The Wine of Angels

trees. Wil Williams ... dancing with demons.’

‘I see.’

‘One guy actually did see. Or claimed to. Lol couldn’t remember his name, but he was a local miller or tanner, one of these quaint, rustic professions. One dark night, he was coming back from the pub – probably well pissed – and he strayed from the track and wound up in the orchard. Or was kind of lured towards the lights and the music, couldn’t help himself. What’s that noise, Mum?’

‘Bats, probably. Vampire bats. Don’t try it on, Jane, I’ve got approximately an hour before the meeting. What happened to the miller?’

‘Private screening of the seventeenth-century equivalent of a dirty video. Wil Williams stark naked, dancing around an unearthly light with these silvery, shapely ... demons. Or sprites, as he called them.’

‘How very tawdry.’

‘Obviously gave the miller a hell of a hard-on.’

‘Jane!’

‘Sorry. Sorry, God. No, naturally, the miller claimed to have been shocked and terrified and he spread it all round the village, and word reached the Sheriff of Hereford and the Bishop of Hereford, and eventually a bunch of them went round to the vicarage, all official—’

‘Our vicarage?’

‘Presumably. It’s old enough, isn’t it? So all these sanctimonious gits arrive on Wil’s doorstep to ask for an explanation or arrest him for devil-worship or whatever the charge was. But there was no answer when they knocked on the door. So they came ... here.’

Merrily didn’t move. Resisted the urge to look around. It was only a story, it was all in the past, and yet ... she was apprehensive. She didn’t want there to have been some sort of Thomas a Becket death scene at the altar, the honeyed stones stained with innocent blood ... some set-piece slaughter she’d have to try not to think about when she arrived to take communion on drab winter mornings.

‘Somebody kicked open the door,’ Jane said.

This time Merrily did look – towards the main oak door, imagining the group of po-faced guardians of the law striding righteously past the font, bearded men with swords half-drawn.

‘But the church was empty,’ Jane whispered. ‘Wil Williams wasn’t here.’

Merrily sighed. The kid really knew how to spin out a story.

‘He was outside,’ Jane said. ‘In the orchard. All dressed up for them, in his full vestments and things.’

‘He was expecting them?’

‘Presumably,’ Jane said.

‘This is the suspense bit, is it?’

‘You could say that.’ Jane gave half a smile. ‘He was hanging from an apple tree.’

‘Oh God.’

‘In his richest vestments,’ Jane said dreamily. ‘Poor Wil, dangling there, all aglow on a bright, sunny morning.’

Jane nodded to signify The End and closed the notebook with a snap, raising her gaze to the vaulted ceiling so that the amber lights were reflected in her big, dark eyes.

‘Terrific.’ Merrily blacked out a flash-image of the half-head of old Edgar Powell hanging like a left-over Christmas bauble on the Apple Tree Man. ‘I hate that bloody orchard.’

Funny thing, though, Gomer Parry had said ... You wanner see the buds on ‘im now.

So the orchard used to belong to the Church, although it was not, of course, holy ground. And yet close. The First Unhallowed Ground, Gomer had called it. Suicides were invariably buried in unhallowed ground.

‘He knew they’d be coming for him,’ Jane said. ‘And he couldn’t face it. The trial, the abuse and everything. Poor, sensitive soul. He was only about twenty-five.’

Obviously, Terrence Cassidy had said, it’s not something the village nowadays is particularly proud of. Although I suppose it has its tourist possibilities, in a lurid sort of way.

‘So they buried him where he died – in the orchard. With only an apple tree to mark his grave. And, as apple trees don’t live very long, nobody knows where it is now.’

Merrily recalled what Gomer had had to say about the reasons the Powells had never grubbed up their unproductive orchard.

... the bones t’other side, them’s the ones you don’t wanner be diggin’ up, you get my meaning.

Unless you were a distinguished playwright, for whom no bones could be buried too deep.

She watched Jane’s gaze travelling around the church with a new interest. The first time, in fact, that the kid had displayed any interest. It would have a history now, a mystery, a romance. In that age-blackened pulpit had stood the doomed Wil Williams, serious totty, with the sunlight in his strawberry-blond hair.

‘Heavy stuff, huh?’ Jane said, well satisfied.

Nothing unhealthy about this. Wil Williams was as remote and unreachable as the lead singer of some boy band in Sugar magazine. Merrily remembered the stage when she would fall in love with the ludicrous heroes of fantasy novels, princes with magic swords. It was a phase. A safe phase which wouldn’t last long. Not long enough. Real boys, real men would be in the picture all too soon.

‘Sure,’ Merrily said. ‘Heavy stuff.’

And felt a pang of impending loss. The sandstone walls still had an old-gold glaze in the lamplight but, when she stood up, she was sensing an end to the honeymoon period.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Thanks, flower.’

7 Dirty Video

‘I BEG YOUR PARDON,’ Terrence Cassidy said, irritated.

‘Old Cider!’ Dermot Child, the musician, thumped the table. ‘That’s what we should call it!’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The entire event. The festival. Old Ciderrrrrr! Resonates.’

Everything Dermot Child said seemed to resonate. He was a plump friar of a man, who, without being obviously Irish, Scottish or Welsh – indeed, his accent was closer to Oxford – vibrated with an emotional fervour you could only describe as Celtic. Merrily quite liked him.

In the absence of the parish secretary, who was also the treasurer of the Women’s Institute (as distinct from the Women’s Group, formed by newcomers) and was attending some sort of WI convention, she’d agreed to take the minutes of this hastily called meeting. She wrote down, Old Cider?

‘Explain, shall I ... Mr Chairman?’ Child leaned over onto an elbow, making a determined fist, as if prepared to arm-wrestle Cassidy into submission.

‘Please do,’ Cassidy said, resignation soaked in acid. It was, after all, his festival, Merrily thought. His idea, his concept. Eccentrics like Child should content themselves with being occasionally amusing.

Merrily smiled. Child caught her eye, winked. Outside, a small motorcycle was being expertly skidded on the cinders under the open window. Councillor Garrod Powell moved swiftly to the door. ‘Give it a rest, Kirk,’ they heard him shout mildly. ‘Else I’ll be round to see your dad, boy.’

It was getting rather dim in the village hall, screened from the sunset by two huge oaks. On the way back to his chair, Councillor Powell lifted a hand over the panel of metal switches to the left of the T’ai Chi group