Read Online The Magus of Hay by Phil Rickman - Free Book Online Page A

bungalow weren’t divorced by now, Betty would be quite surprised.
    Not that she’d ever tried to find out. She’d consulted some people and certain books and got down to softening the place. Making sure she and Robin hadn’t slept in the so-called master bedroom , which had become his studio, a place where he could safely fight with himself.
    She’d looked in there this morning while he was taking a shower and found about a dozen photos of Hay taped to the walls, the basis for some watercolour sketches on a side table. All the pictures had been taken from Back Fold, mostly from low angles, looking up at the castle and the crinkly red chimneys of the Jacobean mansion which the medieval building had nurtured like a big cuckoo chick.
    Robin did most of his work on a trestle table, but now the table had been removed, the trestles used to accommodate the sound part of a broken oak floorboard Robin had found in a reclamation yard. He’d sawn off the splintered end and gone to work with a plane on the surface, until it was ready for the black paint. Now it was a sign, waiting to be varnished. A sign that looked as if it had been a sign forever.
    Thorogood Pagan Books.
    She wondered if there’d be enough light for a studio. Pictures not as good as Robin’s best were on sale for hundreds, even thousands in Hay, drawing on an international market, tourists who’d fallen in love with the booktown, who wanted a piece of Hay on their wall. Why not an alluring Thorogood nocturne, woolly lights against softening stone? She could see Robin’s paintings eventually stealing window-space from the books.
    A foothold to something better. As long as there were some books… enough to keep him in the system.
    Robin’s eyelids jittered like moths’ wings, his eyes opened.
    ‘What’s wrong?’
    ‘Nothing,’ Betty said. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’
    *  *  *
    Later, when Robin went back to work on his sign, Betty took the laptop into the bedroom and Googled antique dealers in Hay. Began emailing them, one by one, asking if they were the people who used to have a shop in Back Fold.
    As the sun went down behind the pink-brick estate, she opened the oak chest in the corner, where the goddess lay in her box, along with the Green Man and the tarot cards, the remains of her crown of lights head-dress and a box of candles.
    She found a bent green candle, the size of a courgette, set it down in a tray in the window, and concentrated.
    Old habits…

10
    A better place
    T HE CITY OF Hereford seemed to be dying, the way a venerable tree died, from the centre outwards – long-established businesses left to rot while councillors turned away to nurture their doomed, peripheral shopping mall, hand-feeding it with taxpayers’ money badly-needed elsewhere.
    Most people were saying that, but nothing came to save the city.
    Still, it was one of the few English cities where, in the absence of high-rise offices and flats, the oldest buildings were still dominant. The spired All Saints Church, on the corner where Broad Street met High Town, was probably packing in more worshippers these days, Merrily was thinking, than at any time in its history.
    Except that they were coming to worship lunch. Half the church was a restaurant now, part self-service and not expensive enough to deter vicars. She’d followed Sophie to the upstairs gallery overlooking the business end where a ghost was said to play the organ.
    Something authentically medieval about having lunch in a still-active town centre church. Merrie Englande. If you looked up from your table, you could see a little carved wooden man with his legs in the air, flashing his bits from the ceiling frieze.
    ‘She rang again,’ Sophie said.
    ‘What, since this morning? It’s been nearly a month. She hasn’t even returned my calls.’
    ‘She’s probably not entirely rational, but she is clearly distressed.’
    A man at the next table was telling his woman companion that Hereford needed to