Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

‘Invariably,’ Sophie said, ‘they contrive to fill the studio with loud-mouthed bigots and professional cranks.’

Merrily nodded. ‘And if you’re insufficiently loud-mouthed, bigoted or cranky they just move on to the psycho sitting next to you who’s invariably shaking at the bars to escape onto live television. Whole thing makes you despair for the future of the human race. I don’t really think spreading despair is what we’re about.’

‘No,’ the bishop said uncomfortably, ‘quite. It’s just that if you don’t do it, we... we have a problem.’

Merrily stiffened. ‘What are you saying exactly, Bernie?’

Bernie Dunmore had taken to wandering down to the Deliverance office on Tuesdays for a snack lunch with Merrily. He always seemed glad to get away from the Bishop’s Palace.

Which was understandable. He was not actually the Bishop of Hereford although, as suffragan Bishop of Ludlow, in the north of the diocese, the caretaker role had fallen to him in the controversial absence of the Right Reverend Michael Hunter.

In the end, though, Mick Hunter’s disappearance had not detonated the media explosion the diocese had feared, coinciding as it had with the resignation of two other Church of England bishops and the suicide of a third – all of this following calls for an outside inquiry into their personal expenses exceeding £200,000 a year, and the acceptance of unorthodox perks.

Questions had also been asked about Hunter’s purchase of a Land Rover and a Mercedes, used by his wife, and, as neither the press nor the police had been able to substantiate anything more damaging, the diocese had been happy to shelter behind any other minor scandal. Now the issue had been turned around: four bishops had spoken out in a Sunday Times feature – ‘Keeping the Mitre on C of E Executive Stress’ – about the trials of their job in an increasingly secular age. There was, inevitably, a picture of Mick Hunter in his jogging gear, ‘escaping from the pressure’.

Was it better, under the circumstances, that the truth had not come out? Merrily wasn’t sure. But she liked Bernie Dunmore, sixty-two years old and comfortably lazy. Prepared to hold the fort until such time as the search for a suitably uncontroversial replacement for Mick Hunter could begin. No one, in fact, could be less controversial than Bernie; the worst he’d ever said about Hunter was, ‘One would have thought the Crown Appointments Commission would have been aware of Michael’s personality problems.’

As Mick’s appointee, Merrily had offered Bernie her resignation from his Deliverance role, citing the seasoned exorcist Huw Owen’s warning that women priests had become a target for every psychotic grinder of the dark satanic mills who ever sacrificed a cockerel.

‘All the more reason for you to remain, my dear,’ Bernie had told her, though she couldn’t quite follow his reasoning. She hoped it wasn’t just because he enjoyed his Tuesday lunchtimes here sitting on the Deliverance desk with a couple of hot dogs and a can of lager.

‘ You explain, Sophie,’ the bishop said.

His lay secretary sat up, spry and elegant in a grey business suit with fine black stripes, and consulted her memo pad.

‘Well, as you know, this programme approached us some weeks ago, with a view to Merrily taking part in a general discussion on supernatural phenomena – which Merrily declined to do.’

‘Because Merrily was afraid of what they might already know about recent events in Hereford,’ added Merrily.

‘Indeed. I then received a personal call from Ms Tania Beauman relating to this week’s proposed paganism programme, again requesting Merrily.’

‘They’ve obviously seen that understatedly sexy photo of you, my dear,’ said Bernie.

Merrily sighed, looked at the clock: 1.35. She had to be back in Ledwardine by three for Minnie Parry’s funeral.

Sophie said, ‘You’ll probably both recall the story in the papers last Thursday about the pagan parents in Somerset who demanded that their child be allowed to make her own religious observances at the village primary school.’

The bishop winced.

‘ Livenight ’s programme peg for this week,’ Sophie explained. ‘It’s now claimed there are over a hundred thousand active pagans in Britain. Either belonging to groups – covens – or nurturing their beliefs independently.’

‘Complete nonsense, of course.’ The bishop sniffed. ‘But figures like that can’t be proved one way or the other.’

‘The programme will discuss the pagans’ claim that they represent the traditional old religion of the British Isles and, as such, should be granted rights and privileges at least equivalent to those accorded to Islam, Buddhism and other non-indigenous faiths.’

Bernie snorted. ‘Most of their so-called traditions date back no further than the fifties and sixties. They’re a sham. These people are just annoyed because they’ve been refused charity status.’

‘In a secular state,’ Merrily said, ‘it could be argued that their superstitions are just as valid as ours – I’m doing my devil’s advocate bit here.’

The bishop jutted his chins and straightened his pectoral cross. ‘My question, though, is should we be actively encouraging people to strip off and have sex with each other’s wives under the full moon while pretending it’s religion? I think not. But neither do I think we should be engaging them in open battle – boosting their collective ego by identifying them as representatives of the Antichrist.’

‘However,’ Sophie said, ‘that does reflect the general approach of one of our more... outgoing rural rectors: the Reverend Nicholas Ellis.’

‘Oh,’ Merrily said.

‘In his sermons and his parish magazine articles, he’s tended to employ... quite colourful terminology. Livenight ’s own kind of terminology, you might say.’

Sophie and the bishop both looked enquiringly at Merrily. She shook her head. ‘I know of him only through the press cuttings. Loose-cannon priest who dumped his churches. Spent some years in the States. Charismatic. Direct intervention of the Holy Spirit... Prophecy... Tongues.’

‘Split the community,’ Bernie said, ‘when he expressed disdain for actual churches and offered to conduct his charismatic services in community halls, barns, warehouses, whatever. So Mick Hunter agreed to appoint a regular priest-in-charge in the area, to appease the traditionalists, and let Ellis continue his roving brief.’

Merrily recalled that Ellis now belonged to a fast-growing Anglican anti-Church faction calling itself the Sea of Light.

‘Awfully popular figure, this Nicholas, I’m afraid,’ Bernie Dunmore said. ‘Since we cut him loose, he’s set up in some run-down village hall and he’s packing it to the rafters with happy-clappies from miles around. Which makes him somewhat unassailable, and yet he’s not a demonstrative bloke in himself. Quiet, almost reticent, apparently. But came back from America with a knowledge of agriculture and farming ways that seems to have rather endeared him to the Radnorshire people.’

Merrily grimaced, recalling what Eileen Cullen at the hospital had said about the piece of Wales just over the border: They have their own ways and they keep closed up .

Bernie flicked her a foxy smile. ‘The man was after your job, did you know?’

Her eyebrows went up. ‘Deliverance?’

‘Wrongly assuming you’d be on the way out in the aftermath of Michael’s, er, breakdown. Soon as I showed my face in Hereford, there was Nicholas requesting an audience.’

‘Did he get one?’

‘Showed him the door, of course, but tactfully. Good God, he’s the last kind of chap you want as your exorcist. Sees the Devil behind every pillar in the cloister. Fortunately, Deliverance is rarely up for tender. Press-gang job, in my experience.’ He beamed at Merrily. ‘And all the better for that.’