A Crown of Lights (12 page)

‘To be blunt,’ Jane said, ‘I need a very, very small favour.’

Home burial. It was becoming, if not exactly commonplace, then less of an upper-class phenomenon than it used to be. Merrily tried to explain this to Barbara Buckingham: that it was a secular thing, or sometimes a green issue; that you often didn’t even need official permission.

‘The main drawback for most people is the risk of taking value off their house if and when it’s sold. No one wants a grave in the garden.’

‘He’s not...’ Barbara had picked up her scarf again; she began to wind it around her hands. ‘He is not going to bury Menna; that’s the worst of it. She’s going into a... tomb.’ She pulled the scarf tight. ‘A mausoleum.’

‘Oh.’
To be loved like that
.

‘He has a Victorian house at Old Hindwell,’ Barbara said. ‘The former rectory. Do you know Old Hindwell?’

‘Not really. Is it in this diocese, I can’t remember?’

‘Possibly. It’s very close to the border, about three miles from Kington, on the edge of the Forest. Radnor Forest. Weal’s house isn’t remote, but it has no immediate neighbours. In the garden there’s a... structure – wine store, ice house, air-raid shelter, I don’t know precisely what it is, but that’s where she’s going to be.’

‘Like a family vault?’

‘It’s sick. I went to see a solicitor in Hereford this morning. He told me there was nothing I could do. A man has a perfect legal right to keep his dead wife in a private museum.’

‘And as a solicitor himself, your brother-in-law is going to be fully aware of his rights.’

‘Don’t call him that!’ Barbara turned away. ‘Whole thing’s obscene.’

‘He loved her,’ Merrily said uncertainly. ‘He doesn’t want to be parted from her. He wants to feel that she’s near him. That’s the usual reason.’

‘No! It’s a statement of ownership. Possession is – what is it? – nine points of the law?’

‘That word again. Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘Go ahead.’

Merrily lit a Silk Cut, pulled over an ashtray.

‘What about the funeral itself? Is it strictly private? I mean, are you kind of barred?’

‘My dear!’ Barbara dropped the scarf. ‘It’s going to be a highly public affair. A service in the village hall.’

‘Not the church?’

‘They don’t have a church any more. The minister holds his services in the village hall.’

‘Ah. And the minister is...?’

‘Father Ellis.’

‘Nick Ellis.’ Merrily nodded. This explained a lot.

‘I don’t know
why
so many Anglicans are choosing to call themselves “Father” now, as if they’re courting Catholicism. You know this man?’

‘I know
of
him. He’s a
charismatic
minister, which means—’

‘Not happy-clappy?’ Barbara’s eyes narrowed in distaste. ‘Everybody hugging one another?’

‘That’s one aspect of it. Nick Ellis is also a member of a group known as the Sea of Light. It’s a movement inside the Anglican Church, which maintains that the Church has become too obsessed with property. Keepers of buildings rather than souls. They claim the Holy Spirit flows through people, not stones. So a Sea of Light minister is more than happy to hold services in village halls, community centres – and private homes, of course.’

‘And the same goes for burial.’

‘I would guess so.’

‘So Jeffery has an accomplice in the clergy.’ Barbara Buckingham stood up. ‘He would have, wouldn’t he? It’s such a tight little world.’

‘Look,’ Merrily said, ‘I know how you feel, but I really don’t think there’s anything you can do about it. And if Nick Ellis is conducting a funeral service at the village hall and a ceremony in J.W. Weal’s back garden, I’m not sure I can hold another one in a church. However—’

‘Mrs Watkins... Merrily...’ She’d failed with the solicitor, now she was trying the Church.

Merrily said awkwardly, ‘I’m really not sure this is a spiritual problem.’

‘Oh, but it
is
.’ Barbara splayed her fingers on the table, leaned towards Merrily. ‘She comes to me, you see...’

The bereavement ghost: the visitor. Maybe sitting in a familiar chair or walking in the garden, or commonly – like Menna – in
dreams. Barbara Buckingham, staying at a hotel near Kington, had dreamt of her sister every night since her death.

Menna was wearing a white shift or shroud, with darkness around her.

‘You’d prefer, no doubt, to think the whole thing is a projection of my guilt,’ Barbara said.

‘Perhaps of your loss, even though you didn’t know her. Perhaps an even greater loss, because of all those years you
might
have known her, and now you realize you never will. Is your husband...?’

‘In France on a buying trip. He has an antiques business.’

‘How do you feel when you wake up?’

‘Anxious.’ Barbara drank some tea very quickly. ‘And drained. Exhausted and debilitated.’

‘Have you seen a doctor?’

‘Yes. As it happens’ – a mild snort – ‘I’ve seen Menna’s doctor, Collard Banks-Morgan. We were at the same primary school. “Dr Coll”, they all call him now. But if you were suggesting that a little Valium might help to relax me, I didn’t go to consult him about myself.’

‘You wanted to know why she’d suffered a stroke.’

‘I gatecrashed his surgery at the school in Old Hindwell. Made a nuisance of myself, not that it made any difference. Bloody man told me I was asking him to be unethical, preempting the post-mortem. He was like that as a child, terribly proper. If they’d had a head boy at the primary school, it would’ve been Collard Banks-Morgan.’

‘
Did
you find out if there was a long-term blood pressure problem?’

‘No.’ Barbara Buckingham put on her scarf at last. ‘But I will.’

‘Look,’ Merrily said, ‘why don’t we say a prayer for Menna before you go? For her spirit. Why don’t we pop over to the church?’

‘I’ve taken too much of your time.’

‘I think it might help.’ Fifth rule of Deliverance: whether you believe the story or not, never leave things without at least a
prayer. ‘I
would
like to help, if I can.’

And there was more to this. Merrily was curious now. Everything suggested there was more. Why should this woman feel robbed of a sister she’d never really known?

‘Then come to the funeral,’ Barbara said.

‘Me?’

‘Is that too much of an imposition?’

‘Well, no but—’

‘You were at the hospital with her.’

Merrily agonized then about whether she should tell Barbara Buckingham what she’d witnessed in the side ward. It was clear Cullen hadn’t or Barbara would have mentioned that. She remembered the feeling she’d had then of something ritualistic about the way Weal was putting dabs of water on Menna’s corpse and then himself. Refusing to let the nurses try to feed her. Refusing to let Merrily pray for her. Wanting to do everything himself. It was, she supposed, a kind of possession.

But she decided to say nothing. It might only inflame an already fraught situation.

‘OK. I’ll try to come. What day?’

‘Saturday. Three-thirty. Old Hindwell village hall.’

‘That should be OK. If something comes up, where can I get a message to you?’

‘Doesn’t matter. If you aren’t there, you aren’t there.’

‘I’ll do my best. Have you... spoken to Mr Weal?’

‘I’m not ready for that yet,’ Barbara said. ‘But I shall do. Thank you, Merrily.’

R
OBIN HAD THE
map spread out under a wine-bottle lamp on the kitchen table, after they’d finished supper.

‘Come take a look, Bets.’ Holding his thick, black drawing pencil the way he held his
athame
in a rite. ‘Whole bunch of churches around the Forest.’

The lamplight sheened his dense, Dark Ages hair. Betty leaned over him. He smelled sweet and warm, like a puppy. She felt an unexpected stirring; he was so lovably uncomplicated.

And so simplistic, sometimes, in his thinking. Why, since they’d arrived here, had any physical desire always been so swiftly soured by irritation? She gazed around the still-gloomy farmhouse kitchen. Why, with the stove on for over a week, was there still an aura of damp – always worse after sunset? She felt clammy and uncomfortable, as though she had the curse. If Robin had said, ‘Let’s give this place up, and leave now, tonight,’ she wouldn’t have hesitated.

But since that mention of the E-word, his attitude had unsubtly altered. A couple of seconds of trepidation then the male thing was kicking in. Robin wanted to find out precisely where Ellis was coming from, then get in his face. It hadn’t been helped, Betty guessed, by Ellis wearing army gear. Combat gear? She was appalled to think that she might even once have shared Robin’s zeal. If only this had been someone else’s house, the home of a fellow pagan in need of moral support.

If only she wasn’t already growing to hate their church too much to want to defend it.

She’d tried to remember her reaction on first seeing it, and couldn’t. Probably because she was being practical at the time and paying more attention to the farmhouse, leaving Robin to moon over the ruins, take dozens of photographs.

He’d now finished ringing churches on the Landranger map. Although it didn’t identify individual ones except by symbols, nearby place names sometimes would give a clue to the dedication. Betty could help him out there a little, from childhood knowledge of Welsh. She put a thumbnail to the southernmost symbol.

‘That one: the village is Llanfihangel nant Melan. Llanfihangel’s Welsh for “The Church of St Michael”.’

‘Cool.’ Robin drew an extra ring around the church and then tracked around the others with the tip of his pencil until he came to the northern part of the forest perimeter. ‘What’s this? Same word, right?’

‘Llanfihangel Rhydithon. That’s another, yeah. And then ours, of course. Three St Michael churches around the Forest. He was right, I suppose.’

‘Gotta be more. Three doesn’t make a circle.’

With swift, firm pencil strokes, he redrew the plan on his sketch-pad. Graphics were important to Robin. Making a picture made things real.

‘Of course,’ Betty said, ‘there’s nothing to suggest all these churches were built at the same time. I vaguely remember going to Llanfihangel Rhydithon as a kid, and I don’t think it’s even medieval.’

‘It’s the site that counts. Come on, Bets, what are you, agnostic now? Look through Ellis’s eyes. Guy thinks he’s fighting an active Devil.’

‘Or, more specifically, in the absence of people actually sacrificing cockerels and abusing children on his doorstep – against us,’ Betty said bitterly.

‘I’m still not sure he knows. Ellis was fishing. Like, who could’ve told him? Who
else
knows, or could’ve seen anything? We didn’t even use removal men.’

Betty said, ‘It scares me. I don’t want this.’

‘Aw, come on,’ he said. ‘You’re a witch. Hey, you know, damn near all these churches have just gotta be on older sites, when you see how close they are to standing stones and burial mounds.’ He leaned back in satisfaction. ‘This valley’s a damned prehistoric ritual freaking wonderland. Which explains everything.’

‘It does?’

‘You got all these sacred sites, right? It’s a good bet most of them were still being used by surviving pagan groups well into medieval times, and probably long after that. This was a remote area with a small and scattered population. Closed in, secretive. I think it’s fair to assume that even when they’d been brutally eradicated from most of the rest of the country, the Old Ways were still preserved here.’

‘Possibly.’

‘The Archangel Michael’s the hard guy of the Church. It’s them saying to the pagans, you bastards better come around,
or else
. Ellis, as a fundamentalist, relates to all of that. Plus, he’s been influenced by insane Bible Belt evangelists who persecute snakes. Plus, his ego’s already been blown up sky high by the size of congregations he’s pulling when all the neighbouring churches are going down the tubes. I’ve decided the guy sucks. The only remaining question is how long we keep stalling before we tell him that he and his exorcism squad can go screw themselves.’

‘I was going to say that if we don’t make an issue of it, if we let it go quiet, then he’ll probably forget about us,’ Betty said lamely.

‘Not gonna happen. Believe me, this guy’s on some kind of crusade under the banner of St Michael. Hey! Would that explain the army surplus stuff?
Shit
.’

Robin smiled at his own flawed logic. Betty saw, with a plummeting heart, that he
wanted
to be a target of Christian fanaticism.

‘When
we
look at those ruins,’ he said, ‘we see a resurgence of the true, indigenous spirituality. Whereas
he
sees a naked tower
giving him and his religion the finger. He
so
wants to be the guy who killed the dragon and claimed it all back. It’s an ego thing.’

‘You and him both.’

The smile crashed. ‘Meaning
what
?’

‘You have a few beers together, you size each other up, and now you’re both flexing your muscles for the big fight. You can’t wait, can you? You love it that he’s got this huge mass of followers and there’s just the two of us here, newcomers, isolated...’

‘Now listen, lady.’ Robin was on his feet, furious. ‘My instinct was to kick his ass, right from the off, but no... I play it the way I figure
you
would want me to! Mr Nice Guy, Mr Don’t Frighten The Horses... Mr Take A Faceful Of Shit And Keep Smiling kind of guy!’

‘No, you didn’t. You thought you could play with him, lead him around the houses, take the piss out of him a little... when in fact he was playing with
you
.’

‘You weren’t even there!’

‘And you’ve never given a thought to where this could leave us. We have to live here... Whatever happens, we have to live here afterwards. And we
will
have to live here, because – in case you haven’t thought about this – who is going to buy a rundown house along with a ruined church which the local minister insists is infested with demonic evil?’ She spun away from him.

‘You shithead.’