‘Jealous, vicar?’ asked Julia. ‘I wouldn’t be. I daresay she’d open her legs for you if you asked her to.’
‘They don’t like you, do they?’ He rounded on her, stung. ‘Why is that?’
‘Because they’re ignorant. That’s why.’
She stalked off without another word.
That night, Adam closeted himself in his study with the parish records. The ledgers went back to 1566, but he decided to work backward, through the registers of weddings, funerals, and christenings, to see if he could gain any useful information about this baffling village from them.
The original documents were held at the county records office, but he seemed to have copies of everything he needed, neatly filed.
The first thing he looked for was Evie. Had she been christened here?
There was no sign of it. If she had been baptised, it had happened
elsewhere. He searched before the year of her birth for any marriage in the name of Witts, but found nothing. A register office, then, or maybe her parents weren’t married. These days, the village church was just a picturesque backdrop for an occasion, and even that role was being taken from it in favour of local venues with wedding licences. Records post-1960s were very sparse indeed.
He turned instead to a file from the early 19th century, curious about that earlier Evangeline on whose grave Evie had behaved so disgracefully.
Her funeral record showed that she had died at the age of 29, in childbirth. Her husband, one Alfred Witts, had predeceased her – by two years! The child was not his.
He checked the baptism records to see if he could glean any information about the child, but there was none, so presumably he or she had been stillborn. There was no funeral record, though. Perhaps the child was whisked away and placed in an orphanage. Or had gone to live with relatives in another village.
Tired of the inconclusivity of his studies, he put the ledgers away and went to bed. Something told him that he would need plenty of rest before the May Fair.
Chapter Five
THE MAYPOLE ON the village green was the biggest Adam had ever seen.
He milled about between stalls, avoiding the Morris dancing display, searching for Evie, but she was nowhere to be found. Julia Shields and her placard-wavers were gearing up for their protest. Julia was fielding questions from a local journalist, getting herself nicely aerated in readiness.
The jingling of bells and banging of sticks came to an end and Julia marched around the green at the head of the protest before lining up in front of the manor house and blocking the gates.
“PERVERTS OUT!” read one placard.
“SAXONHURST, NOT SEXONHURST!”
“SAVE OUR VILLAGE!” was by far the most popular though. Village politics were a strange thing, Adam thought, especially here. As long as the pornographer was born within the village bounds, presumably their activities would be smiled upon. It was lucky for him, and for Julia, that Sebastian and Kasia weren’t children of Saxonhurst.
He stood at the head of the placard wavers, playing it up for the benefit of the cameras from the local TV station – Julia hadn’t warned him they were coming – until some kind of kerfuffle behind the gates caused him to turn around.
They opened mechanically, and a parade of exotically dressed people poured forth, dividing the protesters into two groups.
At their head, Sebastian and Kasia were dressed in top-to-toe rubber, carrying whips and placards of their own. “FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION!” it read.
A bevy of oiled, muscular men in thongs and curvaceous women in similar followed, chanting and smiling, inviting all to join in their procession. In the centre, held aloft on a kind of chair on poles borne by four strong men, was Evie.
At first, Adam thought she was completely naked, but closer inspection revealed that she wore little wreaths of strategically placed flower petals on her breasts and between her legs. A bacchanalian Queen of the May, her locks flowing from beneath her crown of cherry blossom.
Adam dropped his placard in dismay.
‘Sweet Lord!’
He ran alongside the chair, begging her to come down and get dressed, but she laughed down at him and waved, then turned to wave at everyone on the green.
The cameras kept on rolling, despite the film crew’s reservations about being able to show this on the pre-watershed news bulletin. Julia’s protesters chased the caravan, shouting abuse, but it soon became clear that the procession had more support than hostility from the village in general, and defeat had to be admitted.
‘Give us a twirl, Evie!’ bellowed a village lad into Adam’s ear.