A Crown of Lights

‘He...’ Robin shook his head. ‘Oh, boy. He was warning me. That fruitcake was giving me notice.’

‘Of what? What does he want?’

‘He wants to hold a service here. He believes this church was abandoned because the dragon got in. Because the frigging dragon lies coiled here. And that God has chosen him, Ellis, given him the muscle, in the shape of the biggest congregations ever known in this area, given him the power to drive the dragon out.’

Betty went very still.

‘All he wants, Bets... all he wants... is to come along with a few friends and hold some kind of a service.’

‘What kind of a service?’

‘You imagine that? All these farmers in their best suits and the matrons in their Sunday hats and Nick in his white surplice and stuff all standing around in a church with no roof singing goddamn “Bread of Heaven”? In a site that they stole from the Old Religion about eight hundred years ago and then fucking sold off? Jeez, I was so mad! This is our church now. On our farm. And we like dragons!’

Betty was silent. The whole room was silent. The rain had stopped, the breeze had died. Even the Rayburn had temporarily conquered its snoring.

Robin howled like a dog. ‘What’s happening here? Why do we have to wind up in a parish with a priest who’s been exposed to the insane Bible-freaks who stalk the more primitive parts of my beloved homeland? And is therefore no longer content with vicarage tea parties and the organ fund.’

‘So what did you say to him?’

‘Bastard had me over a barrel. I say a flat “no”, the cat’s clean out the bag. So, what I said... to my shame, I said, Nick, I could not think of letting you hold a service in there. Look at all that mud! Look at those pools of water! Just give us some time – like we’ve only been here days – give us some time to get it cleaned up. How sad was that?’

Just like Ellis, she didn’t seem to have been listening. ‘Robin, what kind of service?’

‘He said it would be no big deal – not realizing that any kind of damn service here now, was gonna be a big deal far as we’re concerned. And if it’s no big deal, why do it? Guy doesn’t even like churches.’

‘What kind of service?’ Betty was at the edge of her chair and her eyes were hard.

‘I don’t know.’ Robin was a little scared, and that made him angry. ‘A short Eucharist? Did he say that? What is that precisely? I’m not too familiar with this Christian sh—’

‘It’s a Mass.’

‘Huh?’

‘An Anglican Mass. And do you know why a Mass is generally performed in a building other than a functioning church?’

He didn’t fully. He could only guess.

‘To cleanse it,’ Betty said. ‘The Eucharist is Christian disinfectant. To cleanse, to purify – to get rid of bacteria.’

‘OK, let me get this...’ Robin pulled his hands down his face, in praying mode. ‘This is the E-word, right?’

Betty nodded.

An exorcism.

9 Visitor

THE ANSWERING MACHINE sounded quite irritable.

‘Mrs Watkins. Tania Beauman, Livenight. I’ve left messages for you all over the place. The programme goes out Friday night, so I really have to know whether it’s yes or no. I’ll be here until seven. Please call me... Thank you.’

‘Sorry.’ Merrily came back into the kitchen, hung up her funeral cloak. ‘I can’t think with that thing bleeping.’

Barbara Buckingham was sitting at the refectory table, unwinding her heavy silk scarf while her eyes compiled a photo-inventory of the room.

‘You’re in demand, Mrs Watkins.’ The slight roll on the ‘r’ and the barely perceptible lengthening of the ‘a’ showed her roots were sunk into mid-border clay. But this would be way back, many southern English summers since.

Walking through black and white timber-framed Ledwardine, across the cobbled square to the sixteenth- century vicarage, the dull day dying around them, the lights in the windows blunting the bite of evening, she’d said, ‘How quaint and cosy it is here. I’d forgotten. And so close.’

Close to what? Merrily had made a point of not asking.

‘Tea?’ She still felt slightly ashamed of the kitchen – must get round to emulsioning it in the spring. ‘Or coffee?’

Barbara would have tea. She took off her gloves.

Like her late sister, she was good-looking, but in a sleek and sharp way, with a turned-up nose which once would have been cute but now seemed haughty. The sister’s a retired teacher and there’s no arguing with her, Eileen Cullen had said.

‘I didn’t expect you to be so young, Mrs Watkins.’

‘Going on thirty-seven?’

‘Young for what you’re doing. Young to be the diocesan exorcist.’

‘Diocesan deliverance consultant.’

‘You must have a progressive bishop.’

‘Not any more.’ Merrily filled the kettle.

Mrs Buckingham dropped a short laugh. ‘Of course. That man who couldn’t take the pressure and walked out. Hunt? Hunter? I try to keep up with Church affairs. I was headmistress of a Church school for many years.’

‘In this area? The border?’

‘God no. Got out of there before I was twenty. Couldn’t stand the cold.’

Merrily put the kettle on the stove. ‘We can get bad winters here,’ she agreed.

‘Ah... not simply the climate. My father was a farmer in Radnor Forest. I remember my whole childhood as a kind of perpetual February.’

‘Frugal?’ Merrily tossed tea bags into the pot.

Mrs Buckingham exhaled bitter laughter. ‘In our house, those two tea bags would have to be used at least six times. The fat in the chip pan was only renewed for Christmas.’ Her face grew pinched at the memories.

‘You were poor?’

‘Not particularly. We had in excess of 130 acres. Marginal land, mind – always appallingly overgrazed. Waste nothing. Make every square yard earn its keep. Have you heard of hydatid disease?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘Causes cysts to grow on internal organs, sometimes the size of pomegranates. Originates from a tapeworm absorbed by dogs allowed to feed on infected dead sheep. Or, on our farm, required to eat dead sheep. Human beings can pick it up – the tapeworm eggs – simply through stroking the sheepdog. When I was sixteen I had to go into hospital to have a hydatid cyst removed from my liver.’

‘How awful.’

‘That was when I decided to get out. I doubt my father even noticed I was gone. Had another mouth to feed by then. A girl again, unfortunately.’

‘Menna?’

‘She would be... ten months old when I left. It was a long time before I began to feel guilty about