The Wine of Angels

‘Or it goes back to that night when the cider did things for you it ain’t never done for me, and you know how I really hate it when that happens.’

‘Well, obviously it did things to me it didn’t do to you, on account of you’ve been getting regularly pissed out of your mind for years.’

‘Not good enough. Plus there’s the Devenish angle. That creepy, tacky little shop you can’t turn round in without horrible little fairies dropping down your front. You’re going there now, yeah? Again?’

‘So? It’s a weekend job, all right? We’re not all seriously rich, like on the Cassidy scale.’

‘I’ll find out,’ Colette said menacingly. ‘You can frigging count on it.’

By the mid-1600s, prosecutions for witchcraft were rare in the western half of the country. A notable exception was the case of Wil Williams, of Ledwardine, the second English vicar in this period to be accused of consorting with the devil. About twenty-five years earlier, the Reverend John Lowes, vicar of Brandeston in Suffolk, had been brought to justice by the notorious Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins. Lowes, who was over eighty when he was ducked in the moat of Framlingham Castle, was alleged to have caused the death of a child and a number of cattle by witchcraft as well as employing a familiar spirit to sink a ship off Harwich.

By comparison, Williams’s alleged crime was minor: he was accused by a local farmer of ruining his crop of cider apples. However, other witnesses were said to be ready to testify that the vicar had been seen dancing with shining spirits in the orchard which, at that time, almost surrounded the church.

Whether these charges would have been proved in court will ever remain a mystery as, when warned of his impending arrest, Williams hanged himself in the very orchard he had been accused of bewitching. This was naturally taken as proof of his guilt, and he was buried in unhallowed ground, with only an apple tree to mark his resting place. It was said that neither this tree nor any others planted on the spot ever yielded an apple. The farmer who had laid the charge died soon afterwards and his family was quick to dispose of the orchard, dividing it into sections which were sold off separately. Ledwardine would never again be quite true to its reputation as The Village in the Orchard.

Merrily laid the book on the pine table – which looked like a footstool in this barn of a kitchen – and made herself some tea. Certainly this account backed up Coffey’s argument that Williams had been framed, and this surely could only have been done with the approval of the local JP, Thomas Bull. But it was still a big leap to the idea that Wil was gay.

There was something missing.

Jane was embarrassed. She thought hurting anyone’s feelings was the worst thing you could do to them. Sticks and stones might break your bones, but bones usually healed.

‘I feel awful,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Lucy Devenish. ‘I wouldn’t have expected you to. You’re not old enough.’

The book before Jane on the counter in Ledwardine Lore was quite slim and clearly for children. Its cover was this splodgy watercolour, all green. A small girl, done in pen and ink, was sitting in a clearing in a wood surrounded by trees which were not big but, with their tangled branches making the vague shapes of faces, were very sinister. The girl was looking, half-fearfully, over her shoulder.

The book was called The Little Green Orchard.

It was by Lucy Devenish.

‘Title came from Walter de la Mare’s poem,’ Lucy said. ‘Do you know it?’

Oh yes, Jane remembered that poem from way back in primary school, when it had frightened her a lot. It was about someone you couldn’t see but who was always waiting there in this little green orchard. Always watching you.

‘It used to scare me.’

‘Good,’ Lucy snapped. ‘Children today are not scared nearly often enough. A child that grows up without fear grows up to be a danger to us all.’

Jane opened the book. Its dust jacket was quite dry and brittle and its price was seven shillings and sixpence.

‘Nineteen sixty-four,’ Lucy said. ‘They stopped wanting to publish me about seven years later. Fairy stories? Oh dear me, no. They wanted tales about robots and space ships. Old Dahl kept getting away with it, the bastard, and Blyton lives for ever. But I accept I wasn’t such a wonderful writer that I could do what I wanted, so I stopped doing it. Jumble-sale fodder before you were born, so it’s hardly surprising you’d never heard of me.’

There was another book underneath the first. This one was larger format and had a more cheerful cover, with a happy-looking landscape of smiley flowers, friendly-looking shady trees and sunny hills. And another small girl, this one wandering down a long path and looking kind of blissed-out. In fact the whole package looked a bit like one of those album-covers from the sixties, when bands first discovered mind-altering drugs. Lucy seemed a bit old to have been involved in all that; perhaps it was just the artist. This book was called The Other Voices.

‘Did you never think of reprinting them and selling them here in the shop?’

‘Heavens,’ Lucy said. ‘That would have been desperate, wouldn’t it? Oh, one might do a spot of squirming at the efforts of the dreadful Duchess of York, but at the end of the day ... well, at the end of the day, it’s the end of the bloody day, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t say that!’

‘Jane.’ Lucy leaned over her folded arms. ‘Watch my lips. I don’t care. Don’t give a flying fart. I got the book out because I wanted you to read it. Now. At once. Look, I brought you a stool. Be a good girl, sit down over there and read the books. Take you about twenty minutes each. They’re only children’s stories, but they might make some things clearer. Read The Other Voices first, then ask any questions you like.’

At which point, Lucy seemed to lose all interest in Jane, took down a row of apple mugs and set about them with a duster.

Jane had no alternative but to sit down and get into The Other Voices, which was probably intended for nine-year-olds, max.

It was about a little girl called Rosemary whose mother was ill, and so she went to stay with her grandparents in Herefordshire, natch, on a farm so remote that there were no other children to play with for miles. For a while, Rosemary was very sad, and wandered the fields and paths talking to the flowers and the trees because there was no one else. Pretty soon, she was imagining that the flowers and trees were talking back (which seemed, psychologically, reasonable enough to Jane), each with a distinctive voice. Like the dandelions had these high, pealing yellow voices. The bluebells, because there were so many of them so close together, spoke in a soft, blue harmonious chorus, watched over by the oak trees who, of course, had very deep, powerful brown voices. Soon, in the background, Rosemary could hear other sounds and realized that the hills themselves were breathing. In fact, if she looked hard, she could even see them breathing, their misty sides going in and out, very slowly, far more slowly than human breathing.

This went on for some days, Rosemary waking earlier and earlier because she couldn’t wait to get outside to be with her friends. One morning, she awoke especially early, for this was midsummer, and her friends were putting on a special concert. The birds started them off, the dawn chorus activating everything. And then, as the sun rose, the flowers began to open and as they opened they started to sing, and the trees joined in with their bass notes and the hills amplified their heartbeats like drums and by the time the sun was fully up, Rosemary could no longer hear separate voices, but only musical tones, which blended together until the whole of nature became one huge, magnificent orchestra.

And Rosemary started to wonder about the orchestra’s conductor. Who had composed the music, who had arranged it.

Of course, Rosemary’s mother came out of hospital, which she was very glad about, except that she had to go home to the city, which kind of mortified her. She at once caught a cold which turned into flu, and she was very miserable. One day, when she was a little better, to give her some air, her mother took her out to the dreary old park she’d been to a thousand times ... and, on the way there, Rosemary spotted a single dandelion growing out of a patch of earth around a street lamp, and the dandelion beamed up at her in recognition and she looked up over the rooftops to distant hills and could feel them ... breathing, inside her, and by the time they got to the park, well ...

And Rosemary realized everything had changed, for ever.