through the trees, where all those people had stood in anticipation of… a multiple psychological projection, a shared hallucination on a grand scale?
The existence of ghosts, the nature of ghosts. At least half of the raison d’etre of Deliverance.
She rang Jane to say she was on her way home. The kid sounded tired.
‘I’ll probably have an early night. Take it nobody beat you up or anything?’
‘Not so’s you’d notice. Look, I’m sorry I had to go out again.’
‘Save it for Lol. He’s off to Bristol tomorrow.’
‘Oh my God, I forgot!’
‘You always forget.’
‘I’d better go round.’
‘Stay the night, I’ll be OK.’
‘I’ll be back by midnight,’ Merrily said.
‘Yeah,’ Jane said morosely. ‘I expect you will.’
She parked the car at the vicarage and let herself in. A kitchen lamp had been left on, but there was no sign of Jane. She gave Ethel a foil pack of Felix and then, out of habit, went quietly up to the attic apartment, just to make sure.
‘Er… night-night, Mum,’ Jane said from the other side of the door.
Merrily smiled. Forgiven. Kind of.
She managed to catch the Eight till Late just before it closed, picked up some cigs and a bottle of white wine, carrying the bottle openly down Church Street. The village was deserted, but there were a lot of windows on either side. It was the darkened ones you had to worry about — not all of them were holiday homes.
However, the darkened ones did not, tonight, include Lol’s.
He’d seen her coming. He was standing in his doorway.
‘You’ve had the electricity reconnected!’
‘No going back now,’ Lol said.
He still seemed bewildered at finding himself a man of property. The hall behind him was lit by a low- wattage bulb dangling over the newel post where Lucy Devenish used to hang her poncho.
Merrily felt a rush of emotion.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Definitely no going back.’
In full view of all the darkened windows in Church Street, she stepped up to the doorway and kissed him on the mouth. Saw his eyes widen close to hers as he manoeuvred her inside, throwing the door shut behind them.
‘What have you done?’
Oh God, her glasses! They were still in the car.
‘I…’ She swallowed. ‘Would you believe it if I said I’d walked into a lamp-post?’
‘No.’
‘Thought not.’ She put the bottle on the floor, felt at her dog collar. ‘Look, I’m sorry I’m still in the kit. It’s coming off tonight, for… for at least a week. I’ve been told to get a locum in, so I can be a… an ordinary person.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m probably demob happy, Lol, that’s what it is.’
A lock of hair brushed her bruised eye like a bird’s wing. She pushed it aside with a hand and winced.
‘Tell me what happened,’ Lol said.
She looked up the stairs and imagined Lucy Devenish standing at the top, watching them with a weary disappointment, her poncho drooping. And then caught a sudden mental image of Belladonna down near Ludford Bridge, wrapped in her floor-length cape, electric-blue light on her beautiful, predatory face.
Thought about Marion de la Bruyere — a young girl who had reacted to betrayal in the manner of the times, now a ghost more than eight centuries old — and what the Mayor of Ludlow might be asking.
Probably her last task as a Deliverance minister.
And it wasn’t even official.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘to be honest, I’m not so much demob happy as demob… very pissed-off.’
Could have done a deal with Bernie, Merrily told God later. I could have said save my ministry, get those two bastards off my back, and I’ll help you in Ludlow. That was the obvious thing, wasn’t it?
But, like, playing politics — that’s not what the Church is supposed to be about, is it? Yeah, yeah, the Church has been deep into politics from the start, but that didn’t make it right. Or did it? I mean, it survived, didn’t it? Would it still have survived if there hadn’t been political popes, reformation, renewal and… and…
I don’t want it to end. That’s what I’m trying to say. Deliverance. I don’t want it to be over.
Thought I was starting to get it… to get
And, sure, I’ve felt desperate because it didn’t seem to be working, or I wasn’t getting it right. And guilty when it was fulfilling, when it felt like I was wielding light… guilty because I only had one parish and didn’t have to go on the road on Sundays and learn how to preach properly.
Have I been guilty of pride? Are there ministers in this diocese — there surely are — who could do this so much better than me? Did YOU send Sian and Saltash? Am I stupid and naive and blind? Is it Your will that I give this up, let it be taken from me, stop meddling in the affairs of the dead, run five, six, seven parishes instead, watch it all falling away for all of us…?
I’m sorry. I don’t know. I don’t know. Do I fight this or lie down? Which is worse, cowardice or pride?
And do You ever listen any more?
Merrily opened her eyes, standing by the window, moonlight sugaring the trees on Cole Hill, no easy answers written in the sky.
PART THREE
Bell
To 20th-century eyes such colossal expenditure on unproductive religious ritual may seem strange, but in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries most people were in no doubt that what kept mankind from both spiritual perdition and temporal catastrophe was an incessant flow of prayers to God from the priesthood and from religious orders. It was more vital expenditure than commercial investment or relief of poverty.
Ludlow had become the elite leisure centre of the middle marches in the 18th century and the castle was the focus of this burgeoning tourist industry… John Byng thought it was ‘one of the best towns for a genteel family of small fortune to retire to… Ludlow was thus one of the first tourist “honey pots” in England.’
24
Ancient Incense
Merrily felt very small and exposed.
She was wearing jeans and a green fleece with a torn pocket. She had a canvas shoulder bag with her
