The Smile of a Ghost mw-7

by Phil Rickman

  How the hell had she got into this?

  She supposed the paper bag on the passenger seat answered that question. She picked it up and shook out the book: Everyday Life in the Middle Ages, in Pictures. What had a boy as clued-up as Robbie Walsh wanted with a picture book anyway?

  She laid it on the passenger seat and flicked through it, expecting cartoon-like artist’s impressions; in fact, most of the illustrations seemed to be from old engravings, stained glass, carvings on tombs. This made more sense — he would have wanted as authentic an illustration as possible of what life in the Middle Ages had been like. It had obviously been important to him, as he’d walked these streets, to see through medieval eyes.

  Why had that been so important? Why had an evidently personable adolescent boy needed to retreat through time? What had made the present so unbearable?

  She leafed through the book — the reason she’d bought it, for £7.99 — for where the page had been ripped out. Just one missing page, and the facing one had been about… Trial by Ordeal? Was that it? She turned to the chapter headed ‘Medieval Misdeeds and Retribution’.

  Page ninety-one had a reproduction of a sombre woodcut, depicting a man hanging from a gibbet, his head bowed over a tightened noose. Several people were gathered around, watching. Some appeared to be smiling.

  Merrily stared at it, recalling how the page had been quite carefully removed from Robbie’s copy. The reverse, page ninety-two, had a black and white photograph of the reconstruction of a medieval wooden gibbet from some interpretive museum. Immediately, she was hearing Bernie Dunmore telling her how Bell Pepper might have been dealt with in times gone by on Gallows Hill, still preserved as open space in Ludlow.

  Unfortunately, I think our old execution site is underneath Plascarreg. Don’t you dare make anything of that.

  She wasn’t about to; it seemed unlikely to be relevant, but it was worth mentioning, and so she called Mumford.

  No answer. She rang the Bishop, managed to get him at home. He even seemed relieved to hear her.

  ‘Woke up in the night, deeply troubled about all this, Merrily. Wondering what I’d let you in for. Came out in a sweat — couldn’t get a handle on what I was expecting you to resolve. Just some great amorphous wrongness. Ludicrous.’

  ‘ “A great amorphous wrongness.” I do like talking to an experienced metaphysician.’

  ‘Pack it in and come home. It was stupid of me to even—’

  ‘We can’t disappoint Dennis Beckett now, Bernie. Erm… something that keeps coming up: The Palmers’ Guild. What’s that about?’

  ‘In what context?’

  ‘You remember the Mayor told us Mrs Pepper was setting up a trust to help conserve old buildings in Ludlow? She’s apparently named it after The Palmers’ Guild, which may have built the original house on the site where she’s living.’

  ‘There’s a window in the church — I’m not an expert on this, Merrily, but you can’t operate in Ludlow without coming across the Guild. Sometimes spelt “Gild” without the “u”, in the old way. They were probably the original Ludlow conservationists — kept the church standing, anyway. Started, I think, in the thirteenth century when a great deal of wealth in the town was coming out of the wool industry. Guilds conferred a kind of pseudo-aristocratic social standing on rich businessmen.’

  ‘They invested in property.’

  ‘A couple of hundred properties at one time. Some of the income was used for the benefit of members who had fallen on hard times. It was a cooperative movement.’

  ‘But the religious side of it—’

  ‘Right. The Palmers’ window in St Laurence’s has eight stained-glass panels depicting what we can only think of as a legend put about to give the Palmers some authenticity. It was said that, in the eleventh century, pilgrims from Ludlow had brought back a ring from St John the Evangelist which they presented to the King of England at the time, Edward the Confessor. That’s what the window illustrates. It’s probably a fabrication.’

  ‘On which basis the Guild appointed priests, right?’

  ‘To devote their prayers to speeding its deceased members out of purgatory. A medieval conceit, difficult for us to comprehend, but it’s clear that this was the main function of the Guild. Started out employing three chaplains, who also served the parish church, but there were as many as eight in the fifteenth century, catering to the whims of four thousand Guild members. A lot of prayer, a lot of Masses.’

  ‘All focused on immortality.’

  ‘They were certainly considerably more concerned about what happens afterwards than our society. Even if they did think God was open to back-handers.’

  ‘I met Mrs Pepper this afternoon.’ Merrily tamped out her cigarette in the ashtray. ‘Briefly.’

  ‘And did she appear mad?’

  ‘On one level, barking. She was kissing a yew tree.’

  ‘I beg your—’

  ‘Kissing a yew tree. Very sensuously.’

  ‘I don’t know how to react to that.’

  ‘The yew is nature’s prime symbol of immortality. I’m just trying to find a link here with The Palmers’ Guild, who built her house and who evidently had a similar obsession.’

  ‘No more than anyone in those days. And this woman doesn’t appear to be particularly well disposed towards Christianity.’

  ‘But she’s very much obsessed with place-memories. Ghosts. The way that Ludlow exists in more than one time-frame. It’s as if she wants to experience other… I don’t know. I don’t know if there are hallucinogenic drugs involved here or what. It’s fascinating, in a way. My impression was that she was putting on a show today. Partly because she used to be a rock singer at the theatrical end of the business, and outrageous exhibitionism comes naturally… and partly because it’s a good smokescreen. People think you’re mad, they leave you alone. How people react to your madness tells you whether they… sorry, you still there, Bernie?’

  ‘Merrily, you’re not… I don’t like to think of you being drawn into anything.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I realize you must be feeling terribly insecure at the moment.’

  ‘Insecure,’ Merrily said. ‘She’s evidently looking for some kind of security. Acceptance.’

  ‘But by whom? Not by George Lackland, clearly.’

  ‘By the dead?’ Merrily said. ‘Do you think?’

  29

  All the Big Words

  Merrily didn’t remember when Jane had last been this amused — turning off The Coral on the CD player, coming back to the sofa and curling up in the lamplight, with a cushion clutched to her chest like she used to do when she was twelve, small pulses of amusement producing little choking noises in her throat.

  ‘This’ — fiendish smile — ‘could be the long-delayed beginning, Mum. The start of the new you, in floaty frocks and snaky bangles. And it’ll be, like, so cool that you never return to the grim old Church, and the future opens out for you like… like something that opens out. A sunflower. Whatever.’

  ‘And we’ll give up the vicarage,’ Merrily said, ‘and put our names down for a mobile home with wind-chimes, where we have to share a bedroom, and a shower block with the neighbours, and—’

  ‘Hell, no, you’ll live with Lol!’

  Lol. Merrily looked at the clock. He’d be on stage now, having dealt with his nerves with the help of Moira Cairns, for whom he was opening, the woman who had coerced him back to gigs, who had become a kind of talisman for Lol.

  Maybe he should be living with Moira Cairns.

  Jane was staring at her, wide-eyed. God, had she actually said that out loud?

  ‘Wow,’ Jane said. ‘You’re actually still paranoid about Moira.’

  ‘Oh, that’s rid—’

  ‘Hah!’

  ‘I’m an actual grown-up now, Jane.’

  ‘This is because you’ve never met her,’ Jane said. ‘For what it’s worth, when she first appeared, I used to be worried about that, too, because she is, admittedly,
mesmerically beautiful. But also, for someone who’s almost a big star, she’s actually relatively OK. She understands things. She once called me a wee pain in the arse.’

  ‘That was penetratingly perceptive of her.’

  ‘Seriously,’ Jane said, ‘there are things you could learn from Moira. Like how to step back from other people’s problems and learn to live? Because, when you think about it, neither you nor Lol’s ever had a normal life. Pregnant at nineteen. Widowed with a small and delightfully complex child while you’re still in your twenties…’

  ‘I’m sorry, when did I ever say you were delightful?’

  ‘And your only real experience of student life’ — Jane wrinkled her nose in distaste — ‘is bloody theological college… as a mature student… toting a kid. Like, where were the years of clubbing and getting pissed and waking up in strange beds?’

  ‘Actually that was how it all—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Jane smiled, and then her brow furrowed. ‘Listen, there’s no penance to be paid, Mum. I mean, OK, yeah, we’ve finally got Lol into the village. But you’re still not getting it right. You’re taking a week off the parish to do this private-eye stuff in Ludlow for the Bishop, but you won’t take a break to maybe go somewhere special with Lol.’

  ‘You know…’ Merrily repositioned herself on the sofa, awkwardly. ‘I think I was happier when you were just laughing at the idea of me pretending to be psychic.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that was the wrong attitude. I’ve decided to take it seriously.’ Jane put the cushion behind her on the sofa and sat up straight. ‘You need specialist advice, or that woman is going to take you apart. She’ll just, like, totally dismantle your façade in about ten minutes.’

  ‘And you can, erm, school me, can you?’

  Jane shrugged. ‘I’ve read the books. Spent a few months, if you recall, attempting to worship the moon… when I was young.’

  ‘It was less than two years ago.’ Merrily looked into Jane’s eyes, surely greyer than they used to be.

  ‘I mean, I’m not claiming to be anything more than some kind of failed neophyte, Mum, but I reckon I could probably save you from total humiliation.’

  Merrily considered this.

  When exactly had Jane’s paganism ceased to be a problem for her?

  At first it had seemed like a basic teenage rebellion thing: Jane resenting the Church, seeing poor Lucy Devenish, with her talk of apple-lore and nature spirits, as a kind of guru… and then, after Lucy’s death, lying about her age to get into a goddess-worshipping group based at a Hereford health-food shop. In just a couple of years, Jane had encountered pagans and psychics, good and bad, and emerged, at the age of seventeen… oddly clear-headed.

  Yes, it was still there in some form, Jane’s paganism, but no, it wasn’t quite a problem any more.

  ‘All right,’ Merrily said. ‘Can we go through it?’

  Yew trees. Jane appeared to have read entire books about yew trees.

  ‘Making love to one. That’s totally… I mean, I can connect with that.’

  ‘Are they poisonous to people? I’m not sure.’

  ‘I wouldn’t personally exchange life-fluids with one to find out,’ Jane said. ‘But I do get the point. She’s embracing immortality. Some yew trees could be the oldest living beings on this planet — and that’s heavy. The idea of a tree being a repository of ancient wisdom is not so crazy. So if she has an ancient yew near her house, and that’s the start of her ritual walk, and then she proceeds to this yew at the castle where Marion fell… Where’s the next one? Bound to be one in the churchyard.’

  ‘Several, apparently. I think there’s the remains of a yew alley,’ Merrily said. ‘I asked Jon Scole about that.’

  ‘Cool.’ Jane spread Merrily’s new street map of Ludlow over the OS map of the wider area. ‘And then one in this old cemetery?’

  ‘St Leonard’s, yes.’

  ‘So you’ve probably got an ancient and sacred route… maybe even pre-Christian. Maybe a processional route up and over the holy hill between the two rivers. If you think, way back, before there was a town or a castle there’d just be this hill… a holy hill.’

  ‘How do you know it was holy?’

  ‘Hah!’ Jane beamed in satisfaction. ‘I looked it up. It’s in one of my books upstairs, and I got some more off the Net. This is amazing stuff. The name “Ludlow”, right? “Low” usually refers to a tumulus or a burial mound, and sure enough there was one.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On top of the hills. What’s now the highest point of the town.’

  ‘The church? St Laurence’s?’

  ‘There was a tumulus which, until the end of the twelfth century, was right next to the original church. And then they extended the church into the tumulus and found that it contained bodies — bones. Which were alleged at the time to be the remains of three Irish saints, because in those days if anybody found any bones near a church it would be, like, more kudos if they were holy relics. They were probably the bones of Bronze Age chieftains… which is cool.’

  ‘They’ve gone now, presumably?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. What matters is that the tower — the tallest tower on the border, OK, the Cathedral of the Marches — is rising up directly out of a pagan site, so it’s like’ — Jane held up a fist — ‘one of ours.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘It’s what they did,’ Jane said. ‘These are geopsychically sensitive sites. If the Church hadn’t built on existing places of power, Christianity would probably have vanished by the end of the Middle Ages. So if Belladonna’s making a personal connection with the sacred centres of Ludlow, that’s the big one.’

  ‘Well, she certainly goes into the church, even if she doesn’t go to actual services.’

  ‘There you go. She’s opening herself up to the vibrations.’

  ‘Opening herself up, all right.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Never mind.’ Ethel jumped into Merrily’s lap and started to wash her paws. ‘What exactly is she doing, do you think, Jane? Where’s she coming from? We looking at witchcraft, or what?’

  ‘She on her own?’

  ‘There are some young people who seem to have formed some sort of attachment to her. When I first saw her, she was with, I think, four of them — two men, two women, all wearing Edwardian-type gear, slightly funereal.’

  ‘Could be part of a coven. Doesn’t seem too likely, though.’

  ‘They just struck me as basic goths.’

  ‘OK, listen…’ Jane leaned into the corner of the sofa. ‘I’ve been thinking about this… Could she have any ancestry in the town? Are there any family roots she maybe wants to pick up on? Because that might explain why she was always with Robbie Walsh — he could’ve been helping research it, couldn’t he? That seems to have been the kind of thing he enjoyed.’

  ‘That’s actually not a bad theory,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Or, if you want to extend it in a more mystical direction, could she have been, like, hypnotically regressed into recalling some past life in Ludlow? For instance — and this makes sense — suppose she believes she’s the reincarnation of somebody like, for instance…’

  Merrily brought her hands together. ‘Marion de la Bruyère!’

  ‘Well…?’

  ‘It’s a fascinating thought, flower.’

  ‘And it explains the suicide links,’ Jane said. ‘And it’s exactly the kind of bollocks a mad old slapper like Belladonna would go for.’

  Afterwards, Lol followed Moira back up the M4 to the Severn Bridge services, where she was spending the night. They sat in the café by the big windows where you could see the sweep of the suspension bridge into Wales and the lights bouncing off the estuary’s dark water.

  ‘I’ve never done that before,’ Lol said. ‘Never.’

  Two verses in, freezing up in the heat of the lights, standing quivering, like the mental patient he was singing about.


  ‘You mean it wasnae deliberate?’ Moira raised an eyebrow, cup of hot chocolate held in both hands, like a chalice. ‘Even I thought it was part of the act. And when you started laughing like that…’

  ‘Couldn’t stop.’

  Doubled up, he’d noticed her watching him from the shadows at the side of the stage, in her long, sea-green dress, the strand of white in her hair like the crack of light down a doorway at night. Expecting her to walk on, gently detach the mike and salvage his set.

  Not necessary, as it turned out. The audience had started laughing with him, with no idea why. In the lobby afterwards, Moira’s merchandising guy had sold over sixty copies of Alien. Now he was higher than the Severn Bridge and, every so often, he would shiver at the memory.

  ‘It was a wild moment, but you never looked back,’ Moira said. ‘You were soaring like a gull. I’m thinking, Jesus, he’s become a performer at last — wee Lol. However, just for the record… why?’ She’d put down her cup. Her hair was tied up now. She wore a grey woolly sweater and white jeans. ‘Go on… just out of interest. For m’ personal files…’

  ‘Must’ve been the song,’ Lol admitted. ‘It’s always that song. It’s got… something in it I can’t always control.’

  ‘ “Heavy Medication Day”?’

  ‘The day I refused to take the pills,’ Lol remembered, ‘Dr Gascoigne said… and I remember him leaning over me, I was sitting in a high-backed chair in the main day-room, and I’d turned it away from the TV, and he leaned over me and he said in my ear, “Don’t go thinking you’re ever going to leave here, Mr Robinson. You see that door? One day, when I’ve been long retired to the south of France, you’ll be straining to get your Zimmer frame through it.” ’

  ‘Jesus. This is a shrink? This is how they talk?’

  ‘Well, it’s been said before, but it’s true…’

  ‘That if it wasnae for the white coat you’d never know which were the patients, right? I tell you what… by the time you’d finished laughing and you did the whole song again, they were with you for the duration.’