Midwinter of the Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  Sophie was tending to the woman, the contents of her large handbag emptied out on the pew, the woman’s head tilted back – Sophie dabbing her nose and lips with a wet pad, the woman struggling to say how sorry she was, what a time for a nosebleed to happen.

  ‘She has them now and then,’ a bulky grey-haired man was explaining in a low, embarrassed voice to nobody in particular. ‘Not on this scale, I have to say. It’s nerves, I suppose. It’ll stop in a minute.’

  Merrily said sharply, ‘Nerves?’

  ‘Oh,’ he mumbled, ‘mother of the Boy Bishop, all that. Stressful time all round.’

  ‘You’re Dick Lyden?’

  ‘Yes, I am. Look, can’t you leave the cleaning-up until after the service. Nobody’s going to step in it.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m worried about, Mr Lyden. This is his mother’s blood?’ She was talking to herself, searching for the significance of this.

  ‘I don’t want the boy to see the fuss.’ Dick Lyden pulled out a white handkerchief and began to mop his wife’s splashes from his shoes. ‘He’s temperamental, you see.’

  * * *

  Someone had given James Lyden one of the votive candles from near where the shrine had stood, and he waited there while they pushed back the partition screen.

  ‘Not how we’d like it to be,’ Jane heard this big minister with the bushy beard say. ‘Still, I’m sure St Thomas would understand.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ James Lyden said, like he couldn’t give a toss one way or the other.

  There was no sign of Rowenna.

  Pressed into the side of one of the pointed arches screening off the transept, no more than six yards away from them, Jane saw it all as the bearded minister held open the partition door to the sundered tomb.

  Only the minister and the Boy Bishop went up to the stones – as though it was not just stone slabs in there, but Cantilupe’s mummified body. The two candle-bearing boys in white tunics waited either side of the door, like sentries. One of them, a stocky shock-haired guy, saw Jane and raised a friendly eyebrow. She’d never seen him before and pretended she hadn’t noticed.

  The bearded minister stood before one of the side-panels with those mutilated figures of knights on it – their faces obliterated like someone had attacked them centuries ago with a hammer and a stone-chisel, and a lot of hatred.

  The minister crossed his hands over his stomach, gazed down with closed eyes. He saw nothing.

  ‘Almighty God,’ he said, ‘let us this night remember Your servant, Thomas, guardian of this cathedral church, defender of the weak, healer of the sick, friend to the poor, who well understood the action of Our Lord when His disciples asked of Him: which is the greatest in the Kingdom of God and He shewed to them a child and set him in the midst of them.’

  Jane saw James Lyden’s full lips twist into a sour and superior sneer.

  The minister said, ‘Father, we ask that the humility demonstrated by Thomas Cantilupe throughout his time as bishop here might be shared this night and always by your servant James.’

  ‘No chance,’ Jane breathed grimly, and the shock-haired boy must have seen the expression on her face, because he grinned.

  ‘It is to our shame,’ the minister went on, ‘that Thomas’s shrine, this cathedral’s most sacred jewel, should be in pieces, but we know that James will return here when it is once again whole.’

  Wouldn’t put money on it. This time Jane looked down at her shoes, and kept her mouth shut.

  Which was more than James did when he put down his candle on a mason’s bench, and bent reverently to kiss the stone. Jane reckoned he must have spent some while dredging up this disgusting, venomous wedge of thick saliva.

  When his face came up smiling, she felt sick. She also felt something strange and piercingly frightening: an unmistakable awareness, in her stomach, of the nearness of evil. She gasped, because it weakened her, her legs felt numb, and she wanted to be away from here, but was not sure she could move. She felt herself sinking into the stone of the arch. She felt soiled and corrupted, not so much by what she’d seen but by what she realized it meant, and she groped for the words she’d intoned with all the sincerity of a budgie – while Mum held her hands – before the altar at Ledwardine.

  Christ be with us, Christ within us.

  And then the electric lights went out.

  ‘Look, darling,’ he said, ‘it’s Mr Robinson. You remember Mr Robinson.’

  Tim Purefoy held a large glass of red wine close to the tablecloth white of his surplice.

  Anna wore a simple black shift, quite low-cut. She was a beautiful woman; she threw off a sensual charge like a miasma. Like an aura, Lol supposed.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I thought, one day, there would be somebody. I really didn’t think it would be you.’

  ‘The brother, perhaps.’ Tim lowered himself, with a grateful sigh, into the chair. ‘All rage and bombast, amounting, in the end, to very little – like most of them.’

  ‘Or the exorcist,’ Anna said, ‘Jane’s mother. I did so want to meet her before we moved on.’

  ‘But not this little chap here. No, indeed. Hidden depths, do you think?’ A bar of pewtery moonlight cut through the high window, reaching almost to the top of Tim Purefoy’s pale curls. He held up a dark bottle without a label. ‘Glass of wine, old son?’

  ‘No thanks,’ Lol said tightly. ‘I… seem to be interrupting something.’ Everything he said seemed to emerge slowly, the way words sometimes did in dreams, as though the breath which carried them had to tunnel its way through the atmosphere.

  ‘Not at all.’ Tim Purefoy took a long, unhurried sip of wine. ‘It’s finished now. It’s done. We’re glad to have the company, aren’t we, darling?’

  ‘Done?’

  ‘Ah, now, Mr Robinson…’ Tim put down his glass then used both hands to pull the white surplice over his head, letting it fall in a heap to the flags. ‘You must have some idea of what we’re about, or you wouldn’t be here.’

  Anna Purefoy brought Lol a chair and stood in front of him until he sat down – like he was going to be executed, sacrificed. Anna looked young and fit and energized, as if she’d just had sex. She must, he thought, be about sixty, however. ‘Sure you won’t have a glass of wine?’

  Before you die?

  ‘Communion wine?’ Lol said.

  Tim Purefoy laughed. ‘With a tincture of bat’s blood.’

  ‘It’s our own plum wine, silly.’ Anna took the bottle from her husband and held it out to Lol. ‘See? You really shouldn’t believe everything you read about people like us.’

  Lol remembered her patting floury hands on her apron. 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.

  He was almost disarmed by the ordinariness of it, the civility, the domesticity: candles like these, in holders like these, available in all good branches of Habitat. He blinked and forced himself to remember Katherine Moon congealing in her bath of blood – glancing across towards the bathroom door, holding the image of the dead, grinning Moon pickled like red cabbage. In that room over there, beyond those stairs. Behind that door.

  Visualization, Athena White had said. Willpower.

  ‘Thank you.’ Lol accepted the stoppered wine bottle from Anna. He held it up for a moment before grasping it by the neck and smashing it into the stone fireplace. He felt the sting of glass-shards as the fire hissed in rage. Rivers of wine and blood ran down his wrist. And down over the hanging photograph of Moon.

  ‘Now, tell me what you did to her,’ Lol whispered.

  The choir faded into trails of unconducted melody.

  ‘Please remain in your seats.’ The Bishop’s voice, crisply from the speakers. ‘We appear to have a power failure, but we’re doing all we—’ And then the PA system cut out.

  Merrily spotted Mick in his mitre, by candlelight amid jumping shadows, before the candles began to go out, one by one, the air laden with the odour of
cooling wax, until there was only the oval of light on the corona, like a Catherine wheel over the central altar – the last holy outpost.

  She pulled the cross from under her cloak, standing close to the pool of blood on the tiles, though she couldn’t see it now. A baby began to cry.

  She looked across the aisle and the pews, towards the main door, to where the big black stove should have been jetting red, and saw nothing. The stove was out, too. The Cathedral gone dark – gone cold.

  ‘Jesus,’ – Merrily feeling the fear like a ball of lead in her solar plexus – ‘may all that is You flow into me.’

  ‘James?’ the bearded minister called out. ‘Are you there?’

  Jane stepped out from the archway and heard the swish of heavy robes as the Boy Bishop brushed past her in the dark. The candles held by the two attendants, the sentries, were also out. Only one small flame glowed – the two-inch votive candle given to James Lyden, now lying on the mason’s bench. Jane ran and snatched it up, hid the flame behind her hand, and moved out into the transept, listening for the swish of the robes.

  Lyden was going somewhere, being taken somewhere, escorted.

  She heard him again – his voice this time. ‘Yeah, OK.’ She followed quietly, though maybe not quietly enough, wishing she had her trainers on instead of her stupid best shoes.

  She could see him now – a black, mitred silhouette against the wan light from the huge diamond-paned gothic windows in the nave.

  Moonlight. Shadows of people, unmoving. Jane heard anxious whispers and a baby’s cry mingling into a vast soup of echoes. Where was Mum? Where was Mum with the cross? Why wasn’t she rushing for the pulpit, because, Christ, if there was a time for an exorcism, a time for the soul police to make like an armed response unit, this was it.

  She could no longer see the mitred silhouette. Where had he gone, the sneering bastard who’d spat on the saint’s tomb, and brought darkness? Although, of course, she knew it hadn’t really happened like that. Somebody had hit a big fusebox somewhere. It was all coincidence, theatrics.

  Jane stumbled, stepped into space, groping for stone, nearly dropping her stub of a candle. Hearing quick footsteps receding ahead of her.

  Steps. Stone steps going down.

  The crypt? The Boy Bishop was going into the crypt.

  Jane had never been down there, although it was open to visitors. Mum had seen it. Mum said it was no big deal. No, there weren’t stacks of old coffins, nothing like that. Tombs at one end, effigies, but not as many as you might expect. It was just a bare stone cellar really, and not as big as you’d imagine.

  Jane stayed where she was at the top of the steps.

  Afraid, actually.

  Admit it: afraid of being down there with Rowenna’s creepy boyfriend in his medieval robes, afraid of what slimeball stuff she might see him doing. The guy was a shit. Just like Danny Gittoes had broken into Ledwardine Church for Rowenna, James Lyden had spat on the tomb of the saint for her. Another sex-slave to Rowenna, who in turn was a friend of Angela. How long had Rowenna known Angela?

  Aware of this long slime-trail of evil unravelling before her, Jane edged down two steps, listening hard.

  Nothing.

  She raised the stub of votive candle in its little metal holder. Perhaps she held the light of St Thomas, the guardian.

  Could she believe that?

  What did it matter? Jane shrugged helplessly to herself and went down into the crypt.

  51

  Sacrilege

  ‘BLOOD,’ LOL SAID. ‘I’ve been learning all about blood.’

  Feeling – God help him – the energy of it.

  It had been the right thing to do. Another couple of minutes and the Purefoys would have had him apologizing for disturbing their religious observance.

  Tim scowled. ‘Mr Robinson, there are several ways we could react to your outburst of juvenile violence. The simplest would be to call the police.’

  ‘Do it,’ Lol said.

  ‘If you think we would have any explaining to do,’ Anna said, ‘you’re quite wrong. We have an interest in ritual magic. It’s entirely legal.’

  ‘I am an ordained priest of God,’ Tim said. ‘My God is the God of Abraham and Moses and Solomon, the God who rewards knowledge and learning; the God who shows us strength, who accepts that plague and pestilence have their roles…’

  ‘Stop dressing it up.’

  ‘… the God to whom Satan was a – an albeit occasionally troublesome – serving angel. Calling me a Satanist, as I suspect you were about to do, is therefore, something of an insult. For which’ – Tim Purefoy waved a hand – ‘I excuse you, because it was said in ignorance.’

  ‘We were both brought up in the Christian tradition,’ Anna interrupted. ‘It took us a while to realize that Christianity was introduced primarily as a constraint on human potential, which has to be removed if we are to survive and progress.’

  ‘Let’s say it’s simply run its course,’ Tim added, with the fervour of the converted. ‘The Church has no energy left; it’s riddled with greed and corruption. In this country alone, it’s sitting on billions of pounds which could be put to more sensible use.’

  ‘Even if we didn’t lift a finger, it would destroy itself within the next fifty years. But the signs are there in the sky – too many to be ignored. We cannot ignore signs.’

  ‘The signs are what brought us here to Hereford,’ Tim said. ‘But I don’t think you want to know about that. I think you want to know about the death of Katherine Moon. I think you’re here for reassurance that there was nothing you could have done to save her, am I right?’

  ‘And we’re happy to give you that.’ Anna smiled and reached across the firelight for his bloodied hand. Her fingers were slim and cool.

  George Curtiss had taken charge, talking to vergers, organizing people by sporadic candlelight, shouting from the pulpit, explaining.

  As though he could.

  Merrily noticed that candles had to be repeatedly relit; it was like last night, when she and Huw were at the saint’s tomb. She stumbled past the central altar – only three candles left alight on the corona – looking around for Jane and the Bishop.

  She found Mick Hunter eventually in the deep seclusion of his throne beyond the choir-stalls. The throne was of dark oak, many pinnacled, itself a miniature cathedral. He came out to join her, having removed the mitre. His sigh was like an audible scowl.

  ‘Merrily, of all the people I could do without in this situation…’

  ‘You really… really have to let me do it, Mick.’ Keeping her voice low and steady. ‘You can look away, you can grit your teeth – but you have to let me do it.’

  ‘Do it?’

  ‘You know exactly what I mean. You’ve got darkness and cold and spilt blood in your Cathedral. What you must do now is wind up the service, get the congregation out of here, lock the doors, and just… just let me do it.’

  He stared down at her and, although it was too dark to see his face, she sensed his dismay and disbelief.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘why don’t you ask God? Why don’t you go and kneel down quietly in front of your high altar and ask Him? Ask Him if He’s happy about this?’

  The Bishop didn’t move. There were just the two of them here in the holiest place. She dropped the wooden cross and bent to pick it up.

  ‘I made a mistake, didn’t I?’ Mick Hunter said. ‘I made a big mistake with you.’

  She straightened up. ‘Looks like you did.’

  ‘Do you remember what I said to you last night when you asked me if I wanted your resignation from the post of Deliverance Consultant?’

  ‘You told me to get a good night’s sleep and forget about it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Put it in writing for me tomorrow.’

  ‘Mick—’

  ‘Bishop,’ he said, ‘I think.’

  Jane heard him breathing, so she knew ro
ughly where he was – like, somewhere in the crypt, because the breathing filled the whole, intimidating blackness of it. She had her coat open and the candle cupped in her hand inside. She caught a finger in the flame and nearly yelped.

  Christ be with me, she heard inside her head. In Mum’s voice. Mum be with me – that might be more use!

  Just words, like a mantra – words to repeat and hold on to, to try and shout down your fear, like those poor, doomed soldiers in the First World War singing in the trenches. Christ within me.

  She walked towards the sound of breathing, which came quicker now, with a snorting and a snuffling. Gross. What was this? Maybe she should get back up the steps and shout for help. But there was a power cut; and by the time she could get someone with a lamp down here, it would be over, whatever it was. Like she couldn’t guess.

  She shouted, ‘Freeze!’

  Bringing the candle out from under her coat, she held it as high as she could reach.

  A hundred quaking shadows broke out over the crypt, and James Lyden’s eyes opened wide in shock, his mouth agape.

  ‘Oh!’ Jane recoiled in disgust.

  There he was, the Boy Bishop, with one gaitered leg on a long-dead woman’s stone face. His chasuble was tented over Rowenna, now emerging – who for just a moment looked so gratifyingly ridiculous on her knees that Jane laughed out loud.

  ‘You total slimeballs!’

  But she was nervous, realizing this wasn’t just some irreverent stunt – the Boy Bishop in full regalia, except presumably for his underpants. This was an act of deliberate sacrilege. It was meant to have an unholy resonance.

  Get out of here!

  Jane turned and made a dash for the steps.

  But crashed into a wall. In the dark you quickly lost any sense of direction.

  When she turned back, Rowenna was already between her and the steps leading out. Suddenly James’s arms encircled her from behind, his breath pumping against her neck.