Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

‘A Christianization. I’ve been looking at Hereford Cathedral – at the ornamental chantries in particular. But we’ll have a High Church feel, with censers and things. I’m going to London next week to talk to some designers. I want a store which is going to reflect the true magic, if I can use that word, of Christianity. The angelic.’

‘And your husband…’

‘Hates and deplores it. Thinks it’s going to destroy us. Well, the hell with him, I’m the one with the ideas. Gareth has the contacts and the business acumen. Gareth it was who persuaded countless Londoners to install wood-stoves, to burn scented sacred apple logs brought up from the country at enormous prices. Would’ve been cheaper for some people to chop up their furniture and feed it to the flames.’ Mrs Box laughed coldly. ‘I don’t even want to discuss that man, thank you very much, in this holy place.’

She stood up and glided to the door and reached up and put out the lamp, so that the sacred cell was lit only from the altar, and then she went back to her seat, in shadow now.

‘Anyway… ’twas springtime,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry?’ Merrily stepped to one side so she wasn’t blocking the candlelight.

‘This day I found myself driving out towards Leominster. I’m leaving the main roads behind, soon as I can, looking for somewhere to get out and walk and think. ’Twas spring, and the leaves were half out, and some blossom on the trees, which were all startling white against a sky that was deep and mauve- coloured and loaded with rain that it wasn’t about to part with until it was good and ready. I parked up close to a footpath sign, and I climbed over a stile and here I am on the top of a hill overlooking what proved to be this very village.’

‘I think I know which place.’ Merrily recalled a certain afternoon walking with the late Miss Lucy Devenish, proprietor of Ledwardine Lore, who had known everything there was to know about the history of the village and made informed guesses about the rest.

‘Of course you do,’ Jenny Box said. ‘And you’ll know how it overlooks the orchards, with the spire poking out through all the apple blossom. So very white, the blossom was, this day, under that heavy, heavy purple sky. And here’s me just kneeling there on the grass, and praying and weeping, and weeping and praying… You know how it comes over you?’

‘I…’ Merrily looked down at the flagstones. ‘Yes.’

A movement: Jenny Box sliding gracefully to the end of the settle.

Sit with me.’

Merrily hesitated and then came to sit on the oak seat, opposite the altar and the picture of the church and the figure of light in the sky. There was some other movement, almost imperceptible, a small quiver, a flutter in the close air. Jenny Box gazed directly at the altar. When she began to speak, Merrily felt something like the breeze under Jenny’s voice.

‘I found myself praying to the Highest to be relieved of all that useless so-called spiritual debris. Praying with this absolutely overwhelming intensity – but the intensity wasn’t from me, y’understand. It wasn’t that half-phoney, feverish passion I’d known before; it was something out there that came around me and enveloped me. Something I was powerless to resist, to give you the auld cliché.’

Merrily nodded.

‘You understand that, Merrily? You understand what it is I’m talking about here?’

‘Yes,’ Merrily said and relaxed for a moment into common ground and memories of blue and gold. Yes, this did happen.

‘Of course you do,’ Jenny Box said. ‘See, I’d always thought myself to be a deeply spiritual person. But ’twas a poor spirituality, if I had but known it – Tarot cards and magical crystals and all the shiny paraphernalia of the Devil. Paganism slithering in round the back, like a door-to-door salesman with a suitcase full of glittery trash.’

Merrily, whose attitude towards paganism had become less black and white lately, said nothing.

‘But I was drawn to it all, in the beginning, you see, because of its leanings to the feminine, its exaltation of womankind . Let no one say, Merrily, that it isn’t men that’ve brought the world to the state it’s in. Let no one dare to tell me that – me that was hurled away from the Catholic Church when I was barely out of my teens, soiled with the sick hypocrisy of men.’

Ah. ‘Is this men in general?’ Merrily said. ‘Or…’

‘Or more specifically, our parish priest, Father Colm Meachin.’ The words coming out in a rapid, breathy monotone.

‘The saintly Father Colm, with his stately manners and his high-flown rhetoric and his political friends, and his thin, white hands all over a quiet girl, Niamh Fagan, who was my friend. But that… Ah, you see, it’s too perfect, that’s the real problem.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Too neat and hard, it seems to me now, and it doesn’t capture the glory of it all. The picture, Merrily – doesn’t capture the quite explosive glory of the moment, and I never really expected it to, but I thought the moment should be commemorated here nonetheless.’

Merrily moistened dry lips.

‘The moment?’

The unsettling thing was that Merrily was sure she could remember the exact day, last April or May… a ferocious electric storm heralding rain that had been almost equatorial. A Sunday. Tourists in the village hurrying into the church porch. Jane bored because Eirion had the flu and she’d been stuck indoors all weekend.

‘A flash of lightning, Merrily! A flash so wild and bright I had to shut my eyes against it. And when I opened them, the whole of the sky was as black as a peatbog, and then’ – the soft voice putting a thrill in the still air of the underground chapel – ‘came the tiny light, right at the centre, in the very darkest part of the storm.’

The church steeple in the painting was, without any doubt, Ledwardine’s, shooting out of crowded apple trees, with the wooded hills behind it and the stormy sky above, charcoal clouds delicately parted as if by the point of the sword, and the light oozing through in violet-magnesium bubbles.

‘The little light’s growing larger before my eyes, until it’s like a ball, or an egg shape, like some UFO thing. But I knew from the first that it would be more than that, more glorious.’

Merrily looked at the white figure, the sword-bearer: not Michael nor Gabriel but, apparently, Uriel, a peripheral archangel. Uriel came from the Biblical fringe, the Apocrypha.

As I stood there on that little hill’ – Jenny Box stood up – ‘absolutely transfixed, there was a sudden’ – she swung her arm – ‘ slash of fork lightning, and the lightning itself became the sword. The sword was the lightning. You know? And I just shut my eyes, Merrily, and the rain came down, so very hard that I was soaked to the skin inside a minute. Soaked through, and laughing like a fool.’

Jenny Box’s face shone with joy in the altar lights. She’d stolen the show, had been in charge from the beginning. There had been no way of putting that question – So was it you who brought a sack full of money into the church last night? – not now, not here in Jenny’s private chapel, Jenny’s holy space, in the light of the candles and Jenny’s holy vision.

‘So I drove down to the village, and by the time I got here, in less than ten minutes, it had almost stopped raining and the weakest of suns had come out. And here I am, walking around the village in a dream, burning inside with the white heat of pure joy. I’m walking around the square, looking up at the old buildings and just revelling in the atmosphere… not the quaintness – that’s all rubbish – but this tenuous strand of sanctity that still threaded its way through the streets in spite of all this commercialism. I seemed to see the thread unravelling before me, and so I followed it and… you can guess the rest.’