The Wine of Angels mw-1

by Phil Rickman

‘Again!’ sang a man’s voice. ‘Come on, again! Fill those lungs!’

  Dermot Child, rehearsing his choral work, the male voices like mud in the bottom of a deep pond.

  Aulllllllld ciderrrrrrrrr.

  Jane didn’t look up, but Merrily thought she saw the kid shiver.

  Lol came down from the loft. He stumbled.

  ‘This is a nightmare, Lucy.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Lucy’s face was gaunt in the gloom. ‘If her mother doesn’t start to realize a few things soon, I’m going to have to talk to the child in greater depth.’

  All the apple colours and the translucence in the wings of the fairies had dulled like a stained-glass window at night. The shop seemed heavy around Lucy. It seemed to be not so much a diversion for her as a symbol of responsibility. For the first time it occurred to him that she was probably quite an old woman.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘She was just lying there. She was all white. At first, I thought she was dead. When she moved, it ... I just wanted to run away from it. But I couldn’t. You know? I couldn’t move. What was she doing there, Lucy? Again.’

  ‘Laurence,’ Lucy said, ‘you’re living on your own, too near the orchard. At the wrong time. If you have a weakness, some things will play to that weakness. When you’re prepared to tell me what the weakness is, we can take it from there.’

  ‘I’m all weakness,’ Lol said.

  ‘You’re not helping yourself.’ Lucy’s face darkened. ‘I can’t help you if I don’t know the root of the problem.’

  ‘Can I think about this?’

  ‘It seems to me,’ Lucy said severely, ‘that you’ve already been thinking about it rather too long.’

  18

  The Little Green Orchard

  IT WAS, MERRILY thought in dismay, like still living in a hotel. One without any guests or staff. A hotel in winter.

  ‘Sure this is the lot, Vicar?’ Gomer Parry had asked her, about three times.

  ‘I’m afraid it is.’

  This is awful, she was still thinking, after two days of moving things around. She’d forgotten quite how much furniture she’d sold or given away over the past three years. What it meant was that they had about enough for a decent-sized flat with one living room and a couple of bedrooms.

  Gomer Parry had done it in one trip. Bloody sight easier, he said, than when he and Minnie moved in from the Radnor Valley, with all Minnie’s clutter from nearly forty years of marriage to the late Frank. Gomer and his nephew, Nev, took no more than half an hour to get all the stuff in. But, until such time as the property market improved to a point where the Diocese could make a killing on Ledwardine Vicarage, Merrily was stuck with it.

  Behind the door, she’d found a letter from the North Herefordshire Gay and Lesbian Collective expressing support for Richard Coffey’s ‘brave reappraisal of an historic injustice’ and urging her to ‘do the right thing’. She filed it for a future non-committal reply and returned to practical problems.

  So. OK. There were two ways they could handle this situation. They could scatter the bits and pieces around, so that the whole place had the air of somewhere partly moved-into. Or they could furnish a couple of rooms reasonably well, which made it seem as though you were the live-in caretakers in some kind of hostel.

  ‘I’m told there’s a couple of reasonable secondhand shops in Hereford. If we spent say two hundred pounds fairly wisely, we might make a bit of a difference.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jane said. ‘Whatever.’

  It didn’t help that the kid was still into the idea of this third-floor flat arrangement. More into it than ever, in fact. She’d charmed Gomer and Nev into taking her bed to the top floor, into one of the smaller bedrooms, while the biggest one up there, which she insisted on keeping locked until she’d finished painting the walls, had her stereo, her albums, her books.

  Merrily felt guilty as well as intimidated. Acres – literally, probably – of wasted space.

  ‘But, my dear, virtually all country vicarages are like this,’ Caroline Cassidy said, when she and Terrence arrived to assist. ‘That’s why so many vicars end up having enormous families. Of course, you’ll marry again one day. Oh yes, you will!’

  ‘Perhaps I could offer a home to some refugees,’ Merrily had said, and Caroline had looked quite appalled. Almost as appalled as she’d been when she first saw their miserable collection of worthless furniture, making Merrily scared that they were going to be regarded as a charity case and all kinds of appalling junk would get dumped on them. ‘Actually,’ she’d lied, ‘there’s quite a bit more over in Cheltenham, but we wanted to do a bit of decorating first.’ Caroline had looked sceptical.

  As, in fact, she had over the issue of Jane’s disappearance, which Merrily had tried to gloss over. Fairly sure she hadn’t mentioned to Caroline that the kid had failed to catch the bus in the morning, she’d said Jane had simply missed the one home and had to get a lift from a friend’s father.

  All right then, flower, what really happened?

  She never seemed to get a chance to ask the question – one for a long night in front of a log fire. But it was getting too close to summer for log fires and they never seemed to get a full night in together. Now people knew where to find the vicar, the doorbell and the phone rarely stopped.

  Which was good. In a way. It was good to deal with day-to-day stuff: planning weddings and christenings, agonizing over whether to buy new prayer books. And putting off decisions on more contentious issues.

  On Friday night, Richard Coffey invited her to dinner at the Black Swan. He had with him a man called Martin Creighton, a theatre director, and Creighton’s earnest girlfriend Mira Wickham, a set designer.

  ‘I happened to run into the bishop,’ Coffey said.

  ‘Oh.’ Merrily fingered her napkin. ‘I wondered if you might.’

  ‘He’s thrilled, of course, about our idea for staging Wil in the church. He’s very keen to encourage the wider use of ecclesiastical premises. For the church to be the centre of the community again.’

  ‘Well, me too, obviously, it’s just ... Well, I’d like to have some time to look into the Wil Williams story. I feel it’s important we get him right.’

  ‘Get him right?’ Coffey’s map-like face pulsed in the candlelight. Merrily blinked wearily; she was too tired for all this.

  ‘If you were doing it in a theatre, that would be one thing. But in the church where he ... preached ... I just think we all have a responsibility to get as close to the truth as we can.’

  ‘Ah, the truth. What an adaptable little word that is. The truth. A truth. The literal truth. A universal truth. Where do we begin?’

  Martin Creighton laughed. Mira Wickham smiled.

  ‘I think we have to begin,’ Merrily said, ‘with whether Wil Williams really was a witch.’ She took a quick sip of wine. ‘And whether he really was gay.’

  Coffey leaned back. He wore a black leather jacket and a white shirt and a sort of chamois-leather bow tie. He was not accompanied by Stefan Alder, his partner. There was no humour in his smile.

  ‘Mrs Watkins, if you were to substitute the word “heterosexual” – as in “whether he was heterosexual” – you would perhaps appreciate the degree of offence implicit in the line you’re taking.’

  ‘Oh, now, look, obviously I intended no offence at all. I have absolutely nothing against—’

  ‘Woofters? Queers?’ Tilting his head, playing with her.

  ‘All I’m saying, Mr Coffey’ – Merrily gripped her napkin – ‘is that if we’re talking about causing offence—’

  ‘I know what you’re saying. I gather you’ve already had a state visit from a certain descendant of the tyrannical Thomas Bull. Who thinks I’ve developed a grudge against his entire lineage because the bastard capitalized so ruthlessly on my friend Stefan’s desire to live in his lodge.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Merrily admitted.

  ‘All right, let me explain something to you. I’m an exhaustive researcher. I li
ke to know every minute detail of the background against which I am working. Correct, Martin?’

  ‘Richard’s compulsion to know is legendary,’ Creighton said obsequiously.

  ‘I have read, therefore, everything extant on the Williams case. Which, I have to say, is not a tremendous amount. It’s very sparse. But perhaps my use of the word extant is a misuse. Available would be a better word. Because there are other documents in existence. Several sources, for instance, make mention of the Journal of Thomas Bull, parts of which have been published – the ones relating to the Civil War, for instance, and the Siege of Hereford. Bull’s interesting to historians because, although a supporter of the Crown, he was, in his private life, a puritan.’

  Merrily thought of Bull’s effigy in the church, the rustic simplicity of his clothing.

  ‘Now. As Justice of the Peace, it was Bull’s job to initiate a prosecution of Williams, if he was convinced there was sufficient evidence. Do you know how this began, Mrs Watkins?’

  ‘You mean, the chap who saw him dancing with devilish sprites?’

  ‘No, no, before that; the poor man was accused by one John Rudge, a wealthy, independent farmer, of bringing down a blight on his orchard and destroying his crop of cider apples. Williams, it seems, had good reason to be opposed to the ready availability of cider, having been assaulted by a drunk who wandered into his church. Now ...’

  Coffey angled forward, the tabletop candles reflected in his eyes.

  ‘... we know that, as a puritan – with, if you like, a small p – Thomas Bull also was very much opposed to drink and drunkenness and would not allow cider apples to be grown by any of his tenants. Therefore, he might have been expected, might he not, to take the side of Wil Williams in his crusade for sobriety?’

  Merrily nodded slowly.

  ‘Instead of which,’ Coffey said, ‘Bull appears to have seized on the accusation with a kind of sorrowful glee. This suggests he was already harbouring a certain prejudice against Wil Williams?’

  ‘I suppose it might. But how will we ever know?’

  ‘Only’ – Coffey spread his hand delicately – ‘by obtaining access to the unpublished journals of Thomas Bull. Which our friend James Bull-Davies keeps, no doubt, in the deepest of bank vaults. So, the next time he tries to lean on you, Mrs Watkins, I suggest you invite him to resolve the issue by producing them.’

  ‘Do you have any proof that he’s got them?’

  ‘I’d be astonished if he hadn’t. And, given his recent, ah, cash-flow difficulty, do you not think he wouldn’t have attempted to sell the journals for publication? I’m not suggesting Tom Bull was any kind of rural Pepys. But his Civil War memoirs are surprisingly erudite. Be worth a good few thousand, I suspect. Certainly well worth putting on the market. Unless of course they contained material which, in the current climate, might be considered highly damaging to the family’s reputation.’

  All this made a certain sense.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Merrily said. ‘It gets complicated, doesn’t it?’

  ‘So ...’ Coffey said, ‘would you object if Martin and Mira were to have a look at the church over the weekend?’

  Of course they already would have done. He was just testing her.

  ‘Sure,’ Merrily said, resignedly. ‘Go ahead.’

  The next day, Jane announced that she was to be manager of Ledwardine Lore for the afternoon. Lol Robinson, who usually conquered his shyness to take care of things while Lucy had a half-day off, had gone to a place near Oxford for a few days, to work on some new songs with Gary Kennedy, leaving Lucy to feed his cat, so ...

  ‘The Gary Kennedy?’

  ‘Oh, Mum, how unutterably sad. The Gary Kennedy!’

  ‘Listen, when I was your age—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, he was huge. Personally, I find it unbelievable that someone like Lol should be reduced to writing lyrics for someone as tragically awful as Gary Kennedy but there you are.’

  Merrily watched from the window as Jane crossed the square and entered the mews, to make sure she really was going to Ledwardine Lore. It was wrong to be so suspicious, but she couldn’t dispel the feeling that the kid and Lucy Devenish had come to some kind of arrangement.

  When Jane had not emerged from the mews after five minutes, Merrily went into the hall, where Alf had left a few books of local interest on a shelf under the cupboard housing the electric meters. She pulled out a well-thumbed soft-covered book entitled The Black and White Villages of Herefordshire: A short history and carried it into the kitchen, where they’d temporarily placed two easy chairs and the TV, neither of them feeling quite up to the drawing room.

  OK. Index. Williams, Wil. p 98.

  Merrily pushed the chair on its castors to a spot side-on to the Aga and threw herself down. She wasn’t going to get much out of this, but it would be a start.

  ‘You’ve been avoiding me.’

  Colette was standing right in the centre of the mews, so no chance of avoiding her this time. Short, red plastic windcheater with probably nothing underneath.

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘You fucking have, Janey. I get sent off to scour the village for the vicar’s precious child – and believe me the Reverend Mumsy was in a big, big fret – and the next thing I hear is you’ve turned up in Devenish’s den in like seriously mysterious circumstances.’

  ‘That’s bollocks. There was nothing mysterious at all, there—’

  She stopped talking, spotting the slow-growing smile and knowing she’d blown it, because if there was genuinely nothing to hide then she’d have played along, pretending there was, wouldn’t she?

  ‘Oh, Janey, what are we getting into? I mean, are we like talking, erm ... we talking orchard?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘See, like, there’s two possibles where that orchard’s concerned. One is that you’ve actually got a secret guy.’

  ‘Bitch,’ said Jane. ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘Or it goes back to that night when the cider did things for you it ain’t never done for me, and you know how I really hate it when that happens.’

  ‘Well, obviously it did things to me it didn’t do to you, on account of you’ve been getting regularly pissed out of your mind for years.’

  ‘Not good enough. Plus there’s the Devenish angle. That creepy, tacky little shop you can’t turn round in without horrible little fairies dropping down your front. You’re going there now, yeah? Again?’

  ‘So? It’s a weekend job, all right? We’re not all seriously rich, like on the Cassidy scale.’

  ‘I’ll find out,’ Colette said menacingly. ‘You can frigging count on it.’

  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 dis
pose 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.’