The Wine of Angels

... come up to talk to Father about Colonel Bull-Davies and his ole man, thinking as Father could help her clarify a few points. Got Father in a right state the stuff she was comin’ out with.

It was the way he was so matter of fact about it. Lucy must have gone to see Councillor Powell directly after talking to Jane in the street. What could she possibly have said to get Garrod Powell in ‘a state’? And how could you tell?

Jane started to laugh again. Was this what they called hysteria?

The lock scraped and the great, thick oak door cranked open and Lloyd was standing there, the big key dangling and night behind him.

‘He en’t back, Jane,’ Lloyd said grumpily. ‘Said he’d be back before ten.’ He stared at Jane, suspicious. ‘What you laughing at? What you done?’

Normally, she would have said, Wouldn’t you like to know? – something sarky. Not with Lloyd. Lloyd wouldn’t recognize even sarcasm. It wasn’t that he wasn’t intelligent. He probably was. That was what was so awful. You learned that you had to play everything dead straight. Like when she’d said – in sudden disgust at his sniffy, narrow-minded attitude towards Colette – that she was going to be sick, he’d taken it literally.

She was scared to mention Colette. Didn’t dare ask herself why.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got anything to laugh at, have I? I don’t understand why you’re doing this. You don’t think people aren’t looking for me by now, do you?’

Lloyd looked appalled, insulted. ‘Nobody ever looks yere! Father’s a magistrate. He used to be on the police committee. Grandfather was Chairman of Planning for many years. Great-grandfather was to have been Mayor of Hereford, but he died.’

Like a litany.

‘I expect you’ll be standing for the council, too, then,’ Jane said.

‘When I’m thirty-five.’

‘Jesus,’ said Jane.

‘Nice language from a vicar’s daughter.’

‘Oh, yeah!’ Jane lost it. ‘And how nice is it’ – she sprang to her feet – ‘to keep a vicar’s daughter in this disgusting pit?’

Lloyd’s expression didn’t change.

‘Two things,’ he said. ‘One, my father was not in favour of the appointment of your mother but he was prepared to support her in the interests of local democracy. Two, you wouldn’t be yere if you hadn’t behaved like a little slut, would you?’

Jane pushed her knuckles into her eyes. He couldn’t be like this, really. Not cool, slim-but-muscular Lloyd Powell in his denims and his white truck, not hunky Lloyd, the Young Farmers’ News centrefold. How could genetics be so horribly linear? How could this not be a stupid nightmare?

Not going to cry this time.

She wrenched her fists away from her face and blinked. He was still there.

‘And to think we thought you looked like a young Paul Weller.’

‘Who’s Paul Weller?’ said Lloyd.

‘God.’

‘Anyway,’ Lloyd said. ‘I just come to say Father en’t back yet and when he is I’ll be bringing him in to you and let him decide.’

‘Decide what?’

‘You know,’ he said uncomfortably.

Don’t ask. She bit her lip hard.

‘I don’t know what you’re going on like that for,’ Lloyd said. ‘It’s all your fault. We got that much on now, see, with the festival and all’

‘What did ... what did Lucy tell your father to make him so upset?’

‘Business is that of yours?’ he said sternly.

‘I’m sure she didn’t mean to.’

‘Oh, you are, are you?’

‘It was probably all a mistake. It’s very easy to get things all wrong. If you let me go ...’

She let the sentence trail off because Lloyd had put his hands on his hips and his head to one side.

‘You really do think we’re stupid, don’t you?’

‘No, I ... I don’t’

‘Trying to soft-talk me now, is it, like I’m some mad psycho? Lord above, Jane, it en’t like that. We are ordinary people who serve the local community as best we can and have done for many generations.’

God, he was as much of a museum piece as the cider press.

‘And you always serve the Bull-Davieses, don’t you?’ she said. ‘The Bulls.’

‘Our families have had a close relationship for a number of years, yes. We don’t serve them. That time’s gone. We respect them and they respect us. It’s mutual respect that holds a rural community together in a way you don’t get in the cities, that’s why you got all this crime and drugs and street violence.’

‘What ...?’ She couldn’t hold it back. ‘You just confessed to a murder!’

‘Confessed?’

Lloyd stormed into the cider house, kicked the door shut with his heel.

‘You calling me a common criminal, miss? Like it was wrongto stop that woman spreadin’ her filth and lies and undermining a stable community built on respect? That’s what’s criminal, Jane.’

He towered over her, one foot half over both of hers. She cowered instinctively, which seemed to excite him.

‘Father en’t back soon,’ he said. ‘I en’t gonner wait.’

‘Why don’t you go and look for him?’

‘Shut your mouth, Jane, before I ...’

He stepped back and pulled something out of his jeans. Jane screamed.

‘Only my mobile, Jane.’ Lloyd opened the phone and moved closer to the fluorescent tube. ‘I phoned him twice, but he won’t take his phone into church, see. Not respectful’

He stabbed out the number and waited, with the phone at his ear. ‘Come on, Father, come on. Funny thing ...’ She saw his mouth twist in amusement over the lip of the mobile. ‘I thought you were a bit different at first. Even thought you might make a wife in a year or two. Funny how first impressions can be deceiving.’

‘It was Lucy Devenish who put us on to it,’ Merrily said. ‘Though I suspect it was me coming here that put Lucy on to the idea. I don’t think she could prove it, but she was expecting it to be proved. The arrival in Ledwardine of a female minister ... Well, she seems to have thought that would set something off, and perhaps it did. Certainly in the vicarage. But that’s ... I’ll come back to that, if I can.’

The amazing thing was not that everybody she’d looked at – including James Bull-Davies and Alison Kinnersley – had shown genuine surprise, but that nobody out there now looked sceptical. Most were clearly intrigued. Bull-Davies seemed confused and unhappy. Only Garrod Powell, as usual, was expressionless.

Merrily felt strangely and completely relaxed. All the pressure had lifted from her chest. She was not nervous. Her breathing was even.

‘There’s no reason to doubt that the person who became Wil Williams was indeed a protegee of Susannah Hopton, of Kington, having been introduced to her in the 1660s. It seems more likely to me that Mrs Hopton would have taken a girl into her house than a man. And a hard-up Radnorshire hill farmer would be rather more likely to spare his daughter than his son. Certainly Mrs Hopton would have been fascinated by someone so utterly committed to the Christian life that she was prepared to abandon her womanhood for it.’

‘Let me get this right, Mrs Watkins,’ Bull-Davies said. ‘You are suggesting that Williams managed to con his – or her – way through university and bamboozle the Church of England into accepting her as a man, and then went on to practise as a clergyman for several years without once—’

‘Yes.’