The Fever of the World, page 1
The Fever of the World
Phil Rickman lives on the Welsh border where he writes and presents the book programme Phil the Shelf on BBC Radio Wales. He is the acclaimed author of Midwinter of the Spirit (now a major ITV series), the Merrily Watkins series and the John Dee Papers. Visit his website at www.philrickman.co.uk.
Also by Phil Rickman
THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES
The Wine of Angels
Midwinter of the Spirit
A Crown of Lights
The Cure of Souls
The Lamp of the Wicked
The Prayer of the Night Shepherd
The Smile of a Ghost
The Remains of an Altar
The Fabric of Sin
To Dream of the Dead
The Secrets of Pain
The Magus of Hay
Friends of the Dusk
All of a Winter’s Night
THE JOHN DEE PAPERS
The Bones of Avalon
The Heresy of Dr Dee
OTHER TITLES
Candlenight
Curfew
The Man in the Moss
December
The Chalice
Night After Night
The Cold Calling
Mean Spirit
OTHER TITLES
The House of Susan Lulham
Phil
Rickman
The Fever of the World
Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2022 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Phil Rickman 2022
The moral right of Phil Rickman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 459 7
E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 460 3
Printed in Great Britain
Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House
26–27 Boswell Street
London
WC1N 3JZ
www.corvus-books.co.uk
The Fever of the World
…when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart –
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer thro, the woods,
How oft en has my spirit turned to thee!’
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on
revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour
JULY 13, 1798
Part One
Lampe and Cupitt proposed that ‘exorcism should have no official status in the Church at all…’
… they argued that encouraging belief in ‘occult evil powers’ could lead to dire social consequences… and implied that exorcism was a kind of Christian magic…
About a public letter from theologians
Geoffrey Lampe and Don Cupitt in 1975, quoted in
A History of Anglican Exorcism by Francis Young
1
The lolly and the stick
THE SKY HAD grown darker, small lights had begun bobbing below the forestry, and a chainsaw’s whine fell away into the evening wind. David Vaynor didn’t like any of it, though the Home Office pathologist with him didn’t appear particularly fazed, contemplating the newly dead man in the beam of his lamp and nodding.
‘I’ve seen this, I think, twice before. There’s a name for it, though I can’t remember for the moment what it is.’
He moved closer, flashlight shining brutally into the lifeless face and the dark silver hair.
‘Stone dead after falling… what, forty metres… two hundred? Who knows?’
Behind him, avoiding the light and the face, Vaynor smothered a shudder. Working detectives were supposed to have left shuddering far behind.
‘But it’s him, all right,’ Dr Billy Grace said. ‘Peter Portis. You can certainly confirm that to Bliss.’
Billy’s face, with its lavish white moustache, was lit up by Vaynor’s own lamplight. He raised both hands and gazed up as if waiting to receive something substantial from a crane.
‘Ending up on one’s feet, supported only by bushes, is not, as might be thought, any kind of aid to survival.’ He lowered his arms. ‘When someone comes down with some velocity, like this chap, the upper vertebrae may pass quite neatly through a ring fracture of the occipital bone. You see?’
Vaynor forced himself to move closer. He’d need to tell DI Bliss he’d viewed the damage, but couldn’t remember where the occipital bone was.
Then, avoiding the dead man’s open eyes, he somehow knew.
Oh, God…
‘Like, uh…’ he turned away again, coughed ‘…the stick getting pushed through the lollipop?’
Billy Grace turned and beamed at him.
‘The lolly and the stick. Ha. Yes, indeed.’ Billy’s mouth was a lavish gash under the moustache he’d probably first grown in the army more than twenty years earlier. ‘Perhaps put that in my report for the coroner. He’ll pretend to the police he thought of it himself, but that’s a coroner’s prerogative.’
‘You said Portis,’ Vaynor said. ‘This is Portis the estate agent?’
‘And the region’s leading rock-climber… And now, I’m afraid, ex-rock-climber.’
In a fatal fall, Vaynor was thinking, from a rock where climbing was no longer permitted. Unsafe, unstable. In all kinds of ways.
‘He was climbing alone?’
‘Nothing to immediately indicate he wasn’t,’ Billy Grace said. Though I expect that’s why you’re here. We’ll be checking for signs of struggle, of course.’
‘I think the DI is just covering his back in case it turns out to be more sinister,’ Vaynor said. ‘I can probably think of a few people who’d like to help an estate agent off a cliff, but…’
Billy Grace might have smiled. Over his plastic protective suit, he wore a plaid jacket so conspicuously dated that he’d probably bought it from a rack labelled windjammers. But even up here there was very little wind, and the dusk was folding the surrounding hills, into a luminous mid-March night.
Spring, then. But nobody was in the mood for spring this year, Vaynor thought, thanks to the virus, which seemed to be rampaging everywhere.
‘Could’ve been suicide,’ Billy said. ‘Though he never struck me as the type. Thought too highly of himself.’
‘You knew him?’
‘Not well, but I saw him less than a month ago, at a rotary lunch.’ He sniffed.
Vaynor said, ‘I didn’t know you—’
‘I’m not. I was their guest after-lunch speaker. You find rotarians all keep their food down if you don’t go into too much detail.’ Billy Grace kind of laughed as he prepared to march off. ‘Let’s hope you keep yours.’ He clapped Vaynor on the shoulder. ‘Don’t really like this sort of thing, do you? Unsightly death?’
‘Heights,’ Vaynor said guardedly. ‘I don’t really like heights. But I was the only one who knew how to reach this place quickly.’ He raised a hand to the projecting rocks. ‘The Seven Sisters, anyway.’
He let his gaze glide down from the Sisters’ faces to the water-top and the rising oaks that hid the cave.
Between the trees on the left, Vaynor could just see where the rocks arose from stony soil, where the poet Wordsworth had once walked. Apart from the lights and the chainsaw, not much had changed since William Wordsworth was here, having fled from the blood-pooled streets of Paris, heads bouncing under the guillotine blade behind him. Seeking peace again where he thought he’d once known it.
Again I hear those waters rolling from their mountain springs.
Vaynor thought he could hear the water, too, where the bank of trees ended above the Wye. Must have been about five years since he was last here. Very little had changed since then, and the forestry roads, lit by sparse headlights, were no safer.
Now Billy, cutting a figure bulkier than Wordsworth’s, was striding ahead into the dusk, and Vaynor called to him, not looking at the body.
‘Follow you down then, doc?’
Dr Billy Grace stretched out an arm towards the river, obscured by the bank of trees below the bony crag.
‘ “O sylvan Wye…” ’
‘“…how often has my spirit turned to thee?”’ Vaynor murmured instinctively.
Billy Grace nodded.
‘English at Oxford, David? In fact shouldn’t I be calling you doc?
‘No way! Please don’t.’
No way did Vaynor want to be one of those people who insisted on being addressed as doctor on the strength of one poxy thesis.
It had been published online under the pseudonym Al Fox – after the house Alfoxden, where the poet and his sister had lived in Somerset. He – or rather, Al – had been invited to give a talk at Herefo rd Library on the poet’s 250th anniversary next month. A big relief, therefore, for the reticent Vaynor, when Hereford’s proposed Wordsworth weekend festival had been abandoned because of the virus and he could go on being seen just as a cop.
He followed the Home Office pathologist to an old, black Jaguar parked at the edge of the field. Of course, Billy Grace would have an ageing Jag, letting in an echo of Eve’s disparaging voice from last night at the bedroom door.
You know, I can just imagine you in twenty years’ time – one of those sad old Inspector Morse cops, full of regrets.
Which was how the destructive stuff had started, right on bedtime, going on for dismal hours and climaxing in the morning, with Eve quietly following the taxi driver and her suitcases out of the door, having barely spoken to him since first light. Given a last chance to put things right with her, he’d thrown it all away and walked off to work at Gaol Street, thinking he could deal with it later. But he’d sensed… relief, could it have been that, coming from Eve? Could this be her relief at having left him, at getting it over so quickly?
‘Didn’t really need a lamp tonight, David,’ Billy Grace said, unlocking the Jag’s boot. ‘Not with the lovely Venus doing her best for us.’
He jabbed a thumb towards the single bright planet which dominated the darkening sky. Some years you were hardly aware of Venus at all and other times, night after night, you couldn’t avoid Wordsworth’s evening star.
To watch thy course when Day-light, fled from earth,
In the grey sky hath left his lingering Ghost.
Vaynor looked away, thinking he should be going to try and repair things with Eve before it really was too late. Should have stopped himself from instinctively responding when Bliss had first asked the small gathering in the CID room if anybody knew where the Seven Sisters rocks were. Unless there was something Bliss hadn’t told them, it was just a routine climbing accident which, even on a quiet day like this, would surely have nothing for CID. Nobody particularly wanted to negotiate those treacherous forestry tracks at this time of day.
Vaynor sighed into the early night breeze. He remembered the Seven Sisters rocks rising from a bend of the River Wye. If you happened to fall off the wrong sister you could drop directly into the river.
‘This is where I encountered my first corpses after moving here,’ Billy said. ‘Similar kind of atmosphere, with the planet Venus just as obvious.’
‘Venus is always showing off, coming up to spring,’ Vaynor said. ‘And then she disappears and the nights are quieter and slowly get warmer.’
‘It was a much warmer night than this,’ Billy said, ‘when they perished.’ He pointed. ‘Just about there, as I recall. Venus should have vanished from the sky by then. I remember thinking that. Wondering why this dramatic evening star was still on show so far into the new year. Was it her part in this drama, to stick around, so that she could illuminate death?’
Billy Grace conclusively zipped up his windjammer.
‘Venus appears to like death,’ he said.
2
Cold fire
YOU HOPED FOR bright, frosty days and got floods and gales, nature’s end-of-winter debris collecting under unhealthy skies of pink and grey like dead, peeling skin. This sky was clear now, though: no sun to set, no moon, only the dominant planet that Merrily thought was Venus or maybe Jupiter.
She’d been laying the kitchen wood stove for the evening ahead when he came banging on the door urgently, as though he had a writ to serve. Then he retreated to a partly visible Land Rover. In a corner of the window, she saw the ancient Defender blocking the drive in the last light and steaming like an exhausted bull. Shutting the stove, she went into the hall, slipping the front-door catch.
The cool evening smacked her face as she went outside, calling over to Huw Owen.
‘Just happened to be passing… thought you’d drop in for a brew before lockdown?’
Lockdown: a new word that suddenly everybody was using. It was your life that was locked down, apparently to prevent it getting lost.
Merrily registered that Huw had shaved off his beard. His skin looked as raw as the sky and as mournful as that night under a limp moon, a few years ago, when he’d walked her up a stony track in the Beacons to warn her about wankers in the pews, psychotic grinders of the dark satanic mills, little rat-eyes in the dark. All the horrors awaiting a woman exorcist. Even in a lockdown, God knew.
Did God know? Did God have a role in all this drama? She’d read in a Sunday paper that one effect of the pandemic was a worldwide increase in spirituality, a feeling that only God could stop the spread of this illness. Or that the illness had been started by God to cull a population that was getting way out of control.
God. Her old mate. Merrily caught sight of herself in the mirror near the door: tangled dark hair, cursory make-up… was she finally starting to look tired and middle-aged? Bloody hoped not.
‘Make it a strong ’un, lass,’ Huw said, leaving his Land Rover behind and shaking himself like a ragged mongrel. ‘And three sugars?’
She smiled. Brought up in Yorkshire by his Welsh mother, he was a ragged mongrel. Who apparently could speak primitive, basic Welsh, only with a Yorkshire accent.
*
Pulling off his boots to follow her into the vicarage kitchen, shedding his old charity-shop RAF greatcoat, Huw was rubbing his hands above the stove then stopping in dismay.
‘You’ve let this bugger go out!’
‘Hasn’t been lit yet. Been out of the house most of the day, seeing people I now may not see for weeks in their homes, and Jane’s at work.’
Huw shrugged his coat back on.
‘Thought the kid were away at college.’
‘Still on the gap year. It’s complicated.’ Merrily opened the stove and prised two logs apart with the poker. ‘She’s back in the village now. When the dig ended she went to the festival shop she’ll be running for Barry from the Swan. How she swung that I still don’t know, but she spends most days setting it up, and I’m not making a fuss. Not yet, anyway. These are strange days.’
‘Just on me way back from London,’ Huw said. ‘Church House, Merrily. You forgot?’
‘Oh.’ Merrily let the poker fall. Behind the stove glass, yellow flames gushed. ‘I did. Went down the street to make a fire for my old organist, see a couple of people who’ve lost their jobs.’
‘And you were right about the C of E,’ he said. ‘This is becoming serious.’
‘Is it?’
‘Never been the same since they let the Wizard Merlin out of Canterbury,’ Huw said. ‘Bad sign when he went. We thought him becoming archbishop were the start of summat new and promising, but it could be that him leaving so fast, that were the start of… the end game.’
He’d evidently been to a meeting of the Christian Deliverance Study Group, an offshoot of the clergy who organized exorcisms. First meeting of the year and a significant one for future dealings with the Unseen but not always Untarnished. The one she’d been hoping he’d attend but hadn’t liked to remind him about.
‘Even worse than we thought,’ he said. ‘Buggers might finally pull it off, too, the way things are going. So we’ve no time to waste.’
‘How many of them are there now?’
‘We won’t know till they’re in the majority. And then it’ll be too bloody late – wi’ God turned into a celestial social worker, deliverance study group’ll have nowt to study. And unless we stop ’em now, you, lass, will be an ordinary vicar again. For as long as ordinary vicars last.’
While Huw sat down at the kitchen table to drink his tea Merrily considered how life would be so much simpler if she was an ordinary vicar.
‘Is that what you want?’ Huw said. ‘Caring and compassionate? Sending your congregation home on a Sunday night – all six of ’em – believing there’s nowt bad out there as knows their name?’
Apart from the stove, the kitchen was almost dark. She asked if her bishop had been anywhere near Church House today. He said nothing.
‘Or his pal, Crowden?’
Merrily opened the stove, picturing Crowden: stocky, shavenheaded, pumped-up. Could still hear his plummy voice at the gathering of Welsh Border exorcists she’d hosted last year at the Black Swan, where he’d proclaimed – looking directly at Merrily – that exorcism had nothing to do with faith.
