Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

The Local People? He’d found he was beginning to think of ‘the local people’ the way the Irish thought of ‘the little people’: shadowy, mischievous, will-o’-the-wispish. A different species.

Robin had established that the box did originally come from this house. Or, at least, there were signs of an old hiding place inside the living-room inglenook – new cement, where a brick had been replaced. So was this the reason Betty had resisted the consecration of their living room as a temple? Because it was there that the anti-witchcraft charm had been secreted?

Betty’s behaviour had been altogether difficult most of the weekend. George Webster and his lady, the volatile Vivvie, Craft-buddies from Manchester, had come down on Saturday to help the Thorogoods get the place together, and hadn’t left until Monday afternoon. It ought to have been a good weekend, with loud music, wine and the biggest fires you could make out of resinous green pine. But Betty had kept on complaining of headaches and tiredness.

Which wasn’t like her at all. As a celebratory climax, Robin had wanted the four of them to gather at the top of the tower on Sunday night to welcome the new moon. But – wouldn’t you know? – it was overcast, cold and raining. And Betty had kept on and on about safety. Like, would that old platform support as many as four people? What did she think, that he was planning an orgy?

Standing by the barn door, Robin could just about see the top of the tower, atmospherically wreathed in fog. One day soon, he would produce a painting of it in blurry watercolour, style of Turner, and mail it to his folks in New York. This is a sketch of the church. Did I mention the ancient church we have out back?

And ancient was right.

This was the real thing. The wedge of land overlooking the creek, the glorious plot on which the medieval church of St Michael at Old Hindwell had been built by the goddamn Christians, was most definitely an ancient pagan sacred site. George Webster had confirmed it. And George had expertise in this subject.

Just take a look at these yew trees, Robin, still roughly forming a circle. That one and that one... could be well over a thousand years old.

Red-haired, beardy George running his hands down the ravines in those huge, twisting trunks and then cutting some forks of hazel, so he and Robin could do some exploratory dowsing. What you did, you asked questions – Were there standing stones here? Was this an old burial place, pre-Christianity? How many bodies are lying under here? – and you waited for the twig to twitch in response. Admittedly, a response didn’t happen too often for Robin, but George was adept.

No, there’d been no stones but perhaps wooden poles – a woodhenge kind of arrangement – where the yews now grew. And yes, there had been pre-Christian burials here. George made it 300-plus bodies at one time. But the area had been excavated and skeletons taken away for reburial before the Church sold off the site, so there was the possibility that some pagan people been taken away for Christian burial. The arrogance of those bastards!

What happened, way back when the Christians were moving into Britain, was some smart-ass pope had decreed that they should place their churches on existing sites of worship. This served two purposes: it would demonstrate the dominance of the new religion over the old and, if the site was the same, that might persuade the local tribes to keep on coming there to worship.

But that was all gonna be turned around at last. Boy, was it!

Robin stood down by the noisesome water, lining up the church with Burfa Hill, site of an Iron Age camp. He couldn’t remember when – outside of a rite – he’d last felt so exalted. Sure, it only backed up what he’d already instinctively known from standing up top of the tower the other night. But, hell, confirmation was confirmation! He and Betty had been meant to come here, to revive a great tradition.

It was about repaganization.

They hadn’t talked too much about long-term plans, but – especially after the weekend’s discoveries – it was obvious these would revolve around in some way reinstating the temple which had stood here before there ever was a Christian church. Physically, this process had already begun: the church had fallen into ruins; if this continued, one day only the tower would remain... a single great standing stone.

Beautiful!

So why wasn’t Betty similarly incandescent with excitement? Why so damn moody so much of the time? Was it that box? He’d wanted to tell George and Vivvie about the box and what it contained, but Betty had come on heavy, swearing him to silence. It’s no one else’s problem. It’s between us and them. We have to find our own way of dealing with it.

Them? Like who? She was paranoid.

And also, he knew, still spooked about what had happened to Major Wilshire, from whose widow they’d bought this place.

The Major had died after a fall from a ladder he’d erected up the side of the tower. Hearing the story, George Webster – who’d drunk plenty wine by then – had begun speculating about the site having a guardian and maybe needing a sacrifice every so many years. Maybe they could find out if anyone else had died in accidents here...

At which point Robin had beckoned George behind the barn and told him to keep bullshit ideas like that to himself.

Besides, if there was any residual atmospheric stress resulting from that incident, Robin figured the best answer would be to do something positive on the tower itself to put things right, and as soon as possible.

Some kind of ritual. Betty would know.

Back in the house, he placed the oak box on the kitchen table. Betty’s sea-green eyes narrowed in suspicion.

‘We have to deal with this, Bets,’ Robin told her. ‘Then we forget about it for ever.’

‘But not necessarily now,’ Betty said irritably.

But Robin was already reading aloud the charm again, the parts of it he could decipher. He suspected Betty could interpret some of those symbols – as well as being more psychically developed, her esoteric knowledge was a good deal deeper and more comprehensive than his own – but she was not being overhelpful here, to say the fucking least.

‘OK,’ he conceded, ‘so it’s probably complete bullshit. I guess these things must’ve been real commonplace at one time – like hanging a horseshoe on your gate.’

‘Yes,’ Betty said with heavy patience. ‘I’m sure, if we make enquiries, we’ll find out that there was a local wise man – they called them conjurors in these parts. They were probably still going strong in the nineteenth century.’

‘Like a shaman?’

‘Something like that. Someone who dealt in spells and charms. If a couple of dozen lambs went down with sheep-scab or something, the farmer would start whingeing about being bewitched and call in the conjuror. It was usually a man – probably because farmers hereabouts didn’t like dealing with women. The conjuror would probably write out a charm to keep in the fireplace, and everyone would be happy.’

‘There you go. We just happened to be exposed to this one when we were overtired and stressed-out and ready to leap to gross conclusions.’

Betty nodded non-committally. Against the murk of the morning, she was looking a little more vital, in her big, red mohair sweater and her moon talisman. She’d already gotten sweating piles of pine logs stacked up both sides of the Rayburn. Yesterday, she and Vivvie had hung Chinese lanterns on the naked bulbs and called down blessings. But when George had suggested consecrating the temple in the living room itself, Betty had resisted that. Not something to be rushed into. Give the house spirits time to get to know them. Which had sounded unusually fey, for Betty.