Midwinter of the Spirit

the blessed ward at all.’

22 Edict

MONDAY MORNING, AND Jane felt good – which was rare. She lay and watched for the dawn.

She’d seen like hundreds of dawns from here now, her bed facing the east window. This was not brilliant feng shui-wise, but you did get to see the sun come up over the wooded hill, and that was seriously important today.

Jane replayed last night’s encounter – still amazed at how cool Sorrel had been, inviting her and Rowenna over at once to talk about it all. Jane calling Rowenna, and Ro saying, ‘Look, better not tell them we’re still at school. These people worry about parents finding out and making a fuss.’ That was cool – so they were office working girls. Sorrel, who looked about Mum’s age, had with her an elderly woman called Patricia who was kind of the head of the group and was obviously a really heavy person and had quizzed them in this really soft, knowing voice. How important is it to you to find the Path within yourself? Are you ready for so much hard work at a time when most girls your age are out having fun?

That made you think. You could spend years in search of enlightenment, and still wind up disillusioned at forty or something. The answer was: give it six months and then, if it wasn’t working for you, let it go.

No sign of dawn, and it was getting on for seven. Mum was probably up already, because – yes! – Mum was meeting Lol later in Hereford.

She didn’t know what the meeting was about, and why it was so early, but that didn’t matter. Their meeting was still a major coup for Mystic Jane, who had set the whole thing up the other night. Classic, when you thought about it: Lol taking Merrily in from the cold, offering her sanctuary just like she’d done for him that time. Mum still very big on the sanctuary concept, like with all those hookers she tried to rescue when she was a curate in Liverpool.

It would be really good to have Lol around again, so cool in his vulnerable, nervous way. This Moon – she was entirely wrong for him. You could tell, just by watching her in the shop, that she was remote and self- obsessed. So, OK, she was beautiful and about ten years younger than Mum. But Mum was still sexy. Well, she could be sexy, if she wanted to. If the bloody Church…

Or if they’d met way back – Mum in her Goth frock and her Siouxie Sioux make-up, Lol unhappily on the road with his band, Hazey Jane. You seemed to go all tightened up and inhibited when you got older. Especially when you had your whole life hijacked by the Church. The dogcollar – it was like some sick masochism trip. The punks used to wear actual dog-collars. Had Mum once been into bondage gear, and was that a natural progression to clerical costume?

Jane was just picturing Mum in the pulpit in her Sunday surplice and half a potful of coal-black mascara, when she became aware of the frozen night sky at last beginning to brown with heat from the east. Patricia said you were supposed to wait for the big orb itself but, like, what if it didn’t show until you were on the school bus or something?

She scrambled out of bed and walked slowly to the eastfacing window and opened it as wide as it would go. It was absolutely bloody freezing.

Well, good! Jane steeled herself and flung her arms wide.

Now her first exercise. She had the words Patricia had given them written out on the back of an old birthday card, all ready, balanced on the window ledge. She pictured Rowenna standing at her own window in the big modern house in Credenhill Jane hadn’t yet visited.

She pictured Patricia and Sorrel – sisters, kind of.

OK. She took a mouthful of cold air and coughed. Then she looked into the sandy sky and read aloud from the card.

‘Hail to Thee, Eternal Spiritual Sun

‘Whose symbol now rises in the Heavens.

‘Hail to Thee from the Abodes of Morning.’

Jane lowered her arms, and stayed silent. By tomorrow, she wouldn’t need the card.

She was on the Path.

This time, she was going to do it right.

Merrily dumped her waxed jacket on a front pew and went to kneel in the chancel.

Before her, the altar was a hazy-grey block under a stainedglass window, its colours still sleeping. She hadn’t switched on the lamps or even lit a candle.

Unlocking the church, she’d thought what a shame it was to have to restrict the house of God to not much more than normal working hours. Ted wanted to lock it up at five each evening, but Merrily was insisting on seven at least, even if she then had to go along with her own keys. A church should really be offering sanctuary around the clock. Perhaps you could employ a sympathetic security patrol to filter out the vandals – try getting that one past the parish council.

Enough! Merrily kneeled in silence for maybe ten minutes, letting thoughts drift away, and then began.

Her voice was hesitant, but steady. She kept it low.

‘Christ be with me, Christ within me.

‘Christ behind me…’

Christ and who else? A story in the Church Times last week had revealed two more attacks – one of them sexual – on women priests in their own churches. But you couldn’t wrap yourself in cotton-wool like some religious statuette.

Equally she’d seen with the Denzil Joy incident the potential dangers of not protecting yourself before you went out on a case. And there was a lot about this Moon business she didn’t like. Obsession, for a start, was always dangerous. She’d called Lol last night, while Jane was out, to get some more background. She didn’t like the idea of that newly displayed photograph of the dead father in a room full of Iron Age relics. There was the possibility that this woman was drawing down pagan Celtic elements she would not be able to deal with.

Lol was right: it was necessary to go to the location on this one. To try to see it through Moon’s eyes. But if there was something there, some lurking presence from way way back, would Merrily be able to sense it? While, at the same time, keeping it out?

‘I bind unto myself the Name,

‘The strong Name of the Trinity.

‘By invocation of the same,

‘The Three in One and One in Three…’

Pip-pop! The green tubes ejecting from the nostrils of dying Denzil Joy. Pip-pop!

Merrily cringed.

Stop!

She opened and closed her eyes and pulled the folds of blue and gold around her.

Start again.

‘Christ be with me, Christ within me…’

But Merrily’s visit with Lol to Moon’s barn was not going to happen. Something appalling already had. Something she could not ignore.

Jane took the call while Merrily was making breakfast.

‘It’s some really nasty, officious-sounding bastard.’

‘Not so loud!’ Merrily took it on the cordless phone in the kitchen.

‘Merrily Watkins speaking.’