Midwinter of the Spirit

2

Fluctuation

THE MOUNTAINS HUNCHED around the chapel, in its hollow, like some dark sisterhood over a cauldron. You had to go to the end of the drive before you could make out the meagre lights of the village.

It was awesomely lonely up here, but it was home to Huw, who sniffed appreciatively at Merrily’s smoke, relaxing into his accent.

‘I were born a bastard in a little bwddyn t’other side of that brow. Gone now, but you can find the foundations in the grass if you have a bit of a kick around.’

‘I wondered about that: a Yorkshireman called Huw Owen. You’re actually Welsh, then?’

‘Me mam were waitressing up in Sheffield by the time I turned two, so I’ve no memories of it. She never wanted to come back; just me, forty-odd years on. Back to the land of my father, whoever the bugger was. Got five big, rugged parishes to run now, two of them strong Welsh-speaking. I’m learning, slowly – getting there.’

‘Can’t be easy.’

Huw waved a dismissive arm. ‘Listen, it’s a holiday, luv. Learning Welsh concentrates the mind. Cold, though, in’t it?’

‘Certainly colder than Hereford.’ Merrily pulled her cheap waxed coat together. ‘For all it’s only forty-odd miles away.’

‘Settled in there now, are you?’

‘More or less.’

They followed a stony track in the last of the light. Walkers were advised to stick to the paths, even in the daytime, or they might get lost and wind up dying of hypothermia – or gunshot wounds. The regular soldiers from Brecon and the shadowy SAS from Hereford did most of their training up here in the Beacons.

No camouflaged soldiers around this evening, though. No helicopters, no flares. Even the buzzards had gone to roost. But to Merrily the silence was swollen. After they’d tramped a couple of hundred yards she said, ‘Can we get this over with?’

Huw laughed.

‘I’m not daft, Huw.’

‘No, you’re not that.’

He stopped. From the top of the rise, they could see the white eyes of headlights on the main road crossing the Beacons.

‘All right.’ Huw sat down on the bottom tier of what appeared to be a half-demolished cairn. ‘I’ll be frank. Have to say I were a bit surprised when I heard he’d offered the job to a young lass.’

Merrily stayed on her feet. ‘Not that young.’

‘You look frighteningly young to me. You must look like a little child after Canon T.H.B. Dobbs.’ Huw pronounced the name in deliberate block capitals.

‘Mr Dobbs,’ Merrily said, ‘yes. You know him, then?’

‘Not well. Nobody knows the old bugger well.’

‘I’ve never actually met him – with him being in and out of hospital for over a year.’

‘There’s a treat to look forward to,’ Huw said.

‘I’ve heard he’s a… traditionalist.’

‘Oh aye, he’s that, all right. No bad thing, mind.’

‘I can understand that.’ Merrily finally sat down next to him.

‘Aye,’ Huw said. ‘But does your new bishop?’

It was coming, the point of their expedition. The pale moon was limp above a black flank of Pen-y-fan.

‘Bit of a new broom, Michael Henry Hunter,’ Huw said, as a rabbit crossed the track, ‘so I’m told. Bit of a trendy. Bit flash.’

‘So he appoints a female diocesan exorcist,’ Merrily said, ‘because that’s a cool, new-broom thing to do.’

‘You said it.’

‘Only, he hasn’t appointed me. Not yet. Canon Dobbs is still officially in harness. I haven’t been appointed to anything.’

‘Oh, really?’ Huw tossed a pebble into the darkness.

‘So are you going to tell him?’

‘Tell him?’

‘That he shouldn’t.’

‘Not my job to tell a bishop what he can and can’t do.’

‘I suppose you want me to tell him: that I can’t take it on.’

‘Aye.’ Huw gazed down at the road. ‘I’d be happy with that.’

Shit, Merrily thought.

She’d met the Bishop just once before he’d become the Bishop. It was, fatefully, at a conference at her old college in Birmingham, to review the progress of women priests in the Midlands. He was young, not much older than Merrily, and she’d assumed he was chatting her up.

This was after her unplanned, controversial speech to the assembly, on the subject of women and ghosts.

‘Shot my mouth off,’ she told Huw, sitting now on the other side of the smashed cairn. ‘I’d had a… all right, a psychic experience. One lasting several weeks. Not the kind I could avoid, because it was right there in the vicarage. Possibly a former incumbent, possibly just… a volatile. Plenty of sensations, sounds, possibly hallucinatory – I only ever actually saw it once. Anyway, it was just screwing me up. I didn’t know how to deal with it, and Jane saying: “Didn’t they teach you anything at theological college, Mum?” And I’m thinking, yeah, the kid’s right. Here we are, licensed priests, and the one thing they haven’t taught us is how to handle the supernatural. I didn’t know about Mr Dobbs then. I didn’t even know that every diocese needed to have one, or what exactly they did. I just wanted to know how many other women felt like me – or if I was being naive.’

‘Touched a nerve?’

‘Probably. It certainly didn’t lead to a discussion, and nobody asked me anything about it afterwards. Except for Michael Hunter. He came over later in the restaurant, bought me lunch. I thought, he was just… Anyway, that was how it happened. Obviously, I’d no idea then that he was going to be my new bishop.’

‘But he remembered you. Once he’d got his feet under the table and realized, as a radical sort of lad, that he could already have a bit of a problem on his hands: namely Canon T.H.B. Dobbs, his reactionary old diocesan exorcist. Not “Deliverance minister”. Decidedly not.’

‘I’m afraid “Deliverance consultant” is the Bishop’s term.’

‘Aye.’ She felt his smile. ‘You know why Dobbs doesn’t like the word Deliverance? Because the first two syllables are an anagram of devil. That’s what they say. Must’ve been relieved, Mick Hunter, when the old bugger got his little cardiac prod towards retirement.’

‘But he hasn’t gone yet, and I’m only here because the Bishop wants me to get some idea of how—’

‘No, luv.’ Huw looked up sharply. ‘This isn’t a course for people who just want to learn the basics of metaphysical trench warfare, as Hunter well knows. He wants you, badly.’

It’s a sensitive job. It’s very political. It throws up a few hot potatoes like the satanic child- abuse panic – God, what was all that about, really? Well, I don’t want any of this bell-book-andcandle, incense- burning, medieval rubbish. I want somebody bright and smart and on their toes. But also sympathetic and flexible and non-dogmatic and upfront. Does that describe you, Merrily?

Mick Hunter in his study overlooking the River Wye. Thirtynine years old and lean and fit, pulsing with energy and ambition. The heavy brown hair shading unruly blue eyes.

‘So,’ Huw Owen said now, mock-pathetic, slumped under the rising moon. ‘Would you come over all feminist on me if I begged you not to do it?’

Merrily said nothing. She’d been expecting this, but that didn’t mean she knew how to handle it. Quite a shock being offered the job, obviously. She’d still known very little about Deliverance ministry. But did the Bishop himself know much more? Huw appeared to think not.