A Crown of Lights

‘Stop it!’ Sometimes Betty felt she was a lot older than Robin, instead of two years younger. Whole lifetimes older.

‘He went away.’

‘Of course he did. He went home to warm his bum by a roaring fire of dry, seasoned hardwood logs.’

‘You’re gonna throw that one at me all night, I can tell.’

‘Probably. While we’re sitting with our coats on in front of a lukewarm stove full of sizzling green pine.’

‘Yeah, yeah, the wood guy ripped me off. He won’t do it again.’

‘Dead right he won’t. First rule of country living: show them, from the very start, that you’re not an urban innocent.’

Robin followed her down the narrow, broken stone steps. ‘While being careful not to antagonize them, right?’

Betty stopped on the spiral, looked back up over her shoulder. It was too dark to see his face.

‘Sooner or later,’ she said, ‘there is going to be antagonism – from some of them at least. It’s a phase we’re going to have to go through and come out the other side with some kind of mutual respect. This is not Islington. This is not even Shrewsbury. In Radnorshire, the wheels of change would grind exceeding slow, if they’d ever got around to inventing the wheel.’

‘So what you’re saying, making converts could take time?’

‘We won’t live that long. Tolerance is what we aspire to: the ultimate prize.’

‘Jeez, you’re soooo— Oh, shit—’

Betty whirled round. He’d stumbled on a loose piece of masonry, was hanging on to the hand-rope.

‘You OK?’

‘Third-degree rope burn, is all. I imagine the flesh will grow back within only weeks.’

She thought of Major Wilshire again and felt unsettled.

‘I was born just twenty miles from here,’ she said soberly. ‘People don’t change much in rural areas. I don’t want to cause offence, and I don’t think we need to.’

‘You changed.’

‘It’s not the same. I’m not from yere, as they say.’ Betty stepped out of the tower doorway and onto the frozen mud of what she supposed had once been the chancel. ‘My parents just happened to be working here when I was born. They were from Off. I am, essentially, from Off.’

‘Off what?’

‘That’s what they say. It’s their word. If you’re an immigrant you’re “from Off”. I’d forgotten that. I was not quite eleven when we left there. And then we were in Yorkshire, and Yorkshire flattens all the traces.’

Curtains of cold red light hung from the heavens into the roofless nave. When Robin emerged from the tower entrance, she took his cold hand in her even colder ones.

‘Sorry to be a frigid bitch. It’s been a heavy, heavy day.’

The church was mournful around her. It was like a huge, blackened sheep skeleton, with its ribs opened out. Incongruously, it actually came with the house. Robin had been ecstatic. For him, it had been the deciding factor.

Betty let go of Robin’s hand. She was now facing where the altar must have been – the English side. And it was here, on this frigid January evening, that she had the flash.

A shivering sense of someone at prayer – a man in a long black garment, stained. His face unshaven, glowing with sweat and an unambiguous vivid fear. He’d discovered or identified or been told something he couldn’t live with. In an instant, Betty felt she was suffocating in a miasma of body odour and anguish.

No! She hauled in a cold breath, pulling off her woollen hat, shaking out her sheaf of blonde hair. Go away. Don’t want you.

Cold. Damp. Nothing else. Shook herself like a wet dog. Gone.

This was how it happened. Always without warning, rarely even a change in the temperature.

‘And it’s not officially a church any more,’ Robin was reminding her – he hadn’t, of course, sensed a thing. ‘So this is not about causing offence. Long as we don’t knock it down, we can do what we like here. This is so cool. We get to reclaim an old, pagan sacred place!’

And Betty thought in cold dismay, What kind of sacred is this? But what she actually said, surprised at her own calmness, was, ‘I just think we have to take it slowly. I know the place is decommissioned, but there’re bound to be local people whose families worshipped here for centuries. And whose grandparents got married here and... and buried, of course.’

There were still about a dozen gravestones and tombs visible around the church and, although all the remains were supposed to have been taken away and reinterred after the diocese dumped the building itself, Betty knew that when they started to garden here they’d inevitably unearth bones.

‘And maybe,’ Robin said slyly, ‘just maybe... there are people whose distant ancestors worshipped here before there was a Christian church.’

‘You’re pushing it there.’

‘I like pushing it.’

‘Yeah,’ Betty agreed bitterly.

They moved out of the ruined church and across the winterhard field and then over the yard to the back of the house. She’d left a light on in the hall. It was the only light they could see anywhere – although if they walked around to the front garden, they would find the meagre twinklings of the village of Old Hindwell dotted throughout the high, bare hedge.

She could hear the rushing of the Hindwell Brook, which almost islanded this place when, like now, it was swollen. There’d been weeks of hard rain, while they’d been making regular trips back and forth from their Shrewsbury flat in Robin’s cousin’s van, bringing all the books and stuff and wondering if they were doing the right thing.

Or at least Betty had. Robin had been obsessed from the moment he saw the ruined church and the old yew trees around it in a vague circle and the mighty Burfa Camp in the background and the enigmatic Four Stones less than a couple of miles away. And when he’d heard of the recent archaeological discoveries – the indications of a ritual palisade believed to be the second largest of its kind in Europe – it had blown him clean away. From then on, he needed to live here.

‘There you go.’ He bent down to the back doorstep. ‘What’d I tell ya?’ He lifted up something whitish.

‘What’s that?’

‘It is a carrier bag – Tesco, looks like. The individual by the river had one with him. I’m guessing this is it.’

‘He left it on our step?’

‘House-warming present, maybe? It’s kinda heavy.’

‘Put it down,’ Betty said quietly.

‘Huh?’

‘I’m serious. Put it back on the step, and go inside, put on the lights.’

‘Jeeeeeeez!’ Robin tossed back his head and howled at the newborn moon. ‘I do not understand you! One minute I’m over reacting – which, OK, I do, I overreact sometimes, I confess – and this is some harmless old guy making his weary way home to his humble fireside... and the next, he’s like dumping ten pounds of Semtex or some shit—’

‘Just put it down, Robin.’

Exasperated, Robin let the bag fall. It clumped solidly on the stone. Robin unlocked the back door.

Betty waited for him to enter first. She wouldn’t touch the bag.

It was knotted at the top. She watched Robin wrench it open. A sheet of folded notepaper fell out. He spread it out on the table and she read the type over his shoulder.

Dear Mr and Mrs Thorogood,

In the course of renovation work by the previous occupants of your house, this receptacle was found in a cavity in the wall beside the fireplace. The previous occupants preferred not to keep it and gave it away. It has been suggested you may wish to restore it to its proper place.