Maybe it was a pagan thing, that sense of place. That sense of attachment. Although even Mum was picking up on it now.
Jane had Googled Julian of Norwich last night and discovered a woman who, in an age when God was generally feared, had found the old guy polite, compassionate and…
… had even talked of Mother God. Which the theologians said was no more than a recognition of God’s nurturing of mankind. But, hey, come on, how far was this really from Mother Goddess?
All the blood was running to Jane’s head, almost on the floor by now, in a nest of hair. This whole university thing was like some insidious conspiracy by the lousy Government, just a way of keeping you off benefits for another three years, while hitting you with mega tuition fees. By the time she was out of it, there’d probably be thousands of qualified archaeologists who were all going to be Indiana Jones and…
Jane’s head hit the floor… she didn’t have to go.
Shocked and excited, she wriggled back onto the bed then rolled off it, stood up, went to the window. The village lights were coming on, twin lanterns either side of the main door of the Black Swan, fake gas lamps on the square. The lights you could see, the lights you couldn’t.
Jane’s eyes widened.
Wasn’t going?
That simple? A decision already made? On some level, it had been decided?
Holy shit.
She was breathing very fast now. OK, maybe not a question of deliberately fluffing the A levels. Probably make a point of doing well, getting the grades, just to show she could do it. And then just not going.
No shame in that. It was actually kind of radical. She could just go out and get a job. Any kind of job that would allow her to stay in Ledwardine and fight for what mattered.
Jane felt suddenly still inside and terrifyingly clear-headed. She needed to be absolutely direct about this. No shit. She’d give it a few minutes, then go down and tell Mum before she could change her mind. Hadn’t Mum, after all, dropped out of uni after getting pregnant? Hadn’t she even been known to say – long after Dad’s death in the car crash alongside the woman he’d been shagging – that maybe it was all meant?
Jane stood gazing down at her village. Which needed her. In this sick, withering world, it needed all the energy it could get.
She saw a small shadow emerge from the vicarage gate. Mum, in jeans and sweater, tripping across the market square. Of course – off to meet Lol in the Swan, like it was still the early days of their relationship, courtesies to observe. What was the matter with them, hovering around one another still? Everybody hovering, nobody doing anything.
OK, give them an hour or so and then go across to the Swan. Telling Mum in front of Lol, that would diffuse the effect.
Still in her cloud of knowing, Jane went downstairs to the kitchen, talked it over with Ethel, the cat.
Ethel was like, Yeah, but what about your career?
‘It’s just a word, Ethel.’
Jane stood for an uncertain moment in the cold kitchen, then went over to the fruit bowl on the dresser and took out an apple. Cut it in half – crossways – to reveal the pale green pentagram at its heart. Carried it out into the garden and held it in the cup of her hands, open to the rising moon, only a misty grey-blue smudge, but it would do.
She stood in the silence, expanding the apple pentagram in her mind until she was standing in the middle of it, watching it widen and become a white-golden aura, eventually enclosing the whole of Ledwardine.
And then Jane prayed to the Goddess, to become a channel for the cosmic energy which would make things happen.
15
Lol said, ‘Would Barry have to kill me with his bare hands if I put that on the fire?’
Merrily followed his gaze to the basket in the inglenook, black and ashy.
‘The big log?’
‘The only log.’
He was right. She couldn’t remember ever before seeing only one log in the inglenook at the Black Swan, famous for its apple-wood fires, smoke-sweetened air over the cobbled square. She shivered. In the beamed and panelled lounge bar, only half the wall lights were on. Enough for the eight or so customers whose sparse voices made soft echoes.
‘You might not like what Savitch is doing,’ Lol said, ‘but you really notice when one of his wealthy hunting parties leaves the village.’
‘Barry’s that dependent on them?’
Lol shrugged. He was wearing his fraying grey Gomer Parry Plant Hire sweatshirt. He had a spiral-bound notebook – his lyrics pad – and, beside it on the table, a pint she guessed was shandy, not yet half-drunk.
‘Smoking ban,’ Barry said from behind the bar. ‘Cheap supermarket booze. And now Fortress Hereford. Yeah, we are getting dependent on them. Seven fewer five-course dinners, bar takings down by a third. Put the bleedin’ log on, Laurence, I can always saw up an oak settle.’
Lol left the log alone. Merrily stared at bulky amiable Barry in the black suit and the bow tie.
‘Fortress Hereford?’
‘All farm doors locked at nightfall, shotguns loaded. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me there’s another reason we’re nearly empty.’
‘What, because of-?’
‘Having your quad bike nicked is one thing, but getting killed like Mansel Bull is not a case for Farm Watch, as we know it.’
‘It’s not Texas, either,’ Merrily said. ‘Not yet.’
‘Civilization, vicar, has a thin skin. This is still a frontier. Face west, nothing but lonely Welsh hills. Don’t take much to send us to ground. See this?’
Barry slapped down a glossy flyer showing the winding Wye seen from above. A man in a hunting coat stood with his back to the camera, a riding crop in one hand. Under the photo it said:
W ORTH FIGHTING FOR?
Under that:
C OUNTRYSIDE D EFIANCE
Lol’s eyes flickered.
‘Who are they?’
‘The woman we saw on the box – Wiseman-France – she’s dined here a time or two, with clients. Professional PR, management consultant, not sure which, but you get the idea. You know the type. Move in and tell the hicks their interests are being ignored at national level because they’re not making their voices heard with sufficient eloquence.’
‘Mmm.’ Merrily nodded. ‘Then they offer their services free to give themselves a certain status in the community. Make them feel they belong. She’s created it, has she?’
‘She ain’t created the mood, but she’s given it a name,’ Barry said. ‘Don’t have to be thousands of people behind it, just a few dozen of the right people. The thousands will follow. And the money.’
‘Savitch?’
‘Put it this way… it was one of his minions brought the flyers in. I’m told it also comes in different languages. When the shooting parties come in from Europe, America, Japan they learn that the spiritual home of hunting since the eleventh century is under threat. You ask me, Defiance is pulling donations from US hunting and gun lobbies.’
‘ This is Savitch?’
‘Probably excites him. Life on the edge can be quite sexy when you’re living behind big walls with big guys around and a game-keeper in the lodge with a rack of shotguns.’
‘Spoken by a man who knows all about life on the edge,’ Merrily said.
‘This and that.’
‘You know Syd Spicer?’
It just came out. Barry’s expression didn’t change. Lol glanced at Merrily, curious. You could hear the tunk of a pool game over in the other bar. Barry came round the bar, raked over the fire in the dog-grate, picked up the apple log and dumped it on top.
‘The last good log,’ he said. ‘’Scuse me a minute.’
Lol’s spiral-bound lyrics pad was half-filled. Merrily remembered him buying it in Hereford, maybe two weeks ago, after a rare lunch at All Saints.
‘You’re, erm, cookin’? As Danny would say.’
‘We need to get the album out before summer.’ Lol had a cautious sip of shandy. ‘It’s not just about me any more.’