Midwinter of the Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  Jane was just picturing Mum in the pulpit in her Sunday surplice and half a potful of coal-black mascara, when she became aware of the frozen night sky at last beginning to brown with heat from the east. Patricia said you were supposed to wait for the big orb itself but, like, what if it didn’t show until you were on the school bus or something?

  She scrambled out of bed and walked slowly to the eastfacing window and opened it as wide as it would go. It was absolutely bloody freezing.

  Well, good! Jane steeled herself and flung her arms wide.

  Now her first exercise. She had the words Patricia had given them written out on the back of an old birthday card, all ready, balanced on the window ledge. She pictured Rowenna standing at her own window in the big modern house in Credenhill Jane hadn’t yet visited.

  She pictured Patricia and Sorrel – sisters, kind of.

  OK. She took a mouthful of cold air and coughed. Then she looked into the sandy sky and read aloud from the card.

  ‘Hail to Thee, Eternal Spiritual Sun

  ‘Whose symbol now rises in the Heavens.

  ‘Hail to Thee from the Abodes of Morning.’

  Jane lowered her arms, and stayed silent. By tomorrow, she wouldn’t need the card.

  She was on the Path.

  This time, she was going to do it right.

  Merrily dumped her waxed jacket on a front pew and went to kneel in the chancel.

  Before her, the altar was a hazy-grey block under a stainedglass window, its colours still sleeping. She hadn’t switched on the lamps or even lit a candle.

  Unlocking the church, she’d thought what a shame it was to have to restrict the house of God to not much more than normal working hours. Ted wanted to lock it up at five each evening, but Merrily was insisting on seven at least, even if she then had to go along with her own keys. A church should really be offering sanctuary around the clock. Perhaps you could employ a sympathetic security patrol to filter out the vandals – try getting that one past the parish council.

  Enough! Merrily kneeled in silence for maybe ten minutes, letting thoughts drift away, and then began.

  Her voice was hesitant, but steady. She kept it low.

  ‘Christ be with me, Christ within me.

  ‘Christ behind me…’

  Christ and who else? A story in the Church Times last week had revealed two more attacks – one of them sexual – on women priests in their own churches. But you couldn’t wrap yourself in cotton-wool like some religious statuette.

  Equally she’d seen with the Denzil Joy incident the potential dangers of not protecting yourself before you went out on a case. And there was a lot about this Moon business she didn’t like. Obsession, for a start, was always dangerous. She’d called Lol last night, while Jane was out, to get some more background. She didn’t like the idea of that newly displayed photograph of the dead father in a room full of Iron Age relics. There was the possibility that this woman was drawing down pagan Celtic elements she would not be able to deal with.

  Lol was right: it was necessary to go to the location on this one. To try to see it through Moon’s eyes. But if there was something there, some lurking presence from way way back, would Merrily be able to sense it? While, at the same time, keeping it out?

  ‘I bind unto myself the Name,

  ‘The strong Name of the Trinity.

  ‘By invocation of the same,

  ‘The Three in One and One in Three…’

  Pip-pop! The green tubes ejecting from the nostrils of dying Denzil Joy. Pip-pop!

  Merrily cringed.

  Stop!

  She opened and closed her eyes and pulled the folds of blue and gold around her.

  Start again.

  ‘Christ be with me, Christ within me…’

  But Merrily’s visit with Lol to Moon’s barn was not going to happen. Something appalling already had. Something she could not ignore.

  Jane took the call while Merrily was making breakfast.

  ‘It’s some really nasty, officious-sounding bastard.’

  ‘Not so loud!’ Merrily took it on the cordless phone in the kitchen.

  ‘Merrily Watkins speaking.’

  ‘This is Major Weston, area organizer for the Redundant Churches Fund. I make no apologies for calling you before eight. I find it ridiculous that I should have to call you at all. I wanted the local man to deal with it. Bizarrely, the local man tells me all matters of this nature have to be referred directly to you.’

  ‘What’s the problem, Major?’ She wasn’t aware that the Redundant Churches Fund even had an area organizer.

  ‘Desecration is the problem, Mrs Watkins. At the Church of St Cosmas and St Damien at Stretford. Do you know where that is?’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘I expect you’ll manage to find it. The police already have, for what they’re worth.’

  ‘What kind of desecration?’

  ‘What kind? Satanic desecration, of course.’

  Jane was furious.

  ‘You can’t do this to Lol! Whatever it was, you promised him.’

  ‘I have to. It’s—’

  ‘Your job – yeah, yeah. You know what I think? I think you’re empire-building.’

  ‘Flower, it’s not me! I didn’t even know about this, but apparently every vicar or rector or priest-in-charge in the diocese has received an edict from the Bishop’s office to say that anything arising in their parishes possibly related to Deliverance should be referred initially to me. Through the Deliverance office, naturally, but this Major Weston’s obviously had an earful from a local vicar happy to wash his hands of it, and so the Major’s made a special point of finding my home number and getting me up nice and early in the morning. What can I do?’

  ‘You don’t have to go now.’

  ‘I do have to go now. They’ve got to get the place cleaned up. It’s a disused church supported by this charity.’

  But she was annoyed. Neither Mick nor Sophie had mentioned this memo going out to all the priests. Yes, it did look like empire-building, and whilst a few vicars would be secretly relieved, the majority would resent it. She would have resented it.

  ‘I’ll call Lol,’ she said.

  23

  Strawberry Ice

  THE MAIN ROAD was a brown channel between banks of snow. The Cathedral – usually seen at its most imposing from Greyfriars Bridge – skulked uneasily in half-lit mist.

  Beyond the bridge, the car slid alarmingly towards the kerb where there was a pub called the Treacle Mine. This was not promising. The hill might still be a problem – like the other night.

  White hell, then. Not ten minutes out of the city, but the snow had lain undisturbed for longer. Denny’s monster Mitsubishi would, for once, have been useful. Don’t even try the steep bit, Moon had said. You’ll just get stuck. I can walk down from here.

  Oh, it’s hazardous out there, Moon. Snow-blindness. Hypothermia.

  Lol, the hill’s only five hundred and ninety-five feet above sea level.

  Sometimes her humour-vacuum was almost endearing. Ever since they’d left the shop – Moon, in her green padded skijacket, snuggling into his shoulder – Lol had been thinking: I was wrong, I’m crazy. There’s nothing weird going on. All she needs is love.

  Anyway, he couldn’t stop now; there was nowhere to turn the car around.

  This morning, with no further snow, things were better.

  Someone must have been up the hill with a tractor, perhaps even a snowplough. He made it without too much revving and sliding, as far as the little car park for visitors to the ancient camp.

  The desolation of the day was getting to him. He’d been looking forward to bringing Merrily up here. But Merrily couldn’t make it. Second thoughts, maybe, about loopy Moon – and loopy Lol, too. He’d misunderstood her.

  From the back of the car, he pulled his wellies and his old army combat jacket. The snow around here was untrodden, lying in big drifts. Even where it hadn’t drifted, it was four, five inches dee
p.

  Lol ploughed through. The earth steps had disappeared, becoming a deceptive white ski-run. Lol stopped. He’d imagined the barn below would be winter-picturesque, but it was like a short, blackened toadstool under its snow-swollen roof. Neglected and charmless, most of its windows shrunken by snow.

  On Saturday night, a gauzy moon had been nesting in the snow-bent treetops, and Moon had walked across where the patch of garden would be and looked all around like she wanted to establish a memory of how the barn and the surrounding trees looked in their moonlit winter robes.

  And Lol had then thought, this is it. Dick whispering in his ear, You do find her attractive, don’t you? Think she doesn’t fancy you? Oh, I think she does, old son. I think she does. And then Denny. I would do anything, give anything to get her away from there. Meanwhile, if she’s not alone, that’s the best thing I could hope for under the circumstances.

  Lol crunched carefully down the long earthen steps. It was fully light now, or as light as it was going to get. He knocked on the front door, set into the glassed-over barn bay, long curtains drawn on either side.

  There was no answer. After a minute, Lol stepped back on to the snow-shrouded garden and looked around.

  A big man was striding out of a wall of conifers on the other side of the barn. He stopped. ‘Hello. Can I help?’

  ‘I’m looking for Kathy Moon.’

  ‘Yes, this is where she lives.’ He had a high, hearty voice – not local. He wore a shiny new green Barbour and a matching cap. ‘I’m from the farm. Tim Purefoy.’

  ‘Lol Robinson. I’m a… friend of hers.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure she’s spoken of you.’ Tim Purefoy looked down at Lol, recognition dawning. ‘I know… you were here helping Katherine move in, yes?’ He ambled across to the glassed-over barn bay, squinting through a hole in the condensation. ‘Bit odd – she’s usually up and about quite early. Cycles into town, you know.’

  Lol explained about driving Moon home on Saturday, and the bike being still at the shop.

  ‘Well, I don’t know what to say,’ said Mr Purefoy. ‘Gone for a stroll maybe? Perhaps she wanted to see what the hill was like under snow, before it all vanished. Bit of a romantic about this hill, as you probably know. Anyway, can’t be far away. Come and wait at the farmhouse if you like, and have a coffee.’

  ‘Actually,’ Lol said, ‘I don’t suppose I could use your phone? It’s possible her brother got worried about her being up here in the blizzard. Maybe he’s collected her.’

  ‘No problem at all. Follow me.’ Tim Purefoy beat his gloved hands together. ‘Like midwinter already, isn’t it?’

  The Dyn farmhouse was unexpectedly close – no more than fifteen yards behind the tight row of Leylandii. It was these conifers that deprived the barn of its view, but when you passed between them…

  Lol almost gasped.

  They were standing on a wide white lawn sloping away to a line of low bushes which probably hid the road. But it might as well have been a cliff edge.

  Below it, the city – a timeless vision in the mist.

  ‘Startling, isn’t it?’ Tim Purefoy folded his arms in satisfaction. ‘Best view of Hereford you’ll get from anywhere – except from the ramparts of the hillfort itself.’

  The snow had made Hereford an island and softened the outlines of its buildings, so that the new merged colourlessly with the old. And because the city had somehow been bypassed by the high-rise revolution of the sixties and seventies, it might all have been seventeenth-century, even medieval, underneath. It was both remote and intimate; it made Lol feel very strange.

  ‘See how the steeple of All Saints is superimposed on the Cathedral tower?’ Tim said knowledgeably. ‘That’s one of Alfred Watkins’s ley-lines. An invisible, mystical cable joining sacred sites – a prehistoric path of power.’

  ‘And we’re standing on it?’

  ‘Absolutely. It goes very close to the house. We had a chap over to dowse it – the earth-energy. They’re energy lines, you know. And spirit paths, so we’re told.’

  No wonder this guy had taken to Moon. Standing in the thin rain on the snowy lawn, Lol suddenly felt he could jump off and slide down that mystical cable from the hill to the steeple to the tower in the mist.

  ‘Probably all nonsense,’ Tim Purefoy said, ‘but at sunset you can feel you own the city. Come and have some coffee, my friend.’

  Lol shook himself.

  The farmhouse was three-storeyed, ruggedly rendered in white. With lots of haphazard, irregular mullioned windows, it looked as old as the hill itself. How could Moon live out in that sunken, tree-smothered barn, knowing her own family had lost this house, and this view?

  ‘Anna!’ Tim Purefoy shouldered open the door of a wooden lean-to porch on the side of the house. ‘Coffee, darling!’ He held open the door for Lol. ‘Come in, come in. Don’t worry about the boots. It’s a flagged floor, and the place is a damn mess this morning, anyway.’

  Globular hanging lights were switched on in the vast, farmhouse kitchen. It was golden with antique pine, and had an old cream-coloured double-oven Aga which seemed actually to be putting heat into the room. Like a furnace, in fact. Lol felt almost oppressed by the sudden warmth.

  ‘One second…’ The woman kneeling at the stove wore jeans and a sackcloth-coloured apron tied over a long rainbow sweater. Her fair hair was efficiently bound up in a yellow silk scarf.

  ‘My wife, Anna.’ Tim Purefoy pulled off his cap, freeing springy white-blond curls. ‘Darling, this chap’s a friend of Katherine – who seems to have gone walkabout in the woods again.’

  ‘Oh gosh. Not untypical, though.’ Anna Purefoy closed an oven door, sprang up, patting floury hands on her apron. ‘I’m making bread. One can buy a marvellous loaf at any one of a half-dozen places in town, but one somehow feels obliged, living in a house this old. Do you know what I mean?’

  Lol nodded. ‘Responsibility to the ancestors.’

  ‘My God,’ said Tim. ‘This chap does know Katherine.’

  ‘It’s good to think someone does.’ Anna pulled out chairs from under a refectory table. Concern put lines into her face. She was perhaps fifteen years older than she’d first appeared.

  ‘Don’t interfere, darling!’ said Tim with affection. ‘You know what we said about interfering. My wife’s lost unless she can find someone to worry about.’

  ‘There’s a loaf in here for Katherine,’ said Anna. ‘Left to herself, she’d go days without food.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense, Anna!’

  His wife glared at him. ‘Tim, I have been in her kitchen and found the refrigerator absolutely bare, while the girl sits there with all her books and her maps and her notes. Fascinating, what she’s doing, of course, and we’ve learned a lot by helping her, but she’s so obsessive, isn’t she? I feel enormously guilty.’

  ‘She thinks we twisted her arm to take on the barn.’ Tim pulled off his Barbour, revealing a thick and costly cowboy shirt and a silk cravat. ‘In fact, she virtually twisted ours.’ He focused narrowed eyes on Lol. ‘You know the history, I suppose.’

  Lol nodded warily. ‘I, er, know about her father.’

  ‘Oooh.’ Anna hugged herself with a shiver.

  ‘Speaking personally,’ Tim said, ‘I wouldn’t want to live within a hundred miles of here under those particular circumstances – but there we are. Telephone’s in the hall. I say, do take off your coat, so you won’t feel it so cold when you go outside again.’

  From the square oak-pillared hall, Lol called the shop and got no answer. Then he called Denny at home.

  Denny said angrily, ‘Gone? How can she be gone?’

  ‘So you haven’t seen her? I came to pick her up here—’

  ‘What you mean, came to pick her up?’

  Lol said awkwardly, ‘Denny, there’s… there’s nothing happening between Moon and me. There never has been.’

  Denny was quiet for a few seconds, then he said, ‘I don’t believe this. You gay, Laurence?’

/>   ‘No.’

  ‘Then what the fuck…? I can’t… She sometimes goes in to see the idiots next door… at the farm.’

  ‘That’s where I’m calling from, and they haven’t seen her, either. They say she sometimes goes out for walks, but I can’t see any footprints.’

  ‘I’m coming over,’ Denny said. ‘Fucking stay there.’

  Lol went back outside with both Purefoys.

  ‘You, er… you still own the barn, presumably?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Anna said. ‘Katherine’s indicated several times that she’d like to buy it, but we’re not awfully happy about that idea. It is very near to the house, and suppose she… Well, suppose she had a change of heart or had to sell suddenly?’

  Meaning, Lol guessed, suppose she was removed by men in white coats.

  ‘Anyone could buy it then, couldn’t they?’ Tim said. ‘And it’s awfully close to our house.’

  ‘So you still have keys, presumably.’

  ‘Well, we do. But we’d never dream of going in without permission. As I keep telling Anna, it’s not our place to interfere. Or to be… over curious. That is, we try not to notice what we’re not supposed to notice.’

  What had Moon been doing?

  Lol wondered how long the Purefoys themselves would stay here, once they’d got used to that view, and over the novelty of homemade bread. Houses like this, previously occupied by the same family for centuries, might then change hands half a dozen times in the following twenty years. It was hard to settle under the weight of someone else’s tradition.

  And costly, too. You bought a country residence for what seemed like peanuts compared with London, and then you found out how much you had to spend just to keep it standing. Moon must have been a gift to them. They’d probably run out of money halfway through converting the barn, and bodged the rest very quickly once she came on the scene.