A Crown of Lights mw-3

by Phil Rickman

  The Church of England (the village is in Wales, but the parish is in the Diocese of Hereford) chose not to take any proceedings against Mr Penney. After his departure, another minister was appointed but did not stay long and thereafter the parish became part of a ‘cluster’ which is not so uncommon these days! I suppose one could say Old Hindwell ‘lost heart’ after the extraordinary behaviour of Mr Penney.

  I do hope I have been able to help you, but I am rather ‘out of touch’ with events in Old Hindwell. Although I live no more than half an hour’s drive away.

  I seem never once to have revisited the village since we moved house in 1983. Old Hindwell is one of those places which it is easy to forget exists, except as a rather surreal memory!

  With very best regards,

  Juliet Pottinger (Mrs)

  ‘The Local People,’ Robin said. ‘Whoooeee! Those local people sure like to wield power.’

  ‘No more than in any small community.’ Betty brought over cocoa for them both. She knew he’d go for the cover-up aspect first, rather than the significance of the event that had been covered up. She almost wished she could have censored the papers before letting him see them.

  The idea of this panicked her. It was like the Wilshires in reverse. Until they came here, she’d never even thought of keeping secrets from Robin.

  ‘And who is this Weal?’ he said. ‘Was the plan that they might have to lean on this old broad legally?’

  ‘She wouldn’t have been an old broad then. She was probably quite a young broad.’

  ‘Whatever, this smells of real redneck intrigue. Prosser Senior – that would be Gareth Prosser’s old man?’

  ‘Sounds like it,’ Betty said. And then came to the point. ‘But the main issue is, what happened to the Reverend Penney? What did he do that day that scandalized the community so much that he had to resign on so-called health grounds?’

  ‘Didn’t the widow Wilshire know any of this?’

  ‘She’d never even seen the letter. Bryan would not have wanted to worry the little woman.’

  ‘Well,’ Robin said, ‘it’s clear that the Reverend Penney was under a lot of pressure and it drove him a little crazy. She talks about him feeling isolated. Maybe he came from some English city, couldn’t cut it in the sticks. And the Local People resented him, gave him a hard time.’

  ‘To the extent of vandalizing his church? Starting a fire? You don’t think that sounds a little inner-city for a place like this?’

  ‘Sounds like he was getting some hassle. Sounds like there could be something the Local People are a tad ashamed about, wouldn’t you say?’

  He looked pleased about this. He would make a point now of finding out precisely what had happened and what, if anything, the community had to hide. Betty, on the other hand, could sympathize with Juliet Pottinger’s low-profile approach. Yes, it would be necessary to find out what had happened on what was now their property – but not to go about this in a conspicuous way. They were incomers and foreigners. And had a different religion, which may somehow have become known to certain people. Unspoken opinion might already be stacked against them; they must not be seen to be too nosy or too clever. They must move quietly.

  ‘After Penney left,’ she said, ‘the church appeared to “lose heart”. It was in full use until nineteen seventy-eight and now it’s a ruin. In just over thirty years. Not exactly a slow decay.’

  ‘Aw, buildings go to pieces in no time at all when they’re left derelict. She implies in the letter that it was already falling apart. And maybe in those days the authorities weren’t so hot on preserving old buildings. I’m more curious about what the Local People did to this Penney. Where’s he now?’

  ‘I don’t know. And we’re the last people to know anyone in the clergy who might be able to find out. We—’

  ‘Look, I’ll go find out the truth tomorrow. I’ll go see Prosser. We’re gonna need more logs – real logs. I’ll go find out if Prosser knows a reputable log dealer and at the same time I’ll ask him about Reverend Penney. See if he tries to lean on me, do the rural menace stuff.’

  ‘I’ll go, if you like,’ Betty said, without thinking.

  Robin put down his cocoa mug. ‘Because I will rub him up the wrong way? Because I will be gauche and loud and unsubtle? Because I will say, you can’t touch me, pal, I got the Old Gods on my side?’

  ‘Of course not. I’m sorry. You’re right. You should go. Men around here prefer to deal with other men.’

  ‘What I thought.’ He looked at her and grinned. ‘This is nothing to worry about.’

  ‘No,’ Betty said.

  Far from representing her and Robin’s destiny and the beautiful future of the pagan movement in this country, she was now convinced that the old church of Michael was a tainted and revolting place that should indeed be left to rot. But how could she lay all this on him now, after his crushing disappointment over the Blackmore illustrations?

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ she said.

  14

  Armageddon

  NO WAY COULD she ever have imagined it was going to be like this.

  She’d thought that it could never be worse than the pulpit that first time, up in Liverpool, when those three creaking wooden steps were like the steps to the gallows.

  And may God have mercy on your soul.

  She’d drunk very little of the spring water on offer in the green room, never once thinking of the fierce heat from the studio lights and what it might do to the irrigation of the inside of her mouth.

  With ten minutes to go, she’d popped outside for a cigarette, sharing a fire-escape platform with two sly-smiling New Age warriors and their seven-inch spliff, shaking her head with a friendly, liberal smile when they’d offered it to her.

  Never really imagining that the nerves wouldn’t just float away once they were on the air. Because... well, because this was trivial, trash, tabloid television, forgotten before the first editions of tomorrow’s papers got onto the streets.

  This really mustn’t be taken too seriously.

  Merrily froze, two thousand years of Christianity setting like concrete around her shoulders. The light was merciless and hotter than the sun. She was in terror; she couldn’t even pray.

  ‘Merrily Watkins,’ he’d said, ‘you’re a vicar, a woman of God. Let’s hear how you defend your creator against that kind of logic. Isn’t there really a fair bit of sense in what Ned’s saying?’

  He was slight, not very tall. His natural expression was halfway to a smile, the lips in a little V. He was light and nimble and chatty. He earned probably six times as much as a bishop – the shiny-suited, eel-like, non-stick, omnipotent John Fallon.

  ‘Well, Merrily,’ he said. ‘Isn’t there?’

  And yet, there were no tricks, no surprises. It had started, exactly as Tania Beauman had said it would, with the parents Jean and Roger Gillespie, goddess-worshippers from Taunton, Somerset, who wanted their daughter’s religion to be formally accepted at her primary school. They’d have a second child starting school next year; later a third one; they wanted new data programmed into the education machine, respectful references to new names: Isis, Artemis, Aradia. Roger was an architect with the county council; he maintained that his beliefs were fully accepted on the executive estate where the Gillespies had lived for three years.

  They were both so humourless, Merrily thought, as Jean demanded parity with Islam and boring old Christianity, and special provision for her family’s celebration of the solstices and the equinoxes, the inclusion of pagan songs, at least once a week, at the school assembly.

  Fallon had finally interrupted this tedious monotone. ‘And what do you do exactly, Jean? Do you hold nude ceremonies in your garden? What happens if the neighbours’ve got a barbecue going?’

  ‘Well, that’s just the kind of attitude we don’t get, for a start.’ Jean’s single plait hung like a fat hawser down her bosom. ‘Our rituals are private and discreet and are respected by our neighbours, who—’


  ‘Fine. Sure. OK.’ John Fallon had already been on the move, away from Jean, who carried on talking, although the boom-mic operator had moved on. Fallon had spun away through ninety degrees to his next interviewee: the elegant Mr Edward Bain, nothing so vulgar as King of the Witches.

  ‘We’re here to talk about religious belief,’ Fallon had read from the autocue at the beginning of the show, ‘and the right of people in a free society to worship their own gods. Some of you might think it’s a bit loony, even scary, but the thousands of pagan worshippers in Britain maintain that theirs is the only true religion of these islands, and they want their ceremonies – which sometimes include nudity, simulated and indeed actual sex – to be given full charitable status and full recognition from the state and the education system...’

  When he had his back to Merrily, she saw the wire to his earpiece coming out of his collar, like a ruched scar on the back of his neck. Relaying instructions or suggestions, from the programme’s director in some hidden bunker.

  ‘Ned Bain,’ Fallon said, ‘you’re the high priest of a London coven – can we use the word “coven”? – and also a publisher and an expert on ancient religions of all kinds. I want you to tell me, simply and concisely, why you think paganism is, today, more relevant and more important to these islands than Christianity.’

  And Edward Bain had sat, one leg hooked casually over the other like... like Sean had sat sometimes... a TV natural, expounding without pause, his eyes apparently on Fallon, but actually gazing beyond him across the studio. His eyes, in fact, were lazily fixed on Merrily’s... and they – she clutched her chair seat tightly – they were not Sean’s.

  ‘Well, for a start, they’ve had their two millennia,’ he said reasonably. ‘Two thousand years of war and divison, repression and persecution, torture, genocide... in the name of a cruel, despotic deity dreamed up in the Middle East.’

  From the seats tiered behind Merrily came the swelling sound of indrawn breath, like a whistling in the eaves. Part awe, part shock, part admiration at such cool, convincing blasphemy.

  ‘Two thousand years of the cynical exploitation, by wealthy men, of humanity’s unquenchable yearning for spirituality... the milking of the peasants to build and maintain those great soaring cathedrals... created to harness energies they no longer even understand. Two thousand years of Christianity... a tiny, but ruinous period of Earth’s history. A single dark night of unrelenting savagery and rape.’

  There was a trickle of applause. He continued to look at Merrily, his mouth downturned in sorrow but a winner’s light in his eyes. The space between them seemed to shrink, until she could almost feel the warm dusting of his breath on her face. On a huge screen above him was projected the image of a serene, bare-breasted woman wearing a tiara like a coiled snake.

  ‘Now it’s our turn,’ he said softly. ‘We who worship in woods and circles of rough stone. We who are not afraid to part the curtains, to peer into the mysteries from which Christianity still cowers, screaming shrilly at us to come away, come away. To us – and to the rest of you, if you care to give it any thought – Christianity is, at best, a dull screen, a block. It is anti-spiritual. It was force-fed to the conquered and brutalized natives of the old lands, who practised – as we once did, when we still had sensitivity – a natural religion, in harmony with the tides and the seasons, entirely beneficent, gentle, pacific, not rigid nor patriarchal. The Old Religion has always recognized the equality of the sexes and exalted the nurturing spirit, the spirit which can soothe and heal the Earth before it is too late.’

  The trickle of applause becoming a river. John Fallon standing with folded arms and his habitual half-smile. Someone had dimmed the studio lights so that Ned Bain was haloed like a Christ figure, and when he spoke again it might have been Sean there, being reasonable, logical. Merrily began to sweat.

  ‘The clock of the Earth is running down. We’ve become alienated from her. We must put the last two thousand years behind us and speak to her again.’

  And the river of applause fanned out into a delta among not only the myriad ranks of the pagans, but also the shop-floor workers and the wages staff and the middle and upper management of the paint factory in Walsall. The claps and cheers turned to an agony of white noise in Merrily’s head and she closed her eyes, and when she opened them, there was the fuzzy boom-mic on a pole hanging over her head, and the camera had glided silently across like an enormous floor-polisher and John Fallon, legs apart, hands behind his back, was telling her and the millions at home, ‘... really a fair bit of sense in what Ned’s saying? Well, Merrily... isn’t there?’

  She’s frozen, Jane thought in horror, as two seconds passed.

  Two entire seconds.... on Livenight! A hush in the bear pit.

  ‘Come on, love.’ Gerry’s hands were chivvying at the monitors. ‘You’re not in the bloody pulpit now.’

  Maurice, the director, said into his microphone, ‘John, why don’t you just ask her, very gently, if she’s feeling all right?’

  Jane wanted to haul him from his swivel chair and wrestle him to the ground among the snaking wires. But then, thank Christ, Mum started talking.

  It just wasn’t her voice, that was the problem. She sounded like she’d just been awakened from a drugged sleep. Well, all right, it was going to be a tough one. Ned Bain was a class act, a cool, cool person, undeniably sexy. And Jane admittedly felt some serious empathy with what he was saying. Like, hadn’t she herself had this same argument with Mum time and again, pointing out that paganism – witchcraft – was a European thing, born in dark woodland glades, married to mountain streams. It was practical, and Jane didn’t even see it as entirely incompatible with Christianity.

  The camera was tight on Mum – so tight that, oh no, you could see the sweat. And she was gabbling in that strange, cracked voice about Christianity being pure, selfless love, while paganism seemed to be about sex at its most mechanical and... feelingless.

  Feelingless? Jesus, Jane thought, is that a real word? Oh God.

  ‘This is bloody trite crap, especially after the pagan guy,’ Maurice told John Fallon. ‘Let’s come back to her when, and if, she gets her shit together.’

  ‘All right.’ John Fallon spun away, a flying smirk. ‘That’s the, ah, Church of England angle.’

  Someone jeered.

  Oh God! When she was sure the camera was away from her, Merrily dabbed a crumpled tissue to her forehead, knowing immediately what she should have said, how she could have dealt with Bain’s simplistic generalizations. Now wanting to jump up and tug Fallon back. But it was, of course, too late.

  From halfway up an aisle between rows of seats, she caught a glance from Steve Ewing, the producer, his mouth hidden under a lip-microphone as used by ringside boxing commentators. It was as if he was ironically rerunning his pre-programme pep talk: ‘... you’ll be kicking yourself all the way home because you missed your chance of getting your argument across on the programme.’

  From the adjacent seat to her left, a hand gently squeezed her arm: Patrick Ryan, the sociologist who was supposed to have shagged half the priestesses in the southern counties while compiling his thesis on pagan ritual practice. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ he whispered.

  She nodded. She sought out the eyes of Ned Bain, but they were in shadow now; he seemed to be looking downwards. He appeared very still and limp, as though his body was recharging. She thought, He was staring at me the whole time. And afterwards I couldn’t do a thing.

  ‘... gonna talk to Maureen now,’ John Fallon was saying, back on the other side of the studio floor, just across the aisle from Ned Bain. ‘Maureen, your teenage daughter was into all this peaceful, New Age nature worship. But that was only the start, because Gemma ended up, I believe, in a psychiatric unit.’

  Oh, sure... blame Bain for your own deficiencies. Merrily shook herself, furious. Blame poor dead Sean.

  ‘She’s still attending the unit, John.’ Maureen was a bulky woman, early fifties, south London ac
cent. ‘Apart from that, she won’t hardly leave the house any more, poor kid.’

  ‘She became a witch, right?’

  ‘She became a witch when she was about seventeen, when she first went to the tech college. There was a lecturer there like... him.’ Maureen jerked a thumb at Ned Bain, who tilted his head quizzically. ‘Smooth, good-looking guy, on the make.’

  Ned chuckled. Really nothing like Sean. How could she have—

  ‘But let’s just make it clear,’ Fallon said, ‘that this was not Ned Bain here. So this other man recruited Gemma into a witch coven.’

  Maureen described how her daughter had been initiated in a shop cellar converted into a temple, and within about six months her personality had completely changed. She’d broken off her engagement to a very nice boy who was a garage mechanic, and then they found out she was into hard drugs.

  ‘But I never knew the worst of it till her mate come to see me one day. This was the mate she’d joined the coven with, and she told me Gemma had got involved with this other group what was doing black magic. She said Gemma went with the rest of them to St Anthony’s Church – and I know this happened, ’cause it was in the papers – and they desecrated it.’

  ‘Desecrated, how?’

  ‘Well... you know... did... did their dirt.’ The big face crumpled. ‘Things like—’

  ‘John, let me say...’ Ned Bain was leaning forward. The camera pulled back, the boom-mic operator shifted position. ‘This is satanism, and satanism is a specifically anti-Christian movement. It is entirely irrelevant to Wicca or any of the other strands of paganism. We do not oppose Christianity. We—’