The Wine of Angels

‘You’re making her sound starry-eyed,’ Lol said. ‘She’s not.’

‘No, indeed. She’s cunning. Manipulative. Knows how to use her looks. And the Bull’s a male-menopausal stooge who’s known only two kinds of women, garrison-town whores and county-set heifers. She’s got his balls in the palm of her hand and she’s not going to let go. And if you think a passing concern that little Laurence might top himself is any sign she may come back when she tires of the Bull’s body then, my boy, you’re even less bright than you look.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I’m a straight shooter, Laurence. You were just a stepping stone to the mansion on the hill. Poor James.’

‘Poor James?’ Lol sat down on the stool behind the counter. ‘He’s got the mansion on the hill, even if it is crumbling around him. Now he’s got the girl, too, no strings. Yeah, poor old James.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s just that I knew his father. Or at least I knew Patricia Young, who, I suppose, was one of the old man’s Alisons.’

‘Family tradition, huh?’

‘A tradition in most old country families. I say one of the old man’s Alisons, but she wasn’t at all like that. Patricia was bright, but a little naive. Like you. Stablegirl at the Hall who hadn’t realized that part of a stablegirl’s job was to lie down in the hay with her breeches off, as required. For John Bull-Davies.’

Lucy frowned. She took a paperback book down from a shelf, laid it on the counter.

‘Dissolute old bastard, John Bull-Davies. Slave to the flesh, and let everything else slip through his fingers: money, land, public esteem. If he hadn’t died when he did, there’d’ve been nothing left for James. Perhaps that would have been no bad thing, boy seemed to have been on the straight and narrow in the army. Now he’s been forced to pick up the pieces. And seems, unfortunately, to have slipped further into the family mould than I’d have expected.’

‘What happened to the stablegirl?’

‘I warned her to get out and she did. She left. I’m sure he must have found a replacement – or two, or three – before he died. Time that family faded out of the picture, I say. Turn Upper Hall into a nursing home. And that’s coming from an old conservationist. No, I hope your Alison takes him for everything he’s got, forces him to sell up and move away. It isn’t healthy for him here, because James has some sort of conscience. But that’s not your problem.’

He no longer understood what she was on about. She looked down at him, pushed towards him the paperback book she’d taken down.

‘I shall be back by five-thirty,’ she said. ‘Read this between customers. If you don’t get any customers, you’ll be able to read the lot.’

Lol picked up the book. A Penguin Classic. Thomas Traherne: Selected Poems and Prose.

‘This is the man you need,’ Lucy said. ‘Sitting there playing your mournful, wistful records. Do you no damn good at all. It’s spring. Let Traherne into your life. Open your heart to the Eternal.’

Lol had heard of the guy. Seventeenth-century visionary poet, born in Hereford, lived in Credenhill, about seven miles from here, where he was ...

‘He was a priest, wasn’t he? Vicar?’

‘Rector of Credenhill. I know what you’re thinking, but Traherne’s spirituality and your parents’ so-called Christianity are poles apart. That’s the whole point of this. You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crown’d with the stars’

‘That was him?’

‘You have to learn to open up. Let the world flow into you again. Go into the village on your own and go in smiling. That’s what Traherne did. Happiest man in the county. Discovered felicity. His great realization was that God wants us to enjoy life and nature. That if we don’t, we’re throwing it all back in His face. Traherne walked the fields and was truly happy.’

‘Maybe he’d just discovered magic mushrooms,’ Lol said.

Lucy snorted, pulled down her big hat and left him to it.

5 Buds

THE TRUTH OF it was that, from that first solo stroll around the village, Jane had been looking for an excuse to go into Ledwardine Lore.

She’d been up to it several times, but you could see through the window that the place was too small to browse around and escape without buying something. Maybe that was why so few local people seemed to go in – made more sense than all this stuff about Miss Devenish being weird. Like weirdness was something new in the countryside.

Emerging from the lustrous oakiness of the Black Swan, Jane skipped down the five steps to the cobbles. These were mainly new cobbles, the original ones being so worn away by horses’ hoofs that they’d apparently been considered too dangerous; smart ladies en route to Cassidy’s Country Kitchen might fracture their stiletto heels.

The alleyway was just yards from the bottom of the steps. It was tres bijou, the most terminally bijou part of the village, all bulging walls and lamp-brackets. In the days when the Black Swan was a coaching inn, it was probably a mews, with stables. Now the stables and an attached barn had become Cassidy’s Country Kitchen, with its deli and its restaurant, specializing in game and salmon and things served in nouvelle-cuisine-size portions at silly prices. Jane thought she’d have preferred it in the old days when the best you could expect was a nosebag full of oats.

There were a few early tourists about. Also the famous Colette Cassidy, shrugged into the Country Kitchen doorway, looking like a high-class hooker in a short, white dress. She raised an eyebrow at Jane but didn’t smile. Jane, in jeans and an old blue Pulp T-shirt, breezed past with a noncommittal ‘Hi’.

Ledwardine Lore was at the very end of the mews, crunched into a corner by the flatulent spread of the Country Kitchen. The sign over the window was uptilted so that ‘Lore’ was almost pointing at the twisted chimney; if it had been horizontal they’d never have squeezed all the letters in. As she pushed open the door, Jane could have sworn she heard an amused snort from Colette and was disgusted with herself for blushing.

Inside the shop, there was more standing room than you found in a phone box, but not a lot more. Jane felt suddenly nervous, like when you went into a fortune-teller’s tent and it was just you and her. When she closed the door behind her, this smell went straight to the back of her throat: not the usual horrible incense, but a piercing fruity scent.

She looked around and, at first, it seemed like just the usual tourist bric-a-brac: pottery ornaments and those little stained-glass panels you put over your windows. Cellophane-covered jugs of pot-pourri and gift packs of local wine. And books. Jane’s eyes went in search of history and found the usual paperbacks: Herefordshire Curiosities, Herefordshire Castles, The Folklore of Herefordshire, The Old Straight Track, The Old Golden Land.

Plus dozens of other books about apples. Apples for Growing. Apples for Health. Identifying Apples. Books of apple-legends, apple-customs, superstitions, games, even a book of poems called Ripest Apples.

And then she saw that most of the tourist stuff was apple-shaped and apple-coloured. The pottery was little apple jugs and mugs. The pot-pourri was orchard-scented, which accounted for the pervading smell. The stained- glass panels featured Eve and what looked like an oversized Cox’s Orange Pippin. The local wine was in fact cider, twin green bottles labelled Bittersweet and Bittersharp. There were also rosy apples in small oil paintings, crudely framed. Russet apples glazed on kitchen tiles. Wax apples, apple-shaped notepads and address books and naff fluffy apples, like the dice people hung in their cars, dangling in bunches from the ceiling beams.

And clinging to the fluffy apples and the jugs and the mugs and the frames of the paintings were scores of