The Cure of Souls

a Boswell should never go to someone who couldn’t play. This is the guitar he was promised. Consider yourself an intermediary in this. Play it while you’re there, if it agrees with you, and then perhaps forget to take it with you when you leave. In a few years, I suppose, it’ll be worth ten or twelve thousand to a collector.’

Lol was still bemused. ‘He recorded with Prof?’

‘Mr Levin would always find Al session work when we needed money. He’s a kind man, and he’s very fond of you. He doesn’t want you to fall by the wayside.’

‘The wayside’s OK, sometimes,’ Lol said awkwardly.

She arched an eyebrow. ‘That’s the sort of thing Al says. But we are not Romanies, you and I. When we fall, we don’t just roll over and land on our feet again, grinning all over our faces.’

Lol was curious. ‘Did Prof know Al was going to be here when he bought the stables?’ I have sympathy for the Romanies, Prof had said.

‘Pure coincidence, actually, although Al knew Simon St John, of course. We’re all parts of interlinked circles, aren’t we?’

Lol wondered how this very English woman had come to link up with Al Boswell, pure-bred Romany, apparently luring him off the road for good.

‘But, according to the Prof, you want to know about the Frome Valley,’ Sally Boswell said. ‘Therefore I want to tell you… because there are aspects of life here which do need to be recorded, and nothing keeps memories flowing onwards like songs. And the Frome flows through that guitar – the vein of yew in it came from prunings from a thousand-year-old tree in Simon’s churchyard and there’s also a little willow from a tree which bends over the river itself. The Romany is ever a discreet scavenger. He lives lightly on the earth.’

She led him into the next room. Hop-bines were intertwined along the beams (silent, but as soon as he saw them he could almost hear them crackling and rustling, and he felt a small shiver). More blown-up photographs were spotlit on the walls: men in flat caps, women in print dresses, berets and head-scarves. People laughing. The strange sadness of frozen merriment.

‘Until mechanization began to take over in the sixties, hop-picking was very much a multicultural phenomenon,’ Sally Boswell explained. ‘Well… four cultures, really: the indigenous locals, the Welsh Valleys, the Dudleys, as we called them, from the Black Country, and the gypsies.’

She told him how, at picking time, in September, the local population would expand eight- or tenfold – perhaps a good thing, leaving the locals far less insular than in other rural areas. The hop-masters would have huge barrack blocks for the pickers, and the pubs were always overflowing – the police constantly back and forth, breaking up the fights.

Lol studied a photo in which the smiles seemed more inhibited and there were scowls among the caravans and the cooking pots.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Sally, ‘when did the travellers ever like to be photographed? They were always a settlement apart, but usually very honest and faithful to their particular employers. They liked being able to return to the same establishment year after year.’

‘Al was here, too?’

‘For a while.’

‘That was how you met?’

‘Romanies can be charming.’ She didn’t smile. ‘Also infuriating.’

Lol peered at a picture showing a girl lying in one of the hop-cribs, laughing and helpless, men standing around.

‘Cribbing,’ Sally said. ‘When the picking was almost over, an unmarried girl would be seized and tossed into the crib with the last of the hops. The unspoken implication was that she, too, might be picked before next year’s bines were high on the poles.’ She looked solemn. ‘Al and I met when I was… drawn to the Romany ways. I’ve been planning to write a book. Well, I was planning to. In the end, I gave all my material to Mr Ash, for his book. I suppose this place is better than a book, in the end. More interactive, as they say. And Al, like most Romanies, is suspicious of the written word.’

‘Doesn’t seem to have done Mr Ash much good either,’ Lol said hesitantly, ‘in the end.’

She looked at him thoughtfully, as if deciding how much to say. ‘No,’ she agreed eventually. ‘Stewart was the last casualty – we all hope – in an unhappy chain of events at Knight’s Frome.’ She nodded towards the next doorway. ‘Go through.’

No hop-bines hung in the third and smallest room. It was also the darkest, with no windows and few lights. A long panel in a corner was spotlit. It was a painting on board, in flat oils, or acrylics, of a stark and naked hop- yard at night, with pole-alleys black against a moonlit sky, a tattered bine hanging from one of the frames. Halfway down the central row, hovering above the bare ground, was a woman in a long dark dress, like Sally’s, billowing in the wind. The caption read: The Lady of the Bines: a ghost story.

If Sally noticed he’d gone quiet, she didn’t comment on it.

‘The hop-farmer’s angel of death,’ she said with a curator’s jollity.

There was a half-smile on the face of the woman in the picture.

‘Who painted it?’

‘I did,’ Sally said.

‘It’s really good. It’s as if—’

‘As if I’ve actually seen her?’ She laughed lightly. ‘Perhaps I have. Sometimes I can imagine I have.’

Lol was glad it was dark in here. This was unreal – the sequel to a dream.

‘I expect there’s a story,’ he said.

‘She was the wife of some local lord or knight – maybe the original knight of Knight’s Frome, for all I know. And she couldn’t give him a son. So he sent her away.’

‘Like you do.’

‘Like you did, apparently. What was the point of having the king give you a few hundred acres of stolen land if you couldn’t found a dynasty? Anyway, he threw her out. Gave her some money to go away, and then settled down with his mistress. But the poor, spurned lady pined for the valley. Pined all night long in the fields and the hop-yards.’

‘Is this true?’ It sounded like the theme of a traditional folk song.

‘Until one morning, one beautiful midsummer morning, with the hops ripening on the bines,’ her voice hardened, ‘they found the poor bitch hanging from one of the frames.’

‘When was this?’

‘Don’t know. No one does. It’s a legend. I suppose, if it had any basis in fact, the story couldn’t have dated back earlier than the sixteenth century because hops weren’t grown for brewing in this country until 1520. The postscript is that, from the night she died, the knight’s hops began to wither on the bines and his yard was barren for many years. And if you see her ghost, then your crop will also wither… or someone’s will.’

Lol recalled the shrivelled old hop-garland hanging from the gibbet-like arrangement of poles. He didn’t want to think about the naked woman in the hop-yard. He found himself wanting her to have been a ghost. Ghosts were simpler.

‘She’s become a metaphor for Verticillium Wilt,’ Sally said. ‘And, before that, for red spiders, aphids, white- mould… all the scourges of the hop. Wilt, particularly, renders a hop-yard virtually sterile for a number of years. Perhaps you should write a song about her, Lol.’

‘It’s a thought,’ he said uncertainly – although he knew he could. If he knew what he was writing about.

‘Perhaps we could have it playing softly in this room.’ Sally Boswell laughed. Lol thought she didn’t seem to have much sympathy for either the knight or the Lady of the Bines.

‘She still seen?’

‘Depends who you believe. It’s certainly said she was widely observed in the sixties.’ She nodded towards a black and white photograph of a man with a heavy moustache, who looked a bit like Lord Lucan. ‘But then, people would say that – in the last days of the Emperor of Frome, when all was darkness and chaos.’

She was poised to go on, but for Lol, the darkness and chaos could wait.

He hadn’t planned to ask it. He just did. ‘Does she always have a dress on?’

Sally Boswell’s face was gaunt with shadows. From two rooms away, there was a skimming of strings: the