Midwinter of the Spirit mw-2

by Phil Rickman

  ‘What…?’ Jane found it hard to speak, her mouth was so dry. ‘What do you think I should do?’

  ‘Don’t know. It’s not for me to say. This is a very personal issue.’

  ‘You can’t just leave it like that. I mean, I could buy books and things, but I already do that.’

  Angela gathered up the cards. ‘Have you had any personal experiences which have mystified you?’

  ‘Maybe. Like, there was this time I kind of fell asleep in a field, and when I awoke I felt as though I’d been someone else. It’s like really hard to explain, but—’

  ‘Don’t tell me. These are messages for you alone. Look, Jane, what I’m going to do is give you a telephone number. Not mine, because I don’t think you should be entirely influenced by one person or feel that you’re being pressed from one direction.’

  Angela reached down to a handbag on the floor and pulled out a notepad and a pen. Jane felt a welling excitement and also a small, fizzing trepidation as Angela wrote.

  ‘This is the number of a young woman called Sorrel, not far from here. You’ll like her. She’s very down-to-earth.’

  ‘Who… is she?’

  ‘Just another person with a questing spirit. She runs a healthfood restaurant in Hereford and holds meetings there for people of a like mind: to share experiences and consider methods of developing their skills.’

  ‘Sounds a bit… I mean, I’d feel a bit…’

  ‘If you did decide to go, you could always take your friend… Rosemary, was it?’

  ‘Rowenna.’ Jane felt much better. ‘Yeah, that’d be cool. Er… develop skills? What sort of skills do you think I might have?’

  ‘Healing? Clairvoyance? It’s not for me to say. Perhaps you can find out.’ Angela tore the top page out of her notebook and placed it in front of Jane. ‘It’s entirely up to you now.’

  ‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘Right.’

  When she stood up, her legs felt cold and trembly.

  Moon was pulling down the old-fashioned rollerblind over the CLOSED sign on the door.

  All the lights were out except for a brown-shaded one on the counter, so that the air in the shop had a deep-shadowed sepia density. The unsaleable balalaika hung forlornly on the wall behind the till. The low-level music from the speakers each end of the single seventeenth-century beam was by Radiohead at their most suicidal: the one about escaping lest you choked.

  Lol swallowed. Moon said to him, as though he’d been here for some time, ‘I asked Denny to come over for supper. He said he’d really love to but he was too busy. I knew he’d say that.’

  ‘Well, he probably is. Work’s piling up in the studio.’

  Moon shook her head. ‘It’s his wife. Maggie thinks I’m still doing dope – and I’m poison in all sorts of other ways. Plus, he just doesn’t want to come to the barn.’

  She came to stand next to him. She was wearing a long brown cardigan over a too-much-unbuttoned white cotton blouse and jeans. Something dull and metallic hung from a leather thong around her neck.

  ‘Moon, you can’t go home on your bike, in the dark, up that hill. It’s snowing hard.’

  ‘I’ve got good lights – and nothing will touch me on Dinedor.’

  ‘I could try and get it in the back of the car. Or I could take you back in the car now, and pick you up again tomorrow.’

  He felt tense – the missing element here, as usual, was lightness. In any situation, Moon was a solemn person: no humour, no banter. As if all the family’s irony genes had been been used up on Denny sixteen years before she was born.

  ‘Silly making two trips,’ Moon argued.

  ‘I don’t mind, really.’

  ‘Or you could stay,’ Moon said. ‘Why not stay over?’

  She was very close to him. ‘What exactly did Denny say to you?’

  ‘He said… that he was glad you weren’t on your own.’

  Moon laughed lightly.

  ‘What did you tell him, Moon?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Poor Denny.’ Moon took Lol’s left hand and held it between both of hers. They were slim hands but strong, hardened by delving in the earth. ‘And stupid Dick. I can’t believe how timid and stupid people can be. Dick and his feeble psychology; Denny hiding behind a wall against the past. And you?’ She looked closely at his hand. ‘Are you timid too?’

  ‘Oh, I’m more timid than any of them,’ Lol said.

  ‘What of? What are you frightened of, Lol?’

  She was standing close enough now for him to see that there was dust on her blouse. She seemed to attract dust. Dust of ages, Lol thought. The past had become attracted to her.

  A long way away, Radiohead were playing Karma Police, about what you got if you messed with Us; he could hardly hear it for the drumming in his head.

  ‘I think I’m frightened of you,’ Lol whispered in shame, ‘and I don’t know why.’

  The movements were so minimal that he’d hardly noticed her creeping into his arms, until they were kissing and his hands were in the long, long hair and something flared inside him like when you finally put a match to a long-prepared fire of brittle paper and dry kindling.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ Rowenna asked, as they drove into Ledwardine marketplace, which had a lacing of snow.

  ‘Stop just here for a while,’ Jane said. ‘You haven’t even told me what she said to you.’

  The cobbled square, with its little timbered market-hall, was lit by electric gaslamps on wrought-iron poles and brackets. Rowenna parked under one of these, and its light turned her hair into shivering spirals of rose-gold.

  ‘She told me my spiritual progression would be very much bound up with a friend’s.’

  ‘Oh, gosh.’

  There were only two cars on the square, both in front of the Black Swan. There was a light visible between the trees which screened the vicarage, and Jane thought she could see a cluster of early stars around the tip of the church steeple, but that might just have been snow. She just so much wanted this to be a magical night.

  ‘So, are you going to phone this other woman, kitten?’

  ‘It’s a big step.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. You can check it out first, and if it sounds iffy you don’t get involved.’

  ‘I don’t get involved?’

  ‘All right, we don’t.’

  ‘What about Mum?’

  ‘We don’t have to invite her, do we?’

  ‘You know what I mean. Right now, she would not be cool about this. She’s insecure enough as it is.’

  ‘Of course she’s insecure. She’s a Christian.’

  ‘I don’t think I can do it to her.’

  ‘You’re not doing anything to her!’

  ‘I’d be lying.’

  ‘They expect us to lie,’ Rowenna said.

  The snow made spangles in the fake gaslight.

  ‘I need to think about this.’

  ‘Well, don’t think too long. Like Angela said, repressing it may seriously damage your health.’

  Jane sighed. The village seemed deserted. Through the snowflakes, the light in the vicarage looked very far away.

  18

  Overhead Cables Cut

  ‘WHERE DID YOU get to, flower?’

  ‘Oh, Hereford and places. Shopping and stuff.’

  ‘What did you buy?’

  ‘Nothing much. Rowenna got… some things.’

  ‘She seems to have a lot of money,’ Merrily said, heating soup at the stove. ‘I suppose she’s indulged quite a bit, having to be dragged around the country with her father stationed at different bases.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jane said noncommittally. She’d arrived home about seven – looking a bit pale, Merrily thought. Outside, it was snowing quite hard and sticking impressively to the ground and the trees. November snow; it couldn’t last, surely.

  ‘Where did Rowenna live before?’

  ‘What’s this about?’ said Jane.

  ‘Just interest. You seem to be spending a lot of ti
me with her, that’s all.’

  ‘That,’ said Jane, ‘is because she’s interesting. They were at Malmesbury in Wiltshire. Her dad was with the Army at Salisbury or somewhere. They don’t like to talk about it, the SAS, so I don’t ask. Satisfied?’

  Later, she said, ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’m being a pig. Tired, that’s all. I think I’ll have an early night.’

  Merrily didn’t argue; she wanted to be up early herself. She suspected there’d be a bigger congregation tomorrow than usual; people always liked going to church in the snow.

  She was in bed by eleven, with a hot-water bottle. Less than ten minutes later, the phone bleeped.

  ‘Ledwardine Vic—’

  ‘Merrily, it’s Sophie at the Bishop’s office. I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but we’re having a problem – at the Cathedral. I wonder, could you perhaps come over?’

  Big grey snowflakes tumbled against the window. Merrily sat up in bed. It had never felt so cold in here before.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I… it involves Canon Dobbs. I don’t like to say too much on the phone.’

  Merrily switched on the bedside lamp. ‘Give me half an hour. Maybe forty-five minutes if the roads are bad.’

  ‘Oh God, yes, I didn’t realize. Do be careful.’

  ‘I’ll see you soon.’

  When she came out of the bedroom, buttoning her jeans, she found Jane on the landing. ‘I heard the phone.’ She was in her dressing-gown, and mustn’t have been asleep.

  ‘Some kind of problem at the Cathedral.’

  ‘Why should that concern you?’

  ‘I don’t really know.’

  ‘Shall I come? It looks a bit rough out there.’

  ‘God, no. You get back to bed.’

  ‘What if you get stuck? These roads can be really nasty and the council’s mega-slow off the mark – like about three days, apparently.’

  ‘It’s a big car. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘This is like Deliverance business again, isn’t it?’

  ‘To be honest, I just don’t know.’

  ‘Talk about secrecy,’ Jane said, strangely wide awake. ‘You Deliverance guys make the SAS seem like double-glazing salesmen.’

  * * *

  Why had she imagined the Cathedral would be all lit up? Maybe because that was how she’d been hoping to find it: a beacon of Old Christian warmth and strength.

  But in the snow and the night, she was more than ever aware of how set-apart it had become. Once it had stood almost next to the medieval castle, two powerhouses together; now the city was growing away from the river, and the castle had vanished. The Cathedral crouched, black on white, like the Church at bay.

  Merrily parked on Broad Street, near the central library. The dashboard clock, always five to ten minutes fast, indicated near-midnight. It had been a grindingly slow journey, with her window wound down to let the cigarette smoke out and the arctic air in, just to keep her awake. She’d taken the longer, wider route east of the Wye, where there was always some traffic, even the chance of snowploughing if anyone in the highways department had happened to notice a change in the weather. The road-surface was white and brown and treacherous, snow-lagged trees slumped over it like gross cauliflowers.

  It all still seemed so unlikely – what would Hunter want with her at this time of night? Was he trying to turn Deliverance into the Fourth Emergency Service?

  Merrily locked the Volvo, put on her gloves, pulled up her hood and set out across the snow-quilted silence of Broad Street.

  No one about, not even a drunk in view. No traffic at all. The city centre as you rarely saw it: luminous and Christmas-card serene, snowflakes like big stars against the blue-black. Merrily’s booted steps were muted on the padded pavement. Behind her only the Green Dragon had lights on. She felt conspicuous. There was no sign of the Bishop or the Bishop’s men. Hadn’t a woman once been raped in the Cathedral’s shadow? Hadn’t the last time she’d been called out at night…?

  Christ be with me, Christ within me.

  The Cathedral was towered and turreted, the paths and the green lawns submerged together in snow, a white moat around God’s fortress. But no other night defences; its guardians – the canons and the vergers – were sleeping in the warren of cloisters behind. Nobody about except…

  ‘Merrily!’

  Sophie came hurrying around the building, towards the North Porch, following the bouncing beam of a torch attached to a large shadow beside her.

  Merrily breathed normally again.

  ‘Thank heavens you made it.’ The Bishop’s secretary lived not five minutes’ walk away, in a quiet Victorian villa near the Castle Green. She wore a long sheepskin coat, her white hair coming apart under a woollen scarf. ‘We were just wondering whether to call Michael, after all.’

  ‘But I thought the Bishop—’

  ‘He doesn’t know anything about this,’ Sophie said quickly.

  ‘Do you know George Curtiss?’

  ‘Good evening, Mrs Watkins. I, ah, think we have met.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Hello.’ He was one of the Cathedral canons: a big, overcoated man with a beard of Greek Orthodox proportions and a surprisingly hesitant reedy voice.

  ‘George called me to ask if we should tell Michael about this,’ Sophie said. ‘But I suggested we consult you. This is all very difficult.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry… Am I supposed to know what’s happening?’

  ‘You tell her, George.’

  ‘Yes, it’s… Oh dear.’ George Curtiss glanced behind him to make sure they were alone, bringing down his voice. ‘It’s about old, ah, Tom Dobbs, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Merrily,’ Sophie was hugging herself, ‘he’s virtually barricaded himself in. We think he’s…’

  ‘Drunk, I rather fear,’ George said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s behind that partition,’ Sophie said. ‘You know, where they’re repairing the Cantilupe tomb?’

  ‘He’s in there with—?’

  ‘Chained and padlocked himself in. He won’t talk to us. He’s just rambling. To someone else? To himself? I don’t know. Rambling on and on. Neither of us understands, but I just… well, I rather suspected you might. It’s all… it’s rather frightening, actually.’

  ‘So there is a’ – Merrily swallowed – ‘a Deliverance context?’

  What a stupid question.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Sophie said, ‘I think so. Don’t you?’

  George Curtiss shuffled impatiently. ‘I trust we can, ah, rely on your discretion, Mrs Watkins. I know he’s an odd character, but I do have a long-standing admiration for the man. As does… as does the Dean.’

  ‘But I don’t know him. I’ve never even spoken to him.’

  ‘He’s, ah, had his problems,’ George said. ‘Feels rather beleaguered – threatened by… by certain recent developments. In view of these, we’d rather avoid involving the Dean – or the Bishop – at this stage.’

  ‘But I don’t know him. And he—’

  ‘But you know what he does, Merrily,’ Sophie whispered urgently.

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Mrs Watkins.’ George Curtis coughed. ‘We all know what he does, if not the, ah, technicalities of it. It’s just we’re a little nervous about what’s… going on in there.’

  ‘You want me to try and talk to him?’

  ‘Just listen, I suppose.’ Sophie tightened her scarf. ‘Interpret for us.’

  ‘My Latin isn’t what it used to be,’ George said.

  ‘Latin?’

  George dragged a long breath through the brambles of his beard, but his voice still came out weakly. ‘My impression is he’s talking to, ah… to, ah… to St Thomas.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Merrily said.

  Sophie almost snapped at her, ‘You think we do?’

  They followed George Curtiss and his torch around the building to St John’s door, which was used mainly by the clergy and the vergers. Snow was already spattered up the nearby wal
ls.

  ‘We’ll go in very quietly,’ George said, as though addressing a party of schoolchildren – he was one of the regular tourguides, Merrily recalled. ‘I sometimes think the Dean has ultrasonic hearing.’

  Merrily stepped warily inside – as if a mad-eyed Dobbs might come rampaging at them, swinging his crucifix.

  Drunk? If Dobbs had a drink problem, it was the first she’d heard about it. But if the old exorcist had become a public embarrassment, the Dean could no longer be seen to support him. That way the Dean would himself lose face. And if the Bishop found out, he would make the most of it – in the most discreet way, of course – to strengthen his position as an engine of reform, get rid of Dobbs, and perhaps the Dean as well.

  Can of worms!

  Although it felt no warmer inside, Merrily unzipped her waxed coat and put a hand to the bump in her sweater, her pectoral cross.

  This was because the atmosphere in the Cathedral was different.

  Live?

  Sophie touched her arm. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Merrily remembered reading once that gothic churches somehow recharged themselves at night, like battery packs. She felt again the powerful inner call to prayer she’d experienced on the afternoon she’d emerged from the shell-like chantry to encounter Dobbs and the woman.

  ‘I won’t put on any lights,’ George whispered. ‘Don’t want to draw undue, ah… attention.’

  He snapped off his torch for a moment. The only illumination now was the little aumbry light over the cupboard holding the emergency sacrament: wine and wafers in a silver container. Merrily felt a desperate, vibrating desire to kneel before it.

  There was no sound at all.

  ‘All right.’ George switched on his torch again, and they followed its bobbing beam through the Lady Chapel and into the North Transept, where the great stained-glass window reared over the temporary screening partition hiding the dismantled tomb of St Thomas Cantilupe. George shone his torch over the various posters drawing-pinned to it, telling the story of Cantilupe – a wise and caring bishop, according to the Cathedral guidebook, who stood firm against evil in all its guises.