A Crown of Lights

‘No? What about the shrine of St Thomas, in the cathedral?’

‘Not the same thing.’

‘What – because Ellis spent some time in the States?’

‘My information is that he learned his trade with the more extreme kind of Bible Belt evangelist.’ Sophie shuddered. ‘Would you like to borrow my coat? It may not be exactly funereal, but it’s at least...’

‘Respectable?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Sophie said. ‘I didn’t mean—’

‘Of course you didn’t.’ When Merrily smiled her face felt so stiff with fatigue that it hurt. ‘If anyone does notice me, I could pretend to be a poor single-parent whom Mr Weal defended on a shoplifting charge.’

When the strangers came in, Gomer was getting the local take on the planting of Menna Weal in the rectory garden.

‘Most people couldn’t equate it wiv him being a lawyer and into property,’ Greg said. ‘Who’s gonna wanna buy a house wiv a bleedin’ great tomb? They say he’ll leave it to his nephew who’s started in the firm, but would you wanna live in a house wiv your dead auntie in the garden?’

Gomer wondered how he’d feel if his Min was buried in the back garden, and decided it wouldn’t be right for either of them. In the churchyard she wasn’t alone, see. Not meaning the dead; it was the coming and going of the living.

‘But what I reckon...’ Greg said. ‘That building’s right down the bottom of the garden, OK? You could lop it off, make it separate. A little park, with a footpath to it. The Weal memorial garden. I reckon that’s what he’s got in mind.’

‘Nobody ask him?’

‘Blimey, you don’t ask him nothing. Not even the time – you’d get a bleedin’ bill. It’s like there’s a wall around him, wiv an admission charge. And no first names. It’s Mr Weal. Or J.W., if you’re a friend.’

‘He got many friends?’

‘He knows a lot of people. That’s the main fing in his profession.’ Greg turned to his two new customers. ‘Yes, gents...’

They wore suits – but not funeral suits. Both youngish fellows, in their thirties. One was a bit paunchy, with a half-grown beard; he ordered two pints.

‘Not here for the funeral?’ Greg said.

‘Ah, that’s what it is.’ The plump, bearded one paid for their drinks. ‘Must be somebody important, all those cars.’

‘Oh, that’s not unusual. There’s a mass of cars every Sunday. Popular man, our minister. You get people coming from fifty miles away.’

Gomer looked up, gobsmacked. Most of these folks were not here for Menna at all, but part of some travelling fan club for the rector? Bloody hell.

‘Hang on,’ the plump feller with the beard said. ‘Are there two churches, then?’

‘Kind of,’ Greg said. ‘Our minister uses the village hall for his services.’

‘But the old one, the old church – that’s disused, right?’

‘Long time ago. It’s a ruin.’

‘Can you still get to it?’

‘You probably can,’ Greg said, ‘but it’s on private land. It’s privately owned now.’

‘Only my mate wanted to take some pictures. With permission, of course. We don’t want to go sneaking about. Who would we ask? Who owns it?’

‘Well, it’s new people, actually – only been moved in a week or so. There’s a farmhouse, St Michael’s. If you go back along the lane, past the post office, and on out of the village, you’ll see a big farm, both sides of the road, then there’s a track off to your left. If you go over a little bridge and you get to the old rectory, on your right, you’ve gone too far.’

‘They all right, the people?’

‘Sure,’ Greg said. ‘Young couple. He’s American, an artist – book illustrator. Yeah, they’re fine.’

‘What’s the name?’

Gomer was suspicious by now. Gomer was always suspicious of fellers in suits asking questions. Not Greg, though; suspicious landlords didn’t sell many drinks.

‘Oh blimey, let me think. Goodfellow. Goodbody? Somefing like that.’

The paunchy bloke nodded. ‘Thanks, mate, we’ll go and knock on their door.’

‘You can take a picture of my pub, if you like,’ Greg said. ‘What is it, magazine, holiday guide?’

The two men looked at each other, swapping grins.

‘Something like that,’ said the one who did the talking.

The village hall was like one of those roadside garages built in the 1950s, with a grey-white facade and a stepped roof. From its summit projected a perspex cross which would obviously light up at night. Conifers crowded in on the building, so you had the feeling of a missionary chapel in the jungle.

It was coming up to 3.45 p.m., the sky turning brown, the air raw. As Sophie drove away, Merrily felt unexpectedly apprehensive. From inside, as she walked up the steps, came the sound of a hymn she didn’t recognize.

Below her, Old Hindwell was laid out in a V-shape. Beyond one arm arose the partly afforested hump which, Sophie had told her, was topped by the Iron Age hill fort, Burfa Camp. The northern horizon was broken by the shaven hills of Radnor Forest. The small, falling sun picked up the arc of a thin river around the boundary, like an eroded copper bangle.

Across the village, divided from it by a fuzz of bare trees, she could see the tower of the old church. She wondered if Nicholas Ellis would have made Old Hindwell his main base if that church had still been in use. Arguably not, since using the community hall was a good demonstration of his personal creed: the Church was people, ancient churches were museums.

The hymn she didn’t know, sung unaccompanied by organ or piano, came to an end, and then there was the sound of a communal subsidence into rickety chairs. Merrily pushed open the double doors and went in.

Into darkness. Into a theatre with the house lights down. But the stage – she stifled a gasp – was lit, as though for a Nativity play. Just not Anglican, somehow. Gently, she pulled the doors together behind her and stood under a cracked green exit sign.

There was a row of shadowed heads and shoulders no more than four feet in front of her. The chairs were arranged like theatre-in-the-round under the girdered ceiling. The industrial window blinds were all lowered.

It was alarmingly like the Livenight studio, and the audience must have been at least as big: maybe two hundred people, some on wooden benches pushed back to the walls. Spotlights in the ceiling lit the stage where stood a man in a white, monkish robe, head bowed, eyes cast down to hands loosely clasped on his stomach.

Merrily’s first, disappointing glimpse of the Reverend Nicholas Ellis was a definite so- what moment.

‘... is a particularly poignant occasion for me,’ she heard. ‘It’s only weeks since Menna came to me, with her loving husband, to be baptized again, to pledge herself to the Lord Jesus in the presence of the Holy Spirit. I wonder... if somehow... she knew.’

His face was bland and shining, his mouth wide, like a letter box. His light brown hair was brushed straight back, a modest ponytail disappearing into the folds of his monk’s cowl. Monastic gear was less unorthodox than it used to be for Church of England ministers, but in dazzling white this was hardly a sign of humility. Too messianic for Merrily. His words rang coldly in the factory acoustic.

‘I conducted the solemn but joyful service of rebaptism at their home. And on that day the very air was alive with hope and rejoicing, and these two souls were blessed beneath the wings of angels.’

From the shadows, someone, a man, cried out – involuntarily, it seemed, like a hiccup – ‘Praise God!’ As though the heavenly host had suddenly burst through the ceiling.