Remains of an Altar

‘I’m not happy—’

‘—To discuss an ongoing problem with a roomful of people, probably including the media.’

‘I don’t think the press would cover anything that local, do you? Hope not.’

‘You don’t think,’ Sophie said. ‘That’s hardly satisfactory, is it? I’d be inclined to get the Rector to absolutely guarantee it. What’s the format going to be?’

‘I listen to the evidence and then outline the options.’

‘Oh, I see. You present them with a series of options, and then they vote on it?’

‘No, I listen to what they have to say and then I make a recommendation based on my … experience.’

Sophie gave Merrily a resigned look and opened the desk diary.

‘When is it? And where?’

‘Wednesday evening at the church. They haven’t got a village hall in Wychehill, I think it was converted. This gets tagged on to the end of the bi-monthly parish meeting, which is open to the public—Look, I’m not going to go in cold, Sophie. I’m going to check it all out thoroughly.’

‘In which case you really don’t have much time.’

‘Which is why, unless you can think of anything more pressing, I think I’d better go back there now.’

Merrily walked over to the window. There was something else…

‘Oh yeah … Sophie, have there been any inquiries to the Diocese from Wychehill – anybody asking for my number?’

‘No. I’d have been told. I’m very strict about that. And they don’t give out your number, they give this number in the first instance. Why?’

‘Nothing, really.’

Merrily looked out of the window over the Cathedral green and sunny Broad Street with its library and museum, its extensive hotel, its classical-pillared Roman Catholic church, its shops and cafes … and at least two well-attested ghost stories that she could think of.

From behind Merrily heard the faint clinking of the chain on Sophie’s glasses as she shook her head in sorrow – with just a hint, Merrily thought, of foreboding.

5 Between the Lines

On top of the hill there was a clearing and the remains of what might have been a cairn of stones.

Lol had never been all the way up before, but Jane had said there was something of serious, serious importance here, and not just to her or even to the whole community of Ledwardine. This was possibly a national treasure.

She’d dragged him out to the edge of the village and then across the main road and over the fields to the first stile, which had a public footpath sign next to it. But if there ever had been a footpath it was long overgrown, and it had been a steep and slippery climb to the top of Cole Hill.

‘You can’t see much now,’ Jane said, among the gorse clumps on the summit, ‘but there was a Celtic settlement here once. So obviously that makes it Ledwardine’s holy hill, right?’

‘If you say so.’

Lol had felt slightly uncomfortable about walking through the woods with his girlfriend’s daughter, her navel exposed below the sawn-off summer top.

No, actually, it wasn’t so much this as her attitude: intense, no frivolity, Jane carrying a sense of purpose like storm clouds around her, intimations of war.

Now she was telling him about the name. How, in The Old Straight Track, Alfred Watkins had identified three other Cole hills, or similar, in Herefordshire. One definition of the word, apparently, was juggler … or wizard.

‘“Cole-prophet” – that’s another ancient term,’ Jane said. ‘So Cole Hill – serious, serious magical associations, Lol. I hadn’t realized that. And if I hadn’t realized it…’

Jane stood in the sunlight. Her hair was pulled back and her eyes seemed to be full of tiny sparks.

‘We live in an enchanted landscape, Laurence. And most of us just don’t see any of it any more. How dispiriting is that?’

Below them, the village was wrapped in greenery, and the mist made smoke rings around the church steeple. The view was dizzyingly seductive: you felt that if you fell into it, it would just absorb you and by the time you reached the ground you’d have evaporated.

Lol shook his head. His day had already been tilted. Monday mornings, he needed to establish a work pattern for the week: sit at the desk by the window, write songs. His livelihood. What he did. What he was supposed to do. So why had he been almost grateful to see Jane crossing the street from the vicarage, wearing her skimpy orange top and her sense of purpose?

Jane said she had the day off school to work on a project connected with A-level art, a portfolio she was compiling on landscape mysteries. Something in connection with this that she needed to discuss, and Merrily had gone off early to meet some angsty priest, so, like, if Lol could spare just one hour…

All around Cole Hill the paths were overgrown; there were broken stiles and barbed-wire fences. It had taken most of an hour just to get here.

Jane shouldered her canvas bag.

‘Nobody comes up here now, and that’s wrong. We all need to go to the high places. It says that in the Bible, so even Mum—’

‘Had you been to this … particular high place before, Jane?’

She frowned. ‘I’m here now, that’s what matters. It’s where the ancient energy is drawn down, to feed the village spiritually, to feed its soul. You know?’

‘Alfred Watkins actually said that, did he? About feeding energy into Ledwardine?’

‘Not exactly, but he would have said it if he hadn’t been a magistrate and stuff, with civic duties and all that crap. You have to read between the lines, Lol.’

‘Right.’

Lol would have to agree that reading Alfred Watkins entirely altered your awareness of the humps and bumps of the countryside – the way Watkins’s own had been altered when he’d stood on top of a hill not far from here and noticed, in a flaring of wild revelation, how ancient sites, from prehistoric stones and mounds to medieval churches, seemed to have been arranged in straight lines. But Watkins had seen them as the earliest British trackways; most of the rest was New Age conjecture.

‘So what do we do now, Jane?’

‘Watch the church. Keep watching the steeple.’

The steeple must have been half a mile away, at least, but from up here you felt you could prick your hand on the tip of the weathercock. Beyond it, to the west, you could see distant Hay Bluff over the mist, a dent in the sky at the end of the Black Mountains.

Jane put on her sunglasses.

‘And then we walk towards it.’

Lol followed her, keeping a few feet behind, sure now that something else was bothering her. Some problem between her and Eirion? They’d been together a long time. Maybe too long, for teenagers.

‘We came up the easy way,’ Jane said over her shoulder. ‘But we have to follow a different route down, to more or less keep to the line. The path zigzags a bit, but if we keep the steeple in view…’

‘Eirion OK, Jane?’

‘Fine.’ Her voice was a little too light. ‘Off to uni in September.’

‘Where?’

‘Depends on his A-level results. Oxford, if he does well. Bristol or Cardiff if he fluffs. Or, if he really fluffs, one of these joints that used to be an FE college until, like, last week?’

‘I see.’