The Wine of Angels

46 Pretty Foul

‘THE 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.’

‘That’s not God,’ a woman called out scornfully from the middle of the Northern aisle. ‘I’ve seen that. We all know that. That’s a pentacle. It’s satanic. It’s the mark of the serpent! That’s why you’re supposed to cut the apple the other way.’

Stefan reeled for a moment, as if struck in the face and then, in a graceful piece of theatre-craft, came back.

‘There!’ Dropping the apple halves, he arose, pointing, straight-armed, at the woman. ‘This is how it starts. What upon a tree is more beautiful, more wholesome, more sacred than an apple? The whole world is in an apple. The apple was God’s most precious gift to Hereford. The apple heals! And yet ...’

His arm and voice dropped together. He backed against the pulpit, glanced from side to side, hunted.

‘... in the wrong hands, even an apple can be poisonous. And this is how it began. This is where the hounding began.’

In front of Merrily, Annie Howe leaned forward, revealing the fine, light hair cut close to the nape of the neck, the ears exposed, no earrings. Raised a forefinger to someone.

Towards the front, a hand went up. Merrily saw that it belonged to James Bull-Davies, sprawled now in the Bull family pew, an arm stretched along its back. Although every eye was focused on him, he seemed entirely relaxed.

Stefan had left the spotlight, was walking from candle to candle in a circle round the church, showing how the net had gathered around Wil Williams. Who was alone now in Ledwardine, the much-respected Thomas Traherne, although still nominally the vicar of Credenhill, having gone to London as chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman. Now Wil had no champion, no defender. No lover was the implication.

‘And one enemy,’ Stefan said, arriving back at the pulpit.

A buzz. With those words he had his audience back. They didn’t want to hear about his sensitivity, his affinity with nature, his perception of the whole world in an apple. They wanted the full, unexpurgated chronicle of hate.

‘We were friends, Tom Bull and I,’ Stefan Alder mused. ‘He was not a well-schooled man, but he had some small understanding of Latin and of the Welsh language and was always eager for news of advances in the physical sciences. He would dine at the vicarage and sometimes I would spend an evening at the Hall and talk of letters we had received from Oxford and London. So what went amiss?’

It was clear that Stefan had not yet noticed James.

‘I will tell you,’ he said. ‘The Bull discovered – or rediscovered – an aspect of himself that he could not bear to confront.’

Stefan rose up several inches in the pulpit, as though jagged lightning was working through his body. Abruptly, he turned away and vanished into the darkness, reappearing at the foot of the pulpit, sitting on a step, full in the spotlight.

‘What do you think?’ he said. And laughed. ‘Tom Bull had fallen in love.’

A tapping on the window this time.

Lol stood in the dark, with his back to the kitchen door. The front doorbell had rung twice, the back door had been knocked on.

‘Mr Robinson? Lol Robinson? Gomer Parry, it is, see.’

Well, everybody knew Gomer Parry, even Lol. Genial, harmless Gomer.

It was the name you’d announce yourself by if you didn’t want to scare someone away, if you wanted them to open the door, nice and quiet ...

‘You listenin’, Lol?’ the voice said. “Cause this is what the vicar told me t’say, see? ‘Er says – you ready for this? – ’er says, have you noticed ... the Dick Drake Moon? Hope I got that right.’

Lol let him in anyway.

Now that the blossom had dropped from neighbouring trees, and because it was lighter tonight than the last time, you could see that the Apple Tree Man was actually very sad. Half-dead. Covered with scabs and sores and his branches stuck up like an umbrella with its fabric torn away, some of the prongs bent.

The more Jane drank, the more bent they would seem against the brown sky and the brick-coloured moon.

She lay with her back to the tree, roughly where she’d lain the night Colette had brought her here. It had been easy to find the Man, in his small clearing, but now she was here nothing was quite as she remembered it. It was a different kind of night.

And a different kind of cider.

She’d come in over the wall from the vicarage, tossing the strong, heavy, dark green bottles before her. The idea she’d had from Lucy, of this traditional Ledwardine drink, made from the legendary Pharisees Red, was that this was the booze endorsed by the fairies, who were the little angels of the orchard, and so it would be like nectar, right? The cider itself would have mystical properties.

She’d eased out the champagne-style cork, expecting an emphatic pop, like a magical starting pistol. This is where it begins. But the cork had merely fallen out and rolled away and, although the bottles must have been shaken up getting here, there was no exciting frothy rush either, just this joyless dribble.

Oh well. Jane had leaned back against the trunk, trying not to think of Edgar Powell with his grizzled old head blown off – that episode was a complete irrelevance – and had gripped the lips of the bottle with her own and thrown her head back.

And then came the real shock.

The Wine of Angels was actually pretty foul.

To begin with, it was dry. Horribly dry. The cider she and Colette had drunk that night in the Ox was cheap