‘A box?’ Lizzie Wilshire looked vaguely puzzled. But more vague than puzzled, Betty thought.
‘Inside the fireplace.’
‘I did rather like that fireplace,’ Mrs Wilshire recalled. ‘It had a wonderful old beam across the top. It was the one emphatic feature of a rather drab room.’
‘Yes, the living room.’
‘You thought there ought to be beams across the ceiling too. Bryan said there still must be, underneath all the plaster. But I did like the fireplace, if precious little else.’
The fireplace to which Mrs Wilshire’s chair was presently pulled close was forlornly modern, made of brownish dressed stone. It surrounded a bronze-enamelled oil-fired stove — undernourished flames behind orange-tinted glass.
Mrs Wilshire frowned. ‘It also had woodworm, though.’
‘The box?’
‘The beam, dear. That worried me a little, until Bryan said, “Lizzie, it will take about three hundred years for the worms to eat through it.” I would still have wanted it treated, though.’ She blinked at Betty. ‘Have you had it treated, yet?’
‘Not yet. Er, Mrs Wilshire… there was a box. It was apparently found in the fireplace, while you were having some repairs done to the walls. It contained a paper with a sort of… prayer. I suppose you’d call it a prayer.’
‘Oh!’ Understanding came at last to the bulging eyes of frail Lizzie Wilshire — big eyes which made her look like an extraterrestrial or a wizened, expensive cat. ‘You mean the witch paper!’
‘Yes,’ Betty said softly, ‘the witch paper.’
It wasn’t that she was particularly old, early seventies, Betty reckoned, but she had arthritis — obvious in her hands — and accepted her own helplessness. Clearly, she’d never been used to doing very much for herself or making decisions. ‘It’s so confusing now,’ she said. ‘So many things I know nothing about. Things I don’t want to have to know about. Why should I?’
She was still living in this colonial-style bungalow on the edge of New Radnor, the tiny town, or big village, where she and the Major had lived for over fifteen years, since his retirement. Just a stopgap, the Major always said, until they found the right place… an interesting place, a place he could play with.
She told Betty how she thought he’d finally accepted that he was too old to take on something needing extensive refurbishment when, out on a Sunday drive, they’d found — not three miles away, at Old Hindwell — the house with which Major Bryan Wilshire, to the utter dismay of his wife, had fallen hopelessly in love.
‘It was empty, of course, when we saw it. It had belonged to two reclusive bachelor farmers called Prosser. The last surviving one had finally been taken into a nursing home. So you can imagine the state it was in.’
Betty already knew all this from the estate agents, and from their own searches. Also she’d sensed a residual sourness and meanness in rooms left untouched by Major Wilshire. But she let his widow talk.
‘And that awful old ruined church in the grounds. Some would say it was picturesque, but I hated it. Who could possibly want a disused church? Except Bryan, of course.’
The Major had found the church fascinating and had begun to delve into its history: when it had last been used as a place of worship, why it had been abandoned. Meanwhile, the house was to be auctioned and, because of its poor condition, the reserve price was surprisingly low. This was when the market was still at low ebb, just before the recent property boom, and there was no rush for second homes in the countryside.
‘There was no arguing with Bryan. He put in an offer and it was accepted, so the auction was called off. Bryan was delighted. It was so cheap we didn’t even have to consider selling this bungalow. He said he could renovate the place at his leisure.’
A reputable firm of contractors had been hired, but Major Wilshire insisted on supervising the work himself. The problem was that Bryan was always so hands-on, climbing ladders and scaffolding to demonstrate to the workmen exactly what he wanted doing. Lizzie couldn’t bear to look up at him; it made her quite dizzy. But Bryan had always needed that element in his life, serving as he had with that regiment in Hereford. The SAS, Betty presumed, and she wondered how an all-action man like Major Wilshire had ended up with a wife who didn’t like to look up.
At least that had spared Lizzie an eyewitness memory of the terrible accident. This had been brought about by the combination of a loose stone under a slit window in the tower, a lightweight aluminium ladder, and a freak blast of wind from the Forest.
At first they’d told her it was simply broken bones, and quite a number of them; so it would have taken Major Wilshire a long time to recover. Many months. But no internal injuries, so it could have been worse. He’d at least be home in a matter of weeks. Mrs Wilshire meanwhile had determined that he would never again go back to that awful place.
But Bryan had never come home again. The shock — or something — had brought on pneumonia. For this energetic, seemingly indestructible old soldier, it was all over in four days.
There was one photograph of the Major on the mantelpiece: a wiry man in a cap. He was not in uniform or anything, but in the garden, leaning on a spade, and his smile was only a half-smile.
‘So quick. So bewilderingly quick. There was no time at all for preparations,’ Mrs Wilshire said querulously. ‘We’d always made time to prepare for things; Bryan was a great planner. Nothing was entirely unexpected, because he was always ready for it. Whenever he had to go away, my sister would come to stay and Bryan would always pay the bills in advance and order plenty of heating oil. He always thought ahead.’
How ironic, Betty thought, that a man whose career must have involved several life-or-death situations, and certainly some gruelling and risky training exercises, should have died after a simple fall from a ladder.
From a church? Was this ironic, too?
When it started to rain harder, Robin packed up his paints and folded the easel. A few stray drops on a watercolour could prove interesting; they made the kind of accidental blurs you could use, turned the painting into a raincolour. But if it came on harder, like now, and the wind got up, this was the elements saying to him: Uh-huh, try again.
He stood for a moment down below the church ruins, watching the creek rush into a small gorge maybe fifteen feet deep, carrying branches and a blue plastic feed-sack. Wild! There was a narrow wooden footbridge which people used to cross to get to church. The bridge was a little rickety, which was also kind of quaint. Maybe this even explained why the church had become disused. Fine when the congregation came on foot from the village, but when the village population had gotten smaller, and the first automobiles had arrived in Radnorshire… well, not even country ladies liked to have to park in a field the wrong side of the Hindwell Brook and arrive in church with mud splashes up their Sunday stockings.
In the distance, over the sound of the hurrying water, Robin could hear a vehicle approaching. It was almost a mile along the track to reach the county road, so if you heard any traffic at all, it had to be heading this way. Most often it was Gareth Prosser in his Land Rover — biggest farmer hereabouts, a county councillor and also a nephew of the two old guys who used to own St Michael’s. Robin would have liked if the man stopped one time, came in for a beer, but Gareth Prosser just nodded, never smiled to him, never slowed.
Country folk took time to get to know. Apparently.
But the noise wasn’t rattly enough to be Prosser’s Land Rover, or growly enough to be his kids’ dirt bikes. It was a little early to be Betty back from the widow Wilshire’s, but — who knew? — maybe she at last had developed the hots again for her beloved husband, couldn’t wait to get back to the hissing pine fires and into the sack in that wonderful damp-walled bedroom.
Sure.
Robin kicked a half-brick into the Hindwell Brook, lifting up his face to the squally rain. It would come right. The goddess would return to her. Just the wrong part of the cycle, was all. He offered a short, silent prayer to the spirits of the rushing water, that the flow might once again go their way. Winter was, after all, a stressful time to move house.
The vehicle appeared: it was a Cherokee jeep. When the driver parked in the yard and got out, Robin stared at him, and then closed his eyes and muttered, ‘Holy shit.’
He didn’t need this. He did not need this now.
‘But we don’t believe in those things any more, do we, my dear? Witches, I mean.’
How on earth had the wife of an SAS officer managed to preserve this childlike, glazed-eyed innocence? Betty smiled and lifted the bone china teacup and saucer from her knees in order to smooth her long skirt. Jeans would have been the wrong image entirely and, after the assault on the house over the past few days, she didn’t have an entirely clean pair anyway.
Clean was paramount here. It was a museum of suburbia; it had actual trinkets. Betty guessed that the Major’s wife had secretly been hoping that the renovation work at St Michael’s would never be completed, that it would be simply a long-term hobby for him while they went on living here in New Radnor — which, although it was on the edge of the wilderness and still dominated by a huge castle-mound, was pleasant and open, with a wide main street, neat cottages, window boxes in the summer, a nice shop. Unlike Old Hindwell, it kept the Forest at arm’s length.
Mrs Wilshire said, ‘It was silly, it was slightly unpleasant. And, of course, it wasn’t even terribly old.’
‘About 1850, as I recall.’
‘Oh,’ said Mrs Wilshire. ‘Have you found another one?’
‘No, I think it’s the same one,’ Betty said patiently. ‘Someone brought it back, you see.’
‘Who in the world would do that?’
‘We don’t know. It was left on the doorstep.’
‘What an odd thing to do.’
‘Yes, it was odd, which is why we’d like to find out who did it. I was hoping you might be able to tell me who you gave the box to when you… gave it away. Do you remember, by any chance?’
‘Well, Bryan saw to that, of course. Bryan always knew where to take things, you see.’
‘Would there perhaps have been… I don’t know, a local historian or someone like that who might have had an interest in old documents?’
‘Hmmm.’ Mrs Wilshire pursed her tiny lips. ‘There’s Mr Jenkins, at the bookshop in Kington. But he writes for the newspapers as well, and Bryan was always very suspicious of journalists. Perhaps it was the new rector he gave it to.’
‘Oh.’
‘Not that he was terribly fond of the rector either. We went to one of his services, but only once. So noisy! I’ve never seen so many people in a church — well, not for an ordinary evensong. They must have come from elsewhere, like football supporters. And there were people with guitars. And candles — so many candles. Well, I have nothing against all that, but it’s not for the likes of us, is it? Are you a churchgoer, Mrs Thorogood?’
‘Er… No. Not exactly.’
‘And your husband? What is it your husband does for a living? I’m sure I did know…’
‘He’s an artist, an illustrator. He does book covers, mainly.’
‘Bryan used to read,’ Lizzie Wilshire said distantly. ‘He’d go through periods when he’d read for days in his sanctum.’ Her big eyes were moist; Betty thought of parboiled eggs.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘is there anything I can do, while I’m here? Vacuum the carpet? Clean anything? Prepare you something for tea? Or is there anywhere you need to go? You don’t drive, do you?’
‘Bryan never wanted me to use the car. He always said rural roads were far more dangerous because of the tractors and trailers. And we have a local man, Mr Gibbins, who runs a sort of part-time taxi service. He takes me into Kington twice a week and carries my shopping for me. You mustn’t worry about me, my dear, with all the work you must have on your hands, getting that old place ready to move into.’
‘We moved in last week, actually.’
Mrs Wilshire’s small mouth fell open. ‘But it was an absolute hovel when-’
She stopped, possibly remembering that her own estate agent had preferred phrases like ‘characterful and eccentric’.
‘It’s still got one or two problems,’ Betty said, more cheerfully than she felt, ‘but it doesn’t let the rain in. Well, not in most of the rooms. Mrs Wilshire, is there anyone else apart from the rector that your husband might have handed that box to — or even told about it?’
Mrs Wilshire shook her head. ‘He brought it back here to examine it, but he didn’t keep it very long, I know that, because I wouldn’t have it in the house — so dirty. I do rather remember something, but…’
Betty sighed. ‘Look, let me wash up these cups and things, at least.’
‘No dear, I can manage.’ She fumbled her cup and saucer to the coffee table, but the cup fell over and spilled some tea, which began to trickle over the edge of the table onto the carpet. Betty snatched a handful of tissues from a box nearby and went down on her knees.
Mopping, she glanced up at Lizzie Wilshire and saw years of low-level pain there, solidified like rock strata. And then, as sometimes happened when observing someone from an oblique angle, she caught a momentary glimpse of Lizzie’s aura. It was not intact and vibrated unevenly. This woman needed help.
Betty gathered up the cups and saucers. ‘Are you having treatment for the… arthritis?’
‘Oh, yes, Dr Coll. Do you know Dr Coll?’ Betty shook her head. ‘Dr Coll says I shall need a new hip, soon, and perhaps a new knee. But that may mean going all the way to Gobowen. Sixty miles or more! In the meantime, I’m on a course of tablets. Can’t have new hands, unfortunately, but Dr Coll’s been marvellous, of course. He-’
‘Steroids?’
Mrs Wilshire looked vague again. ‘Cortisone, I believe. And something else — some different pills. I have to take those twice a day. I haven’t been taking them very long. Just since after Bryan died… It seems to have got so much worse since Bryan died. All the worry, I suppose.’
‘Mrs Wilshire… I hope you don’t mind me asking, but have you ever tried anything… alternative? Or complementary, as some people prefer to say.’
‘You mean herbs and things?’
‘Sort of.’
‘I would be very wary, my dear. You never know quite what you’re taking, do you?’
Betty carried the cups and saucers into a large kitchen — made pale, rather than bright, by wide windows, triple-glazed, with a limited view of a narrow garden, a steep, green hillside and a slice of unkind sky. At the bottom of the garden was a shed or summer house with a small verandah — like a miniature cricket pavilion.
Betty’s compassion was veined with anger. Lizzie Wilshire was happily swallowing a cocktail of powerful drugs, with all kinds of side-effects. An unambitious woman who’d let her husband handle everything, make all her decisions for her, and was now willingly submitting to other people who didn’t necessarily give a shit.
When Betty came back, Lizzie Wilshire was staring placidly into the red glow of the oil heater.
‘Are you going to stay here?’ Betty asked.
‘Well, dear, the local people are so good, you see… You youngsters seem to flit about the country at whim. I don’t think I could move. I’d be afraid to.’ Mrs Wilshire looked down into her lap. ‘Of course, I don’t really like it at night — it’s such a big bungalow. So quiet.’
‘Couldn’t you perhaps move into the centre of the village?’
‘But I know Bryan’s still here, you see. The churchyard’s just around the hillside. I feel he’s watching over me. Is that silly?’
‘No.’ Betty gave her an encouraging smile. ‘It’s not silly at all.’
She walked out to the car feeling troubled and anxious in a way she hadn’t expected. That unexpected glimpse of the damaged aura suggested she was meant to come here today. Prodding the little Subaru out onto the long, straight bypass, under an already darkening sky, Betty decided to return soon with something herbal for Mrs Wilshire’s arthritis.
It would be a start. And she was getting back that feeling of having come right round in a circle. It was as a child in Llandrindod Wells, fifteen or so miles from here, that she’d first become fascinated by herbs and alternative medicines — perhaps because the bottles and jars containing them always looked so much more interesting than those from the chemist. There was that alternative shop in Llandrindod into which she was always dragging her mother then — not that she was interested.
They were both teachers, her parents: her mother at the high school, her dad in line for becoming headmaster of one of the primary schools. Betty was only ten when he failed to get the job, and soon after that they moved to Yorkshire, where he’d been born.
Teaching? Until she left school, she didn’t know there was any other kind of job. Her parents treated it like a calling to which they were both martyrs, and it was taken for granted that Betty would commit her life to the same kind of suffering. As for those ‘flights of imagination’ of hers… well, she’d grow out of all that soon enough. A teacher’s job was to stimulate the imagination of others.
Her parents were unbelieving Anglicans. Their world was colourless. Odd, really, that neither of them was sensitive. If it was in Betty’s genes, it must have been dormant for at least two generations. One of her earliest memories — from a holiday up north when she was about four — was her grandma’s chuckled ‘Go ’way wi’ you’ when she’d come up from the cellar of the big terraced house in Sheffield and asked her who the old man was who slept down there.
Betty drove slowly, feeling the countryside. The road from New Radnor cut through an ancient landscape — the historic church of Old Radnor prominent just below the skyline, like a guardian lighthouse without a light. Behind her, she felt the weight of the Radnor Forest hills — muscular, as though they were pushing her away. At Walton — a pub, farms, cottages — she turned left into the low-lying fertile bowl which archaeologists called the Walton Basin, suggesting that thousands of years ago it had been a lake. Now there was only the small Hindwell Pool, to which, according to legend, the Four Stones went secretly to drink at cockcrow — an indication that the Hindwell water had long been sacred.
To the goddess? The goddess who was Isis and Artemis and Hecate and Ceridwen and Brigid in all her forms.
It was at teacher-training college in the Midlands that Betty had been introduced to the goddess. One of her tutors there was a witch; this had emerged when Betty had confessed she found it hard to go into a particular changing room where, it turned out, a student had hanged herself. Alexandra had been entirely understanding about her reaction and had invited Betty home… into a whole new world of incense and veils, earth and water and fire and air… where dreams were analysed, the trees breathed, past and present and future coexisted… and the moon was the guiding lamp of the goddess.
The recent Walton Basin archaeological project had discovered evidence of a prehistoric ritual landscape here, including the remains of a palisade of posts, the biggest of its kind in Britain. Being here, at the centre of all this, ought to be as exciting to Betty as it was to Robin, who was now — thanks to George — totally convinced that their church occupied a site which too had once been very much part of this sacred complex.
So why had her most intense experience there been the image of a tortured figure frenziedly at prayer, radiating agony and despair, in the ruined nave of St Michael’s? She’d tried to drive it away, but it kept coming back to her; she could even smell the sweat and urine. How sacred, how euphoric, was that?
Three lanes met in Old Hindwell, converging at an undistinguished pub. Across the road, the former school had been converted into a health centre — by the famous Dr Coll, presumably. The stone and timbered cottages had once been widely spaced, but now there were graceless bungalows slotted between them. In many cases it would be indigenous local people — often retired farmers — living in these bungalows, freed at last from agricultural headaches, while city-reared incomers spent thousands turning the nearby cottages into the period jewels they were never intended to be.
She didn’t particularly remember this place from her Radnorshire childhood, and she didn’t yet know anyone here. It was actually pretty stupid to move into an area where you knew absolutely nobody, where the social structure and pattern of life were a complete mystery to you. Yet people did it all the time, lured by vistas of green, the magic of comparative isolation. But Betty realized that if there was to be any hope of their long-term survival here, she and Robin would have to start forming links locally. Connecting with the landscape was not enough.
Robin still had this fantasy of holding a mini fire festival at Candlemas, bringing in the celebrants from outside but throwing open the party afterwards to local people. Like a barbecue: the locals getting drunk and realizing that these witches were OK when you got to know them.
Candlemas — Robin preferred the Celtic ‘Imbolc’ — was barely a week away, so that was madness. Lights in the old church, chanting on the night air? Somebody would see, somebody would hear.
Too soon. Much too soon.
Or was that an excuse because Wicca no longer inspired her the way it did Robin? Why had she found George so annoying last weekend? Why had his ideas — truths and certainties to him — seemed so futile to her?
When she got home, Robin was waiting for her in the cold dusk, down by the brook. He wore his fez-thing with the mirrors, no protection at all against the rain. He looked damp and he looked agitated.
‘We have a slight difficulty,’ he said.
Robin was like those US astronauts; he saved the understatements for when things were particularly bad.