Wilkes Shoots and Kills Alice Pagett

Wilkes Shoots and Kills Alice Pagett is the shooting that turns the Banfield pilgrimage service into a catastrophe and interrupts the apparent course of Einor’s revenge. Alice’s death is not the end of the event: she returns changed, while the attack’s motive remains uncertain and its aftermath leaves Fenn without a settled explanation of the connection between Alice and the sixteenth-century history beneath the shrine.

Background and Stakes

The shooting occurs against the history set down in Thomas Woolgar’s chronicle. Its account describes Einor as a nun accused of witchcraft and implicated, with Woolgar, in the deaths of three children; after villagers seized and punished her, she was put to death. The chronicle presents the episode through Woolgar’s guilty, self-exculpating testimony, in which he admits his own part while attributing much of his conduct to Einor’s influence. That compromised account makes the past an uncertain but consequential frame for the modern violence.

The later disaster gives the shooting a further significance: Fenn considers Einor to have pursued vengeance and to have achieved much of it, but Alice’s unexpected death thwarted its completeness. The event therefore joins an apparently contemporary act of violence to the unresolved question of whether the ancient history has returned through Alice, rather than treating the shooting as an isolated attack.

The Shooting and Its Immediate Consequence

At the pilgrimage service, Wilkes shoots Alice. Molly Pagett witnesses her daughter being shot, then returning and changing into something she cannot comprehend. The reversal makes Alice’s death a threshold in the event: the shooting first appears to end her life, but it is followed by a transformation that intensifies the danger surrounding the shrine rather than restoring the familiar child Molly knew.

The attack also gives the surrounding disaster a human perpetrator without making its larger causes clear. Wilkes’s action is definite; what it means in relation to the apparent return of Einor, and how much of the violence belongs to the supernatural conflict, remains uncertain in Fenn’s later reflections.

Wilkes and the Unresolved Motive

Wilkes does not survive the disaster. His body is found among the dead, and the German Luger Pistol is recovered nearby with its barrel jammed. Newspaper clippings in his bedsit show a fascination with the assassins of John Lennon and the attempted assassins of Pope Paul and Ronald Reagan. These discoveries suggest a fixation on political violence, but they do not establish why he chose Alice as his target.

Fenn considers possibilities without settling on one: Wilkes may have sought fame through the trigger, or acted from a rejection of what he regarded as absolute goodness. Neither interpretation is confirmed. The lack of a clear motive preserves a distinction between the documented shooting and the wider pattern of evil that Fenn suspects is operating around the shrine.

Aftermath and Historical Echo

Alice’s remains are found beneath the charred remains of the oak and buried with Molly’s remains in the graveyard of St. Joseph’s Church. A week after the disaster, an excavation at the shrine uncovers a much older skeleton beneath the fallen oak’s roots. The small skeleton is burned and has bones broken around the time of death; it is taken for study, with the prospect of eventual display at the British Museum. Its discovery gives the modern catastrophe a physical link to the buried past without resolving exactly who the remains belonged to.

Fenn’s unanswered questions center on Alice’s transformation and the name Rosemund, which Elnor uses for her. The chronicle names Rosemund as a novice associated with Einor who was later cast out of the priory. Fenn wonders whether Molly could descend from that novice, or whether the returning creature has confused identities in the force of its hatred; he cannot determine which, if either, is true. The shooting thus closes Alice’s ordinary life but opens no reliable explanation of what returned, leaving the attack suspended between a gunman’s unexplained act and an older vengeance whose history is itself recorded by a compromised witness.