A Crown of Lights (25 page)

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.

‘R
OBIN
,
IT
’
S
A
L
.’

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.

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?’