A Crown of Lights mw-3

by Phil Rickman

  She went over to switch on the answering machine. When she came back Betty was saying, ‘In Shrewsbury, we were members of a coven containing quite a few... pagan activists, I suppose you’d have to call them. Teachers, mainly. They’re good people in their way, but they’d be more use on the council. They’re looking for organized religion, for structure.’

  ‘These are the people who’ve moved in on your house?’ Merrily asked her.

  ‘Some of them. It’s what I wanted to come down here and get away from. You don’t have to work in a coven. The only structures I’m really interested in now are the ones you build for yourself. But Robin will go along with anybody, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why don’t you phone him?’

  ‘I will. I just don’t want to speak to any of the others. We came down here to work alone. At least, I did. Robin just wanted to live somewhere inspiring and to show it off to his friends. He’d tell you we were sent here because of a series of omens. All that was irrelevant to me.’

  Interesting. What was slowly becoming apparent to Merrily was that Betty had come to Old Hindwell in a state of personal spiritual crisis. She’d been drawn into witchcraft by the need to understand the psychic experiences she’d been having from an early age. But maybe paganism hadn’t come up with the answers she’d sought.

  ‘Omens?’ Merrily brought out her cigarettes. To Jane’s evident disgust, Betty accepted one.

  ‘Estate agent particulars arriving out of the blue, that kind of thing. When Robin saw the church, he was hooked. Just like Major Wilshire.’

  ‘Tell me about Mrs Wilshire again,’ Merrily said.

  The police had questioned Betty for almost an hour at Mrs Wilshire’s bungalow. A detective constable had arrived who probably had never had a suspicious death to himself before.

  ‘I’d no idea she suffered angina,’ Betty had told them. ‘I just concocted something harmless for her arthritis.’

  No, she could not imagine why Mrs Wilshire would stop taking the Trinitrin tablets prescribed for her angina, a full, unopened bottle of which had been discovered by Dr Banks-Morgan. No, she would never in a million years have advised Mrs Wilshire to stop taking them. She had only suggested a possible winding-down of the steroids if and when the herbal remedy had any appreciable effects on the arthritis.

  ‘She told me Dr Coll knew all about me, and he was very much in favour of complementary medicines for some complaints.’

  ‘You know that’s not true, Mrs Thorogood,’ the CID man had said. ‘Dr Banks-Morgan says he has no respect at all for alternative medicines and he makes this clear to all his patients.’

  It got worse. If Mrs Wilshire was not becoming unduly influenced by Mrs Thorogood and her witch-remedies, why would she tell Dr Banks-Morgan he needn’t bother coming to visit her again?

  Betty could not believe for one minute that Mrs Wilshire had told her caring, caring GP not to come back. But she knew which of them was going to be believed.

  ‘What a bastard,’ Jane said. ‘He’s trying to fit you up.’

  ‘Where did they leave things?’ Merrily said. ‘The police, I mean.’

  ‘They said they might be in touch again.’

  ‘They probably won’t be. There’s nothing they can prove.’

  Betty said, ‘Do you believe me?’

  ‘Course we do,’ Jane said.

  ‘Merrily?’

  ‘From what little I know of Dr Coll, I wouldn’t trust him too far. Gomer?’

  Gomer thought about it. ‘Smarmy little bugger, Dr Coll. Always persuading folk to ’ave tests and things for their own good, like, but it’s just so’s he can pick up cash from the big drug companies – that’s what Greta reckons.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you the rest,’ Betty said.

  And she told them about Mrs Juliet Pottinger and what she’d said about the Hindwell Trust.

  ‘En’t never yeard of it,’ Gomer said when she’d finished.

  Merrily didn’t find that too surprising if the trust was administered by J.W. Weal.

  ‘Lot of incomers is retired folk,’ Gomer confirmed. ‘Like young Greg says, they comes out yere in the summer, thinks how nice it all looks and they’re amazed at how low house prices is, compared to where they comes from. So they sells up, buys a crappy ole cottage, moves out yere, gets ill...’

  ‘Fair game?’

  ‘Like poor bloody hand-reared pheasants,’ Gomer said.

  Merrily asked Betty, ‘Is it your feeling Mrs Wilshire’s left money to the Hindwell Trust?’

  Betty nodded.

  ‘This stinks,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Works both ways, see,’ said Gomer. ‘Patient needs their will sortin’, mabbe some poor ole biddy goin’ a bit soft in the head, and Dr Coll recommends a good lawyer, local man, trust him with your life. Big Weal turns up, you’re some little ole lady, you en’t gonner argue too much. ’Sides which, it’s easy for a lawyer to tamper with a will, ennit? Get the doctor to witness it. All local people, eh?’

  Betty explained why she’d gone to see Mrs Pottinger in the first place. Talking about that particular atmosphere she’d perceived in the old church, but hesitating before finally describing the image of a stricken and desperate man in what might have been a stained cassock.

  ‘Wow,’ said Jane.

  Merrily tried not to react too obviously, but she was becoming increasingly interested in the Reverend Terence Penney. ‘What year was this, again?’

  ‘Seventy-five,’ Betty said. ‘He seems to have been turning into a latent hippy.’

  Gomer looked up. ‘Loads o’ hippies round yere. You could get an ole cottage, no electric, for a few ’undred, back then, see, and nobody asked no questions. More drugs in Radnor them days than you’d find the whole o’ Birmingham.’

  ‘But you never actually ran into Penney yourself?’ Merrily lit another cigarette.

  ‘No, but I been thinkin’ of Danny Thomas. That boy knew all the hippies, see. Most locals they didn’t have nothin’ to do with ’em, but Danny, ’e was right in there. Up in court for growin’ cannabis, the whole bit. You want me to get Danny on the phone?’

  ‘It’s a bit late,’ Merrily suggested.

  ‘Boy don’t keep normal farmin’ hours,’ Gomer said.

  Danny Thomas had now turned down the music. In Danny’s barn there were speaker cabinets the size of wardrobes, all covered with chicken shit. Gomer also recalled an intercom on the wall. Bawling down it at Danny when he was wanted on the phone was how most folk reckoned Greta’s voice had reached air-raid siren level.

  It must be cold tonight out in Danny’s barn, but Danny would jump around a lot to the music before collapsing into the hay with a joint. Gomer pictured him sitting on a bale, straggly grey hair down the back of his donkey jacket, with Jimi at his feet – Mid-Wales’s only deaf sheepdog.

  Gomer sat on the edge of the vicar’s desk and waited while Greta had summoned Danny back to the farmhouse.

  ‘What’s goin’ down, Gomer, my man? You become a private eye, is it? Every bugger I meet these days, they just been grilled by Gomer Parry.’

  ‘All right, listen to me, boy,’ Gomer said. ‘Give your ole drug-raddled memory a rattle on the subject of Terry Penney.’

  A few seconds of quiet. Bit of a rarity around Danny unless he’d had a puff or two.

  ‘Poor bugger,’ he says at last.

  ‘Come to a sad end, what I yeard.’

  ‘I liked ole Terry.’

  ‘You go to ’is church?’

  ‘Din’t like him that much. But he was all right. He lent me his Dylan albums. This to do with that bugger Ellis? Tricky bastard, he is. Blew poor ole Gret’s mind. Gets ’em all in a bloody trance.’

  ‘Why’d he do it, Danny? Why’d Penney fill up the ole brook with good pews?’

  ‘Dope, ennit?’

  ‘Ar, well, that’s what they all says. Don’t mean bugger all.’

  Danny went quiet again.

  ‘What you know about Penney, Danny? What you k
now about Penney you en’t sayin’?’

  ‘Long while back, Gomer. Terry’s dead. Let the poor bugger lie.’

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘It’s that vicar o’ yours, ennit? Diggin’ the dirt.’

  ‘We needs to know, boy.’

  ‘Gimme a day or so to think about it.’

  ‘Can’t. C’mon, Danny, who’s it gonner harm?’

  ‘Me.’ Danny’s voice went thin. ‘I’m as guilty as any bugger, Gomer. It was me got Terry into it. Well... me and Coll.’

  ‘Dr Coll?’

  ‘Me and Dr Coll,’ Danny says. ‘And the bloody era that promised us the earth. And here we all are nigh on forty year later and further in the shit.’

  ‘Stay there,’ Gomer said. ‘Don’t move.’

  When Betty Thorogood started to cry, it turned everything around.

  Until now, talking about a world she knew, she’d been cool and assured. The otherworldly – visions and gods and archetypes – did not scare her, any more than neuroses scared a psychologist. In the everyday world, implicated in the death of a harmless widow, Betty came apart.

  ‘I just wanted to help her. I was sorry for her... that’s all there was to it.’

  Jane had moved her chair back, appalled. Witches don’t cry! Merrily leaned across the table, put a hand over Betty’s.

  Betty parted her hair, peered at Merrily through her tears. ‘What if their tests show up something nasty in that potion I gave her? Something I didn’t put there.’

  ‘What are they going to find? Henbane? Deadly night-shade? Rat poison? He doesn’t need all that. He’s got natural causes, apparently hastened by her overreliance on you.’

  ‘I just don’t understand why she would stop taking the pills he’d prescribed. She thought he was wonderful. She thought...’ Betty’s eyes filled up again. ‘She thought everyone was wonderful. Everyone who tried to help her. The local people were so good. Because she was from Off, anyone local who didn’t actually spit on her front step seemed wonderful and caring. I was so sorry for her. And dying there, in her chair, in front of that lukewarm fire... Perhaps he is telling the truth. Perhaps poor, fuddled Mrs Wilshire thought my little herbal remedy, bottled under the moon, was some sort of cure-all.’

  ‘There’s an experienced nurse I know,’ Merrily said. ‘Perhaps I’ll give her a call.’

  She stopped as Gomer returned. His glasses shone like twin torch-bulbs.

  ‘Come and talk to Danny, vicar.’

  40

  Key to the Kingdom

  AS DANNY TALKED, the picture formed for Merrily in ragged, fluttering colours. Radnor Forest in the 1960s and 1970s: hippy paradise.

  The flower children had wandered in from Off and settled in this border country in their hundreds because it was cheap and remote. They rented or even bought half-ruined cottages far from the roads. Thin boys in yellow trousers chopping wood from the hedges. Beautiful, long-haired girls in ankle-length medieval dresses fetching water from the well.

  In spite of the electricity supply being at best intermittent, they brought the new music – why, The Incredible String Band even lived for a while near Llandegley towards the northwestern end of the Forest.

  And the dope. The hippies also brought the dope.

  The local people were amused rather than hostile – the hippies didn’t do any damage and they were always a talking point.

  And for some – like Danny Thomas, dreamy, faraway farmer’s boy – this was what they’d been waiting for all their lives. When it was really happening Danny was good and ready; he figured he must’ve been born a hippy – growing up on Elvis, then the Beatles, popping purple hearts to groove all night and still be awake in time to milk the cows.

  Merrily smiled.

  And then cannabis. Danny had acquired his first joint at a dance in Llandod, with another to smoke in the top field after sunset. He did a bit of dealing for a while, but he was never much good at that and, besides, there was a much more reliable dealer emerging in the area. Better just to grow the stuff – nice, sheltered spot, in Bryncot Dingle – and then give it away. Danny was so excited by the dawning of this incredible new world that, by the summer of 1975, he was wanting to turn on the whole Forest.

  ‘Who was this “more reliable dealer”?’ Merrily asked. ‘Can I take a guess?’

  Danny was talking freely now, his voice hoarse but liquid, like wet ash. Dr Coll had been the son of a surgeon at Hereford Hospital with a house in New Radnor. Still a medical student back then, in need of a few quid, like all your students. ‘Medical students always got their sources, ennit?’ Danny said.

  ‘He was a hippy, too?’

  ‘Lord, no. Dr Coll en’t never been a hippy, not even as a boy. Just a feller with a eye to a few quid. Course when he qualified as a doctor, that all come to an end. Gotter keep ’is nose clean. Or at least keep it lookin’ clean.’

  And there would have been better ways of making money by then, Merrily thought. ‘What about Terry Penney? When did he appear?’ From what Betty had learned from Mrs Pottinger and from what Sophie had passed on to Merrily, Penney had emerged as a bright boy, but impressionable, and not too well-off. But what Danny was saying produced a different picture: Terry was an upper-middle-class radical with a posh, wealthy girlfriend who everyone thought was his wife, until she found life in Radnor seriously lacking and went back to the Smoke, leaving the vicar of Old Hindwell to grow his hair and smoke dope with the likes of Danny Thomas.

  Terry, like Danny, was finding the times life-enhancing and life-changing. But Terry also saw it from a religious perspective: drugs opening the doors of perception, the gates of the soul. Terry was a fan of the seventeenth-century poet, Thomas Traherne, who had found secrets of the universe in Herefordshire meadows.

  The dope had certainly elevated and coloured Terry’s faith in God. Today, perhaps he’d be all happy-clappy and singing-in-tongues, like Ellis, and perhaps the drugs would have represented a passing phase. But it was a never-ending inner journey, then. Terry and Danny would smoke dope, untroubled by the law and Danny discovered that he loved the whole world and Terry loved the world and God. Terry believed that the time was coming when all mankind would be herbally awakened to the splendour of the Lord.

  Then Dr Coll brought the acid along.

  Merrily nodded. Acid had been something different. Not just another drug, but the key to serious religious experience, a direct line to God. To Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, all those guys, LSD was the light on the road to Damascus, and anyone could get there.

  So, one fine, warm day, Terry Penney and Danny Thomas and Dr Coll had found a shady corner of a Radnor Valley field, overlooking the Four Stones. They had their lumps of sugar and Dr Coll brought out the lysergic acid. An experiment, he said. He wouldn’t take any himself; he’d supervise, make sure they came to no harm.

  Danny’s trip lasted for ever. Under the perfumed, satin sky, he went through whole lifetimes in one afternoon. He found that the Radnor Valley was in his blood... really in his blood – the whole landscape turning to liquid and jetting through his veins. When he looked at the inside of his wrist he could see through the skin and into that fast-flowing land. He was the land, he was the valley, he was the forest. He walked through the silken grass down to the Four Stones, which he now understood to hold the mind of the valley, and Dr Coll said afterwards he had to stop Danny beating his head on the prehistoric stones to get inside them because the stones knew the secret.

  The Reverend Penney, meanwhile, came to believe he’d been granted access to the very kingdom of heaven.

  He saw an angel, a giant angel with his feet astride the valley. Merrily imagined a great William Blake angel with the red sun in his wings and a raised sword which cleaved the hills.

  Life was never going to be the same again for either Terry or Danny. Danny was still tripping when he got home to the farm and he walked down the yard and saw the depth of sorrow in the eyes of the beautiful pigs and realized how much he loved those pigs
. To this day, Danny Thomas said, he wouldn’t see a pig ever killed.

  He and Terry took four more trips together. Terry told Danny that he knew now that he had seen the Archangel Michael, who had been appointed to guard the forest and the Radnor Valley, because this was a great doorway through which you could enter the kingdom. Terry found a book by the Reverend Parry-Jones who’d been vicar at Llanfihangel Rhydithon back in the twenties and he too thought the Forest was special, but he also mentioned a dragon that you could hear breathing in the night, and Terry said this was no surprise because places of great spiritual power were equally attractive to devilish forces.

  Terry considered it no accident that he had been brought here, now, at this time of spiritual awakening, to be the priest of one of St Michael’s churches. He had told Danny he was going to call a meeting of all the other St Michael clergy around the Forest because they were destined to work together. But this never happened, because the other ministers had all heard about Terry Penney.

  Still Terry insisted he was being groomed by God for the Big Task. Every day, before dawn, he’d kneel before his altar in Old Hindwell Church and beg God and St Michael that his mission might be revealed to him.

  But God held out on him.

  Terry decided he was not yet worthy, did not yet know enough, was not yet pure enough. He stopped smoking cannabis and concentrated on reading the Book of Revelation a hundred times. He wrote out important verses from it on sheets of white card and hung them around his room at the old rectory. His sermons became impenetrably apocalyptic. He began to research St Michael and the lives of those saints and mystics who had become obsessed by the warrior archangel. He made solemn pilgrimages to all the St Michael churches around Radnor Forest... approaching each from the direction of the last, walking the final mile barefoot after a day’s fasting.

  ‘Local people was startin’ to go off him in a big way,’ Danny said. ‘Local people don’t like it when their vicar gets talked about in other parishes.’

  Terry Penney had walked barefoot across the bridge to the church of St Michael, Cefnllys – an awesome setting, where an entire medieval town had been laid out under its castle. Then Terry had hiked unshod across the bleak Penybont Common to Llanfihangel Rhydithon. Next, he’d come down from the Forest to the yews encircling the rebuilt roadside church at Llanfihangel nant Melan. And finally he’d tramped on callused feet along the sombre, narrow road to Cascob, where he’d stood before the old Abracadabra charm.