A Crown of Lights (8 page)

When Betty came back, Lizzie Wilshire was staring placidly into the red glow of the oil heater.

‘Are you going to stay here?’ Betty asked.

‘Well, dear, the local people are so good, you see... You youngsters seem to flit about the country at whim. I don’t think I could move. I’d be afraid to.’ Mrs Wilshire looked down into her lap. ‘Of course, I don’t really like it at night – it’s such a big bungalow. So quiet.’

‘Couldn’t you perhaps move into the centre of the village?’

‘But I know Bryan’s still here, you see. The churchyard’s just around the hillside. I feel he’s watching over me. Is that silly?’

‘No.’ Betty gave her an encouraging smile. ‘It’s not silly at all.’

She walked out to the car feeling troubled and anxious in a way she hadn’t expected. That unexpected glimpse of the damaged aura suggested she was meant to come here today. Prodding the little Subaru out onto the long, straight bypass, under an already darkening sky, Betty decided to return soon with something herbal for Mrs Wilshire’s arthritis.

It would be a start. And she was getting back that feeling of having come right round in a circle. It was as a child in Llandrindod Wells, fifteen or so miles from here, that she’d first become fascinated by herbs and alternative medicines – perhaps because the bottles and jars containing them always looked so much more interesting than those from the chemist. There was that alternative shop in Llandrindod into which she was always dragging her mother then – not that
she
was interested.

They were both teachers, her parents: her mother at the high school, her dad in line for becoming headmaster of one of the primary schools. Betty was only ten when he failed to get the job, and soon after that they moved to Yorkshire, where he’d been born.

Teaching? Until she left school, she didn’t know there
was
any other kind of job. Her parents treated it like a calling to which they were both martyrs, and it was taken for granted that Betty would commit her life to the same kind of suffering. As for those ‘flights of imagination’ of hers... well, she’d grow out of all that soon enough. A teacher’s job was to stimulate the imagination of others.

Her parents were unbelieving Anglicans. Their world was colourless. Odd, really, that neither of them was sensitive. If it was in Betty’s genes, it must have been dormant for at least two generations. One of her earliest memories – from a holiday up north when she was about four – was her grandma’s chuckled ‘Go ’way wi’ you’ when she’d come up from the cellar of the big terraced house in Sheffield and asked her who the old man was who slept down there.

Betty drove slowly,
feeling
the countryside. The road from New Radnor cut through an ancient landscape – the historic church of Old Radnor prominent just below the skyline, like a guardian lighthouse without a light. Behind her, she felt the weight of the Radnor Forest hills – muscular, as though they were pushing her away. At Walton – a pub, farms, cottages – she turned left into the low-lying fertile bowl which archaeologists called the Walton Basin, suggesting that thousands of years ago it had been a lake. Now there was only the small Hindwell Pool, to which, according to legend, the Four Stones went secretly to drink at cockcrow – an indication that the Hindwell water had long been sacred.

To the goddess? The goddess who was Isis and Artemis and Hecate and Ceridwen and Brigid in all her forms.

It was at teacher-training college in the Midlands that Betty had been introduced to the goddess. One of her tutors there was a witch; this had emerged when Betty had confessed she found it hard to go into a particular changing room where, it turned out, a student had hanged herself. Alexandra had been entirely understanding about her reaction and had invited Betty home... into a whole new world of incense and veils, earth and
water and fire and air... where dreams were analysed, the trees breathed, past and present and future coexisted... and the moon was the guiding lamp of the goddess.

The recent Walton Basin archaeological project had discovered evidence of a prehistoric ritual landscape here, including the remains of a palisade of posts, the biggest of its kind in Britain. Being here, at the centre of all this, ought to be as exciting to Betty as it was to Robin, who was now – thanks to George – totally convinced that their church occupied a site which too had once been very much part of this sacred complex.

So why had her most intense experience there been the image of a tortured figure frenziedly at prayer, radiating agony and despair, in the ruined nave of St Michael’s? She’d tried to drive it away, but it kept coming back to her; she could even smell the sweat and urine. How sacred, how euphoric, was
that
?

Three lanes met in Old Hindwell, converging at an undistinguished pub. Across the road, the former school had been converted into a health centre – by the famous Dr Coll, presumably. The stone and timbered cottages had once been widely spaced, but now there were graceless bungalows slotted between them. In many cases it would be indigenous local people – often retired farmers – living in these bungalows, freed at last from agricultural headaches, while city-reared incomers spent thousands turning the nearby cottages into the period jewels they were never intended to be.

She didn’t particularly remember this place from her Radnorshire childhood, and she didn’t yet know anyone here. It was actually pretty stupid to move into an area where you knew absolutely nobody, where the social structure and pattern of life were a complete mystery to you. Yet people did it all the time, lured by vistas of green, the magic of comparative isolation. But Betty realized that if there was to be any hope of their long-term survival here, she and Robin would have to start forming links locally. Connecting with the landscape was not enough.

Robin still had this fantasy of holding a mini fire festival at Candlemas, bringing in the celebrants from outside but throwing open the party afterwards to local people. Like a barbecue: the locals getting drunk and realizing that these witches were OK when you got to know them.

Candlemas – Robin preferred the Celtic ‘Imbolc’ – was barely a week away, so that was madness. Lights in the old church, chanting on the night air? Somebody would see, somebody would hear.

Too soon. Much too soon.

Or was that an excuse because Wicca no longer inspired her the way it did Robin? Why had she found George so annoying last weekend? Why had his ideas – truths and certainties to him – seemed so futile to her?

When she got home, Robin was waiting for her in the cold dusk, down by the brook. He wore his fez-thing with the mirrors, no protection at all against the rain. He looked damp and he looked agitated.

‘We have a slight difficulty,’ he said.

Robin was like those US astronauts; he saved the understatements for when things were particularly bad.

E
VEN IN EMBITTERED
January, the interior of Ledwardine Church kept its autumnal glow. Because of the apples.

This was an orchard village and, when the orchards were bare, Merrily would buy red and yellow apples in Hereford and scatter them around: on the pulpit, down by the font, along the deep window ledges.

The biggest and oldest apple there was clasped in the hand of Eve in the most dramatic of Ledwardine’s stained-glass windows, west-facing to pull in the sunset. Although there’d been no sun this afternoon, that old, fatal fruit was still a beacon, and its warmth was picked up by the lone Bramley cooking apple sitting plump and rosy on Minnie’s coffin.

‘Um... want to tell you about this morning,’ Merrily said. ‘How the day began for Gomer and me.’

She wasn’t in the pulpit; she was standing to one side of it, in front of the rood screen of foliate faces and carved wooden apples, viewing the congregation along the coffin’s shiny mahogany top.

‘Somehow, I never sleep well the night before a funeral. Especially if it’s someone I know as well as I’d got to know Minnie. So this morning, I was up before six, and I made a cup of tea, and then I walked out, intending to stroll around the square for a bit. To think about what I was going to say here.’

There must have been seventy or eighty people in the church,
and she recognized fewer than half of them. As well as Minnie’s relatives from the Midlands, there were several farmer-looking blokes who must have known Gomer when he was digging drainage ditches along the Welsh border.
You wanner know why most of them buggers’ve come yere,
he’d hissed in Merrily’s ear,
you watch how high they piles up their bloody plates with pie and cake in the village hall afterwards.

Now, she looked across at Gomer, sitting forlorn in the front pew, his glasses opaque, his wild white hair Brylcreemed probably as close to flat as it had ever been. Sitting next to him was Jane, looking amazingly neat and prim and solemn in her dark blue two-piece. Jane had taken the day off school, and had helped prepare the tea now laid out at the village hall.

‘It was very cold,’ Merrily said. ‘Nobody else in the village seemed to be up yet. No lights, no smoke from chimneys. I was thinking it was true what they say about it always being darkest just before the dawn. But then... as I walked past the lychgate... I became aware of a small light in the churchyard.’

She’d approached carefully, listening hard – remembering, inevitably, the words of Huw Owen, her tutor on the Deliverance course.
They’ll follow you home, they’ll breathe into your phone at night, break into your vestry and tamper with your gear. Crouch in the back pews and masturbate through your sermons... Little rat-eyes in the dark.

The light glowed soft in the mist. It was down at the bottom of the churchyard, where it met the orchard, close to the spot where Merrily had planned a small memorial for Wil Williams, seventeeth-century vicar of this parish and the vicarage’s onetime resident ghost.

The light yellowed the air immediately above the open space awaiting Minnie Parry. Merrily had stopped about five yards from the grave and, as she watched, the light grew brighter.

And then there was another light, a small red firefly gleam, and she almost laughed in relief as Gomer Parry, glowing ciggy clamped between his teeth, reached up from below and dumped
his hurricane lamp, with a clank, on the edge of the grave.

‘Oh, hell.’ Gomer heaved himself out. ‘Din’t disturb you, nor nothing, did I, vicar? Din’t think you could see this ole lamp from the vicarage. Din’t think you’d be up, see.’

‘I didn’t see it from the vicarage. I was... I was up anyway. Got a lot of things to do before... Got to see the bishop – stuff like that.’ She was burbling, half embarrassed.

‘Ar,’ said Gomer.

Merrily was determined not to ask what he’d been up to down there in the grave; if he was doing it under cover of darkness, it was no business of anyone else’s. Besides, he’d made himself solely responsible for Minnie’s resting place, turning up with his mini-JCB to attack the ice-hard ground, personally laying down the lining.

‘Fancy a cup of tea, Gomer?’

Gomer came over, carrying his lamp.

‘Bugger me, vicar,’ he said. ‘Catch a feller pokin’ round your churchyard at dead of night and you offers him a cup o’ tea?’

‘Listen, pal,’ Merrily said, echoing the asphalt tones of the verger of the Liverpool church where she’d served as a curate, ‘I’m a bloody Christian, me.’

Gomer grinned, a tired, white gash in the lamplight.

‘So... we went back to the vicarage.’ Merrily’s gaze was fixed on the shiny Bramley on Minnie’s coffin. ‘And there we were, Gomer and me, at six o’clock in the morning, sitting either side of the kitchen table, drinking tea. And for once I was at a bit of a loss...’

She heard light footsteps and saw a stocky figure tiptoeing up the central aisle; recognized young Eirion Lewis, in school uniform. He was looking hesitantly from side to side... looking for Jane. He must be
extremely
keen on the kid to drive straight from school to join her at the funeral of someone he hadn’t even known.

It was, you had to admit, a smart and subtle gesture. But Eirion had been raised to it; his old man ran Welsh Water or
something. Eirion, though you wouldn’t know it from his English accent, had been raised among the Welsh-speaking Cardiff aristocracy: the
crachach
.

When he saw that Jane was in the front pew, a leading mourner, he quietly backed off and went to sit on his own in the northern aisle which was where, in the old days, the women had been obliged to sit – the ghetto aisle. Eirion was, in fact, a nice kid, so Jane would probably dump him in a couple of weeks.

Merrily looked up. ‘Then, after his second mug of tea, Gomer began to talk.’

‘All it was... just buryin’ a little box o’ stuff, ’fore my Min goes down there, like. So’s it’ll be underneath the big box, kind of thing. En’t no church rules against that, is there?’

‘If there are,’ Merrily had said, lighting a cigarette, ‘I can have them changed by this afternoon.’

‘Just bits o’ stuff, see. Couple o’ little wedding photos. Them white plastic earrings ’er insisted on wearing, ’cept for church. Nothing valuable – not even the watches.’

She had stared at him. He looked down at his tea, added more sugar. She noticed his wrist was bare.

‘Mine and Min’s, they both got new batteries. So’s they’d go on ticking for a year or so. Two year, mabbe.’

Don’t smile, Merrily told herself. Don’t cry. She remembered Gomer’s watch. It was years old, probably one of the first watches ever to work off a battery. And so it really did tick, loudly.

‘Dunno why I done it, really, vicar. Don’t make no sense, do it?’

‘I think, somehow...’ Merrily looked into the cigarette smoke, ‘it makes the kind of sense neither of us is clever enough to explain.’

‘And I’m not going to try too hard to explain it now,’ she said to the congregation. ‘I think people in this job can sometimes spend too long trying to explain too much.’

In the pew next to Gomer, Jane nodded firmly.

‘I mean, I
could
go on about those watches ticking day and night under the ground, symbolizing the life beyond death... but that’s not a great analogy when you start to think about it. In the end, it was Gomer making the point that he and Minnie had something together that can’t just be switched off by death.’