Jack Sturmey liked to think the cloister belonged to him.

Not in law, of course. On paper it was the property of the Dean and Chapter of Yorbridge, and in sermons it was invariably referred to as “the Lord’s house.” But as he padded along the worn flags in his thin-soled shoes, hands tucked behind his back, he felt the familiar pleasant ripple of power work through him: the way conversation faltered as he passed; the way people turned their shoulders, or their eyes, or their entire bodies so as not to meet his gaze.

Fear. Reverence was for the Dean. Fear, these days, was reserved for Jack “Squirmey” Sturmey.

He moved slowly, deliberately, letting his steps echo. Morning light spilled in from the garth, pale and cold, drawing long bars on the stone. Somewhere above, an invisible sparrow chittered in the gutters. Sturmey listened past the bird to the murmurs ahead—two canons in quiet discussion under the far arch. One of them glanced up, saw him, and broke off in the middle of a sentence.

Sturmey smiled.

He did not go to them. It was better to let men come to him in time, when their nerves failed and their consciences pricked. For the moment he paused near one of the slender columns, drew out a worn little notebook from his pocket and licked the tip of his pencil.

“Price. Canon,” he murmured under his breath, as if committing a new anthem to memory. “Still in conversation with—Alton? Something about… parishes.” He scribbled in a cramped, fast hand. “Manner: strained when interrupted. Subject dropped on my approach.”

There. Not much, but patterns were made from very small notes, one after another. He had learned that early.

“Morning, Mr Sturmey.”

The voice came from his left, tentative, hopefulness carefully arranged over dislike. Mrs Henshall stood in the doorway that led out to the verger’s lodge—a small, neat woman in a dark dress that had seen better years, with a shawl drawn tight about her shoulders despite the mildness of the day. Her hair, iron-grey and scraped back, had escaped its pins.

“Mrs Henshall,” he said pleasantly. “Out early.”

“Always work to be done, sir.” Her hands twisted in the shawl. Her eyes did not quite meet his. “They’ll be wanting the stalls dusted before Evensong.”

“A conscientious soul,” said Sturmey. “Your late husband would approve, I’m sure.”

Her mouth tightened at that. Gideon Henshall had been verger here for thirty years, a solid dependable man who had never once missed a bell or a curtain call. Sturmey had a note about him somewhere in the book as well. Gideon Henshall—drank more than he admitted, occasional lapses in accounts; frightened to death of exposure. There had been other sins too, smaller ones, compounded over the years. Sturmey had never had to push very hard. The man’s conscience had done most of the work.

He wondered, briefly, whether Mrs Henshall suspected how much he had known. The thought amused him.

“Your curtains were open late last night,” he remarked. “I happened to notice.”

Colour rose in her cheeks. “I had a lamp, that’s all.”

“You should be careful,” said Sturmey, his tone light. “A woman alone in the close, peering out at all hours. People might wonder what you’re looking for.”

Her hands clenched tighter. “I keep my own counsel,” she said. “Begging your pardon, Mr Sturmey, but I’ve work to get on with.”

She disappeared down the passage without waiting for his reply. Sturmey watched her go, then made another brief note. Henshall, Ada—up late; curtains open. Jumpy when spoken to.

The mighty Cathedral of St Cuthbert and All Saints, Yorbridge, was not merely a house of prayer. It was a hive. Sturmey had learned all its runnels and secret paths: not the physical ones, though he knew many of those too, but the passages of gossip and fear that ran from sacristy to schoolroom, from refectory to College and back again. He had discovered, slowly and delightedly, that men in holy orders sinned in much the same ways as men in taverns—greed, lust, pride, vanity—and that they were so much more frightened when someone noticed.

He slid the notebook away and strolled on.

The cloister gave on to the south door of the Cathedral, to the Chapter House, to the door that descended to the choir school’s rehearsal room—“the Cave,” the boys called it. Faintly, from below, came a rasping scale on the organ in the loft above the nave, followed by a thunderous chord that made dust shiver down from the vaulting. Sturmey smiled again. Varley Barker was in one of his moods.

At the far end of the walk, the cloister opened into the Cathedral close proper: a sloping lawn bordered by the long, grey flank of the College of St David and St Maurice. As Sturmey reached the arch, a figure in an academic gown swept across the grass, hurrying from the College toward the Deanery: a stout man, bearded and florid, his gown billowing faintly in the wind.

Principal Bacchus Dyson.

Sturmey did not call out. He simply stopped where he was, in the shadow of the arch, and waited.

Dyson almost made it past the cloister without looking his way. Almost. Perhaps it was the stillness of the figure under the arch that drew his eye; perhaps it was something more superstitious. His gaze met Sturmey’s; for an instant, something flickered there—annoyance, swiftly masked. He altered his course with the smallest of motions and came to stand just within the cloister entrance, the hem of his gown brushing the stone.

“Mr Sturmey,” he said. His tone was hearty, his smile forced. “You are about your… walks.”

“Exercise is advised for the lungs,” said Sturmey. “Particularly for those who sing.” He tapped his chest lightly. “Lay clerk’s duty.”

 

“Quite, quite.” Dyson’s eyes darted to the little black book peeping from Sturmey’s pocket, then away again. “I must be brief—I have a tutorial.”

“We must all be brief,” murmured Sturmey. “Life is so uncertain.”

Dyson’s jaw tightened. “If this is to be one of your little—conversations, Mr Sturmey, I must insist we schedule it properly. I do not conduct College business in the cloisters like some fishwife.”

“College business?” Sturmey’s eyebrows rose. “Who mentioned College business? I was merely thinking about music.”

He drew out the book and flicked it open, more for effect than necessity. Pages and pages of cramped writing, names, dates, little sums. Dyson’s gaze flickered over it and then away, as if the sight offended him.

“I’ve been wondering,” said Sturmey mildly, “how one keeps so many balls in the air at once. Examinations, endowments, noble parents, royal patrons—such a burden. And then there are the irregularities.”

“Mr Sturmey,” said Dyson sharply.

“Such a little word on paper,” Sturmey went on. “Irregular. Harmless in itself. But in the wrong context it can sound so very ugly.”

Dyson stared at him. The joviality had dropped from his face now; there was a hard-looking man under there, with small, calculating eyes.

“We will discuss this,” he said, very quietly, “in my office. At a proper hour. Not here in the open like a pair of market women. Good morning.”

Before Sturmey could reply, he turned on his heel and strode away, gown flapping, his boots beating a regular, angry tattoo on the flags.

Sturmey watched him go and made another note.

John Lomas, who would not willingly have described himself as a man of habit, nevertheless stood always in the same place when the choir rehearsed. Fourth stall from the west end on the south side, halfway back: close enough to follow the organist’s baton, far enough not to be deafened by Barker when the man lost his temper.

This morning, even before he had settled his music on the ledge, Lomas could feel a storm in the air.

“Again!” Barker barked, stabbing the air with his pencil. “From the Gloria. You, Handl, were early. Polkinghorne, you were late. The Almighty may forgive such sins but I do not. Basses, you sound like a herd of cows in a ditch.”

The boys giggled nervously. Lomas caught Ivor Handl’s eye—sharp, pale, quick as a bird—and was met with an insolent half-smile. The boy had a beautiful treble and an instinctive feel for line; he also had the kind of temperament that drew a man like Barker as flint draws steel.

Lomas sang when he was told, marked his own part quietly, and watched.

“Hold the ‘et in terra pax’ like it means something,” Barker snarled, clapping his hands sharply. “You’re offering peace to men of good will, not a plate of cold gruel.”

They began again. The organ hummed beneath them; Barker’s foot tapped impatiently. As they reached the end of the phrase, there was a muffled cough from the rear. A figure slid into the Cave and leaned against the wall, arms folded.

Jack Sturmey.

He did not interrupt at once. He stood there, watching, eyes moving from Barker’s flailing pencil to the boys’ anxious faces to the basses’ dogged concentration. Then, as the music petered out, he said, in a quiet, carrying voice:

“Varley, you’re rushing the Amen again.”

Every head turned. Barker’s shoulders went rigid.

“I am not rushing the Amen,” he said, through his teeth.

“Oh, forgive me,” said Sturmey. “It only sounded that way from the cloister. Perhaps it is the acoustic.”

The boys shifted, sensing danger. Lomas kept his face carefully blank.

“If you would be so good as to leave us to our work, Mr Sturmey,” said Barker, “the choir will survive your absence for half an hour.”

“I have responsibilities,” said Sturmey mildly. “The Dean expects a certain standard. And the Bishop is due in a fortnight. I should hate for him to notice that the organist of Yorbridge Cathedral has yet to master elementary tempo.”

There was a small, sharp intake of breath from somewhere among the altos.

Barker stepped away from the console. His fists were clenched. “You miserable little—”

“Varley.” Sturmey’s voice dropped, silk over steel. “I’d be careful what you call people. You have so much more to lose.”

He glanced, almost casually, toward the boys. One or two of them dropped their eyes at once, as if they had been caught tattling. Lomas felt the tension knot in the room.

Barker took a step forward. For an instant Lomas thought he was going to strike Sturmey. Then the organist stopped, visibly reined himself in, and laughed instead—a short, ugly sound.

“Out,” he said. “Get out of my rehearsal.”

“As you wish.” Sturmey inclined his head. “We must have that talk soon, though.

There are—irregularities—to discuss.”

 

He let the word hang for a fraction of a second, his gaze passing briefly over Lomas before he turned and walked up the stairs, his footsteps fading into the echo of the stone.

The Cave held its breath.

“From the Gloria,” said Barker hoarsely. “Once more. And you will sing as if the Almighty is actually listening.”

As the boys raised their books, Lomas watched the empty doorway where Sturmey had vanished and thought, not for the first time, that Yorbridge Cathedral contained more shadows than the architects had intended.

By evening, the close lay under a thin veil of mist. The great bulk of the Cathedral loomed black against a sallow sky; the windows, lit from within, glowed like banked embers. Lomas, coat collar turned up, crossed from the Chapter House to the south door, the last notes of the Nunc dimittis still in his ears.

He did not see Sturmey again that day, but he felt him—like a splinter in the finger, like a draught in a closed room. He heard the way Barker slammed books a little too hard in the vestry; saw the way the Dean’s eyes slid away from Dyson’s across the dinner table in the refectory. He stored it all away in the back of his mind, as he always did, without quite knowing why.

Later, when the messenger came pounding on his door at an hour when honest men should be asleep, crying that there had been a body found in the cloister, Lomas would think back to this day. To the notebook peeping from Sturmey’s pocket; to Dyson’s forced smile; to Mrs Henshall’s pinched face in the doorway.

And he would realise, with a slow, reluctant certainty, that the man everyone feared had, in the end, been the spark rather than the fire.