A Crown of Lights

And although I did not say we were married I didn’t mention handfasting either. I said we had gotten hitched.’

‘Hitched?’

‘Uh-huh. And when he brought up the subject of religion, as priests are inclined to do when they get through with football and stuff, I was quite awesomely discreet. I simply said we were not churchgoers.’

Betty breathed out properly for the first time since sitting down. ‘All right. I’m sorry. I do trust you. I’ve just been feeling a little uptight.’

‘Because you’re not being true to yourself and your beliefs,’ Robin said severely.

‘So what was he like?’

‘Unexceptional at first. Friendly, but also watchful. Open, but... holding back. He’s of medium height but the way he holds himself makes him look taller. Rangy, you know? Looks like a backwoods boy. Looks fit. He drank just one beer while I appear to have drunk three. His hair is fairish and he wears it brushed straight back, and in a ponytail, which is cool. I mean, I have no basic problem with these guys – as a spiritual grouping. As a profession.’

‘But?’

Robin got up and fed the Rayburn some pine. The Rayburn spat in disgust. Robin looked up at Betty; his eyes were unsteady.

‘But, if you want the truth, babe, I guess this is probably a very sick and dangerous example of the species.’

Robin had been anxious the priest remained in the kitchen. He would have had problems explaining the brass pentacle over the living-room fireplace. Would not be happy to have had the Reverend Nicholas Ellis browsing through those books on the shelves. He was glad his guest consumed only one beer and therefore would be less likely to need the bathroom.

And when Ellis asked if he might take a look at the ancient church of St Michael, Robin had the back door open faster than was entirely polite.

Still raining out there. The priest wore hiking boots and pulled out a camouflage beret. They strolled back across the farmyard, around the barn into the field, where the ground was uneven and boggy. And there it was, on its promontory above the water, its stones glistening, its tower proud but its roofless body like a split, gutted fish.

‘Cool, huh, Nick?’ Robin had told the priest about St Michael’s probably becoming disused on account of the Hindwell Brook, the problem of getting cars close enough to the church in the wintertime.

The priest smiled sceptically. ‘That’s your theory, is it, Robin?’

‘Well, that and the general decline in, uh, faith. I guess some people’d started looking for something a little more progressive, dynamic.’

The Reverend Ellis stopped. He had a wide, loose mouth. And though his face was a touch weathered, it had no lines, no wrinkles. He was maybe forty.

‘What do you mean by that, Robin?’

‘Well... uh...’ Robin had felt himself blushing. He talked on about how maybe the Church had become kind of hidebound: same old hymns, same old... you know?

The minister had said nothing, just stood there looking even taller, watching Robin sinking into the mud.

‘Uh... what I meant... maybe they began to feel the Church wasn’t offering too much in the direction of personal development, you know?’

And then Ellis went, ‘Yeah, I do know. And you’re dead right.’

‘Oh. For a minute, I was worried I was offending you.’

‘The Church over here has lost much of its dynamism. Don’t suppose I need tell you that in most areas of the United States a far higher proportion of the population attends regular services than in this country.’

‘So how come you were over there?’ Robin had grabbed his chance to edge the talk away from religion.

‘Went over with my mother as a teenager. After her marriage ended. We moved around quite a bit, mainly in the South.’

‘Really? That’s interesting. My mom was English and she met my dad when he was serving with the Air Force in the north of England, and she went home with him, to New Jersey. So, like—’

‘And it was there,’ Nicholas Ellis continued steadily, ‘that I first became exposed to what you might consider a more “dynamic” manifestation of Christianity.’

‘In the, uh, Bible Belt?’ Snakes and hot coals?

‘Where I became fully aware of the power of God.’ The priest looked up at the veiled church. ‘Where, if you like, the power of the Holy Spirit reached out and touched me.’

No, Robin did not like. ‘You notice how the mist winds itself around the tower? As a painter, that fascinates me.’

‘The sheer fervour, the electric momentum, you encountered in little...’ Ellis’s hands forming fists for emphasis, ‘little clapboard chapels. The living church – I knew what that meant for the first time. Over here, we have all these exquisite ancient buildings, steeped in centuries of worship... and we’re losing it, losing it, Robin.’

‘Right,’ Robin had said neutrally.

Ellis nodded toward the ruins. ‘Poets eulogizing the beauty of country churches... and they meant the buildings, the surroundings. Man, is that not beauty at its most superficial?’

‘Uh... I guess.’ Robin considered how Betty would want him to play this and so didn’t rise to it. But he knew in his soul that what those poets were evoking, whether they were aware of it or not, was an energy of place which long pre-dated Christianity. The energy Robin was experiencing right there, right this minute, with the tower uniting with the mist and the water surging below. Sure, the Christians picked up on that, mainly in medieval times, with all those soaring Gothic cathedrals, but basically it was out of their league.

Because, Robin thought, meeting the priest’s pale eyes, this is a pagan thing, man.

And this was when he had first become aware of an agenda. Sensing that whatever the future held for him and this casual-looking priest in his army cast-offs, it was not going to involve friendly rivalry and good-natured badinage.

‘Buildings are jewellery,’ Ellis had said, ‘baubles. When I came home, I felt like a missionary in my own land. I was working as a teacher at the time. But when I was subsequently ordained, ended up here, I knew this was where I was destined to be. These people have their priorities right.’

‘How’s that?’

Ellis let the question go by. He was now talking about how the States also had its bad side. How he had spent time in California, where people threw away their souls like candy wrappers, where the Devil squatted in shop windows like Santa Claus, handing out packs of tarot cards and runes and I Ching sets.

‘Can you believe those people?’ Robin turned away to control a grin. For, albeit he was East Coast raised, he was those people.

‘Over here, it’s less obvious.’ Ellis shuddered suddenly. ‘Far more deeply embedded. Like bindweed, the worst of it’s underground.’

Robin hadn’t reacted, though he was unsure of whether this was the best response or not. Maybe some normal person bombarded with this bullshit would, by now, be telling this guy he had things to do, someplace else to go, calls to make – nice talking with you, Reverend, maybe see you around.

Looking over at the rain-screened hills, Ellis was saying how, the very week he had arrived here, it was announced that archaeologists had stumbled on something in the Radnor Valley – evidence of one of the biggest prehistoric wooden temples ever discovered in Europe.

Robin’s response had been, ‘Yeah, wasn’t that terrific?’

When Ellis had turned to him, there was a light in his eyes which Robin perceived as like a gas jet.

‘He said it was a sign of something coming to the surface.’