A Crown of Lights (5 page)

In the scruffy silence of the hospital corridor, she thought she heard Minnie Parry at her most comfortably Brummy:
Yow don’t go worrying about us, my duck. We’re retired, got all the time in the world to worry about ourselves.

Instinctively she unslung her bag, plunged a hand in. But Gomer was there first.

‘Have one o’ mine, vicar. Extra-high tar, see.’

T
UESDAY BEGAN WITH
a brown fog over the windows like dirty lace curtains. The house was too quiet. They ought to get a dog. Two dogs, Robin had said after breakfast, before going off for a walk on his own.

He’d end up, inevitably, at the church, just to satisfy himself it hadn’t disappeared in the mist. He would walk all around the ruins, and the ruins would look spectacularly eerie and Robin would think,
Yes!

From the kitchen window, Betty watched him cross the yard between dank and oily puddles, then let himself into the old barn, where they’d stowed the oak box. Robin also thought it was seriously cool having a barn of your own.
Hey! How about I stash this in... the barn?

When she was sure he wouldn’t be coming back for a while, Betty brought out, from the bottom shelf of the dampest kitchen cupboard, the secret copy she’d managed to make of that awful witch charm. She’d done this on Robin’s photocopier while he’d gone for a tour of Old Hindwell with George and Vivvie, their weekend visitors who – for several reasons – she could have done without.

Betty now took the copy over to the window sill. Produced in high contrast, for definition, it looked even more obscurely threatening than the original.

First the flash-vision of the praying man in the church, then this.

O Lord, Jesus Christ Saviour Salvator I beseech the salvation of all who dwell within from witchcraft and from the power of all evil... Amen Amen Amen... Dei nunce... Amen Amen Amen Amen Amen.

Ritualistic repetition. A curious mixture of Catholic and Anglican. And also:

By Jehovah, Jehovah and by the Ineffable Names 17317... Holy Names... Elohim... Emmanuel...

Jewish mysticism... the Kabbalah. A strong hint of ritual magic. And then those symbols – planetary, Betty thought, astrological.

It was bizarre and muddled, a nineteenth-century cobbling together of Christianity and the occult. And it seemed utterly genuine.

It was someone saying:
We know about you. We know what you are
.

And we know how to deal with you.

Inside the barn, the mysterious box was still there, tucked down the side of a manger. All the hassle it was causing with Betty, Robin had been kind of hoping the Local People would somehow have spirited this item away again. It was cute, it was weird but it was, essentially, a crock of shit. A joke, right?

The Local People? He’d found he was beginning to think of ‘the local people’ the way the Irish thought of ‘the little people’: shadowy, mischievous, will-o’-the-wispish. A different species.

Robin had established that the box did originally come from this house. Or, at least, there were signs of an old hiding place inside the living-room inglenook – new cement, where a brick had been replaced. So was this the reason Betty had resisted the
consecration of their living room as a temple? Because it was there that the anti-witchcraft charm had been secreted?

Betty’s behaviour had been altogether difficult most of the weekend. George Webster and his lady, the volatile Vivvie, Craft-buddies from Manchester, had come down on Saturday to help the Thorogoods get the place together, and hadn’t left until Monday afternoon. It ought to have been a good weekend, with loud music, wine and the biggest fires you could make out of resinous green pine. But Betty had kept on complaining of headaches and tiredness.

Which wasn’t like her at all. As a celebratory climax, Robin had wanted the four of them to gather at the top of the tower on Sunday night to welcome the new moon. But – wouldn’t you know? – it was overcast, cold and raining. And Betty had kept on and on about safety. Like, would that old platform support as many as four people? What did she think, that he was planning an orgy?

Standing by the barn door, Robin could just about see the top of the tower, atmospherically wreathed in fog. One day soon, he would produce a painting of it in blurry watercolour, style of Turner, and mail it to his folks in New York.
This is a sketch of the church. Did I mention the ancient church we have out back?

And
ancient
was right.

This was the real thing. The wedge of land overlooking the creek, the glorious plot on which the medieval church of St Michael at Old Hindwell had been built by the goddamn Christians, was most definitely an ancient pagan sacred site. George Webster had confirmed it. And George had expertise in this subject.

Just take a look at these yew trees, Robin, still roughly forming a circle. That one and that one... could be well over a thousand years old.

Red-haired, beardy George running his hands down the ravines in those huge, twisting trunks and then cutting some forks of hazel, so he and Robin could do some exploratory dowsing. What you did, you asked questions – Were there
standing stones here? Was this an old burial place, pre-Christianity? How many bodies are lying under here? – and you waited for the twig to twitch in response. Admittedly, a response didn’t happen too often for Robin, but George was adept.

No, there’d been no stones but perhaps wooden poles – a woodhenge kind of arrangement – where the yews now grew. And yes, there had been pre-Christian burials here. George made it 300-plus bodies at one time. But the area had been excavated and skeletons taken away for reburial before the Church sold off the site, so there was the possibility that some pagan people been taken away for
Christian
burial. The arrogance of those bastards!

What happened, way back when the Christians were moving into Britain, was some smart-ass pope had decreed that they should place their churches on existing sites of worship. This served two purposes: it would demonstrate the dominance of the new religion over the old and, if the site was the same, that might persuade the local tribes to keep on coming there to worship.

But that was all gonna be turned around at last. Boy,
was
it!

Robin stood down by the noisesome water, lining up the church with Burfa Hill, site of an Iron Age camp. He couldn’t remember when – outside of a rite – he’d last felt so exalted. Sure, it only backed up what he’d already instinctively known from standing up top of the tower the other night. But, hell, confirmation was confirmation! He and Betty had been meant to come here, to revive a great tradition.

It was about repaganization.

They hadn’t talked too much about long-term plans, but – especially after the weekend’s discoveries – it was obvious these would revolve around in some way reinstating the temple which had stood here before there ever was a Christian church. Physically, this process had already begun: the church had fallen into ruins; if this continued, one day only the tower would remain... a single great standing stone.

Beautiful!

So why wasn’t Betty similarly incandescent with excitement? Why so damn moody so much of the time? Was it that box? He’d wanted to tell George and Vivvie about the box and what it contained, but Betty had come on heavy, swearing him to silence.
It’s no one else’s problem. It’s between us and
them.
We have to find our own way of dealing with it.

Them? Like who? She was paranoid.

And also, he knew, still spooked about what had happened to Major Wilshire, from whose widow they’d bought this place.

The Major had died after a fall from a ladder he’d erected up the side of the tower. Hearing the story, George Webster – who’d drunk plenty wine by then – had begun speculating about the site having a guardian and maybe needing a sacrifice every so many years. Maybe they could find out if anyone
else
had died in accidents here...

At which point Robin had beckoned George behind the barn and told him to keep bullshit ideas like that to himself.

Besides, if there
was
any residual atmospheric stress resulting from that incident, Robin figured the best answer would be to do something positive on the tower itself to put things right, and as soon as possible.

Some kind of ritual. Betty would know.

Back in the house, he placed the oak box on the kitchen table. Betty’s sea-green eyes narrowed in suspicion.

‘We have to deal with this, Bets,’ Robin told her. ‘Then we forget about it for ever.’

‘But not necessarily now,’ Betty said irritably.

But Robin was already reading aloud the charm again, the parts of it he could decipher. He suspected Betty could interpret some of those symbols – as well as being more psychically developed, her esoteric knowledge was a good deal deeper and more comprehensive than his own – but she was not being overhelpful here, to say the fucking least.

‘OK,’ he conceded, ‘so it’s probably complete bullshit. I guess
these things must’ve been real commonplace at one time – like hanging a horseshoe on your gate.’

‘Yes,’ Betty said with heavy patience. ‘I’m sure, if we make enquiries, we’ll find out that there was a local wise man – they called them conjurors in these parts. They were probably still going strong in the nineteenth century.’

‘Like a shaman?’

‘Something like that. Someone who dealt in spells and charms. If a couple of dozen lambs went down with sheep-scab or something, the farmer would start whingeing about being bewitched and call in the conjuror. It was usually a man – probably because farmers hereabouts didn’t like dealing with women. The conjuror would probably write out a charm to keep in the fireplace, and everyone would be happy.’

‘There you go. We just happened to be exposed to this one when we were overtired and stressed-out and ready to leap to gross conclusions.’

Betty nodded non-committally. Against the murk of the morning, she was looking a little more vital, in her big, red mohair sweater and her moon talisman. She’d already gotten sweating piles of pine logs stacked up both sides of the Rayburn. Yesterday, she and Vivvie had hung Chinese lanterns on the naked bulbs and called down blessings. But when George had suggested consecrating the temple in the living room itself, Betty had resisted that. Not something to be rushed into. Give the house spirits time to get to know them. Which had sounded unusually fey, for Betty.

‘You know, if I’d followed my first instinct when I spotted that guy from the tower, I’d’ve run down directly and caught him dumping the carrier bag.’

Betty shook her head. ‘If whoever it was had come face to face with you on the doorstep, he’d just have made some excuse – like seeing lights in the house, coming over to check everything was OK. He’d have pretended the bag was his shopping and just taken it away with him.’

He didn’t argue; she was usually right. He put his hands on
the box, closed his eyes, imagined other hands on the box – tried for a face.

‘I did that already,’ Betty said, offhand. ‘Nothing obvious.’

Robin opened his eyes. If she’d tried it and gotten nothing then there was nothing to be had. He had no illusions about which of them was the most perceptive in
that
way. He didn’t mind; he still had his creative vision.

‘Put it back, now huh, Rob?’

‘In the fireplace?’

‘In the
barn
, dickhead! Let’s not take any chances. Not till we know where it’s been.’

‘Ha!’ He sprang back. ‘You just have to know, dontcha?’

‘I’d quite
like
to know,’ Betty said casually.

‘Bets...’ He walked over, took her tenderly by the shoulders. ‘Look at me... listen... What the fuck’s it matter if someone
does
know we’re pagans? What kind of big deal is that these days?’

‘No problem at all,’ Betty said, ‘if you live in Islington or somewhere. In a place like this—’

‘
Still
no problem is my guess. Bets, this is
not you
. It’s me does the overreacting. Me who won’t leave the house if there’s only one magpie out in the garden. I’m telling you, this is a
good
place. We’re
meant
to be here. We came at the right time. Meant, right? Ordained. Making the church site into a sacred place again. All of that.’

Betty gently disengaged his hands. ‘I thought I might go and see Mrs Wilshire. The note says, “The previous occupant preferred not to keep it and gave it away.” So presumably they’re talking about Mrs Wilshire. Or more likely her husband.’

‘He was an old soldier. He’d have thought this was pure bullshit.’

‘Before he died,’ Betty said.

‘Whooo!’ Robin flung up his hands, backed away, as if from an apparition. ‘Don’t you start with that!’

‘They didn’t even get to live here, did they? They get the place half-renovated and then the poor old Major is gone, crash, bang.’

Robin spread his arms. ‘Bets, it’s like... it’s an ill wind. It’s a
big pile of ifs. If the Wilshires had gotten all the renovation work done, everything smoothed out and shiny, and then put the place on the market, it’d’ve been way out of our price league. If people hereabouts hadn’t been put off by the tragic reasons for the sale, there might’ve been some competition... If it hadn’t gone on sale in November, all the holiday-home-seekers from London woulda been down here. If... if... if... What can I say? All the ifs were in our favour. But, if it makes you feel better, OK, let’s go see her. When?’

‘What?’

‘The widow Wilshire.’

‘Oh. No, actually, I thought I’d go alone. She struck me as a timid kind of person.’

‘And I would spook her?’

‘We don’t want to look like a delegation. Anyway, you’ve work to do.’

‘I do. I have work.’

The Kirk Blackmore artwork was complete, and would now be couriered, by special arrangement, not to the publishers but to Kirk himself. But the idea of producing a painting of the church, fog-swathed, had gotten hold of Robin, and if he mentioned it to Betty she’d be like:
If you’ve got time for that, you’ve got time to emulsion a wall
. But while she was gone, he could knock off a watercolour sketch of the church. He was already envisioning a seasonal series... a whatever you called a triptych when there were
four
of them.