by Phil Rickman
‘It’s false wealth, you know that. Cider was Ledwardine’s wealth, and it dried up long ago.’
‘But hang on yere, Lucy, if this Mr Cassidy’s out to revive it—
‘In his dilettante, touristy fashion.’
Gomer studied her. She’d never been what you’d call pretty, but there was a time when she could’ve had her pick of men. And, from what he’d heard, she’d picked a fair few in her time and thrown them back a bit more out-of-breath than they might’ve reckoned on. But time passed.
‘Well,’ He fished out his ciggy. ‘I wouldn’t know what that means, dilly-whatever ... me bein’ just an ill-educated plant-hire man, like. But it do strike me, Lucy, as you’re bein’ a bit of a wosname in the manger. Cause you din’t think of it yourself, you don’t wannit to work. Same with the festival. You feels ... what the word? Sidelined.’
Lucy Devenish blinked and brought a hand to her face, and for one terrible moment, Gomer feared she had a tear coming. But she used the hand to straighten her hat.
‘What I feel, Gomer,’ she said, ‘especially when I stand on this side of the churchyard, is a certain fear for your nice little girl.’
6
Cold in the House of God
MERRILY WALKED SOFTLY into the darkening church, still hesitant, still unsure.
‘Do you know what I couldn’t do?’ her mother had said a couple of years ago. ‘I couldn’t go into one of those old churches alone at night. Spooky. Anybody could be in there: tramps, rapists. That’s another reason why it isn’t a job for a woman, in my view.’
Least of my problems, Merrily thought, still half-afraid that she would be met by a chill of hostility, a cavernous yawn of disapproval.
It had all been too easy, so far. Respectable congregations (all right, curiosity, novelty value). Sermons which seemed to write themselves, even in the hotel room at midnight. No dark looks in the street, no suspicious stares.
And not even inducted yet. Apart from reducing the number of hymns, she hadn’t even started on what she planned. Although she didn’t, to be honest, know what form it was going to take yet.
It still didn’t feel quite real, this was the problem. Staying in a hotel – even when you had to drive into Hereford at night to use the launderette – created this illusion of a holiday. Perhaps when they moved into the vicarage, reality would set in.
She wasn’t looking forward to that; the vicarage was too big to be a home; it scared her far more than the church.
It was a dull evening now, the stained glass fading to opaque. Her hand slid over the stone, up to the light switches. Even the air in here was temperate. The brass-bracketed lamps came on. In the soft amber, the walls themselves glistened with antiquity, yet not in an austere, forbidding way. The stones were mellow and softly encrusted, like country honey.
The evening visit had become a kind of ritual. Her trainers pattered on the flagged floor of the nave. Her footsteps made no echoes; the acoustics, as Alf had said, were warm and tight.
Walking on bones. Several of the flags were memorial stones, dating back three, four centuries. Francis Mott, d. 1713. John Jenkyn, whose dates were worn away into the sandstone like the lower half of the indented skull in the centre of Jenkyn’s flag – they didn’t dress it up in those days.
Couldn’t be more different from the last place, in Liverpool: a warehouse: scuffed, kicked about, a city church of smutted brick, with no graveyard, only rusty railings. The building couldn’t have been less important; it was what you did there, what you brought to it.
This church was important – medieval, Grade One Listed. Beautiful beyond price, even to people with no faith. And it felt friendly. Even to a woman. It enfolded you.
Hey, don’t knock it.
Merrily faced the altar through the rood-screen out of which row upon row of apple shapes were carved. Closed her eyes and saw a deep, dark velvety blue. Feeling at once guilty about this habitual need for reassurance.
‘Mum? That you?’
Merrily’s eyes opened. ‘In here!’
Jane’s head appeared round the door, hair as dark as the oak. ‘You’re not doing anything ... private?’
‘Like what, for heaven’s sake?’
‘You know...’
‘Like doing the rounds? Locking up?’
Merrily stood with hands on hips. Getting a bit fed up with this attitude, the kid treating God like a stepfather. Was it always going to be like this until she left home and old mum in the dog collar became a figure of affectionate amusement?
‘Got him, Mum.’
‘Well, don’t leave him on the mat. Who are we talking about?’
‘Wil. Wil Williams.’
‘Oh.’
‘One L. He was Welsh.’
‘Anything wrong with that in the seventeenth century?’
‘A lot wrong with him,’ Jane said. ‘In the seventeenth century. Though I don’t think it would’ve worried me.’
‘Well, that’s wonderful,’ Merrily said glumly. ‘That’s all we need, isn’t it?’
They sat side by side in the front pew.
‘There’s no evidence he was.’ Jane picked at the thick varnish on the prayer-book ledge. ‘Not what you’d call real evidence. I mean, people were always getting stitched up in those days.’
‘But not vicars. Believe me, there’s very little history of this kind of thing inside the Anglican Church.’
‘Very little of interest has ever gone on inside the Anglican Church.’ Jane grinned. ‘Still, they haven’t had you very long yet, have they?’
‘Ha.’ Merrily looked up at the Norman arch, so plain, so curiously modern-looking. ‘All right, why hadn’t we heard about this, Jane? Why isn’t it a celebrated case, like Salem, Massachusetts?’
‘Because he was only one bloke, I suppose. Besides, it never came to a trial, according to Lol.’
‘Lol?’
‘Guy in the shop. Very nervous.’
‘You make everyone nervous. Where was Miss Devenish?’
‘Day off. Look, it’s all straight up.’ Jane pulled a little notepad from her jacket. ‘Date: 1670. That makes it after the Reformation, right?’
‘Restoration.’
‘Whatever. After Cromwell. Was that Charles the Second’s time, guy in the curly wig? Anyway, in rural areas, they were still very reactionary and always on the lookout for witches to persecute. Poor old Wil put himself well in the frame.’
‘Meaning?’
‘I’ll tell it in sequence, so I get it right. He’d been vicar a couple of years, OK? Got the job possibly on the recommendation of the Rector of Credenhill, the poet guy ... ?’
‘Thomas Traherne.’
‘Yeah. They were mates. Went for long nature rambles together, Lol reckons, discussing ethics and stuff. Only then Traherne gets a new job near London, and when he leaves there’s nobody to stick up for little Wil and somebody like dropped him in it, big-time.’
Merrily smiled. Jane’s style of historical narration wasn’t exactly textbook, but it did confer a certain immediacy.
‘See, from what I can make out, Wil Williams was serious, serious totty. Like really great-looking, in a poetic, ethereal, unworldly sort of way. Strawberry-blond, unblemished, lovely smile. Women swooning in the aisle kind of scenario.’
Merrily frowned. ‘You’re not embellishing this by any chance? Because if you drop me in it at this meeting ...’
‘Swear to God. And it’s significant because this could be one reason he wasn’t all that popular with the men. I mean the macho, hunting types who ran things. Lol reckons parsons in those days were expected to ride with the hunt, drink too much port, get gout ...’
‘Sure. Go on.’
Jane turned over a page in her notebook, following the lines with a forefinger; she’d never quite outgrown that.
‘Very superstitious times, OK? So when you get reports of strange phenomena, I mean, you know ... Sounds like complete rubbish, total crap, today. But people didn’t take too
much convincing back then. Everything was an omen. You only had to start a rumour and they’d all be screaming for blood.’
‘What sort of phenomena?’
‘I’m coming to it. Most of it was centred on the orchard ... just over the wall? Powell’s orchard? Mum, you shivered ...’
‘I didn’t!’
‘You bloody did. And now you’ve lied in the House of God!’
Merrily growled. ‘It gets cold in the House of God after a while. Just shut up and get on with it.’
Jane peered at her notes. ‘Something about ... hogs? Oh. Yeah. The orchard belonged to the Church back then. They produced quite a lot of cider in those days, apparently, and the vicar’s stipend included what he could make out of it. Which was expected to be about fifty hogsheads of cider every year. Is that a lot?’
‘I have no idea. What happened in the orchard?’
‘Lights,’ Jane said. ‘Lights and music.’
‘Parish barbecue?’
‘Strains of eerie music in the night.’ Jane’s voice dropped to a sepulchral whisper, which wasn’t actually all that funny in the vast, lamplit church. ‘Fiddle music, like for dancing. Little, glowing, bobbing lights among the apple trees. Wil Williams ... dancing with demons.’
‘I see.’
‘One guy actually did see. Or claimed to. Lol couldn’t remember his name, but he was a local miller or tanner, one of these quaint, rustic professions. One dark night, he was coming back from the pub – probably well pissed – and he strayed from the track and wound up in the orchard. Or was kind of lured towards the lights and the music, couldn’t help himself. What’s that noise, Mum?’
‘Bats, probably. Vampire bats. Don’t try it on, Jane, I’ve got approximately an hour before the meeting. What happened to the miller?’
‘Private screening of the seventeenth-century equivalent of a dirty video. Wil Williams stark naked, dancing around an unearthly light with these silvery, shapely ... demons. Or sprites, as he called them.’
‘How very tawdry.’
‘Obviously gave the miller a hell of a hard-on.’
‘Jane!’
‘Sorry. Sorry, God. No, naturally, the miller claimed to have been shocked and terrified and he spread it all round the village, and word reached the Sheriff of Hereford and the Bishop of Hereford, and eventually a bunch of them went round to the vicarage, all official—’
‘Our vicarage?’
‘Presumably. It’s old enough, isn’t it? So all these sanctimonious gits arrive on Wil’s doorstep to ask for an explanation or arrest him for devil-worship or whatever the charge was. But there was no answer when they knocked on the door. So they came ... here.’
Merrily didn’t move. Resisted the urge to look around. It was only a story, it was all in the past, and yet ... she was apprehensive. She didn’t want there to have been some sort of Thomas a Becket death scene at the altar, the honeyed stones stained with innocent blood ... some set-piece slaughter she’d have to try not to think about when she arrived to take communion on drab winter mornings.
‘Somebody kicked open the door,’ Jane said.
This time Merrily did look – towards the main oak door, imagining the group of po-faced guardians of the law striding righteously past the font, bearded men with swords half-drawn.
‘But the church was empty,’ Jane whispered. ‘Wil Williams wasn’t here.’
Merrily sighed. The kid really knew how to spin out a story.
‘He was outside,’ Jane said. ‘In the orchard. All dressed up for them, in his full vestments and things.’
‘He was expecting them?’
‘Presumably,’ Jane said.
‘This is the suspense bit, is it?’
‘You could say that.’ Jane gave half a smile. ‘He was hanging from an apple tree.’
‘Oh God.’
‘In his richest vestments,’ Jane said dreamily. ‘Poor Wil, dangling there, all aglow on a bright, sunny morning.’
Jane nodded to signify The End and closed the notebook with a snap, raising her gaze to the vaulted ceiling so that the amber lights were reflected in her big, dark eyes.
‘Terrific.’ Merrily blacked out a flash-image of the half-head of old Edgar Powell hanging like a left-over Christmas bauble on the Apple Tree Man. ‘I hate that bloody orchard.’
Funny thing, though, Gomer Parry had said ... You wanner see the buds on ‘im now.
So the orchard used to belong to the Church, although it was not, of course, holy ground. And yet close. The First Unhallowed Ground, Gomer had called it. Suicides were invariably buried in unhallowed ground.
‘He knew they’d be coming for him,’ Jane said. ‘And he couldn’t face it. The trial, the abuse and everything. Poor, sensitive soul. He was only about twenty-five.’
Obviously, Terrence Cassidy had said, it’s not something the village nowadays is particularly proud of. Although I suppose it has its tourist possibilities, in a lurid sort of way.
‘So they buried him where he died – in the orchard. With only an apple tree to mark his grave. And, as apple trees don’t live very long, nobody knows where it is now.’
Merrily recalled what Gomer had had to say about the reasons the Powells had never grubbed up their unproductive orchard.
... the bones t’other side, them’s the ones you don’t wanner be diggin’ up, you get my meaning.
Unless you were a distinguished playwright, for whom no bones could be buried too deep.
She watched Jane’s gaze travelling around the church with a new interest. The first time, in fact, that the kid had displayed any interest. It would have a history now, a mystery, a romance. In that age-blackened pulpit had stood the doomed Wil Williams, serious totty, with the sunlight in his strawberry-blond hair.
‘Heavy stuff, huh?’ Jane said, well satisfied.
Nothing unhealthy about this. Wil Williams was as remote and unreachable as the lead singer of some boy band in Sugar magazine. Merrily remembered the stage when she would fall in love with the ludicrous heroes of fantasy novels, princes with magic swords. It was a phase. A safe phase which wouldn’t last long. Not long enough. Real boys, real men would be in the picture all too soon.
‘Sure,’ Merrily said. ‘Heavy stuff.’
And felt a pang of impending loss. The sandstone walls still had an old-gold glaze in the lamplight but, when she stood up, she was sensing an end to the honeymoon period.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Thanks, flower.’
7
Dirty Video
‘I BEG YOUR PARDON,’ Terrence Cassidy said, irritated.
‘Old Cider!’ Dermot Child, the musician, thumped the table. ‘That’s what we should call it!’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘The entire event. The festival. Old Ciderrrrrr! Resonates.’
Everything Dermot Child said seemed to resonate. He was a plump friar of a man, who, without being obviously Irish, Scottish or Welsh – indeed, his accent was closer to Oxford – vibrated with an emotional fervour you could only describe as Celtic. Merrily quite liked him.
In the absence of the parish secretary, who was also the treasurer of the Women’s Institute (as distinct from the Women’s Group, formed by newcomers) and was attending some sort of WI convention, she’d agreed to take the minutes of this hastily called meeting. She wrote down, Old Cider?
‘Explain, shall I ... Mr Chairman?’ Child leaned over onto an elbow, making a determined fist, as if prepared to arm-wrestle Cassidy into submission.
‘Please do,’ Cassidy said, resignation soaked in acid. It was, after all, his festival, Merrily thought. His idea, his concept. Eccentrics like Child should content themselves with being occasionally amusing.
Merrily smiled. Child caught her eye, winked. Outside, a small motorcycle was being expertly skidded on the cinders under the open window. Councillor Garrod Powell moved swiftly to the door. ‘Give it a rest, Kirk,’ they heard him shout mildly. ‘Else I’ll be round to see your dad, boy.’
It was getting rather dim in the village hall, screened from the sunset by two huge oaks. On the way back to his chair, Councillor Powell lifted a hand over the panel of metal switches to the left of the T’ai Chi group noticeboard. ‘Leave it a moment, would you, Rod?’ Child said.
Powell, tall and trim and oddly dignified, shrugged and went back to his seat between Cassidy and a moody-looking James Bull-Davies.
‘It begins with “Crying the Mare”,’ said Child. ‘You’d know all about that, Rod. They used to do that on your farm?’
‘Sure to,’ Powell said uncertainly.
‘Harvest custom. They’d leave the last of the corn standing, separating it out into four bundles, sticking up like legs. The Mare, you see? Then they’d tie these together at the top to make a single sheaf, step a few paces back and hurl their hooks and sickles at it, to try and cut off the ears of corn.’
‘Sounds rather pointless to me,’ observed Terrence Cassidy, apparently failing to recall his role as principal organizer of the infamous Twelfth Night event in which shotguns were discharged into an apple tree.
Dermot Child ignored him. ‘Be interesting to arrange a contest in one of the fields, see how many chaps can still do it.’
Somehow, Merrily couldn’t quite imagine Lloyd and Garrod Powell, plus sundry seasonal labourers, abandoning the combine harvester to waste a valuable daylight hour attempting to shave a sheaf with tossed sickles.
‘However,’ Child said, ‘this was really a preamble. On this and other occasions, the ritual would invariably conclude with mugs of cider all round. Now. This would be preceded by all the chaps gathering into a circle and intoning—’
Abruptly, he pushed back his chair, stood up, filled his lungs. And with his fingertips pressed into the tabletop, bellowed in a lugubrious bass, ‘Auld ... ciderrrrrrrrrrrrr.’
Rolling and dragging out the word on a single note, in a deep, rumbling drone, a Herefordshire mantra. Merrily was startled. How eerily primeval it seemed in the purply gloom. You felt that if several of them were doing it, the walls would start to peel and crumble.
