‘So the woman made it up?’ Ice particles in Sophie’s voice. ‘The whole thing?’
‘Either that or her perceptions have been conditioned by her reading habits, which seems unlikely.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Presumably you’ll go back and ask her.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘That should be revelatory.’
‘I’m almost looking forward to it, in a rather unChristian way. I’ll try and get over to Monkland tomorrow after the morning worship. With or without a Special Branch tail.’
‘I’m sorry, Merrily — I may have misheard.’
‘You didn’t.’ Merrily looked at the cigarettes on the desk, decided against. ‘Sources close to Gaol Street intimate I’ve been checked out by the security services. Jane, too — the heritage terrorist.’
‘This is purely because of your unsolicited proximity to the business interests of the heir to the throne?’
‘I don’t know, Sophie.’
‘But you’re a minister in the Church of England.’
‘That makes me harmless? Think about it.’
‘The amount of surveillance in this country is becoming quite terrifying.’ A pause. ‘Incidentally, have you had a chance to read Canon Dobbs’s file on the Prince of Wales?’
‘Not really. It’s on the desk here. I’ll try and have a look later.’
‘Well,’ Sophie said, ‘I realize we live in troubled times, but I think this has gone far enough. Leave it with me.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I think I’m going to call the Bishop in London.’
Sophie was probably the only person, outside his immediate family, with the Bishop’s mobile number.
‘I’m not sure that would really—’
‘Will you be in tonight, Merrily?’
‘Yeah, but I don’t want to ruin
‘Merrily,’ Sophie said with some severity. ‘This is what I
Merrily sighed, pulled over the old black box file and opened it up. Unwrapped a wodge of A4 copier paper, held together by two rubber bands, the top page splashing two headlines.
CHARLES IN HEALTH STORM
Both dated back to the early 1980s when the Prince of Wales, newly married to Diana Spencer, had been appointed President of the British Medical Association, the conservative and seriously cautious organization representing doctors in the UK.
The BMA was not into alternative therapy. In fact, the hatred of the association for practitioners who had not been through the System knew few bounds.
You would have thought these guys might have known better than to appoint, as their figurehead, a man whose famously healthy family had a long history of consulting osteopaths, homeopaths and various spiritual healers.
The first warning came at a dinner for the new President. In his speech, the Prince said how touched he’d been that the BMA should have even considered electing him, adding,
The laughter, Merrily thought, must have been hollow. She’d thought she remembered the row, but was now realizing that she couldn’t have fully absorbed it, nor been knowledgeable enough at the time to recognize its significance.
One of the cuttings had an edited transcript of Charles’s speech to the BMA.
It was dynamite, basically.
One of the least attractive traits of various professional bodies is the deeply ingrained suspicion and downright hostility which can exist towards anything unorthodox. I suppose it is inevitable that something which is different should arouse strong feelings on the part of the majority whose conventional wisdom is being challenged.
I suppose, too, that human nature is such that we are frequently prevented from seeing that what is taken for today’s unorthodoxy is probably going to be tomorrow’s convention …
Perhaps we just have to accept it is God’s will that the unorthodox individual is doomed to years of frustration, ridicule and failure in order to act out his role in the scheme of things, until his day arrives and mankind is ready to receive his message … a message which he probably finds hard to explain himself but which he knows comes from a far deeper source than conscious thought …
Merrily lit a cigarette. Amazing to think he’d actually said that to a bunch of doctors.
It got better — or worse, depending on your angle of approach.
Through the centuries, healing has been practised by folk healers who are guided by traditional wisdom that sees illness as a disorder of the whole person, involving not only the patient’s body but his mind, his self-image, his dependence on the physical and social environment, as well as his relation to …
Bloody hell.
… the cosmos. I would suggest that the whole impossible edifice of modern medicine, for all its breathtaking successes, is, like the tower of Pisa, slightly off-balance.
You could imagine some of Britain’s leading physicians having to leave, at this point, to check their own blood pressure. Especially if they looked closely at the Prince’s sources.
Merrily found an interview with Charles, which Dobbs, or someone, had marked down the side in what looked like felt pen.
It seemed that Charles — how had she avoided knowing about all this? — had become interested, apparently via the writings of Carl Jung, in the power of dreams, coincidence and what he called
In other words, the idea that individuals were open to guidance from … elsewhere — the collective unconscious. The cosmos. That they should be alert for psychic pointers.
One of which had apparently manifested while Charles was in his study attempting to draft his speech to the BMA. He was quoted as saying.
It was the most extraordinary thing. I was sitting at my desk at the time and I happened to look at my bookshelf and my eyes suddenly settled on a book about Paracelsus. So I took the book down and read it, and as a result I tried to make a speech around Paracelsus and perhaps a relook at what he was saying and the ideas he propounded. Wasn’t it time to think again about the relationship between mind and body, or body and spirit?
Paracelsus. Rennaissance physician and … herbalist?
Also, an occultist of the Renaissance period. A magician.
Deep waters.
11
Because it was Raining
‘As above …’ Jane did the arm movements ‘… so below.’
At least she seemed happier, the sullen face replaced by the concentration face. It always paid to consult Jane. They’d built a log fire in the parlour and eaten from trays, and Jane had produced one of her paperbacks with planets and pentagrams on the front.
‘Paracelsus was just the name he adopted, OK? His real name was — this is interesting — Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, from which the word
