A Crown of Lights

Despite Livenight, Jane still always thought of them as dark-haired, dark- complexioned. Celtic. But this was an English rose, and a wild rose at that. She had a subdued energy about her. Or maybe that was just a subjective thing, because, thanks to Gomer, Jane knew.

Wow!

‘This is Betty,’ Mum had said casually. ‘She’s staying the night. This is my daughter, Jane. Brew some tea, flower. We’ll be down in a few minutes.’

Under normal circumstances, this would have been an ultra-cool moment, a significant chapter in the liberalization of the Anglican Church.

But the chances that the Thorogood woman was not involved with Ned Bain were pretty remote. Pagans stuck together, so clearly Mum could have invited in more than she knew.

‘We keep a room fairly ready,’ she was saying. ‘It’s not very grand, but the bedding should be aired.’

‘Anything, please,’ Betty Thorogood said.

Jane forgot about the tea, followed them upstairs. The blonde, it had to be admitted, did not look like a threat. Instead she looked done in. By now, most people who’d never been here before would be commenting on the atmosphere and the obvious antiquity of the place – the twisting black beams, the bulging walls, the tilted ceilings. This woman might have been climbing the stairwell of a concrete apartment block.

Mum said, ‘If you need a change of clothes I’m sure we can sort something out. I’m a bit on the stunted side, but Jane’s got a lot of stuff from the days when you were supposed to buy everything a couple of sizes too big.’

The self-styled witch and Mum were standing on the landing, near the second staircase leading to Jane’s apartment. ‘Bathroom’s that one.’ Mum indicated the one door that was slightly ajar. ‘It’s bleak and cold and horrible, but one day, when we get the money...’ She broke off.

From six stairs down, Jane witnessed this clearly. Betty Thorogood quivered for just an instant before tossing back her mass of hair and, almost absently, shaking out a word.

‘Apples?’

Mum froze; Jane saw her eyes grow watchful.

Mum said, ‘I’m sorry?’ As though she hadn’t heard, which of course she had.

She and Jane both had. And they knew what it meant. For a moment, the air up here seemed almost too thick to breathe.

‘I’m sorry,’ Betty said. ‘I just... you know... Sorry.’

Jane marched up four steps. ‘You had a feeling of apples?’

Mum frowned. ‘Jane...’

‘What kind of apples?’

‘I...’ Betty shook her head again, as if to clear it, her hair tumbling. ‘I suppose not apples as much as blossom. White, like soft snow.’

‘Oh, wow,’ Jane breathed.

‘I’m sorry,’ Betty said. ‘It just came out.’

Mum bit her lip.

Jane said, ‘And we thought Wil had gone...’

Mum started flinging lights on. ‘Betty, if you want to just check out your room...’

Betty Thorogood nodded and followed her.

She wasn’t getting away that easily.

‘Wil was our ghost,’ Jane called after them. ‘Wil Williams, vicar of this parish. Found dead in the orchard behind the church in sixteen seventy. Hanging from an apple tree – when the blossom was out.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Betty Thorogood said again. ‘It’s a problem I have.’

‘Wow,’ Jane said, in serious awe. Nobody knew about the apple blossom. Not even Kali Three. ‘You’re the real thing, aren’t you?’

39 Witches Don’t Cry

THE KID BROUGHT them tea at the kitchen table and then started filling the kitchen with the seductive scent of toast. It was ten-thirty. As far as Jane was concerned, Betty Thorogood had proved herself.

Merrily had stopped agonizing about this stuff. Where sensitives were concerned, seeking the cold, earthly, rational explanation could be wastefully time-consuming. Life was too short to question it too hard; it just was. It would have been less impressive in Betty’s case if she hadn’t, in other respects, appeared defeated, demoralized, broken. As though she’d looked into her own future and seen black water.

‘Is Wil still here?’ demanded Jane, galvanized – knowing nothing about the death of the elderly woman, Mrs Wilshire. ‘I mean as a spirit, not just an imprint?’

‘I don’t know,’ Betty said. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to qualify what I feel. I just get images sometimes. Fragments, incomplete messages.’

The apple blossom. Last year, when they’d first moved in, Merrily had been sensing an old distress locked into the upper storeys of the vicarage, the timeless dementia of trapped emotions. Jane, under the influence of Miss Lucy Devenish, folklorist and mystic, claimed to have actually smelled the blossom, felt it on her face like warm snow.

It was this undismissable haunting and the Church’s general disinterest which had prodded Merrily in the general direction of Deliverance. There needed to be someone around to reassure people that they weren’t necessarily losing their minds.

Jane was saying, ‘Were you like sensitive before you became a witch?’

Betty looked uncomfortable. ‘It’s why I became one. If you exclude spiritualism, Wicca’s one of the few refuges for people who are... that way. My parents are C of E, which doesn’t encourage that kind of thing.’

An apologetic glance at Merrily, who also caught a triumphant glance from Jane, little cow, before she went greedily back into the interrogation. ‘But, like, who do you actually worship?’

‘That’s probably the wrong word. We recognize the male and female principles, and they can take several forms. Most of it comes down to fertility, in the widest sense – we don’t need more people in the world, but we do need expanded consciousness.’

‘And you, like, draw down the moon?’ The kid showing off her knowledge of witch jargon. ‘Invoke the goddess into yourself?’

‘Kind of.’

Betty was reticent, solemn in the subdued light of the big, cream-walled kitchen. Maybe having a vicar in the same room was an inhibiting factor, but this woman was certainly not Livenight material. Merrily sat down at the table and listened as Betty, pressured by Jane, began explaining how she’d actually got into Wicca at teacher training college, before dropping out to work for a herbalist. How she’d saved up to go with a friend to an international pagan conference in New England, where she met the American, Robin Thorogood, making a film with some old art school friends. So Robin had found Betty first, and then Wicca, in that order. Betty’s face momentarily shone at the memory. Her green eyes were clear as rock pools: she must literally have bewitched Robin Thorogood.

The phone rang. Jane dropped the cheese grater and carried the cordless into a corner.

‘You have a disciple,’ Merrily said softly.

‘Kids only find Wicca exotic because it’s forbidden. When it becomes a regular part of religious education they’ll find it just as boring as... anything else.’

‘Don’t feel you have to talk it down on my account.’

‘Merrily’ – Betty pushed back her hair – ‘there doesn’t need to be conflict. There’s actually a lot of common ground. Spiritual people of any kind have more in common than they do with total non-believers. In the end we want