‘Doesn’t matter. If you aren’t there, you aren’t there.’
‘I’ll do my best. Have you... spoken to Mr Weal?’
‘I’m not ready for that yet,’ Barbara said. ‘But I shall do. Thank you, Merrily.’
10
Nightlife of Old Hindwell
ROBIN HAD THE map spread out under a wine-bottle lamp on the kitchen table, after they’d finished supper.
‘Come take a look, Bets.’ Holding his thick, black drawing pencil the way he held his athame in a rite. ‘Whole bunch of churches around the Forest.’
The lamplight sheened his dense, Dark Ages hair. Betty leaned over him. He smelled sweet and warm, like a puppy. She felt an unexpected stirring; he was so lovably uncomplicated.
And so simplistic, sometimes, in his thinking. Why, since they’d arrived here, had any physical desire always been so swiftly soured by irritation? She gazed around the still-gloomy farmhouse kitchen. Why, with the stove on for over a week, was there still an aura of damp – always worse after sunset? She felt clammy and uncomfortable, as though she had the curse. If Robin had said, ‘Let’s give this place up, and leave now, tonight,’ she wouldn’t have hesitated.
But since that mention of the E-word, his attitude had unsubtly altered. A couple of seconds of trepidation then the male thing was kicking in. Robin wanted to find out precisely where Ellis was coming from, then get in his face. It hadn’t been helped, Betty guessed, by Ellis wearing army gear. Combat gear? She was appalled to think that she might even once have shared Robin’s zeal. If only this had been someone else’s house, the home of a fellow pagan in need of moral support.
If only she wasn’t already growing to hate their church too much to want to defend it.
She’d tried to remember her reaction on first seeing it, and couldn’t. Probably because she was being practical at the time and paying more attention to the farmhouse, leaving Robin to moon over the ruins, take dozens of photographs.
He’d now finished ringing churches on the Landranger map. Although it didn’t identify individual ones except by symbols, nearby place names sometimes would give a clue to the dedication. Betty could help him out there a little, from childhood knowledge of Welsh. She put a thumbnail to the southernmost symbol.
‘That one: the village is Llanfihangel nant Melan. Llanfihangel’s Welsh for “The Church of St Michael”.’
‘Cool.’ Robin drew an extra ring around the church and then tracked around the others with the tip of his pencil until he came to the northern part of the forest perimeter. ‘What’s this? Same word, right?’
‘Llanfihangel Rhydithon. That’s another, yeah. And then ours, of course. Three St Michael churches around the Forest. He was right, I suppose.’
‘Gotta be more. Three doesn’t make a circle.’
With swift, firm pencil strokes, he redrew the plan on his sketch-pad. Graphics were important to Robin. Making a picture made things real.
‘Of course,’ Betty said, ‘there’s nothing to suggest all these churches were built at the same time. I vaguely remember going to Llanfihangel Rhydithon as a kid, and I don’t think it’s even medieval.’
‘It’s the site that counts. Come on, Bets, what are you, agnostic now? Look through Ellis’s eyes. Guy thinks he’s fighting an active Devil.’
‘Or, more specifically, in the absence of people actually sacrificing cockerels and abusing children on his doorstep – against us,’ Betty said bitterly.
‘I’m still not sure he knows. Ellis was fishing. Like, who could’ve told him? Who else knows, or could’ve seen anything? We didn’t even use removal men.’
Betty said, ‘It scares me. I don’t want this.’
‘Aw, come on,’ he said. ‘You’re a witch. Hey, you know, damn near all these churches have just gotta be on older sites, when you see how close they are to standing stones and burial mounds.’ He leaned back in satisfaction. ‘This valley’s a damned prehistoric ritual freaking wonderland. Which explains everything.’
‘It does?’
‘You got all these sacred sites, right? It’s a good bet most of them were still being used by surviving pagan groups well into medieval times, and probably long after that. This was a remote area with a small and scattered population. Closed in, secretive. I think it’s fair to assume that even when they’d been brutally eradicated from most of the rest of the country, the Old Ways were still preserved here.’
‘Possibly.’
‘The Archangel Michael’s the hard guy of the Church. It’s them saying to the pagans, you bastards better come around, or else. Ellis, as a fundamentalist, relates to all of that. Plus, he’s been influenced by insane Bible Belt evangelists who persecute snakes. Plus, his ego’s already been blown up sky high by the size of congregations he’s pulling when all the neighbouring churches are going down the tubes. I’ve decided the guy sucks. The only remaining question is how long we keep stalling before we tell him that he and his exorcism squad can go screw themselves.’
‘I was going to say that if we don’t make an issue of it, if we let it go quiet, then he’ll probably forget about us,’ Betty said lamely.
‘Not gonna happen. Believe me, this guy’s on some kind of crusade under the banner of St Michael. Hey! Would that explain the army surplus stuff? Shit.’
Robin smiled at his own flawed logic. Betty saw, with a plummeting heart, that he wanted to be a target of Christian fanaticism.
‘When we look at those ruins,’ he said, ‘we see a resurgence of the true, indigenous spirituality. Whereas he sees a naked tower giving him and his religion the finger. He so wants to be the guy who killed the dragon and claimed it all back. It’s an ego thing.’
‘You and him both.’
The smile crashed. ‘Meaning what?’
‘You have a few beers together, you size each other up, and now you’re both flexing your muscles for the big fight. You can’t wait, can you? You love it that he’s got this huge mass of followers and there’s just the two of us here, newcomers, isolated...’
‘Now listen, lady.’ Robin was on his feet, furious. ‘My instinct was to kick his ass, right from the off, but no... I play it the way I figure you would want me to! Mr Nice Guy, Mr Don’t Frighten The Horses... Mr Take A Faceful Of Shit And Keep Smiling kind of guy!’
‘No, you didn’t. You thought you could play with him, lead him around the houses, take the piss out of him a little... when in fact he was playing with you.’
‘You weren’t even there!’
‘And you’ve never given a thought to where this could leave us. We have to live here... Whatever happens, we have to live here afterwards. And we will have to live here, because – in case you haven’t thought about this – who is going to buy a rundown house along with a ruined church which the local minister insists is infested with demonic evil?’ She spun away from him.
‘You shithead.’
Robin snatched in a breath that was halfway to a sob then threw his pencil down on the table. ‘I need some air.’
‘You certainly do!’
He turned his back on her, strode across the kitchen like Lord bloody Madoc and tore open the back door. Before he slammed it behind him, she heard the rushing of the rain-swollen Hindwell Brook in the night, like a hiss of glee.
Betty let her head fall into her hands on the tabletop.
What have we done? What have we walked into?
Robin stomped across the yard, hit the track toward the gate and the road. It was cold and the going wasn’t so easy in the dark, but he was damned if he was going back for a coat and flashlight.