Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

Merrily’s first, disappointing glimpse of the Reverend Nicholas Ellis was a definite so-what moment.

‘... is a particularly poignant occasion for me,’ she heard. ‘It’s only weeks since Menna came to me, with her loving husband, to be baptized again, to pledge herself to the Lord Jesus in the presence of the Holy Spirit. I wonder... if somehow... she knew.’

His face was bland and shining, his mouth wide, like a letter box. His light brown hair was brushed straight back, a modest ponytail disappearing into the folds of his monk’s cowl. Monastic gear was less unorthodox than it used to be for Church of England ministers, but in dazzling white this was hardly a sign of humility. Too messianic for Merrily. His words rang coldly in the factory acoustic.

‘I conducted the solemn but joyful service of rebaptism at their home. And on that day the very air was alive with hope and rejoicing, and these two souls were blessed beneath the wings of angels.’

From the shadows, someone, a man, cried out – involuntarily, it seemed, like a hiccup – ‘Praise God!’ As though the heavenly host had suddenly burst through the ceiling.

Nicholas Ellis was silent for a moment. Merrily couldn’t make out his expression because the spotlights in the ceiling were aimed not at him but at the uncovered coffin.

Lidless! In the American style, Menna Weal lay in an open casket. Wrapped in her shroud. Her face looked like marble under the lights. A curtain of shadows surrounded her.

Merrily didn’t like this, found it eerie. She looked for Barbara Buckingham in the congregation, but in this light it was hopeless. How could Barbara, wherever she was, stand this performance? How could any of them?

Eerie – what a funeral should never be.

Nicholas Ellis said, ‘And it is to that same loving home that, in a short time, Menna’s body will return. The final laying to rest of these earthly remains will be a small private ceremony which, in the context of that loving relationship, is as it should be.’

Merrily saw the seated figure of J.W. Weal, hunched like a big rock, gazing steadily at the body of his wife. Her thoughts were carried back to the county hospital, that first sight of him with his bowl of water and his cloth. An act of worship?

‘Let us thank God for love,’ Ellis said, ‘when the black dragon wings of evil beat above our heads and the night air carries the stench of Satan.’

Merrily wrinkled her nose.

‘... let us remember that only the strong light of love can bring us through the long hours of darkness. Now let us all rise and, with Menna and Jeffery together in our hearts, sing number two on our hymn sheet, “Take Me, Lord, To Your Golden Palace”.’

The lights blinked on, so that they could all read the words. Everyone rose, with a mass scraping of metal chair legs that was almost a shriek, and Merrily saw, at the front, one broad head thrust above all the others. J.W. looking down on the remains of his wife.

A statement of ownership , Barbara had said. Possession is nine points of the law .

Merrily found herself outside in the cold again, feeling slightly shocked.

She stopped about halfway down the steps, with her back to a Scots pine tree. The sand colour in the sky had all but disappeared, washed under the rapid, grey estuary of dusk. Below her, Old Hindwell settled into its umbered shadows. Merrily stood watching for the lights of Sophie’s Saab, listening for its engine.

Just not Anglican, somehow.

You could say that again. She sank her hands far into her coat pockets.

It had been a singalong, gospelly, country-and-western hymn. It was cloying, trite – no worse but certainly no better than the stilted Victorian hymns which Merrily had been trying for months to squeeze out of her services. She’d had no hymn sheet, but the dipping of the house lights told her when the last verse had finished. Then words that were not on the hymn sheet took over – when, in the darkness, the tune and the rhythm disappeared but the singing itself did not stop.

Merrily stood silent, not having been exposed for quite some years to this phenomenon: the language of the angels according to some evangelists. Nonsense words, bubbling and flowing and ululating between slackened jaws.

Tongues. The gift of . The sign that the Holy Spirit was here in Old Hindwell village hall.

Right now, she was in no position to dispute this. It wasn’t the hymn or its ghostly coda which had brought her out here, nor the sight of the silent, sombre Jeffery Weal, his gaze still fixed on his wife while the congregation summoned angels to waft her spirit into paradise.

It was just that, during the hymn, while the lights were on, she’d had an opportunity to investigate the congregation, row by row, and Barbara Buckingham was definitely not there. And while that meant she hadn’t had to listen to Ellis’s Gothic nonsense and stand in fuming silence while all around her sang themselves into a religious stupor, it did raise a possible problem.

Barbara was a determined woman. She had a serious grudge against this area, arising from a deprived childhood, which had become narrowed and focused into a hatred of the lumbering, sullen, slow-moving, single-minded Jeffery Weal.

Suppose she was already at Weal’s house? Outside somewhere, waiting for the mourners at the small private ceremony that would follow.

Merrily hurried down the rest of the steps. After what she’d seen in there, she too wanted very much to know how this was going to end.

‘ROBIN, IT’S AL.’

But this was not Al. Al was so cheerful that if he called you too early in the morning it hurt.

And this was not early morning, it was late afternoon and Betty had gone to see the goddamn widow Wilshire again and the voice on the phone was like the voice of a relative calling to say someone close to you was dead.

As art director handling Talisman, the fantasy imprint of the multinational publisher, Harvey-Calder, Al Delaney did not know any of Robin’s relatives; he kept his dealings strictly to artists and writers and editors. So Robin was already feeling sick to his gut.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How’s it going?’

With the light failing fast, he stood by the window in his studio. Or, at least, the north-facing room that was to go on serving as his studio until they’d gotten enough money together to convert one of their outbuildings. The room had two trestle tables, one carrying his paints and his four airbrush motors, only two of which now worked. Airbrushes seemed to react badly to Robin. Must be all that awesome psychic energy.

Haw!

‘I’m calling you from home,’ Al said.

‘That would be because it’s Saturday and the offices are closed, right?’

‘And because I’ve just heard from, er... Kirk Blackmore.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Robin moistened his lips.

‘And I’d rather say what I want to say from home. Like that Blackmore’s an insufferable egomaniac who’d stand there and tell Botticelli he couldn’t draw arses, and that there are a few of us who’d like to use the Sword of Twilight to publicly disembowel him. But, tragically—’

‘Tragically, he is also the hottest fantasy writer in Britain, so it would be unwise to say that to his face. Yeah, yeah. OK, Al, just listen for one minute. Since I got Blackmore’s fax, I’ve been giving it a whole lot of thought and I’ve come up with something which I think he’s gonna like a whole lot more. I accept that the purple mist was too lurid, the lettering too loud, so what I propose, for starters—’

‘Robin, he now doesn’t want you to do it at all.’

On the second table, the work table, lay Robin’s preliminary watercolour drawings for the proposed new Kirk Blackmore format, the one which would run down the backlist like gold thread. The one, in fact, which would launch the fund which would finance the restoration of the outbuildings – providing Betty with her own herbal haven and Robin, in a year or two, with the most wonderful, inspiring, sacred studio.