Wakenhyrst

by Michelle Paver

Me, I don’t hold by none of it. There’s many a wrong thing done by godly folk.’

Put not your faith in men, she thought. That out there is all you can trust: that hedge and that wet grass. Those dripping trees. As if it were happening to someone else, she observed the pieces of her past – Maman, Father, herself – rearranging to make a different pattern. She saw her childhood peel off and float away like a piece of waterweed in the Lode.

She thought, this church was built in the years after the Black Death had killed a third of the people. It was built out of fear. It’s a bribe to God: Please don’t do it again. ‘All things bright and beautiful,’ she sang, ‘the Lord God made them all.’ Presumably, the Lord God had also made the malaria which had killed nine of the blacksmith’s children in Wakenhyrst, prompting his desperate wife to smother the last one in its cradle, ‘to get it over with.’

This is what your faith means, she told Miss Broadstairs silently. You can dress it up with cherubs if you wish, but the man who painted this picture was rather more honest. He knew that it all boils down to a threat to keep people in line. That sketchy promise of Heaven if you do what you’re told – and the certainty of endless torture if you don’t. Take that, peasants. Now back to the fields and don’t even think about improving your lot.