A Crown of Lights (31 page)

She’d read the
Daily Mail
story twice. Robin Thorogood sounded typical of the type of pagan recruited for
Livenight
. Primarily political, and an anarchist – what they used to call in Liverpool a tear-arse – but not necessarily insidiously evil. She wondered what his wife was like; no picture of her in the paper.

Sophie had said,
The bishop would like you to point out to whoever it might concern that, while this might have previously been a church, it is also now this couple’s private property, and they do not appear to be breaking any laws – which the Reverend Ellis and his followers might well be doing if any of them sets foot inside it.

Merrily slowed to a crawl at the side road to the church and farm. This was where you might have expected to find a lychgate. There was a small parking area, and then an ordinary, barred farm gate. She saw that, while St Michael’s Church had never been exactly in a central position, trees and bushes had been allowed to grow around what was presumably the churchyard, hedging it off from the village. Somewhere in there, also, was the brook providing another natural barrier.

They moved on up the hill. ‘I wouldn’t mind taking a look at that place without drawing attention. Would that be possible, Gomer?’

‘Sure t’be. There’s a bit of an ole footpath following the brook from the other side. They opened him up a bit for the
harchaeologists last summer, so we oughter be able to park a good way in.’

‘You know everything, don’t you?’

‘Ah, well, reason I knows this, vicar, is my nephew, Nev, he got brought in to shovel a few tons o’ soil and clay back when the harchaeologists was finished. I give Nev a bell last night. Good money, he reckoned, but a lot o’ waitin’ around. Bugger me, vicar, look at
that
...’

Merrily braked. There was a cottage on the right, almost on the road. It had small windows, lace-curtained, but in one of the downstairs ones the curtains had been pushed back and a candle was alight. Although the forestry was thinning, it was dark enough here for the flame to be visible from quite a distance. Power cut?

Not exactly. The candle was fixed on a pewter tray, which itself sat on a thick, black book, almost certainly a Bible.
Christ is the Light
.

‘Annie Smith lives there,’ Gomer said. ‘She’s a widow. Percy Smith, he had a little timber business, died ten year ago. Their boy, Mansel, he took it over but he en’t doin’ too well. Deals mostly in firewood now, for wood-burners and such.’

Merrily stopped the car just past the cottage. ‘She overtly religious, this Annie Smith?’

‘Never made a thing of it, if she is. But local people sticks together on things, see. Gareth Prosser goes along with the rector, say, then the rest of ’em en’t gonner go the other way. It’s a border thing: when the Welsh was fightin’ the English, the border folk’d be on the fence till they figured out which side was gonner be first to knock the ole fence down, see. And that was the side they’d jump down on. But they’d all jump together, see.’

‘Border logic.’

‘Don’t matter they hates each other’s guts the rest o’ the time, they jumps together. All about survival, vicar.’

‘And
does
Gareth Prosser go along with the rector?’

‘They d’say he’s got one o’ them Christ stickers in the back of his Land Rover.’

‘What does that mean, then?’

‘Means he’s got a sticker,’ Gomer said.

Before they reached the village centre, they’d passed five homes with candles burning in their windows, and two of them with Bibles stood on end, gilt crosses facing outwards. A fat church candle gleamed greasily in the window of the post office. Merrily, usually at home with Bibles and candles, found this uncanny.
We don’t
do
this kind of thing any more.

‘It’s medieval, Gomer. One couple. One pagan couple – OK, young, confrontational, but still just one couple. Then it’s like there’s a contagious disease about, and you put a candle in the window if it’s safe to go inside. Is this village... I mean, is it normally... normal?’

‘Just a village like any other yereabouts.’ He pondered a moment. ‘No, that en’t right. Ole Hindwell was always a bit set apart. Not part o’ the Valley, not quite in the Forest. Seen better times – used to ’ave a little school an’ a blacksmith. Same as there used t’be a church, ennit? But villages around yere, they grows and wanes. I never seen it as not normal.’

A big, white-haired man was walking up the hill, carrying something on his shoulder.

‘They d’say he does a bit o’ healin’,’ Gomer said.

‘Ellis? Laying on of hands at the end of the services?’

At the Big Bible Fest in Warwickshire, the spiritual energy generated by power prayer and singing in tongues would often be channelled into healing, members of the congregations stepping up with various ailments and chronic conditions and often claiming remarkable relief afterwards. It was this aspect Merrily had most wanted to believe in, but she suspected that, when the euphoria faded, the pain would usually return and she hated to hear people who failed to make it out of their wheelchairs being told that their faith was not strong enough.

‘They reckons he does a bit o’ house-to-house. And it en’t just normal sickness either.’

‘Know any specific cases?’ A snatch of conversation came back to her from Minnie’s funeral tea at Ledwardine village hall.
Boy gets picked up by the police, with a pocketful o’ these bloody ecstersee. Up in court... Dennis says, ‘That’s it, boy, you stay under my roof you can change your bloody ways. We’re gonner go an’ see the bloody rector...’

When the big man stepped into the middle of the road and swung round, the item on his shoulder was revealed to be a large grey video camera. He took a step back, to take in the empty, sloping street, where the only movement was the flickering of the candles. He stood with his legs apart, recording the silent scene – looking like the sheriff in a western in the seconds before doors flew open and figures appeared, shooting.

No doors opened. Clouds hung low and heavy; there was little light left in the sky; the weather was co-operating with the candles. The cameraman shot the scene at leisure.

‘TV news,’ Merrily said. ‘There’ll be a reporter around somewhere, too. I’m supposed to make myself known to them.’

Gomer nodded towards the cameraman. ‘Least that tells you why there’s no bugger about. Nobody yere’s gonner wanner explain on telly about them candles.’

Even if they could, Merrily thought.

‘What you wanner do, vicar?’

‘It’s not what I
want
to do,’ Merrily said, ‘but I do have to talk to the Reverend Nick Ellis. He lives on the estate. Would that be...?’

Past the pub, about a hundred yards out of the village centre, were eight semi-detached houses on the same side of the road.

‘That’s the estate.’ Gomer pointed, as they approached.

Merrily parked in front of the first house. Though these were once council houses, fancy gates, double glazing and new front doors showed that most of them had been purchased.

They all had candles in the windows.

Only one house, fairly central, kept its maroon, standard-issue front door and flaking metal gates. It was the only one still looking like a council house. Except for the cross on the door: wood, painted gold, and nailed on.

There was a large jeep crowding the brief drive. A sticker over a nameplate on the gate announced that Christ was the
Light. In the single downstairs window, two beeswax candles burned, in trays, on Bibles.

Merrily had heard that Ellis was living in a council house because, when he’d given up his churches, he’d also given up his rectory. The Church paid the rent on this modest new manse. A small price to pay per head of congregation, and it wouldn’t do Ellis’s image any harm at all, and he would know that.

She felt a pulse of fury. From singing in tongues to erecting a wall of silence, this man had turned a whole community, dozens maybe hundreds of people, against a couple who hadn’t yet been here long enough for anyone really to know them. The Thorogoods would need to be very hard-faced to survive it.

‘T
HIS IS NO COINCIDENCE,
’ George said on the phone. ‘This is fate. We all know what tomorrow is.’

‘Probably the last day of my freaking marriage.’

‘You have to go with it, Robin. We can turn this round. We can make it a triumph.’

Robin wanted to scream that he couldn’t give a shit about Imbolc; he just wanted things to come right again with his wife, some work to bring in some money, his religious beliefs no longer to be national news. He just wanted to become a boring, obscure person.

In the background, the old fax machine huffed and whizzed. He watched the paper emerge.

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live

Poison faxes? Creepy Bible quotes? Someone had unleashed the Christian propaganda machine. The spirit of Salem living on.

‘It’s all our fault, man,’ George said.

‘Not your fault. Vivvie’s fault.’

‘I share the blame. I was there too. I also now share the responsibility for getting you and Betty through this.’

‘We could maybe get through this, George, if people would just leave us the fuck alone.’

He wasn’t so sure about that, though, the way Betty was behaving.

By nine a.m. the answering machine had taken calls from BBC Wales, Radio Hereford and Worcester, HTV, Central News, BBC Midlands and 5 Live. And from some flat-voiced kid who said he was a pagan too and would like to pledge his support and his magic.

Already they were starting to come to the front door. By eleven a.m., there’d been four people knocking. He hadn’t answered. Instead he’d closed the curtains and sat in the dimness, hugging the Rayburn. He’d listened to the answering machine, intercepting just this one call from George.

The whole damn story was truly out; it had been on all the radio stations and breakfast TV. Was also out on the World Wide Web, with e-mails of support – according to George – coming from Native Americans in Canada and pagans as far away as India. George claimed that already this confrontation was being seen as a rallying flashpoint for ethnic worshippers of all persuasions. Strength and courage were being transmitted to them from all over the world.

‘We don’t want it,’ Robin told George. ‘We came here for a
quiet
life. Pretty soon I’m gonna take the phone off the hook and unplug the fax.’

‘In that case,’ George said, ‘surely it’s better that the people you know—’

‘You mean people
you
know. Listen, George, just hold off, can you do that? I would need to talk to Betty.’

‘When’s she going to be back?’

‘I don’t
know
when she’s gonna be back. She’s mad at me. She thinks I screwed up with the
Mail
guys.
I
think I screwed up with the
Mail
guys.
I’m
mad at me.’

‘You need support, man. And there’s a lot of Craft brothers and Craft sisters who want to give you some. I tell you, there’s an unbelievable amount of strong feeling about this. It’ll be very much a question of
stopping
people coming out there.’

‘Well you fucking
better
stop them.’

‘Plus, the opposition, of course,’ George said. ‘We don’t know how many they are or where they’re coming from.’

Robin peered round the edge of the curtain at the puddles in the farmyard and along the side of the barn. It looked bleak, it looked desolate. In spite of all the courage and strength being beamed at them, it looked lonely as hell. Sure he felt vulnerable; how could he not?

When he sighed, it came out rough, with a tremor underneath it.

‘How many were you thinking?’

‘Well, we need a coven,’ George had said. ‘I’ll find eleven good people which, with you and Betty makes... the right number. We could be there by nightfall. Don’t worry about accommodation, we’ll have at least two camper vans. We’ll bring food and wine and everything we need to deck out the church for Imbolc. Be the greatest Imbolc ever, Robin. We’ll set the place alight.’

‘I dunno. I dunno what to do.’ For George this was cool, this was exciting. If you’d put it to Robin, even just a few days ago, he’d have said yeah, wow, great. It was what he’d envisaged from the start: the repaganized church becoming a centre of the old religion at the heart of a prehistoric ritual landscape.
The idyll
.

But this was not Betty’s vision any more – if it ever had been.

‘Leave it with me, yeah?’ George said. ‘Blessed be, man.’

‘I’m quite psychic, you know.’ Juliet Pottinger had what Betty regarded as a posh Lowland Scottish accent. ‘I was about to go into town, and then I thought, no, if I go out now I shall miss something interesting.’

Which was a better opening than Betty could have hoped for.

Lower Lodge was an extended Georgian cottage on the edge of a minor road about two miles out of Leominster and a good twenty-five miles east of Old Hindwell. Once away from Old Hindwell, Betty’s head had seemed to clear. The day was dull but dry, the temperature no worse than you could expect in late January. Out here, she felt lighter, less scared, less oppressed.

Mrs Pottinger’s house was full of books. Six bookcases in the hall, with two piles of books beside one of them, propped up by an umbrella stand. In the long kitchen, where she made Betty tea, the demands of reading and research seemed to have long since overtaken the need for food preparation. Books and box-files were wedged between pans on the shelves and under cups and plates on the dresser. The only visible cooker was a microwave, and an old Amstrad word processor with a daisywheel printer took up half the kitchen table. There was – small blessing – no sign of a
Daily Mail
.

Juliet Pottinger was about sixty-five, with a heavy body, layered in cardigans, and what you could only call wide hair. Her seat was a typist’s chair, which creaked when she moved. She was working, she said, on a definitive history of the mid-border.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t phone first,’ Betty said. ‘I just happened to be... passing.’