A Crown of Lights

‘Indeed. I then received a personal call from Ms Tania Beauman relating to this week’s proposed paganism programme, again requesting Merrily.’

‘They’ve obviously seen that understatedly sexy photo of you, my dear,’ said Bernie.

Merrily sighed, looked at the clock: 1.35. She had to be back in Ledwardine by three for Minnie Parry’s funeral.

Sophie said, ‘You’ll probably both recall the story in the papers last Thursday about the pagan parents in Somerset who demanded that their child be allowed to make her own religious observances at the village primary school.’

The bishop winced.

‘Livenight’s programme peg for this week,’ Sophie explained. ‘It’s now claimed there are over a hundred thousand active pagans in Britain. Either belonging to groups – covens – or nurturing their beliefs independently.’

‘Complete nonsense, of course.’ The bishop sniffed. ‘But figures like that can’t be proved one way or the other.’

‘The programme will discuss the pagans’ claim that they represent the traditional old religion of the British Isles and, as such, should be granted rights and privileges at least equivalent to those accorded to Islam, Buddhism and other non-indigenous faiths.’

Bernie snorted. ‘Most of their so-called traditions date back no further than the fifties and sixties. They’re a sham. These people are just annoyed because they’ve been refused charity status.’

‘In a secular state,’ Merrily said, ‘it could be argued that their superstitions are just as valid as ours – I’m doing my devil’s advocate bit here.’

The bishop jutted his chins and straightened his pectoral cross. ‘My question, though, is should we be actively encouraging people to strip off and have sex with each other’s wives under the full moon while pretending it’s religion? I think not. But neither do I think we should be engaging them in open battle – boosting their collective ego by identifying them as representatives of the Antichrist.’

‘However,’ Sophie said, ‘that does reflect the general approach of one of our more... outgoing rural rectors: the Reverend Nicholas Ellis.’

‘Oh,’ Merrily said.

‘In his sermons and his parish magazine articles, he’s tended to employ... quite colourful terminology. Livenight’s own kind of terminology, you might say.’

Sophie and the bishop both looked enquiringly at Merrily. She shook her head. ‘I know of him only through the press cuttings. Loose-cannon priest who dumped his churches. Spent some years in the States. Charismatic. Direct intervention of the Holy Spirit... Prophecy... Tongues.’

‘Split the community,’ Bernie said, ‘when he expressed disdain for actual churches and offered to conduct his charismatic services in community halls, barns, warehouses, whatever. So Mick Hunter agreed to appoint a regular priest-in-charge in the area, to appease the traditionalists, and let Ellis continue his roving brief.’

Merrily recalled that Ellis now belonged to a fast-growing Anglican anti-Church faction calling itself the Sea of Light.

‘Awfully popular figure, this Nicholas, I’m afraid,’ Bernie Dunmore said. ‘Since we cut him loose, he’s set up in some run-down village hall and he’s packing it to the rafters with happy-clappies from miles around. Which makes him somewhat unassailable, and yet he’s not a demonstrative bloke in himself. Quiet, almost reticent, apparently. But came back from America with a knowledge of agriculture and farming ways that seems to have rather endeared him to the Radnorshire people.’

Merrily grimaced, recalling what Eileen Cullen at the hospital had said about the piece of Wales just over the border: They have their own ways and they keep closed up.

Bernie flicked her a foxy smile. ‘The man was after your job, did you know?’

Her eyebrows went up. ‘Deliverance?’

‘Wrongly assuming you’d be on the way out in the aftermath of Michael’s, er, breakdown. Soon as I showed my face in Hereford, there was Nicholas requesting an audience.’

‘Did he get one?’

‘Showed him the door, of course, but tactfully. Good God, he’s the last kind of chap you want as your exorcist. Sees the Devil behind every pillar in the cloister. Fortunately, Deliverance is rarely up for tender. Press- gang job, in my experience.’ He beamed at Merrily. ‘And all the better for that.’

‘Is he currently doing any deliverance work?’ she asked warily.

‘Frankly, my dear... one doesn’t like to enquire. Though if there are any complaints, I suppose we’ll have to peer into the pond. Meanwhile... this Livenight.’ The bishop snapped back the ringpull on his can of lager and accepted a tall glass from Sophie. ‘Apparently, he has been mentioned as a possible – what do you call it? – front-row speaker.’

‘Having already been approached by Ms Beauman,’ Sophie said, ‘and having apparently said yes.’

‘But not on behalf of the diocese,’ Merrily said. ‘Just a lone maverick, surely?’

The bishop shrugged, spilling a little lager. ‘One can’t stop the man appearing on national television. And one can’t be seen to try to stop him.’

‘But if he starts shooting his mouth off about the invasion of sinister sects and child sacrifice and that kind of stuff, it’s going to reflect on all of us.’

‘In the wake of recent events here,’ said the bishop, ‘we were all rather looking for a quiet life for a while.’

Merrily looked into the big, generally honest face of the suffragan Bishop of Ludlow, a lovely old town in south Shropshire from which he was commuting and to which he clearly couldn’t wait to get back.

‘Well...’ Sophie folded a square of green blotting paper into a beer mat for the bishop, giving herself an excuse not to look directly at Merrily. ‘Ms Beauman did intimate to me that they might be prepared to consider rescinding their invitation to the Reverend Mr Ellis... if they could recruit for their programme the person they originally had in mind.’

There was an uneasy silence. The bishop drank some lager and gazed out of the window, across Broad Street. It was starting to rain.

‘Shit,’ Merrily said under her breath.

6 Unkind Sky

‘A BOX?’ LIZZIE Wilshire looked vaguely puzzled. But more vague than puzzled, Betty thought.

‘Inside the fireplace.’

‘I did rather like that fireplace,’ Mrs Wilshire recalled. ‘It had a wonderful old beam across the top. It was the one emphatic feature of a rather drab room.’

‘Yes, the living room.’

‘You thought there ought to be beams across the ceiling too. Bryan said there still must be, underneath all the plaster. But I did like the fireplace, if precious little else.’

The fireplace to which Mrs Wilshire’s chair was presently pulled close was forlornly modern, made of brownish dressed stone. It surrounded a bronze-enamelled oil-fired stove – undernourished flames behind orange- tinted glass.

Mrs Wilshire frowned. ‘It also had woodworm, though.’

‘The box?’

‘The beam, dear. That worried me a little, until Bryan said, “Lizzie, it will take about three hundred years for the worms to eat through it.” I would still have wanted it treated, though.’ She blinked at Betty. ‘Have you had it treated, yet?’

‘Not yet. Er, Mrs Wilshire... there was a box. It was apparently found in the fireplace, while you were having some repairs done to the walls. It contained a paper with a sort of... prayer. I suppose you’d call it a prayer.’

‘Oh!’ Understanding came at last to the bulging eyes of frail Lizzie Wilshire – big eyes which made her look