Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

‘Is he currently doing any deliverance work?’ she asked warily.

‘Frankly, my dear... one doesn’t like to enquire. Though if there are any complaints, I suppose we’ll have to peer into the pond. Meanwhile... this Livenight .’ The bishop snapped back the ringpull on his can of lager and accepted a tall glass from Sophie. ‘Apparently, he has been mentioned as a possible – what do you call it? – front-row speaker.’

‘Having already been approached by Ms Beauman,’ Sophie said, ‘and having apparently said yes.’

‘But not on behalf of the diocese,’ Merrily said. ‘Just a lone maverick, surely?’

The bishop shrugged, spilling a little lager. ‘One can’t stop the man appearing on national television. And one can’t be seen to try to stop him.’

‘But if he starts shooting his mouth off about the invasion of sinister sects and child sacrifice and that kind of stuff, it’s going to reflect on all of us.’

‘In the wake of recent events here,’ said the bishop, ‘we were all rather looking for a quiet life for a while.’

Merrily looked into the big, generally honest face of the suffragan Bishop of Ludlow, a lovely old town in south Shropshire from which he was commuting and to which he clearly couldn’t wait to get back.

‘Well...’ Sophie folded a square of green blotting paper into a beer mat for the bishop, giving herself an excuse not to look directly at Merrily. ‘Ms Beauman did intimate to me that they might be prepared to consider rescinding their invitation to the Reverend Mr Ellis... if they could recruit for their programme the person they originally had in mind.’

There was an uneasy silence. The bishop drank some lager and gazed out of the window, across Broad Street. It was starting to rain.

‘Shit,’ Merrily said under her breath.

‘A BOX?’ LIZZIE Wilshire looked vaguely puzzled. But more vague than puzzled, Betty thought.

‘Inside the fireplace.’

‘I did rather like that fireplace,’ Mrs Wilshire recalled. ‘It had a wonderful old beam across the top. It was the one emphatic feature of a rather drab room.’

‘Yes, the living room.’

‘You thought there ought to be beams across the ceiling too. Bryan said there still must be, underneath all the plaster. But I did like the fireplace, if precious little else.’

The fireplace to which Mrs Wilshire’s chair was presently pulled close was forlornly modern, made of brownish dressed stone. It surrounded a bronze-enamelled oil-fired stove – undernourished flames behind orange-tinted glass.

Mrs Wilshire frowned. ‘It also had woodworm, though.’

‘The box?’

‘The beam, dear. That worried me a little, until Bryan said, “Lizzie, it will take about three hundred years for the worms to eat through it.” I would still have wanted it treated, though.’ She blinked at Betty. ‘Have you had it treated, yet?’

‘Not yet. Er, Mrs Wilshire... there was a box. It was apparently found in the fireplace, while you were having some repairs done to the walls. It contained a paper with a sort of... prayer. I suppose you’d call it a prayer.’

‘Oh!’ Understanding came at last to the bulging eyes of frail Lizzie Wilshire – big eyes which made her look like an extraterrestrial or a wizened, expensive cat. ‘You mean the witch paper !’

‘Yes,’ Betty said softly, ‘the witch paper.’

It wasn’t that she was particularly old, early seventies, Betty reckoned, but she had arthritis – obvious in her hands – and accepted her own helplessness. Clearly, she’d never been used to doing very much for herself or making decisions. ‘It’s so confusing now,’ she said. ‘So many things I know nothing about. Things I don’t want to have to know about. Why should I?’

She was still living in this colonial-style bungalow on the edge of New Radnor, the tiny town, or big village, where she and the Major had lived for over fifteen years, since his retirement. Just a stopgap, the Major always said, until they found the right place... an interesting place, a place he could play with.

She told Betty how she thought he’d finally accepted that he was too old to take on something needing extensive refurbishment when, out on a Sunday drive, they’d found – not three miles away, at Old Hindwell – the house with which Major Bryan Wilshire, to the utter dismay of his wife, had fallen hopelessly in love.

‘It was empty, of course, when we saw it. It had belonged to two reclusive bachelor farmers called Prosser. The last surviving one had finally been taken into a nursing home. So you can imagine the state it was in.’

Betty already knew all this from the estate agents, and from their own searches. Also she’d sensed a residual sourness and meanness in rooms left untouched by Major Wilshire. But she let his widow talk.

‘And that awful old ruined church in the grounds. Some would say it was picturesque, but I hated it. Who could possibly want a disused church? Except Bryan, of course.’

The Major had found the church fascinating and had begun to delve into its history: when it had last been used as a place of worship, why it had been abandoned. Meanwhile, the house was to be auctioned and, because of its poor condition, the reserve price was surprisingly low. This was when the market was still at low ebb, just before the recent property boom, and there was no rush for second homes in the countryside.

‘There was no arguing with Bryan. He put in an offer and it was accepted, so the auction was called off. Bryan was delighted. It was so cheap we didn’t even have to consider selling this bungalow. He said he could renovate the place at his leisure.’

A reputable firm of contractors had been hired, but Major Wilshire insisted on supervising the work himself. The problem was that Bryan was always so hands-on, climbing ladders and scaffolding to demonstrate to the workmen exactly what he wanted doing. Lizzie couldn’t bear to look up at him; it made her quite dizzy. But Bryan had always needed that element in his life, serving as he had with that regiment in Hereford. The SAS, Betty presumed, and she wondered how an all-action man like Major Wilshire had ended up with a wife who didn’t like to look up .

At least that had spared Lizzie an eyewitness memory of the terrible accident. This had been brought about by the combination of a loose stone under a slit window in the tower, a lightweight aluminium ladder, and a freak blast of wind from the Forest.

At first they’d told her it was simply broken bones, and quite a number of them; so it would have taken Major Wilshire a long time to recover. Many months. But no internal injuries, so it could have been worse. He’d at least be home in a matter of weeks. Mrs Wilshire meanwhile had determined that he would never again go back to that awful place.

But Bryan had never come home again. The shock – or something – had brought on pneumonia. For this energetic, seemingly indestructible old soldier, it was all over in four days.

There was one photograph of the Major on the mantelpiece: a wiry man in a cap. He was not in uniform or anything, but in the garden, leaning on a spade, and his smile was only a half-smile.

‘So quick. So bewilderingly quick . There was no time at all for preparations,’ Mrs Wilshire said querulously. ‘We’d always made time to prepare for things; Bryan was a great planner. Nothing was entirely unexpected, because he was always ready for it. Whenever he had to go away, my sister would come to stay and Bryan would always pay the bills in advance and order plenty of heating oil. He always thought ahead.’

How ironic, Betty thought, that a man whose career must have involved several life-or-death situations, and certainly some gruelling and risky training exercises, should have died after a simple fall from a ladder.