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A Crown of Lights
By Phil Rickman Atlantic Books Ltd
Copyright © 2001 Phil Rickman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85789-018-4
CHAPTER 1
The Local People
Betty was determined To Keep the lid on the cauldron for as long as possible, which might just – the way she'd been feeling lately – mean for ever.
The arrival of the old box was no help.
It turned up on the back step at St Michael's only a few days after they had moved into the farmhouse and a week after Betty turned twenty-seven. It wasn't her kind of present. It seemed like a direct threat – or at least confirmation that their new life was unlikely to be the idyll that Robin expected.
For Betty, the first inkling of this – if you could call such experiences inklings – had already occurred only minutes before on that same weird evening.
The new year had been blown in, battered and dripping, and the wind and the rain still bullied the hills. Tonight, though, it looked like being clean and still and iron-hard with frost, and Robin had persuaded Betty to come with him to the top of the church tower – their church tower – to witness the brilliant winter sunset.
This was the first time she'd been up there, and the first time she'd ever been into the church out of daylight hours. It wasn't yet five p.m. but evening still came early to the Radnor Valley in late January – the dark side of Candlemas – and Robin was leaning over the cracked parapet to watch the final bloodrush over an otherwise unblemished sky.
'I guess what we oughta do,' he murmured playfully, 'is shake down that old moon.'
The Forest was laid out before them: darkening storybook hills, bearded with bracken. There were few trees – misleadingly, it had been named forest in the medieval sense of a place for hunting. Betty wondered how much of that still went on: the lamping of hares, the baiting of badgers. Maybe some night Robin would be standing up here and would see a party of silent men with guns and dogs. And then the shit would fly.
'So, uh, how would you...' Robin straightened up, slapping moss from his hands, '... how would you feel about that?'
'You mean now, don't you?' With both hands, Betty pushed back her wild, blonde hair. She backed away from the edge, which had got her thinking about the death of Major Wilshire. Down below, about six feet out from the base of the tower, two flat tombstones had been exposed beneath a bush blasted back by the gales. That was probably where he'd fallen. She shivered. 'You actually mean out here?'
He shrugged. 'Why not?' He wore his orange fleece and his ludicrous flattened fez-thing with tiny mirrors around the side. The way Betty saw it, Robin Thorogood, having grown up in America, had yet to develop a functioning sense of the absurd.
'Why not?' Betty didn't remember exactly when 'shaking down the moon' had become his personal euphemism for sex, but she didn't altogether care for the term. 'Because this is, you know, January?'
'We could bring up blankets.' Robin did his abandoned puppy face.
Which no longer worked on Betty. 'Mother of God, I bet it's not even safe! Look at the floor ... the walls! We wind up down in the bloody belfry, in a cloud of plaster dust, with multiple fractures, what happens then?'
'Aw, come on. It's been here for six ... eight centuries. Just because —'
'And probably falling apart for most of the last hundred years!'
Betty gripped one of the battlements, then let go quickly in alarm, convinced for a second that a lump of mortar, or whatever medieval mixture those old masons used, was actually moving underneath it. The entire tower could be crumbling, for all they knew; their funds had run to only a cursory survey by a local bloke who'd said, 'Oh, just make sure it doesn't fall down on anybody, and you'll be all right.' They ought to bring in a reliable builder to give the place a going-over before they contemplated even having a picnic up here. If they could ever afford a builder, which seemed unlikely.
Robin stood warrior-like, with his back to the fallen sun, and she knew that in his mind he was wearing animal skins and there was a short, thick blade at his hip. Very like the figure dominating his painting-in-progress: Lord Madoc the intergalactic Celt, hero of Kirk Blackmore's Sword of Twilight. Seven hundred pages of total bollocks, but it was misty cover designs for the likes of Blackmore that were going to have to meet the mortgage premiums until Betty dared come out locally as a herbalist and healer, or whatever was socially acceptable.
'Just I had a sensation of what it would be like afterwards,' the great visionary artist burbled on, unabashed, 'lying here on our backs, watching the swirl of the cosmos, from our own —'
'Whereas I'm getting a real sensation of watching the swirl of tomato soup with croutons.' Betty moved to the steps, took hold of the oily rope, feeling about with a trainered foot for the top step. 'Come on. We'll have years to do all that.'
Her words lingered in a void as hollow as these ruins. Betty could not lose the feeling that this time next year they would not even be here.
'You know your trouble?' Robin suddenly yelled. 'You're becoming sensible before your time.'
'What?' She spun at him, though knowing that he'd spoken without thinking ... that it was just petulance ... that she should let it go.
'Well ...' He looked uneasy. 'You know ...'
'No, I don't.'
'OK, OK ...' Making placatory patting gestures with his hands, too late.
'Wrong word, maybe.'
'No, you've said it now. In normal life we're not supposed to be sensible because we're living the fantasy. Like we're really not supposed to bother about everyday stuff like falling to our deaths down these bloody crumbling steps, because —'
'There's a guy over there,' Robin said. 'In the field down by the creek.'
'It's a brook.' Betty paused on the top step.
'He's looking up.' Robin moved back to the rim of the tower. 'He's carrying something.'
'A spear of light, perhaps?' Betty said sarcastically. 'A glowing trident?'
'A bag, I think. A carrier bag. No, he's not in the field. I believe he's on the footway.'
'Which, of course, is a public footpath – which makes him entitled to be there.'
'Naw, he's checking us out.' The sunset made unearthly jewels out of the tiny round mirrors on Robin's fez. 'Hey!' he shouted down. 'Can I help you?'
'Stop it!' Sometimes Betty felt she was a lot older than Robin, instead of two years younger. Whole lifetimes older.
'He went away.'
'Of course he did. He went home to warm his bum by a roaring fire of dry, seasoned hardwood logs.'
'You're gonna throw that one at me all night, I can tell.'
'Probably. While we're sitting with our coats on in front of a lukewarm stove full of sizzling green pine.'
'Yeah, yeah, the wood guy ripped me off. He won't do it again.'
'Dead right he won't. First rule of country living: show them, from the very start, that you're not an urban innocent.'
Robin followed her down the narrow, broken stone steps. 'While being careful not to antagonize them, right?'
Betty stopped on the spiral, looked back up over her shoulder. It was too dark to see his face.
'Sooner or later,' she said, 'there is going to be antagonism – from some of them at least. It's a phase we're going to have to go through and come out the other side with some kind of mutual respect. This is not Islington. This is not even Shrewsbury. In Radnorshire, the wheels of change would grind exceeding slow, if they'd ever got around to inventing the wheel.'
'So what you're saying, making converts could take time?'
'We won't live that long. Tolerance is what we aspire to: the ultimate prize.'
'Jeez, you're soooo — Oh, shit —'
Betty whirled round. He'd stumbled on a loose piece of masonry, was hanging on to the hand-rope.
'You OK?'
'Third-degree rope burn, is all. I imagine the flesh will grow back within only weeks.'
She thought of Major Wilshire again and felt unsettled.
'I was born just twenty miles from here,' she said soberly. 'People don't change much in rural areas. I don't want to cause offence, and I don't think we need to.'
'You changed.'
'It's not the same. I'm not from yere, as they say.' Betty stepped out of the tower doorway and onto the frozen mud of what she supposed had once been the chancel. 'My parents just happened to be working here when I was born. They were from Off. I am, essentially, from Off.'
'Off what?'
'That's what they say. It's their word. If you're an immigrant you're "from Off". I'd forgotten that. I was not quite eleven when we left there. And then we were in Yorkshire, and Yorkshire flattens all the traces.'
Curtains of cold red light hung from the heavens into the roofless nave. When Robin emerged from the tower entrance, she took his cold hand in her even colder ones.
'Sorry to be a frigid bitch. It's been a heavy, heavy day.'
The church was mournful around her. It was like a huge, blackened sheep skeleton, with its ribs opened out. Incongruously, it actually came with the house. Robin had been ecstatic. For him, it had been the deciding factor.
Betty let go of Robin's hand. She was now facing where the altar must have been – the English side. And it was here, on this frigid January evening, that she had the flash.
A shivering sense of someone at prayer – a man in a long black garment, stained. His face unshaven, glowing with sweat and an unambiguous vivid fear. He'd discovered or identified or been told something he couldn't live with. In an instant, Betty felt she was suffocating in a miasma of body odour and anguish.
No! She hauled in a cold breath, pulling off her woollen hat, shaking out her sheaf of blonde hair. Go away. Don't want you.
Cold. Damp. Nothing else. Shook herself like a wet dog. Gone.
This was how it happened. Always without warning, rarely even a change in the temperature.
'And it's not officially a church any more,' Robin was reminding her – he hadn't, of course, sensed a thing. 'So this is not about causing offence. Long as we don't knock it down, we can do what we like here. This is so cool. We get to reclaim an old, pagan sacred place!'
And Betty thought in cold dismay, What kind of sacred is this? But what she actually said, surprised at her own calmness, was, 'I just think we have to take it slowly. I know the place is decommissioned, but there're bound to be local people whose families worshipped here for centuries. And whose grandparents got married here and ... and buried, of course.'
There were still about a dozen gravestones and tombs visible around the church and, although all the remains were supposed to have been taken away and reinterred after the diocese dumped the building itself, Betty knew that when they started to garden here they'd inevitably unearth bones.
'And maybe,' Robin said slyly, 'just maybe... there are people whose distant ancestors worshipped here before there was a Christian church.'
'You're pushing it there.'
'I like pushing it.'
'Yeah,' Betty agreed bitterly.
They moved out of the ruined church and across the winterhard field and then over the yard to the back of the house. She'd left a light on in the hall. It was the only light they could see anywhere – although if they walked around to the front garden, they would find the meagre twinklings of the village of Old Hindwell dotted throughout the high, bare hedge.
She could hear the rushing of the Hindwell Brook, which almost islanded this place when, like now, it was swollen. There'd been weeks of hard rain, while they'd been making regular trips back and forth from their Shrewsbury flat in Robin's cousin's van, bringing all the books and stuff and wondering if they were doing the right thing.
Or at least Betty had. Robin had been obsessed from the moment he saw the ruined church and the old yew trees around it in a vague circle and the mighty Burfa Camp in the background and the enigmatic Four Stones less than a couple of miles away. And when he'd heard of the recent archaeological discoveries – the indications of a ritual palisade believed to be the second largest of its kind in Europe – it had blown him clean away. From then on, he needed to live here.
'There you go.' He bent down to the back doorstep. 'What'd I tell ya?' He lifted up something whitish.
'What's that?'
'It is a carrier bag – Tesco, looks like. The individual by the river had one with him. I'm guessing this is it.'
'He left it on our step?'
'House-warming present, maybe? It's kinda heavy.'
'Put it down,' Betty said quietly.
'Huh?'
'I'm serious. Put it back on the step, and go inside, put on the lights.'
'Jeeeeeeez!' Robin tossed back his head and howled at the newborn moon. 'I do not understand you! One minute I'm over reacting – which, OK, I do, I overreact sometimes, I confess – and this is some harmless old guy making his weary way home to his humble fireside ... and the next, he's like dumping ten pounds of Semtex or some shit —'
'Just put it down, Robin.'
Exasperated, Robin let the bag fall. It clumped solidly on the stone. Robin unlocked the back door.
Betty waited for him to enter first. She wouldn't touch the bag.
It was knotted at the top. She watched Robin wrench it open. A sheet of folded notepaper fell out. He spread it out on the table and she read the type over his shoulder.
Dear Mr and Mrs Thorogood,
In the course of renovation work by the previous occupants of your house, this receptacle was found in a cavity in the wall beside the fireplace. The previous occupants preferred not to keep it and gave it away. It has been suggested you may wish to restore it to its proper place.
With all good wishes,
The Local People
'"The Local People"?'
Robin let the typewritten note flutter to the tabletop. 'All of them? The entire population of Old Hindwell got together to present the newcomers with a wooden box with ...' He lifted the hinged lid, '... some paper in it.'
The box was of oak. It didn't look all that old. Maybe a century, Betty thought. It was the size of a pencil box she'd had as a kid – narrow, coffin-shaped. You could probably fit it in the space left by a single extracted brick.
She was glad there was only paper in there, not... well, bones or something. She'd never seriously thought of Semtex, only bones. Why would she think that? She found she was shivering slightly, so kept her red ski jacket on.
Robin was excited, naturally: a mysterious wooden box left by a shadowy stranger, a cryptic note ... major, major turn-on for him. She knew that within the next hour or so he'd have found the original hiding place of that box, if he had to pull the entire fireplace to pieces. He'd taken off his fleece and his mirrored fez. The warrior on the battlements had been replaced by the big schoolboy innocent.
He flicked on all the kitchen lights – just dangling bulbs, as yet, which made the room look even starker than in daylight. They hadn't done anything with this room so far. There was a Belfast sink and a cranky old Rayburn and, under the window, their pine dining table and chairs from the flat. The table was much too small for this kitchen; up against the wall, under a window full of the day's end, it looked like... well, an altar. For which this was not the correct place – and anyway, Betty was not yet sure she wanted an altar in the house. Part of the reason for finding a rural hideaway was to consider her own future, which – soon she'd have to confess to Robin – might not involve the Craft.
'The paper looks old,' Robin said. 'Well ... the ink went brown.'
'Gosh, Rob, that must date it back to ... oh, arguably pre-1980.'
He gave her one of those looks which said: Why have you no basic romance in you any more?
Which wasn't true. She simply felt you should distinguish between true insight and passing impressions, between fleeting sensations and real feelings.
The basic feeling she had – especially since her sense of the praying man in the church – was one of severe unease. She would rather the box had not been delivered. She wished she didn't have to know what was inside it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Crown of Lights by Phil Rickman. Copyright © 2001 Phil Rickman. Excerpted by permission of Atlantic Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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