Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

At the corner of the rectory, where the drive split, Merrily looked for a car, but there was just an empty space. J.W. Weal had gone to don his Masonic apron. It must look like a postage stamp on him. Lodge night: a crude ritual structure to further stiffen his already rigid life.

The police had gone, too, now. There seemed to have been a winding-down of the action at the gates of St Michael’s. Nothing to see or hear when Merrily and Judith had walked past the farm entrance.

They dropped down to the tarmac and then the crazy paving to the lawn. Sharp conifers were all around, pricking stars. Merrily glanced back once at the grey-stone rectory, at the angular bulge of the bay window: lightless, no magisterial shadows of furniture, no frenetic flickering, crackling...

Stop it!

‘Something bothering you, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Nothing at all, Mrs Prosser.’

At the end of the lawn, pale grey and shining slightly, was the squat conical building, the wine store... ice house... now tomb. Merrily stumbled on a lump in the lawn; Judith’s arm easily found her waist, helped her up. Merrily tightened inside. It was about here that Weal had wrapped his arms around her, lifting her, whirling her around. Men-na.

Merrily shivered suddenly, and Judith knew.

‘You’re frightened.’

‘I’m cold.’ She clutched her blue airline bag to her side.

‘As you wish.’ Judith bit the end of one of her leather gloves to pull it off and produced from a pocket something that jingled: the keys to the mausoleum. ‘But it will, I’m afraid, be even colder in here.’

When Betty had been talking for a while – calm, succinct, devastating – someone actually got up, went over and switched on all the lights. Hard reality time.

It was a starkly meaningful moment. Robin stared in cold dismay around the parlour, with its damp patches, its dull fire of smoky, sizzling green twigs, its sad assembly of robed witches and the crown of lights on the floor like some unfinished product of a kids’ handicraft class left behind at the end of the semester.

It all looked like some half-assed fancy dress party that never quite took off. The air was sick with confusion, incomprehension, embarrassment – affecting everyone here, except for Ned Bain, who was still entirely relaxed in the lotus position, his butt on the stone-flag floor.

And Betty, in her green medieval robe, remained expressionless, having come out with stuff about Ned that Robin, with his famously huge imagination, couldn’t begin to fathom how she’d gotten hold of. Was that where she’d been last night – obtaining Ned Bain’s life story? And never saying a word to Robin because he was this big-mouthed asshole whom all subtlety deserted the second he put away his paints.

He felt royally betrayed, shafted up the ass, by everyone. Like, how many of them already knew this? How many knew that Nicholas Ellis was Bain’s stepbrother, who covered up for his old lady after she stabbed Bain’s father to death? Was this some British Wiccan conspiracy, to which only he was denied access?

But Robin only had to look at Vivvie’s pinched and frozen face to be pretty damn sure that few, if any, of them had been aware of it all. They might’ve known about Ned’s father and the lingering bitterness over his killing, but not about the real identity of the saintly Nick Ellis.

‘Ned...’ Max came to his feet, nervously massaging his massive beard. ‘I do rather think we’re due an explanation.’

All of them, except for Betty, were now looking over at black-robed Ned Bain, still relaxed, but moody now, kind of saturnine. Betty, having rolled a grenade into the room, just gazed down into her lap.

Ned brought his hands together, elbows tucked inside his knees, the sleeves of his robe falling back. He smiled ruefully, slowly shaking his head. Then, in the face of Max’s evident disapproval, he brought out a packet of cigarettes and a small lighter, and they had to wait while he organized himself a smoke.

‘First of all, what Betty says is broadly correct.’ He sounded kind of detached, like it was dope he was smoking. ‘My father married Frances Wesson, and our intelligent, freethinking, liberal household changed almost overnight into a strict Christian, grace-at-mealtimes, church-twice-on-Sunday bloody purgatory. Icons on every wall, religious tracts on every flat surface... and the beatific face of my smug, pious little stepbrother. Well, of course I hated him. I hated him long before he lied to the police.’

There was another smoky silence.

‘So Simon Wesson... changed his name?’ Max prompted.

‘I believe Ellis was Frances’s maiden name. She’d already met the appalling Marshall McAllman during one of his early missions to the UK, but this only became evident later.’

‘In other words,’ said Max, too obviously anxious to help Ned clear up this little misunderstanding, ‘with the promise of American nouveaux riches, your father had somewhat outlived his usefulness.’

‘Oh, I’ve conjured a number of scenarios, Max, in the years since – none of which allows for the possibility of my father’s death being self-defence. Simon knows the truth. I realized part of my destiny was to make him bloody well confess it. It became a focus for me, led me into areas I might never have entered. Into Wicca.’

Robin saw Betty look up, her green eyes hard, but lit with intelligence and insight. There would be no get-outs, no short cuts. Ned Bain took another drag at his cigarette.

‘I’d tried to be a simple iconoclast at first, telling myself I was an atheist. Then, for a while – I’d be about nineteen – I was into ceremonial magic. Until I realized that was as cramped and pompous as Frances’s High Church Christianity. Only paganism appeared free of such crap, and there was a great sense of release. Naked, elemental, no hierarchy it was what I needed.’

Betty said, without looking up, ‘How long have you known about this place?’

‘Oh, only since Simon arrived here. Since he took over the church hall. Since he became “Father Ellis”. When he first came back to Britain, he was a curate in the north-east, but that was no use to me. He wasn’t doing anything that left him... open. I’d had people watching him in America for years – there’s an enormous pagan network over there now, happy to be accessed. And other links too.’

‘Like Kali Three?’ Betty said.

Robin saw Bain throw her a short, knife-like glance; she didn’t even react. ‘I used several agencies.’ He turned away, like this was an irrelevance. ‘And then, when “Father Ellis” began to make waves on the Welsh border, I came down to take a look for myself. Fell rather in love with the place.’

Bain then talked of how the archaeological excavation was under way at the time, just across the brook from the church; how the immense importance of the site as a place of ancient worship was becoming apparent. ‘One of the archaeologists told me he’d dearly love to know what lay under that church. Circular churchyard, pre-Christian site. I took a walk over there myself, and met some eagle-eyed old boy who told me he’d just bought it.’

‘Major Wilshire,’ Robin said. He couldn’t believe how this was shaping up.

‘Something like that. I didn’t pay too much attention to him, as I was being knocked sideways by the ambience. It was while I was talking to this guy that I had... the vision, I suppose. A moment beyond inspiration, when past and future collided in the present. Boom . I became aware how wonderful and apt it would be if the power of this place could be channelled. If this church was to become a temple again.’

‘Under the very nose of your fundamentalist Christian brother,’ Betty said quietly.