The Wine of Angels

Coffey? He was in love with Stefan. He’d bought a house in the village because of it. But he hated the vendor, Bull-Davies; he had a score to settle there and he would use Stefan’s desire.

Coffey and Bull-Davies were both, in their separate ways, powerful and influential men. Stefan Alder was neither and so was vulnerable. But he was also the catalyst.

Merrily sighed and thought back to her famous Wil Williams sermon.

Collect all the information you can get, listen to all the arguments.

Yes, done that.

Seek out independent people who might have an opinion or a point of view you hadn’t thought about.

Nobody here is entirely independent. Not Lucy Devenish, nor Alison Kinnersley. They each have their own hidden agenda.

So why not put it all on Him? That’s what He’s there for. Go into a quiet place ...

‘Yes. I’m here.’

In a cushion of soft, white petals.

Put that question. Tell Him it’s urgent. Tell Him you’d like an answer as quickly as possible.

‘I wouldn’t mind an answer now, actually. If that’s all right with You.’

She looked up to where the church steeple was fingering Heaven. Focusing on the gilded weathercock on top of the steeple as if it could point her in the right direction.

Perhaps only the weathercock had changed since Williams’s day. The steeples and towers were still the tallest structures in the countryside. The churches were powerful places.

Merrily bit her lip. Was this the answer? Freedom of expression was one thing, multiple obsession and the taint of necrophilia something else?

You let obsession into a church at your peril?

When she went back into the building, the theatricals had gone, replaced by Uncle Ted, Caroline Cassidy and her restaurant manager, Barry Bloom. They were setting up tables in the space behind the pews.

‘I really don’t know about this,’ Ted was saying. ‘It is a church.’

‘Oh, but the very name of the cider, Ted!’ Caroline sang. ‘And if as many people as you say turn up, they’ll get about half a paper cupful each. Ah, Merrily! Merrily will decide.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ Merrily said without thinking. ‘What is it this time?’

Ted and Caroline both stared at her. Oh God.

‘Sorry. I’m a bit on edge. Big night.’

‘Coffee, Vicar?’ Barry Bloom said. He was squat, wide-shouldered, frizz-haired. Ex-SAS, it was rumoured, like, for some reason, quite a few people in the catering business around Hereford. Barry already had a coffee machine set up next to the font.

‘Oh, thanks. Caffeine. Wonderful’ She hadn’t had any breakfast, wasn’t likely to get any lunch. She was dying for a smoke, but maybe not. ‘So, what’s the problem?’

‘Well, as you know,’ Caroline said, ‘the Ledwardine festival officially opens on Saturday.’

‘Does it? God.’ Wrapping her hands around the hot, polystyrene coffee cup. This meant she’d be expected to announce her decision about the play.

Caroline said, ‘The idea is we open in a small way, with a ceremony in the square in the afternoon – Terrence has hired a town-crier. We’ll hold some of the lesser events and exhibitions in the first weeks, and then gradually build up to the major concerts and the pi— and whatever else we arrange. But, you see, my dear, we wanted, before the opening, to introduce our new cider, produced by the Powells to their old recipe – with a little help from Barry, of course ...’

‘I just organized the bottles,’ Barry said. ‘I gather they had to get in some extra apples to supplement the Pharisees Reds. The orchard wasn’t over-productive last year. Hadn’t been pruned hardly in years. Be a good crop this year, though, by the looks of it.’

‘We have an absolutely terrific label,’ Caroline said, ‘designed by the young man at Marches Media on his computers. It has a drawing of the church on it – Alfred approved that, before he left.’

‘How many bottles?’ Merrily asked.

‘How many, Barry, three hundred?’

‘Nearer five.’

‘It’s going to be frightfully exclusive and rather expensive. Proper champagne bottles, naturally. There was a time when good cider was valued higher than champagne, and this is an awfully good cider, isn’t it, Barry? Not the kind of beverage likely to be on sale to the village louts at the Ox. So we wondered if we might use the occasion of your induction ...’

‘Installation.’

‘Makes you sound rather like a household appliance, my dear.’ Caroline squeezed Merrily’s arm. ‘No, we wondered if we might uncork the first bottle at your reception.’

‘And give everyone a drink?’

‘Perhaps just a teensy one. The cider, you see – this was Dermot Child’s idea – will have an ecclesiastical connection, because the church was itself once in the very centre of the orchard, wasn’t it? And the name we chose – I gather this originated from—’

‘Lucy Devenish,’ said Barry.

‘Quite.’ Caroline tossed him a disapproving glance. ‘I was going to say the poet Traherne.’

‘The poet Traherne, via Miss Devenish,’ Barry said stolidly. ‘Being as none of us were that conversant with his work. It comes from a prayer Traherne’s supposed to have written with a woman over at Kington, but nobody’s quite certain about that.’

‘Well,’ Merrily said. ‘It sounds fair enough to me. As you’ve probably gathered, I’m trying to make the church less formal, more accessible, and while it might be a bit early to set up an actual bar, with beer pumps and optics and things—’

Caroline tittered shrilly.

‘—I can’t see any problem over a few glasses of cider. Do you want me to kind of bless the stuff or something?’

Caroline looked thrilled. ‘Would that be in order?’

‘I don’t know, really. Ted?’

Didn’t know why she was asking him. She was, after all, entirely on her own.

‘Merrily,’ Ted said, ‘in his time, Alf Hayden blessed everything from tractors to the microwave oven in the village hall.’

Didn’t seem to be a problem, then, even if the mention of Dermot Child in connection with cider had sent a bad ripple down her spine.

‘OK then,’ she said. ‘What’s it called?’

‘The cider?’ Barry Bloom said. ‘The Wine of Angels. You like that?’

‘That’s Traherne?’

‘The line goes “Tears are the Wine of Angels and the Delight of God, which falling from ...” what is it, Mrs Cassidy? The whole verse is printed on a label on the back.’

‘Something about them being sweet, precious and wholesome.’

‘That’s the bit. “Sweet, precious and wholesome ... and delicious indeed.” And then there’s a bit of a duff line about them being the best water works to quench the Devil’s Fires, but we’ve stopped it before that. Sweet, precious and wholesome and delicious indeed. You couldn’t get an ad agency to do a better one than that, could you, Vicar?’

‘But, I mean, he wasn’t actually talking about cider, he was talking about tears.’

‘Well ...’ Barry spread his hands. ‘If it ends in tears, at least we can all get drunk.’

Leaving the church, Merrily met James Bull-Davies coming in.

‘Ah. Mrs Watkins.’

As if the meeting was a surprise.