The Wine of Angels (12 page)

She was fascinated and wasn’t aware of how long she’d been staring at him until the vacuum of silence around them was popped by a discreet chairman’s cough.

‘Mustn’t waste time.’ Terrence Cassidy tapped his pen on the table. ‘You all know Richard as one of our most celebrated contemporary writers for both the stage and television. He’s now living, part of the time, at Upper Hall Lodge, and naturally we’re glad he chose our village as his weekend retreat.’

‘My feeling now is that it chose me,’ Coffey purred diffidently.

Merrily saw James Bull-Davies gazing at the ceiling. Envisaged words in a bubble above his head.
Tiresome bloody poofter,
something like that. He’d be seeing rather more of Coffey than any of them; Upper Hall Lodge was, of course, at the bottom of his drive and used to be occupied by generations of Bull-Davies gamekeepers.

Cassidy nodded. ‘I’m sure that’s true. And we’re all delighted at Richard’s plan to use the Ledwardine Festival to premiere a major new drama illuminating a rather ... rather unfortunate episode in our history. Unfortunate, but ... but fascinating. Ah, at the moment, apart from its general theme, I know no more than any of you about the project. Which is why I asked Richard along tonight to tell us as much as he feels able to divulge at this stage of the, ah, creative process.’

‘Thank you, Mr Chairman.’ Coffey fluidly opening his briefcase and extracting a file of papers. ‘I should, however, say from the outset that the prospect of staging a complete production, with a full cast, here in late summer, early autumn, is not really a viable one.’

‘But, I ...’ Cassidy fought for balance, the rug sliding from under him. Merrily saw Dermot Child perk up.

‘However – calm yourself, Terrence – what I do have in mind will be very much an event in itself. A re-creation, in the original setting, which I think could be absolutely electric. Will not only, I believe, lay a ghost, clear the name of a good man, but effectively solve a three-hundred-year-old mystery.’

‘Oh. Is
that
all?’ Bull-Davies said sourly.

Yes, it
would
upset him, having his village’s history mined for nuggets of controversy by the celebrated interloper who’d turned his one-time gamekeeper’s lodge into a less-than-discreet second home. Had he, Merrily wondered, seen
The Crystal Dungeon,
Richard Coffey’s controversial TV play about a reclusive earl’s incestuous relationship with his sister and their persecution by an evil butler?

Coffey didn’t even seem to recognize the big, tweedy person as the owner of the rundown heap at the top of the drive.

‘Anyway,’ he said smoothly, ‘I propose to outline my idea and then leave you to discuss it amongst yourselves. If it bothers any of you, I’m sure one of the other villages—’

‘No!’ Cassidy looked helpless. ‘I mean, tell us, Richard. Tell us.’

‘Wil Williams.’ Coffey slid on half-glasses, spoke with precision. A man with nothing to prove and no time to waste on dissent. ‘I take it we’re all conversant with the brief facts.’

Merrily was able to nod. Thank God for Jane.

‘Williams became rector here in the late 1660s. We don’t know how old he was when he arrived. We think late twenties. His friend and neighbouring cleric, the poet Traherne, in a letter to his brother Philip, describes Williams as fair-haired, youthful in appearance and exuding a kind of perpetual joy.’

‘Traherne.’ James Bull-Davies was scornful. ‘Chap never had a bad word for anybody. Walked around in bloody cloud-cuckoo-land half the time. Wrote as if he was
on
something.’

‘One could argue at some length with you there. But this is not the occasion. I think no one would deny Williams was a man who loved the area and exulted in his ministry.’

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

‘I
T’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 they’d had; must be the fourth, good job it was only sweet cider. She mopped her mouth and then the table with her handkerchief. The table seemed quite a long way below her and wobbling, and she kept missing the puddles.

She remembered something important. ‘Hey, what did that bloke say to you this afternoon?’

‘What bloke?’

‘In the sports car?’

‘Oh, yeah, right. Not bad, was he? Bit old. He just said was it too late to get some lunch, and I said it was and he said maybe he’d come back for dinner, would I be there, the way guys do. What were you doing with little Lol?’

‘Oh. Just, like ... checking out the shop. Weird.’

‘Sad. Lol’s mega-sad. Lucy doesn’t need anybody to look after the shop on a Saturday, she’s just trying to bring him out, introduce him into the community. Gives him nice poetry to read.’

‘Huh?’

‘Like with mental patients? They don’t lock them away any more, they let them out on the streets. The way there used to be village idiots?’

‘You’re saying he’s mental?’

‘Sort of. He had a breakdown. Actually, he used to be a sort of pop star, way back. Well, very minor. I mean, like,
tiny.
’

‘
Pop star ...?
’

‘Like, he was in this band and he wrote songs for other people.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know, do I? It’s
way
back. I’m not interested. I only listen to dance music’

‘Why’d he have a breakdown?’

‘
I
don’t know. He lost his girlfriend, but I’m not sure whether that was before or after or maybe the
reason
she walked out on him. They never looked right together, she was taller than Lol for a start. And then she left him for ... Oh ... in fact, for
him.
’