A Crown of Lights

emulsion a wall. But while she was gone, he could knock off a watercolour sketch of the church. He was already envisioning a seasonal series... a whatever you called a triptych when there were four of them.

‘Besides...’ Betty walked to the door then turned back with a swirl of her wild-corn hair. ‘I’m sure there are lots of new things you want to play with, without me on your back.’

Robin managed a grin. With Betty around it was sometimes like your innermost thoughts were written in neon over your head. Sometimes, even for a high priestess, this broad was awesomely spooky.

And so beautiful.

Face it: if he really thought there was an element of risk here, any danger of it turning into an unhappy place, they would be out of here, no matter how much money they lost on the deal.

But that wasn’t going to happen. That wasn’t a part of the package. How they’d come to find this place was, in itself, too magical to ignore: the prophecy... the arrival of the house particulars within the same week, the offer of the Blackmore contract along with the possibility of a mega-deal for the backlist.

It was like the road to down here had been lit up for them, and if they let those lights go out, well that would really attract some bad karma.

The Local People?

Assholes. Forget them.

5 Every Pillar in the Cloister

‘PAGANISM.’ THE BISHOP spooned mustard on to his hot dog. ‘What do we have to say about paganism?’

‘As little as possible?’ Merrily suggested.

The bishop put down his spoon on Sophie’s desk. ‘Exactly.’ He nodded, and went on nodding like, she thought, one of those brushed-fabric boxer dogs motorists used to keep on their parcel shelves. ‘Absolutely right.’

The e-mail on the computer screen concluded:

The programme will take the form of a live studio discussion and protagonists will probably include practising witches, possibly Druids, and ‘fundamentalist’ clergy. Would you please confirm asap with the programme researcher, Tania Beauman, in Birmingham?

‘So, it’s a “no”, then. Fine.’ Merrily stood up, relieved. ‘I’ll call them tonight. I’ll say it’s not a debate to which we feel we can make a meaningful contribution. And anyway, it’s not something we encounter a particular problem with in this diocese. How does that sound?’

‘Sounds eminently sensible, Merrily.’ But the bishop’s large, hairless face still looked worried.

‘Good. Nobody comes out of an edition of Livenight with any dignity left. The pits of tabloid TV – Jerry Springer off the leash.’

‘Who is Jerry Springer?’ asked the bishop.

‘You really don’t want to know.’

‘One finds oneself watching less and less television.’ He brushed crumbs from his generously cut purple shirt. ‘Which is wrong, I suppose. It is, after all, one’s pastoral duty to monitor society’s drab cavalcade... the excesses of the young... the latest jargon. The ubiquity of the word “shag” in a non-tobacco context.’

‘I’ll get my daughter Jane to compile a glossary for you.’

The bishop smiled, but still appeared strangely apprehensive. ‘So this...’ he peered at the screen ‘... Livenight is not current affairs television?’

‘Not as you know it. How would you describe Livenight, Sophie?’

‘Like a rehearsal for Armageddon.’ A shudder from the bishop’s lay secretary, now permanently based in Merrily’s gatehouse office. Sophie tucked a frond of white hair behind one ear and used a tissue to dab away a blob of English mustard which the bishop had let fall, appropriately, on the head of the burger-gobbling Homer Simpson on the computer’s mouse mat. ‘They begin with a specific topic, which is loosely based on a Sunday paper sort of news item.’

‘Say you have a suburban husband who pimps for his wife,’ Merrily said, ‘is she being exploited, or is it a valid way of meeting the mortgage premiums?’

‘Invariably,’ Sophie said, ‘they contrive to fill the studio with loud-mouthed bigots and professional cranks.’

Merrily nodded. ‘And if you’re insufficiently loud-mouthed, bigoted or cranky they just move on to the psycho sitting next to you who’s invariably shaking at the bars to escape onto live television. Whole thing makes you despair for the future of the human race. I don’t really think spreading despair is what we’re about.’

‘No,’ the bishop said uncomfortably, ‘quite. It’s just that if you don’t do it, we... we have a problem.’

Merrily stiffened. ‘What are you saying exactly, Bernie?’

Bernie Dunmore had taken to wandering down to the Deliverance office on Tuesdays for a snack lunch with Merrily. He always seemed glad to get away from the Bishop’s Palace.

Which was understandable. He was not actually the Bishop of Hereford although, as suffragan Bishop of Ludlow, in the north of the diocese, the caretaker role had fallen to him in the controversial absence of the Right Reverend Michael Hunter.

In the end, though, Mick Hunter’s disappearance had not detonated the media explosion the diocese had feared, coinciding as it had with the resignation of two other Church of England bishops and the suicide of a third – all of this following calls for an outside inquiry into their personal expenses exceeding ?200,000 a year, and the acceptance of unorthodox perks.

Questions had also been asked about Hunter’s purchase of a Land Rover and a Mercedes, used by his wife, and, as neither the press nor the police had been able to substantiate anything more damaging, the diocese had been happy to shelter behind any other minor scandal. Now the issue had been turned around: four bishops had spoken out in a Sunday Times feature – ‘Keeping the Mitre on C of E Executive Stress’ – about the trials of their job in an increasingly secular age. There was, inevitably, a picture of Mick Hunter in his jogging gear, ‘escaping from the pressure’.

Was it better, under the circumstances, that the truth had not come out? Merrily wasn’t sure. But she liked Bernie Dunmore, sixty-two years old and comfortably lazy. Prepared to hold the fort until such time as the search for a suitably uncontroversial replacement for Mick Hunter could begin. No one, in fact, could be less controversial than Bernie; the worst he’d ever said about Hunter was, ‘One would have thought the Crown Appointments Commission would have been aware of Michael’s personality problems.’

As Mick’s appointee, Merrily had offered Bernie her resignation from his Deliverance role, citing the seasoned exorcist Huw Owen’s warning that women priests had become a target for every psychotic grinder of the dark satanic mills who ever sacrificed a cockerel.

‘All the more reason for you to remain, my dear,’ Bernie had told her, though she couldn’t quite follow his reasoning. She hoped it wasn’t just because he enjoyed his Tuesday lunchtimes here sitting on the Deliverance desk with a couple of hot dogs and a can of lager.

‘You explain, Sophie,’ the bishop said.

His lay secretary sat up, spry and elegant in a grey business suit with fine black stripes, and consulted her memo pad.

‘Well, as you know, this programme approached us some weeks ago, with a view to Merrily taking part in a general discussion on supernatural phenomena – which Merrily declined to do.’

‘Because Merrily was afraid of what they might already know about recent events in Hereford,’ added Merrily.