The Wine of Angels (62 page)

‘Let me help you. Please.’ Outside the porch, Stefan was bending over Mrs Goddard in her wheelchair, a rug over her knees. The stress lines had vanished from his handsome face, concern glowed out, the setting sun colouring his hair.

Stefan was acting. Or something.

‘Thankyou,’ Mrs Goddard said, ‘Mr ...?’

‘Williams,’ he said simply.

The daughter pushing the wheelchair frowned, Merrily noticed, but Mrs Goddard smiled. ‘They didn’t want me to come, but I insisted.’ She patted his hand resting on the arm of the chair. ‘I believe in you.’

‘I am glad,’ Stefan said.

‘And, you know, I believe what poor Miss Devenish often used to say, that until we face up to our history and uncover the truth, we shall never be a real village again, merely a tourist museum. A sort of black and white theme park.’

Stefan listened and nodded. Merrily marvelled at the old girl, although she’d noticed this before, the way disabled people often became clearer sighted, more focused and certainly more outspoken.

Most of the others had been less forthcoming. A couple of men had uncomfortably declined to shake the hand Stefan offered them, as though they might contract HIV or something. A retired headmaster called Carrington had pushed past him into the church, grunting, ‘Don’t take us for fools, Mr Alder.’ But most of the women had seemed charmed, if, in some cases, reluctantly. They’d all seen him on television, many had been scandalized and titillated by the news that he was living in Ledwardine with an older man who was also a controversial playwright. But he was young and good-looking, magnetic, charismatic ... and he was performing exclusively for them, and they were part of that performance.

‘Boy knows what he’s doing.’ Big Jim Prosser, from the shop, had come to stand with Merrily, on the grass to the left of the porch. ‘Look at ’em all. Nearest they’ll ever get to being extras in
Pride and Prejudice.
I know that’s a century or so out, but what do they care?’

‘Yes.’ There was an unfortunate number of rather showy dresses drifting along the path from the lych-gate. Jim himself, in a striped apron over a collarless shirt, was rather more than a century out, but he didn’t seem to care either.

‘What’s the feeling in the village about this, Jim?’

‘Caused a bit of a flurry, Vicar. Nothing else got talked about in the shop this afternoon, that’s for sure.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Aye. Mabbe I do.’

Ted Clowes walked in on his own. He was wearing his dark churchwarden’s suit. He did not look at Merrily.

‘And?’

Jim grinned. ‘You know as well as I do that most folk yere tonight don’t give a toss about Wil Williams. Never even heard of the feller until all this fuss started. But the old timers and the WI ladies and the ones who’ve been around a while are all of a flutter ‘cause they seen the effect it’s having on some folk. They wanner be able to say, I was there, all dressed up, the night of the fireworks.’

‘Fireworks,’ said Merrily.

‘Some folk gonner be real disappointed if there en’t, Vicar.’

‘You haven’t seen James Bull-Davies around by any chance?’

‘Not yet.’ Big Jim twinkling with anticipation.

‘Good evening, Ms Watkins.’

Merrily turned to find Detective Inspector Annie Howe stepping on to the grass. She was not in costume.

‘Hello,’ Merrily said, ‘Annie.’

Howe stood quietly, watching the villagers gather in the churchyard. She wore jeans. She carried her white mac over her arm.

‘Night off?’ Merrily said.

‘What do you think?’

‘Depends how close you are to finding Colette Cassidy, I suppose.’

‘You think we might be close?’

Tell her about Dermot. Tell her about the desecration of the tomb.

‘I pray that you are,’ she said.

Thinking this was precisely what Alf Hayden would have said, a platitude.

All right. Be practical, Lol told himself. Be objective for the first time in your life. She’s out there. She’s presiding over something she doesn’t understand. There are people there who want to stop her. There are people who want to destroy her. And people who want to watch.

At the centre of all this is a secret involving the death of a man more than three centuries ago.

Merrily doesn’t know the secret. Ignorance is dangerous.

If you want to help her you have just a short time to discover the secret.

‘Help me, Lucy,’ Lol said.

He didn’t know where to start. He switched off the lamps and drew back the curtains. Church Street, draped in dusk, was deserted. Above the house across the street, the moon rose. It was almost full.

It was pink.

No other way to describe it. This was a pink moon.

Nick Drake’s bleak last album was called
Pink Moon.

The title track was this short song with very few words. One verse, repeated. It didn’t have to explain all the folklore about a pink moon, that a pink moon meant death, violence, was tinted by blood.

The song just said, in Nick’s flattest, coldest, most aridly refined upper-middle-class tone, that the pink moon was going to
get ye all.

‘I’m over that,’ Lol howled, wrenching at the curtains, his legs feeling heavy, his arms numb, his heart like the leaden pendulum of some old clock. ‘I’m over it ...’

45

The Eternal Bull

‘A
ND LET US
pray,’ Stefan said, ‘for Tom Bull.’

It was as though the red stone of the church had trapped the sunset, as it had on the night of Merrily’s non-installation as priest-in-charge. The remains of the evening travelled through all the apples in the windows – the Pharisees Red in the hand of Eve, the cluster of green and orange fruit around the nucleus of the big circular window above the pulpit, where Stefan stood, collecting the last light in his hair and face and shirt.

‘The man,’ Stefan said, more loudly. ‘And the Bull’

The pulpit steps creaked as he came down, the nave echoed back the rapid crackling of his shoes on the stone flags.

‘Bull of Ages!’ Stefan cried, mock-heroically.

He stopped in front of the organ, half-turned towards the screen which hid the chapel.

‘The Eternal Bull’ An edge of desperation. ‘Will you be joining us, Thomas? Will you pray with us before you take me? I’m your priest, Thomas. Still your priest, when all is said. Tom? Tom Bull? Will you come and pray?’

There was an almost audible apprehension in the church, faces lifting to the organ pipes and the wooden panel which sheltered them from the eyes which were open for eternity.

Merrily watched from the rearmost pew of the northern aisle, where the women sat. Stefan, it seemed, had had no difficulty at all in persuading the women away from their husbands, and they all clustered in the Satan sector in their variety of costumes, Minnie Parry at the front in dark brown wool, the velvet wives, mostly incomers, conspicuously in the middle, like visitors from Restoration London.

Silence apart from some shuffling, a few coughs. Stefan wiped his brow with an arm. He sniffed. He looked beyond the burnished walls and pillars into the blackness of the rafters.

‘It goes dark,’ he said sadly. ‘We have so little time.’

He was at the front of the northern aisle now, close to Minnie. Merrily could see Gomer Parry, sitting just across from her in the central nave, squeezed into his inquest suit. He looked in need of a cigarette; she could sympathize. In the otherwise empty pew behind Gomer sat the only woman who, unsurprisingly, had resisted attempts to put her in the northern aisle, but Annie Howe looked curiously uncomfortable.

‘Bessie!’ Stefan called out suddenly. ‘Where are you, Bessie Cross?’ Advancing down the aisle, looking this way and that over the heads; wherever he went he seemed to take the light with him. ‘Bessie Cross! Nay, don’t deny me now, woman!’

He stopped three pews from the bottom of the aisle. He waited.

‘Bessie?’

Two rows in front of Merrily, a woman moved: Teresa Roberts, a farmer’s widow in her late sixties, a friendly, decent soul and a regular churchgoer. Earlier, she’d been one of several people Stefan had asked Merrily to point out to him.

Teresa said hesitantly, ‘Bessie Cross ... she was my grand-moth—’ But Stefan was leaning over the pew end, reaching for her hands to pull her to her feet.

‘Bessie! How is the girl now? How is Janet? For I myself have prayed for her many times. Bessie, don’t be affeared, he’s not here. The Bull’s not here yet, we have time for this. How does she lie now, Bessie, is Janet Cross at peace?’

The woman next to Teresa looked up quickly and Merrily saw, with widening eyes, that it was Caroline Cassidy in a dark brown cape. She must have come in alone, after the others.

Still holding Teresa’s hand, Stefan turned to the wider congregation, raised his voice.

‘You all know about this. All of you know what happened to Bessie Cross’s girl, who went into the Bull’s meadow to look for her cockerel at close of day, fearing the attentions of the fox, and was caught and branded for a poacher.’

A murmuring. Merrily remembered what Stefan had said, before Coffey could shut him up, about hiring a researcher to gather memories and old stories from the village. But, if this was about Teresa Roberts’s grandmother, it was Victorian – for Wil Williams, a couple of hundred years in the future.

It didn’t seem to matter. Stefan was clearly invoking memories of a figure which bestrode the centuries: the Eternal Bull.

‘And the Bull said to the child, did he not, “Now, Janet, would you appear in court and bring shame down upon your family or have me deal with you now?” ’

Stefan paused.

‘
Deal with you now,
’ he repeated quietly, with low menace. ‘Bessie, my poor, dear woman, is what I say true in every detail?’

Teresa Roberts, entirely in shadow, said, ‘Well, my mother, she used to tell me—’

‘How old was she, Bessie? How old was Janet when she was brought before the Bull?’

The church had gone very quiet. Some had turned to look at the dim tableau of Stefan and Teresa. Others gazed stoically in front of them as if they were afraid to respond, afraid of repercussions. Merrily marvelled at the willingness of a group of disparate people in an enclosed space to relinquish their world for another ... indeed, their inability
not
to. The power of theatre. Power. She’d never had, nor wanted, power, but this was what being a successful minister was still all about.

Twenty minutes, and he’s got them in his hands. They’ve never given me half this much attention.

Teresa said, ‘Twelve. Twelve year old.’

‘Has she stopped crying now?’ Stefan asked gently. ‘Has the poor child stopped crying in the night?’

‘She ... she never stopped. Hardly a week went by they wouldn’t hear her crying in her bed. Hardly a week, my mother used to say.’

‘
Deal ... with ... her ... now.
A whipping? Was that not what you were told by the gamekeeper, when he brought the child home?’

‘It was.’

‘A whipping? Does a whipping do that to a girl? A farm girl, a big, hardy, raw-boned girl, a scamp? Does a whipping do that?’

Teresa Roberts said, pain coming through, ‘Please ...’

‘Don’t worry,’ Stefan whispered, just loud enough for Merrily to hear. ‘This should be heard.’

The air inside the church was thicker and darker now, the walls like dull earth, but a heart of pure red fire in the circular window. All that was visible of Stefan was the white of his shirt. He moved around the pew like a restless ghost.

‘Does a whipping do that, Bessie? I’ll bet she’d been whipped a time or two at home.’

‘Aye.’ Teresa Roberts was a talking shadow. ‘We all were, back then.’

‘How long did she cry at night?’

‘They say she was never at peace and she couldn’t look no man in the face from that day till—’

‘Where did the Bull take her, Bessie? Don’t be afraid. Let it be told, in this holy place, for this haunts your family still’

‘The cider house! He took her in the ole cider house, where they say he took all his women. Because the air itself in there, they used to say, the smell of it could make you drunk. So’s you wouldn’t notice. The cider house. It was always the ole cider house. It made you drunk, to be in there. And ... wanton.’

Merrily froze up in the darkness. Images came alive in her head, the dream she’d had in the afternoon in the Black Swan, the dream of Dermot Child in the foetid, sweating cell.

‘The cider house,’ Stefan said with satisfaction. ‘The old Bull cider house. God bless you, Bessie, for your courage! God have mercy on the Bull! And God bless the child who cries in the night!’

‘No!’ The voice of Teresa Roberts was ragged. ‘She don’t cry n’more, Reverend. Don’t cry n’more ...’

‘How old was she?’ Stefan’s voice gentle but full and round and relishing his punchline. ‘How old was she the day she hanged herself in the barn?’