A Crown of Lights

like an extraterrestrial or a wizened, expensive cat. ‘You mean the witch paper!’

‘Yes,’ Betty said softly, ‘the witch paper.’

It wasn’t that she was particularly old, early seventies, Betty reckoned, but she had arthritis – obvious in her hands – and accepted her own helplessness. Clearly, she’d never been used to doing very much for herself or making decisions. ‘It’s so confusing now,’ she said. ‘So many things I know nothing about. Things I don’t want to have to know about. Why should I?’

She was still living in this colonial-style bungalow on the edge of New Radnor, the tiny town, or big village, where she and the Major had lived for over fifteen years, since his retirement. Just a stopgap, the Major always said, until they found the right place... an interesting place, a place he could play with.

She told Betty how she thought he’d finally accepted that he was too old to take on something needing extensive refurbishment when, out on a Sunday drive, they’d found – not three miles away, at Old Hindwell – the house with which Major Bryan Wilshire, to the utter dismay of his wife, had fallen hopelessly in love.

‘It was empty, of course, when we saw it. It had belonged to two reclusive bachelor farmers called Prosser. The last surviving one had finally been taken into a nursing home. So you can imagine the state it was in.’

Betty already knew all this from the estate agents, and from their own searches. Also she’d sensed a residual sourness and meanness in rooms left untouched by Major Wilshire. But she let his widow talk.

‘And that awful old ruined church in the grounds. Some would say it was picturesque, but I hated it. Who could possibly want a disused church? Except Bryan, of course.’

The Major had found the church fascinating and had begun to delve into its history: when it had last been used as a place of worship, why it had been abandoned. Meanwhile, the house was to be auctioned and, because of its poor condition, the reserve price was surprisingly low. This was when the market was still at low ebb, just before the recent property boom, and there was no rush for second homes in the countryside.

‘There was no arguing with Bryan. He put in an offer and it was accepted, so the auction was called off. Bryan was delighted. It was so cheap we didn’t even have to consider selling this bungalow. He said he could renovate the place at his leisure.’

A reputable firm of contractors had been hired, but Major Wilshire insisted on supervising the work himself. The problem was that Bryan was always so hands-on, climbing ladders and scaffolding to demonstrate to the workmen exactly what he wanted doing. Lizzie couldn’t bear to look up at him; it made her quite dizzy. But Bryan had always needed that element in his life, serving as he had with that regiment in Hereford. The SAS, Betty presumed, and she wondered how an all-action man like Major Wilshire had ended up with a wife who didn’t like to look up.

At least that had spared Lizzie an eyewitness memory of the terrible accident. This had been brought about by the combination of a loose stone under a slit window in the tower, a lightweight aluminium ladder, and a freak blast of wind from the Forest.

At first they’d told her it was simply broken bones, and quite a number of them; so it would have taken Major Wilshire a long time to recover. Many months. But no internal injuries, so it could have been worse. He’d at least be home in a matter of weeks. Mrs Wilshire meanwhile had determined that he would never again go back to that awful place.

But Bryan had never come home again. The shock – or something – had brought on pneumonia. For this energetic, seemingly indestructible old soldier, it was all over in four days.

There was one photograph of the Major on the mantelpiece: a wiry man in a cap. He was not in uniform or anything, but in the garden, leaning on a spade, and his smile was only a half-smile.

‘So quick. So bewilderingly quick. There was no time at all for preparations,’ Mrs Wilshire said querulously. ‘We’d always made time to prepare for things; Bryan was a great planner. Nothing was entirely unexpected, because he was always ready for it. Whenever he had to go away, my sister would come to stay and Bryan would always pay the bills in advance and order plenty of heating oil. He always thought ahead.’

How ironic, Betty thought, that a man whose career must have involved several life-or-death situations, and certainly some gruelling and risky training exercises, should have died after a simple fall from a ladder.

From a church? Was this ironic, too?

When it started to rain harder, Robin packed up his paints and folded the easel. A few stray drops on a watercolour could prove interesting; they made the kind of accidental blurs you could use, turned the painting into a raincolour. But if it came on harder, like now, and the wind got up, this was the elements saying to him: Uh-huh, try again.

He stood for a moment down below the church ruins, watching the creek rush into a small gorge maybe fifteen feet deep, carrying branches and a blue plastic feed-sack. Wild! There was a narrow wooden footbridge which people used to cross to get to church. The bridge was a little rickety, which was also kind of quaint. Maybe this even explained why the church had become disused. Fine when the congregation came on foot from the village, but when the village population had gotten smaller, and the first automobiles had arrived in Radnorshire... well, not even country ladies liked to have to park in a field the wrong side of the Hindwell Brook and arrive in church with mud splashes up their Sunday stockings.

In the distance, over the sound of the hurrying water, Robin could hear a vehicle approaching. It was almost a mile along the track to reach the county road, so if you heard any traffic at all, it had to be heading this way. Most often it was Gareth Prosser in his Land Rover – biggest farmer hereabouts, a county councillor and also a nephew of the two old guys who used to own St Michael’s. Robin would have liked if the man stopped one time, came in for a beer, but Gareth Prosser just nodded, never smiled to him, never slowed.

Country folk took time to get to know. Apparently.

But the noise wasn’t rattly enough to be Prosser’s Land Rover, or growly enough to be his kids’ dirt bikes. It was a little early to be Betty back from the widow Wilshire’s, but – who knew? – maybe she at last had developed the hots again for her beloved husband, couldn’t wait to get back to the hissing pine fires and into the sack in that wonderful damp-walled bedroom.

Sure.

Robin kicked a half-brick into the Hindwell Brook, lifting up his face to the squally rain. It would come right. The goddess would return to her. Just the wrong part of the cycle, was all. He offered a short, silent prayer to the spirits of the rushing water, that the flow might once again go their way. Winter was, after all, a stressful time to move house.

The vehicle appeared: it was a Cherokee jeep. When the driver parked in the yard and got out, Robin stared at him, and then closed his eyes and muttered, ‘Holy shit.’

He didn’t need this. He did not need this now.

‘But we don’t believe in those things any more, do we, my dear? Witches, I mean.’

How on earth had the wife of an SAS officer managed to preserve this childlike, glazed-eyed innocence? Betty smiled and lifted the bone china teacup and saucer from her knees in order to smooth her long skirt. Jeans would have been the wrong image entirely and, after the assault on the house over the past few days, she didn’t have an entirely clean pair anyway.

Clean was paramount here. It was a museum of suburbia; it had actual trinkets. Betty guessed that the Major’s wife had secretly been hoping that the renovation work at St Michael’s would never be completed, that it would be simply a long-term hobby for him while they went on living here in New Radnor – which, although it was on the edge of the wilderness and still dominated by a huge castle-mound, was pleasant and open, with a wide main street, neat cottages, window boxes in the summer, a nice shop. Unlike Old Hindwell, it kept the Forest at arm’s length.

Mrs Wilshire said, ‘It was silly, it was slightly unpleasant. And, of course, it wasn’t even terribly old.’

‘About 1850, as I recall.’

‘Oh,’ said Mrs Wilshire. ‘Have you found another one?’

‘No, I think it’s the same one,’ Betty said patiently. ‘Someone brought it back, you see.’

‘Who in the world would do that?’