A Crown of Lights mw-3

by Phil Rickman

  The first grey-brown cottages appeared up ahead.

  And the cars. The village was clogged with cars.

  The pub car park was full, as was the yard in front of what had once been a school. Cars and Land Rovers also lined the two principal lanes, blocking driveways and entrances, until the roads became so narrow that another parked vehicle would have made them impassable. Could it possibly be like this every Sunday?

  Sophie slowed for a drab posse of mourners. They crossed the road and filed into a tarmac track between two big leylandii.

  ‘The village hall,’ Merrily said, unnecessarily.

  It stood on what she judged to be the western edge of the village, partly concealed a little way up a conifered hillside, and was accessed by a footpath and steps. Sophie wondered aloud how they got any wheelchairs up there, for all the disabled people who thought Nicholas Ellis’s prayers might cure them.

  ‘So it’s true then?’ Merrily said. ‘He does healing, too?’

  ‘I copied cuttings from the local papers onto your computer file.’ Sophie reversed into a field entrance to turn round again in the hope of finding a space. ‘I don’t suppose you had time to read them yet. I don’t know how many people he’s actually supposed to have healed.’

  ‘You don’t usually get statistics on it.’

  Sophie frowned. ‘That sort of thing is just not Anglican, somehow.’

  ‘No? What about the shrine of St Thomas, in the cathedral?’

  ‘Not the same thing.’

  ‘What – because Ellis spent some time in the States?’

  ‘My information is that he learned his trade with the more extreme kind of Bible Belt evangelist.’ Sophie shuddered. ‘Would you like to borrow my coat? It may not be exactly funereal, but it’s at least...’

  ‘Respectable?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sophie said. ‘I didn’t mean—’

  ‘Of course you didn’t.’ When Merrily smiled her face felt so stiff with fatigue that it hurt. ‘If anyone does notice me, I could pretend to be a poor single-parent whom Mr Weal defended on a shoplifting charge.’

  When the strangers came in, Gomer was getting the local take on the planting of Menna Weal in the rectory garden.

  ‘Most people couldn’t equate it wiv him being a lawyer and into property,’ Greg said. ‘Who’s gonna wanna buy a house wiv a bleedin’ great tomb? They say he’ll leave it to his nephew who’s started in the firm, but would you wanna live in a house wiv your dead auntie in the garden?’

  Gomer wondered how he’d feel if his Min was buried in the back garden, and decided it wouldn’t be right for either of them. In the churchyard she wasn’t alone, see. Not meaning the dead; it was the coming and going of the living.

  ‘But what I reckon...’ Greg said. ‘That building’s right down the bottom of the garden, OK? You could lop it off, make it separate. A little park, with a footpath to it. The Weal memorial garden. I reckon that’s what he’s got in mind.’

  ‘Nobody ask him?’

  ‘Blimey, you don’t ask him nothing. Not even the time – you’d get a bleedin’ bill. It’s like there’s a wall around him, wiv an admission charge. And no first names. It’s Mr Weal. Or J.W., if you’re a friend.’

  ‘He got many friends?’

  ‘He knows a lot of people. That’s the main fing in his profession.’ Greg turned to his two new customers. ‘Yes, gents...’

  They wore suits – but not funeral suits. Both youngish fellows, in their thirties. One was a bit paunchy, with a half-grown beard; he ordered two pints.

  ‘Not here for the funeral?’ Greg said.

  ‘Ah, that’s what it is.’ The plump, bearded one paid for their drinks. ‘Must be somebody important, all those cars.’

  ‘Oh, that’s not unusual. There’s a mass of cars every Sunday. Popular man, our minister. You get people coming from fifty miles away.’

  Gomer looked up, gobsmacked. Most of these folks were not here for Menna at all, but part of some travelling fan club for the rector? Bloody hell.

  ‘Hang on,’ the plump feller with the beard said. ‘Are there two churches, then?’

  ‘Kind of,’ Greg said. ‘Our minister uses the village hall for his services.’

  ‘But the old one, the old church – that’s disused, right?’

  ‘Long time ago. It’s a ruin.’

  ‘Can you still get to it?’

  ‘You probably can,’ Greg said, ‘but it’s on private land. It’s privately owned now.’

  ‘Only my mate wanted to take some pictures. With permission, of course. We don’t want to go sneaking about. Who would we ask? Who owns it?’

  ‘Well, it’s new people, actually – only been moved in a week or so. There’s a farmhouse, St Michael’s. If you go back along the lane, past the post office, and on out of the village, you’ll see a big farm, both sides of the road, then there’s a track off to your left. If you go over a little bridge and you get to the old rectory, on your right, you’ve gone too far.’

  ‘They all right, the people?’

  ‘Sure,’ Greg said. ‘Young couple. He’s American, an artist – book illustrator. Yeah, they’re fine.’

  ‘What’s the name?’

  Gomer was suspicious by now. Gomer was always suspicious of fellers in suits asking questions. Not Greg, though; suspicious landlords didn’t sell many drinks.

  ‘Oh blimey, let me think. Goodfellow. Goodbody? Somefing like that.’

  The paunchy bloke nodded. ‘Thanks, mate, we’ll go and knock on their door.’

  ‘You can take a picture of my pub, if you like,’ Greg said. ‘What is it, magazine, holiday guide?’

  The two men looked at each other, swapping grins.

  ‘Something like that,’ said the one who did the talking.

  The village hall was like one of those roadside garages built in the 1950s, with a grey-white facade and a stepped roof. From its summit projected a perspex cross which would obviously light up at night. Conifers crowded in on the building, so you had the feeling of a missionary chapel in the jungle.

  It was coming up to 3.45 p.m., the sky turning brown, the air raw. As Sophie drove away, Merrily felt unexpectedly apprehensive. From inside, as she walked up the steps, came the sound of a hymn she didn’t recognize.

  Below her, Old Hindwell was laid out in a V-shape. Beyond one arm arose the partly afforested hump which, Sophie had told her, was topped by the Iron Age hill fort, Burfa Camp. The northern horizon was broken by the shaven hills of Radnor Forest. The small, falling sun picked up the arc of a thin river around the boundary, like an eroded copper bangle.

  Across the village, divided from it by a fuzz of bare trees, she could see the tower of the old church. She wondered if Nicholas Ellis would have made Old Hindwell his main base if that church had still been in use. Arguably not, since using the community hall was a good demonstration of his personal creed: the Church was people, ancient churches were museums.

  The hymn she didn’t know, sung unaccompanied by organ or piano, came to an end, and then there was the sound of a communal subsidence into rickety chairs. Merrily pushed open the double doors and went in.

  Into darkness. Into a theatre with the house lights down. But the stage – she stifled a gasp – was lit, as though for a Nativity play. Just not Anglican, somehow. Gently, she pulled the doors together behind her and stood under a cracked green exit sign.

  There was a row of shadowed heads and shoulders no more than four feet in front of her. The chairs were arranged like theatre-in-the-round under the girdered ceiling. The industrial window blinds were all lowered.

  It was alarmingly like the Livenight studio, and the audience must have been at least as big: maybe two hundred people, some on wooden benches pushed back to the walls. Spotlights in the ceiling lit the stage where stood a man in a white, monkish robe, head bowed, eyes cast down to hands loosely clasped on his stomach.

  Merrily’s first, disappointing glimpse of the Reverend Nicholas Ellis was a definite
so-what moment.

  ‘... is a particularly poignant occasion for me,’ she heard. ‘It’s only weeks since Menna came to me, with her loving husband, to be baptized again, to pledge herself to the Lord Jesus in the presence of the Holy Spirit. I wonder... if somehow... she knew.’

  His face was bland and shining, his mouth wide, like a letter box. His light brown hair was brushed straight back, a modest ponytail disappearing into the folds of his monk’s cowl. Monastic gear was less unorthodox than it used to be for Church of England ministers, but in dazzling white this was hardly a sign of humility. Too messianic for Merrily. His words rang coldly in the factory acoustic.

  ‘I conducted the solemn but joyful service of rebaptism at their home. And on that day the very air was alive with hope and rejoicing, and these two souls were blessed beneath the wings of angels.’

  From the shadows, someone, a man, cried out – involuntarily, it seemed, like a hiccup – ‘Praise God!’ As though the heavenly host had suddenly burst through the ceiling.

  Nicholas Ellis was silent for a moment. Merrily couldn’t make out his expression because the spotlights in the ceiling were aimed not at him but at the uncovered coffin.

  Lidless! In the American style, Menna Weal lay in an open casket. Wrapped in her shroud. Her face looked like marble under the lights. A curtain of shadows surrounded her.

  Merrily didn’t like this, found it eerie. She looked for Barbara Buckingham in the congregation, but in this light it was hopeless. How could Barbara, wherever she was, stand this performance? How could any of them?

  Eerie – what a funeral should never be.

  Nicholas Ellis said, ‘And it is to that same loving home that, in a short time, Menna’s body will return. The final laying to rest of these earthly remains will be a small private ceremony which, in the context of that loving relationship, is as it should be.’

  Merrily saw the seated figure of J.W. Weal, hunched like a big rock, gazing steadily at the body of his wife. Her thoughts were carried back to the county hospital, that first sight of him with his bowl of water and his cloth. An act of worship?

  ‘Let us thank God for love,’ Ellis said, ‘when the black dragon wings of evil beat above our heads and the night air carries the stench of Satan.’

  Merrily wrinkled her nose.

  ‘... let us remember that only the strong light of love can bring us through the long hours of darkness. Now let us all rise and, with Menna and Jeffery together in our hearts, sing number two on our hymn sheet, “Take Me, Lord, To Your Golden Palace”.’

  The lights blinked on, so that they could all read the words. Everyone rose, with a mass scraping of metal chair legs that was almost a shriek, and Merrily saw, at the front, one broad head thrust above all the others. J.W. looking down on the remains of his wife.

  A statement of ownership, Barbara had said. Possession is nine points of the law.

  Merrily found herself outside in the cold again, feeling slightly shocked.

  She stopped about halfway down the steps, with her back to a Scots pine tree. The sand colour in the sky had all but disappeared, washed under the rapid, grey estuary of dusk. Below her, Old Hindwell settled into its umbered shadows. Merrily stood watching for the lights of Sophie’s Saab, listening for its engine.

  Just not Anglican, somehow.

  You could say that again. She sank her hands far into her coat pockets.

  It had been a singalong, gospelly, country-and-western hymn. It was cloying, trite – no worse but certainly no better than the stilted Victorian hymns which Merrily had been trying for months to squeeze out of her services. She’d had no hymn sheet, but the dipping of the house lights told her when the last verse had finished. Then words that were not on the hymn sheet took over – when, in the darkness, the tune and the rhythm disappeared but the singing itself did not stop.

  Merrily stood silent, not having been exposed for quite some years to this phenomenon: the language of the angels according to some evangelists. Nonsense words, bubbling and flowing and ululating between slackened jaws.

  Tongues. The gift of. The sign that the Holy Spirit was here in Old Hindwell village hall.

  Right now, she was in no position to dispute this. It wasn’t the hymn or its ghostly coda which had brought her out here, nor the sight of the silent, sombre Jeffery Weal, his gaze still fixed on his wife while the congregation summoned angels to waft her spirit into paradise.

  It was just that, during the hymn, while the lights were on, she’d had an opportunity to investigate the congregation, row by row, and Barbara Buckingham was definitely not there. And while that meant she hadn’t had to listen to Ellis’s Gothic nonsense and stand in fuming silence while all around her sang themselves into a religious stupor, it did raise a possible problem.

  Barbara was a determined woman. She had a serious grudge against this area, arising from a deprived childhood, which had become narrowed and focused into a hatred of the lumbering, sullen, slow-moving, single-minded Jeffery Weal.

  Suppose she was already at Weal’s house? Outside somewhere, waiting for the mourners at the small private ceremony that would follow.

  Merrily hurried down the rest of the steps. After what she’d seen in there, she too wanted very much to know how this was going to end.

  21

  Lord Madoc

  ‘ROBIN, IT’S AL.’

  But this was not Al. Al was so cheerful that if he called you too early in the morning it hurt.

  And this was not early morning, it was late afternoon and Betty had gone to see the goddamn widow Wilshire again and the voice on the phone was like the voice of a relative calling to say someone close to you was dead.

  As art director handling Talisman, the fantasy imprint of the multinational publisher, Harvey-Calder, Al Delaney did not know any of Robin’s relatives; he kept his dealings strictly to artists and writers and editors. So Robin was already feeling sick to his gut.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How’s it going?’

  With the light failing fast, he stood by the window in his studio. Or, at least, the north-facing room that was to go on serving as his studio until they’d gotten enough money together to convert one of their outbuildings. The room had two trestle tables, one carrying his paints and his four airbrush motors, only two of which now worked. Airbrushes seemed to react badly to Robin. Must be all that awesome psychic energy.

  Haw!

  ‘I’m calling you from home,’ Al said.

  ‘That would be because it’s Saturday and the offices are closed, right?’

  ‘And because I’ve just heard from, er... Kirk Blackmore.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Robin moistened his lips.

  ‘And I’d rather say what I want to say from home. Like that Blackmore’s an insufferable egomaniac who’d stand there and tell Botticelli he couldn’t draw arses, and that there are a few of us who’d like to use the Sword of Twilight to publicly disembowel him. But, tragically—’

  ‘Tragically, he is also the hottest fantasy writer in Britain, so it would be unwise to say that to his face. Yeah, yeah. OK, Al, just listen for one minute. Since I got Blackmore’s fax, I’ve been giving it a whole lot of thought and I’ve come up with something which I think he’s gonna like a whole lot more. I accept that the purple mist was too lurid, the lettering too loud, so what I propose, for starters—’

  ‘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.