A Crown of Lights (47 page)

‘That’s... silly.’

‘And now Ned Bain’s in Old Hindwell.’

‘OK, not good.’

Two religious fanatics facing each other across the ruins of a church that was spiritually suspect. Both sides raising the stakes.

Betty Thorogood came down, wearing a sloppy old baseball sweater of Jane’s. She declined an egg, but accepted toast and honey.

She’d heard the radio report from upstairs.

She said she was going back to St Michael’s.

‘I don’t want that church reconsecrating – not in anybody’s name. I’m not forecasting some apocalypse scenario, I just don’t want it to happen. I’m stopping it.’

‘You’ve got thirteen people to persuade. All determined to celebrate Candlemas.’

‘They can bloody well do it somewhere else,’ Betty said flatly.

Merrily brought coffee. ‘Tell me exactly what happens at Candlemas.’

‘It’s the festival of Brigid, the triple goddess.’

‘Three stages of womanhood,’ Jane translated, ‘maiden, mother, hag.’

‘Imbolc means belly. It’s about Mother Earth giving birth to spring, so in Wicca we put the emphasis on the mother. Three women are involved in the rite, but the mother wears the crown of lights... that’s a headdress of candles. This is a festival of light and new awakening. Of all the sabbats, it’s probably the one closest to Christianity, I’d guess.’

Merrily nodded.

‘Normally, it would be an especially good time to consecrate a church or temple, simply because it’s coming out of a long period of darkness, reawakening to spring.’

‘Everything perfect, then,’ Merrily said neutrally, ‘for giving back Old Hindwell to the old gods.’

‘No, everything’s utterly wrong – take it from me. If there were good omens before, it all reversed when we moved in. I’ve become snappy and irritable and... alienated from Robin. We’ve hardly even, you know, touched each other since we arrived. And even regarding money. Robin had the possibility – almost the
certainty
– of a very lucrative contract, to do seven book covers for Kirk Blackmore, the fantasy writer.’

‘Wow,’ Jane said. ‘I used to read his stuff, when I was a kid.’

‘And then the rug seems to have been pulled. Blackmore’s decided he doesn’t like Robin’s concept, and it’s Blackmore calls the shots. That’s just the latest thing to go wrong.’

Jane said, ‘Maybe
you
need the new light.’

Betty shook her head. ‘There won’t be any. We won’t bring that place out of the darkness; it’ll suck us in.’ She looked vaguely around, from face to face. ‘Whatever you may think about this, I’ve called out to the goddess in the night, and the goddess won’t come to me. I’m not being emotional or hysterical about this. I just don’t see a good future.’

‘OK, so you go back,’ Merrily said, ‘and you try to stop it. How do you do that?’

Betty shrugged. ‘If necessary I can just tell them all to get out. It’ll cause another row with Robin, but the house is half mine. That’s only a last resort. If I play along for a while, something subtler might occur. I don’t want to create negative vibrations, if possible. What about you?’

‘I’m going to have to try and cool Ellis. One or two ideas occur. Well, one anyway.’ Merrily’s throat was dry from too much smoking, not enough sleep. ‘Maybe we can meet somewhere, late afternoon, and see where we stand.’

‘There’s a footbridge,’ Betty said, ‘that leads from the church to the other side of the brook.’

‘I know it. Four o’clock?’ Part of her was saying this was whimsy, that the only really important things were to, first, find Barbara Buckingham, and second, persuade the police to investigate the Hindwell Trust. ‘Betty, what do you think, seriously, is likely to happen if we can’t stop this tonight?’

Betty shook her head quickly, non-committally.

‘The dragon gets out,’ Jane said, ‘whatever that means.’

‘I’ve been thinking.’ Betty looked at Merrily. ‘The problem with this place is nothing really to do with us. But it
is
to do with you, I suspect – with what you do. Ellis thought it needed exorcizing. I’m not sure he was wrong.’

‘But not by him.’

‘No,’ Betty said, ‘not by him.’

‘You mean... by me?’ Merrily felt obscurely honoured and immediately guilty about that.

‘I wondered about tonight,’ Betty said. ‘Candlemas is Candlemas. I suppose it’s a good time, wherever you stand. I mean, I’d go in
with
you, if you thought that would help. Or, if you thought that would be spiritually wrong, I’d stay out of the way.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Would you think about it, Merrily? It’s become kind of central to everything, hasn’t it?’

‘But... exorcizing a church...’

‘Like you keep saying,’ Jane said, ‘it isn’t a church any more.’

‘All right, I’ll talk to the bishop.’

‘Please don’t do that,’ Betty said. ‘He might suggest you have other priests along. That would bother me. I don’t want it to look like a
formal
sellout.’

Merrily nodded. ‘OK.’

‘Wow,’ Jane said.

J
ANE HAD CALLED
Eirion at the rotting mansion and there was no answer. Well, there was an answer... on a machine, and in Welsh.

Like she wasn’t already feeling excluded enough. Gomer had collected Betty and taken her back to Old Hindwell, Mum had gone off on her own. Little Jane had been given the really important job of relaying any messages to Mum on her mobile.

Bastards!

‘I can’t
speak
bloody Welsh!’ she howled over the message. ‘Just tell Irene... Eirion... to call me. It’s very urgent. It’s Jane Wat—’

She shut up. The message was being translated.

‘Dafydd and Gwennan Lewis are unable to take your call. Please leave your message after the tone. Diolch yn fawr.’

‘OK. Please, please, tell Eirion to ring me. It’s Jane Watkins. It’s very urgent. Please?’ Realizing she’d ended on a kind of strangled sob. Maybe that would underline the urgency, or maybe just the existing suspicions of the wealthy and powerful Dafydd Lewis about the hysterical English. It was not bloody
fair
, because she now had, like,
masses
of new data to lay on Eirion. He could hit the Net, and they could crack this thing wide open.

Jane paced the kitchen. Actually, she was quite proud of Mum this time, agreeing to undertake an exorcism on behalf of
a witch. Like, it was a really heavy decision to have to make. But had she accepted the significance of Kali Three? It really was a pity they hadn’t got a decent computer.

Ah!

Jane went rapidly round the house, doing what had to be done – laying a fire in the drawing room, putting out dried cat food for Ethel, and all the time thinking hard. She didn’t need Irene; she just needed an online computer.

Sophie!

Sophie had one in the Deliverance office. It was only right that the diocese should pay for this research.

There should be a bus to Hereford passing through Ledwardine within the hour. Jane ran a brush through her hair, tugged on her fleece coat and was out of there. There’d be some resistance from Sophie, sure, but nothing Jane couldn’t handle with the usual combination of pathos and rat-like cunning.

She bought a Mars bar from the Eight-till-Late and stood on the square munching it, relishing the freedom to do things. Back at bloody school next week, with dismal GCSEs looming. Although the public school system was this, like, totally disgusting anachronism, she wished she was at the cathedral school with Eirion; at least it was in the middle of town.

It was bright but unexpectedly cold on the square. Jane chewed and stamped her feet on the cobbles. A silver BMW went past, then slowed suddenly and backed up and stopped on the edge of the square. The window glided down on the passenger side. Some sex beast wondering if she was in need of a lift.

‘Excuse me, little girl.’ Creepy voice sibilating from the bourgeois, tinted interior. Eyes narrowing, Jane pocketed the Mars bar and sashayed over. ‘Looking for somewhere, I am, see?’ he oozed. ‘Wonder if you can point me in the right direction. Little place called... if I can just see it on the map... Ah, got it...’ The passenger door was thrown wide open. ‘
England!
’

Jane glared in delight. ‘You bastard!’

‘Good morning, Eirion,’ Eirion said. ‘How’s the whiplash? Well, it’s quite a bit more comfortable, thank you, Jane.’

Jane got in. The leather seat creaked luxuriously. ‘Where’d you steal the flash Kraut wheels?’

‘Gwen’s, it is. She owes me. Don’t ask. Are you doing the decent thing and going to school?’

‘Well, I
was
, naturally. But, on second thoughts, I think we’ll go to Hereford Cathedral. I can show you the Deliverance office, in the gatehouse.’

‘Jane...’ Eirion snatched off his baseball cap and his dark glasses. ‘Half the school goes past there.’

‘You won’t be spotted, you’ll have your head bent over a keyboard. By lunchtime your eyes will be so terminally weakened you’ll be regretting you ever left the land of Druids and sad male voice choirs.’

Eirion sighed and let out the clutch. He handed her a brown A4 envelope. ‘Read this.’

‘What is it?’

‘What do you think it is?’

Jane pulled out a thin sheaf of printouts.

‘Kali Three.’

She read about her mother and her father.

At home with a young child, Merrily Watkins was horrified to discover that her husband was ‘representing’ Gerald McConnell, a West Midlands businessman who would later be jailed for four years for fraud and money-laundering. It was this...

Jane looked across at Eirion. She felt embarrassed.

Eirion drove serenely on. ‘There but for the grace of God, Jane. When my father was on the board of the Welsh Development Agency... Never mind, he’d have been out by now even if the charges had stuck.’

‘You’re just saying that to make me feel better.’

‘I wish. Read the other stuff, on Bain and his old man. Start at the top of page five.’

Jane read:

Ned was ten years old when his mother, Edward Bainbridge’s first wife, Susan, walked out on her husband. They were quietly divorced and, soon afterwards, Bainbridge formed a relationship with Mrs Frances Wesson, the widow of a chaplain at his college. Mrs Wesson had remained a strong, even fanatical Christian, although the extent of this did not become apparent to Bainbridge or his son until after the marriage.

Strange how formally this was written. Like out of a real biography, not the usual chatty crap you got off the Net. It drew you into what, even though it was then the mid-1970s, seemed like a Victorian kind of world.

Thus Ned entered his teenage years in a stifling High Church household dominated by the beautiful but austere Frances Wesson, whose own two children seemed to be accorded special privileges. To please his new wife, Bainbridge, hitherto a lukewarm Christian at most, began to attend church services twice every Sunday. Ned was soon glad to be sent away to public school, where he was free to pursue an interest in subjects which would certainly have been forbidden at home.

During school holidays, he became aware of his father’s slide into depression. Edward Bainbridge had given up writing poetry after his latest volume had been derided as maudlin, self-pitying and, indeed, pitifully inept. Unsurprisingly, his academic reputation was crumbling and his drinking had become a problem. All of this was concurrent with the dissolution of the Bainbridge marriage, with the couple living increasingly separate lives. If Edward now no longer attended church, his wife had inflicted all its
trappings and symbolism on what remained of their domestic life. The house in Oxford had become heavy with icons and crucifixes; its drawing room had a constant and pervading smell of incense, and Frances had even set up a private chapel in a pantry next to the kitchen.

The summer of 1975 brought a severe and life-changing shock for Ned. Edward Bainbridge’s brother, David, arrived at the school to break the news that his father was dead. Ned learned, to his horror, that his father had bled to death on the floor of the private chapel, and that his stepmother had already been charged with murder.

Some days later, to the eighteen-year-old Ned’s outrage, the charge was reduced to manslaughter, to which Frances Bainbridge had agreed to plead guilty. There was, she had claimed, a strong element of self-defence. According to Mrs Bainbridge, her husband, who had been drinking heavily for most of the day, had come hammering on the door of the chapel while she was at prayer and, when she refused to admit him, had kicked in the door, burst into the tiny chapel and proceeded to tear down drapes and overturn the altar. When she screamed at him to get out, he began to slash viciously with a kitchen knife at a Victorian picture of Christ, until he stumbled and dropped the knife – whereupon Mrs Bainbridge snatched it up. Edward Bainbridge then attacked his wife, tearing at her dress, and in her struggle to get away she stabbed him fatally in the throat.

The original murder charge was reduced to manslaughter after Frances Bainbridge’s description of the events – somewhat unconvincing to Ned – was supported by her son Simon, aged fifteen, and her twelve-year-old daughter Madeleine, both of whom said they had witnessed the struggle. Frances Bainbridge pleaded guilty to manslaughter, but walked free from the court after being given a two-year suspended sentence because of the mitigating circumstances.

Ned Bainbridge returned to school to sit his A levels before going up to Oxford, to his father’s old college where, with fellow students, he formed his first coven.

Eirion drove into Hereford via Whitecross. ‘Quite a significant family skeleton, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You can understand that guy not being over-fond of the Church.’

G
REG HAD SHAVED.
He wore a clean shirt. He stood in the back doorway at the end of the yard and made rapid wiping movements with his arms.

‘No, no,
no
.’

Merrily stopped about four yards away. ‘She’s worse?’