A Crown of Lights

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Robin, he now doesn’t want you to do it at all.’

  On the second table, the work table, lay Robin’s preliminary watercolour drawings for the proposed new Kirk Blackmore format, the one which would run down the backlist like gold thread. The one, in fact, which would launch the fund which would finance the restoration of the outbuildings – providing Betty with her own herbal haven and Robin, in a year or two, with the most wonderful, inspiring, sacred studio.

  ‘He just... he just said he didn’t like the painting,’ Robin said. His whole body seemed very light. ‘He said he... he said there were elements of the painting he didn’t like, was all.’

  Al said, ‘He wants someone else to do it, Robin.’

  ‘Who?’ Robin couldn’t feel his hands.

  ‘It doesn’t matter who. Nobody in particular – but not you. Mate, I’m sorry. I was so convinced you were the man for this, I would’ve... I had to tell you today. I didn’t want you spending all weekend working out something that wasn’t even going to get—’

  ‘And the backlist?’

  ‘The backlist?’

  ‘What I’m saying, this isn’t just the one cover he doesn’t like...?’

  ‘It is the one cover he doesn’t like, obviously, and you’ll get paid in full for that, no problem at all. But it’s also... How many ways can I put this? He wants... he wants another artist. He doesn’t want you.’

  Robin held up the core design which Blackmore should have loved, took a last look into the eyes of Lord Madoc who, in times of need, would stand in his megalithic circle and summon the Celtic Ray.

  Robin’s Madoc – who would not now be Blackmore’s Madoc. A lean, noble, beardless face, its hairstyle – or glorious neglect of style – shamelessly modelled on Betty’s own delicious profusion. Sympathetic magic: Madoc’s hair was full of electricity and pulsed in the mist around him; Madoc, the hack fantasy hero, had been permitted to reflect the bright essence of Betty’s holy power. How could frigging Blackmore have failed to respond to that?

  And what were they gonna live on now?

  Maybe not love. He recalled Betty’s face before she had gone out, the light gone from her eyes, the shine from her skin. And her hair all brushed. She’d brushed her hair flat!

  She also wore a skirt he didn’t even remember her owning, a dark, mid-length skirt – a very ordinary skirt. This was the true horror of it. When she left the house she was looking like an ordinary person.

  And it was his fault. Ever since they got here, everything he did was wrong. And everything he didn’t do – or say.

  Jeez, he’d never even thought much about what had happened with Marianne outside the pub. That whole sequence was like a dream – the glowing cross in the sky, the big, weird guy looking over his shoulder at no one right behind him. Robin had gone home and he’d slept, and tomorrow had been another lousy day.

  He felt cold to his gut. Lately, Betty had lain with her back to him in bed, feigning sleep, a psychic wall between them.

  Very tired, she would say, with the move and all.

  ‘Fuck!’ Robin tore the Madoc drawings end to end and let the strips fall to the floorboards. ‘Fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.’

  Trying to picture Blackmore as he was ripping them, but he’d never seen the guy. The face that came to him was the smug, unlined, holy face of the Reverend Nicholas Ellis. Ellis had done this. Ellis who had made Robin his devil, focused his smug, holy Christian hatred on the ruins of St Michael’s, the lair of the dragon. Ellis had brought down bad luck on them.

  And they were innocent.

  He broke down and wept in frustration and despair, his head among the scattered paint tubes. Robin Thorogood, illustrator, seducer of souls, guardian of the softly lit doorways? What a fucking joke.

  By seed, by root, by bud and stem, by leaf and flower and fruit, by life and love, in the name of the goddess, I Robin, take thee, Betty, to my hand, my heart and my spirit at the setting of the sun and rising of the stars.

  A handfasting. None of this till-death-do-us-part shit.

  In the fullness of time we shall be born again, at the same time and in the same place as each other, and we shall meet and know and remember and love again.

  It made you cry. Every time you thought of that it made you cry. How much of the prosaic Christian marriage ceremony could do that to you?

  Robin cried some more. He saw her in her wedding dress. He saw her slipping out of the dress, when they were left alone, for the consummation, the Great Rite.

  How could it be that their souls were sailing away from each other? How could this happen in the sacred place which, it had been prophesied – it had been fucking prophesied – was their destiny?

  Robin rose from the table. He figured what he would do now was take a walk down to the barn.

  And from the barn he would retrieve the box containing the charm which promised to protect this house and all the chickens and pigs and local people therein from the menace of the Old Religion.

  And he, Robin Thorogood, guardian of the softly lit doorways, would take this box and carry it to the edge of the promontory on which the Christians had built their church and, with due ceremony and acknowledgement to the Reverend Penney, hurl the motherfucker into the hungry torrent of the Hindwell Brook.

  Robin wiped his eyes with a paint cloth. He thought he heard a knocking at the front door.

  Local people. It was probably only Local People. Like the deeply local person who wrote the anonymous letter to his wife, shafting him good.

  Well, these local people could just remove themselves from off of his – and the building society’s – property. Robin’s fists bunched. They could very kindly evacuate their asses from said property right now.

  The guy said, ‘Mr Thorogood?’

  Not a local person. Even Robin was getting so he could separate out British accents, and this was kind of London middle class.

  Two of them, and one carried a biggish metal-edged case.

  When Robin saw the case, he thought sourly, Whaddaya know, it’s another local person bringing us another box with another charm to guard us against ourselves and thus turn our idyllic lives into liquid shit.

  ‘Mr Thorogood, my name’s Richard Prentice. This is Stuart Joyce.’

  Robin flicked on the porch light. Overweight guy with a beard, and a thinner, younger guy in a leather jacket. Double-glazing, Robin figured; or travelling reps from some company that would maximize your prospects by investing the contents of your bank account in a chain of international vivisection laboratories.

  ‘We both work for the Daily Mail newspaper,’ Prentice said. ‘If it’s convenient, I’d like a chat with you – about your religion.’

  ‘About my...?’ Robin glanced at the case. Of course, a camera case.

  ‘I understand you and your wife are practising witches.’

  Robin went still. ‘How would you have come to understand that?’

  Relax. No camera around the thin guy’s neck.

  Prentice smiled. ‘You didn’t happen to watch a TV programme called Livenight, by any chance?’

  ‘We don’t have a TV.’

  ‘Oh.’ The man smiled. ‘That would certainly explain it. Well, Mr Thorogood, you and your wife were referred to on that programme.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not by name – but your situation was mentioned. Now, it sounds as though we’re the first media people to approach you. And that’s a good thing for both of us, because—’

  ‘Hold on a moment,’ Robin said.

  ‘If, as you say, we are witches – which, in these enlightened times, I’m hardly gonna deny... Why are you interested? There are thousands of us. It’s, like, the fastest growing religion in the country right now. What I’m saying is, what kind of big deal is that for a paper like yours?’

  ‘Well, I’ll be straight with you, Robin, it’s primarily the church. How many witches have actually taken over a Christian church for their rituals?’

  ‘Well, Richard,’
Robin said, ‘if I can reverse that question, how many Christian churches have taken over pagan sites for their rituals?’

  Richard Prentice grinned through his beard. ‘That, my friend, is an excellent point, and we’d like to give you the opportunity to amplify it.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Richard.’

  ‘Could we come in and talk about it? It’s perishing out here.’

  ‘I really don’t think so. For starters, my wife—’

  ‘Look,’ Prentice said. ‘You were more or less outed – if I can use that term – on a TV programme watched by millions of viewers. I’d guess you’re going to be hearing from a lot of other journalists over the next few days. And I mean tabloid journalists.’

  ‘Isn’t that what you are?’

  ‘We like to call ours a compact paper. There’s a difference.’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh, Richard.’

  ‘Robin... look... what we have in mind – and this would be for Monday’s paper, so we’d have a whole day to get it absolutely right – is a serious feature explaining exactly what your plans are for this church, and why you believe you’re no threat to the community.’

  ‘Somebody say we’re a threat to the community here?’

  ‘You know what local people are like, Robin.’

  ‘Out,’ Robin said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Go, Richard.’

  ‘Robin, I think you’ll find that we can protect you from the unwanted intrusion of less responsible—’

  ‘Leave now. Or I’ll, like, turn you into a fucking toad.’

  ‘That’s not a very sensible attitude. Look, this was probably a bad time. I can tell something’s happened to upset you. We’re going to be staying in the area tonight. I suggest we come back in the morning. All right?’

  Robin stepped out of the porch. Through the trees, he could hear the racing of the Hindwell Brook.

  ‘OK,’ Prentice said, ‘that’s your decision.’

  And if they’d gone at that moment, things might all have been so much less fraught.

  Unfortunately, at this point the porch and Robin were lit up brightly, and Robin realized the younger guy suddenly had a camera out.

  The rushing of the brook filled his head. Cold white noise. Robin thought of silent Betty with her back to him in the sack. He thought he heard, somewhere on the ether, the rich sound of Kirk Blackmore laughing at his artwork.

  Robin made like Lord freaking Madoc.

  22

  Wisp

  MERRILY COULD SEE the battlemented outline of Old Hindwell church tower over the bristle of trees, and the spiteful voice cawed in her head.

  I can show you a church with a tower and graves and everything... which is now a pagan church. You don’t know what’s happening on your own doorstep.

  If these pagans had been around for a while, it would explain why Ellis had adopted Old Hindwell – extremes attract extremes. The only other abandoned Anglican church she could think of in the diocese was at Llanwarne, down towards Ross-on-Wye, and that was close to the centre of a village and open to the road, a tourist attraction.

  But whether this was or wasn’t the alleged neo-pagan temple was not the issue right now. What she needed to make for was the former rectory, which was not ruined, far from abandoned... but about to accommodate its first grave.

  She would probably encounter Sophie’s car along the way.

  And Barbara Buckingham?

  That grumbling foreboding in her stomach – that was subjective, right? Merrily walked faster, aware that the only sound on the street was the soft padding of her own flat shoes. She walked into the centre of the village, where there was a small shop and post office – closed already – and the pub had frosted windows and looked inviting only compared with everywhere else.

  In one of the cottages, a dog howled suddenly, a spiralling sound; maybe it had picked up a distant discordant wailing emanating from the village hall. Something which was not, perhaps, quite human.

  The pub car park was still full. With the cars – of course – of outsiders. The singing in tongues should have given it away: many people in today’s congregation were not, in fact, family mourners or friends or long-time clients of J.W. Weal, but core members of Nicholas Ellis’s church.

  And the tongues was not a spontaneous phenomenon; for them it had become routine, a habit, almost an addiction, a Christian trip. She’d learned that while at theological college when a bunch of students, well into the born-again thing, had persuaded her to join them at a weekend event known as the Big Bible Fest, held in a huge marquee near Warwick. Two long days of everybody smiling at everybody else and doing the ‘Praise Him!’ routine like kids with a new schoolyard catchphrase, and by the end of the first day Merrily had been ready to swing for the next person who addressed her as ‘sister’.

  It had been Jeremy, one of the faithful, who’d told her that the cynical bitch persona was simply concealing her fear of complete surrender to the Holy Spirit. He was challenging her to go along that night with an open mind, without prejudice, without resistance. Praise Him! So, OK, she’d attended a service where all the hymns had been simple, rhythmic pop anthems, sung by happy people in Hawaiian shirts and sweatpants – and all ending in tongues.

  Tongues was the gift of Christ, originally granted to a select few. The Bible did not spell out what tongues actually sounded like, its linguistic roots, its grammatical structure, but modern evangelical Christians insisted it was a way of talking directly to God, who Himself did not necessarily speak English.

  Not entirely convincing, but for the first two hymns she’d held out. After all, hadn’t her own formative mystical moment occurred in total silence, lit by the blue and the gold, alone in a little hermit’s cave of a church?

  And then – Praise Him, praise God! – her mouth had been open like everyone else’s, and out it all came like those flimsy coloured scarves produced by conjurers. Words which were flowing and lyrical and meant nothing, but sounded as if they ought to. Lush, liquid worship. Dynamic, wordless prayer. A disconnecting of the senses. A transcendent experience, up there around the marquee’s striped roof.

  She could, in fact, still bring it on when she wanted to, could summon that wild Christian high, simple as popping a pill, as though just doing it that once had been a lifetime’s initiation. It was easy.

  Maybe too easy.

  She wondered to what extent the locals had joined in. Were slow-speaking farmers now singing in tongues? Did they say ‘Praise God’ when they met by the sheep pens on market day, instead of the time-honoured ‘’Ow’re you?’

  You couldn’t rule that out. After all, it was in Wales that traditional church worship had been massively abandoned in the rush to build stark, spartan Noncomformist chapels. So how far down the charismatic road did Old Hindwell go? Was it like the Toronto Blessing, with people collapsing everywhere? Were they discovering Galilean sand in the palms of their hands and gold fillings in their teeth?

  But how appropriate was this at a funeral?

  Merrily scanned the cars by the pub. Was one of them Barbara’s? What make had Barbara been driving? Merrily didn’t know.

  She turned and walked on down the darkening street, a headache coming on, although it was dulled by the cold. Beyond the village shop and a lone bungalow with a 1970s-style rainbow-stone porch, the grass verge came to an end, so Merrily walked in the road, down into a conifered valley which would eventually open out to the hill country of Radnor Forest.

  Soon afterwards, she heard the low mutter of approaching vehicles, and then dipped headlights began to cast a pale light on the road, and she pressed close to the hedge as the cortège came past.

  As the mourners had started coming for their cars, Gomer had moved to the pub window to look out for Gareth and Judy Prosser. Chances were the Prossers would be on foot, but they’d still have to come this way. Most of the people picking up their vehicles Gomer didn’t recognize.

  ‘There a funeral tea up the h
all?’ he asked Greg.

  ‘If there is, we weren’t asked to provide it. Nah, they say Father Ellis don’t go for eating and drinking in church.’

  ‘It’s a bloody village hall!’

  ‘Not when he’s there it ain’t.’

  Gomer looked over his shoulder at Greg polishing glasses for the customers that didn’t come in. ‘You’re not a churchgoer, then, boy?’

  ‘Never was. But the bloody pressure’s on now.’ The anxious look flitted across Greg’s face again. ‘Lot of people’ve started going. He don’t look much, Ellis, but they reckon you come out feeling on cloud nine. I mean, whatever it is, I’m not sure I wanna catch it. The wife’s gone to this funeral. And I let ’em use the car park – all his fans from miles around. Not that many of ’em drop in for a pint or anyfing afterwards. Don’t need drink when you’re high on God.’

  ‘You got a few yere now, boy,’ Gomer observed. ‘Stand by your pumps.’

  Two men and three women came in, all in black. One of the men was Tony Probert, farmer from Evenjobb – Gomer knew him to speak to, just about – and one of the women was...

  ‘Gomer Parry!’

  ‘Greta,’ Gomer said, ‘’ow’re you?’

  Greta Thomas, wife of Danny, the rock-and-roll farmer from Kinnerton. She was little and busty, with a voice Nash Rocks could’ve used for blasting. Used to be receptionist for Dr Coll.

  ‘I hope you’re lookin’ after yourself, Gomer,’ Greta yelled. ‘Not goin’ back to the wild?’ Never one to make a meal of the ole condolences; once the funeral was over Greta believed it was time to start cheering you up.

  ‘I’m doing fine, Gret.’

  ‘’Cause if Min thought you was on the bevvy...’

  ‘Moderation in all things, you know me, girl. I dunno, I seen bloody Danny earlier, he never said you was goin’ to see Menna off.’