The Wine of Angels

by Phil Rickman

  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.’

  ‘Mrs Watkins, hi. So sorry to bother you in the evening. Craig Jamieson at The Sunday Times newspaper. I’m just checking—’

  ‘Sure. To be honest, I can’t imagine why anyone should want to cause mischief by telling you complete lies about an issue on which no decision’s yet been announced one way or the other.’

  ‘Really? That is puzzling, isn’t it, Mrs Watkins?’ Craig Jamieson sounded about seventeen, but Merrily supposed he must be at least a PhD to be a hack on The Sunday Times. ‘You see, I’ve spoken to Richard Coffey and he told me he wouldn’t be in the least surprised to find that you’d turned against the play. Because of all the pressure you’d been under.’

  ‘Pressure?’

  Craig Jamieson chuckled. ‘I gather certain ... well-established families are feeling threatened.’

  ‘Look, I don’t want to be cagey, but whoever told you this is going way over the top. There’s been no row. Have you spoken to the member of the well-established family?’

  ‘I was going to see what you had to say first.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure that if you spoke to him he’d tell you he was right behind the play. Good heavens, when someone as distinguished as Richard Coffey wants to put your obscure little community on the
literary map, you don’t throw it back in his face, do you?’

  God forgive me.

  There was a pause. Then Craig Jamieson said, ‘So you’re going to let them do the play in your church?’

  ‘I ... Look, I can’t just tell you that, can I? When nothing’s been officially decided yet. I mean, there’s ... you know what the Church is like ... there’s protocol. I haven’t even talked it over with the bishop yet.’

  ‘He has to give his permission, does he? That’s the Bishop of Hereford, right?’

  ‘It’s just ... it’s protocol. You know. I’m sorry, but there’s really no story. You know?’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Craig Jamieson blandly.

  Coffey, Merrily thought. This is Coffey. He wants to force the issue.

  Perhaps it was time to call his bluff.

  Replacing the phone, she saw Lol’s fist connecting with the table. He was staring down at the scrawl in Mrs Leather’s book.

  ‘Young Alison,’ he said. ‘Young Alison.’

  37

  Wil’s Play

  IN A CORNER of the bar at the Swan, Gomer Parry sniffed suspiciously into his poncy glass. Not that he was any kind of connoisseur, see, but there was something ...

  ‘Stop that,’ Minnie hissed down his ear. ‘It’s not French wine, you know. You’ll be showing us up.’

  ‘En’t right, somehow.’ Gomer shuffled uncomfortably inside what he’d always thought of as his laying-out suit. ‘Nothing wrong with it, like, but it en’t right.’

  ‘The rubbish you talk, Gomer. Can’t you just drink it?’

  There was a free glass of the so-called Wine of Angels for everybody attending the string quartet concert – recital, Minnie kept stressing, I think it’s a recital, Gomer – served in thin champagne glasses. Bottles of the stuff, with the picture of the church on the label, were set out on a special table, Emrys, the wine waiter, doing the honours to make everybody think this was a real privilege, like. ‘Fermented in the bottle,’ he kept telling the arty buggers from Off, whose Land Rover Discoveries were clogging up the market place – not that there was many of them, but a few of that sort went a long way, in Gomer’s view.

  On account of the tickets not going as well as they’d figured, Dermot Child’s festival flunkeys had been doing the rounds, offering half-price seats to locals and finally fetching up at Gomer and Minnie’s bungalow, the bastards. ‘Oughter be called off, I reckon, in respect of poor Lucy,’ Gomer had mumbled, but Minnie had shelled out for the tickets straight off, though neither of fhem’d know a string quartet from a dustcart crew.

  There were other people you wouldn’t expect to see at this kind of do. Brenda Prosser, from the Eight till Late shop, and Bernard and Norma Putley, from the garage, putting a brave face on it ‘spite of their boy being grilled by the Law over drugs. Oh, and Bull-Davies with his blonde floozie.

  No sign of the vicar, mind. Gomer was worried about that little lady. Needed friends, she did, and all that was happening was folk getting turned against her. Too many mischief-makers. Life was boring in the country now, for folk born and raised locally. No jobs worth getting up for, less they moved away, the telly always showing them what they were missing, the Sun telling them they ought to be having dynamite sex twice a night and different partners at weekends, drug dealers showing enterprising youngsters like Mark Putley how they could earn enough for a smart motorbike.

  And no characters any more. Gomer fiddled in a pocket of his stiff, blue jacket for a cigarette he daren’t bring out. No characters, now poor Lucy was gone. All gloss and no soul. The string quartet was made up of professional musicians from London with weekend cottages hereabouts.

  And the so-called Wine of Angels, even that had no character. All this talk about the Pharisees Red and it tasted like supermarket cider. Whatever the old recipe was, the Powells had lost it.

  ‘En’t right,’ Gomer mumbled, following Minnie into the big dining room, done out as a concert hall. ‘Artificial’ That was the word. Whole village was artificial nowadays, but the cider, that needed checking out.

  ‘Here for the concert, Reverend?’ asked the fifty-something man at the hand dryer. Bank-manager type.

  ‘Yes, I er ... I’m staying with friends in Hereford.’ Try and project your voice more. Always sound confident. ‘I gather the Queen’s Arms Quartet are building up quite a reputation.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ the bank manager said. ‘I believe they are. Well ... enjoy it’

  As the toilet door wheezed into place, the face of Sandy Locke came up in the mirror. The Reverend Sandy Locke. Whose parish was in Hampshire, who was spending a couple of weeks with some old college friends in the cathedral city and who, this evening, was indulging his fondness for chamber music.

  In the mirror, the Rev. Sandy Locke produced a surprisingly encouraging smile. It scared him how plausible he looked. How confident, how relaxed. He actually wouldn’t have recognized himself. A natural vicar’s face, Merrily had told him. Kind of fresh and innocent.

  God forbid.

  The ponytail had had to go. It was quite reasonable for a vicar to have long hair these days, Merrily said, but in Ledwardine it would make some people look again. Jane had cut his hair, finishing off with nail scissors so that it looked neat and groomed. Merrily had produced the black jacket and black cord jeans, the black T-shirt thing and the dog collar, all out of her own wardrobe. Everything was very tight. The jacket buttoned the wrong way, but it wouldn’t button anyway.

  He froze momentarily when, on leaving the Gents’, he brushed against a woman who turned out to be Detective Inspector Annie Howe, severely youthful in her business suit. Howe glanced at him and they both smiled and he was terrified, but Howe moved on, and that was the clincher: the Rev. Sandy Locke bore no resemblance to the police picture of the young Lol Robinson, sex offender.

  He went to the bar. He ordered a Perrier, carried it over to the window and stood there and watched the beautiful Alison Kinnersley, in a low-cut, wine-coloured velvet dress he didn’t recognize, flashing smiles across a table at her lover, and he felt no longing.

  Where he’d thought he’d be feeling ridiculous, in fact he felt controlled. It was a strange and powerful sensation, everything now tightly wrapped around this deep and focused curiosity. Wild. Exhilarating. And, in the garb of a church minister, entirely and ironically unexpected.

  He stood there, by the long, floral curtains, the opulent scene before him glimmering with artificial candlelight from the oak-pillared walls, and he looked at Alison Kinnersley, as though he was seeing her for the first time and saw that she was focused, too. Every smile she flung at Bull-Davies had a weight of history behind it. Or was he imagining that because of what he now knew?

  He went on looking at Alison Kinnersley, whose name just happened to be the name of a straggling village in North Herefordshire which you might pick off a map and think how solid and convincing it would sound as a surname.

  He went on looking at Alison Kinnersley but he thought about the Reverend Merrily Watkins.

  Look. She’d held the dog collar to his throat. It’ll work. This is the only way. It’ll work.

  She’d seemed exhilarated by it, fussing around, attending to details.

  She was very lovely. He only wished she hadn’t seen Lol Robinson at his most pathetic.

  Alison and Bull-Davies finished their drinks together and stood up together and walked together through a double doorway under a sign saying dining room.

  In his strange, controlled way, the Rev. Sandy Locke followed them.

  Where Lol Robinson would have hung around outside in the bar, hoping she’d need to go to the toilet, the Rev. Sandy Locke would take the seat right next to Alison.

  Controlled?

  Jesus, could it possibly last?

  ‘You are happy to discuss this in front of your little daughter?’ Richard Coffey said.

  He wore a black leather waistcoat over a grandad vest. A rather good plaster facsimile of Michel
angelo’s David flaunted itself on a plinth beside his chair. On the flock-papered walls were some artfully lit but fairly blatant black and white photos of naked men.

  ‘If there’s anything I don’t understand,’ Merrily said, ‘I’m sure she can explain it to me on the way home.’

  Coffey didn’t smile. The truth was, she hadn’t been prepared to leave the kid alone in the vicarage. You might be able to lock Ethel the cat in the kitchen, but Jane disappeared too easily these days.

  Jane sat on a cushion on a stone arm of the fireplace and gazed at Stefan Alder who shared the sofa with Coffey. Still young enough to think it just needed the right woman to come along to straighten him out. Merrily’s view, looking at Coffey’s bare, steely hawsered arms and his patchwork face, inclined more towards the right younger man. But to business.

  ‘Reason I wanted to see you, Mr Coffey, was the telephone call I had from The Sunday Times.’

  ‘Ah.’ Coffey leaned an arm along the back of the sofa, behind Stefan. ‘Dear Craig.’

  ‘I presumed he got his initial information from you.’

  Coffey scowled. ‘He did not.’

  The light in the lodge’s cubical sitting room was fading and dusty. The room was furnished with reproduction statuary and thousands of books. No TV, only a small, portable stereo. Nothing valuable because the house was left empty for long periods, Coffey had explained, and who wanted to steal books? Not that their despicable neighbour, Bull-Davies, would do anything to stop them.

  ‘If you’re looking for Craig’s informant,’ Coffey said, ‘I suggest you look no further than the festival committee. And I suspect that under the present circumstances one can rule out the unfortunate Cassidy.’

  Merrily sat up even straighter than her pine Shaker-style chair demanded. ‘You mean Child?’