The Wine of Angels

Bull-Davies shrugged impatiently. Merrily wrote down, Traherne, feeling a bit ignorant. Traherne had been mentioned briefly at college as a major literary precursor of Wordsworth and Blake and one of the greatest Christian mystical poets, but she actually didn’t know that much about him or his work. Fairly reprehensible, really, considering he’d been rector of a parish not ten miles away.

‘As I understand it,’ Dermot Child said, ‘it was Traherne who more or less secured the Ledwardine post for Williams. Then buggered off.’

‘It’s never been proved that Traherne had a hand in the appointment of Williams,’ said Coffey. ‘Although, as you say, it is a theory. Certainly the two knew each other before Williams came here, possibly at Oxford. You say “buggered off' ... Traherne certainly appears to have lost touch with Williams when he left the area in 1669. We know of no correspondence, and it seems unlikely that Traherne knew of the subsequent persecution. Perhaps because Williams made a point of not telling him.’

‘Not telling him he’d been accused of bloody witchcraft?’ Child leaned over the table, hands clasped together. ‘Man’s life was on the line. Surely, he needed all the support he could get. Traherne had good contacts by then – chaplain to this fellow, er ...’

‘Sir Orlando Bridgeman, one-time Lord Keeper of the Great Seal for Charles the Second. Yes, Traherne could perhaps have helped him, had the charges quashed. But Williams didn’t seek Traherne’s help. Why? I see that question as crucial’

Merrily said tentatively, ‘It seems incredible to me that a minister of the Church could find himself accused of witchcraft, even then. I know that was a fairly paranoid period, but ...’

Coffey glanced at her, twitched a smile.

Merrily said, ‘You’re going to say he was fitted up, aren’t you, Mr Coffey?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘On what basis?’ Bull-Davies said sullenly.

‘Well,’ Coffey eased from his case a photocopied document. ‘Let’s look at the evidence. In September 1670, Williams was accused of “consorting with sprites”. What do we mean by sprites?’

Silence.

‘Spirits of the dead?’ Child offered finally. ‘Evil spirits?’

‘I think not,’ Coffey said. ‘The only specific evidence handed down to us is a statement by one Silas Monks, a tanner—’

‘The only evidence that remains,’ Bull-Davies said. His eyes were hard.

‘—who tells us that, while returning to his holding from the inn one night, he saw Williams in the orchard next to the churchyard, cavorting under the fruit-laden trees with an unspecified number of “vague and slender persons ... whose forms shone palely in the moonlight”.’

He paused, presumably to allow everyone to draw individual conclusions about this. Merrily thought of what Jane had said about the seventeenth-century equivalent of a dirty video, and a slippery, silvery image floated into her mind. She felt herself blush.

‘Well, good for him.’ Dermot Child laughed lightly, as if to dispel what Merrily sensed was a thickening fog of discomfort around the table.

‘But it wasn’t, was it?’ Coffey said. ‘On the alleged evidence of this presumably drunken tanner, and the resulting rumours, Wil Williams was visited and formally accused of witchcraft by a delegation including a Justice of the Peace, the local schoolmaster and, ah ...’

A chair’s metal legs scraped on the wooden floor. James Bull-Davies stood up, eyes reduced to black slits in a big, darkened face.

‘I’m leaving. I’ll be in the pub. Call me back when you’ve heard enough of this shit.’

‘James ...’ Cassidy coming to his feet in a panic.

Bull-Davies didn’t look back.

8 The After-hours Social Club

‘IT’S LIKE I’VE walked in on her and she’s having sex or something, you know? I’m like, Ooops, sorry. Backing out of the room, kind of all gooeyed-up inside. And then she tries to talk to me about it, which makes it worse.’

Jane was sweating. She drank some more cider to cool herself down. The cider was quite sweet and very soft. Never had it before. Amazing. You could actually taste apples.

‘Can’t handle it,’ she said. ‘Talk about a cross to bear. Just embarrasses me to bits.’

It was really dark in the Ox. Dark like a church. And hazy, so that the red and green and orange lights in the old slot-machines hung in the gloom like the small panes in the corners of stained-glass windows. Which was what had reminded her, brought up the awful image of Mum wearing out the knees of her tights.

Colette was unimpressed. ‘At least praying’s quiet. My mother shouts a lot now. Shouts at my old man, shouts at the cleaner and the cook and the waitresses. I don’t mean bollocking them, just being loud. Asserting herself. It’s one of her new words. Assertive. She went on this course for it. Kind of menopause training – when you start to lose your looks, make sure you get on top in bed kind of stuff.’

Jane didn’t contest the issue. Everybody knew Colette’s parents were a first-division pain.

‘You just have to accept,’ Colette said, ‘that one way or the other they’re going to embarrass the piss out of you. It’s what they’re for. At least yours is youngish.’

‘And paranoid. She’s convinced I’m gonna make the same mistake. Like get pregnant before I’m twenty. Doesn’t realize how everything’s changed. Like with condoms. Her day, you had to sneak into chemist shops wearing a false beard or something. Now they’re hanging on Christmas trees. Anyway, I’m never going to get pregnant. Nobody with any sense of responsibility these days wants to dump another kid on the heap.’

‘You should get her to put a condom machine in the church porch,’ Colette said. ‘That’s where it all happens.’

‘Yeah. And have them handed out with the prayer books!’

And they both broke up laughing and clutched at each other, and Jane thought, Hey, this woman is really OK, you should never judge people by their parents.

‘Another one.’ Colette stood up. ‘You got anymore money?’

Jane found the last fiver in her jacket pocket. Colette was getting the drinks because she looked the older, at least twenty-five, although she was only a few months older than Jane, coming up to sixteen and able to do It legally – be no fun any more, she reckoned. Woman of the world.

And one day ... Jane leaned back against the scratched oak settle, which was kind of like a pew. Feeling pretty dreamy actually.

But aware that some of the guys at the bar were sneaking little glances at her. Even if one of them was this oozing gumboil, Dean Wall, a year over her at the high school. Dean and his mates played three-card-brag on the bus, big men. When they’d sidled over once tonight, Colette had taken no crap at all, told them to piss off back to their homework, and they’d slunk off, laughing, although you could tell they were really feeling stupid. One of them said something to Colette now, as she turned away from the bar with the drinks, white dress rucked up to her thighs, and she turned and raised a contemptuous middle finger and the boy laughed, but he was blushing too, under the sweat.

‘Virgins.’ Colette put down their ciders. ‘Got virgin written all over them.’ Except for the ones who’ve done it with sheep.’

‘That’s not really true, is it?’ Jane drank some cider. ‘I mean you hear all these jokes—’

‘Of course it’s true! This is the country. You only have to look at that Dean Wall, his eyes all wide apart. Even looks like a sheep.’

‘Maybe his mother was a sheep.’

Jane looked over at Dean Wall, and his eyes were actually quite a long way apart and also his upper lip seemed to overhang the other one, like a sheep’s did. She spluttered over her drink. Couldn’t remember how many