, as well. That was sufficient, wasn't it? He hadn't a wand, Dud considered, or any bow of burning gold, but he'd seen to it his daughter and his grandson were a sword and buckler of ordered liberty under law.
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Hymn: Te lucis ante terminum
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Least he could have done, thought Dud. Soon enough, he supposed, he'd cease from mental fight, and go into the soft evenfall, to a place that was his fortress and his ease. And all manner of thing should be well enough, then: every day he had left to his lot was midwinter Spring; every hour, ash on an old man's sleeve. It was stumps, at his age, quite soon enough: offered the light, close of play at close of day. In his end was his beginning: he'd left a monument of his own, from some bloody poor clay and not much foundation. He wasn't Harry, certainly: an attendant lord, at best, to swell a scene; but he'd achieved this much, at least: he wasn't the Vernon of village and hamlet, nor was meant to be. He knew, with no little gratitude, that he'd been kept and guarded when he'd least deserved it; he was content to be assured that he'd kept his guard in turn, and that he should be kept and guarded at close of day, St James's Day to St James's Day, eventides in ordinary time that had never been truly ordinary, once he'd been shocked into seeing things aright.
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A Prayer of Saint Chrysostom: Fulfil now, O Lord, the desires and petitions of thy servants, as may be most expedient for them
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That had been the point, hadn't it. And yet was. Desires … well, it was all in what you wished; and what you wished wasn't what you were in want of, nine times in ten. Greed and guzzle and thinking yourself special and apart: good Lord, if he'd kept on in that, he'd have been a waste of space in a churchyard by now, friendless, loveless, unwed and childless. And he hoped he was duly grateful for having been shaken out of that with a short, sharp shock. A life that had never held Elspeth, still as staunch and sensible as ever, and yet with a matronly shapeliness, as well; a life, still more incomprehensibly, that had never issued in new life, Harriet and through her and that excellent chap Simon - superb son-in-law, Simon, and thank God Harriet'd seen so much of her cousinage and connexions in youth that she'd not been able to consider any of 'em as suitors without breaking down in sniggering: imagine had she married Jamie, or Freddykins (not that Freddykins was thus disposed women-wards), or, frankly, any of that lot, God help 'em - through Harriet and Simon, then, flesh and bone of 'em, the Young Artful now….
He'd forgiven Vernon and Petunia at last, long since - something they'd never accepted; one of a thousand things they'd never accepted, poor old creatures - and, looking back, he felt for them only compassion and pity; for they'd never known, as he knew, and had never known because of their own foolish choices, the joys he'd known and yet knew as father and grandfather, by opening himself to the new and the eccentric and the dauntingly different, simply so as to keep his relationship with his daughter when she was but a child, learning new things that had never else crossed his ken. Best thing he'd ever done, asking Harry's advice - and taking it when he'd had it. It had made a full life, however long or short the time remained.
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Hymn: The day thou gavest
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St Clement the tune, Scholefield the name on it - though Dud, like most folk, suspected Sullivan'd had a hand in it - and apt, apt as ever, for Evensong in ordinary time. Clem Scholefield slept his long sleep in Eashing churchyard, none so far away, a neighbour of sorts; and whatever else he'd done poorly, aided or alone, he'd set Ellerton's verses properly. In parishes the length and breadth of England, in the Valleys of the Land of Song, in the wee Piscie kirks in thrawn, dour Scotland, in Norn and Eire and the Anglican communion over, the church was singing precisely what it was doing and ever did, keeping an unsleeping watch as day and night danced grave figures over the spinning globe, the ecclesiastical Aurorlty, watching in the watches of the night, unresting, unstinting, secure as the kingdom that should last when all the kingdoms of the world were fading memories. His wife beside him, his daughter and son-in-law and grandson to her right, Dud knew that there was no darkness in the fall of evening shade.
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Grace: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen
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The end is where we start from. Grace, and love, and fellowship: an almost-instinct wholly true. What survives of us, Dud knew, was love: of family and neighbour, of learning, of country, and of the abiding land in the late light of Summertide, the high tide of Summer.
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Naylor's Final Responses
Postlude (choral): Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace
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The darkness is no darkness: it is peace. If Dud had learnt anything over the steady, slow, sprung rhythm of the years, he'd learnt that. It was only when night fell that you could see the stars, that he and his daughter had learnt all but together, and that he and she had taught Young Artful: the tongues of flame in-folded into the crowned knot of fire, the fire and the rose which are one.
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Postlude: Meditation on 'Brother James's Air'
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Brother James…. Uncle James; young Jamie; the Apostolic Son of Thunder. St James's Day, Evensong on a weekday in ordinary time. There was no dark in darkness; there was light imperishable in Darke and his music. It was only in the dark one saw the stars, after all. Any action, every action, is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat, or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start. Right action is freedom from past and future also. Be still, says hard-won wisdom, and let the dark come upon you which shall be the darkness of God, the visible reminder of Invisible Light too bright for mortal vision, the splendour of light inaccessible that hideth God. 'Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way': Cousin Harry was forever crossing the frontier beyond which safety and danger have a different meaning, and never fully returning: that was his privilege. This, this long, late slant of light, this gathering velvet of dark, was Dudley's gift and privilege, uncovenanted, unasked, received with wonder and obligation: stars with meanings beyond his knowing, runes he could read but could not cast.
They left the little porch of the little church, walking through leaves of fallen birdsong. Young Artful fell in beside his grandfather, as Harriet and Simon went on with brisk, no-nonsense Elspeth, avid for tea.
'Grandfather?'
'Yes?'
'You know I've NEWTs coming up. Would you mind terribly, drilling me a bit in some of the less-used runes?'
'Not at all, my boy. But after tea - your gran's made seedy-cake and lemon curd, and there may just be some Deptford pudding left as well, and if I mayn't have any, she ruddy well intends that you do.'
Arthur grinned, and they hurried to catch the rest of the family up, as they all wended homewards together in the fall of light, after Evensong, on a Thursday in ordinary time.
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FINITE
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PART I
Author/Artist: ???
Prompt: Prompt 49: 'Dudley really wants to help his kid with homework. It's just a little hard when the subjects have names like Herbology and Charms and Transfiguration.'
Pairing, or gen: Gen-ish.
Rating: BBFC - 12A to BBFC - 15.
Warning(s): 1662 BCP, see Book of Common Prayer 1662; Anglicanism; antiquities; astronomy; Betjeman; Blake; Book of Common Prayer 1662; Book of Exeter, the (Codex Exoniensis); Browning; buildings, listed; charms, Anglo-Saxon; choristers; Countryside Code, the; Cranmer; Darke (arts, but not the sort you want to worry about); Donne; Elgar (arr. Cameron); Eliot; Ellerton, Jno; Evensong, obviously (do keep up, please); gardening; Gardiner, H Balfour; geography; geology; gods, false (interpretatio germanica); Gray; Hooker; Hopkins; Howells; Hymns Ancient & Modern; Johnson, Dr Sam; Larkin; Latin (birder's); Latin (gardener's); Latin (trots); Longbottom, shrewd, kindly Neville; Naylor, Edward; Old English literature; Parry; politics, County council, PCC, and Vestry; Potter, Harry; Potter, James, the Elder; Potter, James, the Younger, the young rip; Radcliffe, Philip; railways, model; roses, old; RSPB, the; runes, Anglo-Frisian; Scholefield, Clement; 'Solomon and Saturn'; Stanford; Sumsion; war memorials; Weasleys, in their multitudes.
For those interested, the service music, so far as it is available online and I can find it, is as follows: Prelude: Master Tallis' Testament (Howells); Psalm preludes (choral): Howells, Set I, Ps 34 v 6; Responses: Philip Radcliffe; Psalm (set): Beati quorum via (Stanford); Magnificat: Stanford in G; Nunc dimittis: Stanford in G; Lux æterna (Elgar / arr Cameron); Te lucis ante terminum (HB Gardiner); The day thou gavest (St Clement, Scholefield); Final responses: Naylor; Postlude (choral): Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace (SS Wesley); and Postlude: Meditation on 'Brother James's Air' (Darke).
Word count/medium: Just a trifle more than 13125 words, I'm afraid.
Summary/Excerpt: Rum sort of place, Elstead; rum sort of place, England: Dudley reflects upon fatherhood, upon St James's Day.
Author's or Artist's notes: I am obliged to far greater writers (Cranmer not least, and the Usual Poets, Blake well to the fore); and I am obliged here specially to my editors.
I am further obliged to St James's Church, Elstead; Elstead CC; Elstead PCC; Waverley Borough Council; Surrey County Council; Surrey CCC; Surrey Wildlife Trust; Sir Charles Villiers Stanford; Herbert Howells CH; Philip Radcliffe; Edward W Naylor; Sir Edward Elgar and J Cameron; HB Gardiner; Harold Darke; the Revd Clement Scholefield (and, let's not blink the fact, Sir Arthur Sullivan); and Samuel Sebastian Wesley; The Surrey Hills Society, Registered Charity No. 1125532, Ms Joanne Tollow, Warren Farm Barns, Headley Lane, Mickleham, Dorking, Surrey RH5 6DG; The Friends of St. James's Church, Elstead, Charitable Trust, Registered Charity No. 1088231, Lord Strathalmond, Trustee, Holt House, Seale Road, Elstead, Godalming, Surrey GU8 6LF; and the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum.
Of these, I should particularly obliged if any reader who is diverted or at all pleased by this meagre story were to make a contribution to the parish; its charitable trust; the Surrey Hills Society; the Surrey Wildlife Trust, Registered Charity No. 208123, School Lane, Pirbright, Woking, Surrey GU24 0JN; or the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum Endowment Trust, Registered Charity No. 1084969, Mr Maurice Pollock, Singleton, Chichester, West Sussex PO18 0EU.
All the good bits are due to good editors (B and M and L of the P and a tyger rampant argent). The failures are mine own.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all associated characters and settings remain the intellectual property of JK Rowling and her associates. We are very grateful for permission to play with them.
PART I
Evensong on a Thursday in ordinary time
Part II
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The kingdom, the power, and the glory
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Old is old England, ancient of days, and all things begin and end in Albion's ancient Druid rocky shore. What we call the beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning: the end is where we start from, with runes scrawling, sprawling, coursing unreadably upon an illegible stone. That is where we start, Dud found: we die with the dying: see, they depart; and we go with them; we are born with the dead:
see, they return, and bring us with them, in that moment that is all moments, of infinite duration, time in time out of time, the moment that is the time of the yew in Peper Harow churchyard, with its chill fingers down-curled, and the time alike of the dusty rose twining in the rain-beaten arbour of the cottage garden. For the moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration, and all things begin and end in Albion's ancient Druid rocky shore. The end is where we start from.
That St James's Day, that Thursday Evensong in ordinary time those years previous, all time being ordinary and redeemed extraordinary, is where we start from, Dud knew. Home is where we start from; and the end of all our exploring is to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time, to return again through the unknown, unremembered gate, the half-remembered half-familiar, and find our almost-instinct wholly true. No Summer midnight of danced figures around a bonfire, the rural measures treading to weak pipe and little drum, but the ordained ordinary, meet answers and neat interiors, doctrinal, dry, and sound: this was the answer returned, the counsel given. Even so late as that, there had been in Dudley the last, lingering fear, that Harry's world, Aunt Lily's world, Millie's and Elspeth's parents' and little Harriet's world, was eldritch and uncanny, all Asia in the Edgware Road, moved by dæmonic, chthonic Powers: the fear that, beneath the kindly, English forms of kinsmen, stirred that which incontinently should communicate with Mars, converse with spirits; haruspicate or scry, release omens by sortilege, or tea leaves; fiddle with pentagrams or dissect the recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors; explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams….
The end was where they started from, and in the beginning was the end, and the end, its beginning; and all things, Dud now knew, begin and end in Albion's ancient Druid rocky shore.
Elstead was a clubbable place. By that long-ago St James's Day, although they'd not yet been urged up a few pews to their present place, the Dursleys had been, were, accepted and well-regarded neighbours, as incomers went: in large part because, as incomers, they had not gone, but rather stayed, and rooted themselves. Elspeth was admired and respected, and feared as she was liked; Dud, liked and respected and admired, quietly. Harriet was a universal pet; and Harry and Gin and their brood and all the Weasleys, and the rest of the Wizarding Great and Good, were regarded favourably by the parish when they descended upon the village from time to time: kindly Arthur, motherly Molly, staunch Ron and bluestocking Hermione; Andromeda, as grand as Justin and infinitely less diffident with it; that incorrigible and incorrigibly donnish humorist, Teddy….
The Astronomy Club welcomed him, with Wing Commander Callingham as his sponsor (and if they talked more PCC and vestry politics, and cricket, than celestial navigation, no one minded in the least); and several fellow members of the Gardening Club, who with Dud and Elspeth threw open their gardens yearly to the NGS Open Days in aid of charity, were members also, not only of the Rambling Club and the Pony Club and the Conservative Association, but of the RSPB and the local Antiquarian Society: for they, like Dud, liked to pause in their rambles to stop and look at the flowers and the birds … and the barrows and sarsen stones, tumuli and holy wells, that starred and adorned the country 'round, upon their rambles.
Father, gardener, and birder, increasingly content as he waxed increasingly a countryman, Dud put down roots, and learnt soil and earth, strata and landscape, spring, well, and river; and learnt also trackway and road, ford and bridge, hoard and barrow, the impress of generations upon the countryside: the trees they had venerated, the constellations they had watched, the fields they had hedged 'round, and the tombs they had builded.
What he had commenced to aid his daughter, he followed after for his own delight, between Thursley and Thundry Meadows, from the Devil's Punchbowl to Tuesley to Peper Harow and the Harrow Way, his own way of pilgrimage through intersecting moments, time past in time present, the Thunderer prefiguring St James Boanerges, the knot of rose and flame. Albion.
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Radcliffe's Responses: Open thou our lips
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By the next St James's Day, between Harriet's first and second years, Dud had found his feet, and moved slowly and steadily, like the sun on its diurnal course, towards his goals. Harriet had taken of him his quiet enthusiasm, for runes and the stars as for green, growing things and the beasts of the field; and as the ivy climbed the ash, and the sun, the ivy, so also they went up and about the heaths, in sun and beneath the moon: the full- and fair-rigged ship is not made to lie in harbour, but to explore. It had been Harry who had said - not to Dud, and thus more memorably - that 'Dudley's understood early what too bloody many understand late, if at all: that the greater part of a parent's teaching is when he's not teaching, by intent, at all'; and Dud had done his damnedest to live up to that praise.
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Psalm (set): Beati quorum via
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On that first memorable St James's Day when Dud had bethought himself of Harry's counsel, so now: Stanford's setting, Beati quorum via. So they were, to be sure: he'd done a good deal of walking since that day, had Dud, Harriet innocent and attentive at his side, and they had walked with care and lawfully: always leaving gates as they found them, attending to others and their rights, observing the Countryside Code. Plimsolls in the Summer, galoshes in the wet. Blessed are they that walk in the way. And it was lawful England they walked and rambled in, stratum upon stratum, leaf upon leaf, a country long builded by slow accretion and by precedent, obedient to Law, whose seat is the bosom of God and whose voice, the harmony of the world; to whom all things in heaven and earth do homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power. As below, so above: the dance of the stars was grave and ordered in measure, righteousness saluting peace with a decorous kiss; and the dancers above, mirrored in the dancers beneath, a dignified and commodious sacrament betokening concord: for the dancers are gone under the hill, they are dancing still though their dance be stilled forever, and the light and the music within barrow and tumulus are always at the edge of sight and hearing: the whisper of running streams, and Winter lightning; the wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, the laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy.
And they had learnt together to read the runes he could not cast, and scry the stars he could but name and not know the magic of, and he and his daughter had been content, and Dame Elspeth contented in them. And when the season was apt, time in time interpenetrate, in Betjeman's beloved Surrey highlands, the highlands of the Home Counties, they would all go together, to pull amidst the heather the wild mountain time unseen, in days of infinite duration, soft evenings, no end, but addition, outwith time's covenant, never and always, now and in England.
He who runs may read; they who ramble, read closely. It is a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything. For even gardened Surrey has its bird-watching colonels, velvet thatch, pale drifts of wide-cascading primrose; and man has been long upon the land.
Ask and receive; seek and find. All things begin and end in Albion's ancient Druid rocky shore; and the end is where we start from.
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Psalm: In aeternum, Domine: … thou hast laid the foundation of the earth, and it abideth
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As then, on that memorable Feast of St James, so now: the same psalms and lessons appointed, on a Thursday Evensong in ordinary time.
On that occasion, when Dudley had first thought to ask Harry's advice, as Harriet readied excitedly for school, too soon, enthralled by a prospective separation her parents dreaded and dared not show disquieting, there had still resounded, half-heard, the echo, the half-remembered half-familiar almost-instinct, wholly true, of the preceding Sunday's lectionary. The Fifth Sunday after Trinity, in a year of Easter lateness: that the course of this world may be peaceably ordered by thy governance; all of one mind, having compassion one of another: love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous; so was also James, and John, the sons of Zebedee, which were partners with Simon….
Elstead had been as Elstead was and should be, half-hidden, set apart. Elstead, like Elspeth, abided. Bells, pouring sound through bare bough and branch, pealing centuries of Evensong, over cottages alike fruitful of births and coffins, sea-wave heaths and country lanes … and deep within history and under earth, a responding tone, harmonic, heard in bone and blood and not upon the airs of hearing and the mortal ear. Sanctity does not depart - never does it depart - however the sanctified place be overrun with trippers sedulous of guidebooks' advice, sequacious of Approved Insights. The tourist nor the bestial army can destroy it, and even in denial there springs from it the renewal of the world.
It had been with trembling and fear, a numinous awe beyond mere mortal affright, that the Oldest Ones and the Next Eldest had found this place, Greensand and Wood, way and path and temple, Elstead and Peper Harow, holy ground; and men, after, found it so beyond comprehension, reason not being wanted to place here Thor Thunor, thunderous, and Hel the Hidden, and Tiw One-Hand the Glorious, Invictus, that was Týr, the Northern Mars, the Ares of the Teutons. Accident is design; design, accident in a cloud of unknowing; generations have gone into the wood to seek a treasure and borne back but an inconsolable memory of the I AM of the Oaks of Albion: for who should seek riches must carry those riches with him on his journey, so soon as he sets out.
Dud had never been a scholar; knowing Hermione, he was content not to have been. Yet in the end, he, simply by being a father, came to scholarship and more than scholarship: to wisdom and not only to learning. As Harriet went through school, she and he together left a record, and more record - a wort here, duly catalogued in their name by Neville; an antiquity there, published learnedly by Millie - that outshone that of not a few headmistresses.
The land abides, as it has ever abided.
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The First Lesson: Therefore now amend your ways and your doings
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It came, Dud reflected, of knowing - at last - one's own limits, and feeling the twitch of one's tether. He could - he had - put Harriet in the way of knowledge, but he could not follow her in the uses to which Witches and Wizards might put it.
It came, Dud reflected, of knowing - at last - one's own limits, and feeling the twitch of one's tether. He had been right beyond reason in calling upon Harry's aid and expertise; and it had paid off handsomely.
There was no magic in him - for which Dud tended to be grateful, to the point of privately including a proper gratitude for that particular mercy when he tottered over, upon occasion, to Mattins. He had long since amended his way and his doings, else he should never have asked Harry's advice, nor, quite possibly, been given it. There was no magic in him; but there had been fortune undeserved. He knew he should never be, in arts magical, Salomon cyning; yet Saturnus could he be to daughter Harriet, and Socrates, teaching by questioning.
It had been on a ramble towards the tumuli of Charleshill: a summer morning, after Mattins (Dudley's one complaint against Morning Prayer was that on major feasts, one was forced to plough the very arduous furrow of the Athanasian Creed in place of the Nicene), clear and bright. Harriet was soon to begin her fifth year at Hogwarts. Yaffle and stock dove haunted the wood beyond the meadows and mere. In the slow working of soils, wind and storm, rain and heat, sun and snow, a resurrection had come at last. It was the corner of the chest or casket that first showed, to be, as Dud ruefully admitted, damned nearly stumbled over, and assuredly merely stumbled upon.
In the steady, slow, sprung rhythm of the years, the Dursleys of Elstead, Elspeth, Dud, and Harriet, had prospered. It was known that the Bulstrodes, in adjacent Hants, Had Money; Harry had quietly and subtly seen to it that it was understood that the Evanses had had money also: a subterfuge that he did not care for - it had been the Potters, after all, who'd rather more richly done - but that he felt necessary, for Dud's sake. It had been a doddle: Elstead knew that Dud and Harry were cousins on their mother's side, and Elstead knew beyond cavil that Dud was a Decent Chap and that Harry was a high-flying officer (Int Corps, the village rather thought). What was more, Elstead firmly believed- in consequence of the natural Muffliato that has evolved to shield the odder Wizarding names from Muggle ears - that, if Dud had married a Bulstrode, Harry had married a Wellesley (and one whose welcome old buffer of a father, much loved when he stopped in Elstead for a day or two with Harry, visiting Dud, had been christened 'Arthur', at that). Consequently, the prospering of the Dursleys was not looked at askance, as the prospering of senior trust and eleemosynary administrators quite commonly otherwise was, it being presumed in such cases that someone'd had a hand in the till.
In the steady, slow, sprung rhythm of the years, the Dursleys of Elstead had prospered, by neighbours un-begrudged. The Dursleys of Sloe Cottage, fanatical gardeners, had bought the adjoining cottages and their gardens over the years, these being also Grade II gems, and the combined cottage gardens of Sloe, Crab, and Elder Cottages, on the Thursley Road near to Elstead Green, were a local point of pride and all but a public amenity.
In the steady, slow, sprung rhythm of the years, the Dursleys of Elstead had prospered; and after Dud had satiated himself as best he might upon the village cottages and cottage gardens, he'd bought a farm out Tilford way, just within the parish boundaries, past Charleshill and Normanswood, Westwards of Thundry Meadows and the Three Barrows. Cross Mead Farm as well as the cottage gardens threw itself open to the punters for the NGS show-days, and both its gardens and (to Elspeth's despair: she blamed Arthur, far more than Nev, for this) its G-scale railway, the Sheephatch Light Railway in the Southern's chrome green, cream, and buff, were something of a parish attraction.
On that Summer morning, as sheep and cattle, cockerel, pony, and dog, all added a burden to the avian part-song of hedgerow, field, and wood, Dud and Harriet had not yet left their own bounds, at Cross Mead Farm, when they made their discovery. Dud, to tell the truth, had been meditating upon the modelled hoardings and adverts of his garden railway layout (Bovril, Virol, and Woodbine; Fry's chocs and Sunlight Soap; Guinness, Shell petrol, Brooke Bond Tea) when they'd all but literally stumbled upon their find.
Harriet had, naturally, always accepted that her father was simply her father as she had known him since birth; and Elspeth, though not unaware of Dud's past, had only really known him in the first flush of his unexpected maturity, and after. Vernon and Petunia had had little to do with him since that maturation, which they disapproved; only Harry knew Dud wholly, when it came to it, and after Harry, George, a bit, Nev, Ernie, and Ron, Ginny, and Molly and wise old Arthur, who'd become in a way Dud's surrogate parents as they'd become Harry's. It rather embarrassed Dud that he'd been who he'd been, when young - a trait he shared, with a certain mutual and rueful understanding, with Malfoy, and with Greg, and indeed with George: reformed bullies tended to spot one another readily - and it embarrassed Dud the more that Harry so clearly admired the reformation he'd managed. Yet Harry knew, and occasionally quietly remarked upon, what Dud knew and preferred to ignore, that Dudley Dursley had done rather a good job in becoming who he was. Given his head, and, still more, given a chance at rebelling against Vernon and Petunia, Dud had turned to, with a will; and if he refused to credit his own abilities, and capacity for learning, Harry insisted upon gently reminding him from time to time (which, Dud considered, was damned obliging of him, if rather discomfiting). Dud recognised, without stating it openly, what Harry was not above stating, privately, that much of Dud's childhood had been spent - wasted, really - in a futile attempt to find something and do something his parents should finally disapprove and fail to palliate and excuse. It is not, actually, reassuring to a child to realise, if inchoately and instinctively, that his parents should merely blame the lorry driver were he run down in the street whilst mafficking about without any discipline. It had been only when he'd ceased to be a pet - and with the same latitude given him as is granted any four-legged beast that perisheth - and a doll, that his parents had finally ceased to indulge him, and he'd become a person in his own right, defined by their disapproval and his opposition to their folly.
The result, although Dud deprecated it, had been that, given something that interested him and that was certain to annoy his parents (who, as Harry was not beyond pointing out, eminently deserved every bit of it), he was capable of a riper scholarship than he himself could credit in him. From seeking to make himself at least capable of assisting his daughter in her peculiar studies, Dud had come to no small knowledge of the Anglo-Frisian runes of the insular fuþorc, and late Old English as a result; equally, he knew his astronomy and, as a gardener, his herbs, if not magical Herbology, and Nev did not scruple to bring queries to him.
If any Muggle-cum-Squib were destined to discover, with a juvenile Witch, the Cross Mead Treasure, it was Lily's nephew, Harriet's father, Harry's cousin.
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Magnificat: He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts; He hath put down the mighty from their seat : and hath exalted the humble and meek; He hath filled the hungry with good things : and the rich he hath sent empty away
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Being a thoroughly conventional and law-abiding man - a parish councillor and a county councillor, in fact, and a churchwarden to boot - Dud's first, instinctive reaction, once he'd made certain that he was yet on his own lands, was to ring up the local PC and get on to the coroner, to sit upon treasure trove, and to have the council send 'round whoever liaised with - well, with English Heritage, he supposed, ultimately, after the FLO for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, dozy bugger, had been alerted: whoever did the antiquities and the excavating, surely those jacks in office should know that much, at least (Dud had no very high opinion of local government, having been exposed to its innermost workings).
His second and wiser thought was to get Cousin Harry there as quickly as possible: for even as his own wits were working, slow and sure, towards the same realisation, Harriet had gasped. 'It can't be real, can it? It - it could have been made yesterday,' said she; and she was right.
Little enough of the find could as yet be seen. Yet what could be seen was remarkable: sea-ivory, cunningly carven and wreathed in runes - they could see a Rad-rune, 'R', and the S-T-R sequence after, sigel-Tiw-rad, Sun and Týr and ride, through the mud and mould, and Dud had a sudden (and, as it happened, entirely correct) suspicion that the word was Rome-chester; and the sea-ivory panels, runed and carven in half-glimpsed depictions, were clasped and bound in Anglo-Saxon metalwork, niello, bright silver, red gold, and gold-and-garnet cloisonné…. And all, all, as fresh as if new from the maker's hand.
Dud could not say were it an Enchanted Muggle Object or a work of magical hand, but it was clearly something Harry's people and the Ministry wanted to look at, sharpish. He smiled as Harriet dashed back towards the old farmhouse, butter-blonde braids flying, a pink and white streak against field and copse and the none so distant prospect of the half-timbered, galleted brick and Bargate stone farmhouse beneath its hipped roof: Harriet healthy and fleet, slim, urgent, and full of life, the child of his heart whose childhood and youth had been so blessedly different to his greedy and swinish own.
Dudley smiled, remembering that long-sped Summer, when, as on this latter St James's Day, he had listened as now, as so often since, to the Magnificat: and its setting, as on that first memorable St James's Day that had put it all in motion, and as so often since, Stanford in G.
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The Second Lesson: But he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty
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The land abided: Elstead and Cross Mead Farm, the Greensand and the Downs, Weald and river. Good ground, receptive of the broadcast seed and bringing forth its bounty in its season.
The ground had been long prepared, hallowed and harrowed for later seed: sacred to the Oldest Ones, and to the laughing Celts with their bold swords, long hair, and shining torques; sacred to the gods of Rome and to the Saxon gods, Hel and Týr and the Thunderer, a preparation and amendment of the soil, an enriching marl, to prepare it for the good seed, where in time the myth and parable of Thor Thunor in his thunders should give way to the good corn and rich tilth, the good seed and proper bounty, of the true St James, Boanerges, the Son of Thunder, and his Master whom he followed and for whose dear sake he suffered martyrdom and was gloriously crowned thereby.
And this bounty that had thrust forth from the sown ground on that Summer's day, the Cross Mead Treasure, was the least of the treasures, fruits of the kindly earth, that Dud reaped. Harry had come, and Luna, Hermione and Teddy Lupin; Draco and Scorp and Al, Unspeakably; Tony Goldstein in his learning and expertise, and tiny, wizened Flitwick in sere age, to marvel and to pronounce upon it: a treasure unlikely, far inland from the usual sites of recovered runic inscription and rich work; jewelled and golden, silvered and ivoried, a work of astonishing craft. Bind-runes for a Christogram; panels of Christ treading upon the beasts, lion and dragon, asp and basilisk - and the basilisk properly depicted as only Wizards knew it in its proper form - super aspidem et basiliscum calcabis conculcabis leonem et draconem; and of Christ, recognised as judge by the beasts of the Wilderness, blessing them, hart and hind, bear and boar and their mates, wyverns male and female, lion and lioness, the Peaceable Kingdom, recognising him and honouring him as iudex æquitatis; bestiæ et dracones cognoverunt in deserto salvatorem mundi; and the Hymn of Cædmon, 'Nu scylun hergan / hefænricæs uard', 'Now honour we Heaven's guardian', soaring like the earliest Anglo-Saxon hymnody it was.
And within it, uncorrupted and unmarred, rings, agate and gold and niello, runed with aerkriu charms, remedies from the Leechbook of Bald, or with loricas, or with verses of the Psalter or proleptic protections from the Lacnunga: prophylaxes against wens or bleeding, against dwarfs and against elf-shot, Witching pains, Wið færstice; and marvels of hardstone carving in personal adornment; rich gold and fine silver…. (Dudley could not help recalling to his mind one of Wg Cdr Callingham's last attendances, before his death in sere age, at the local history society, when aerkriu charms had been discussed. Even then, spry and wry to the last, the dear old lad had knocked them with a succession of ever wilder and funnier puns about the Royal Heptarchy Air Force and its runic aircrew.)
It was unquestionably a combination of Wizarding work and Enchanted Muggle Objects, bespelled to remain in earth without loss or wear or decay, and wholly within the remit of the Ministry of Magic. What the Muggle coroner sat upon, in the end, was its transfigured geminal copy, a facsimile not suspiciously unworn and incorruptible; and although Dudley could not very well decline its value when it was declared treasure under the Treasure Act 1996 - there was enough gold and silver for that, and the rest, associated objects - he could and did donate most of the amount awarded by the Treasure Valuation Committee to worthy charitable uses in the parish.
Harry's only comment, with a smile, and privately, to Dud alone, had been, 'Aren't you glad you decided to get up your runes for Harriet's schooling?'; and Dud, with an embarrassed grin, was, really. He felt then and after a sudden sympathy and pity for Vernon and Petunia, who had never known, nor deserved to know, the joy of having one's child be justly proud of one.
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Nunc dimittis: LORD, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace : according to thy word. For mine eyes have seen : thy salvation
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In the steady, slow, sprung rhythm of the years, Dud, if less intimately and less often than Harry, whose career it had been in part, had seen and heard and attended enough Remembrance Days and village funerals to have Elgar's variation, 'Nimrod', off by heart; and it never failed to move him when the Nunc dimittis was Stanford in G, which so curiously echoed it, in mysterious consonance: as on that long-ago St James's Day; as this evening, on St James's Day once more.
In the steady, slow, sprung rhythm of the years, Dud had seen his salvation; and seen depart in peace so many of those he had come to love: Arthur, and then Molly, who had been to him the parents that Vernon and Petunia had not; Elspeth's parents; dear, tart, canny Minerva; Muggle friends and neighbours, great and humble alike. And even those who had departed in violence - Ginny; Malfoy's late wife; Nev's first and Luna's first - had departed in peace, certain and sure as the turning years, when it came to it. Thunderous James Boanerges, the first of the Apostles to be martyred, had died by the sword; yet he had departed in a peace hard-won to his nature, who had once wished to call down brimstone and the fire of Heaven upon a Samaritan village (really, Dud reflected, not for the first time, Uncle James Potter had been far too aptly christened, and young James Sirius, well, that was simply asking for trouble, wasn't it…).
Yet in the steady, slow, sprung rhythm of the years, the land abided, learning lasted, and the dead were never wholly gone, for they were never wholly forgotten. Dud didn't pretend to be well-versed in the book of the words, and was content that the communion of saints remain rather a mysterious concept to which one assented without prying too far, but he made ruddy well certain that Arthur, for instance, was not and could not be forgotten, so long as Harriet and Simon and their son, named for Arthur as his all but great-grandsire in all that mattered, lived and moved and had their being. Young Artful mightn't be a Weasley by descent, but by gum, he'd a deal of Arthur in him, somehow. The stars in their courses could read that rune plainly.
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Credo: I believe in the Holy Ghost: The holy Catholick Church: The Communion of Saints: The Forgiveness of sins: The Resurrection of the body, And the Life everlasting. Amen
The Lord's Prayer: in earth, As it is in Heaven
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Life lasted, in Elstead, Dud reflected, as the land abided; and as for the forgiveness of sins….
He could read the runes, if he could not cast them; and identify the stars that did not speak to him. Or, rather, they did speak to him, as to all gardeners, in season and out, orderly and sure.
Martock broad beans; skirrets that the introduction of parsnips had sent out of fashion long ago; the Pink Fir Apple maincrop potato: the land abided, and after all the tumult and the excitements of the new, it was the heritage varieties, the heirlooms, some so long in the land that the Anglo-Saxons had known them, that lasted. Well: one couldn't very well be a gardener and not realise what work was and meant. You might learn to recognise a rune, but that wasn't reading an inscription. You might know one constellation from another - although few enough folk even in the country now did, the silly buggers - but that alone didn't tell you when to plant and when to harvest, now, did it. Ground had to be tilled more than once, and with each season it changed, improved if you'd the faintest ruddy glimmering of what you were about, deepened and enriched itself….
Reforming oneself - earning absolution and forgiveness by actual penitence: a mere form of words simply wasn't on - was a lifelong process, like bloody dieting. Haymaking and harvest…. You set out to be able to do something more than sit there like a stock when your child wanted help with her revisions for school, and you simply had no choice but to forge on, fare forward, a voyager with her; and in each end was a beginning, and the end was where you started. And in the end, you were renewed, just as was the abiding, kindly land.
And every St James's Day was the same, and wholly new, end and beginning, Evensongs in ordinary time, time interpenetrate, time past in time future in time present, time out of time, its own season.
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Radcliffe's Responses: Make thy chosen people joyful; bless thine inheritance; give peace in our time, O LORD
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St James's Day then and now, and all the St James's Days between, and all that should come after: this was the rhythm of the world and life, sprung rhythm, recurrent and recursive and ever new. You set out, Dud knew, to do one thing, and it burgeoned, and the only prospect one ought to expect was the unexpected. You set out to better things for your child and your lady wife, your family, connexions, and neighbours, and you entered unexpectedly and without at first knowing it upon your inheritance, to augment and pass on in your turn, a treasure you never anticipated and that moth nor thief could assail.
'"Saga me for hwylcum þingum heofen sý gehatan heofen?"
'"Ic ðe secge, forðon he behelað eal ðæt him be úfan bið."'
'"Say me why is heaven called heaven?"
'"I say you, for that it conceals all that is above it."'
Elstead, Hele-stead of old, the hidden place, the concealed steading that beheleth all, had been set aside for them, even as the treasure had waited in the earth for them. The Potters were Wessex to their bones; for all their removal elsewhere, the Evanses were Welsh of the Welsh; the Weasleys were autochthonous of the West Country; and Dursley was a Gloucestershire town, between the Cotswold Edge and the Severn Vale, where Tyndale was born and Shakespeare taught; yet somehow, here, in Elstead, not far from his wife's people's long home, Dudley, with Elspeth, had found and established his inheritance, in the Saxon lands of the Southern Realm; a rural hiddenness in the Home Counties, no lost Elysium of once-rural Middlesex, the last stronghold and redoubt of the Middle Saxons, 'South the River', where little streams and youthful rivers heard the call and seduction of Thames afar and hastened, heeding, heedless, to lose themselves in those dark waters and thence in the insatiate sea. Pilgrim's Way and Harrow Way, all roads had led him there, to make and find his home, which should be Harriet's after him, and young Arthur's in time, an end and a beginning.
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The Collects: … as thine holy Apostle Saint James, leaving his father and all that he had, without delay was obedient unto the calling; Give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give; Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee
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The end is where we start from. In mine end is my beginning. Dudley knew that the inheritance he'd found and built was found and built, founded from the beginning and builded disposedly, to be passed on: as it ever is. Whatever a father does, good or ill, the child must and shall and does leave it behind for her calling, a light in darkness that beckons to a peace that the inheritance of the world merely does not give. Cousin Harry had been forced early to that realisation, as Uncle James, that Son of Thunder, and Aunt Lily, light and peaceable and dangerous to foes, had realised it; as Harriet was realising it, and Young Artful; and, far across the country's breadth, thunderous Jamie and clever Al and cunning little Lils…. To enter upon one's inheritance is to surrender it, and forsake it for whatever destiny and calling beckons one through the darkness to peace and light. The stars do not govern, nor write a doom; to know the runes is not to read the future, but rather to be prepared to write it anew, one's own story. He'd learnt that at last, if he'd learnt anything; and he had learnt what he had learnt by teaching it. He looked over at Harriet and Simon and young Arthur as he sat back in his pew, the lights in his and Elspeth's on-drawing eventide, the peace unobtained by the world alone and freely given.
It had been a good, long time since that other St James's Day, an Evensong in ordinary time; and the time between the times had been redeemed from time. It had been a kindly Providence that had prompted him to seek Harry's casual advice, from which so much had come.
The long fall of light lengthened. Elstead, hidden and set apart and consecrated, an inheritance lost if gripped too tightly and found when set aside for the calling, abided. Time redeemed from time, in pattern of timeless moments, with the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling…. In my beginning is my end; the end is where we start from.
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Anthem: Lux æterna
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Say what you liked, Dud considered, of the dear, creaky old C of E, there was genius in these St James's Day Evensongs: Stanford in G and the echo redoubling of Elgar's and Cameron's Lux æterna, the regular anthem of the patronal services. There was never an ordinary time, all time redeemed extraordinary. The music of ten thousand funerals and of peace, of Remembrance at the Cenotaph, and of all the saints and the slow fall of evening that was the dawn of eternal day: Lux æterna luceat eis, Domine, cum sanctis tuis in æternum, quia pius es. Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
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Prayers: Most heartily we beseech thee with thy favour to behold our most gracious Sovereign; … and all the Royal Family; Send down upon our Bishops, and Curates, and all Congregations committed to their charge, the healthful Spirit of thy grace
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A people without history is not redeemed from time. It was Dud's opinion, private and not so private - indeed, roundly and forthrightly expressed as churchwarden - that, although it seemed to be a prayer the Almighty wasn't eager to grant, it couldn't hurt to keep praying for bishops and clergy, as God knew the silly buggers were in want of it. So far, Divine Providence hadn't conspicuously answered the request, but it did no harm to keep trying.
The Crown, on the other hand - well, Dud, although his neighbours couldn't get him to stand for Parliament if they begged him or indeed fixed their bayonets and prodded, knew, more than most hon. Members, let alone councillors, what pains a considerable number of good folk had been at to preserve the constitution and the monarchy as part of it. Cousin Harry alone, and his Aurors…. Blast it all, it mightn't be what other nations wanted, and fair play to them, but it was his and his countrymen's choice, not lightly to be set aside. Crown and Church together, in the Muggle realm and in the unseen magical, had been warp and woof in the weaving of Britain, drawing threads that stretched far back in time out of time, from the petty kings of the Celts and the Oldest Ones before them, through the imperial possession of Rome, to the Saxon kings and the successors of Norman William. The land abided, and it had abided long a monarchy, and so it should, so long as the people chose; and Dud, whose inheritance it was that he purposed to pass undiminished to Harriet and Arthur and such heirs as Arthur should get, was staunchly determined to maintain it so. My soul, Dud thought, and by gum there <>is a country with its sentinel, all skilful in the wars, and a country whose armies are countless and whose king, unseen, and it was an Englishman's part to defend both realms, in whatever station he might be called to, and vow him to his country. He wasn't Cousin Harry, but he did rather think he'd done his part, over the years, and, what was more, Cousin Harry rather clearly thought he'd done, as well. That was sufficient, wasn't it? He hadn't a wand, Dud considered, or any bow of burning gold, but he'd seen to it his daughter and his grandson were a sword and buckler of ordered liberty under law.
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Hymn: Te lucis ante terminum
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Least he could have done, thought Dud. Soon enough, he supposed, he'd cease from mental fight, and go into the soft evenfall, to a place that was his fortress and his ease. And all manner of thing should be well enough, then: every day he had left to his lot was midwinter Spring; every hour, ash on an old man's sleeve. It was stumps, at his age, quite soon enough: offered the light, close of play at close of day. In his end was his beginning: he'd left a monument of his own, from some bloody poor clay and not much foundation. He wasn't Harry, certainly: an attendant lord, at best, to swell a scene; but he'd achieved this much, at least: he wasn't the Vernon of village and hamlet, nor was meant to be. He knew, with no little gratitude, that he'd been kept and guarded when he'd least deserved it; he was content to be assured that he'd kept his guard in turn, and that he should be kept and guarded at close of day, St James's Day to St James's Day, eventides in ordinary time that had never been truly ordinary, once he'd been shocked into seeing things aright.
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A Prayer of Saint Chrysostom: Fulfil now, O Lord, the desires and petitions of thy servants, as may be most expedient for them
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That had been the point, hadn't it. And yet was. Desires … well, it was all in what you wished; and what you wished wasn't what you were in want of, nine times in ten. Greed and guzzle and thinking yourself special and apart: good Lord, if he'd kept on in that, he'd have been a waste of space in a churchyard by now, friendless, loveless, unwed and childless. And he hoped he was duly grateful for having been shaken out of that with a short, sharp shock. A life that had never held Elspeth, still as staunch and sensible as ever, and yet with a matronly shapeliness, as well; a life, still more incomprehensibly, that had never issued in new life, Harriet and through her and that excellent chap Simon - superb son-in-law, Simon, and thank God Harriet'd seen so much of her cousinage and connexions in youth that she'd not been able to consider any of 'em as suitors without breaking down in sniggering: imagine had she married Jamie, or Freddykins (not that Freddykins was thus disposed women-wards), or, frankly, any of that lot, God help 'em - through Harriet and Simon, then, flesh and bone of 'em, the Young Artful now….
He'd forgiven Vernon and Petunia at last, long since - something they'd never accepted; one of a thousand things they'd never accepted, poor old creatures - and, looking back, he felt for them only compassion and pity; for they'd never known, as he knew, and had never known because of their own foolish choices, the joys he'd known and yet knew as father and grandfather, by opening himself to the new and the eccentric and the dauntingly different, simply so as to keep his relationship with his daughter when she was but a child, learning new things that had never else crossed his ken. Best thing he'd ever done, asking Harry's advice - and taking it when he'd had it. It had made a full life, however long or short the time remained.
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Hymn: The day thou gavest
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St Clement the tune, Scholefield the name on it - though Dud, like most folk, suspected Sullivan'd had a hand in it - and apt, apt as ever, for Evensong in ordinary time. Clem Scholefield slept his long sleep in Eashing churchyard, none so far away, a neighbour of sorts; and whatever else he'd done poorly, aided or alone, he'd set Ellerton's verses properly. In parishes the length and breadth of England, in the Valleys of the Land of Song, in the wee Piscie kirks in thrawn, dour Scotland, in Norn and Eire and the Anglican communion over, the church was singing precisely what it was doing and ever did, keeping an unsleeping watch as day and night danced grave figures over the spinning globe, the ecclesiastical Aurorlty, watching in the watches of the night, unresting, unstinting, secure as the kingdom that should last when all the kingdoms of the world were fading memories. His wife beside him, his daughter and son-in-law and grandson to her right, Dud knew that there was no darkness in the fall of evening shade.
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Grace: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen
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The end is where we start from. Grace, and love, and fellowship: an almost-instinct wholly true. What survives of us, Dud knew, was love: of family and neighbour, of learning, of country, and of the abiding land in the late light of Summertide, the high tide of Summer.
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Naylor's Final Responses
Postlude (choral): Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace
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The darkness is no darkness: it is peace. If Dud had learnt anything over the steady, slow, sprung rhythm of the years, he'd learnt that. It was only when night fell that you could see the stars, that he and his daughter had learnt all but together, and that he and she had taught Young Artful: the tongues of flame in-folded into the crowned knot of fire, the fire and the rose which are one.
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Postlude: Meditation on 'Brother James's Air'
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Brother James…. Uncle James; young Jamie; the Apostolic Son of Thunder. St James's Day, Evensong on a weekday in ordinary time. There was no dark in darkness; there was light imperishable in Darke and his music. It was only in the dark one saw the stars, after all. Any action, every action, is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat, or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start. Right action is freedom from past and future also. Be still, says hard-won wisdom, and let the dark come upon you which shall be the darkness of God, the visible reminder of Invisible Light too bright for mortal vision, the splendour of light inaccessible that hideth God. 'Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way': Cousin Harry was forever crossing the frontier beyond which safety and danger have a different meaning, and never fully returning: that was his privilege. This, this long, late slant of light, this gathering velvet of dark, was Dudley's gift and privilege, uncovenanted, unasked, received with wonder and obligation: stars with meanings beyond his knowing, runes he could read but could not cast.
They left the little porch of the little church, walking through leaves of fallen birdsong. Young Artful fell in beside his grandfather, as Harriet and Simon went on with brisk, no-nonsense Elspeth, avid for tea.
'Grandfather?'
'Yes?'
'You know I've NEWTs coming up. Would you mind terribly, drilling me a bit in some of the less-used runes?'
'Not at all, my boy. But after tea - your gran's made seedy-cake and lemon curd, and there may just be some Deptford pudding left as well, and if I mayn't have any, she ruddy well intends that you do.'
Arthur grinned, and they hurried to catch the rest of the family up, as they all wended homewards together in the fall of light, after Evensong, on a Thursday in ordinary time.
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FINITE
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PART I