Saints of Blackwater

BLACKWATER

The first thing Nell Calder saw of Greyhaven was the prison, although at first she mistook it for an industrial complex built too close to the sea.

She had just crested the last rise before Blackwater when the trees opened on her right and the whole Reach appeared beneath a hard February sky. The water was a dark, metallic blue, rucked by the wind into long parallel ridges, and eight or nine miles away the opposite shore pushed out into the Atlantic in a shoulder of granite and black spruce. Greyhaven Head caught the weather full on. Its seaward face fell almost sheer in places, white surf breaking at its base, while the correctional complex occupied the higher ground behind it: low concrete buildings, a perimeter wall, two watchtowers she could make out from the road, and other structures half-lost among the trees.

It looked less sinister than remote. That was almost worse. Something overtly Gothic would have announced itself as theatre; Greyhaven simply seemed to have been put where nobody would ever arrive by accident.

Blackwater lay on the nearer shore, gathered around a much kinder harbour. From the ridge she could see slate roofs stepping down towards the waterfront, white clapboard houses, the square tower of a church and, unexpectedly, three large hotels whose scale suggested a town that had once expected many more visitors than it could possibly have produced itself.

Nell slowed as she reached the municipal sign.

WELCOME TO BLACKWATER

HOME OF FATHER MATTHEW CAVANAGH

A MAINE HERITAGE COMMUNITY

Below it, strapped to the same posts in a different typeface, a smaller notice warned that winter parking restrictions were in effect. She smiled despite herself. It was reassuring to find a town capable of commemorating sanctity and towing cars with equal seriousness.

The road descended through houses into the commercial centre. Blackwater was prettier than the photographs in the diocesan briefing had suggested, partly because those photographs had all been trying too hard. The real town was less composed. A nineteenth-century bank had become a pharmacy. A coffee shop next door advertised chowder, breakfast sandwiches and CAVANAGH BLEND in gold vinyl lettering. Across the street stood a hardware store, an insurance office and a narrow shop called INTERCESSIONS, whose window displayed candles, medals, postcards of St Peter’s and jars of blueberry preserve beneath a hand-painted sign promising LOCAL GIFTS.

The commercialisation was obvious without feeling especially cynical. Nell had spent enough time around shrines to know the difference. People needed somewhere to eat, sleep, park and buy things; sanctity had generated markets long before anyone thought to call them tourism economies.

The harbour opened suddenly between two buildings. Fishing boats still worked from the inner docks, gulls standing along the warehouse roofs with the proprietorial air of creatures who had paid taxes. Beyond them was an older passenger pier, its ticket office shuttered for winter, and farther along the waterfront an ornate hotel faced the sea behind a row of leafless elms.

GIVENS HOUSE — EST. 1882.

Her satnav announced that she had arrived just as she drove past it.

Nell parked beside a bank of dirty snow and sat for a moment before getting out. On the opposite side of the road a low granite wall marked the beginning of a landscaped waterfront path. CREWE PROMENADE, the brass plaque said. The name was familiar from the diocesan papers: Walter James Crewe, Blackwater native, public administrator and later political figure, credited with rescuing the town from severe decline in the 1960s. He had occupied perhaps three paragraphs in the briefing. Father Matthew Cavanagh had occupied forty-seven pages and four appendices.

The cold outside made the inside of her nose hurt. She wrestled her suitcase from the back seat and crossed towards Givens House, deciding that whatever else Blackwater had exaggerated, nobody had oversold the Maine winter.

The hotel’s lobby smelled faintly of wood polish, coffee and a fire that had been burning for several hours. Dark panelling rose to a plaster ceiling, old rugs softened the floorboards, and an antique brass bell sat on the reception desk even though a woman was already coming through from the office before Nell had finished taking off her gloves.

“Dr Calder?”

“Nell is fine.” She shifted the suitcase upright and offered her hand.

“Ruth Givens.” Ruth was in her early sixties, silver-blonde hair cut at her jaw and reading glasses hanging from a cord around her neck. She shook Nell’s hand with the brisk warmth of someone who had welcomed strangers professionally for most of her adult life, then came around the desk and took one end of the suitcase before Nell could protest.

“You found us, then.”

“With technological assistance.” Nell let Ruth lead the way towards the stairs.

“We allow satellites now. It was controversial.” Ruth’s smile made it difficult to tell how often she used the line. “I’ve put you on the third floor, harbour side. In July people argue about those rooms. In February we give them to historians and anyone else reckless enough to come here voluntarily.”

Nell followed with the other end of the suitcase, already warmer than she wanted to be inside her coat. “I’m here for three weeks initially.”

Ruth glanced back over her shoulder. “That’s optimistic.”

“So everyone keeps telling me.”

“Father Julian?”

“Among others.”

Ruth made a small sound of recognition as they reached the first landing. “That sounds more like Maggie Fenwick. She considers timetables a form of youthful arrogance.”

On the wall beside the stairs hung a sequence of large photographs showing the hotel at different points in its history. The earliest depicted a darker timber building with a deep verandah crowded by women under parasols and men in straw boaters. In another, a procession filled Harbour Road. Nell stopped at the next image, which appeared to have been taken from an upper-storey window across St Peter’s Square. The space below was packed with people from one side to the other; nurses were visible in the foreground and a banner hung from a building opposite.

THANKS BE TO GOD AND HIS SERVANT MATTHEW.

“What year is that?” she asked.

“1918.” Ruth set down the suitcase. “October, according to my grandfather.”

“The influenza year.”

“The end of it, yes. Patients, families, pilgrims, reporters. People who came because somebody had told them somebody else had got better here.”

Nell stepped closer. There was nothing celebratory about many of the faces. Even in an old black-and-white photograph, she could see fatigue, anxiety, bandages, the strange mixture of dread and hope that gathered outside hospitals during epidemics.

“Your grandfather took it?”

“He was seven. His father ran the hotel. We don’t know who took the photograph, but you’ll see copies all over town.”

The final image in the row showed a broad-shouldered man in a dark suit behind a waterfront lectern. The plaque identified him as WALTER CREWE AT THE DEDICATION OF BLACKWATER CIVIC CENTRE, 1974.

Ruth saw where she was looking. “Different saint.”

Nell turned to her.

“That was a joke,” Ruth said, though her expression suggested it was also something people in Blackwater had said often enough for the joke to have acquired a little truth.

“A useful one.”

“You definitely haven’t met Maggie yet.”

Her room looked directly across the harbour towards the Reach. Once Ruth had left, Nell stood at the window and watched a squat service vessel move away from Greyhaven Head, white wake curling behind it. The water between the two communities looked perfectly traversable. Her phone, when she checked the map, told her the journey by road was forty-six miles.

On the desk lay a welcome folder from the hotel. Between restaurant recommendations and winter opening hours was a two-page history of Father Matthew Cavanagh. Nell read the first paragraph standing up.

Born County Galway, Ireland, 1827. Arrived in the United States in 1848. Ordained in Boston in 1853. Assigned two years later to what diocesan records called the Eastern Coastal Mission. St Peter’s Mission, Blackwater, established 1855. St Andrew’s Mission, Greyhaven, established 1856.

She had seen the second church in the diocesan papers, but only in passing. Cavanagh had served several isolated communities, and Blackwater’s later fame had swallowed most of them in the telling. Nell opened her notebook and wrote, St Andrew’s, Greyhaven — surviving structure? Then she put the notebook away. It was too early to turn every stray fact into a clue.

At four she walked to St Peter’s.

Blackwater’s centre was compact enough that she reached the church in ten minutes. Harbour Road climbed away from the waterfront through shops and restaurants before widening into what had once been a market square. St Peter’s occupied the upper end on slightly raised ground, larger and more imposing than the mission chapel Cavanagh had founded. The present building was a late-Victorian mixture of granite and brick with a square tower and broad steps made for congregations that could spill out onto the pavement. According to a plaque by the door, parts of the original timber church had been incorporated into later construction.

A second sign directed visitors around the side of the building towards THE TOMB OF THE SERVANT OF GOD MATTHEW CAVANAGH.

Nell made a mental note to mention the language to Father Oakes. “Servant of God” had a specific canonical meaning, and the whole point of her presence was that no formal cause had yet been opened.

Inside, the church was almost empty. An older couple were speaking quietly to a priest near the sanctuary. He saw Nell, lifted a finger to acknowledge her, and finished the conversation before crossing the nave.

“Dr Calder.”

“Father Oakes.”

“Julian, unless we’re in court.” He was tall and grey-haired, and at first glance looked younger than the fifty-nine listed in her notes. Close up, the lines around his eyes suggested a man who laughed often and slept irregularly. He shook her hand, then glanced towards the doors as though checking Ruth had not followed her in. “She hasn’t frightened you away yet?”

“Not yet.”

“She’s slipping. How was the drive?”

“Not particularly bad.” Nell loosened her scarf.

“From Boston in February?” Julian gave her a look of exaggerated respect. “There’s your first verified miracle.”

That was encouraging. Nell had been half afraid of earnestness.

Julian led her down a side aisle and through a door into the churchyard. Cavanagh’s grave was simpler than she had expected: a low granite slab beneath a plain upright cross, his name and dates cut deeply into the stone. MATTHEW CAVANAGH, PRIEST, 1827–1876. Underneath, in smaller letters: HE WENT WHERE HE WAS NEEDED.

People had left flowers despite the cold. A child’s knitted mitten rested at the foot of the cross, along with two rosaries, a hospital wristband and a photograph sealed inside clear plastic of a woman holding a newborn baby. Nell deliberately did not ask whose they were. There would be time enough for stories later.

Julian tucked his hands into the pockets of his coat. “You know why the diocese asked you to come.”

“To make several groups of people unhappy in a disciplined way.”

“That was roughly my reading of the brief.”

“You want the cause opened.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The question made him think, which Nell appreciated. Priests accustomed to speaking about saints often had prepared answers; prepared answers were useful evidence of institutional culture and almost useless evidence of personal belief.

“Because I think Matthew Cavanagh was a very good priest,” Julian said eventually.

“That isn’t enough.”

“I know.” He glanced down at the grave, rubbing one thumb against the seam of his coat pocket.

“And the miracles?” Nell asked.

“Some of the accounts are difficult to explain.”

“Difficult to explain is not the same as miraculous.”

This time he looked back at her. “I know that too.”

Nell smiled. “You’ve rehearsed this.”

“For fifteen years. The campaign was here before I was. So were most of the people who think I’m personally responsible for Rome’s failure to notice us.”

He looked down at the grave. “I do want the cause examined seriously. But I would rather discover there isn’t one before we build another twenty years of local certainty on top of it.”

That answer was considerably better than the one she had expected. “What exactly do you want me to establish?”

“Whether the biographical evidence supports the reputation for sanctity, whether the miracle tradition is as strong as people here believe, and how much of what survives is original testimony rather than later retelling. The diocese wants the same things, only in more expensive language.”

“And if the answer to any of those questions is no?”

“Then the answer is no.” Julian paused. “I reserve the right not to enjoy it.”

Beyond the churchyard wall, Blackwater fell away towards the harbour. Greyhaven was plainly visible on the far shore in the winter light, the prison’s perimeter cutting a pale line through the trees.

Nell nodded towards it. “St Andrew’s is still standing?”

“Technically.”

“That doesn’t sound promising.”

“It’s inside correctional property. The old chapel was used by the sanatorium and, for a while, by the prison. It’s been deconsecrated for years.”

“Can I visit?”

“We can ask. That will involve forms, which may be the only genuinely supernatural force in the story.”

A bell sounded inside St Peter’s, five slow notes announcing the hour. Julian looked towards the door. “Mass. You’re welcome to stay.”

“I know.”

He accepted the non-answer without interest. Nell appreciated that too.

She walked back through the square as dusk settled over the harbour. Outside the civic centre she stopped to read a bronze plaque set into a granite block.

WALTER JAMES CREWE

1916–1989

PUBLIC SERVANT — SON OF BLACKWATER

THROUGH VISION, PERSISTENCE AND SERVICE HE SECURED THE INVESTMENT THAT SAVED HIS HOME TOWN AND GAVE BLACKWATER ITS FUTURE.

Nell photographed it because plaques were rarely neutral. A community might forget a policy document, but if it put a sentence in bronze it wanted the sentence to survive.

Back at Givens House, Ruth had left a pot of coffee in the lounge and a note recommending the chowder at a restaurant two streets away. Nell carried a cup upstairs instead. Across the Reach the lights of Greyhaven had come on in rows, institutional white against the dark headland. From this distance they looked almost decorative.

She opened a fresh section of her notebook and wrote BLACKWATER — CAVANAGH REVIEW at the top of the page. Underneath she listed the questions she already knew she would have to answer: how quickly Cavanagh’s reputation for sanctity had developed after his death; the earliest securely documented extraordinary outcome; whether pilgrimage had followed the miracle tradition or helped create it; and what remained in the record of St Andrew’s and Greyhaven.

At the bottom she added, Walter Crewe — economic context only?

She stared at the question mark, almost crossed it out, then left it where it was. There was no reason yet to think Crewe had anything to do with Cavanagh beyond the fact that both men had become part of Blackwater’s preferred story about itself.

Outside, Greyhaven remained visible through the dark, close enough to see from her window and far enough away to feel like somewhere else entirely.