Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

She’d wanted Huw to come and stay the night at Ledwardine vicarage, but he’d said he had to think. First put some mountains between himself and Hereford, then think and meditate – and pray.

She’d watched him walk away under the darkened Santas, into the fog, winding his scarf around his neck. And she wondered…

Fourth one in two years , Huw had said as she’d looked into the scorched mouth of the ruined video. It’s a right difficult place, this .

And It were playing with us , he’d said just now, as the serial snuffing of votive candles threw shiver after shiver into her, convincing Merrily, without a second thought, of his claim that there was a squatter in the Cathedral.

She stood cold and doubt-haunted on the lawn before the Palace, her shopping bag full of supporting documents lying on the grass by her feet. The night seemed as heavy as Huw’s greatcoat around her.

Suppose it was him ? What, after all, was a priest but a licensed magician?

And where did this squatter story have its origins? Dobbs, perhaps – the man who had made a point of never once speaking to her directly; who had sent her that single cryptic note; who had made her a little present of Denzil Joy. A man, too, with whom Huw had spent long hours. Had they talked about Merrily? Huw hadn’t said – but how could they have avoided it?

She looked up to where the sky began, below the tops of the chimney stacks.

Help me!

She was only aware that she must have shouted it aloud into the unyielding night when the white door opened, and there, against the falling light was…

‘Merrily? Is that you?’

The Bishop himself, in tuxedo and a bow-tie of dark purple.

‘Merrily!’

‘I…’ She started forward. ‘Can I see you, Bishop?’

‘Mick,’ he reminded her softly. ‘Come in, Merrily.’

She felt the pressure of his hand between her shoulder blades, and found herself in the chandeliered splendour of the Great Hall. Doric pilasters, a domed ceiling at the far end, like God’s conservatory. She was blinded for a moment, disoriented.

The Bishop blurred past her to a table, pulling out two velvetbacked chairs.

‘No,’ she said, her nerve gone. ‘This is terrible. I’m interrupting something. Could I come back early tomorow, perhaps? Oh, God, tomorrow’s Sunday…’

‘Merrily, relax. It’s a perfect, timely interruption of a terminally tedious dinner party with some oleaginous oafs from the City Council and their dreary wives. Val will sparkle all over them until I return. Sit. You look terribly cold. A drink?’

‘No, please…’ She sat down, feeling like a tramp next to the Bishop, with his poise and his elegance. ‘I just need your help, Mick.’

He listened without a word. Twenty minutes and no interruptions.

She talked and talked – except when she dried up.

Or fumbled in her bag for Mrs Leather – a book of local folklore: collected nonsenses.

Or for the report by the late Mr Havergal on the opening of the Cantilupe tomb in the mid-nineteenth century, an eyewitness description of which it had been considered imprudent to publish.

Or for her cigarette packet, which she gripped for maybe ten seconds, as though the nicotine might be absorbed through her stimulated sweat glands and made to flow up her arm, before she let it drop back into her bag.

It was an impromtu sermon given before an expert audience. A dissertation combining medieval theology with the elements of some Hollywood fantasy-melodrama. An exercise in semicontrolled hysteria.

‘I can’t… won’t… ask you to believe the unbelievable. But I’m trying to do the job that you asked me to do… although… it’s… led in directions I could never have imagined it would. Not so soon, anyway. Probably not ever, if I’m honest. But it’s a job where you have to rely on instinct, where you never know what is truth and what’s…’

Tests. Lies. Disinformation .

‘And I’m reporting back to you in confidence, because those are the rules. And you’re probably thinking what’s the silly bitch doing disturbing me at home on a Saturday night, with dinner guests and…’

Looking up at him, wanting some help, but getting no reaction.

‘You must wonder: is she overtired? Has she gone bonkers? The bottom line’ – looking up at the twinkling chandelier, half wishing it would fall and smash into ten thousand crystal shards; that something would happen to make him afraid – ‘is that I believe we should do this cleansing. And that you should be there. And the Dean, too. And as many canons as you feel you can trust.’

The Bishop’s expression did not alter. He neither nodded nor shook his head.

‘It could be carried out in total secrecy, late at night or, better still, early in the morning, at four or five o’clock. It would take less than a couple of hours. It’s… Consider it a precaution. If nothing happens, then either it was successful or it wasn’t necessary. I don’t care if people say later that it wasn’t necessary. It doesn’t matter that…’

A door opened and Val Hunter stood there in black, dramatic. ‘Michael?’

‘Five minutes.’ He lifted one hand.

With a single, long breath down her nostrils, Val went away without even a glance at Merrily.

The Bishop waited until his wife’s footsteps had receded, then he spoke. ‘Have you finished, Merrily?’

She nodded, dispirited.

‘Who was it?’ he said. ‘Come on, it’s either Dobbs, or the Dean – or, more likely, Owen. Who put you up to this?’

All three , she thought miserably. ‘Circumstances,’ she said at last. ‘A lot of individually meaningless circumstances.’

He gave a small sigh. ‘But I’d rather you didn’t list them.’

‘All I can say is I believe my suggestion is valid. We can’t afford to take any risk.’

‘Risk of what?’

‘Of the Cathedral being contaminated.’

‘Tell me, Merrily, who would conduct this major exorcism?’

‘That would be your decision.’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘of course.’ He shifted position, looking out through the long windows to the floodlight beams across the lawns, turned to milk chocolate by the fog. ‘May I list once again your items of evidence? From the felling of Thomas Dobbs in the North Transept, to the apparently supernatural extinguishing of two votive candles.’

‘I never said any of that was evidence.’

‘Of course you didn’t. You were merely reporting to me. The decision must be mine – on the advice of my female exorcist, the appointment of whom I was strongly advised against.’

‘At the time, I didn’t know that.’

‘You didn’t? You really didn’t? Oh come, Merrily…’

‘Silly of me. Arrogant, perhaps.’

‘Yes,’ the Bishop said, ‘that’s certainly how it’s going to look when someone leaks to the media that, within weeks of your appointment, you advised me to have my cathedral formally exorcized.’

‘I know.’

‘If you want to go the whole hog, why not have the ceremony conducted entirely by – and in the presence only of – women priests? Obviously, that wouldn’t offend me , being a radical.’

‘Mick, you know there’s nothing political—’

‘Nothing political? Are you quite serious? Tell me, Merrily, do you want to become the subject of a hate campaign in the diocese, as well as receiving an unflattering profile in the Observer and any number of politely vitriolic letters to the Church Times ? Do you want to move, quite quickly, to a new and challenging ministry on the other side of the country?’

‘No.’

‘And do you want to damage me?’