Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

Whatever, this room was bare without being stark, a sanctuary, a space out of time. One day, perhaps, she might even get to spend a whole night here.

‘Then, at the same time,’ she said, ‘I get the feeling that I’m neglecting you.’

‘Some feelings you should listen to,’ Lol said. ‘This could be God telling you that you’re neglecting me.’

‘Dangerous to blaspheme in front of a vicar.’ Her fingers paddling over his thigh. ‘Especially when naked.’

He gripped her hand. They laughed, and when they stopped laughing she told him everything. About Winnie Sparke and Tim Loste and their beautiful secret and her own dismal morning.

‘I’m tired. I can’t get a handle on it any more. People’s attitudes change overnight. They want me to do something, then they don’t. They want to talk to me and then… Winnie Sparke, particularly. It was as if she’d picked a fight just to wind up the conversation because I was asking the wrong questions. Like mentioning the blow-up photo of Elgar.’

‘Let me get this right. Who’s seen Elgar, other than Loste?’

‘Stella Cobham. Who no longer wants to have anything to do with it because they’ve suddenly decided to move. Well, nobody just decides overnight to emigrate. Must’ve been very much on the cards when she came to the meeting in the church and poured it all out, thus burning her boats with Preston Devereaux who, according to Spicer, nobody likes to offend because he’s Old Wychehill…’

Lol sat up against the pillow, retrieved his little brass-rimmed glasses from the floorboards, and put them on.

‘But for a couple of things,’ he said, ‘I’d be suggesting that Elgar might be a psychological projection by Tim Loste.’

‘Well, me, too. Although, if we step over the threshold… sometimes, if the personality behind it is strong enough, a psychological projection may be perceptible to a third party.’

‘Musicians can be obsessive.’

‘No kidding.’

‘Um…’ Lol hesitated.

‘What?’

‘Anything I can do about this?’

‘I don’t like to interrupt your work.’

Lol laughed.

‘What it comes down to,’ Merrily said, ‘is the only person I haven’t spoken to, can’t get at and may never get at.’

‘Loste.’

‘Who now seems to be the key to both mysteries, that is, the Elgar thing and the killing on the Beacon, whether he did that or not – and the circumstantial evidence is impressive. But the key to Tim Loste is Winnie Sparke, who isn’t talking. I don’t think she ever planned to say much, and yet she wanted to check me out. Why? I still don’t really know these people or what they’re doing.’

‘There must be other ways in,’ Lol said. ‘For instance… a lot of singers in a choir.’

‘You know any? I don’t.’

‘Not yet. But musicians can be obsessive. Leave this with me.’

‘Thank you, Lol. And thanks for keeping an eye on Jane, which I… I’m not getting anything right, am I? I’m a lousy mother, a lousy girlfriend, an inept exorcist and an incompetent parish priest.’

‘But at least you don’t suffer from low self-esteem,’ Lol said.

They went downstairs and shared half a loaf, a pot of hummus and a box of cress, and Merrily resolved to spend the rest of the day in penance, dusting and polishing the church furniture, finding sick parishioners to visit before…

… A last assault, tomorrow, on Wychehill. Or, more specifically, on Winnie Sparke.

‘And I want to look at Coleman’s Meadow.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Why does Jane think Lyndon Pierce has some secret scheme to expand the village?’

‘Probably because he has. Don’t worry. Gomer’s looking into it.’

‘That’s reassuring.’ Merrily sat on the sofa and smoked half a cigarette. ‘Or maybe not. Pierce used to shoot blue tits, apparently. Nothing he could do for Jane to acquit himself after that. What if Sparke’s right and Loste didn’t kill that guy?’

‘Then Annie Howe will find out for herself. She’s not an incompetent detective, she just doesn’t like you. And your mind’s gone like a TV remote control switching from one channel to another.’

‘Too many channels nowadays,’ Merrily said. ‘That’s the problem.’

The grave was marked by a low wedge of sandstone and overhung by an apple tree from the old orchard over the wall. It was arguably the smallest, least ostentatious memorial in the churchyard.

Jane could have found it blindfolded.

Lucy Devenish.

The lettering tiny, and no dates. Lucy’s will had requested no dates, and somehow Mum had been able to comply, probably against all the regulations. And if this wasn’t a sign that Lucy had believed herself to be an eternal presence in Ledwardine, no date for her arrival, no date for her passing…

This always made Jane shiver, but with a kind of delight.

Underneath the name were the lines Lucy had chosen from Thomas Traherne (his dates were given: 1637-74), Herefordshire’s greatest, most mysterious poet.

No more shall clouds eclipse my treasures

Nor viler shades obscure my highest pleasures.

All things in their proper place

My Soul doth best embrace.

All things in their proper place. That spelled it out, really, didn’t it?

Jane placed her hands on the top of the stone for a moment. It always, even in winter, felt warm.

She stood up and looked back towards the church. Lucy’s grave was at the very end of the churchyard, right beside the path which led, through a small wooden gate, to the orchard, which had once virtually surrounded the village. Ledwardine – The Village in the Orchard – some guidebooks still called it that. And this was the coffin track. No doubt about it.

Way back, corpses would have been carried in, ceremonially, through the orchard. There was a long, flat, backless bench, probably the successor to generations of wooden benches on which the bearers had rested the coffins. The lych-gate at the front of the church had been a comparatively modern addition.

Jane looked towards the steeple and imagined what Lucy might have seen – might be seeing now: the churchyard like a circular clearing in the orchard. Perhaps there’d once been a circle of stones around where the steeple now soared.

Jane remembered the day Lucy had cut an apple in half and showed her the five-pointed star, the pentagram at the heart of every apple. An indestructible symbol of the paganism at the heart of Ledwardine. In those days – the days when she’d painted the Mondrian walls – Jane had seen paganism as the real religion, Christianity as a pointless distraction from the Middle East, Mum as misguided.

It didn’t seem as simple now. The church steeple was a powerful symbol and far more effective than a stone circle at indicating, from long distances, the alignment with Cole Hill. Now Jane felt – and arrangements like this underlined it – that paganism and Christianity had often walked together on the same straight path. She was sure that this was what Alfred Watkins had instinctively felt when archaeologists were slagging him off for including medieval churches in the otherwise Neolithic ley system.

Have I done the right thing? She still didn’t know.

Jane walked through the churchyard, past the south door and out through the lych-gate into the market place. Perhaps an old cross or an outlying marker stone might have stood here.

Across into the alley, through the broken gate and into the derelict orchard behind Church Street, past the hump of the burial mound, if that was what it was. And so to Coleman’s Meadow – the meadow of the earth-shaman – to Cole Hill, the sacred hill, the mother hill.

She felt choked up with emotion now, remembering the night she’d got drunk on cider with poor Colette and had started hallucinating in the orchard. Cider’s the blood of the orchard, Lucy had said later, and Jane could still hear her sharp headmistressy voice. It’s in your blood now. I felt at once that it had to be one or both of you… you and Merrily.