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
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
‘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
‘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
‘But not vicars. Believe me, there’s very little history of this kind of thing inside the Anglican Church.’
‘Very little of interest has
‘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,
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
