A Crown of Lights mw-3

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Don’t give me that ole wallop, Greg, boy. Open this bloody door!’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire.’ Sounding like he was planning to take a bulldozer to the side of the pub if he couldn’t gain normal access.

  Bolts were thrown.

  The licensee was probably not much older than Merrily, but his eyes were bagged, his mouth pinched, his shirt collar frayed. He’d shaved, but not well. Gomer regarded him without sympathy.

  ‘Bloody hell, Greg, we only wants a pot o’ tea and a sandwich.’

  The man hesitated. ‘All right... Just don’t make a big fing about it.’

  They followed him through a storeroom and an expensive, fitted kitchen with a tomato-red double-oven Aga, and the sound of extractor fans.

  ‘Busy night, boy?’

  ‘Yeah.’ But he didn’t sound happy about it. ‘Go frew there, to the lounge bar. I won’t put no lights on.’

  ‘Long’s we can see what we’re eatin’.’

  The lounge bar, grey-lit through more frosted glass, looked to have been only half renovated, as if the money had run out: new brass light fittings on walls too thinly emulsioned. Also a vague smell of damp.

  ‘I can make you coffee, but not tea,’ Greg said without explanation.

  ‘We’ll take it.’ Gomer pulled out bar stools for Merrily and himself.

  Greg threw out the dregs of a smile. ‘Hope this is your daughter, Gomer?’

  ‘En’t got no daughter,’ Gomer said gruffly. ‘This is the vicar of our church.’ As Greg’s smile vanished, Gomer sat down, leaned both elbows on the bar top. ‘Who made you close the pub, then, boy?’

  ‘The wife.’

  ‘And who made her close it?’

  ‘Look,’ Greg said, ‘I’m not saying you’re a nosy git, but this is your second visit inside a few days, asking more questions than that geezer from the Mail. What are you, Radnorshire correspondent for Saga magazine?’

  Merrily was quietly zipping up her coat. It was freezing in there. ‘Well, Mr...’

  ‘Starkey.’

  ‘Mr Starkey, the nosy git’s me. I’m with the Hereford Diocese.’

  Greg’s eyes slitted. ‘Wassat mean?’

  ‘It means... Well, it means I’m interested, among other things, in what the Reverend Ellis is getting up to – you know?’ Greg snorted; Merrily unwound her scarf to let him see the dog collar. ‘This seems to be one of the few places without a candle in the window.’

  Greg pushed fingers through his receding hairline. He looked as if there wasn’t much more he could take.

  ‘You wanna know what he’s getting up to? Like apart from destroying marriages?’

  ‘No, let’s include that.’ Merrily sat down.

  Greg said there’d been a full house last night.

  ‘First time in ages. Folks I ain’t never seen before. Not big drinkers, but we got frew a lot of Cokes and shandies and if you know anyfing about the licensing trade you’ll know that’s where the big profit margins lie, so I got no complaints there.’

  ‘Thievin’ bugger,’ Gomer said. ‘So what brought this increase in trade, boy?’

  ‘Wife went to church, Gomer. That funeral. Mrs Weal. Never come back for a good while after you’d left. I mean hours. Said she’d got talking to people. First time she’d really talked to anybody since we come here.’ He scowled. ‘Including me.’

  ‘She’d never been before?’ Merrily said. ‘To church – to the hall?’

  ‘Nah. Not to any kind of church. See, what you gotta realize about Marianne – and I’ve never told a soul round here, and I would bleedin’ hate for anybody—’

  ‘Not a word, boy,’ Gomer said. ‘Not a word from us.’

  ‘She got problems.’ Greg’s voice went down to a mutter. ‘Depression. Acute depression. Been in hospital for it. You know what I mean – psychiatric? This is back in London, when we was managing a pub in Fulham. She was getting... difficult to handle.’

  Merrily said nothing.

  ‘Wiv men and... and that.’ Greg waved it away with an embarrassed shake of the head. ‘Ain’t a nympho or noffink like that. It was just the depression. We had a holiday once and she was fine. Said she was sure she’d be fine the whole time if we went to live somewhere nice, like in the country.’ He snorted. ‘Country ain’t cheap no more. Not for a long time.’

  ‘’Cept yere, mabbe,’ Gomer said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s a trap, Greg, boy.’

  ‘Tell me about it. I’ve had people in here – incomers, you can pick ’em out from the nervous laughter – still lookin’ for strawberries and cream on the village green and the blacksmith taptappin’ over his forge. Be funny if it wasn’t so bleedin’ tragic.’

  ‘That was you, was it?’ Merrily said softly. ‘When you first came here?’

  ‘Her – not me. I ain’t a romantic. I tried to tell her... yeah, all right, maybe I did fink it was gonna be different. I mean, there’s noffink wrong with the local people, most of ’em...’

  ‘I coulder tole you, boy,’ Gomer said. ‘You come to the wrong part o’ the valley. Folks back there...’ he waved a hand over his shoulder, back towards New Radnor. ‘They’re different again, see. Bit of air back there. Makes a difference.’

  ‘So your wife went to church again yesterday?’ Merrily prompted.

  ‘Yeah. Off again. Up the village hall. Couldn’t get out this place fast enough. I didn’t want this. Sure, I wanted her to make friends, but not this way. I said, come on, we ain’t churchgoers and it’d be hypocritical to start now.’

  ‘Without the hypocrites, all our congregations would be sadly depleted,’ Merrily admitted. ‘But she went anyway. And came back all aglow, right?’

  Greg didn’t smile.

  ‘Made lots of new instant friends,’ Merrily said. ‘People she’d only nodded to in the village shop hugged her as she left. She realized she’d never felt quite so much at home in the community before.’

  ‘Dead on,’ Greg said sourly.

  ‘And she wants you to close the pub and go to church with her next week.’

  ‘Says it’s the only way we’re gonna have a future. And I don’t fink she meant the extra business. It won’t...’ He looked scared. ‘It won’t last, will it, Miss...?’

  ‘Merrily.’

  ‘It can’t last. Can it? She’s not a religious person. I mean... yeah, I coulda foreseen this, soon as people starting whispering about the new rector, what a wonderful geezer he was, how their lives was changed, how he’d... I dunno, helped them stop smoking, straightened out their kids, this kind of stuff. All this talk of the Holy Spirit, and people fainting in church. And Marianne kind of saying, “Makes you fink, don’t it? Never had no luck to speak of since we moved in. Wouldn’t do no harm, would it?” ’ Greg looked at Merrily’s collar. ‘Not your style, then, all this Holy Spirit shite?’

  ‘Not my style, exactly...’

  Gomer said, ‘Don’t do any good to let your feet get too far off the ground, my experience.’

  ‘Why did they want you to close the pub today?’ Merrily asked.

  ‘Aaah.’ Shook his head contemptuously. ‘You seen the paper. He told ’em all yesterday this was coming off. Got bloody Devil-worshippers in the village and they gotta be prepared. Bleedin’ huge turnout. Standing room only up the hall, ’cording to Marianne, when I could get any sense out of her. People hanging out the doors, lining the bloody steps.’

  ‘This is local people or... newcomers?’

  ‘Mainly newcomers, I reckon. A few locals, though, no question. And apparently Ellis is going...’ Greg threw up his arms. ‘ “There’s a great evil come amongst us! We got to fight it. We are the chosen ones in the battle against Satan!” ’ Satan is this Robin Thorogood? All right, a Yank, a bit loud – in your face. But Satan? You credit that?’

  ‘You know him, then?’

  He shrugged. ‘Americans. Talk to ’em for half an hour, you know ’em. His wife’s more down t
o earth. I didn’t know they was witches, though. They never talked about that. But why should they?’

  ‘You were going to tell us why you’d closed the pub.’

  ‘He don’t want any distractions. He wants concentration of faith.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Merrily said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Mondays he holds his healing sessions,’ Greg said. ‘Up the village hall.’

  ‘So?’

  There was a lot of pain and bewilderment in his eyes.

  ‘I can help,’ Merrily said. ‘Just tell me.’

  Greg breathed heavily down his nose. ‘Last night, she says to me, “I’m unclean.” Just like that – like out the Bible. “I’ve been tempted by Satan,” she says.’

  ‘En’t we all, boy?’ Gomer said.

  ‘By Thorogood. Suddenly, she’s being frank all the time. She’s telling me stuff I don’t wanna know. Like she was... tempted sexually by Robin Thorogood, agent of Satan. She was possessed by his “dark glamour”. She wanted to sh— sleep wiv him. She comes out wiv all this. To me.’

  ‘Wanted to sleep with him?’

  ‘Ah, noffink bleedin’ happened. I’m sure of that. He ain’t been here two minutes. Plus she’s ten years older than what he is, gotta be, and if you seen his wife... Nah, I doubt he even noticed Marianne. It’s just shite.’ Greg shook his head, gutted. ‘I’ll go get your coffee.’

  ‘Greg, hang on... “Possessed by his dark glamour”?’ This wasn’t his wife speaking, this was Ellis. ‘Did she actually use the word “possessed”?’

  ‘I reckon, yeah. To be honest, I couldn’t take no more. I was knackered out. I went to bed. This is totally stupid. This don’t happen in places like this. This is city madness, innit?’

  ‘And she’s up at the hall now?’

  Merrily slid from her stool, picked up her scarf.

  30

  Handmaiden

  OUT IN THE pub car park, she was ambushed.

  ‘Mrs Watkins – Martyn Kinsey, BBC Wales. I gather you’re speaking for the diocese today.’

  ‘Well, I am, but—’

  ‘We’d like to knock off a quick interview, if that’s OK.’

  He’d probably recognized her from Livenight. She asked him if there was any chance of doing this stuff later. From where she stood she could see the top of the cross on the village hall, and it was lit up, and it hadn’t been lit before.

  ‘Actually’ – Kinsey was a plump, shrewd-eyed guy in his thirties – ‘if we don’t do it now, I suspect we could be overtaken by events. Nick Ellis is over there in the hall, having a meeting with some people. We’re expecting him to come out and announce plans for a march to St Michael’s Church, probably tonight.’

  ‘That’s what he’s doing in there, is it?’ The cross was lit up for a policy meeting? I don’t think so.

  ‘Isn’t that going to be too late for your programme?’

  ‘Oh sure – much too late. We might get a piece in the half nine slot, though that’ll be only about forty seconds. But I think it’s going to be a damp squib anyway, with no one there to protest at. The Thorogoods have been smart enough to vacate the premises.’

  ‘You’ve not been able to speak to them?’

  Kinsey shook his head. ‘That’s why we’re going to have to make do – if you don’t mind me putting it like that – with people like you. Just tell us where the Church stands on this issue. A straightforward response. Won’t take more than a couple of minutes.’

  Of course, it wasn’t straightforward. And, with the positioning and the repositioning and the cutaways and the noddies, it took most of twenty minutes. Kinsey asked her if the diocese was fully behind Ellis; Merrily said the diocese was concerned about the situation. So would she be joining in tonight’s protest? Not exactly; but she’d be going along as an observer.

  ‘So the diocese is actually sitting on the fence?’

  Merrily said, ‘Personally, I don’t care too much for witch-hunts.’

  ‘So you think that’s literally what this is?’

  ‘I just wouldn’t like it to turn into one. The Reverend Ellis has a perfect right – well, it’s his job, in fact – to oppose whatever he considers evil, but—’

  ‘Do you think it’s evil?’

  ‘I haven’t met the Thorogoods. I wouldn’t, on face value, condemn paganism any more than I’d condemn Buddhism or Islam. But I would, like everyone else, be interested to find out what they’re proposing to do in Old Hindwell Church.’

  ‘You’d see that potentially as sacrilege?’

  ‘The significant point about Old Hindwell Church is that it’s no longer a functioning church. It’s been decommissioned.’

  ‘What about the graveyard, though? Wouldn’t relatives of dead people buried there—’

  ‘There never were all that many graves because the proximity of the brook caused occasional flooding. What graves there were are quite old, and only the stones now remain. Obviously, we’re concerned that those stones should not be tampered with.’

  ‘What about the way the village itself has reacted? All the candles in the windows... how do you feel about that?’

  Merrily smiled. ‘I think they look very pretty.’

  ‘What do you think they’re saying?’

  ‘Well... lots of different things, probably. Why don’t you knock on a few doors and ask?’

  Kinsey lowered his microphone, nodded to the cameraman. It was a wrap. ‘Out of interest, Martyn,’ Merrily said, ‘what did people have to say when you knocked on their doors?’

  ‘Sod all,’ said Kinsey. ‘Either they didn’t answer or they backed off or they politely informed us that Mr Ellis was doing the talking. And in some cases not so politely. Off the record, why is Ellis doing this? Why’s he going for these people – these so-called pagans?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘I can’t. He’s not your usual evangelical, all praising God and bonhomie. He’s quiet, he chooses his words carefully. Also he gets on with the locals... which is unusual. They’re canny round here, not what you’d call impressionable. Anyway, not my problem. You going to be around, if we need anything else?’

  ‘For the duration,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Well, good luck.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She ran all the way to the village hall, meeting nobody on the way, bounding up the steps and praying she wasn’t too late, because if it was all over... well, hearsay evidence just wasn’t the same.

  At the top, she stopped for breath – and to assess the man in the porch, obviously guarding the closed doors to the hall. Slumped on a folding chair like a sack of cement. He was an unsmiling, flat-capped bloke in his fifties. She didn’t recognize him.

  He didn’t quite look at her. ‘’Ow’re you?’

  ‘I’m fine. OK if I just pop in?’

  ‘No press, thank you. Father Ellis will be out in a while.’

  ‘I’m not press.’

  ‘I still can’t let you in.’

  Merrily unwound her scarf. He took in the collar, his watery eyes swivelling uncertainly.

  ‘You’re with Father Ellis?’

  ‘Every step of the way,’ Merrily said shamelessly.

  He ushered her inside. ‘Be very quiet,’ he said sternly, and closed the doors silently behind her.

  Suddenly she was in darkness.

  She waited, close to the place where she’d stood at Menna’s funeral service, until her eyes adjusted enough to reassure her there was little chance of being spotted. Here, at the end of the hall, she stood alone.

  All the window blinds had been pulled down tight, and it seemed to have a different layout, no longer a theatre-in-the-round. Whatever was happening was happening in a far corner, and all she could see of it was a white-gold aura, like over a Nativity scene, a distant holy grotto.

  And all she could hear was a sobbing – hollow, slow and even.

  Merrily slipped off her shoes, carried them to the shelter of a brick pillar about halfway down the hall. I
t was cold; no heating on.

  She waited for about half a minute before peering carefully around the pillar.

  The glow had resolved into two tiers of candles. The sobbing had softened into a whispery panting. Merrily could make out several people – seemed like women – some sitting or kneeling in a circle, the others standing behind them, all holding candles on small tin or pewter trays, like the ones in the windows of the village.

  Women only? This was why the guy on the door had let her in without too much dispute.

  The scene, with its unsteady glow and its umber shadows, had a dreamlike, period ambience: seventeenth or eighteenth century. You expected the women to be wearing starched Puritan collars.

  ‘In the name of the Father... and of the Son... and of the Holy Ghost...’

  Ellis’s voice was low-level, with that transatlantic lubrication. User-friendly and surprisingly warm.

  But only momentarily, for then he paused. Merrily saw him rise up, in his white monk’s robe, in the centre of the circle, the only man here. Next to him stood a slender table with a candle on it and a chalice and something else in shadow, probably a Bible.

  His voice rose, too, became more distinct, the American element now clipped out.

  ‘O God, the Creator and Protector of the human race, Who hast formed man in Thine own image, look upon this Thy handmaiden who is grievously vexed with the wiles of an unclean spirit... whom the old adversary, the ancient enemy of the earth, encompasses with a horrible dread... and blinds the senses of her human understanding with stupor, confounds her with terror... and harasses her with trembling and fear.’

  Merrily’s feet were cold; she bent and slipped on her shoes. She wouldn’t be getting any closer; from here she could see and hear all she needed. And she was fairly sure this was a modified version of the Roman Catholic ritual.

  Ellis’s voice gathered a rolling energy. ‘Drive away, O Lord, the power of the Devil, take away his deceitful snares.’

  At some signal, the women held their candles high, wafting out the rich and ancient aroma of melted wax.

  With a glittering flourish, Ellis’s arm was thrust up amid the lights.