The Wine of Angels (63 page)

‘Sixteen,’ Teresa whispered. ‘Sixteen that day, sir.’

In the long, hollow silence that followed, Merrily was aware of Gomer Parry edging out of his pew and then Stefan Alder was leaning over her, his lips against her ear. She could smell his sweat.

‘The light, please, Merrily. The spot. Five minutes?’

He was so screwed up he couldn’t think. He kept walking around the room, pulling books from the shelves. He didn’t know where to start. He had so little time and no idea where the hell to start.

He made himself sit down.

Traherne. Start with Traherne. How did Traherne come to know Wil Williams? Help me, Lucy. Just remind me.

Thinking back to when Lucy had first introduced him to Traherne, who had a link with Ledwardine through Wil Williams and ...

Hopton.

Susannah Hopton. The patroness.

It took Lol nearly twenty minutes to discover, from the various histories of Herefordshire, that Susannah Hopton had been the wife of a judge on the Welsh circuit who lived right on the border at Kington and was a devout high Anglican with some kind of circle of disciples. During the puritan Cromwellian years, Mrs Hopton had moved towards Roman Catholicism but returned after the Restoration of the monarchy. She had a strict and punishing regime of daily worship, which began before dawn. She was very fond of clergymen and her best-known protege was Thomas Traherne.

But Wil Williams, Lucy said, had become virtually a part of her household.

His background had equipped him to meet her schedules without difficulty.

‘I was born,’ Stefan said, ‘on a grey and wind-soured hill farm at Glascwm in Radnorshire.’

He looked down at his fingernails, as if remembering a time when they were black and ragged.

‘My father held seventy acres of rocky, boggy, clay-heavy, God-deserted earth. My father had little faith. No hope. And no conception of charity ...’

Stefan moved around the church; you could hear the crackling of his footsteps, the only sound, and wherever he would stop light would flare.

Candles.

All around the church, faces were lit by little, oval spears, and in this timeless light, the centuries dissolved, and you saw that essentially nothing had changed, farming faces no less rough and reddened than ever they were, than the stones themselves. And no face more severely stony than Garrod Powell’s.
An axe to grind ...
Merrily recalled the councillor’s fist striking the table in the village hall ...
Let him grind it somewhere else, sir. Not in our church.
And would he say a word tonight? Probably not. No muscle would twitch in Rod’s puritan face, no eyebrow rise.

There were no stray breezes in the church tonight, and the flames were vertical, sending up wispy tapers of smoke and that faintly bitter, singeing aroma.

Faces. She saw the moon-bland countenance of Dermot Child. He had not looked at her. She saw the pert, urban features of Caroline Cassidy made gaunt and austere by the wan and waxy light and the anxiety that many a mother knew in the seventeenth century when so many children would expire in infancy. Caroline had not noticed her.

Then she saw Alison Kinnersley. Who had slipped into the back central pew occupied, at the other end, by Annie Howe.

Behind them, Jane hovered. Merrily walked over, made a little signal with a forefinger to tell her to put on the left-hand spot. She could easily have done the lights herself, but it was an excuse to have the kid safely in the building. Jane nodded.

By the time the spot came on, a dusty yellow tunnel from the rafters to the area below the pulpit, Stefan was there, sitting on the second step, half in the beam, half in shadow. He began to speak conversationally, as though to friends, about his adoption by a rich and pious woman who recognized in him an intelligence, a longing and a purity of spirit so rare it required special nurturing.

He had everyone’s attention. The world of Wil Williams. But he spoke boastfully, and that wouldn’t go down well. Herefordshire people were generally laid-back and self-effacing.

All around her, Merrily felt a cloudy, ancient atmosphere, but when she looked at Stefan she saw ... an actor.

Why? She rubbed her eyes. Was it jealousy, because they were never so silent, so attentive to her? She went and stood against the back wall of the nave, next to the heavy curtain covering the entrance to the vestry, and listened to Stefan telling of his introduction to Traherne. How Traherne, with, perhaps, financial assistance from Hopton, had secured Wil’s acceptance to his old Oxford College, Brasenose.

Merrily felt very strange. She felt a tightness in her chest. She leaned against the wall, took deep breaths until it subsided.

Stefan was saying something about him and Traherne being two halves of the same apple. Traherne was a poet and a mystic, Wil was deeply sensitive, a natural psychic, a visionary in the most direct sense. When Wil walked out on the hills or into the oak woods, the spirits came to him like the birds and animals to St Francis. He was a wild child, possessed of a raw, exciting beauty.

Where was this leading? Traherne’s rough trade, or what?

Merrily felt that alarming tightening in the chest and this time she couldn’t make it go away. She held on to the curtain to the vestry to prevent herself falling to her knees. When she began to wheeze, heads turned.

Oh no, not again. Not again, no way.

Merrily walked out.

‘Mum?’

Jane stood in the porch, watching her anxiously.

Merrily took gulps of air. All around her, the graves were washed amber-pink by the moon.

‘You’re not ill again, are you?’

‘Sorry, flower, I think it’s the fumes from all those candles. You go back. Stefan’ll think we don’t like it.’

‘I don’t. Do you?’

‘I’ll tell you when it’s finished. Just go back, Jane, OK? There’s nothing to worry about. I’m just going to have a cigarette, OK?’

‘God,’ said Jane. ‘You can’t go an hour without one, can you?’

She gave her mother one final disapproving glance before disappearing into the porch.

Merrily turned away and leaned her arms over a tall gravestone as a red speck came up from behind another stone.

‘Sorry, Vicar, went and hid, I did. Thought it was gonner be my Minnie.’

His cigarette end made a glowing triangle with the twin moons in his glasses.

‘Hello, Gomer.’

‘Lost track of time in there. En’t allowed to wear my watch tonight. Digital, see, gives a bit of a bleep on the hour. Minnie says, What’s that gonner sound like in the seventeenth century, eh? Had to sit at the back, too, on account of not havin’ a proper fancy-dress costume.’

‘Still. You came. I’m glad.’ Out here, the pain in her chest had dulled to a throb.

Gomer took a pull on his cigarette. ‘En’t workin’, is it?’

‘What en’t? Sorry.’

‘Thought ‘e was gonner hit the spot, that young feller, when he got on to cider, but it went by, see.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The cider house. Got me thinkin’, that did, so I come out to think sumore. Does a lot o’ thinkin’ these days. Too much time.’

‘The cider house?’

‘Where the Bulls took their women. Not their wives, like, you know. Their women. Them as was old enough to qualify as women.’

‘Their mistresses?’

‘Not even their mistresses, Vicar. The ones they used for their sport, you might say. The ones as didn’t count for shit, ‘scuse my language.’

‘There were more like this ... Janet?’

‘I should say. God bless you, Vicar, it were cheaper than fox ‘untin’, and no hounds to feed.’ Gomer shook his head sadly. ‘You looks in need of a ciggy. I got a few yere, ready rolled.’

‘Thanks, but ... Oh, sod it ... if you can spare one.’

Gomer produced a skinny roll-up and lit it for her.

‘When you’re retired, see, God damn it, you gets to hangin’ around and dwellin’ on things and all the folk you ever worked for or had a pint or two with, and they all gets jumbled up in your memory, and then a coupler things rolls out when you en’t expectin’ it, and you thinks, well bugger me. Why’d ole Edgar Powell shoot ‘isself ...
accidently,
like? Why en’t the cider the real stuff?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’ll tell you, you got time. I’m sick of keepin’ it all up yere. ‘Cause I don’t understand, neither, and I reckons it’s time we did.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, you start with the ole cider house. That’s the Powell cider house now, see. The Bulls originally, but the Powells, they had it off ’em, way back when the Bulls got rid of all that ground. Interestin’, when you works out just how much Bull ground’s now Powell ground. I reckon it’s gotter be ...’

Gomer stopped talking. Merrily followed his gaze towards the lych-gate, through which they could see car lights.

‘You notice when you come in, Vicar, them cars parked on the edge of the square just across from the church.’

‘So many these days. Why?’

‘Miserable Andy Mumford in one, coupler young fellers in the other usually wears uniforms, but plain clothes tonight. Mind if we just ...?’

Gomer set off towards the lych-gate, Merrily following.

‘They’re on to somefhin’, I reckon. Don’t waste manpower on that scale, less they got somefhin’ in mind. And that lady copper in the church? They’re lookin’ for somebody. Or they got somebody in mind. Where’s your friend Mr Robinson tonight?’

As they approached, one of the parked cars had put on its lights and pulled out to make way for another vehicle which took over its space just left of the lych-gate. The new vehicle was a battered blue Land Rover with a torn canvas. The driver’s door opened as the wheels gritted to a halt.

Gomer put a hand under Merrily’s arm and pulled her into the trees beside the gate, as James Bull-Davies stepped down and ducked quickly under the lych-gate, slamming the Land Rover door behind him.

Both front doors of the parked police car opened. Mumford and another man followed Bull-Davies at a distance.

Gomer looked at Merrily.

‘Not my place to ask, mabbe, but they clear this with you, the police? Stakin’ out your church and whatnot?’

She could hear Bull-Davies’s voice crackling into the answering machine.
I shall personally take action to put a stop to this homosexual farce. You may consider this an ultimatum.

‘No,’ she said. ‘They bloody didn’t.’

‘You better get back in there. Wouldn’t be anythin’ I could do, would there?’

‘I think there would.’

From the apple trees next to the porch, Jane watched James Bull-Davies go in, followed by the two detectives.

The Eternal Bull. It could start to get interesting at last. Sadly, she couldn’t stay for it. She waited for Mum to come back – on her own and looking pretty fired up – before she slipped away.

46

Pretty Foul

‘T
HE ORCHARD WAS
mine,’ Stefan Alder said.

The spotlight hugging him like a sunbeam from a high window as he knelt at the pulpit steps, looking up towards the rood-screen, where a hundred apples were carved.

‘Oh, yes, it belonged to the church, the whole forty acres, but it also belonged to me. It was where I found my peace. And my God. God was always in the orchard.’

He turned full into the light, his hands held out in supplication, half an apple in each. His face was creamed with sweat. Even from the back, Merrily could see the film of desperation over his eyes.

He was losing it. He’d gone on too long. Without Coffey’s cohesion, his performance had become shapeless and over-emotional. The dramatic edge was blunt. The audience shuffled and coughed, older Ledwardine folk beginning to see the holes.

And there
were
holes, despite the research. Richard Coffey had not wanted this because he was not ready, but Stefan had been lured here by Merrily and when the evening was discredited as a piece of faintly tedious, overdramatized, gay propaganda the remaining fragments of her own credibility would go with it.

By the light of a cluster of candles, she could see a satisfied smile on the face of Dermot Child. Occasionally he would glance towards one or other of the police.

He would have told them Lol could well be here. Knowing that the vicarage was now unsafe, where else would she hide him? One of the few pieces of information to escape Dermot’s intelligence net, perhaps, would be Merrily’s appointment as Lucy’s executor, her receipt of the keys to Lucy’s house. Although you could rely on nothing in a village this size.

But where – much as he would enjoy the sight of Lol being taken away with Merrily as an accessory – did Bull-Davies come into this?

She’d followed them into the church prepared to battle this out; now she felt drained again. Get it over.
Whatever it is, just get it over.

‘For God was inside every apple.’ Stefan held up the halves. ‘And here had left his mark, the five-pointed star of wisdom.’