Old Hindwell Post office was a brick-built nineteenth-century building a little way down from the pub, on the opposite side of the street. Betty was there by eight-fifteen on this dry but bitter Monday morning. The newsagent side of the business opened at eight. There were no other customers inside.
‘Daily Mail, please.’
The postmistress, Mrs Eleri Cobbold, glanced quickly at Betty and went stiff.
‘None left, I’m sorry.’
‘You’ve only been open fifteen minutes.’ Betty eyed her steadily. It was the first time she’d been in here. She saw a thin-faced woman of about sixty. She saw a woman who had already read today’s Daily Mail.
‘Only got ordered copies, isn’t it?’ Mrs Cobbold swallowed. ‘Besides two extras. Which we’ve sold.’
Betty was not giving up. She glanced at the public photocopier at the other end of the shop. ‘In that case, could I perhaps borrow one of the ordered papers and make a copy of one particular page?’
Mrs Cobbold blinked nervously. ‘Well, I don’t…’
Betty sought her eyes, but Mrs Cobbold kept looking away as though her narrow, God-fearing soul was in danger. She glanced towards the door and seemed very relieved when it was opened by a slim, tweed-suited man with a neat beard.
‘Oh, good morning, Doctor.’
‘A sharp day, Eleri.’
‘Yes. Yes, indeed.’ Mrs Cobbold bent quickly below the counter and produced a Daily Mail. She didn’t look at Betty. ‘You had better take mine. Thirty-five pence, please.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ Mrs Cobbold whispered.
This was ridiculous.
‘Thank you.’ Betty also bought a bottle of milk and a pot of local honey. She took her purse from her shoulder bag. She didn’t smile. ‘And if I could have a carton of bat’s blood as well, please.’
This, and the presence in the shop of the doctor, seemed to release something.
‘Take your paper and don’t come in here again, please,’ Mrs Cobbold said shrilly.
The doctor raised a ginger eyebrow.
Betty started to shake her head. ‘I really can’t believe this.’
‘And’ — Mrs Cobbold looked at her at last — ‘you can tell that husband of yours that if he wants to conduct affairs with married women, we don’t want to have to watch it on the street at night. You tell him that.’
Betty’s mouth fell open as Mrs Cobbold stared defiantly at her. The doctor smiled and held open the door for her.
Robin paced the freaking kitchen.
She wouldn’t let him fetch the paper. She didn’t trust him not to overreact if there were any comments… to behave, in fact, like a man who’d been cold-shouldered by his wife, told his artwork was a piece of shit and then stitched up by the media.
She’d been awesomely and unapproachably silent most of yesterday, like she was half out of the world, sealing herself off from the awful implications of the whole nation — worse still, the whole village — knowing where they were coming from. Implications? Like what implications? A lynch mob? The stake? Their house torched? Was this the twenty-first century or, like, 1650?
Later in the day he’d actually found her sunk into a book on the seventeenth-century witch-hunts. The chapter was headed ‘Suckling Demons’; it was about women accused of having sex with the Devil. But she wouldn’t talk about it. He just wanted to snatch away the book and feed it to the stove.
She’d hardly moved from the kitchen for the rest of the morning, drinking strong herbal tea and smoking — Robin counted — eleven cigarettes. And still he hadn’t told her the truly awful news, about Blackmore, because things were bad enough. He’d just spent the entire day trying to persuade her just to talk to him, which was like trying to lure a wounded vixen from her lair.
Was she blaming him for the truth leaking out — like he’d been down the pub handing out invitations to their next sabbat. And the journalists… well, how was he supposed to have handled them? Invite the bastards in to watch them perform the Great Rite on the hearthrug?
Some chance.
If he’d had the brains he was born with, she’d told him, her voice now inflected with hard Yorkshire — this was while they were still speaking — he’d’ve kept very quiet, not answered the door. There was no car there, so they could quite easily have been away from home.
What? This had made him actually start pulling at his hair. Like, how the fuck was he supposed to know it was the god-damned media at the door? Might have been insurance salesmen, the Jehovah’s freaking Witnesses. How could he have known?
No reply. No reply either when he’d twice called George Webster and Vivvie, up in Manchester, to see if they knew anything about this damn TV show. He’d left two messages on their answering machine.
And then yesterday, after a lunch of tomato soup and stale rolls, Betty had said she needed time to think and went outside to walk alone, leaving Robin eking out the very last of the sodden pine wood. Maybe she went to the church to try and communicate with the Reverend freaking Penney. Robin wasn’t interested any more. When she came back, she started moving furniture around and drinking yet more herbal tea.
Maybe there was something on her mind he didn’t know about. Dare he ask? What was the damn use?
It was like she was waiting for something even worse to happen.
This was all down to Ellis. No question there. It was Ellis sicked the press on them.
Goddamn Christian bastard.
She came in from the post office and laid a newspaper on the kitchen table. She didn’t even look at Robin. ‘I’m going to change,’ she said and went out. He heard her going upstairs.
The room felt cold. The colours had faded.
This was bad, wasn’t it? It was going to be worse than he could have imagined, although he accepted that he maybe hadn’t endeared himself to the Mail hacks by going for their camera like that.
He looked at the paper. At least it wasn’t on the front. Nervously, he turned over the first page.
Holy shit…
Just the whole of page three, was all.
Down the right-hand side was a long picture of St Michael’s Church, in silhouette against a sunset sky, the tower starkly framed by winter trees. It was a good picture, black and white. The headline above it, however, was just crazy: ‘Witches possess parish church. “Nightmare evil in our midst,” warns rector’.
‘Evil?’ Robin shouted. ‘They really listened to that crazy motherfucker?’
But it was the big picture, in colour, that made him cringe the most.
It was a grainy close-up of a snarling man, eyes burning under long, shaggy black hair. On his sweat-shiny cheeks were streaks of paint, diluted — if you wanted the truth — by bitter tears, but who was ever gonna think that? This was blue paint. It had obviously come off the cloth he’d used to wipe his eyes. In the picture, it looked like freaking woad. The guy looked like he would cut out your heart before raping your wife and slaughtering your children. Aligned with the picture, the story read:
This is the face of the new ‘priest’ at an ancient village church.
Robin Thorogood is a professional artist. He and his wife, Betty, are also practising witches. Now the couple have become the owners of a medieval parish church — while the local rector has to hold his services in the village hall.
‘This is my worst nightmare come true,’ says the Rev. Nicholas Ellis. ‘It is the manifestation of a truly insidious evil in our midst.’
Now the acting Bishop of Hereford, the Rt Rev. Bernard Dunmore, is to look into the bizarre situation. ‘It concerns me very deeply,’ he said last night.
It is more than thirty years since the church, at Old Hindwell, Powys, was decommissioned by the Church of England. For most of that time, it stood undisturbed on the land of farming brothers John and Ifan Prosser. When the last brother, John, died two years ago it passed out of the family and was bought by the Thorogoods just before Christmas.
Robin Thorogood, who is American-born, says he and his wife represent ‘the fastest-growing religion in the country’.
He claims that many of Britain’s old churches were built on former pagan ritual sites — one of which, he says, he and his wife have now repossessed.
However, when invited to explain their plans for the church, Mr Thorogood became abusive and attacked Daily Mail photographer Stuart Joyce, screaming, ‘I’ll turn you into a f-ing toad.’
Now villagers say they are terrified that the couple will desecrate the ruined church by conducting pagan rites there. They say they have already seen strange lights in the ruins late at night.
The Thorogoods’ nearest neighbour, local councillor Gareth Prosser, a farmer and nephew of the former owners, said, ‘This has always been a God-fearing community and we will not tolerate this kind of sacrilege.
‘These people sneaked in, pretending to be just an ordinary young couple.
‘Although this is a community of old-established families, newcomers have always been welcome here as long as they respect our way of life.
‘But we feel these people have betrayed our trust and that is utterly despicable.’
‘Trust?’ Robin exploded. ‘What did that fat asshole ever trust us with?’ Jeez, he’d hardly even spoken to the guy till a couple days ago, and then it was like Robin was some kind of vagrant.
He sat down, beating his fist on the table. It was a while before he realized the phone was ringing. By that time, Betty had come down and answered it.
When she came off the phone she was white with anger.
‘Who?’ Robin said.
She didn’t answer.
‘Please?’
She said in low voice, ‘Vivvie.’
‘Good of them to call back after only a day. Did they know anything about that programme? For all it matters.’
‘She was on the programme.’
He sat up. ‘What?’
‘They were both there in the studio, but only Vivienne got to talk.’ Betty’s voice was clipped and precise. ‘It was a late-night forum about the growth of Dark Age paganism in twenty-first-century Britain. They had Wiccans and Druids, Odinists — also some Christians to generate friction. It’s a friction programme.’
Robin snorted. TV was a psychic drain.
‘Vivienne was one of a group of experienced, civilized Wiccans put together by Ned Bain for that programme.’
‘Jesus,’ Robin said, ‘if she was one of the civilized ones, I sure wouldn’t like to be alone with the wild children of Odin.’
And Ned Bain? Who, as well as being some kind of rich, society witch, just happened to be an editorial director at Harvey-Calder, proprietors of Talisman Books. Robin had already felt an irrational anger that Bain should have allowed Blackmore to dump a fellow pagan — although, realistically, in a big outfit like that, it was unlikely Bain had anything at all to do with the bastard.
Betty said, ‘She claims she lost her cool when some woman priest became abusive.’
‘She doesn’t have any freaking cool.’
‘This priest was from Hereford. Ned Bain had argued that, after two thousand years of strife and corruption, the Christian Church was finally on the way out and Vivienne informed the Hereford priest that the erosion had already started in her own backyard, with pagans claiming back the old pagan sites, taking them back from the Church that had stolen them.’
Robin froze. ‘You have got to be fucking kidding.’
She didn’t reply.
‘She… Jeez, that dumb bitch! She named us? Right there on network TV?’
‘No. Some local journalist must have picked it up and tracked us down.’
‘And sold us to the Mail.’
‘The paper that supports suburban values,’ Betty said.
The phone rang. Robin went for it.
‘Mr Thorogood?’
‘He’s away,’ Robin said calmly. ‘He went back to the States.’ He hung up. ‘That the way to handle the media?’
Betty walked over and switched on the machine. ‘That’s a better way.’
‘They’ll only show up at the door.’
‘Well, I won’t be here.’
He saw that she was wearing her ordinary person outfit, the one with the ordinary skirt. And this time with a silk scarf around her neck. It panicked him.
‘Look,’ he cried, ‘listen to me. I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry about that picture. I’m sorry for looking like an asshole. I just… I just lost it, you know? I’d just had… I’d just taken this really bad call.’
‘From your friend?’ Betty said.
‘Huh?’
‘From your friend in the village?’
The phone rang again.
‘From Al,’ he said. ‘Al at Talisman.’
The machine picked up.
‘This is Juliet Pottinger. You appear to have telephoned me over the weekend. I am now back home, if you would like to call again. Thank you.’
‘Look’ — Robin waved a contemptuous hand at the paper — ‘this is just… complete shit. Like, are we supposed to feel threatened because the freaking Bishop of Hereford finds it a matter warranting deep concern? Because loopy Nick Ellis sees us as symptoms of some new epidemic of an old disease? What is he, the Witchfinder freaking General, now?’
He leapt up, moved toward her.
Betty’s hair was loose and tumbled. Her face was flushed. She looked more beautiful than he’d ever seen her. She always did look beautiful. And he was losing her. He’d been losing her from the moment they arrived here. He felt like his heart was swollen to the size of the room.
‘We’re not gonna let them take us down, are we? Betty, this is… this is you and me against the world, right?’
Betty detached her car keys from the hook by the door.
‘Please,’ Robin said. ‘Please don’t go.’
Betty said quietly, ‘I’m not leaving you, Robin.’
He put his head in his hands and wept. When he took them down again, she was no longer there.