Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

Robin widened his eyes.

‘The church is wrong , says Mr Penney. It’s in the wrong place. It should never have been built where it is. The water’s not healthy. The fabric’s rotten. Parking’s difficult. Oh, a whole host of excuses. He says he’s written to the diocese and whoever else, suggesting that they dispense with St Michael’s at the earliest possible opportunity.’

Robin was fazed. ‘He called for them to get rid of his own church? Just like that?’

‘ Just like that. No one could believe it.’

‘Wow.’ Robin was thinking furiously. Had Penney realized this was a powerful pagan site? Was it that simple? Had he made some kind of discovery? He tried to hide his excitement. ‘Was he mad?’

‘Perhaps he’d always been a little mad,’ said Mrs Prosser. ‘But we just never saw it until it was too late.’

‘So, like... what did he do?’

Judith Prosser put down her coffee. ‘No one likes to talk about it. But, as the owner now, I suppose you have a right to be told.’

One of the few good things about living here was that the post usually arrived before nine; in some rural areas you couldn’t count on getting it before lunchtime.

Today’s was a catalogue from a mail order supplier of garden ornaments – how quickly these people caught up with you – and a letter addressed to ‘Mrs’ Thoroughgood with a Hereford postmark.

That ‘Mrs’ told her what this was going to be.

She sat down at the table with the letter in front of her. Usual cheap white envelope. They’d received two when they were living in Shrewsbury. They said things like: We Know About Your Dirty Nude Ceremonies Worshipping Heathen Gods. The Lord Will Punish You.

How had they found out? Who’d told them? Had Robin been indiscreet?

Betty felt gutted. The sick irony of this was that she hadn’t practised as a witch since they moved here and, the way she was feeling now, never would again – at least, not in any organized way.

She contemplated tossing the letter in the stove unopened. But if she did that it would dwell in her, would be twice as destructive.

With contempt, Betty slit the envelope.

She read the note three times. Usual capitals, usual poor spelling.

But otherwise not quite what she’d expected.

YOU HAD BETTER TELL THAT LONG HAIRED LOUT THAT IF HE WANTS TO GO HELPING HIMSELF TO THE FAVOURS OF THE BIGGEST HORE IN THE VILLAGE HE OUGHT TO BE MORE DISCREAT ABOUT IT.

IT WAS INCREDIBLE! So wonderfully bizarre that, walking back to St Michael’s Farm, Robin forgot all about agonizing over that asshole Blackmore who thought bestsellerdom had conferred upon him an art critic’s instincts.

On the footbridge over the Hindwell Brook, he stopped a moment, evoking the incredible scene on that October morning back in the sixties when the brook was in flood. Had anyone photographed it? Could there be pictures still around?

Naw, anyone who’d pulled out a camera would probably have been compelled by some local by-law to hand over the film to Councillor Prosser – whichever Prosser happened to be the councillor at the time.

Judith Prosser had let him out the front way, through a dark-beamed hallway with some nice oak panelling. Up against the panelling there had been an outsize chair with a leather seat and a brass plate on the back. The chairman’s chair, Judith had explained when he asked about it, from the Old Hindwell Community Council, disbanded some years ago under local government reorganization. And, yes, Gareth had been its chairman – twice.

Robin wondered if Judith Prosser called her husband by his title. Maybe got a little bedtime buzz out of it: Oh, oh... give it to me harder, Councillor...

He grinned at the winter sun. He felt a whole lot lighter. Holy shit, he’d actually spoken, in a meaningful way, to a Local Person! It was a seminal thing.

Indeed, when he looked across at the church on its promontory he even had the feeling that the Imbolc sabbat could go back on the schedule. He could see it now – using his visualization skills to cancel the brightness, and paint the sky dark, he could see lights awakening in the church, its ruins coming alive. He conjured the sound of Celtic drums and a tin whistle. Son et lumière . He saw, in the foreground, Betty’s graceful silhouette – Betty in her pale cloak and a headdress woven from twigs. And, in the headdress, a ring of tiny flames, a sacred circle of candle-spears, a crown of lights.

He came in through the back door of St Michael’s farmhouse so much happier than when he’d gone out of it. Returning with the breeze behind him.

‘Siddown, babe,’ he told her. ‘You should hear this.’

‘Should I?’ She was already sitting down.

Robin halted on the stone flags. His mood fell, like a cooling meteor, to earth.

Her voice was flat as nan bread. At gone ten in the morning she was still in her robe. She looked pale and swollen-eyed, sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of the hot water she sometimes drank early in the day.

‘You OK?’

Her hair also looked flat, like tired barn-straw. She’d been sleeping when he’d slipped out of bed around seven. He’d first made some coffee and toast for himself, not keeping especially quiet, and left a note for her on the table before he went over to the Prosser farm. He was half suspecting then that it was going to be one of those days, the kind he’d hoped there wouldn’t be any more of after they moved to the country. In fact, since they’d moved here those days had accumulated one after the other, sure as sunrise. It was now reaching the point where it seemed they could never, simultaneously, be in a good mood. Like the sun would only shine on one of them at any one time.

Is this a psychic malaise? Could this be solved?

‘Bets?’ He was burning to bring her comfort, but he didn’t know how. There were always going to be areas of her he could not reach; he accepted this. He also accepted that in some ways he was no more than her attendant. This was not necessarily sad, was it?

‘I’m sorry. Time of the moon.’ She gave him the palest smile he could recall. ‘Tell me what you learned at the farm.’

She was evidently not going to talk about whatever it was. He sat down opposite her and, in a voice from which the oil of narrative enthusiasm had now been well drained, told her what he’d learned about the Reverend Penney.

It was obviously his change of mood, but now he saw beyond the bizarre; he saw the sadness of it all.

‘It’s like early in the morning, still only half light and a mist down by the water, so not everyone sees it. Just the Prossers, that’s the two brothers who lived here, and their older brother – Gareth’s father – and his wife. And Gareth himself, who’d have been in his twenties back then. And this Mrs Pottinger, she was there soon enough, in her role as the eyes and ears of Old Hindwell for the Brecon and Radnor Express . Because she’d seen a... what do you call that thing they kneel on to pray?’

‘Hassock,’ Betty said. ‘I think.’

‘Yeah. Pottinger was out for an early walk with the dog and she’d seen a hassock floating down the brook. Maybe her first thought was that this was the vandals she talked about in her letter to Major Wilshire. Seems she wanted to call the cops, but she ran into the Prossers, and the Prossers stopped her. They knew it was an inside job.’

‘Yes,’ Betty said, like she knew it would have to be.

‘Well, the brook was already high, with all the rain, and close to bursting its banks, and that’s what they think’s happened at first. It’s overflowed into the field by the barn and it’s halfway up the promontory where the church is. It’s like there’s a dam – like a tree or something fell into the brook – but as the day gets lighter they can see the full extent of what’s going down here.’