The Wine of Angels

by Phil Rickman

  By the mid-1600s, prosecutions for witchcraft were rare in the western half of the country. A notable exception was the case of Wil Williams, of Ledwardine, the second English vicar in this period to be accused of consorting with the devil. About twenty-five years earlier, the Reverend John Lowes, vicar of Brandeston in Suffolk, had been brought to justice by the notorious Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins. Lowes, who was over eighty when he was ducked in the moat of Framlingham Castle, was alleged to have caused the death of a child and a number of cattle by witchcraft as well as employing a familiar spirit to sink a ship off Harwich.

  By comparison, Williams’s alleged crime was minor: he was accused by a local farmer of ruining his crop of cider apples. However, other witnesses were said to be ready to testify that the vicar had been seen dancing with shining spirits in the orchard which, at that time, almost surrounded the church.

  Whether these charges would have been proved in court will ever remain a mystery as, when warned of his impending arrest, Williams hanged himself in the very orchard he had been accused of bewitching. This was naturally taken as proof of his guilt, and he was buried in unhallowed ground, with only an apple tree to mark his resting place. It was said that neither this tree nor any others planted on the spot ever yielded an apple. The farmer who had laid the charge died soon afterwards and his family was quick to dispose of the orchard, dividing it into sections which were sold off separately. Ledwardine would never again be quite true to its reputation as The Village in the Orchard.

  Merrily laid the book on the pine table – which looked like a footstool in this barn of a kitchen – and made herself some tea. Certainly this account backed up Coffey’s argument that Williams had been framed, and this surely could only have been done with the approval of the local JP, Thomas Bull. But it was still a big leap to the idea that Wil was gay.

  There was something missing.

  Jane was embarrassed. She thought hurting anyone’s feelings was the worst thing you could do to them. Sticks and stones might break your bones, but bones usually healed.

  ‘I feel awful,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Lucy Devenish. ‘I wouldn’t have expected you to. You’re not old enough.’

  The book before Jane on the counter in Ledwardine Lore was quite slim and clearly for children. Its cover was this splodgy watercolour, all green. A small girl, done in pen and ink, was sitting in a clearing in a wood surrounded by trees which were not big but, with their tangled branches making the vague shapes of faces, were very sinister. The girl was looking, half-fearfully, over her shoulder.

  The book was called The Little Green Orchard.

  It was by Lucy Devenish.

  ‘Title came from Walter de la Mare’s poem,’ Lucy said. ‘Do you know it?’

  Oh yes, Jane remembered that poem from way back in primary school, when it had frightened her a lot. It was about someone you couldn’t see but who was always waiting there in this little green orchard. Always watching you.

  ‘It used to scare me.’

  ‘Good,’ Lucy snapped. ‘Children today are not scared nearly often enough. A child that grows up without fear grows up to be a danger to us all.’

  Jane opened the book. Its dust jacket was quite dry and brittle and its price was seven shillings and sixpence.

  ‘Nineteen sixty-four,’ Lucy said. ‘They stopped wanting to publish me about seven years later. Fairy stories? Oh dear me, no. They wanted tales about robots and space ships. Old Dahl kept getting away with it, the bastard, and Blyton lives for ever. But I accept I wasn’t such a wonderful writer that I could do what I wanted, so I stopped doing it. Jumble-sale fodder before you were born, so it’s hardly surprising you’d never heard of me.’

  There was another book underneath the first. This one was larger format and had a more cheerful cover, with a happy-looking landscape of smiley flowers, friendly-looking shady trees and sunny hills. And another small girl, this one wandering down a long path and looking kind of blissed-out. In fact the whole package looked a bit like one of those album-covers from the sixties, when bands first discovered mind-altering drugs. Lucy seemed a bit old to have been involved in all that; perhaps it was just the artist. This book was called The Other Voices.

  ‘Did you never think of reprinting them and selling them here in the shop?’

  ‘Heavens,’ Lucy said. ‘That would have been desperate, wouldn’t it? Oh, one might do a spot of squirming at the efforts of the dreadful Duchess of York, but at the end of the day ... well, at the end of the day, it’s the end of the bloody day, isn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t say that!’

  ‘Jane.’ Lucy leaned over her folded arms. ‘Watch my lips. I don’t care. Don’t give a flying fart. I got the book out because I wanted you to read it. Now. At once. Look, I brought you a stool. Be a good girl, sit down over there and read the books. Take you about twenty minutes each. They’re only children’s stories, but they might make some things clearer. Read The Other Voices first, then ask any questions you like.’

  At which point, Lucy seemed to lose all interest in Jane, took down a row of apple mugs and set about them with a duster.

  Jane had no alternative but to sit down and get into The Other Voices, which was probably intended for nine-year-olds, max.

  It was about a little girl called Rosemary whose mother was ill, and so she went to stay with her grandparents in Herefordshire, natch, on a farm so remote that there were no other children to play with for miles. For a while, Rosemary was very sad, and wandered the fields and paths talking to the flowers and the trees because there was no one else. Pretty soon, she was imagining that the flowers and trees were talking back (which seemed, psychologically, reasonable enough to Jane), each with a distinctive voice. Like the dandelions had these high, pealing yellow voices. The bluebells, because there were so many of them so close together, spoke in a soft, blue harmonious chorus, watched over by the oak trees who, of course, had very deep, powerful brown voices. Soon, in the background, Rosemary could hear other sounds and realized that the hills themselves were breathing. In fact, if she looked hard, she could even see them breathing, their misty sides going in and out, very slowly, far more slowly than human breathing.

  This went on for some days, Rosemary waking earlier and earlier because she couldn’t wait to get outside to be with her friends. One morning, she awoke especially early, for this was midsummer, and her friends were putting on a special concert. The birds started them off, the dawn chorus activating everything. And then, as the sun rose, the flowers began to open and as they opened they started to sing, and the trees joined in with their bass notes and the hills amplified their heartbeats like drums and by the time the sun was fully up, Rosemary could no longer hear separate voices, but only musical tones, which blended together until the whole of nature became one huge, magnificent orchestra.

  And Rosemary started to wonder about the orchestra’s conductor. Who had composed the music, who had arranged it.

  Of course, Rosemary’s mother came out of hospital, which she was very glad about, except that she had to go home to the city, which kind of mortified her. She at once caught a cold which turned into flu, and she was very miserable. One day, when she was a little better, to give her some air, her mother took her out to the dreary old park she’d been to a thousand times ... and, on the way there, Rosemary spotted a single dandelion growing out of a patch of earth around a street lamp, and the dandelion beamed up at her in recognition and she looked up over the rooftops to distant hills and could feel them ... breathing, inside her, and by the time they got to the park, well ...

  And Rosemary realized everything had changed, for ever.

  Jane looked up. ‘She’d changed, of course. But you never say that.’

  ‘First rule of writing for children. Never lecture. Never let them think it’s a parable. Which of course’ – Lucy put down her duster – ‘you know it isn’t.’

  ‘Shame there aren’t books like that
for adults.’

  ‘Adults,’ said Lucy, ‘can read Traherne.’

  ‘Oh,’ Jane said. ‘Right.’ Not a single customer had been in while she was reading; she wondered how Lucy kept this place going.

  ‘The story you’ve just read is, of course, an introduction to Traherne’s world. Traherne showed how higher consciousness is there for us all. I’ll give you some of his work to take home. Leave it lying about and hope your mother reads it. There’s so much she needs to know, if she’s going to surv— succeed here.’ Lucy snatched up her duster. ‘Now read the other one.’

  In the little green orchard, there was an awesome hush.

  In the little green orchard, it all became serious.

  Rosemary again. A little older.

  Her grandfather had died and she was spending the holidays with her grandmother, helping out on the farm, where it would soon be time to harvest the apples.

  Rosemary had never been into the orchard before.

  She was to discover that the orchard was the heart of everything.

  19

  The Nighthouse

  LUCY SENT JANE to the village stores to buy a pound of apples. Any apples would do. Jane returned with three large Bramleys. The apples lay on the counter, the only living fruit in a shop devoted to artificial representations of it.

  Lucy talked about apples. As the highest and purest and most magical of fruits. She talked of the golden apples of Greek myth. Of the mystical Avalon, the orchard where King Arthur had passed over. Of Eve.

  And of the apple as the mystic heart of Herefordshire. The seventeenth-century diarist, John Evelyn, had written that ‘all Herefordshire has become, in a manner, but one entire orchard’, praising Lord Scudamore, who had improved and refined the cider apple, developing the famous Redstreak, from which the Ledwardine apple, the Pharisees Red, had been, in turn, created.

  ‘Why’s it called that?’ Jane asked.

  Lucy smiled. When she did that, her cheeks seemed to take on the ruddier colours of the apples on the counter. She was wearing a long, green dress, her hair in this complicated bun. She must have really quite long hair, Jane realized. You could imagine her, in years gone by, striding the land with her hair blowing out parallel to the ground. Listening to the hills breathe. Believing everything was possible. Like some ancient, Celtic enchantress.

  Jane was just blown away. Lucy was just, like, the coolest person she’d ever met.

  ‘Pay attention, Jane!’ Lucy snapped.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Now.’ Lucy plucked a souvenir penknife from a rack. She selected an apple, laid it on a square of plain wrapping paper. ‘I’m going to cut it sideways. Have you ever done this before?’

  Jane shook her head and Lucy pushed the point of the knife into the apple and sliced it in half.

  ‘There.’ She held out a half in the palm of each hand. ‘What do you see?’

  Jane leaned over the counter. The green-white pulp was veined with thin green lines and dots which made a kind of wheel.

  ‘Count the spokes,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Five.’

  ‘It makes a five-pointed star, you see? Inside a circle. A pentagram.’

  ‘Oh, wow.’ Jane had read enough weird books involving pentagrams in her time.

  ‘Forget all this black magic nonsense. The pentagram’s a very ancient symbol of purification and of protection. And there’s one at the heart of every apple. That says something, doesn’t it?’

  ‘That’s like really amazing.’ She couldn’t stop looking at the little green veins. ‘Something really ordinary, like an apple.’

  ‘Nothing is ordinary! Read Traherne.’

  ‘I’m going to.’

  ‘Least of all the apple,’ Lucy said sternly. ‘Let no one talk of the humble apple to me.’

  Jane looked around the shop and saw it with different eyes, like the storybook child, Rosemary, in the park. It was more than a little souvenir shop, it was a shrine. A temple. A temple to the apple.

  ‘You were going to tell me why it was called the Pharisees Red.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ Lucy said.

  ‘All right, well, I asked you, didn’t I?’

  ‘That’s not the same thing.’

  'Will you tell me? Like in the scribes and pharisees, all that stuff?’

  ‘Jane, you’re so ill-read.’ Lucy came out from behind the counter, pulled down a large, fat, soft-backed book. ‘Here, find out for yourself. Page forty-three.’

  It was The Folklore of Herefordshire by Ella Mary Leather.

  ‘Published in 1912,’ Lucy said. ‘A formidable work of research and scholarship.’

  On page forty-three, Jane found a sub-heading.

  (5) Fairies

  Although there are now hut few persons living in

  Herefordshire who believe in fairies, faith in their existence

  must have been common enough with the folk of the last

  generation. All the old people who can tell anything about

  fairies do not call them fairies at all, but farises’; the word is

  pronounced almost like Pharisees.

  ‘So you see, Jane, nothing too biblical about that.’

  ‘Oh, wow.’

  ‘Don’t keep saying that. It’s most annoying. Of course, people deny today that it’s anything to do with fairies, but people always deny fairies because the word itself has become such a term of ridicule.’

  Jane looked at the matchstick-limbed, gossamer-winged things clinging to the rims of cups and plaques, perched on the tops of shelves, the edges of picture frames.

  ‘Nothing like those, Jane, I’m afraid. Those are the traditional forms that everybody knows, and if one is to create an impression of the spirit in nature, that’s the one people are normally prepared to accept, even as a joke. If one were to create an effigy of a real tree spirit, as they’re more often perceived by those able to, the customers would be disturbed and I’d have a reputation as something a good deal worse than a lunatic crone.’

  ‘Tree spirits?’

  ‘For want of a more credible term. Essences, whatever you want to call them. They are, in fact, more perceptible in and around fruit-bearing trees. The female trees. That’s why I was so outraged by all this nonsensical talk of the oldest tree in the orchard as the Apple Tree Man. Not a feminist thing, simply the way it is.’

  ‘But I still don’t understand why the apples were called Farises Red. Were they supposed to belong to the fairies?’

  ‘What you have,’ said Lucy, ‘is a belief in some supernatural intervention in the creation of this particular apple. It’s a not-so-rare blending of paganism, as we’re forced to call it, and Christianity. The church being, for much of its history, in the very centre of the orchard. Which came first, I wouldn’t like to say, though I suspect the orchard. Perhaps there was a pre-Christian shrine where the church now stands, we can’t say, we can but speculate.’

  ‘Oh, w—’ Jane swallowed. Waited. Lucy detached one of the tiny fairies from a shelf edge, held it up to the light.

  ‘Translucence, you see. That’s the essence of it. As fine as air. Spirits of the air. The spirits of the earth, goblins and things, are denser. The tree elves are brown and green. They’re the protective and motivating forces in nature. Some of them are of limited intelligence but, like us, they evolve. I find it impossible to explain the phenomenon of life without them.’

  ‘Mum might not be sympathetic’

  Lucy thought for a moment, her lips becoming a tight bud.

  After a while she said, ‘The great mystery of life can be approached in terms of pure physics – the electronic soup of atoms and particles. And also in religious terms. Terms, that’s all it is, Jane. Traherne never speaks of elves or devas, but he refers all the time to angels. Cherubim and seraphim and cupids who pass through the air bringing love. Traherne is full of coded references – we know of his interest in the ancient occult philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus, we know from the writings of John Aubrey
that Traherne was psychic.

  But in those days, as you know, one had to be extremely cautious.’

  ‘Or you ended up like Wil Williams?’

  ‘Precisely, Jane. Williams, we know, was Traherne’s protege as well as his neighbour. I think Wil was a little too incautious in his attempts to walk with the angels.’

  Jane said, ‘Mum doesn’t have much to say about angels. Angels are not cool in today’s streetwise Church. I mean ...’

  ‘Angelic forces correspond to what are called devic presences. The devas are the prime movers, if you like, in the structure. A deva may control a whole area, a whole sphere of activity, or an ecosystem.’

  ‘Like an orchard?’ Jane said automatically.

  Lucy positively purred with pleasure. ‘You’re making the leaps. You’re receiving help. The channel was opened – you know when.’

  ‘I thought it was just the cider.’

  ‘Oh, the cider’s very much a part of it. The cider’s the blood of the orchard. It’s in your blood now. I felt at once that it had to be one or both of you.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘You and Merrily.’

  ‘She won’t want to know,’ Jane said.

  Jane returned just before six. She said trade had not been exactly brisk, but a nice Brummie couple with a corgi had bought a set of four hand-painted apple-shaped cups and saucers for sixty-four pounds.

  ‘Thank heavens for people with no taste,’ Jane said.

  Merrily noticed she had with her a copy of the Penguin edition of selected poems and prose by Thomas Traherne.

  ‘You bought that with your wages?’

  ‘Lucy gave it to me. I refused to take any wages. It’s fun playing shop.’

  ‘You going to actually read it?’

  ‘Of course I’m going to read it. Traherne’s cool’

  ‘Oh. Right. Should’ve realized. Why is he cool?’

  ‘Because he could see that we were surrounded by all this beauty, but we didn’t appreciate it, and we were quite likely to destroy it. Which was pretty prophetic thinking back in the mid-seventeenth century, when there was no industry and no insecticides and things.’