Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

‘Oh, yes, Dr Coll. Do you know Dr Coll?’ Betty shook her head. ‘Dr Coll says I shall need a new hip, soon, and perhaps a new knee. But that may mean going all the way to Gobowen. Sixty miles or more! In the meantime, I’m on a course of tablets. Can’t have new hands, unfortunately, but Dr Coll’s been marvellous, of course. He—’

‘Steroids?’

Mrs Wilshire looked vague again. ‘Cortisone, I believe. And something else – some different pills. I have to take those twice a day. I haven’t been taking them very long. Just since after Bryan died... It seems to have got so much worse since Bryan died. All the worry, I suppose.’

‘Mrs Wilshire... I hope you don’t mind me asking, but have you ever tried anything... alternative? Or complementary, as some people prefer to say.’

‘You mean herbs and things?’

‘Sort of.’

‘I would be very wary, my dear. You never know quite what you’re taking, do you?’

Betty carried the cups and saucers into a large kitchen – made pale, rather than bright, by wide windows, triple-glazed, with a limited view of a narrow garden, a steep, green hillside and a slice of unkind sky. At the bottom of the garden was a shed or summer house with a small verandah – like a miniature cricket pavilion.

Betty’s compassion was veined with anger. Lizzie Wilshire was happily swallowing a cocktail of powerful drugs, with all kinds of side-effects. An unambitious woman who’d let her husband handle everything, make all her decisions for her, and was now willingly submitting to other people who didn’t necessarily give a shit.

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.