Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

BETTY WAS DETERMINED To Keep the lid on the cauldron for as long as possible, which might just – the way she’d been feeling lately – mean for ever.

The arrival of the old box was no help.

It turned up on the back step at St Michael’s only a few days after they had moved into the farmhouse and a week after Betty turned twenty-seven. It wasn’t her kind of present. It seemed like a direct threat – or at least confirmation that their new life was unlikely to be the idyll that Robin expected.

For Betty, the first inkling of this – if you could call such experiences inklings – had already occurred only minutes before on that same weird evening.

The new year had been blown in, battered and dripping, and the wind and the rain still bullied the hills. Tonight, though, it looked like being clean and still and iron-hard with frost, and Robin had persuaded Betty to come with him to the top of the church tower – their church tower – to witness the brilliant winter sunset.

This was the first time she’d been up there, and the first time she’d ever been into the church out of daylight hours. It wasn’t yet five p.m. but evening still came early to the Radnor Valley in late January – the dark side of Candlemas – and Robin was leaning over the cracked parapet to watch the final bloodrush over an otherwise unblemished sky.

‘I guess what we oughta do,’ he murmured playfully, ‘is shake down that old moon.’

The Forest was laid out before them: darkening storybook hills, bearded with bracken. There were few trees – misleadingly, it had been named forest in the medieval sense of a place for hunting. Betty wondered how much of that still went on: the lamping of hares, the baiting of badgers. Maybe some night Robin would be standing up here and would see a party of silent men with guns and dogs. And then the shit would fly.

‘So, uh, how would you...’ Robin straightened up, slapping moss from his hands, ‘... how would you feel about that?’

‘You mean now, don’t you?’ With both hands, Betty pushed back her wild, blonde hair. She backed away from the edge, which had got her thinking about the death of Major Wilshire. Down below, about six feet out from the base of the tower, two flat tombstones had been exposed beneath a bush blasted back by the gales. That was probably where he’d fallen. She shivered. ‘You actually mean out here ?’

He shrugged. ‘Why not?’ He wore his orange fleece and his ludicrous flattened fez-thing with tiny mirrors around the side. The way Betty saw it, Robin Thorogood, having grown up in America, had yet to develop a functioning sense of the absurd.

‘Why not ?’ Betty didn’t remember exactly when ‘shaking down the moon’ had become his personal euphemism for sex, but she didn’t altogether care for the term. ‘Because this is, you know, January?’

‘We could bring up blankets.’ Robin did his abandoned puppy face.

Which no longer worked on Betty. ‘Mother of God, I bet it’s not even safe! Look at the floor... the walls! We wind up down in the bloody belfry, in a cloud of plaster dust, with multiple fractures, what happens then ?’

‘Aw, come on . It’s been here for six... eight centuries. Just because—’

‘And probably falling apart for most of the last hundred years!’

Betty gripped one of the battlements, then let go quickly in alarm, convinced for a second that a lump of mortar, or whatever medieval mixture those old masons used, was actually moving underneath it. The entire tower could be crumbling, for all they knew; their funds had run to only a cursory survey by a local bloke who’d said, ‘Oh, just make sure it doesn’t fall down on anybody, and you’ll be all right.’ They ought to bring in a reliable builder to give the place a going-over before they contemplated even having a picnic up here. If they could ever afford a builder, which seemed unlikely.

Robin stood warrior-like, with his back to the fallen sun, and she knew that in his mind he was wearing animal skins and there was a short, thick blade at his hip. Very like the figure dominating his painting-in-progress: Lord Madoc the intergalactic Celt, hero of Kirk Blackmore’s Sword of Twilight . Seven hundred pages of total bollocks, but it was misty cover designs for the likes of Blackmore that were going to have to meet the mortgage premiums until Betty dared come out locally as a herbalist and healer, or whatever was socially acceptable.

‘Just I had a sensation of what it would be like afterwards,’ the great visionary artist burbled on, unabashed, ‘lying here on our backs, watching the swirl of the cosmos, from our own—’

‘Whereas I’m getting a real sensation of watching the swirl of tomato soup with croutons.’ Betty moved to the steps, took hold of the oily rope, feeling about with a trainered foot for the top step. ‘Come on. We’ll have years to do all that.’

Her words lingered in a void as hollow as these ruins. Betty could not lose the feeling that this time next year they would not even be here.

‘You know your trouble?’ Robin suddenly yelled. ‘You’re becoming sensible before your time.’

‘What?’ She spun at him, though knowing that he’d spoken without thinking... that it was just petulance... that she should let it go.

‘Well...’ He looked uneasy. ‘You know...’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘OK, OK...’ Making placatory patting gestures with his hands, too late. ‘Wrong word, maybe.’

‘No, you’ve said it now. In normal life we’re not supposed to be sensible because we’re living the fantasy . Like we’re really not supposed to bother about everyday stuff like falling to our deaths down these bloody crumbling steps, because—’

‘There’s a guy over there,’ Robin said. ‘In the field down by the creek.’

‘It’s a brook.’ Betty paused on the top step.

‘He’s looking up.’ Robin moved back to the rim of the tower. ‘He’s carrying something.’

‘A spear of light, perhaps?’ Betty said sarcastically. ‘A glowing trident?’

‘A bag, I think. A carrier bag. No, he’s not in the field. I believe he’s on the footway.’

‘Which, of course, is a public footpath – which makes him entitled to be there.’

‘Naw, he’s checking us out.’ The sunset made unearthly jewels out of the tiny round mirrors on Robin’s fez. ‘Hey!’ he shouted down. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Stop it!’ Sometimes Betty felt she was a lot older than Robin, instead of two years younger. Whole lifetimes older.

‘He went away.’

‘Of course he did. He went home to warm his bum by a roaring fire of dry, seasoned hardwood logs.’

‘You’re gonna throw that one at me all night, I can tell.’

‘Probably. While we’re sitting with our coats on in front of a lukewarm stove full of sizzling green pine.’

‘Yeah, yeah, the wood guy ripped me off. He won’t do it again.’

‘Dead right he won’t. First rule of country living: show them, from the very start, that you’re not an urban innocent.’