Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

Although it didn’t look much from the front, the Bishop’s Palace was perhaps the most desirable dwelling in Hereford: next door to the Cathedral but closer to the River Wye, and dreamily visible from the public footpath on the opposite bank, with its big white windows on mellow red brick, tree-fringed lawns sloping to the water.

Inside, she’d never been further than the vastly refurbished twelfth-century Great Hall where receptions were held. Today she didn’t even make it across the courtyard. Sophie Hill, the Bishop’s elegant white-haired lay-secretary, met her at the entrance, steering her through a door under the gatehouse and up winding stone stairs, about twenty of them.

‘It’s not very big, but Michael thought you’d like it better that way.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Merrily pulled off her scarf.

‘It could be quite charming’ – Sophie reached beyond her to push open the door at the top of the steps – ‘with a few pictures and things. To the left, please, Mrs Watkins.’

There were two offices in the gatehouse: a bigger one with a vista of Broad Street… and this.

Sloping ceiling, timbered and whitewashed walls, a desk with a phone. A scuffed repro captain’s chair that swivelled, two filing cabinets, a small bookcase with a Bible and some local reference books, including Jane’s one-time bible, The Folklore of Herefordshire by Ella Mary Leather.

Merrily walked uncertainly over to the window overlooking the courtyard and the former stables, a few parked cars and great stacks of split logs for the Bishop’s fires.

‘Welcome to Deliverance Tower,’ said Sophie deadpan. ‘The computer’s on order.’

Walking dazed into the blustery sunshine on Broad Street, Merrily felt the hand of fate so heavily on her shoulder that she nearly threw up an arm to shake it off.

It had felt good up in the gatehouse, almost cosy. On top of the city and yet remote from it – a refuge, an eyrie. It had felt right.

Careful. Don’t be seduced on the first date .

Sophie had said the Bishop had planned to see her himself, but Mrs Hunter had an important appointment and her own car was being serviced. This appeared to be true; through the window, Merrily had watched Mick, in clerical shirt under what was almost certainly an Armani jacket, accompany his wife to a dusty BMW in British racing green. She saw that Val Hunter was very tall, nearly as tall as the Bishop. Angular, heronlike, tawny hair thrown back, a beauty with breeding. They had two sons at boarding school; although Mick had confessed, in an interview with the Observer , to having very mixed feelings about private education. Merrily suspected his wife didn’t share them.

‘He’s still rather feeling his way,’ Sophie had confided, ‘but he does want change, and I’m afraid he’ll be terribly disappointed if you walk away from this, Mrs Watkins. He regards it as a very meaningful step for the female ministry.’

At the top of Broad Street now, Merrily stared at the rings in a jeweller’s window, and saw her reflection and all the people passing behind her – one man with a briefcase looking over his shoulder at her legs while her back was turned.

She began to tremble. She needed a cigarette.

Actually, even stronger than that, came the realization that she needed to pray.

Like now .

Abruptly, as though obeying some hypnotic command, she turned back towards the Cathedral, rapidly crossing the green and once again guiltily winding the scarf about her throat to cover the collar. She wanted no one to see her, no one to approach.

Within yards of the north door, she thought of going around the back to the cloisters, asking the first person she didn’t recognize where Canon Dobbs lived, but by now the compulsion to pray was too strong, a racing in the blood.

She breathed out. Jesus!

It happened only rarely like this. Like the day she drove into the country with a blinding headache, and ended up following a track to a cell-like church dedicated to some forgotten Celtic saint where – when she’d most needed it; when she was just finding out the sordid truth about Sean’s business – there’d been this sudden blissful sense of blue and gold, and a lamplit path opening in front of her.

A group was entering the Cathedral; it looked like a Women’s Institute party. ‘Isn’t there a café?’ someone said grumpily.

Merrily felt like pushing past, but waited at the end of the line as the women moved singly through the porch. When she was inside, she saw them fanning into the aisles, heard echoes of footsteps and birdlike voices spiralling through sacred stone caverns.

And she was just standing there on her own and tingling with need.

‘Welcome to Hereford Cathedral.’ An amplified voice from the distant pulpit, the duty chaplain. ‘If you’d all please be seated, we’ll begin the tour with a short prayer. Thank you.’

Sweating now, almost panicking, Merrily stumbled through the first available doorway and slithered to her knees in the merciful gloom of the fifteenth-century chantry chapel of Bishop John Stanbury, with its gilded triptych and its luxuriously carved and moulded walls and ceilings merging almost organically, it seemed, in a rush of rippling honeyed stone.

When she put her hands together she could feel the tiny hairs on the backs of them standing electrically on end.

‘God,’ she was whispering. ‘What is it? What is it?’

That sensation of incredible potential: all the answers to all the questions no more than an instant away, an atom of time, a membrane of space.

‘There’s this picture of her,’ Jane said, ‘that she once threw away, only I rescued it from the bin for purposes of future leverage and blackmail and stuff. I think she knows I’ve got it, but she never says anything.’

They walked past the school tennis courts, their nets removed for the winter, and across to the sixth-form car park where Rowenna’s Fiesta stood, six years old and lime-green but otherwise brilliant.

‘She’s wearing this frock like a heavy-duty binliner, right? And her hair’s kind of bunched up with these like plastic spikes sticking out. She’s got on this luminous white lipstick. And her eyes are like under about three economy packs of cheap mascara.’

Rowenna shook her head sadly.

‘Her favourite band,’ Jane said, ‘was Siouxsie and the Banshees.’

‘Don’t,’ said Rowenna, pained.

‘Well, actually they weren’t bad.’

Rowenna unlocked the Fiesta. ‘You could always sell the picture to the tabloids.’

‘Yeah, but she’d have to do something controversial first, to get them interested. Just another woman priest who used to be a punk, that isn’t enough, is it? I suppose I could take it to the Hereford Times .’

‘Who’d pay you about enough to buy a couple of CDs.’

‘Yeah, mid-price ones.’ Jane climbed into the passenger seat. ‘No, the point I was trying to make: you look at that picture and you can somehow see the future priest there. You know what I mean, all dark and ritualistic?’

‘What, she’s some kind of vestment fetishist?’

‘No! It’s just… oh shit.’

Dean Wall and Danny Gittoes, famous sad Ledwardine louts, were leaning over the car, Dean’s big face up against the passenger window. Jane wound it down. Dean fumbled out his ingratiating leer.

‘All right for a lift home, ladies?’

‘Not today, OK?’ Rowenna said.

‘In fact, not ever .’ Jane cranked up the window. ‘Like, no offence, but we’d rather not wind up raped and the car burned out, if that’s OK with you.’

Dean was saying, ‘You f—’ as Jane wound the window the last inch.

‘Foot down, Ro.’