by Phil Rickman
‘All that evening,’ Jane said, ‘I’d had this kind of a sense of coming home. First it was Colette. She just like appeared in the Black Swan and we clicked, and that was great. But when I looked up in the orchard I was on my own again and it was like a different kind of bonding with ... I don’t know. I still don’t know.’
‘Something beyond everything,’ Merrily said clumsily.
‘She must have felt excluded,’ Jane said. ‘That was the problem.’
‘Colette?’
‘Yeah. She felt ... That was why she tried to lead them all into the orchard at the party. She wanted to ... I don’t know.’
‘Re-establish control. Inspector Howe said she was shouting ...’
‘Jane knows. Like it was a secret we had between us. But there wasn’t. It’s not something you can share. She didn’t know anything about it. She was going in mob-handed, trampling on everything. She was going to cause offence.’
‘What?’ Merrily stiffened.
Going to cause offence. Miss Devenish on the night of the wassailing, nose twitching in disdain. Can’t anyone see that? Deep offence.
Merrily said, ‘Offence to whom?’
‘The watchers,’ Jane said. ‘The watchers in ... in the little green orchard.’
Merrily tensed. ‘Who are the watchers, Jane?’
Jane’s mouth opened, but the words wouldn’t come. She saw Lol, standing shyly in the doorway.
‘Poor Karl Windling,’ she said. ‘But you must be awfully glad.’
It was all very strange and cathartic. Merrily and Jane sat on the old sofa, Lol walked around, and they talked about levels of existence and the life-force in nature. The Lucy Devenish Memorial Discussion.
‘So how does the Apple Tree Man come into this?’ Merrily said. ‘I thought he represented the spirit of the orchard.’
‘Oh no,’ said Jane. ‘You haven’t been listening. Lucy said that was wrong. That wasn’t local folklore. She said different places grew their own customs and beliefs according to what was needed. She said Wil Williams knew the reality of it because he was so psychic. And all that about him being seen dancing with sprites, that probably had a basis in fact, because when he was in the orchard the spirits would show themselves to him.’
She and Lol explained about the Pharisees Reds. How, when the old farmers found out they had an exceptional cider apple that was different to the ones growing anywhere else, they thought it was a gift from the spirits of the orchard.
‘Or the angels,’ Jane said. ‘Lucy said that in the seventeenth century if you said too much about fairies, you’d wind up ... well, like Wil Williams.’
‘Oh.’ Merrily sank into the old sofa. ‘I see. The Wine of Angels. Barry Bloom said that was Lucy’s idea.’
‘She wasn’t happy about it though, Mum. She wasn’t happy about the way the orchard had been let go and now it’s all started coming back after the wassailing and old Edgar shooting himself.’
‘Lucy thought things were coming to a head,’ Lol said. ‘And when Jane ... Oh shit, this is really difficult.’
Down in the house, the phone was ringing. Jane exchanged a glance with Lol. ‘I’ll get it,’ she said.
Lol said, ‘She was just there. One second there was blossom on the ground, lots of it, and the next Jane was there, kind of ... enshrouded in it. I don’t know where she came from. I don’t know how long she’d been there.’
‘And what had you taken?’ Merrily said coldly.
Lol sighed.
‘I’m sorry’ She spread her hands on her lap and looked down at them. ‘That was the scary thing, right? The thing you discussed with Miss Devenish. If there was anything calculated to scare you it would be the appearance of a fifteen-year-old girl lying on her back, wearing a school uniform and apple blossom. Could she have been there all the time and you just didn’t see her until you were close up?’
‘I don’t know. It’s possible. She had on this white school blouse. When she sat up, it was covered with petals. She sat up just like she’d been asleep, sunbathing. Except there was no sun. I took her right back to the cottage and phoned Lucy.’
‘She could have been there all day, that’s what you’re saying. Since she failed to get on the school bus.’
‘I don’t know. Lucy said it ... sometimes happened. Though not as often as you might imagine from all the folk tales. She said a day was nothing. Sometimes it could be a year before people came back, although it only felt like a few moments. And sometimes it felt like years but it was only a few moments. She showed me stuff in books.’ He looked sick. ‘You see why I was reluctant to tell you this. You imagine me telling the cops?’
‘Don’t even contemplate it.’ Merrily placed a cigarette on the arm of the sofa, searched around for her Zippo. ‘It’s like these alien abductions. Was it a dream, was it hallucination? You want me to believe that, in some way, the orchard took her. That Jane has – or thinks she has – in some way been possessed by the orchard, which is itself an entity, a sentient thing. And that it’s now taken Colette, maybe?’
Lol shook his head in defeat.
‘Which,’ Merrily said, ‘I suppose could hardly be dismissed as entirely incredible by someone whose profession implies she believes a dead man appeared to his mates, displaying his crucifixion scars. Right?’
Lol shrugged.
‘Except’ – Merrily located her lighter in a cuff of her sweater – ‘that this is paganism.’
‘I suppose it must be.’
‘It really is, Lol. It makes me want to reach for my big cross.’
‘Mum,’ Jane said from the doorway, ‘it’s some solicitor in Hereford called McGreedy.’
‘So you told her. You told her her daughter had been spirited away.’
‘Something like that.’
‘She scoff?’
‘No. But that doesn’t mean she believed it, though. You’re going to have to be patient with her. Supportive, as they say.’
‘That’s what Lucy said.’ Jane pulled the teddy bear on to her knees. ‘She said Mum was the catalyst. I’m not sure what that means.’
‘Means she’s the one who’s going to make things happen.’
‘She’s the one? We could wait for ever.’
‘What for? What do you expect to happen? What happened to you? Where did you go? Did you just fall asleep or what?’
‘It’s a blank. I mean, maybe there’s some part of my subconscious that remembers being prodded about by little green men or whatever, but it must be well buried. Suppose that’s what happened to Colette. What can we do about that? Suppose, because she wasn’t respectful, she’s been received ... less kindly.’
Lol was allowing himself to wonder whether they were really having this conversation or whether he himself had been abducted, slipped back into the hospital, back on to the medication, when Merrily returned, a little out of breath from all the stairs, her forehead furrowed.
‘This your doing, flower?’
Lol, relaxed for the first time in nearly two decades in the company of a teenage girl, let himself think how very pretty her mother was.
‘That was a lawyer called Harold McCready. He is Lucy Devenish’s lawyer. He says she went to his office a couple of days ago to add a codicil to her will, appointing an extra executor. As though she knew she hadn’t long to live, McCready said. A folksy, country lawyer. Seen it before, he said. People often know, even when they’re not ill.’
Jane sat up. ‘What’s an executor?’
‘Someone responsible for seeing that the wishes of the deceased are carried out to the letter. Normally, just a formality. Somehow, I suspect this is going to be more complicated.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s me, flower. Things get stranger. Why would she do that? Someone who’s had so little to do with her. It’s weird. I’m supposed to look over her possessions for any indications of her last wishes ... As vague as that. There’s a clerk from McCready’s office driving over with a key to her house. Ha
ve either of you ever been in there?’
‘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
‘DISASTROUS,’ DERMOT CHILD 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. Som
e 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?’
