by Phil Rickman
‘All the more reason for you to remain, my dear,’ Bernie had told her, though she couldn’t quite follow his reasoning. She hoped it wasn’t just because he enjoyed his Tuesday lunchtimes here sitting on the Deliverance desk with a couple of hot dogs and a can of lager.
‘You explain, Sophie,’ the bishop said.
His lay secretary sat up, spry and elegant in a grey business suit with fine black stripes, and consulted her memo pad.
‘Well, as you know, this programme approached us some weeks ago, with a view to Merrily taking part in a general discussion on supernatural phenomena – which Merrily declined to do.’
‘Because Merrily was afraid of what they might already know about recent events in Hereford,’ added Merrily.
‘Indeed. I then received a personal call from Ms Tania Beauman relating to this week’s proposed paganism programme, again requesting Merrily.’
‘They’ve obviously seen that understatedly sexy photo of you, my dear,’ said Bernie.
Merrily sighed, looked at the clock: 1.35. She had to be back in Ledwardine by three for Minnie Parry’s funeral.
Sophie said, ‘You’ll probably both recall the story in the papers last Thursday about the pagan parents in Somerset who demanded that their child be allowed to make her own religious observances at the village primary school.’
The bishop winced.
‘Livenight’s programme peg for this week,’ Sophie explained. ‘It’s now claimed there are over a hundred thousand active pagans in Britain. Either belonging to groups – covens – or nurturing their beliefs independently.’
‘Complete nonsense, of course.’ The bishop sniffed. ‘But figures like that can’t be proved one way or the other.’
‘The programme will discuss the pagans’ claim that they represent the traditional old religion of the British Isles and, as such, should be granted rights and privileges at least equivalent to those accorded to Islam, Buddhism and other non-indigenous faiths.’
Bernie snorted. ‘Most of their so-called traditions date back no further than the fifties and sixties. They’re a sham. These people are just annoyed because they’ve been refused charity status.’
‘In a secular state,’ Merrily said, ‘it could be argued that their superstitions are just as valid as ours – I’m doing my devil’s advocate bit here.’
The bishop jutted his chins and straightened his pectoral cross. ‘My question, though, is should we be actively encouraging people to strip off and have sex with each other’s wives under the full moon while pretending it’s religion? I think not. But neither do I think we should be engaging them in open battle – boosting their collective ego by identifying them as representatives of the Antichrist.’
‘However,’ Sophie said, ‘that does reflect the general approach of one of our more... outgoing rural rectors: the Reverend Nicholas Ellis.’
‘Oh,’ Merrily said.
‘In his sermons and his parish magazine articles, he’s tended to employ... quite colourful terminology. Livenight’s own kind of terminology, you might say.’
Sophie and the bishop both looked enquiringly at Merrily. She shook her head. ‘I know of him only through the press cuttings. Loose-cannon priest who dumped his churches. Spent some years in the States. Charismatic. Direct intervention of the Holy Spirit... Prophecy... Tongues.’
‘Split the community,’ Bernie said, ‘when he expressed disdain for actual churches and offered to conduct his charismatic services in community halls, barns, warehouses, whatever. So Mick Hunter agreed to appoint a regular priest-in-charge in the area, to appease the traditionalists, and let Ellis continue his roving brief.’
Merrily recalled that Ellis now belonged to a fast-growing Anglican anti-Church faction calling itself the Sea of Light.
‘Awfully popular figure, this Nicholas, I’m afraid,’ Bernie Dunmore said. ‘Since we cut him loose, he’s set up in some run-down village hall and he’s packing it to the rafters with happy-clappies from miles around. Which makes him somewhat unassailable, and yet he’s not a demonstrative bloke in himself. Quiet, almost reticent, apparently. But came back from America with a knowledge of agriculture and farming ways that seems to have rather endeared him to the Radnorshire people.’
Merrily grimaced, recalling what Eileen Cullen at the hospital had said about the piece of Wales just over the border: They have their own ways and they keep closed up.
Bernie flicked her a foxy smile. ‘The man was after your job, did you know?’
Her eyebrows went up. ‘Deliverance?’
‘Wrongly assuming you’d be on the way out in the aftermath of Michael’s, er, breakdown. Soon as I showed my face in Hereford, there was Nicholas requesting an audience.’
‘Did he get one?’
‘Showed him the door, of course, but tactfully. Good God, he’s the last kind of chap you want as your exorcist. Sees the Devil behind every pillar in the cloister. Fortunately, Deliverance is rarely up for tender. Press-gang job, in my experience.’ He beamed at Merrily. ‘And all the better for that.’
‘Is he currently doing any deliverance work?’ she asked warily.
‘Frankly, my dear... one doesn’t like to enquire. Though if there are any complaints, I suppose we’ll have to peer into the pond. Meanwhile... this Livenight.’ The bishop snapped back the ringpull on his can of lager and accepted a tall glass from Sophie. ‘Apparently, he has been mentioned as a possible – what do you call it? – front-row speaker.’
‘Having already been approached by Ms Beauman,’ Sophie said, ‘and having apparently said yes.’
‘But not on behalf of the diocese,’ Merrily said. ‘Just a lone maverick, surely?’
The bishop shrugged, spilling a little lager. ‘One can’t stop the man appearing on national television. And one can’t be seen to try to stop him.’
‘But if he starts shooting his mouth off about the invasion of sinister sects and child sacrifice and that kind of stuff, it’s going to reflect on all of us.’
‘In the wake of recent events here,’ said the bishop, ‘we were all rather looking for a quiet life for a while.’
Merrily looked into the big, generally honest face of the suffragan Bishop of Ludlow, a lovely old town in south Shropshire from which he was commuting and to which he clearly couldn’t wait to get back.
‘Well...’ Sophie folded a square of green blotting paper into a beer mat for the bishop, giving herself an excuse not to look directly at Merrily. ‘Ms Beauman did intimate to me that they might be prepared to consider rescinding their invitation to the Reverend Mr Ellis... if they could recruit for their programme the person they originally had in mind.’
There was an uneasy silence. The bishop drank some lager and gazed out of the window, across Broad Street. It was starting to rain.
‘Shit,’ Merrily said under her breath.
6
Unkind Sky
‘A BOX?’ LIZZIE Wilshire looked vaguely puzzled. But more vague than puzzled, Betty thought.
‘Inside the fireplace.’
‘I did rather like that fireplace,’ Mrs Wilshire recalled. ‘It had a wonderful old beam across the top. It was the one emphatic feature of a rather drab room.’
‘Yes, the living room.’
‘You thought there ought to be beams across the ceiling too. Bryan said there still must be, underneath all the plaster. But I did like the fireplace, if precious little else.’
The fireplace to which Mrs Wilshire’s chair was presently pulled close was forlornly modern, made of brownish dressed stone. It surrounded a bronze-enamelled oil-fired stove – undernourished flames behind orange-tinted glass.
Mrs Wilshire frowned. ‘It also had woodworm, though.’
‘The box?’
‘The beam, dear. That worried me a little, until Bryan said, “Lizzie, it will take about three hundred years for the worms to eat through it.” I would still have wanted it treated, though.’ She blinked at Betty. ‘Have you had it treated, yet?’
‘Oh!’ Understanding came at last to the bulging eyes of frail Lizzie Wilshire – big eyes which made her look like an extraterrestrial or a wizened, expensive cat. ‘You mean the witch paper!’
‘Yes,’ Betty said softly, ‘the witch paper.’
It wasn’t that she was particularly old, early seventies, Betty reckoned, but she had arthritis – obvious in her hands – and accepted her own helplessness. Clearly, she’d never been used to doing very much for herself or making decisions. ‘It’s so confusing now,’ she said. ‘So many things I know nothing about. Things I don’t want to have to know about. Why should I?’
She was still living in this colonial-style bungalow on the edge of New Radnor, the tiny town, or big village, where she and the Major had lived for over fifteen years, since his retirement. Just a stopgap, the Major always said, until they found the right place... an interesting place, a place he could play with.
She told Betty how she thought he’d finally accepted that he was too old to take on something needing extensive refurbishment when, out on a Sunday drive, they’d found – not three miles away, at Old Hindwell – the house with which Major Bryan Wilshire, to the utter dismay of his wife, had fallen hopelessly in love.
‘It was empty, of course, when we saw it. It had belonged to two reclusive bachelor farmers called Prosser. The last surviving one had finally been taken into a nursing home. So you can imagine the state it was in.’
Betty already knew all this from the estate agents, and from their own searches. Also she’d sensed a residual sourness and meanness in rooms left untouched by Major Wilshire. But she let his widow talk.
‘And that awful old ruined church in the grounds. Some would say it was picturesque, but I hated it. Who could possibly want a disused church? Except Bryan, of course.’
The Major had found the church fascinating and had begun to delve into its history: when it had last been used as a place of worship, why it had been abandoned. Meanwhile, the house was to be auctioned and, because of its poor condition, the reserve price was surprisingly low. This was when the market was still at low ebb, just before the recent property boom, and there was no rush for second homes in the countryside.
‘There was no arguing with Bryan. He put in an offer and it was accepted, so the auction was called off. Bryan was delighted. It was so cheap we didn’t even have to consider selling this bungalow. He said he could renovate the place at his leisure.’
A reputable firm of contractors had been hired, but Major Wilshire insisted on supervising the work himself. The problem was that Bryan was always so hands-on, climbing ladders and scaffolding to demonstrate to the workmen exactly what he wanted doing. Lizzie couldn’t bear to look up at him; it made her quite dizzy. But Bryan had always needed that element in his life, serving as he had with that regiment in Hereford. The SAS, Betty presumed, and she wondered how an all-action man like Major Wilshire had ended up with a wife who didn’t like to look up.
At least that had spared Lizzie an eyewitness memory of the terrible accident. This had been brought about by the combination of a loose stone under a slit window in the tower, a lightweight aluminium ladder, and a freak blast of wind from the Forest.
At first they’d told her it was simply broken bones, and quite a number of them; so it would have taken Major Wilshire a long time to recover. Many months. But no internal injuries, so it could have been worse. He’d at least be home in a matter of weeks. Mrs Wilshire meanwhile had determined that he would never again go back to that awful place.
But Bryan had never come home again. The shock – or something – had brought on pneumonia. For this energetic, seemingly indestructible old soldier, it was all over in four days.
There was one photograph of the Major on the mantelpiece: a wiry man in a cap. He was not in uniform or anything, but in the garden, leaning on a spade, and his smile was only a half-smile.
‘So quick. So bewilderingly quick. There was no time at all for preparations,’ Mrs Wilshire said querulously. ‘We’d always made time to prepare for things; Bryan was a great planner. Nothing was entirely unexpected, because he was always ready for it. Whenever he had to go away, my sister would come to stay and Bryan would always pay the bills in advance and order plenty of heating oil. He always thought ahead.’
How ironic, Betty thought, that a man whose career must have involved several life-or-death situations, and certainly some gruelling and risky training exercises, should have died after a simple fall from a ladder.
From a church? Was this ironic, too?
When it started to rain harder, Robin packed up his paints and folded the easel. A few stray drops on a watercolour could prove interesting; they made the kind of accidental blurs you could use, turned the painting into a raincolour. But if it came on harder, like now, and the wind got up, this was the elements saying to him: Uh-huh, try again.
He stood for a moment down below the church ruins, watching the creek rush into a small gorge maybe fifteen feet deep, carrying branches and a blue plastic feed-sack. Wild! There was a narrow wooden footbridge which people used to cross to get to church. The bridge was a little rickety, which was also kind of quaint. Maybe this even explained why the church had become disused. Fine when the congregation came on foot from the village, but when the village population had gotten smaller, and the first automobiles had arrived in Radnorshire... well, not even country ladies liked to have to park in a field the wrong side of the Hindwell Brook and arrive in church with mud splashes up their Sunday stockings.
In the distance, over the sound of the hurrying water, Robin could hear a vehicle approaching. It was almost a mile along the track to reach the county road, so if you heard any traffic at all, it had to be heading this way. Most often it was Gareth Prosser in his Land Rover – biggest farmer hereabouts, a county councillor and also a nephew of the two old guys who used to own St Michael’s. Robin would have liked if the man stopped one time, came in for a beer, but Gareth Prosser just nodded, never smiled to him, never slowed.
Country folk took time to get to know. Apparently.
But the noise wasn’t rattly enough to be Prosser’s Land Rover, or growly enough to be his kids’ dirt bikes. It was a little early to be Betty back from the widow Wilshire’s, but – who knew? – maybe she at last had developed the hots again for her beloved husband, couldn’t wait to get back to the hissing pine fires and into the sack in that wonderful damp-walled bedroom.
Sure.
Robin kicked a half-brick into the Hindwell Brook, lifting up his face to the squally rain. It would come right. The goddess would return to her. Just the wrong part of the cycle, was all. He offered a short, silent prayer to the spirits of the rushing water, that the flow might once again go their way. Winter was, after all, a stressful time to move house.
The vehicle appeared: it was a Cherokee jeep. When the driver parked in the yard and got out, Robin stared at him, and then closed his eyes and muttered, ‘Holy shit.’
He didn’t need this. He did not need this now.
‘But we don’t believe in those things any more, do we, my dear? Witches, I mean.’
How on earth had the wife of an SAS officer managed to preserve this childlike, glazed-eyed innocence? Betty smiled and lifted the bone china teacup and saucer from her knees in order to smooth her long skirt. Jeans would have been the wrong image entirely and, after the assault on the house over the past few days, she didn’t have an entirely clean pair anyway.
Clean was paramount here. It was a museum of suburbia; it had actual trinkets. Betty guessed that the Major’s wife had secretly been hoping that the renovation work at St Michael’s would never be completed, that it would be simply a long-term hobby for him while they went on living here in New Radnor – which, although it was on
the edge of the wilderness and still dominated by a huge castle-mound, was pleasant and open, with a wide main street, neat cottages, window boxes in the summer, a nice shop. Unlike Old Hindwell, it kept the Forest at arm’s length.
Mrs Wilshire said, ‘It was silly, it was slightly unpleasant. And, of course, it wasn’t even terribly old.’
‘About 1850, as I recall.’
‘Oh,’ said Mrs Wilshire. ‘Have you found another one?’
‘No, I think it’s the same one,’ Betty said patiently. ‘Someone brought it back, you see.’
‘Who in the world would do that?’
‘We don’t know. It was left on the doorstep.’
‘What an odd thing to do.’
‘Yes, it was odd, which is why we’d like to find out who did it. I was hoping you might be able to tell me who you gave the box to when you... gave it away. Do you remember, by any chance?’
‘Well, Bryan saw to that, of course. Bryan always knew where to take things, you see.’
‘Would there perhaps have been... I don’t know, a local historian or someone like that who might have had an interest in old documents?’
‘Hmmm.’ Mrs Wilshire pursed her tiny lips. ‘There’s Mr Jenkins, at the bookshop in Kington. But he writes for the newspapers as well, and Bryan was always very suspicious of journalists. Perhaps it was the new rector he gave it to.’
‘Oh.’
‘Not that he was terribly fond of the rector either. We went to one of his services, but only once. So noisy! I’ve never seen so many people in a church – well, not for an ordinary evensong. They must have come from elsewhere, like football supporters. And there were people with guitars. And candles – so many candles. Well, I have nothing against all that, but it’s not for the likes of us, is it? Are you a churchgoer, Mrs Thorogood?’
‘Er... No. Not exactly.’
‘And your husband? What is it your husband does for a living? I’m sure I did know...’
‘He’s an artist, an illustrator. He does book covers, mainly.’
