Every Pillar in the Cloister 'PAGANISM.' THE BISHOP spooned mustard on to his hot dog. 'What do we have to say about paganism?'

'As little as possible?' Merrily suggested.

The bishop put down his spoon on Sophie's desk. 'Exactly.' He nodded, and went on nodding like, she thought, one of those brushed-fabric boxer dogs motorists used to keep on their parcel shelves. 'Absolutely right.'

The e-mail on the computer screen concluded:

The programme will take the form of a live studio discussion and protagonists will probably include practising witches, possibly Druids, and 'fundamentalist' clergy. Would you please confirm asap with the programme researcher, Tania Beauman, in Birmingham?

'So, it's a "no", then. Fine.' Merrily stood up, relieved. 'I'll call them tonight. I'll say it's not a debate to which we feel we can make a meaningful contribution. And anyway, it's not something we encounter a particular problem with in this diocese. How does that sound?'

'Sounds eminently sensible, Merrily.' But the bishop's large, hairless face still looked worried.

'Good. Nobody comes out of an edition of Livenight with any dignity left. The pits of tabloid TV Jerry Springer off the leash.'

'Who is Jerry Springer?' asked the bishop.

'You really don't want to know.'

'One finds oneself watching less and less television.' He brushed crumbs from his generously cut purple shirt. 'Which is wrong, I suppose. It is, after all, one's pastoral duty to monitor society's drab cavalcade... the excesses of the young... the latest jargon. The ubiquity of the word "shag" in a non-tobacco context.'

'I'll get my daughter Jane to compile a glossary for you.'

The bishop smiled, but still appeared strangely apprehensive. 'So this...' he peered at the screen '... Livenight is not current affairs television?'

'Not as you know it. How would you describe Livenight, Sophie?'

'Like a rehearsal for Armageddon.' A shudder from the bishop's lay secretary, now permanently based in Merrily's gatehouse office. Sophie tucked a frond of white hair behind one ear and used a tissue to dab away a blob of English mustard which the bishop had let fall, appropriately, on the head of the burger-gobbling Homer Simpson on the computer's mouse mat. 'They begin with a specific topic, which is loosely based on a Sunday paper sort of news item.'

'Say you have a suburban husband who pimps for his wife,' Merrily said, 'is she being exploited, or is it a valid way of meeting the mortgage premiums?'

'Invariably,' Sophie said, 'they contrive to fill the studio with loud-mouthed bigots and professional cranks.'

Merrily nodded. 'And if you're insufficiently loud-mouthed, bigoted or cranky they just move on to the psycho sitting next to you who's invariably shaking at the bars to escape onto live television. Whole thing makes you despair for the future of the human race. I don't really think spreading despair is what we're about.'

'No,' the bishop said uncomfortably, 'quite. It's just that if you don't do it, we... we have a problem.'

Merrily stiffened. 'What are you saying exactly, Bernie?'

Bernie Dunmore had taken to wandering down to the Deliverance office on Tuesdays for a snack lunch with Merrily. He always seemed glad to get away from the Bishop's Palace.

Which was understandable. He was not actually the Bishop of Hereford although, as suffragan Bishop of Ludlow, in the north of the diocese, the caretaker role had fallen to him in the controversial absence of the Right Reverend Michael Hunter.

In the end, though, Mick Hunter's disappearance had not detonated the media explosion the diocese had feared, coinciding as it had with the resignation of two other Church of England bishops and the suicide of a third all of this following calls for an outside inquiry into their personal expenses exceeding 200,000 a year, and the acceptance of unorthodox perks.

Questions had also been asked about Hunter's purchase of a Land Rover and a Mercedes, used by his wife, and, as neither the press nor the police had been able to substantiate anything more damaging, the diocese had been happy to shelter behind any other minor scandal. Now the issue had been turned around: four bishops had spoken out in a Sunday Times feature 'Keeping the Mitre on C of E Executive Stress' about the trials of their job in an increasingly secular age. There was, inevitably, a picture of Mick Hunter in his jogging gear, 'escaping from the pressure'.

Was it better, under the circumstances, that the truth had not come out? Merrily wasn't sure. But she liked Bernie Dunmore, sixty-two years old and comfortably lazy. Prepared to hold the fort until such time as the search for a suitably uncontroversial replacement for Mick Hunter could begin. No one, in fact, could be less controversial than Bernie; the worst he'd ever said about Hunter was, 'One would have thought the Crown Appointments Commission would have been aware of Michael's personality problems.'

As Mick's appointee, Merrily had offered Bernie her resignation from his Deliverance role, citing the seasoned exorcist Huw Owen's warning that women priests had become a target for every psychotic grinder of the dark satanic mills who ever sacrificed a cockerel.

'All the more reason for you to remain, my dear,' Bernie had told her, though she couldn't quite follow his reasoning. She hoped it wasn't just because he enjoyed his Tuesday lunchtimes here sitting on the Deliverance desk with a couple of hot dogs and a can of lager.

'You explain, Sophie,' the bishop said.

His lay secretary sat up, spry and elegant in a grey business suit with fine black stripes, and consulted her memo pad.

'Well, as you know, this programme approached us some weeks ago, with a view to Merrily taking part in a general discussion on supernatural phenomena which Merrily declined to do.'

'Because Merrily was afraid of what they might already know about recent events in Hereford,' added Merrily.

'Indeed. I then received a personal call from Ms Tania Beauman relating to this week's proposed paganism programme, again requesting Merrily.'

'They've obviously seen that understatedly sexy photo of you, my dear,' said Bernie.

Merrily sighed, looked at the clock: 1.35. She had to be back in Ledwardine by three for Minnie Parry's funeral.

Sophie said, 'You'll probably both recall the story in the papers last Thursday about the pagan parents in Somerset who demanded that their child be allowed to make her own religious observances at the village primary school.'

The bishop winced.

'Livenight's programme peg for this week,' Sophie explained. 'It's now claimed there are over a hundred thousand active pagans in Britain. Either belonging to groups covens or nurturing their beliefs independently.'

'Complete nonsense, of course.' The bishop sniffed. 'But figures like that can't be proved one way or the other.'

'The programme will discuss the pagans' claim that they represent the traditional old religion of the British Isles and, as such, should be granted rights and privileges at least equivalent to those accorded to Islam, Buddhism and other non-indigenous faiths.'

Bernie snorted. 'Most of their so-called traditions date back no further than the fifties and sixties. They're a sham. These people are just annoyed because they've been refused charity status.'

'In a secular state,' Merrily said, 'it could be argued that their superstitions are just as valid as ours I'm doing my devil's advocate bit here.'

The bishop jutted his chins and straightened his pectoral cross. 'My question, though, is should we be actively encouraging people to strip off and have sex with each other's wives under the full moon while pretending it's religion? I think not. But neither do I think we should be engaging them in open battle boosting their collective ego by identifying them as representatives of the Antichrist.'

'However,' Sophie said, 'that does reflect the general approach of one of our more... outgoing rural rectors: the Reverend Nicholas Ellis.'

'Oh,' Merrily said.

'In his sermons and his parish magazine articles, he's tended to employ... quite colourful terminology. Livenight's own kind of terminology, you might say.'

Sophie and the bishop both looked enquiringly at Merrily. She shook her head. 'I know of him only through the press cuttings. Loose-cannon priest who dumped his churches. Spent some years in the States. Charismatic. Direct intervention of the Holy Spirit... Prophecy... Tongues.'

'Split the community,' Bernie said, 'when he expressed disdain for actual churches and offered to conduct his charismatic services in community halls, barns, warehouses, whatever. So Mick Hunter agreed to appoint a regular priest-in-charge in the area, to appease the traditionalists, and let Ellis continue his roving brief.'

Merrily recalled that Ellis now belonged to a fast-growing Anglican anti-Church faction calling itself the Sea of Light.

'Awfully popular figure, this Nicholas, I'm afraid,' Bernie Dunmore said. 'Since we cut him loose, he's set up in some run-down village hall and he's packing it to the rafters with happy-clappies from miles around. Which makes him somewhat unassailable, and yet he's not a demonstrative bloke in himself. Quiet, almost reticent, apparently. But came back from America with a knowledge of agriculture and farming ways that seems to have rather endeared him to the Radnorshire people.'

Merrily grimaced, recalling what Eileen Cullen at the hospital had said about the piece of Wales just over the border: They have their own ways and they keep closed up.

Bernie flicked her a foxy smile. 'The man was after your job, did you know?'

Her eyebrows went up. 'Deliverance?'

'Wrongly assuming you'd be on the way out in the aftermath of Michael's, er, breakdown. Soon as I showed my face in Hereford, there was Nicholas requesting an audience.'

'Did he get one?'

'Showed him the door, of course, but tactfully. Good God, he's the last kind of chap you want as your exorcist. Sees the Devil behind every pillar in the cloister. Fortunately, Deliverance is rarely up for tender. Press-gang job, in my experience.' He beamed at Merrily. 'And all the better for that.'

'Is he currently doing any deliverance work?' she asked warily.

'Frankly, my dear... one doesn't like to enquire. Though if there are any complaints, I suppose we'll have to peer into the pond. Meanwhile... this Livenight.' The bishop snapped back the ringpull on his can of lager and accepted a tall glass from Sophie. 'Apparently, he has been mentioned as a possible what do you call it? front-row speaker.'

'Having already been approached by Ms Beauman,' Sophie said, 'and having apparently said yes.'

'But not on behalf of the diocese,' Merrily said. 'Just a lone maverick, surely?'

The bishop shrugged, spilling a little lager. 'One can't stop the man appearing on national television. And one can't be seen to try to stop him.'

'But if he starts shooting his mouth off about the invasion of sinister sects and child sacrifice and that kind of stuff, it's going to reflect on all of us.'

'In the wake of recent events here,' said the bishop, 'we were all rather looking for a quiet life for a while.'

Merrily looked into the big, generally honest face of the suffragan Bishop of Ludlow, a lovely old town in south Shropshire from which he was commuting and to which he clearly couldn't wait to get back.

'Well...' Sophie folded a square of green blotting paper into a beer mat for the bishop, giving herself an excuse not to look directly at Merrily. 'Ms Beauman did intimate to me that they might be prepared to consider rescinding their invitation to the Reverend Mr Ellis... if they could recruit for their programme the person they originally had in mind.'

There was an uneasy silence. The bishop drank some lager and gazed out of the window, across Broad Street. It was starting to rain.

'Shit,' Merrily said under her breath.

6.

Unkind Sky '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.