Read The Wine of Angels Online
Authors: Phil Rickman
‘Just the shop,’ Jane said. ‘Mum, you have to take this very, very seriously. She said you might get cold feet and want to leave. Because of what happened in the church and stuff. She said you mustn’t. She also said you should change your mind about not letting that play go on in the church. She said—’
‘Flower—’
‘I’m just a kid,’ Jane said. ‘Does executor mean the same as catalyst?’
36
Dancing Gates
‘D
ISASTROUS
,’ D
ERMOT
C
HILD
said into the early evening stillness. ‘Totally disastrous. By the end of the afternoon it was fairly conclusive. About three dozen genuine ones, the rest were rubberneckers hoping for a body bag. When the police cars dwindled to one, they took themselves off home.’
He stood on the corner of Church Street looking out to the square, where the last stallholder was packing up, spreading stains of armpit sweat on his polo shirt uncomfortably reminiscent, for Merrily, of the menacing dream-Dermot.
‘The bloody Press, too. Not an arts journalist among them. Ten people went into the exhibition, none of them bought a thing. Thirty tickets sold for the string quartet. Is it even worth it? Come and have a drink, Merrily. Do your understanding-vicar bit. Tell me you’ll offer a prayer for the festival.’
‘Priest-in-charge,’ Merrily said dully. Lack of sleep was already corroding her resolve. The last thing she needed was a cosy drink with Dermot Child. ‘Understanding-priest-in-charge. I’m sorry, I can’t, Dermot. I have an appointment. I’ll try and make it to the concert.’
‘Perhaps it’s telling us something. Controversy certainly attracts attention, but this was the wrong kind of controversy. Pulls in the wrong element.’
‘The gossiping classes, as distinct from the chattering classes.’
He smiled. ‘Clearly, the morris dancers were a mistake. Terrence’s idea. Falls between two stools. The cultured consider it quaint but a little simplistic, the working class find it more than a bit of a yawn. Terrence is all for harmless tradition. I think we need to be a touch more avant-garde.’
‘Like your Old Cider thing?’
‘Ah.’ His eyes went to sly slits and he tapped his nose. ‘You haven’t seen that yet, Merrily. And neither has Terrence, thank God. It might seem tame, but what you have is this
very male
celebration of fecundity.’
‘Fascinating,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m sorry, I do have to go.’
‘Approached it the wrong way at first, you see. I was looking for singers when I should’ve been seeking out untamed virility. Chaps who, with a little training, can learn to sing not from the throat, not from the stomach but from the, ah, loins.’
‘Yes,’ Merrily said. Dermot talking dirty only made her feel more exhausted. ‘Well, good luck with tonight – I’m sure you’ll get lots of people turning up on spec’
She walked across the street, but carried on down past Miss Devenish’s house, not wanting him to know where she was going. At the junction with Old Barn Lane, she turned, and he was gone. She walked back to Lucy’s terraced black and white, taking out the key. As she pushed it into the lock beside the goblin knocker, a gruff and loaded male chorus sang in her head.
Auld ciderrrrrrrrrr.
Dermot’s choral work was going to be a kind of aural hard-on.
She shuddered.
She was several feet into Lucy’s living room when the door twitched shut behind her.
She started and turned her head, but no one was there. The silence, in fact, was almost companionable, and she understood that she was more afraid of Dermot Child having crept in behind her than she was of Lucy’s ghost. Would almost have welcomed the jolly, ponchoed apparition.
To advise her, for a start, on what the hell she was supposed to be doing in here.
The muted evening light was a soft presence in the single, small window, leaded and lace-curtained. But not in the room, which was well into its own dusk. Merrily went back to the door and found a light switch, an old metal one like a pewter pip.
It activated two Victorian bracket lamps over an ornate, ebony desk which sat under the window and dominated the room like an altar. The beams above it were stained as black as the exterior timbers. There was a rigid-looking armchair and a Victorian chaise longue. All four walls were half-panelled, to waist level, white-painted above, between glass-fronted bookcases. There was a single etching – two Victorian fairies, elegantly pool-peering – in a thin black frame. And some framed photographs.
Merrily stood, for a moment, hands by her sides. Trying for quietness inside, receptivity.
The solicitor’s clerk from McCready’s office had arrived on a red Honda motorbike just before six, handing her a brown envelope containing only the front-door key and a smaller one. No instructions, no advice.
Jane had wanted to come across with her, but she’d felt that would be wrong. This apparently was between Miss Devenish and her. Although it would have been useful having Lol in here, the person who’d known her best of late, but who dare not be seen on the streets.
She was still reluctant to touch anything without at least a sensation of having permission. It was all so tidy. As though Lucy Devenish had actually walked out of here this morning under a premonition that she might not be returning.
Merrily folded her arms. ‘What do you want me to do, Lucy?’
It didn’t seem foolish to ask aloud. She’d always had the slightly unorthodox idea that the dead were not fully gone until after the funeral service. Sometimes she’d look at the coffin in the church and sense a relief, a gratefulness, emanating from it. Occasionally, a sense of indignation.
‘What do you want me to know?’
Nothing happened. The lights did not go out. No bat-winged, hook-nosed spectre peeled itself from the panelling. Neither did she feel anything, nor hear any inner voice.
She went to look at the photographs on the walls. One, in blurry black and white, showed a much younger, bushy-haired Lucy in a summer dress sitting on a bench. A young, smiling man in cricketing clothes was leaning over the back of the bench, hands on her shoulders. Lucy wore a sad half-smile, as though she knew it wouldn’t come to anything. In another picture, a shorter haired, middle-aged Lucy, trousers rolled into riding boots, held out a feed bucket for a piebald pony, while a younger woman looked on. She looked curiously familiar. Sister? Close friend?
Merrily peered into the bookcases without opening the doors. There was a surprising number of volumes on English and Welsh history, from the old, popular favourites, like Arthur Mee, to modern classics, like John Davies’s
History of Wales
and, more specialist, Keith Thomas’s
Religion and the Decline of Magic.
With the slump in congregations and the growth of New Age cults, somebody should have written one called
Magic and the Decline of Religion.
Someone like Lucy, perhaps.
She turned back to the desk.
There was a box on it. A Victorian writing box which should open out into a small, sloping desk-surface. Merrily saw that both bracket lamps had been angled to focus on it, pooling it in light.
‘Spooky,’ she said aloud, to show to herself that she wasn’t spooked by this. Not at all. Good heavens no.
From the pocket of her denim skirt, she brought out the second key. A little brass key. The box had a brass escutcheon over its keyhole.
The key fitted, of course. The lock glided open with a discreet
pock.
Eerie.
She made no immediate move to lift the lid, remembering the story of Joanna Southcott’s box which could only be opened in the presence of about a dozen bishops and never had been because most bishops were too lofty or politically sensitive even to consider it.
She wondered if she should say a small prayer.
‘This was it?’ Lol picked up the hefty Lapridge Press paperback of Ella Mary Leather’s
The Folklore of Herefordshire.
‘This was all there was inside?’
‘Lucy’s Bible. Careful, there are markers.’
Folded bits of paper had been placed between pages at intervals. Some had scrawled notes on them. When Lol put the book on the kitchen table it fell open at once to the section on wassailing the old girl had quoted on Twelfth Night.
‘I’m at a loss.’ Merrily sat down with a bump. ‘I liked her. I want to honour her last wishes. I’m trying to feel flattered that she chose me as the instrument. But ... you know ... what are we looking for? And in what context?’
Jane perched on a corner of the table. ‘It’s obvious that we have to work it out for ourselves. Because if she just wrote it down in black and white we – or you, especially – would be able to say like, Yeah, yeah, very interesting, but the old boot was completely out of it. But if you have to spend some time working it out, you’ll see the reasoning behind it.’
Merrily yawned. ‘Can we look at this tomorrow?’
‘Mum, it’s important. It’s vital!’
‘Sure, but vital how? Vital to what?’
‘Vital to
Lucy?
’ Jane dropped her feet to the flagstones. ‘Isn’t that enough for you? It’s enough for me. And Lol.’
Merrily smiled wearily. ‘OK. You’re right. We have a duty.
I
have a duty. No idea where to start, of course.’ She plucked out one of the paper bookmarks, keeping her thumb in the place. ‘Hannah Snell, 1745,’ she read from the paper. ‘That’s all it says. What’s that mean?’
‘Mum, we can find out. You can find out anything if you put your mind to it.’
‘Sure.’ She pushed both hands through her hair. ‘There’re a few more obvious references to cider and apples. And this looks like a photocopy of a page from some other book, stuffed in here, something about Oxford University. Can’t think what that connects to. There’s a page marked here, lots of heavy underlining. Fairies again.’
It seemed to be a story told to Mrs Leather by an unnamed woman who got it from her mother who said it had happened to her first cousin and she remembered it well.
The cousin, a girl about eighteen, was very fond of dancing; she insisted on going to all the balls for miles around; wherever there was dancing going on, there was she. Her people told her something would happen to her some day, and one night when she was coming home just by the ‘Dancing Gates’ near Kington, she heard beautiful music. It was the music of the fairies and she was caught into the ring. Search was made for her and she appeared to her friends from time to time, but when they spoke to her she immediately disappeared. Her mother was told (probably by the wise man or woman) that if seen again she must be very quickly seized, without speaking, or she would never come back. So one day, a year after her disappearance, her mother saw her and took hold of her dress before she could escape. ‘Why, Mother,’ she said, ‘where have you been since yesterday?
’
Merrily looked up at Jane, now leaning over her other shoulder. ‘I know what you’re going to say. This girl’s a nineteenth-century Colette. But I see no mention, in this curious precedent, of clothing found several miles away, do you?’
‘What’s this written inside the back cover?
Young Alison. 1965.
With a question mark.’
‘It’s not an uncommon name,’ Merrily said. ‘But Alison Kinnersley did go to see Lucy this morning.’
‘Alison did?’ Lol came over.
‘This morning. Early. Just after I’d left the Country Kitchen. She asked me which was Lucy’s house, and I directed her. I wondered at the time why she wanted to see her that early. Did they know each other?’
‘Not that I know of.
Young Alison?
’
‘It’s just a pencil scrawl.’
‘But, Mum, what if this was the last thing she wrote before she went out on her moped? The last thing she ever wrote?’
‘Well, we aren’t ever going to know that, are we, flower?’
The phone rang. Jane walked over to answer it. ‘You in, or what?’
‘Depends who it is. I’ll leave it to your judgement. I might be having a bath.’
‘Right.’
‘I’m very confused,’ Merrily said to Lol. ‘I’m not happy.’
‘And who’s
that?
’ Jane said into the phone. ‘Oh. Right. Well, no, actually I’m her daughter, but if you tell me what it’s about I might be able to find her.’
Jane listened, expressionless, for over a minute.
‘Really,’ she said flatly. ‘And who told you that?’ She smiled. ‘No, I didn’t think you would. Hang on, give me a couple of minutes, I’ll wander over the vicarage, see if she’s around.’
She inspected the receiver and then put it down on the window ledge and signalled to Merrily to follow her into the passage. ‘Guy from
The Sunday Times
in London. Apparently, somebody’s rung to tell them there’s a row developed over you refusing to let Coffey do his play in the church. Looks like your chance to back off before they crucify you as a Philistine.’
‘Damn.’
‘You want to buy some time? How about if I tell them you’re out at a string quartet recital and then you’re going on to a fashionable village cocktail party?’
‘And then they print it anyway and say I was unavailable for comment. Sod it.’ Merrily went back into the kitchen, snatched up the phone. ‘Hello. Merrily Watkins.’