by Phil Rickman
Merrily paused, looking down into the central aisle, meeting nobody’s eyes. She had some lights on, high in the rafters over the nave, and a couple of spots. Say it.
‘Last week, I was virtually accused of being one.’
A pagan.
Better if there’d been more people to hear it, but the Sunday before Christmas you rarely got many in church. And it would get around — these things always did.
Secretly standing on a hassock, Merrily gripped the sides of a high Gothic pulpit that was too big for her. Never really liked the pulpit. A glorified play-fort.
She’d told them there were things that needed saying about Coleman’s Meadow. What it meant for the village.
About thirty-five punters; could be worse with Sunday opening, all those last-minute presents to buy. Which reminded her, with a jolt, that she’d need to get over to Knights Frome to pick up the Boswell guitar. Could she fit that in before tonight’s meditation?
No — phew — it was OK. No Sunday evening meditation this week; it was happening on Christmas Eve instead. Tomorrow. God. The medieval sandstone walls seemed to close together under the lights, crushing her like a moth.
She closed her eyes, drew a breath. The noise in the windows was like a battering of arrows. The relentless thuggery of the rain had awoken her well before the sky was diluted into daylight, so vicious you expected to find craters in the road. She raised her voice against it. ‘Most of us will be aware of the archaeologists who started work yesterday. They could even be working this morning — I don’t think I see any of them here.’
Just as well, perhaps.
Last night had been almost unprecedented. Jane looking cowed, hunted. Not even angry, just… dulled and unreachable. From the moment they’d got back Eirion had kept looking at Merrily, his eyes clouded with worry, wide with mute appeal: do something.
In the end, Lol had created an opening, announcing he’d had an unexpected cheque from album sales in Germany. Enough to buy them all dinner at the Black Swan.
Jane had looked immediately panicked, said she was, like, really tired? Merrily, throwing Lol a glance, had said why didn’t he and Eirion go to the Swan, talk music and stuff? Eirion having met Lol before he’d even known Jane, back when he was in a schoolboy rock band with the son of Lol’s psychotherapist friend Dick Lyden. Merrily thinking that if she didn’t get the full facts out of Jane, Lol would at least hear it from Eirion.
When they’d gone she’d built up the fire in the parlour, and they’d sat for two hours going over the implications.
‘The bottom line,’ Merrily told Lol on the phone, after midnight, ‘is that this has virtually destroyed archaeology for her. It’s something she’s never going to forget — or be allowed to. And if you take away the possibility of some ancient magic in the distant past and all you’re left with is…’
‘Bits of pottery and old bones,’ Lol said. ‘Not enough for Jane.’
‘I can’t believe he could do that to her.’
She’d been on the mobile in her bedroom, Eirion and Jane in their separate beds a floor apart. Presumably.
‘She was in the way,’ Lol said. ‘He’d had a bad morning, and Jane was in the way.’
‘And the dowser he threatened to impale on his own rods?’
‘Just warming up. Jane tell you how relaxed he was afterwards, when he’d turned it around?’
‘And that tells you what? As a psychotherapist.’
‘Failed psychotherapist. It may, of course, be nothing to do with psychology, just cold professionalism. It’s the Trench One format, isn’t it, now? It’s had to become one of those programmes founded on friction, confrontation.’
‘Cruelty.’
‘But the victims have to look like they deserve it. I’m guessing Blore had been encouraging Jane to get carried away with her own discovery, so she’d come over as a bit… you know, precocious, full of herself. Get the audience on Blore’s side before he…’
‘Takes her down?’
‘With a beautifully timed joke. At the end of a sequence leaving him looking witty and sharp. Couldn’t’ve been better with a script.’
‘You think maybe there was a script?’
‘Probably nothing that formal, but the way Eirion told it, it just struck me that the student had been set up as a feed. Obviously, you’d never prove that. And if you could… so what? It’s Blore’s job.’
‘To make an eighteen-year-old girl feel two feet high?’
‘I had to stop Eirion going for him in the pub.’
‘Blore was there?’
Merrily supposed that was why Jane hadn’t wanted to go near the Swan.
‘Mr Conviviality,’ Lol said. ‘Buying nearly as many drinks as he consumed. Eirion wanted to threaten him with bad publicity. It wouldn’t’ve helped. Eirion’s not a journalist yet. Blore would’ve swatted him like a wasp.’
‘You think there’s anything we can do to stop it going out?’
‘Probably not by appealing to his sense of moral decency. He’s not going to throw away five minutes of great telly.’
‘No.’
The worst thing about this was that Jane would feel she couldn’t go back to Coleman’s Meadow as long as Blore and his crew were there. So she probably wouldn’t see the stones raised. Her stones.
It had taken Merrily another hour and a half to get to sleep, and then the rain had awoken her twice before she’d given up, struggled into her robe and gone down to make tea before the dawn had arrived like industrial smoke, and the rain had really set in.
Enough of the congregation had been at the parish meeting and knew this already, but it bore repeating.
‘Coleman’s Meadow,’ Merrily said, ‘was already seen as quite a controversial issue because the archaeology could, if it was significant enough, prevent housing development in the village. But there are other possible housing sites, so that’s not so vitally important.’
Except to the people who knew that only full development of Coleman’s Meadow could swiftly open the way for the kind of serious, large-scale expansion that would very soon become unstoppable. A lot of money at stake here, and she was tempted to talk about that… but, although Lyndon Pierce wasn’t here, it would get back to him. And his lawyers.
‘The other reason for controversy is that what’s being uncovered is a pagan site. Again, not that many people would see this as a problem.’ Who, in fact, apart from Shirley West? She didn’t look at Shirley in the corner of a pew halfway down the nave in her padded raincoat, but she could feel Shirley looking at her. A public figure now, the postmistress, status.
‘But, because this is basically a religious issue, I suppose I should be the one to address it.’
Focusing on James Bull-Davies because he wasn’t looking at her. James was in the old Bull family pew, an elbow on the prayer-book rack, head lowered into forked forefingers, listening. Two rows behind him, Jim and Brenda Prosser glanced at one another.
Merrily had called in at the shop just before eight, on the way to Holy Communion, and Jim had shown her the Sunday paper spreads.
ROAD-RAGE, PAGAN-STYLE.
The Sunday Telegraph was the only paper to connect the Dinedor Serpent with the Tara Hill row in Ireland, quoting the poet Seamus Heaney and other luminaries on the way that determinedly secular governments, fuelled by fat bags of Euro-loot, were happy to lay tarmac over sacred ground.
In Hereford, the chairperson of the Save the Serpent group was quoted as saying, They’re cutting the ancient umbilical between Hereford and its mother hill.
Lower down, a local landowner said, with some bitterness, If this road was in danger of going through a mosque we’d be diverting it without a second thought.
But had Clem Ayling actually been killed because of his ridiculing of the Serpent? The Telegraph feature writer, maintaining his distance and a healthy irony, had discovered a woman called Sara Starkey, described as a Wiccan High Priestess. Sara, whom Merrily had never encountered, hadn’t held back.
The Serpent was sanctified to the Old Ones. I’ve walked there and, in a psychic state, seen ceremonies of night and fire. I’ve seen a torchlight procession led by Druid priests, clad all in white, moving slowly down the hill towards the river, where the moon’s reflection swims, following the coils of the Serpent. I’ve felt the anger and the sorrow resounding down the ages, and I’m telling you that this road, if it goes ahead, will be subject to forces which no surveyor can control.
Already, one man has been badly injured felling trees on the site. On any road that goes through there, cars and lorries will go wildly out of control, and there’ll be serious accidents. Drivers will be slamming on the brakes for human shapes that do not exist… in their world.
Merrily had smiled. Got that one right, then.
But it was interesting, the way the pagan aspect had been emphasised. You’d think nobody else cared. But even Jane’s database suggested that the majority of the Coleman’s Meadow protesters were people with no obvious spiritual affiliation, simply an interest in prehistory and heritage, and the Dinedor Serpent campaigners were likely to be even more orthodox. However, somebody — very probably Annie Howe, via the police press office — had inflated the religious angle. Hence yesterday’s headlines about pagan nutters.
The Telegraph had a picture of Sara, a sharp-faced middle-aged woman with long straight hair standing on the earthen ramparts of Dinedor hill fort.
I’m speaking in sorrow, but from experience. When we ignore the spiritual traditions of the ancestors, in full awareness of what we are doing, we deserve all we get. However, the idea that a Wiccan or a follower of any other earth-related spiritual path would commit a murder is proof only that the accusers know nothing of the pagan way.
Retribution they’d leave to the gods.
Before Lol and Eirion came back from the pub, Merrily had asked Jane about the worst the cops might find on the Coleman’s Meadow database.
‘Do you want me to tell the media that the police took away the computer? I’m prepared to do that. They haven’t brought it back, have they?’
‘No way,’ Jane had said. ‘That would just make you look like…’ the kid had found the first and last smile of the night ‘… one of us.’
It wasn’t going to be Stonehenge, Merrily said, but even a few modest standing stones re-erected after many centuries — so many centuries that they’d vanished from recorded history — would inevitably be a presence in the village.
‘Even if they’re not as high as me, we’re looking at a significant ancient monument. So was this a pagan monument, buried because it had been seen as anti-Christian? Or because this was a nice flat field and the stones were getting in the way of somebody’s plough? OK, let’s deal with pagan. What do we mean by pagan?’
Quick sweep of the congregation. No significant reaction. Shirley West was no longer looking at her. Shirley was hunched, her head bowed, still as an obelisk.
‘The dictionary tells us — just to be sure, I looked it up this morning — that the word comes from the Latin, paganus, meaning a rustic or peasant. Meaning ordinary people. Like the people who lived here, in this community, before the time of Jesus. Pre-Christian. And what does that mean? Means they didn’t have the benefit of having known about Jesus Christ, who introduced the human race to a new dimension of love, a new understanding of what love can mean. This was sophisticated stuff, and maybe their society wasn’t ready for it.’ Merrily stood on tiptoe on the hidden hassock, leaned over the battlements of the play-fort.
‘But does that mean they were bad people who lived in darkness and sin, with no possibility of eternal life? I don’t think so. I look at where these stones were positioned, possibly to catch the first rays of the midsummer sun when it rose over Cole Hill. These were people who had no doctrine to follow, no commandments. Only their feelings. And their feelings told them to reach for the light. And that’s good enough for me.’
She looked across at the stained-glass window of Eve with the apple, still, unfortunately, brown and unlustred. Bloody rain.
‘I’m not inclined to worry about pagans, past or present. They at least represent some kind of spirituality. The Bronze Age people were aware of higher forces, which they responded to. These were the people who first developed this community, then kept it going, fed it, tended livestock, planted the first orchards… created what our old friend Lucy Devenish, taking her cue from the poet Thomas Traherne, used to call the Orb.’
She looked up at the apple shapes outlined in the filigree of the rood screen.
‘What did Lucy mean by that? I think she was talking about the idea of Ledwardine as a living organism sustained by an energy and an intelligence beyond ours. Don’t know about you, but I’d tend to call that God.’
Down at the bottom of the nave, the latch went up on the main door, with a clank, and rain swept in, bringing with it Gomer Parry in his old gabardine mac that was soaked through and tied at the waist with baler twine. Gomer shut the door behind him, took off his flat cap, drips falling onto the worn skull indented into the memorial stone of John Jenkyn, d. seventeen hundred and something. Gomer and the stone spotlit from above.
‘All I know for certain,’ Merrily said, ‘is that this — this church — became and remains the centre of the Ledwardine orb. So I’d say let’s do it. Let’s raise the stones, because they’re about the dawning of spirituality in Ledwardine — that first reaching for the light. I think they can only strengthen us.’
She looked down at the sermon pad, which she hadn’t consulted once. She saw Shirley West stand up, as grey and still as the pillars.
‘Can we sing number fourteen in your carol book. “In the Bleak Midwinter”. Softly wind made—’
‘You are disgusting.’
Shirley’s forefinger quivering, before she turned and went scuttling down the aisle, pushing past Gomer to get to the door, and Edna Huws hit the opening chords.
Gomer shambled up the aisle as Merrily came down from the pulpit. They met at the bottom of the chancel steps.
‘Quick word, vicar,’ Gomer said under some ragged, nervy singing. ‘Only I needs to get back, see.’
In the old days, the bells would have been rung.
Clanging down the valley, peeling through the rain, to be echoed by the bells of Weobley and Dilwyn and Pembridge and Eardisland. A chain of warning, ley lines of alarm spearing across the county.
Merrily went back into the pulpit. Let them finish. Stay calm. James Bull-Davies had seen Gomer. He was looking watchful, not singing. An Army man.
In the old days, the Bulls would have known what to do.
Shirley West’s outburst… in a couple of minutes even that would be forgotten.
Merrily let the old carol soak away into the sandstone.
‘Erm… something you should all know.’
There needed to be a prayer, but would anyone bother to stay for it?
36
Out
Jane stood near the top of Church Street, on the edge of the cobbles, and watched him coming out.
There was this huge, almost peaceful sense of… relief? Beyond the amplified drumming of the rain on the hood of her parka, everything was awesomely silent.
An almost religious hush. A transformation.
It was as if he’d known this had always belonged to him and now, having repossessed it, was turning it into a different place: a drowned dreamscape, an alternative village, Ledwardine-on-Sea.
The village-hall car park was like a harbour, litter bins three-parts submerged like lobster pots. A couple of guys were dumping sandbags around the hall’s entrance, Uncle Ted in fisherman’s waders quietly directing operations, the swollen scene doused in shades of grey and brown.
Jane, at first, was stunned and then dismayed.
It had all happened within a couple of hours… on the first morning when self-pity had sapped her will to go down at first light and talk to the river.
Even last night with Eirion had just been an excu
se to get out of the house; there’d been no contact. Guilt — it was ridiculous but it was there. She’d released something huge, by default. Broken off contact, and now he was out.
Like he’d come looking for her.
She said to Eirion, ‘I suppose you’ve seen all this before?’
‘Common enough in the Valleys, Jane.’
‘Not here.’
OK, it wasn’t exactly a tsunami, and the water hadn’t reached any houses yet, and you could still just about see where the river ended and the flooding began. But it was scary. You could smell it, too, she was sure you could smell it. Something dank. The river had always looked clean; this wasn’t.
No traffic noise — that explained the hush. No motorists attempting to leave the village, from the south anyway. Well, they couldn’t. Across the street Lol had appeared in his doorway, casual, hands in the pockets of his jeans. Raising a hand to Jane and Eirion as an elderly guy Jane didn’t recognise started bawling at him through the rain.
‘Anybody informed the authorities?’
‘Probably, but they could be overstretched,’ Lol said. ‘If it’s happening here, it’s happening all over the county.’
‘But it’s not supposed to happen here.’ The man was struggling with an umbrella. ‘We were formally assured it never happened here. We’ve come down for Christmas, brought everything… wine, turkey…’
One of the second-homers, who’d pushed up house prices. Jane’s sympathy dissipating.
‘How soon before it goes down again?’ the man said, outraged. ‘We can’t afford to get stranded here.’
‘Hard to say,’ Lol told him, ‘as it’s never happened before. But as long as you can get to the bypass, you’re—’
The rest of it was mangled under the grinding clatter and rumble of the first vehicle coming through the new Church Street pond, maybe the only one that could.
Jane went cold, thinking about what the man driving it had said the other night when they were on the bridge.
