The Wine of Angels

13 The Feudalist

EARLY MONDAY EVENING, Uncle Ted took them back to the vicarage. Apart from the new sink and cupboards in the kitchen, square-pin sockets everywhere and a black hole where the monster electric fire had been stuffed into the inglenook, it wasn’t a lot different.

‘It’s still huge,’ Merrily said hopelessly.

‘Don’t worry, girl!’ Ted squeezed her arm. ‘You’ll grow into it in no time. You and Jane’ll fill this place in no time. In fact’ – he beamed – ‘the way you’ve held things together, you’ve already grown a hell of a lot over the past few weeks. In everyone’s estimation.’

‘That’s very nice of you, but it was just the honeymoon period.’

‘Nonsense.’ Ted chuckled. ‘Dermot dropped in last night to deplete my Scotch. He says you’re holding your own better than he’d imagined. Your Own Woman, he says. That’s good.’

Bloody Dermot. Bloody Ted. She wondered what else they’d discussed. Her delinquent daughter, product of a disastrous marriage to a crook?

She felt the vicarage looming behind her, huge and ancient and forbidding like someone else’s family seat.

‘Merrily,’ Ted said, ‘you’ll come to love it. I’ve been in some really awful, draughty old mausoleums, but this place has such a lovely, warm, enclosing sort of atmosphere that you’ll simply forget how big it is after a while. Especially when Jane has her Own Apartment. Eh?’

Jane grinned. Merrily said, ‘We’ll see.’

Ted vanished into Church Street, Merrily wondering when she would get to meet his widow. Jane disappeared eagerly into the vicarage. Merrily was about to follow her, somewhat less eagerly, when Gomer Parry appeared in the drive, blinking through his glasses, unlit cigarette wagging in his teeth. For a pensioner, Gomer had a surprising amount of half-suppressed energy.

‘Removals, Vicar. What you got planned?’

‘Erm ...’ She’d given more thought to how they were going to spread the stuff around to make the vicarage look less like a derelict sixteenth-century warehouse than the method of actually getting it here.

‘Only, if you en’t made arrangements, see, you don’t wanner go botherin’ with no expensive removals firm when I got a very clean truck entirely at your disposal.’

When you thought about it, it was going to be a bit complicated. ‘It’s all around Cheltenham, you see. All over the place. Some bits in store, some at my mother’s house, some at—’

‘No problem, Vicar. Couple hours’ round trip. Piece o’ piss-cake. ‘Sides which’ – Gomer leaned closer, taking out his cigarette, confidential – ‘keeps the ole truck in business, know what I mean? Minnie, her says the place looks like a bloody scrapyard, I says you never know what you’re gonner need in life.’

‘How many vehicles have you got there, Gomer?’

‘Oh, no more’n four now. And Gwynneth, the digger.’

The mind boggled; it was only a bungalow with a garden.

‘Her’s given me three months to get ’em out, see. But Minnie’s a bit more, like, you know, religious than what I am. So I tells her, if this yere plant-hire equipment is in the service of the Lord ... Get my point?’

‘Understood. Bless, you, Gomer. Look, I’ll pay you in advance—’

Gomer backed off, outraged.

‘All right, the petrol, at least the petrol. Diesel. Whatever. How many gallons – ten, twelve?’

‘Full tank in there already, Vicar.’ He looked up at the house. ‘Three floors, eh? Gonner take a bit o’ manoeuvring about. What I’ll do, I’ll get my nephew, Nev. Big lad. What day you want us? Any day but Thursday, which is Nev’s day for the cesspits. Oh, and tomorrow. Inquest tomorrow, see.’

‘Inquest?’

‘Edgar Powell. Opened back in January then adjourned. Took ’em long enough to get it sorted. Ole Edgar’ll be compost by now.’

‘You’re a witness, Gomer?’

‘Oh hell, aye. Me and about half a dozen others. Prob’ly drag on till flamin’ teatime. ‘Specially if it’s true Rod’s gonner get Doc Asprey to stand in the box and tell ’em his dad was halfway round the twist.’

‘Why would Rod want him to do that?’

‘Stigma, Vicar. No way do he want his ole man put down as a suicide. So if they got evidence of Edgar bein’ three bales short of a full stack, it’s more likely he done it by accident, see?’

‘Right.’ She did, come to think of it, remember Alf saying Garrod Powell was insisting his father hadn’t taken his own life. ‘And what are you going to tell the coroner, Gomer?’

“Pends what they ask me. All I can say is what I seen. Which is not a lot, on account my glasses got all bloodied up. But before that, I do recall as when the others put up their guns, Edgar, he just didn’t. Now make of that what you like.’

‘I suppose it’ll be a question of whether he just had a funny turn and got all confused, or ...’

‘Or he had it all worked out. Gotter say that don’t ring true to me. He wasn’t no kind of show-off, farmers en’t, as a rule. You’d think if he wanted to do away with hisself, he’d do it in the barn. Yet ... I dunno ... He weren’t daft in any respect, ole Edgar. How ‘bout Wednesday?’

‘That would be brilliant. This is above and beyond, Gomer.’

Gomer slipped his cigarette into his grin. ‘You don’t owe me nothing, Vicar, never think that. But there may be one small thing one day, just one ... How’s the kiddie, now?’

‘Oh God, does everybody know?’

‘Hell, Vicar, don’t go worryin’ about that. They all knows what that Cassidy girl’s like. Too promiscuous by half, Minnie reckons.’

‘I just hope she means precocious,’ Merrily said.

‘Aye,’ Gomer said. ‘That was prob’ly it.’

Jane stood on the first landing, looking up.

‘Hey, listen. Why don’t we just move in? Like tonight.’

Her voice echoing in the emptiness. She was still in her school uniform, the dark blue blazer, the pleated skirt. Merrily, at the foot of the stairs, felt a heart-pang of love and fear that she wouldn’t have been able to explain.

‘How can we do that? Even with Gomer’s help, it’ll be nearly the weekend before we can get all the stuff in and sorted out. Besides, with the Diocese paying for the hotel, it means we can get everything right, for once. Instead of being in the usual chaos.’

Going to be a disaster, she was thinking. You could get all their stuff, beds included, into two rooms; they’d be rattling around like two peas in a coffee tin.

‘We’ve got sleeping bags, Mum. We could spread them out in the drawing room. Get the feel of the place. Go on. It’d be fun.’

‘On those flags? Jane, you are joking.’

Jane stared down the stairs at her. ‘You don’t really want to move in at all, do you?’

‘That’s stupid,’ Merrily said uncomfortably.

All around her, doors. Above her, doors. All of them half open, to signify empty rooms. She wanted to rush from door to door, shepherding Jane before her, banging each one shut and then finally the front door, behind them, as they ran into the square and the sanctuary of the Black Swan.

‘I can tell by the way you talk about it,’ Jane said. ‘Always going on about how big it is. At the Swan it’s kind of temporary, like a holiday. In here you’ve got to face what you’re taking on. Like the full burden.’

God, the perceptiveness of this kid was frightening.

‘Come on, Mum, there’s no shame in admitting it.’

‘I just want to do it efficiently, I ...’

Did it remind her of moving from the flat into the four-bedroomed – it seemed enormous at the time – suburban villa that Sean had suddenly acquired, at an amazingly modest price, from A Client? Somewhere for her to organize, decorate. Somewhere to keep her occupied while ...

‘... I just want it all to be, you know, right,’ Merrily said.

Which, right now, seemed an impossible dream.

‘For a major-league Christian,’ Jane said, ‘you don’t half lie a lot.’

Merrily felt her face darken. The doorbell saved them both.

‘Heard you were finally taking up occupancy. Called to see if I could be of any help.’

No, you didn’t.

‘That’s kind,’ Merrily said. ‘But we’re just giving the place the once-over. We won’t be actually moving in for a couple of days yet.’

James Bull-Davies looked around the empty, dusty hall. Sniffed once, like a pointer on a heath. He’d obviously waited until Gomer Parry had gone. Damn. She’d as good as told him to leave it for a while; he was either dense or simply didn’t believe his family was obliged to bow to the wishes of anyone in Ledwardine.

‘Interesting sermon of yours, yesterday, Mrs Watkins. Wrote that after the meeting, I suppose.’

‘Didn’t write it at all,’ Merrily said brusquely. ‘Came off the top of my head, more or less. Sometimes you have to busk it.’

‘Really. Don’t recall Hayden “busking”.’

‘Perhaps he was just better at it than me,’ she said sweetly. ‘Er, I think I can cobble together a mug of tea, if you have the time. Can’t do any better than that at the moment.’

He looked down at her with suspicion. Perhaps wondering if she’d heard about him being rolling drunk in the square on Saturday night, offering to lay his concubine on the cobbles. She walked through to the kitchen, which had fitted units now but still some of the old formicaed shelves and white tiles. She wrinkled her nose. Not yet her kind of kitchen.

James Bull-Davies shuffled awkwardly in the middle of the flagged floor. She was clearly not his kind of vicar. He didn’t know what to do with her. He wasn’t even happy looking at her, preferred the ceiling.

‘Used to be two rooms, this, as I recall. When I was a boy. That section over there used to be a pantry or buttery or something.’

‘Did you come here often?’ Someone had left a tiny kettle for the Aga; Merrily filled it over the open sink, with all the pipework visible underneath. ‘I mean recently.’

‘Only when there was business to deal with. Parish business.’

Don’t offend anyone called Bull-Davies, Ted had said. The church would be rubble but for them. Strange how things changed; from what she’d heard, Upper Hall was closer to rubble these days. Not a great deal left from the old days. His divorce, presumably, had not helped. Were there children, or was that another source of pressure, the inheritance factor?

Perhaps, after the parish business had been dealt with, he’d have discussed some of his problems with Alf. As his priest, his padre. The way a man like James would never be able to do with a woman because women were mothers or aunts or sisters or you fucked them.

Merrily set the kettle on the stove. Perhaps she was wrong. ‘Sorry, there’s nowhere to sit. We’ll have to lean on the Aga.’

It occurred to her that this was the first time they’d been alone together, the squire and the parsoness he didn’t want in his village. She hoped Jane would stay out.

James Bull-Davies propped himself stiffly against one end of the big stove’s chromium bar, leaving a good two feet between them. A woman in a cassock? Perverse, surely.

Or did it secretly turn him on, like, say, the matron at his public school? Merrily suspected she would never know.

‘That sermon ...’ She squeezed the warm bar. ‘I suppose I was just stalling for time.’

‘Message seemed to be that you were going to lay the whole vexed issue before the Almighty, let him sort it out.’

‘If you want to look at it that way, yes, I suppose that’s what I’m going to do. In the end.’

‘Way I look at it,’ he said, ‘it has bugger-all to do with God. Question of honour. And responsibility.’

‘Meaning your honour, my responsibility?’

Merrily looked sideways at him, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes, stared across the kitchen, his full lips in a kind of pout. A surprisingly powerful shaft of evening sunlight brutally exposed his bald patch and put a shine on his tightly shaven jaw – he’d shaved again, before coming here?

‘Why did you walk out the other night, Mr Davies? I’d’ve thought you’d have wanted to stay and confront the enemy.’

He lowered his gaze to the stained flags. ‘Perhaps I couldn’t trust myself not to smash his smug face in.’

‘Oh, I think you could. Disciplined, military chap like you.’

He exhaled a short laugh.

‘I mean, I can see your point,’ Merrily said. ‘If he’s got to make a statement about the treatment of gay people, why use a real character who might not, in fact, have been—’

‘It’s personal. It’s political’

‘Yes. Obviously.’

‘Oh, I don’t mean poo/politics. Though obviously that’s the other chip on his shoulder. Coffey fell in love, if you like, with the village, the area. Wanted the keeper’s lodge, bottom of my drive. Wasn’t for sale, but it was empty – had to dispense with the keeper’s services year or two ago, matter of cash flow. But that’s the nearest dwelling to Upper Hall and I wasn’t letting it go for peanuts. Made him pay. Made him pay.’

‘And he resents that, does he?’

‘Look ...’ Bull-Davies levered himself from the stove. ‘He wanted the lodge. I wasn’t touting. Never told him he wouldn’t have to spend a substantial amount of money on the place.’

‘Oh.’

‘Didn’t need that much to make it perfectly habitable. Of course, to turn it into the kind of perfumed brothel he wanted – I mean, the water supply was perfectly fine – nobody has to have a ... a whirlpool bath.’

Merrily tried not to smile. His father would probably have said the same about hot water. ‘So it’s a personal vendetta because of what you’ve cost him. That’s what you’re saying?’

‘I think it’s a probability you should consider.’

‘That he’s written a whole play to get back at you?’

‘Hardly a whole play ... Vicar.’

‘I’m a bit lost here,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t even know for sure why this would hurt you so much. I know your family’s well-embedded in the village, but, I mean, was one of your ancestors seriously involved in the persecution of Williams?’

Bull-Davies didn’t answer. He looked down at the flagstones and bit his upper lip with his lower teeth, which made him look momentarily feral, and it was at that moment that dear little Jane decided to stroll airily in.

‘Mum, I ...’ As if she hadn’t been listening outside the door. As if she’d had no idea there was a visitor. ‘Oh, hello.’

Bull-Davies looked at the kid and nodded. Merrily said, thinking fast, ‘Jane, if we’re going to spend the evening here, we need to eat. Why don’t you get some money out of my bag and pop over to the chip shop?’

‘They won’t be open.’

‘Yes,’ Merrily said grimly. ‘They will.’

Jane’s eyes had the mutinous look of one who’d been stitched up; she shrugged. ‘OK, then. Can I have a pickled egg?’

‘Get two.’

When the front door slammed, with a vaultlike echo, Merrily turned and faced the Squire. ‘I think we have enough time before she gets back for you to tell me what all this is really about.’

The wooden clock in the fish-and-chip shop window indicated that it wouldn’t be open for another quarter of an hour, so she’d lied again. Mum lied all the time. Like vicars had some kind of special dispensation.

The chip shop was on the corner of Old Barn Lane and the Hereford road. On the edge of the village and therefore outside the main conservation area, which probably explained why it was allowed to exist. It was still a dull-looking joint, denied the brilliantly greasy illuminated signs you found on chippies in Liverpool. Jane turned away and strolled back towards the village centre, wondering if there’d be time to nip into the Black Swan and ditch the uniform.

Circumstances dictated otherwise. As she emerged into Church Street, Colette Cassidy was walking down from the square.

Colette seemed to be studying the texture of the cobbles, and neither of them acknowledged the other until they were about to collide.

‘Hi,’ Jane said, kind of throwaway.

‘How’s it going?’ Colette wore jeans and a black scoop-necked top under a studded leather jacket. But no make-up, no nose-stud. She carried a small brown-paper bag.

‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘I suppose.’

‘Get much hassle?’

‘Bit. You?’

‘They do the motions. Uh ...’ Colette proffered the bag. ‘I got you this.’

‘Oh.’ She took the bag, surprised. It felt like a CD.

‘You were asking about Lol Robinson. That’s his last album, reissued. Well, his band, from way back. One of the guys at school bought one after she read in some magazine how this guy out of Radiohead likes them. When I saw what it was called, I thought you’d ... Anyway, it was the last copy.’

‘Oh. Wow.’ This was unexpectedly touching. ‘That’s amazing. I mean ... thanks.’

‘It was only mid-price,’ Colette said. ‘Don’t take it out of the bag, or people’ll think we’re really sad. Listen, I’m having this kind of a birthday party. My sixteenth. Friday after next. Just guys from school and one or two marginally cool people. And Dr Samedi – this DJ, who’s like really cool. Dr Samedi’s Mojomix? Heavy voodoo, Taney.’

‘Sounds excellent,’ Jane said. ‘Where’s it going to be?’

‘They’re letting me have the restaurant. Big gesture. They’ve promised to go out and stay out.’

‘Are they mad?’

‘Well, Barry the manager’ll be in charge, but he’s relatively OK. Also, it’s got to be invitation only, no riffraff, no lowlife.’ Colette smiled cynically.

‘Cool,’ Jane said. ‘If I tell Mum it’s at the Country Kitchen, no problem.’

‘Good,’ Colette said. ‘Listen. I mean, thanks for not grassing me up about what happened. Like, it was pretty shitty of me, all that Edgar Powell stuff. I was feeling moderately pissed off by then, with those tossers and everything. So, like, thanks.’

‘No problem.’

‘So you gonna tell me?’

‘Huh?’

‘What happened. Weird scenes, Janey. I thought you’d gone.’

‘Gone where?’

‘Like dead. Then suddenly opening your eyes, rambling about these kind of little lights. And then you’ve like, gone again. Coma-stuff.’

Jane felt strange. She looked behind Colette and along Old Barn Street. There was a couple of women with a pram heading down from the Market Cross, no one else in sight. She felt strange, like she wasn’t here at all.

Colette’s eyes flashed. ‘Oh, come on, Janey. Don’t tell me you don’t remember. Don’t shit me.’

‘I don’t.’

‘What did Devenish say then?’

‘She just brought me back. She was just like ... cool about it. I don’t even know how she came to be there.’

‘Lol phoned her. Any crisis, he calls Lucy. She’s like his therapist, poor little sod. He was really shit scared. Wouldn’t go in that big, old orchard in the dark without Lucy to protect him. Well, he wouldn’t go in with me. I think he’s even scared of me. You imagine that?’

Jane didn’t say anything. Colette was trying to recapture ground, saying Lol was scared of her. She decided not to tell Colette about what she’d heard under Lol’s window. Maybe the person to tell was Miss Devenish. Really needed to see the old girl, like soon.

‘I don’t know why the fuck I bothered,’ Colette said bitterly.

On the way back to the chip shop, Jane took the CD out of its paper bag. When she saw what it was called, she gasped.

‘People don’t understand. Think we’re simply stuff-shirted shits. Hunting, shooting and fishing, lording it over the peasants.’

James Bull-Davies stood up straight and still very much the army officer.

‘We merely serve,’ he said. ‘We serve our country. We serve the countryside. Wasn’t for us, the traditional landowners, place just wouldn’t look the same, wouldn’t have the same atmosphere, the same beauty, the same harmony. We’re the stewards. The custodians. We don’t have power. We have responsibility.’

It sounded very noble. It didn’t, however, sound like the man who liked to call his mistress a slinky whore while she called him My Lord. Unless, of course, that was all down to Alison and her feminine wiles, bringing out the feudalist in him.

‘I’m an army man. Understand the army. Well-oiled machine. Puts human relations, dealing with people, into some form of order. You know who you are, what you are. Most chaps like me, when they come out, go on calling themselves Colonel, as though they still have some sort of authority, as though the commoners should salute. Look in the local phone book: Colonel this, Colonel that. Pointless. Meaningless affectation. No time for it. I’m Mr Bull-Davies, now. James, to chaps I wish I’d had in the army, knock off some of the damn pretentions.’

Like Terrence Cassidy, presumably. Merrily smiled to herself.

‘I’ve no illusions.’ James paced the kitchen. ‘Wasn’t expecting it to happen when it did, wasn’t expecting the old man to keel over for another twenty years. But no getting out of it. When the time comes, you have to shoulder the responsibility and that’s that. No arguments. And you become someone else. In the army you’re what you are. No complications. Here – no getting away from it – you’re what your family is. What your family was. You have a responsibility not only to the living – the living people, the living countryside – but also to the dead. You see where I’m heading, Mrs Watkins?’

Merrily stirred the tea in the pot. ‘Army-strength?’

‘Not too strong. Civilian now. Do you know what Cassidy said to me? Came to see me yesterday. Dithering. “But, James,” he said, “this was a long time ago.” You credit that? Man’s an arsehole. Shows the state of Britain that the rural economy’s now increasingly reliant on specimens like this – bloody caterers.’

His eyes met Merrily’s for the first time. They were pale blue and showed a surprising insecurity.

‘I’m sorry if I speak crudely. You’re ... Well. Never minced words with Hayden.’

‘My last parish was in a rundown part of Liverpool,’ Merrily said. ‘The only soldiers were squaddies back from Iraq. They tended to be the more refined parishioners.’

James barked a laugh.

‘I do understand,’ Merrily said, ‘that three centuries, in the history of a rural family like yours, is not so very long.’

‘I said to him’ – James’s lower lip jutted and curled – ‘Cassidy, I said, you’ve been here about two minutes. In the past three centuries, your family – what anyone can trace of it – has probably lived in a couple of dozen different houses in God knows how many different towns. However many generations it goes back, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, this is my family. In my village. How could I possibly condone some fatuous little pageant’ – he spat out the word like a pip – ‘which seeks to demean and ridicule my heritage? Yes, the local magistrate was Thomas Bull. Yes, he was one of the party who confronted Wil Williams. Yes, he was there when they found the body. And yes, he believed the evidence. Yes, he was convinced Williams was in league with the devil and should die for it. He was a man of his time. Homosexuality doesn’t come into it, and I won’t have his memory soiled by some sordid little queer in the name of so-called art and a few dozen visiting trendies paying London prices for fancy fodder at Cassidy’s Country bloody Kitchen.’

He came up to Merrily. The stove was hot against her bottom, but she didn’t move.

‘Went along with the wassailing fiasco last winter because that was at least an attempt at reinstating a tradition. But this festival’s in danger of going the wrong way and dragging my village along with it. Realize there’s going to be some change. Even if I disagree with it. Recognize that your presence here’s part of that change.’

‘And naturally you’re opposed to the ordination of women.’

James backed off a little. ‘There are some who say it strengthens the Church. Have my doubts about that, but there’s nothing I can do now. You’re here, and you at least seem like a reasonable sort of woman, head screwed on.’

‘Thank you very much,’ Merrily said acidly.

‘But you must understand my position, Mrs Watkins. Where my family stands. We have a role. That role, regardless of how we may feel as individuals, is to resist change. It’s what we do. We defend. And so I opposed your appointment, made no secret of it. Well, all right, that battle’s lost, it’s over. You’re here. Generally speaking, under most circumstances, you can now count on my support.’

Merrily said nothing.

‘So long,’ he said, ‘as you remain sensitive to the best interests of this village.’

‘I see. And if’ – Merrily prised herself painfully from the Aga – ‘on some significant and controversial issue, we don’t agree on what those best interests might be?’

‘I really don’t think,’ said James Bull-Davies, ‘that you would ever be so short-sighted.’

‘But say there was. Say there was an issue on which your idea of what was in the best interests of the village was in conflict with what I considered to be morally and spiritually right.’

He sighed. ‘You make it hard for me, Mrs Watkins. And perhaps for yourself.’

Merrily took a deep breath. ‘You haven’t answered my question. How would you react in a situation where we found it impossible to work out our differences?’

‘All right. Depending on the seriousness of the, er, matter under discussion, I should be obliged to use what influence I have. To get you out of the parish.’

Like your wretched ancestor did with Wil Williams? Merrily didn’t say it.

She didn’t say it.

‘Thank you for your honesty,’ she said.

He nodded to her and left before she could pour his tea.

When Jane came back with the fish and chips, she found her mother white-faced and furious, hands wrapped around the chrome bar of the Aga and twisting.

‘Mum ...?’ Jane stood in the doorway, holding the hot paper package. ‘What ...?’

‘Put them in the warming oven.’ Mum’s voice was a small, curled-up thing. ‘We’ll go and get the car.’

‘Car?’

‘And the sleeping bags, if you want.’

‘We’re staying the night?’

‘Yeah. We bloody are.’

‘Oh. What changed your mind? Something he said?’

‘We’re getting our feet under the bloody table. We’re letting the good folk of Ledwardine know we’ve arrived.’

Mum’s hands had stopped twisting on the bar. She was very, very still now.

‘No more shit.’ She’d never used that word to Jane before. ‘No more shit.’

14 Grown Women, or What?

TRUST NOBODY.

OK, not a very Christian maxim, but ...

Merrily dragged a bulging suitcase through the Black Swan’s porch and out on to the steps.

Remembering being in this very spot on Saturday night, in the frozen moments before the James Bull-Davies drama, when Dermot Child had so confidently slipped an arm around her waist, shortly after explaining to her how Cassidy and Powell, politicians both, had nominated her for the role of parish scapegoat.

Stitched up, sexually patronized ... and now, openly threatened.

Stuff them all.

Even less Christian. What was this place doing to her? Were all rural parishes this stifling?

Jane had already carried down a bag full of toiletries and overnight stuff, a few clothes. Merrily had stopped at reception to leave a message for Roland, the manager, who, with the approach of the real tourist season, had been mildly indicating that he could use their rooms more profitably. As a tourist venue, Ledwardine was finally taking off.

Just at the moment, and for the first time, Merrily felt like taking off too. They’d been in Ledwardine over a month, and the only resident she’d felt entirely relaxed with had been Miss Devenish. Of whom the cautious Ted Clowes had once said, Delightful old girl, may be some sort of witch. Don’t be tempted to get too close.

Plaintive music drifted across the residents’ car park, in the yard behind the inn. It was coming from the Volvo, their onetime ‘family car later spurned by Sean for something smaller and faster and, as it turned out, less resistant to impact. The Volvo still had the eight-speaker stereo with built-in CD-autochanger presented to Sean, as such items often had been, by A Client. As Merrily got in, a wispy male voice sang low and breathy over an acoustic wash.

Walked her up and down the garden in the rain.

I called her name.

She didn’t know it ...

‘Turn it down, huh, Jane.’

‘Isn’t it great? It’s like really moving. His girlfriend’s a junkie and he doesn’t—’

‘It’s OK. Sounds like, what’s his name? He killed himself – Nick Drake?’

‘Nick Drake killed himself?’

‘We had all his albums when I was a kid, courtesy of your Uncle Jonathan in his morose phase. Listen, I said we wouldn’t be back tonight, but we’d get the rooms cleaned out by tomorrow night, so that Roland can charge twice as much for them. So don’t make any other arrangements, all right?’

‘Would I?’

‘No, flower,’ Merrily said. ‘You wouldn’t. You’re my very best friend.’

‘Oh please!’ Jane made a vomiting sound. ‘You can’t be that sad!’

Merrily turned on the engine for the first time in days. All she had to do was drive out of the yard, across the square and about thirty yards down Church Street to where the vicarage drive was overhung by a weeping birch. Although she didn’t even get out of second gear, it felt like driving across some distant frontier into another country. A foreign country where no one could be trusted.

‘Oh, I can, flower,’ Merrily said.

Through the eight speakers – on the dashboard, the rear parcel shelf and all four doors – the same voice sang another song, its muted chorus concluding,

... and it’s always on the sunny days

you feel you can’t go on.

Jane picked up the CD box from the dash, running her finger down the track list as the Volvo wobbled over the cobbles. The track was called Sunny Days, and it was followed by one called Song for Nick.

By nightfall, they must have walked all over the vicarage about four times, trying to make it seem smaller. And failing, as Merrily always knew they would.

Yeah, sure, it was a big mistake, coming to camp here – a futile gesture of defiance from Merrily, a silly adventure for Jane.

They were both overwhelmed. Even small houses looked enormous without furniture. Even small, new houses. This place – without a TV set, a microwave, even a bookcase full of paperbacks – was oppressive with age. In the light of naked bulbs, the walls looked grey and damp. Upstairs, where wardrobes had stood, there were great meshes of cobwebs, big as fishermen’s nets.

‘Before ...’ Jane said. ‘Before ... it just looked big. You know what I mean?’

Merrily nodded. Freshly vacated, the house was huge and naked and dead, its skeleton of woodwormed oak exposed – the shrunken remains of trees, killed half a millennium ago, embalmed and mummified in the walls. How, with their minimal furniture, their token pots and pans, could they possibly get its blood flowing again?

‘I wonder if I’m allowed to take in lodgers,’ Merrily said gloomily. ‘Maybe one of those guys who sit in the middle of Hereford with a penny whistle and a dog.’

‘Or four of them,’ Jane said. ‘All with dogs. Barking.’

Because it was so quiet. Whether it was the trees all around or whatever, you wouldn’t know you were near the centre of the village.

After Sean’s death, before she’d gone to college, she’d sold all the fancy new furniture, the rich-lawyer toys. This is tragic, her mother had said, all these nice things ...you may find you regret it one day when you have a big house again.

I’m never going to have a big house again, Merrily had said very calmly.

‘Still,’ Jane said. ‘We’re seeing it at its very worst. It can only get better and better, can’t it?’

‘It can, flower. And it will. Look, let’s forget this idea. Mrs Peat’s coming tomorrow, the cleaner. Why don’t we let her have a go at it first? Come on, let’s go back to the pub.’

Jane hesitated. She was standing by the window in the drawing room made mauve by dull twilight through the surrounding trees. Across the room the inglenook yawned like an open tomb, its lintel two feet thick. There’d been an archaic, coal-effect electric fire in there when the Haydens were here; now it was just blackened stone, and you couldn’t light a fire because the wide chimney had been sealed off for insulation.

‘Buy you dinner, OK?’ Merrily said. ‘We could extend to that. Not in the bar. I mean in the restaurant. Those chips’ll be all stuck together by now, anyway.’

It was just stone flags underfoot, like the ones in the church but without the memorials and carved-out skulls. You could spend a year’s stipend just carpeting the downstairs.

‘What do you say, flower?’

‘No.’ Jane stamped a foot on the stone. ‘We should stay. It’s stupid to be scared of your house. Are we grown women, or what?’

In the end, they slept in the bedroom Merrily had used that first night. At least it had a wooden floor. They spread out the red and blue sleeping bags bought for a camping holiday in the Lake District, a holiday which never happened, the summer after Sean died.

It was still cold at night, especially in here. The sleeping bags were a couple of feet apart, up against the wall with the door in it. Two kids in a haunted house.

‘Isn’t it funny,’ Jane said into the darkness, ‘how, when you finally get to bed on a cold night, you always want to go to the loo?’

‘All in the mind. Which means I’m not going with you.’

‘Did I ask you to?’

‘Think of something else,’ Merrily said. ‘It’ll go away.’

‘OK.’

Silence. Odd, really; a place this old, you expected creaks and groans. Didn’t timber-frame houses kind of settle down for the night?

‘Mum ...’

‘Mm-mm.’

‘You ever know anybody who committed suicide?’

The kid had always been good at choosing her moments.

‘I can’t think,’ Merrily said. ‘Nobody close, anyway.’

There was Edgar Powell, of course, whose inquest was to be concluded tomorrow. But she hadn’t really known him, only seen him. In the last hour of the last night of his life. Go to sleep, Jane.

‘What happened to Nick Drake?’

Merrily sighed. ‘I don’t know if that was suicide or not.’

‘You said he killed himself.’

‘Well, he died of an overdose of antidepressants, so he must have taken them himself. Whether he actually intended to take an overdose seems to be questionable. He was just a sad, withdrawn young guy whose career wasn’t taking off, that’s all. It was before you were born, anyway.’

Before you were born. Another lifetime. Before Jane was born, Merrily had been almost a child. In a few years’ time, Jane would be older than Merrily had been then. Was probably already, in some ways, more mature. Over the congealed chips, she’d explained how James Bull-Davies had made her so angry, and Jane had said, If he’s so sensitive to the best interests of the village, what’s he doing shacking up with that woman?

What indeed? Merrily rolled on to her side.

‘Mum.’

‘What?’

‘If Dad hadn’t been killed, would he have gone to jail?’

God almighty. Dark Night of the Soul, or what?

‘I don’t know. It’s possible. He might just have been struck off. Wasn’t a criminal. As such. He was just frustrated and he could see people around him making lots of money in unorthodox ways. And they became his clients. You know all this.’

‘When did you find out?’

‘When it was too late to stop him.’

‘Why didn’t you leave him then?’

‘I expect I would have.’

‘And would you have still got into theological college?’

‘Sure.’

‘But would you still have been acceptable as a vicar?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you feel sort of ... soiled? Because we’d benefited from dirty money.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Did that make you all the keener to get into the Church? To throw yourself into it?’

‘You make it sound like a canal.’

‘Did you love him? Even when you found out he was bent?’

‘You don’t stop loving people just like ...’

‘What about when you found out about his affair?’

‘I don’t know. I hated him then, I suppose. I thought I hated him. I mean, I’m not Jesus, am I?’

‘You forgiven him now?’

‘I like to think so.’

‘If he hadn’t been killed, would you have?’

‘I don’t know. Would have depended on what he did next.’

‘If he was sorry.’

‘Yeah. If he was sorry. Jane, what’s all this about?’

Jane’s thin, white arm came out of the sleeping bag. ‘I just keep going back over things. Everything seems ... not real. Like a dream. I have to keep working out how we got here. Just in case this is a dream. I don’t really like it.’

Merrily didn’t know how to respond.

‘Is it because I got drunk? Is it the cider? Does it go on affecting you for days?’

Merrily had to smile. ‘No.’ She reached out and took the small, cold hand. ‘And I’m afraid this is not a dream. Janey, love, is all this anything to do with that record? The CD you had in the car. Where’d it come from?’

‘Oh. A friend gave it to me.’

‘Right.’

Merrily closed her eyes. She was determined they weren’t going to do this again tomorrow. She’d make a deal with Roland for another couple of nights, until they had their own beds in here.

‘I told you about Lol,’ Jane said. ‘It’s his old band. He was apparently very influenced by Nick Drake.’

‘Only musically, one hopes.’

Jane didn’t reply. Merrily opened her eyes and lay on her back, gazing through the long window, pondering on this Lol, about whom Jane seemed to know a little too much. A small, yellow light, as from a candle or a child’s nightlight, shone between the thickening trees from a window across the street.

Later, much later, when she awoke to a tugging on her hand, the only light through the window was from a misty quarter moon, which turned the room grey.

Damn. Why can’t she hold out till morning?

Merrily squirmed, not half-awake, out of the warm sleeping bag into the damp air. The bedroom door was already ajar and she slid cautiously through the gap. She didn’t need to do this, of course; but she knew that Jane, for all her bravado, would not like wandering alone around the not even half-known rooms of the big, empty house.

Outside, there was the passage with doors and doors and doors, and one must be the bathroom, she couldn’t remember which, only that it was a stark, sixties bathroom with a black, plastic lavatory seat and cracked tiles everywhere.

She’d left her dressing gown at the Black Swan, and it was pre-dawn cold out here in just a short nightdress, bare feet on oak boards. Across the stairs, the landing window was an oblong of flat aluminium.

‘Jane?’

The house was absolutely still. Why can’t you creak? Have you no personality?

‘Ja-ane?’

Which one was the bathroom? She opened a door; space and silence sucked at her and she shut it quickly.

A pace along the passage and she lost the moonlight. Now, there was only the faint, green spot of a smoke-alarm on a ceiling beam and the deeper darkness of doorways. She put a hand into a recess, found a cold doorknob and then drew back.

‘Jane!’

Shouting this time, but the passage swallowed it; she could almost see the short, bright name narrowing like a light down a tunnel, vanishing in no time. She was aware of a slow panic, like a dark train coming, and she grabbed the handle and turned it and the door didn’t open; perhaps this was the bathroom and the kid had locked it. ‘Jane ...’

A sudden yielding, and she stumbled, the oak door rolling away into the vastness of a long, long bedroom, empty as an open field, and Merrily grabbed at the handle and hauled the door closed, turning away and finding herself facing another door and she opened that, and there was the lavatory with its seat up and caught in a frail moonbeam, making an apologetic O.

As in NO. No Jane ...

No, no, no, no, no ... She fled along the passage, all the doors closed and blank. She felt she’d been out here for hours, trying door after door, and in that time Jane must have finished in the bathroom and gone back to bed, so which one was the bedroom?

Which one was the bloody bedroom?

All the doors were closed, and she’d surely left the bedroom door open, hadn’t she? But maybe Jane had closed it, shut her out. Jane had shut her out. ‘Jane!!!’ she screamed, and ran wildly from door to door, all the same, all black oak and all shut.

And spun round and round and found herself facing stairs. Where was she now? Had she gone downstairs? Had she gone down to the dreadful kitchen or the drawing room with its chimney blocked; she couldn’t have.

No. These were the other stairs. The next stairs. Oh, Jesus, there were more stairs.

The extra floor. A third and empty floor of doors and doors and doors.

She stood at the bottom of the stairs and couldn’t look up. She hugged herself, and felt sweat cold on her shoulders.

She knew, of course, that she would have to go up there.

In all her dreams of being in a house and suddenly discovering it had a third storey, she had accepted that, sooner or later, she was going to have to climb those final stairs. Because of the presence. Because there was someone up there waiting for her. In the best dreams, it was herself; if she climbed the stairs, she would find her true self, discover her hidden potential. This, said the analysts she had read over the years, was the true meaning of this dream. It was about reaching for the higher dimension. Or, in a spiritual sense, carrying the lantern of faith along the dark corridors to the foot of the last stairs, at the top of which was the greater light.

But in the worst dreams, the presence at the top of the stairs, along the final passage, behind the final doors, was neither her higher self nor the light of lights. For a while, after his death, it had been Sean, still greedily grinning through the torn metal, through his blood.

So, which one was this: the good dream or the bad dream?

No.

It wasn’t a dream. This was the promised reality, the culmination. She had obeyed her calling, given herself up to the Holy Spirit. And moved at last into the house with three floors. Oh God, the tugging on the hand ...

Jane?

No.

All right. So be it. Merrily relaxed the grip on her cold shoulders, let her arms fall to her side.

She looked up.

Couldn’t breathe.

‘Mum?’

Oh my God, my God, my God, my God, my God, I can’t breathe.

‘Mum!’

Her chest was rigid, as though there was a tourniquet around it, winding tighter and tighter, squashing her breasts. She rolled over, gasping.

‘Mummy!’ Her eyes blinked open and the breath gushed into her, and she sat up, coughing. Jane had hold of her shoulders. Big, frightened eyes, dark hair fluffed up and haloed by the pinky-orange light of dawn.

‘You’re back,’ Merrily croaked.

‘Mum, I haven’t been anywhere.’

‘You went to the bathroom.’

‘No ...’

Merrily turned to the door. It was closed.

‘You were having a dream,’ Jane said.

‘It couldn’t have been a dream. I followed you out.’

Jane shook her head wryly and skipped to the window. ‘Oh, look, you can see the hills. You can see right over the houses across the road. I bet it’s brilliant from upstairs, on the top floor. In my apartment.’

She turned back to Merrily and grinned.

‘I’ll go and make some tea.’

Merrily closed her eyes. When she opened them, Jane was gone, the door slamming behind her. Merrily’s hair felt cold and damp around the numbness of her face, and her chest felt like it had been sat on. She was exhausted.

15 Hazey Jane

OF COURSE, SHE’D had this kind of nightmare before. Everybody had. The point about dreams was that your reactions were often intensified because you were so helpless. Apprehension, mild fear, turned very quickly into terror; small, disquieting things were sometimes loaded with a bloated menace, which gradually deflated when you awoke.

Well. Usually.

Very occasionally, the essence of it remained draped over you like dusty, moth-eaten rags, for most of the day. Merrily knelt under the pink-washed window, hoping to rinse her spirits with prayer. But it was mechanical, she couldn’t find the level. It was as though the nightmare had blocked her spiritual pores.

And something else was blocked. What did I see? she kept asking herself. What did I see when I looked up those stairs? And something cold crept up her vertebrae and left behind it a formless, drifting dread.

She stood up and shook herself. Found a towel and some shampoo in the overnight bag, went for a bath but nearly chickened out: the sight of the cold, tiled bathroom made clammy skin and sweat-stiffened hair seem rather less offensive, and she had to dismiss sinful images of the warm, creamy comforts of the en-suite at the Black Swan, the urge to slip back there for one last, glorious soak.

Anyway, it was only about five-thirty. Too early even to get into the Swan. Oh, come on. Are we grown women, or what? She helped a big spider to freedom and turned on the flaking, chromium taps, noticing that the oak floorboards had been concealed, probably for the past thirty years, under well-worn, well-cracked black and white lino tiles.

During Alf Hayden’s lengthy tenure, the nouveau riche village of Ledwardine had managed to leave its vicarage a long way behind.

‘You,’ her daughter said, looking thoughtful, ‘are looking pretty rough.’

They’d bought a loaf last night from the Late store, and Jane was trying to make the Aga make toast.

‘Why don’t you just go back to bed?’

‘What bloody bed?’ Merrily leaned over the stove with a cigarette in her mouth, wondering if there was somewhere to ignite it; evidently there wasn’t.

‘I’m quite sure,’ Jane said primly, ‘that your God wouldn’t want you to smoke like a chimney.’

‘Listen, flower, if you can find the bit in the Bible where it says that ...’

‘All right, sorry. Just because I had a decent night’s sleep and you didn’t.’

‘That’s because you’re a child. An innocent. Look, I don’t suppose, if I were to mind your toast, you could run upstairs and fetch my Zippo from the bathroom?’

Jane raised her eyes cynically to the ceiling and trotted off. Merrily stood resting her forehead on folded arms on the plate rack over the stove.

Stress? Hell, she’d only been here a month. It hadn’t started yet. She wasn’t even official until the end of the week, and people were still not sure where to find her. There were communion classes to organize, visits to the primary school, the senior citizens’ social club, an invitation to address the WI ...

And there’d be more, much more. Domestic situations where, as she’d learned in Liverpool, a clergyman would never have been approached. Failing marriages. Problem kids. Spiteful, invalid mothers who declined to die. Any one of which would make something like the Wil Williams controversy seem precious and fatuous.

She needed to get it all into perspective. She’d wander over to the church after breakfast, when Jane had gone to school, and she wouldn’t come out until she felt purged.

Although it was more than an hour before the school bus was due, Jane didn’t see much point in hanging around an empty house with a grouchy parent. Besides, it was good walking about the village before most people were up and about. It sparkled, as though the air itself were alive. Strange.

And she might see Miss Devenish.

The need to see Miss Devenish was, in fact, pretty urgent. Firstly, she had to thank her for whatever she did on Saturday night. Secondly, there was the question of Lol Robinson. The way that guy Karl had been winding him up, the talk of suicide and Kurt Cobain and Nick Drake ... and then Colette implying that Lol was already wound so tight he couldn’t go out in the dark without Miss Devenish to hold his hand.

Karl was obviously the Karl Windling (bass, backing vocals) mentioned on the back of the CD. Karl was offering to kickstart Lol’s career again. And on the evidence of the album, for which Lol had written all the songs, Lol was good, Lol was brilliant. But for some reason he didn’t want to go back, and it wasn’t just a case of playing hard to get. He hadn’t even wanted to see Karl; he’d been afraid to see Karl. So why was he in this state? Why was he hiding himself away in Ledwardine? Why was he alone? Why had the cool, beautiful Alison left him for the horrible and grotesquely old James Bull-Davies?

Money and status probably. Actually, what was even more strange was how someone as sensitive as Lol had ever got involved with someone as glossy and superficial as Alison.

It all made Jane feel anxious, in a rather thrilling way. And protective, because Karl Windling was such a bully. She tried to feel the state of mind you’d have to be in to want to just end your life. Where you didn’t want to do anything else in the world ever again, or go anywhere, or love anyone. Or write another sad song.

She couldn’t imagine it. She was probably emotionally backward. Though, perhaps, in some cases, it was just kind of an impulse thing. Especially if you were already more than a bit unstable.

She wondered where Miss Devenish lived. No point in going to the shop this early. But Miss Devenish and Jane, they needed to talk.

It was going to be another warm day. She walked up to the square, school books in a canvas airline bag over one shoulder, school blazer over the other. Nearly forty-five minutes to kill before the bus was due. School: French and economics and maths, then double games. She looked up into a tide of flawless blue coming in over a smooth sandbank of early cloud. What, really, was the point of going to sodding school today when there was so much she needed to learn here in the village? Schoolwork, essays and stuff, you could always get over that with a bit of effort. Real life ... not so easy.

A snatch of one of Lol’s songs kept coming back to her.

... and it’s always on the sunny days

you feel you can’t go on.

That album was sending her signals. She just knew that the girls Karl Windling had seen in Andy’s Records in Hereford had been the friends of Colette’s who’d bought the album.

It was all fated: Jane Watkins was somehow destined to rescue the tragic Lol Robinson. The cobbles glittered in affirmation. Strange.

It wasn’t a schoolgirl crush, of course. Nothing so immature. Anyway, he was old enough to be her father. No, this was on an altogether higher level.

She’d known last night, when she’d first opened the brown-paper bag and seen the name of the band on the front of the CD. The band formed by Lol Robinson over fifteen years ago, before she was born. Or perhaps ... perhaps exactly at the time she was born.

Some kind of omen; it had to be. The name so exactly summing up the way she was feeling. Had been feeling since ... well, Saturday night.

Lol’s old band had been called – eerily – Hazey Jane.

Hardly even thinking about what she was doing, Jane wandered past the market cross and into the cool, secretive shade of Blackberry Lane, the trees overhead throbbing and pulsing with spring. Spring like she’d never felt it before.

A grey van was parked outside the church. Who could that be? The main door was still shut, so Merrily went round the back with her fat bunch of jailer’s keys.

However, the small, south-east door, leading in by the Bull Chapel, was already ajar. As she slipped inside, there was a vast discordant wail from the organ, and she jumped, alarmed. An organ in an empty church was a spooky sound.

‘See?’ Dermot Child’s voice called out. ‘It’s sticking. I’ve tried working it up and down.’

‘Hmm. May need replacing. You can’t keep on bodging these things for ever.’

Midlands accent. Obviously Mr Gerald Watts, the organ repair man from Bromsgrove. Ted had mentioned him; his phone number was in the book of essential parish contacts. And Dermot had remarked the other week that the organ would soon need some attention.

‘Problem is, Dermot, I’d have to make one to fit. Can you manage like this for a couple of weeks?’

‘Sounds like I haven’t got a choice.’

Merrily slid into the Bull Chapel. It was separated from the organ by an eighteenth-century wooden screen, so they couldn’t see each other, she and Dermot and Mr Watts, the organ man. She stood with her back to the screen, didn’t want to interrupt them.

‘So what’s the damage, Gerry? Roughly. If it’s over fifty, I’ll need to check it with the vicar.’

Sunlight fanned in through the chapel’s leaded window and pooled in the eyes of Thomas Bull. They were fully open. She hadn’t really noticed that before. It was disturbing, abnormal. His lids surely should be lowered, displaying for eternity the familiar and usually false humility of the wealthy dead.

‘All right, what I’ll do, Dermot, if it’s looking a bit heavy I’ll send a copy of the estimate to Hayden, but I’ll give you a ring first, so you’ll know.’

‘It isn’t Hayden any more.’

‘Lord, no, I’d forgotten. Saw her picture in the Hereford Times. Looked like a pretty fair swap to me, unless it was an unusually flattering photo.’

‘Didn’t do her justice, Gerry. Didn’t do her justice. Absolute little cracker. I tell you, it’s bloody hard to concentrate on your playing sometimes.’

Merrily was aware of smiling. What, in the end, could you say?

‘Must be a new experience for you,’ Mr Watts said. ‘Fancying the vicar. Least, I hope it is.’

‘It’s a funny thing, Gerry. It’s a bit like nurses. The uniform gives it an added something. She’s being very traditional – I suppose she’s a bit insecure – and she wears this long, supposedly shapeless black cassock. Only on her it’s not shapeless at all. You get bumps in all the right places. And it’s got about a hundred buttons down the front, and you imagine yourself undoing them all, very slowly, one by one. Oh God.’

Merrily’s face began to burn.

Mr Watts said, ‘What d’you reckon they wear underneath?’

‘Exactly. What do they wear underneath? You could go mad thinking about it. Could be nothing, couldn’t it? I mean, it could be nothing at all.’

‘In your dreams.’

‘In my dreams, Gerald, she’s wearing nothing but the bloody dog collar. Imagine that: white collar, pink body, brown nipples.’

Merrily wasn’t smiling any more. Her eyes found the wide-open dead eyes of Thomas Bull. He was clothed in what, for those frilly Cavalier times, must have been a rather severe jacket, with a high collar. A sword, unsheathed, was lying by his side. Thomas was carved out of local stone, worn smooth now, his eyes wide open to face his God without fear, without excuses, in the year 1696 – a quarter of a century after his pivotal role in the hounding of Wil Williams. Bull’s face was stern, but, as she watched, the angle of the sun created the illusion of a supercilious smirk on the full, beard-fringed lips.

Mr Watts said, ‘You’ll go to hell, Dermot.’

‘Yes,’ said Dermot Child. ‘And it might even be worth it. Don’t forget your cap.’

They were coming out and there wasn’t time for her to reach the door without being seen.

Lol’s cottage was really rather lonely, the last one in the lane before it narrowed into a cart track. On each side, the Powell Orchard was starting to shimmer with new blossom.

Jane walked up the path between the front lawn that needed mowing and the fence bordering the orchard, and found herself knocking on the white-painted door around which red and orange early roses grew.

There was no answer. A small black cat watched her from a fence post.

She peered through the window into the room where Lol had talked with Karl Windling. It was so sparsely furnished it gave you the impression the cottage was not really occupied. As though someone had dumped a few things there in advance of moving in.

What if I’m too late? In her mind was an image of Lol lying limply across his bed, one arm outstretched, the fingers just parted from a small brown pill bottle. A variation, she realized, of a famous painting about a dead, young poet. But oh God ... She had to stop herself banging on the window. When she stepped away from it, she could hear faint music from the rear of the cottage.

There was a small gate hanging from one rusty hinge, and the path continued round the back. Jane carefully lifted open the gate and went, half-fearfully, through. In the small back garden were about four apple trees, all of them bending away from the cottage, as if the garden were trying to join the orchard. Or the orchard was trying to draw in the garden. Sunlight was sprinkled through the fragile white blossom.

... and it’s always on the sunny days

you feel you can’t go on.

Trembling a little, Jane went to the back door and was about to knock gently when she became aware of the music again. It was behind her now and so not coming from inside the cottage but from the garden itself, or the orchard, separated from it by the narrow path she knew was a bridleway.

She wandered among the apple trees, and the music came and went in snatches. It sounded a little like the music on the album, Hazey Jane, far away and melancholy.

There was another old garden gate, leading to the bridleway and the orchard. Jane drifted towards it.

The side of the tomb was cold on her face. She crouched there in her cassock, furious – hiding in her own church! – as Dermot Child and Mr Watts walked out. The cassock felt soiled, as though Child’s fingers had already been up and down the buttons. She wanted to have another bath, to scrub herself like she’d done once, late at night, to remove the blood of Edgar Powell.

Dermot’s key turned in the lock, but she didn’t move from behind the tomb, in case they came back.

Silence in the chapel. Only inches between her and Tom Bull’s bones. She saw, with a twinge of unease, that part of the tomb, below the feet of the effigy, had been repaired, as though Tom Bull had stretched out in death and pushed out a couple of the sandstone bricks to make more room for himself. You could feel quite resentful at the way influential local families thought they could buy into Paradise with a fancy tomb.

Traherne had a lot to say about that. Tom Bull must have known Traherne. But Traherne had left for London by the time they were laying their accusations at the door of his friend, Wil Williams.

How did James know about his ancestor’s role in the persecution and his feelings at the time? Were there family documents?

How, in fact, had the Williams story been passed down? She was reluctant to ask the old guy who did the All Our Yesterdays bit for the parish mag. He was sentimental and unreliable, and he’d keep her talking all day. And, anyway, he would never have been given access to the Bull-Davies family records.

Merrily stood up, brushed herself down. ‘Smug bastards,’ she muttered to Tom Bull and his absent descendant. ‘Nothing changes, does it?’

‘Well, that’s true,’ a woman murmured behind her. ‘In this family, anyway.’

Merrily spun round.

She wore an ankle-length skirt, the colour of Ledwardine soil, and possibly the same black, cotton shirt she’d worn on the square that night, open to the gold pendant in the cleft of her breasts. She also wore a knowing smile.

‘You drop something?’

‘Just a key,’ Merrily lied. She hadn’t heard the porch door open, or footsteps. ‘Sorry. Have you been here long?’

‘Just this minute walked in.’ She had glazed, Marilyn Monroe lips, but the resemblance ended there, before the steep, regal nose, before the slanting, dark blue eyes. ‘Alison Kinnersley. I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced.’

‘Probably because I’ve never seen you here before. Merrily Watkins.’

‘I do come here sometimes,’ Alison said. ‘To look around. And think. But never with James.’ Her voice dropped into the Bull-Davies bark. ‘Not seemly, you know.’

Merrily raised an eyebrow. ‘Anyone care about seemly any more?’

Twenty-five, even fifteen years ago, Alison Kinnersley would have been a scarlet woman. Today, the villagers still gossiped, but not many would be scandalized.

‘James cares,’ Alison said.

‘Yes.’ Merrily walked away from the tomb. ‘I expect he would.’

Then why? she wanted to ask. Remembering Alison’s hands inside James’s sheepskin on the night of the wassailing. Why does he let you flaunt him in public and yet, when you’re not there, behave as if you don’t exist?

‘Poor guy ...’ Alison moved into Merrily’s place at the tomb-side. ‘Poor guy came home in a bit of a state last night. He’s convinced you’re going to shaft him over that play.’

‘That’s rich. He threatened to shaft me.’

Alison laughed. ‘James is full of shit. OK? I just thought I should tell you that.’ She looked down dispassionately at the effigy. ‘He’s gone to Hereford today. For the Powell inquest. Gone to do his duty and help Rod Powell convince the coroner his old man didn’t top himself. He’ll be gone most of the day. And so, I ...’

The dark blue eyes focused directly on Merrily, as though this was very important.

‘... I just got the feeling you’d had this horrendous scene with him and you might be feeling intimidated. So I thought I’d tell you he was full of shit and whatever he said you should disregard. I’m relying, of course, on your discretion. As a woman of the cloth.’

Merrily didn’t know how to react. As a woman of the cloth or, indeed, as a woman.

‘I really wouldn’t mind seeing that play,’ Alison said. ‘I think it could be quite interesting.’

There was the faint hint of a rural vowel there – quoit interesting – which showed she didn’t exactly share James’s background.

‘I’ll tell you one thing.’ She touched, with a pink, ovalled fingernail, the sandstone lips of Tom Bull. ‘There was more to this old bastard than James is prepared to admit.’

‘Like what?’

‘Frankly, I don’t know.’ Alison’s lips turned down. ‘If I knew that ...’ She pulled her hand away from the effigy. ‘Anyway.’

‘Excuse me,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m a bit baffled. You’re James’s ...’

‘Mistress,’ Alison said softly. ‘Mistress. Old-fashioned word, old-fashioned guy.’

‘I had that impression.’

‘So why would I want to do this to him?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Hmm.’ Alison nodded. ‘Well, you’ve met him. You’ve been exposed to the archaic, paternalistic balls.’

‘I’m still baffled,’ Merrily said.

‘Well, fine,’ Alison said lightly. ‘That’s all right. So long as you’re not unsettled about it.’

She began to walk away, half turned, wryly raised a hand and brought the fingers down twice, like a bird pecking.

‘See you, Vicar.’

Merrily went directly to the Black Swan. She had some pleading to do; couldn’t face another night in a sleeping bag.

‘Well, I’m sorry, Mrs Watkins,’ Roland said. ‘I was only going by your instructions. I’ve got a theatre director and his partner arriving for lunch tomorrow, and they’ll be taking the Woolhope Suite until the weekend.’

‘One more night?’

‘I’m so sorry. No reflection on you, of course, but it’ll require the full works tonight. We were allowing for you having all your things out by ... seven? Oh, and this came for you. Somebody dropped it through the letterbox.’

A white envelope addressed to The Vicar, The Black Swan.

‘OK,’ Merrily said wearily. ‘I’ll go up and get everything sorted out and when Jane comes home we’ll get it all moved.’

Up in the suite, she thought, sod it, and ran a bath in the creamy bathroom. Got out of the cassock, rolled it into a ball and threw it into a corner. So much for tradition. As the bath filled up, she went to the wardrobe and found a plain black sweater and a charcoal-grey jersey skirt. Too hot but probably less appealing to the fetishist. Pity about the cassock; it was comfortable, like a kaftan, but it wasn’t coming back.

After her last, luxurious bath, Merrily lay down on the bed and tore open the letter. Looked like an invitation, a mixed blessing for vicars.

It was a card. A funeral card, with a black border. It said,

WIL WILLIAMS

WAS THE DEVIL’S MINISTER.

LET HIM LIE. BE WARNED.

Merrily let it fall to the floor.

She should take it to the police. It was a threat, wasn’t it?

And what would the police do? Fingerprint it? Then fingerprint the entire village?

She sat up and looked again at the card. The message had been printed on a slip of paper, which had been pasted inside the black rectangle. Anyone with access to a computer could have done it. And anyone could have access to a computer; for a very small fee you could use the one in Marches Media.

Waste of time. Some crank. On impulse, she took the card to the window, set light to it with her Zippo and let the air take the ashes.

Crank, maybe, but someone had spent some time on it. Another indication that something in this Wil Williams business went very deep in Ledwardine. Alison Kinnersley and Lucy Devenish both thought Coffey’s play would open up the can of worms and that would be no bad thing. But here was proof that Bull-Davies was clearly not alone in wanting to keep the lid on.

She shut the window and went back and lay on the bed, her whole body shaking with anger and what she suspected, after last night, was nervous exhaustion.

16 Like Lace

THIS WAS A secret place, an old place.

To begin with, it existed only as warmth and a sense-sapping humidity. Then she was aware of lustrous, wet stone walls on every side, like some Middle Eastern dungeon. But the atmosphere was dense and dark and syrupy with a sour-sweet aroma, fruitier and earthier than wine: a heavy drenching of deepest rural England.

His face went in and out of focus, sweat rippling down his cheeks like wax down a candle. His eyes were sly, his hands were busy. The lower half of him was lost in steam but it was moving. Squirming.

She, however, was lying helplessly still in what felt like damp hay. She couldn’t move at all; her muscles were heavy and sagging, like balloons full of water. She kept trying to concentrate, make out details, but her vision was all fuzzy and her self-control just drifted away into the thick, cloying, musted air.

She didn’t know where this was; it might be underground, at England’s core, it was hot enough. Above her, no sun, only oaken rafters, pickled in centuries of juice.

Hot enough to be hell. And his face ...

His mad, moist face had split into a wide grin, the way a crisp apple splits. But it was rotten inside, oozing brown pulp, and the pips dropped from his stained teeth and, behind, she saw his fat buttocks rising out of the vapour, glossy orbs, rosy apples.

He took in a slow, wheezing breath. Eyes popping in his friar’s face as his buttocks tensed, and she realized, with terror tightening inside, that he was fully on top of her.

And she was wearing the tattered remnants of the black cassock, ripped down the front and stained with stinking apple pulp. And her collar was tightening like a shackle, like a stiff, white noose.

White collar. He began to gasp. Pink body. Brown nipples. Absolute little cracker.

There was the squeak and grind of an ancient mechanism, the sense of an enormous, waiting weight, before a lunge and a squeezing and a second of silence like a crack in the universe until – accompanied by a long, liquid gush – Dermot Child snarled out, his enormous voice echoing through caverns of time as her own throat constricted.

‘Auld ... ciderrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ...’

Bastards!

Merrily hurled clothes, unfolded, into the open suitcase. The cassock last, but the lid wouldn’t close, and in a rage she seized the cassock and tore it down the back and threw it into the bin liner with the rubbish.

Look at the time, look at the time. Four-fifteen! She’d slept for nearly five hours. God almighty.

Calm down.

She sat on a corner of the bed, settled her breathing, gave herself a good talking-to. Alf Hayden would have chuckled and let it all pass over him – Child, Bull-Davies and his mistress, the funeral card. Nothing would intrude into Alf’s placid dreams.

But would any of it have happened to Alf? Merrily didn’t somehow think it would.

When she’d awakened – the dream-Child’s ghastly orgasmic cry biting into her brain like an alarm clock – she’d stripped at once in front of the bathroom washbasin, throwing angry handfuls of cold tap water at herself and then drinking half a pint of tepid spring water from a plastic bottle and brushing her teeth with a violence that made her gums bleed.

Just calm down. Jane’ll be getting off the bus in about ten minutes; you can’t let her see you like this.

In the bedroom, she dressed in the quietly secular black jumper and skirt, slotted her clerical collar under her dark-brown curls. Pink skin, brown nipples, white—

Stop it!

Before the open window overlooking the mellowed, red-cobbled village square, she knelt to pray. Pressing her palms flat together, sandwiching the heat between them. Stilling her mind, entering the inner temple, before whispering into the Silence.

O God, I know you’re testing me. As you will, no doubt, test all women who dare to don the cloth ...

Stop. You’re sounding resentful. You’re whingeing.

She knelt in silence for several minutes, waiting for the right tone, the right level. Waiting for the calm. But, to her anguish, her senses began to fill up with the pulpy essence of the foetid cider cellar, the organist’s sweating face. Sweat and rotting apples; how was she ever going to bring herself to talk to that bloody man again?

You pompous cow. He’s just a normal guy. If you’re not responsible for your dreams, Dermot Child certainly isn’t!

Sure. Reluctantly, she stood up. The odd thing was, she’d never seen a cider mill at work, only the static exhibits at the Bulmer’s Museum in Hereford. She’d never smelt the powerful aroma, although she’d read about it. Never experienced the moment when the press came down on the cloth-rolled pulp and the first juice burst out like—

A bus juddered to a stop on the edge of the square; through the open window she heard chattering and laughter.

Jane’s bus.

Merrily stood the suitcase in the centre of the room together with the bin liner and three cardboard wine boxes from Sainsbury’s to put the rest of the stuff in. She dashed into the bathroom, started to drag a comb through her tangled hair, but it snagged and she gave up and ran out of the Woolhope Suite, down the stairs and into the square, to grab hold of Jane before she tramped back to an empty vicarage.

And what have you been doing today, Mum? Well, I slept most of it, actually, flower, then I had a pornographic dream.

Help!

The kids on the square were separating slowly, school shirts and blouses pulled out of waistbands, gestures of slovenly cool. No sign of Jane. One of the older boys spotted Merrily and nudged his mate and they smiled slyly, and Merrily thought, Jesus, is there no end to this?

When she walked up to them, retrieving her breath, the tall, thin one went gratifyingly red. Merrily didn’t smile at him.

‘You seen Jane Watkins anywhere?’

‘Yeah,’ the other boy said. ‘I seen her a few times. Nice-looking. Bit like you.’ Smothering a giggle with his hand, cocky little sod.

‘And do you know,’ Merrily said patiently, ‘where she is?’

‘Hang on,’ the tall one said, ‘I never seen her on the bus. You see her, Dean?’

‘She weren’t on the bus. She weren’t on the bus this morning neither, I’m pretty sure.’

Merrily frowned.

‘No, honestly.’ Dean was overweight and beady-eyed. ‘There’s six of us gets on at this stop, right? And she’s always there when I gets yere. Last minute, me. Matter of pride. Jane wasn’t there, Vicar.’ He grinned in her face. ‘Swear to God.’

‘Thanks,’ Merrily said tightly.

‘Looks like ’er bunked off, dunnit? Naughty, naughty.’

The square swam before her. She couldn’t believe it. Not for one minute. Whatever she said about school, most of it disparaging, Jane did not bunk off. Jane had never missed a day except through illness and family tragedy. The youth was lying. Why was he lying to her?

Dean nonchalantly pulled from his schoolbag a can of Woodpecker cider, ripped off the tab. Merrily was sure she could smell it. Sweat and apples. She turned away in disgust. The kids were separating, going off in different directions. Maybe Jane had missed the bus. But if she wasn’t there this morning?

Merrily went cold. She turned round and round, the square blurring into the Black Swan, the Country Kitchen alleyway, the Late Shop, Church Street, the vicarage behind its trees. Not again. Jane, please God, not again, don’t do this to me.

Calm down. It’s broad daylight. She’s fifteen years old, she’s smart, she’s been around. She’s probably at the vicarage. Up in her Apartment with a tape-measure.

I’ll kill her.

In his last, morose months, Nick Drake, aged twenty-six, would get into his car and drive and drive until he ran out of petrol, because he hadn’t the confidence to stop at a garage. Often, his father would have to travel about seventy miles to bring him home.

When he was not out in his car, Nick would sit with his guitar in his room at his parents’ home and play the same chord sequence over and over again, like some sad mantra. There had been a time, not so many years ago, when all this had made terrifying sense to Lol.

He sat on the chair arm with the dented Washburn on his knee. His fingers found A-minor and then F and then E-minor, stroking the strings with nails ruined by a winter of collecting and chopping logs for the stove. Conceding that Nick’s chord-sequence, even in those faded days, was probably a good deal more complex. Never could work out his tunings.

On the table was a letter which had arrived this morning from the record company, TMM. It was pleased to inform Lol Robinson that the compilers of a new mass-market collection, to be called Acoustic Echoes, would be interested in including his song ‘Dandelion Dreams’ from the third and last Hazey Jane album.

Money for nothing. Backed by TV-advertising, these compilation albums sold by the vanload and also generated new interest in your old records. This was the fourth in two years to include one of his songs; it was how he lived. And it was a living; it paid the mortgage on the cottage, it put food on Lol’s table and Ethel’s dish. It was enough. Wasn’t it?

He struck the doleful E-minor. He wanted to write again, sure he did, but when you lost it you lost it. You were supposed to be more inspired when you were unhappy, when your woman had gone and left you all alone. How come he could just about cobble lyrics together for Gary Kennedy’s adequate tunes and that was it?

The phone rang. It would be Karl. Karl had rung twice since the weekend. The second time, he’d said, I’m going to come and see you again. I’ve got some ideas for songs. As if Lol had never said, No way, no I’m not doing it, I can’t do it. Got some ideas for songs, Karl had said, voice absolutely bland, no hint of menace. I’m going to come and see you again.

He put down the guitar, picked up the phone.

‘Lol? It’s, er, it’s Dennis. Dennis Clarke.’

‘Hello,’ Lol said, relieved. ‘How are you doing? Thanks for the album.’

‘No, er, no problem.’ Dennis coughed. ‘So you saw Karl, then.’

‘He came over.’

‘Yeah,’ Dennis said. ‘Right. He came back to see me again. We had a talk.’

‘He tell you about this gig he did with this band in America and all the girls afterwards and how he could’ve gone on all night despite being twice their age?’

‘No,’ Dennis said. ‘Gillian was there. He told me about how much money we could make if we did another album.’

‘And were you impressed?’

Dennis went quiet.

Lol said, ‘Was Gillian impressed?’

‘Lol, OK, look, I ... Well, I said ... I said yes. I said I would.’

‘Would what?’

‘Do another album.’

This time Lol went quiet.

‘It’s just a record, Lol. It won’t mean touring. I mean ... I can fit it in. Karl says they’ll organize a studio at Chipping Camden or somewhere, so I travel up, come home at night. Gillian’s ... Gill says she doesn’t mind.’

‘What about your wrist?’

‘Elbow. I suppose, if I take a couple of pain-killers ...’

‘Right,’ Lol said. ‘Well, good luck. I’ll look out for it.’

‘No, hang on. I mean ... I mean, you have to be in the band, obviously.’

‘That’s funny, Dennis, because I told Karl I wasn’t going to do it.’

‘Lol, you’ve got to do it.’

‘Oh. I see,’ Lol said. ‘He kind of threatened you, did he? What was it, plain violence, or something Gillian doesn’t know about? I have to say, it was the violence used to work with me. But that was nearly twenty years ago. Not now, I don’t think. What he did finally was worse.’

‘Lol, listen—’

‘He says, Dennis, you persuade that little bastard, or—?’

‘No! No, he didn’t! It was nothing like that.’

Lol felt sorry for him. He felt sorry for himself too, but maybe Dennis, the safe, Chippenham accountant, was more vulnerable right now.

‘Dennis, if he ever asks, I’ll tell him you did your best.’

‘Lol, for Christ’s sake ...’ He sensed Dennis was near to tears. ‘Oh, come on, man, you know it’s you he needs. You know he can’t write a fucking song to save his life.’

‘Dennis.’ Lol was surprised how firm his own voice sounded. ‘Just tell him to leave me alone. Tell him not to come near me.’

Outside the window, there was white blossom on the apple trees. Why did white blossom depress him so much? Maybe the memory of white flowers on his mother’s coffin. His father turning his back on Lol at the graveside. On a luminously still May afternoon much like this one.

‘I won’t tell him that,’ Dennis said. ‘Not yet. Jesus Christ, it’s only an album, Lol. Just the one.’

‘Vicar!’

She turned impatiently at the vicarage gate. ‘Oh. Gomer. Oh dear, I’m sorry, I’m—’

‘You got some addresses for me, Vicar?’ He was wearing a dark suit and a black tie with what had to be a twenty-year-old knot.

‘Sorry?’

‘In Cheltenham. Figured I’d set off early, like.’

‘Oh. Of course. I’m really sorry, Gomer, things have been ... Would you mind if I were to call you with the stuff tonight? It’s just—’

‘Whenever you like, Vicar. The ole inquest’s over and done now.’

‘Oh.’ She’d have to ask. ‘How did it go?’

‘Death’ – Gomer snatched out his cigarette in disgust – ‘by misadventure.’

‘Accident, then. Councillor Powell must be pleased.’

‘Ah. Bloody ole whitewash, Vicar. Bull-Davies, he give evidence of how he couldn’t get no sense out of Edgar all night and how he was a bit worried about the ole feller havin’ charge of a shotgun and how he wishes he’d taken some action when he had the chance. Well, load of ole sheepshit, sure t’be, ‘scuse my language. But you puts a Bull-Davies in the witness box they all thinks it’s bloody gospel. Something botherin’ you, Vicar?’

‘Sorry, I was just looking out for Jane. So you think he really did kill himself deliberately?’

‘Ah ...’ Gomer rubbed at his glasses, as though this would clarify things. ‘Call me a cynic, but it was the way they was all tryin’ to convince the whats-his-name, the judge ...’

‘Coroner.’

‘Aye. The way they was all bangin’ on about Edgar not bein’ his ole self, acting confused-like all day, like. Doc Asprey – wouldn’t trust that young bugger to the end o’ the yard – he says Edgar had a bit o’ trouble comin in the arteries as could give ‘im funny turns. Well, see, I could understand Rod not wantin’ his ole feller buried the wrong side o’ the churchyard—’

‘We don’t actually do that any more, Gomer.’

‘I was speaking metaphysically, Vicar. It’s still the stigma, see. You don’t want a reputation as a suicide family. So you could understand Rod perjurin’ his bollocks off, but Bull-Davies ... Big guns, Vicar. Big guns. Course, the Bulls, they been relyin’ on the Powells for generations.’

‘You think Edgar wasn’t actually confused? I wasn’t really taking much notice.’

‘He weren’t confused in the Ox earlier on, is all I can say. And he weren’t drunk neither, though he’d had a few, all paid for by other folk as usual. Crafty ole bugger, Edgar Powell. I been thinkin’ a lot about this, see – got plenty bloody time to think nowadays, more’s the pity – and I reckon, whether he done isself by accident or deliberate, summat put the wind up Edgar that night. If you gets time to think back on it, Vicar, I’d be interested in your opinion. As an outsider like.’

‘I think I was just trying to keep warm at the time. But perhaps we could discuss it tomorrow over a cup of—’

‘I’m delayin’ you, Vicar.’ Gomer threw up his hands. ‘Gettin’ an ole woman, see. What bloody retirement does for you. Useless bastard of a thing retirement, ’scuse my language.’

It was only when she was halfway up the vicarage drive that Merrily realized Jane couldn’t possibly be inside. Because she hadn’t yet got a key.

She looked up in despair at the beautiful, old, oak-framed pile, the oldest three-storey house in Ledwardine, and felt it repelling her. The highest, smallest windows seemed remote; even the trees didn’t reach them. The unwindowed oak door looked like the door of some old jail.

She didn’t go in. ‘Jane ...’ She hurried around the side of the house, under a wooden arch and on to the big, square lawn overhung with willow and birch. ‘Jane!’

She walked right round the house. The Volvo was still parked under the trees. She’d had it nicked four times in Liverpool, and she was always ridiculously grateful to see it. Why couldn’t they have stayed in cosy old Liverpool, where you only worried about your car getting nicked?

Jane’s CD case was still on the dash, with its photo of four men in a forest clearing watching a blurred girl-shape, and the words Hazey Jane. Merrily smiled. No wonder the kid was infatuated. Tears pricking.

‘Jane!’

Brushing at her eyes, she found her face was glazed with sweat. She ran back to the gate. No schoolkids left on the square now. Just two women with prams and toddlers. It was nearly five o’clock. Oh my God.

No. Stop. Think.

All right ... She wasn’t on the bus tonight, she probably didn’t catch it this morning. She’d made a point of leaving early. To take a stroll around the village. Well, OK. Merrily hadn’t questioned that; Jane was a curious kid, liked to get to know places. On the other hand, Ledwardine wasn’t a place that took that much getting to know, not when you’d already lived here for several weeks.

She’d arranged to meet someone? A boyfriend? Merrily thought of the overweight youth slurping his cider. Please not.

Cider.

Her mouth tightened. She strode across the square towards Cassidy’s Country Kitchen.

I’ll kill her.

Oh God, please let her be out with that little bitch on some unholy binge.

Lol walked out into the garden. White blossom. Spring. Always the most depressing time of year. All those long, empty summer days ahead. In winter, on your own, you could spend whole hours of dwindling daylight chopping logs to stay warm through the evenings.

Blossom all over the orchard. Even though it began at the bottom of his garden, Lol had hardly ever been in there. It was someone else’s property. It was also unwelcoming, overgrown and gloomy – nothing picturesque about neglected apple trees.

It was Alison who’d really liked this place. Alison who’d said how much she would love it here, watching Lol rebuild himself. Turned to him with that look of longing and then the coy smile, with eyes downcast that always worked for the late Princess of Wales. Turning Lol like the right key in a rusted lock.

Scattered with clusters of tiny flowers the orchard was no longer clawed and sinister. But still eerie, the old, gnarled fingers white-gloved.

He wondered if it would have made a difference if he’d been here with Alison at the wassailing on Twelfth Night. The truth was he hadn’t wanted to go, be among all those strangers. Partly why he’d agreed to go over to Oxford to work on the songs with the fading legend Gary Kennedy. (Lol felt safer with people who were fading.) Thinking Alison would go with him, but she’d said she was sure she had a cold coming on and it was better if she stayed here, kept warm.

There’d been no cold, but she’d kept warm. Perhaps she and Bull-Davies had come back to the cottage afterwards to shower away bits of the old man.

Old man Powell. This made it two suicides, if you included the hanged minister, Wil Williams. At least two. A place to stay out of, if you were that way inclined. He’d been amazed to find himself following Colette Cassidy into the heart of it last Saturday night. He hadn’t had time to think.

But he was thinking now. Thinking hard. Thinking, You have to do this. You have to keep fighting back.

Against Karl. Dennis behind him now – reluctantly, of course. Dennis was a nice guy. Karl Windling wasn’t. Karl wouldn’t give up. He’d come again to the cottage. And when Karl had finally exhausted his limited powers of persuasion, when he realized there was nothing else to be done, nothing to lose, nothing to gain, he would become destructive. His pride would demand it.

Lol walked on, becoming increasingly depressed. All this blossom, promising apples. The only harvest last year had been logs from dead and dying trees. Last winter, he and Alison had bought a trailer-load of apple logs from the Powells. On the wood-burner, with the doors open, it had perfumed the whole room. No logs like apple logs for perfume; if traditional Christmas cards were scented, this was how they’d smell.

Lol had wanted to make love with Alison on the rug beside the stove at Christmas, but it had never happened.

How she’d changed. How classy she looked in her dark-blue riding gear, very point-to-point. Classy, but not sexy. Too militaristic.

When he turned round, the cottage had vanished into a tangle of white-dusted trees. Soon, he’d reach the so-called Apple Tree Man, where he and Colette had found Jane. It would be today’s test to get that far on his own, to touch the Man’s scabby bark. And then he’d turn and go back.

Clouds had gathered and the sky was nearly white, with holes of wet sunlight and veins like cheese mould. The trees closer packed, their blossom exploding around him, like a flour bomb; whichever way he turned it was the same, and even though there was no breeze, the whiteness seemed to swirl. He felt disoriented, but he wouldn’t stop. A battle against himself. He moved on through the warm, windless snowstorm. When he looked up, the blossom and sky absorbed each other and floated down around him like a crinkling shroud; he didn’t like that, looked down at the ground.

Where he saw, God help him, the girl lying across the path. Apple blossom around her face, like lace.

17 Whiteout

‘OH, HI,’ COLETTE Cassidy said without enthusiasm. ‘You want to talk to my father?’

Merrily’s heart plunged. The girl shouldn’t be here. She should be somewhere – anywhere – forbidden. With Jane Watkins.

‘Because he’s out,’ Colette said.

She had a luscious, sulky mouth, which seemed to be all there was under heavy, mid-brown hair. She had in abundance what you could only call Attitude. Merrily saw in Colette a lot of things she’d never seen in Jane. Yet.

The girl leaned inside the doorway of Cassidy’s Country Kitchen, arms folded, long denim legs straight. It was a wide doorway, built into what had evidently been the bay of a barn. Colette hardly barred the way, but there was a certain type of customer her presence would deter. And probably another type it would attract.

‘Colette, where’s Jane?’

Colette shrugged. ‘I should know?’

‘I hoped you would, yeah.’

‘Well, I don’t,’ Colette said. ‘Sorry.’

Through the flower transfers on the high, glass doors, Merrily saw Caroline Cassidy scurrying across the delicatessen. Caroline spotted her and changed direction.

‘You’re sure?’ Merrily said.

‘I wouldn’t lie to you, Vicar,’ Colette gave her a Nutra-sweet smile as Caroline came out. Tipping a glance at her mother that said, At least, not like I lie to her.

‘Merrily!’ Caroline wore a kind of milkmaid dress with gingham sleeves; only true townies dressed like this. ‘We’ve been dying for you to come ...’

‘Hello, Caroline.’

‘... but I said to Terrence, for God’s sake don’t pressure the girl, she’s far too much on her plate to worry about our little festival.’

Throwing her all into a smile of sympathy and true compassion. Right now, it almost helped.

‘I was just asking your daughter if she’d seen Jane.’

Caroline’s face hardened. ‘Colette?’

‘No, I haven’t.’ Colette levered herself upright. ‘I really haven’t, OK? I mean, like, what is this, for Christ’s sake? Just because we went out once and got a tiny bit pissed, everybody thinks we’re on some kind of permanent pub crawl. I saw Jane for a few minutes last night and I haven’t seen her since, OK?’

‘Colette, two coffees. Go.’ Caroline pushed her daughter through the doors, turned back to Merrily. ‘Is there a problem here? When did you last see her?’

‘This morning. When she left for school.’

‘Oh, yes, she goes to that ... comprehensive. Isn’t there a special bus?’

‘She wasn’t on it.’

Caroline shook her head with a jingle of earrings. ‘Teenage girls are so utterly thoughtless. She’s probably stayed behind to play tennis or something.’

‘You think so?’ For a moment, Merrily clutched at it. Caroline Cassidy was perhaps twelve years older, she had a very difficult daughter; this must have taught her something. She took Merrily by an arm.

‘Come and have that coffee. You’ve been very lucky with Jane if this is the first time she’s done this to you. Look, why don’t you ring the school from here? There’s always someone around these places for hours.’

‘No, it ...’ It came down on Merrily that, according to the cider-swigging youth, Jane hadn’t even taken the bus this morning. How long, she wondered despairingly, were you supposed to wait before you called the police?

Caroline Cassidy propelled her inside, sat her at one of three empty tables in the deli, went back to the door and turned over the laminated closed sign.

‘You know, teenagers, much more than children, have a problem moving to a new place.’

‘She’s done it several times,’ Merrily said. ‘OK, she was unhappy about it at first, but lately she’s been fine. More or less.’

‘Is there anyone she knows, locally, apart from Colette?’

‘Nobody ...’ She thought of this man, Lol. She’d been remiss; she ought to have checked him out. ‘Nobody special. Look, I’m sorry, I’m probably worrying about nothing, but didn’t a girl go missing from Kingsland or somewhere a few months ago: Petra ...?’

‘Good, I think. Petra Good. But that was back in the winter. Look, Merrily—’

‘And they haven’t found her, have they?’

‘My dear, you won’t find many parts of the country where there isn’t a girl missing. That doesn’t mean— Colette, isn’t that coffee ready yet?’

Merrily said, ‘Do you know Lol Robinson?’

Caroline sniffed. ‘Works for her, sometimes. Miss Devenish. Odd little man. Alison Kinnersley, James Bull-Davies’s ... partner ... she used to live with Robinson. They bought the Timlins’ cottage in Blackberry Lane – old couple, he died, she went into a home. Hadn’t been there more than a few months and Alison’d taken up with James. One suspects there could be a drug problem.’

‘What?’ Merrily’s fingers tightened on the seat of the rustic, wooden chair.

Caroline’s look was penetrating. ‘Jane knows him?’

‘She had one of his records, that’s all.’

‘Aw, look ...’ Colette dumped two coffees, with cartons of cream. ‘He’s harmless. He’s just screwed up is all’

Her mother looked up sharply.

‘Look,’ Colette said, ‘we’ve all been round there. At first, you think like, wow, a rock musician, and you’re expecting him to have his own studio and cool people around, but he’s like ... like he could be a bank clerk or something. One old guitar. Anyway, he’s all messed up over Alison. He won’t stay around here. Or, if he does, he’ll like OD or something.’

‘I have to go.’

Merrily stood up. She was thinking of that album. The track called ‘Song for Nick’. Jane asking her, as they lay in their sleeping bags, You ever know anybody who committed suicide?

‘You’ve been very kind. But what if she’s come back to the vicarage or the inn? I’m sorry—’

‘Drink your coffee, Merrily, please. Colette, go to the vicarage, go to the Black Swan, ask around and be discreet.’

Colette went without a word and Caroline gently pressed Merrily back into her chair, sat down opposite her.

‘I can assure you she’ll leave no stone unturned. My daughter is being ultra cooperative – at least until after the party.’

‘Sorry. Party?’

‘Didn’t Jane tell you? She’s certainly invited.’

‘Well, I—’ There was obviously a whole lot Jane hadn’t told her. Merrily drank some coffee, although she was starting to feel sick. ‘She probably mentioned it and I forgot. Things have been ... you know.’

Caroline slid a hand over Merrily’s, squeezed it. ‘You’re taking on too much. You really ought to let us help. Alfred delegated. He’d learned, you see. No, the party ... Oh dear, it’s her sixteenth. People say we must be absolutely mad to let her have it in the restaurant. But what I say is, better our own premises here in the village than some awful disco-club in Hereford. We’ve promised to go out, but Barry will be in charge. Our restaurant manager. Barry’s awfully capable.’

Merrily was only half-listening. She was thinking of suicide. Mass suicides of once-rational people, like the Heaven’s Gate thing. Suicide was contagious. God, you really thought you knew your own child. You thought your generation was going to be different. There was going to be nothing you wouldn’t be able to talk about, that you couldn’t iron out between you. But every generation, there was something new growing in their heads, something terrifying.

‘Terrence has gone to see Richard Coffey,’ Caroline said brightly ‘They were hoping to catch up with you over the weekend. Richard’s got some friends down from London, a theatre director whose name I ought to know but I’ve forgotten. They were hoping to put their proposals to you ... for the church?’

Maybe it was the Church. God. God had come between them, made Merrily into a remote figure. Or even an embarrassment. The way Jane looked at her when she went to pray. She’d thought that was just going to be a phase.

Caroline said, ‘They want to show you they can present Wil in a way that would cause absolutely minimal disruption to normal services and things. Hasn’t Richard been to see you yet? With his friend? One has to say he totes that young man around like a trophy wife.’

‘I ... I’ve been putting people off. Until we got settled into the vicarage. Well, not settled, exactly, that could take years. But, you know, in. Oh my God, we’re supposed to be moving tomorrow.’

‘We’ll help. Of course we will. Everything will be absolutely fine, you’ll see.’ Caroline paused, eyes narrowing. ‘We, er, we heard James came to see you.’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know what’s got into that man. He was always so enthusiastic about developing the village economy and restoring a degree of self-sufficiency. Suddenly, he’s become a positive millstone, and Terrence is terribly scared that Richard will simply turn his back on us and the whole festival will be a disaster. It’s all so worrying.’

‘You seem to be ... treading on old corns.’ Merrily drank some more coffee; most of her mind was out on the square with Colette.

Caroline scowled. ‘That illustrates precisely what we have to overcome if we’re going to get this place buzzing. The past is over. It can’t harm us. But we can use it. Do you see? We’re lucky enough to have these wonderful old buildings, set in such beautiful countryside, and an absolute wealth of traditions. But, Lord, we mustn’t let them hold us back.’

Merrily suspected Caroline Cassidy had just said something deeply flawed, but her anxiety wouldn’t let her concentrate.

There was a tapping on the glass.

‘We’re closed!’ Caroline called out. Then she said, ‘Oh, no.’ Pushed her coffee cup aside. ‘Bloody woman. Now she really does make you think you’re trapped in some ghastly timewarp.’

Caroline opened one of the double glass doors.

‘Is that the vicar I see with you, Mrs Cassidy?’

Merrily stood up, heart thumping.

Miss Devenish was hatless. She wore a shapeless dress with a geranium pattern. Her hair was in two plaits which looked as strong as anchor chains. Her face was grave.

‘Ah. Mrs Watkins. Yes. Could I talk to you, please? In my shop?’

Lol was shivering in the dark. Hunched into a corner of the loft, hugging his knees; he felt like a priest in a priest’s hole. Hunted.

Filtered through a tiny, mossed-over skylight, the only light in here was green. It was unearthly, it made his fingers look like corpse fingers; he shuffled to squeeze himself into shadow.

Although his eyes were fixed on the green skylight, the pictures rolling in were all white. The warm blizzard of blossom in the orchard. The disorientation.

The whiteout. And the girl. Her features indistinct, a corpse under a pale catafalque of blossom.

Oh God, the girl.

The mews was deserted. The shops had closed, the afternoon clouded over. Lucy Devenish didn’t speak until the double doors were between them and the face of Caroline Cassidy, puckered with resentment.

‘Appalling woman. Never tell her anything you don’t want the entire county to know.’

Merrily said, ‘Lucy, unless this is really important, could we perhaps talk tomorrow? I’m honestly not thinking too well at the moment.’

But it clearly was important. ‘Come to the shop.’ Lucy Devenish took her arm and led her into the mews. ‘Please.’

From even a few yards away, Ledwardine Lore looked like an old-fashioned fruit shop. Then you saw that none of the apples in the window were real and small butterfly creatures were all over them. Merrily experienced a momentary illusion of being outside herself, as though nothing at all here was real, as though this was an enchanted village in a child’s dream. It was a moment of strange relief.

‘Come in, Merrily.’

The door was unlocked, but the shop had closed, the lights were out. It was dim inside. The smell of apples was overwhelming.

‘Hello, Mum,’ Jane said softly.

Lucy Devenish didn’t put on the lights. As though she didn’t want Merrily to see Jane too clearly.

The kid was on a stool up against the counter. Her features were indistinct. There was a couple of yards between them, so Merrily couldn’t tell whether she was smiling or serious. All around her, things shaped like apples. Mugs, candles, ornaments. Pot fruit, wax fruit, fluffy fruits.

Breath bolted into Merrily. Her anxiety swelled for an instant and then burst, like a boil. Relief, but a discoloured relief.

‘Oh Jesus,’ she croaked finally. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

Jane said nothing. Merrily saw that she was holding an apple-shaped mug, faintly steaming, between her hands, as if for warmth.

Lucy Devenish shut the door.

‘She’s been with me,’ she said.

Merrily turned on her angrily. ‘For how long?’

‘Oh,’ Lucy said. ‘All ... all day.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Her vision adjusting to the dimness, she saw that Jane still wore her school uniform, even the blazer, even the tie. ‘She should have been at school, for heaven’s sake. What’s going on? What’s happened to her?’

‘It was me,’ Lucy said quickly. ‘I went for my early-morning walk and I’m afraid I collapsed. In Blackberry Lane. Stupid of me, I thought the fresh air would make me feel better.’

She had her back to the door, her face almost entirely in shadow.

‘It’s ... it’s a blood pressure problem. One forgets one’s age. All I can say is thank God for Jane. I was lying in the hedge when she found me. Somehow, she got me home. And then she made me some tea. And she insisted on staying with me. I kept telling her to leave, but she wouldn’t. Of course, she missed the bus.’

Jane didn’t move, her hands still clasping the steaming orb of the apple mug.

‘I wanted to drive her to school, but she said I wasn’t fit to drive in my condition. A bossy child.’

‘You could have sent her to find me,’ Merrily said cautiously. ‘I could’ve taken her.’

‘Oh. Well. If I’m being truthful – I’m sorry, Jane – that was why she didn’t want to find you. Because she said you would only have insisted on taking her to school and she told me she didn’t want to have to explain to everybody.’

Merrily sighed. ‘I’ve been worried sick. When she didn’t get off the school bus ...’

‘She’s been helping me in the shop. We rather lost track of time. I’m so sorry, Merrily.’

‘I just wish somebody had told me. How are you feeling now, Miss Devenish?’

‘Much better, thank you.’

‘Have you seen the doctor?’

‘That twerp Asprey? No, thank you. And indeed, Merrily, I’d be very grateful if you wouldn’t mention this to anybody. Tell the Cassidy woman to mind her own damn business.’

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

‘Your daughter’s done everything. Take her home.’

Caroline Cassidy’s gossip-greedy gaze alighted on them as soon as they emerged into the mews.

‘Oh, Merrily, I’m so glad!’

Perhaps she noticed Jane’s vacant eyes, because she backed off a little, with a meaningful glance towards the door of Ledwardine Lore.

‘She, er, she was helping Miss Devenish,’ Merrily said.

‘All day?’

‘No, that was ... a mistake on my part. I got a little confused. Everything got kind of criss-crossed. I’m sorry to have caused such a fuss.’

Caroline’s tilted smile showed she believed not a word, and who could blame her.

Jane was silent. Crossing the market place. Merrily kept glancing at her, sure she was a little pale. In curious contrast, as it happened, to Miss Lucy Devenish, who’d looked as ripe and ruddy as one of the apples in her damned shop window. Blood-pressure – balls.

They crossed the square to the church and the vicarage shoulder to shoulder, but there was distance between them.

Into the silence came a long, low rumble from the church. Merrily could see through the lych-gate that the porch doors were wide open, like amplifying hands. The sound was like the rising drone of an enormous vacuum cleaner.

‘Again!’ sang a man’s voice. ‘Come on, again! Fill those lungs!’

Dermot Child, rehearsing his choral work, the male voices like mud in the bottom of a deep pond.

Aulllllllld ciderrrrrrrrr.

Jane didn’t look up, but Merrily thought she saw the kid shiver.

Lol came down from the loft. He stumbled.

‘This is a nightmare, Lucy.’

‘Perhaps.’ Lucy’s face was gaunt in the gloom. ‘If her mother doesn’t start to realize a few things soon, I’m going to have to talk to the child in greater depth.’

All the apple colours and the translucence in the wings of the fairies had dulled like a stained-glass window at night. The shop seemed heavy around Lucy. It seemed to be not so much a diversion for her as a symbol of responsibility. For the first time it occurred to him that she was probably quite an old woman.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘She was just lying there. She was all white. At first, I thought she was dead. When she moved, it ... I just wanted to run away from it. But I couldn’t. You know? I couldn’t move. What was she doing there, Lucy? Again.’

‘Laurence,’ Lucy said, ‘you’re living on your own, too near the orchard. At the wrong time. If you have a weakness, some things will play to that weakness. When you’re prepared to tell me what the weakness is, we can take it from there.’

‘I’m all weakness,’ Lol said.

‘You’re not helping yourself.’ Lucy’s face darkened. ‘I can’t help you if I don’t know the root of the problem.’

‘Can I think about this?’

‘It seems to me,’ Lucy said severely, ‘that you’ve already been thinking about it rather too long.’

18 The Little Green Orchard

IT WAS, MERRILY thought in dismay, like still living in a hotel. One without any guests or staff. A hotel in winter.

‘Sure this is the lot, Vicar?’ Gomer Parry had asked her, about three times.

‘I’m afraid it is.’

This is awful, she was still thinking, after two days of moving things around. She’d forgotten quite how much furniture she’d sold or given away over the past three years. What it meant was that they had about enough for a decent-sized flat with one living room and a couple of bedrooms.

Gomer Parry had done it in one trip. Bloody sight easier, he said, than when he and Minnie moved in from the Radnor Valley, with all Minnie’s clutter from nearly forty years of marriage to the late Frank. Gomer and his nephew, Nev, took no more than half an hour to get all the stuff in. But, until such time as the property market improved to a point where the Diocese could make a killing on Ledwardine Vicarage, Merrily was stuck with it.

Behind the door, she’d found a letter from the North Herefordshire Gay and Lesbian Collective expressing support for Richard Coffey’s ‘brave reappraisal of an historic injustice’ and urging her to ‘do the right thing’. She filed it for a future non-committal reply and returned to practical problems.

So. OK. There were two ways they could handle this situation. They could scatter the bits and pieces around, so that the whole place had the air of somewhere partly moved-into. Or they could furnish a couple of rooms reasonably well, which made it seem as though you were the live-in caretakers in some kind of hostel.

‘I’m told there’s a couple of reasonable secondhand shops in Hereford. If we spent say two hundred pounds fairly wisely, we might make a bit of a difference.’

‘Yeah,’ Jane said. ‘Whatever.’

It didn’t help that the kid was still into the idea of this third-floor flat arrangement. More into it than ever, in fact. She’d charmed Gomer and Nev into taking her bed to the top floor, into one of the smaller bedrooms, while the biggest one up there, which she insisted on keeping locked until she’d finished painting the walls, had her stereo, her albums, her books.

Merrily felt guilty as well as intimidated. Acres – literally, probably – of wasted space.

‘But, my dear, virtually all country vicarages are like this,’ Caroline Cassidy said, when she and Terrence arrived to assist. ‘That’s why so many vicars end up having enormous families. Of course, you’ll marry again one day. Oh yes, you will!’

‘Perhaps I could offer a home to some refugees,’ Merrily had said, and Caroline had looked quite appalled. Almost as appalled as she’d been when she first saw their miserable collection of worthless furniture, making Merrily scared that they were going to be regarded as a charity case and all kinds of appalling junk would get dumped on them. ‘Actually,’ she’d lied, ‘there’s quite a bit more over in Cheltenham, but we wanted to do a bit of decorating first.’ Caroline had looked sceptical.

As, in fact, she had over the issue of Jane’s disappearance, which Merrily had tried to gloss over. Fairly sure she hadn’t mentioned to Caroline that the kid had failed to catch the bus in the morning, she’d said Jane had simply missed the one home and had to get a lift from a friend’s father.

All right then, flower, what really happened?

She never seemed to get a chance to ask the question – one for a long night in front of a log fire. But it was getting too close to summer for log fires and they never seemed to get a full night in together. Now people knew where to find the vicar, the doorbell and the phone rarely stopped.

Which was good. In a way. It was good to deal with day-to-day stuff: planning weddings and christenings, agonizing over whether to buy new prayer books. And putting off decisions on more contentious issues.

On Friday night, Richard Coffey invited her to dinner at the Black Swan. He had with him a man called Martin Creighton, a theatre director, and Creighton’s earnest girlfriend Mira Wickham, a set designer.

‘I happened to run into the bishop,’ Coffey said.

‘Oh.’ Merrily fingered her napkin. ‘I wondered if you might.’

‘He’s thrilled, of course, about our idea for staging Wil in the church. He’s very keen to encourage the wider use of ecclesiastical premises. For the church to be the centre of the community again.’

‘Well, me too, obviously, it’s just ... Well, I’d like to have some time to look into the Wil Williams story. I feel it’s important we get him right.’

‘Get him right?’ Coffey’s map-like face pulsed in the candlelight. Merrily blinked wearily; she was too tired for all this.

‘If you were doing it in a theatre, that would be one thing. But in the church where he ... preached ... I just think we all have a responsibility to get as close to the truth as we can.’

‘Ah, the truth. What an adaptable little word that is. The truth. A truth. The literal truth. A universal truth. Where do we begin?’

Martin Creighton laughed. Mira Wickham smiled.

‘I think we have to begin,’ Merrily said, ‘with whether Wil Williams really was a witch.’ She took a quick sip of wine. ‘And whether he really was gay.’

Coffey leaned back. He wore a black leather jacket and a white shirt and a sort of chamois-leather bow tie. He was not accompanied by Stefan Alder, his partner. There was no humour in his smile.

‘Mrs Watkins, if you were to substitute the word “heterosexual” – as in “whether he was heterosexual” – you would perhaps appreciate the degree of offence implicit in the line you’re taking.’

‘Oh, now, look, obviously I intended no offence at all. I have absolutely nothing against—’

‘Woofters? Queers?’ Tilting his head, playing with her.

‘All I’m saying, Mr Coffey’ – Merrily gripped her napkin – ‘is that if we’re talking about causing offence—’

‘I know what you’re saying. I gather you’ve already had a state visit from a certain descendant of the tyrannical Thomas Bull. Who thinks I’ve developed a grudge against his entire lineage because the bastard capitalized so ruthlessly on my friend Stefan’s desire to live in his lodge.’

‘Something like that,’ Merrily admitted.

‘All right, let me explain something to you. I’m an exhaustive researcher. I like to know every minute detail of the background against which I am working. Correct, Martin?’

‘Richard’s compulsion to know is legendary,’ Creighton said obsequiously.

‘I have read, therefore, everything extant on the Williams case. Which, I have to say, is not a tremendous amount. It’s very sparse. But perhaps my use of the word extant is a misuse. Available would be a better word. Because there are other documents in existence. Several sources, for instance, make mention of the Journal of Thomas Bull, parts of which have been published – the ones relating to the Civil War, for instance, and the Siege of Hereford. Bull’s interesting to historians because, although a supporter of the Crown, he was, in his private life, a puritan.’

Merrily thought of Bull’s effigy in the church, the rustic simplicity of his clothing.

‘Now. As Justice of the Peace, it was Bull’s job to initiate a prosecution of Williams, if he was convinced there was sufficient evidence. Do you know how this began, Mrs Watkins?’

‘You mean, the chap who saw him dancing with devilish sprites?’

‘No, no, before that; the poor man was accused by one John Rudge, a wealthy, independent farmer, of bringing down a blight on his orchard and destroying his crop of cider apples. Williams, it seems, had good reason to be opposed to the ready availability of cider, having been assaulted by a drunk who wandered into his church. Now ...’

Coffey angled forward, the tabletop candles reflected in his eyes.

‘... we know that, as a puritan – with, if you like, a small p – Thomas Bull also was very much opposed to drink and drunkenness and would not allow cider apples to be grown by any of his tenants. Therefore, he might have been expected, might he not, to take the side of Wil Williams in his crusade for sobriety?’

Merrily nodded slowly.

‘Instead of which,’ Coffey said, ‘Bull appears to have seized on the accusation with a kind of sorrowful glee. This suggests he was already harbouring a certain prejudice against Wil Williams?’

‘I suppose it might. But how will we ever know?’

‘Only’ – Coffey spread his hand delicately – ‘by obtaining access to the unpublished journals of Thomas Bull. Which our friend James Bull-Davies keeps, no doubt, in the deepest of bank vaults. So, the next time he tries to lean on you, Mrs Watkins, I suggest you invite him to resolve the issue by producing them.’

‘Do you have any proof that he’s got them?’

‘I’d be astonished if he hadn’t. And, given his recent, ah, cash-flow difficulty, do you not think he wouldn’t have attempted to sell the journals for publication? I’m not suggesting Tom Bull was any kind of rural Pepys. But his Civil War memoirs are surprisingly erudite. Be worth a good few thousand, I suspect. Certainly well worth putting on the market. Unless of course they contained material which, in the current climate, might be considered highly damaging to the family’s reputation.’

All this made a certain sense.

‘Oh dear,’ Merrily said. ‘It gets complicated, doesn’t it?’

‘So ...’ Coffey said, ‘would you object if Martin and Mira were to have a look at the church over the weekend?’

Of course they already would have done. He was just testing her.

‘Sure,’ Merrily said, resignedly. ‘Go ahead.’

The next day, Jane announced that she was to be manager of Ledwardine Lore for the afternoon. Lol Robinson, who usually conquered his shyness to take care of things while Lucy had a half-day off, had gone to a place near Oxford for a few days, to work on some new songs with Gary Kennedy, leaving Lucy to feed his cat, so ...

‘The Gary Kennedy?’

‘Oh, Mum, how unutterably sad. The Gary Kennedy!’

‘Listen, when I was your age—’

‘Yeah, yeah, he was huge. Personally, I find it unbelievable that someone like Lol should be reduced to writing lyrics for someone as tragically awful as Gary Kennedy but there you are.’

Merrily watched from the window as Jane crossed the square and entered the mews, to make sure she really was going to Ledwardine Lore. It was wrong to be so suspicious, but she couldn’t dispel the feeling that the kid and Lucy Devenish had come to some kind of arrangement.

When Jane had not emerged from the mews after five minutes, Merrily went into the hall, where Alf had left a few books of local interest on a shelf under the cupboard housing the electric meters. She pulled out a well-thumbed soft-covered book entitled The Black and White Villages of Herefordshire: A short history and carried it into the kitchen, where they’d temporarily placed two easy chairs and the TV, neither of them feeling quite up to the drawing room.

OK. Index. Williams, Wil. p 98.

Merrily pushed the chair on its castors to a spot side-on to the Aga and threw herself down. She wasn’t going to get much out of this, but it would be a start.

‘You’ve been avoiding me.’

Colette was standing right in the centre of the mews, so no chance of avoiding her this time. Short, red plastic windcheater with probably nothing underneath.

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘You fucking have, Janey. I get sent off to scour the village for the vicar’s precious child – and believe me the Reverend Mumsy was in a big, big fret – and the next thing I hear is you’ve turned up in Devenish’s den in like seriously mysterious circumstances.’

‘That’s bollocks. There was nothing mysterious at all, there—’

She stopped talking, spotting the slow-growing smile and knowing she’d blown it, because if there was genuinely nothing to hide then she’d have played along, pretending there was, wouldn’t she?

‘Oh, Janey, what are we getting into? I mean, are we like talking, erm ... we talking orchard?’

‘No way.’

‘See, like, there’s two possibles where that orchard’s concerned. One is that you’ve actually got a secret guy.’

‘Bitch,’ said Jane. ‘How did you find out?’

‘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.

Jane looked up. ‘She’d changed, of course. But you never say that.’

‘First rule of writing for children. Never lecture. Never let them think it’s a parable. Which of course’ – Lucy put down her duster – ‘you know it isn’t.’

‘Shame there aren’t books like that for adults.’

‘Adults,’ said Lucy, ‘can read Traherne.’

‘Oh,’ Jane said. ‘Right.’ Not a single customer had been in while she was reading; she wondered how Lucy kept this place going.

‘The story you’ve just read is, of course, an introduction to Traherne’s world. Traherne showed how higher consciousness is there for us all. I’ll give you some of his work to take home. Leave it lying about and hope your mother reads it. There’s so much she needs to know, if she’s going to surv— succeed here.’ Lucy snatched up her duster. ‘Now read the other one.’

In the little green orchard, there was an awesome hush.

In the little green orchard, it all became serious.

Rosemary again. A little older.

Her grandfather had died and she was spending the holidays with her grandmother, helping out on the farm, where it would soon be time to harvest the apples.

Rosemary had never been into the orchard before.

She was to discover that the orchard was the heart of everything.

19 The Nighthouse

LUCY SENT JANE to the village stores to buy a pound of apples. Any apples would do. Jane returned with three large Bramleys. The apples lay on the counter, the only living fruit in a shop devoted to artificial representations of it.

Lucy talked about apples. As the highest and purest and most magical of fruits. She talked of the golden apples of Greek myth. Of the mystical Avalon, the orchard where King Arthur had passed over. Of Eve.

And of the apple as the mystic heart of Herefordshire. The seventeenth-century diarist, John Evelyn, had written that ‘all Herefordshire has become, in a manner, but one entire orchard’, praising Lord Scudamore, who had improved and refined the cider apple, developing the famous Redstreak, from which the Ledwardine apple, the Pharisees Red, had been, in turn, created.

‘Why’s it called that?’ Jane asked.

Lucy smiled. When she did that, her cheeks seemed to take on the ruddier colours of the apples on the counter. She was wearing a long, green dress, her hair in this complicated bun. She must have really quite long hair, Jane realized. You could imagine her, in years gone by, striding the land with her hair blowing out parallel to the ground. Listening to the hills breathe. Believing everything was possible. Like some ancient, Celtic enchantress.

Jane was just blown away. Lucy was just, like, the coolest person she’d ever met.

‘Pay attention, Jane!’ Lucy snapped.

‘Sorry.’

‘Now.’ Lucy plucked a souvenir penknife from a rack. She selected an apple, laid it on a square of plain wrapping paper. ‘I’m going to cut it sideways. Have you ever done this before?’

Jane shook her head and Lucy pushed the point of the knife into the apple and sliced it in half.

‘There.’ She held out a half in the palm of each hand. ‘What do you see?’

Jane leaned over the counter. The green-white pulp was veined with thin green lines and dots which made a kind of wheel.

‘Count the spokes,’ Lucy said.

‘Five.’

‘It makes a five-pointed star, you see? Inside a circle. A pentagram.’

‘Oh, wow.’ Jane had read enough weird books involving pentagrams in her time.

‘Forget all this black magic nonsense. The pentagram’s a very ancient symbol of purification and of protection. And there’s one at the heart of every apple. That says something, doesn’t it?’

‘That’s like really amazing.’ She couldn’t stop looking at the little green veins. ‘Something really ordinary, like an apple.’

‘Nothing is ordinary! Read Traherne.’

‘I’m going to.’

‘Least of all the apple,’ Lucy said sternly. ‘Let no one talk of the humble apple to me.’

Jane looked around the shop and saw it with different eyes, like the storybook child, Rosemary, in the park. It was more than a little souvenir shop, it was a shrine. A temple. A temple to the apple.

‘You were going to tell me why it was called the Pharisees Red.’

‘No, I wasn’t,’ Lucy said.

‘All right, well, I asked you, didn’t I?’

‘That’s not the same thing.’

'Will you tell me? Like in the scribes and pharisees, all that stuff?’

‘Jane, you’re so ill-read.’ Lucy came out from behind the counter, pulled down a large, fat, soft-backed book. ‘Here, find out for yourself. Page forty-three.’

It was The Folklore of Herefordshire by Ella Mary Leather.

‘Published in 1912,’ Lucy said. ‘A formidable work of research and scholarship.’

On page forty-three, Jane found a sub-heading.

(5) Fairies

Although there are now but few persons living in

Herefordshire who believe in fairies, faith in their existence

must have been common enough with the folk of the last

generation. All the old people who can tell anything about

fairies do not call them fairies at all, but farises’; the word is

pronounced almost like Pharisees.

‘So you see, Jane, nothing too biblical about that.’

‘Oh, wow.’

‘Don’t keep saying that. It’s most annoying. Of course, people deny today that it’s anything to do with fairies, but people always deny fairies because the word itself has become such a term of ridicule.’

Jane looked at the matchstick-limbed, gossamer-winged things clinging to the rims of cups and plaques, perched on the tops of shelves, the edges of picture frames.

‘Nothing like those, Jane, I’m afraid. Those are the traditional forms that everybody knows, and if one is to create an impression of the spirit in nature, that’s the one people are normally prepared to accept, even as a joke. If one were to create an effigy of a real tree spirit, as they’re more often perceived by those able to, the customers would be disturbed and I’d have a reputation as something a good deal worse than a lunatic crone.’

‘Tree spirits?’

‘For want of a more credible term. Essences, whatever you want to call them. They are, in fact, more perceptible in and around fruit-bearing trees. The female trees. That’s why I was so outraged by all this nonsensical talk of the oldest tree in the orchard as the Apple Tree Man. Not a feminist thing, simply the way it is.’

‘But I still don’t understand why the apples were called Farises Red. Were they supposed to belong to the fairies?’

‘What you have,’ said Lucy, ‘is a belief in some supernatural intervention in the creation of this particular apple. It’s a not-so-rare blending of paganism, as we’re forced to call it, and Christianity. The church being, for much of its history, in the very centre of the orchard. Which came first, I wouldn’t like to say, though I suspect the orchard. Perhaps there was a pre-Christian shrine where the church now stands, we can’t say, we can but speculate.’

‘Oh, w—’ Jane swallowed. Waited. Lucy detached one of the tiny fairies from a shelf edge, held it up to the light.

‘Translucence, you see. That’s the essence of it. As fine as air. Spirits of the air. The spirits of the earth, goblins and things, are denser. The tree elves are brown and green. They’re the protective and motivating forces in nature. Some of them are of limited intelligence but, like us, they evolve. I find it impossible to explain the phenomenon of life without them.’

‘Mum might not be sympathetic’

Lucy thought for a moment, her lips becoming a tight bud.

After a while she said, ‘The great mystery of life can be approached in terms of pure physics – the electronic soup of atoms and particles. And also in religious terms. Terms, that’s all it is, Jane. Traherne never speaks of elves or devas, but he refers all the time to angels. Cherubim and seraphim and cupids who pass through the air bringing love. Traherne is full of coded references – we know of his interest in the ancient occult philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus, we know from the writings of John Aubrey that Traherne was psychic.

But in those days, as you know, one had to be extremely cautious.’

‘Or you ended up like Wil Williams?’

‘Precisely, Jane. Williams, we know, was Traherne’s protege as well as his neighbour. I think Wil was a little too incautious in his attempts to walk with the angels.’

Jane said, ‘Mum doesn’t have much to say about angels. Angels are not cool in today’s streetwise Church. I mean ...’

‘Angelic forces correspond to what are called devic presences. The devas are the prime movers, if you like, in the structure. A deva may control a whole area, a whole sphere of activity, or an ecosystem.’

‘Like an orchard?’ Jane said automatically.

Lucy positively purred with pleasure. ‘You’re making the leaps. You’re receiving help. The channel was opened – you know when.’

‘I thought it was just the cider.’

‘Oh, the cider’s very much a part of it. The cider’s the blood of the orchard. It’s in your blood now. I felt at once that it had to be one or both of you.’

‘Us?’

‘You and Merrily.’

‘She won’t want to know,’ Jane said.

Jane returned just before six. She said trade had not been exactly brisk, but a nice Brummie couple with a corgi had bought a set of four hand-painted apple-shaped cups and saucers for sixty-four pounds.

‘Thank heavens for people with no taste,’ Jane said.

Merrily noticed she had with her a copy of the Penguin edition of selected poems and prose by Thomas Traherne.

‘You bought that with your wages?’

‘Lucy gave it to me. I refused to take any wages. It’s fun playing shop.’

‘You going to actually read it?’

‘Of course I’m going to read it. Traherne’s cool’

‘Oh. Right. Should’ve realized. Why is he cool?’

‘Because he could see that we were surrounded by all this beauty, but we didn’t appreciate it, and we were quite likely to destroy it. Which was pretty prophetic thinking back in the mid-seventeenth century, when there was no industry and no insecticides and things.’

‘Fair enough,’ Merrily said.

‘And he said we should enjoy the world. Get a buzz out of it. Get high on nature. Like, God wanted us to be happy.’

‘Like have parties and things?’

‘You know,’ Jane said, ‘you kind of make me sick sometimes. You’re so smug.’

Merrily said nothing. Oh, dear. One of those moods.

And yet – thinking about it – she hadn’t been at all sullen or sulky of late. Just distant, more self-contained. As if there was something going on inside her. Which, of course, there would be at her age, all kinds of volatile chemicals sloshing about.

A boy?

Possibly. But why would she hide that? She’d never hidden it in the past. No, this was something to do with Miss Devenish. Twice Jane had disappeared, twice she’d turned up with Lucy Devenish.

But I rather like Lucy Devenish.

Merrily lit a cigarette. Should she go and talk to the old girl?

Jane went up to her apartment to work on her Mondrian walls. This apparently involved painting the irregular rectangles between the oak beams in blue, black, red and white. The Listed Buildings inspector would probably come out in the same colours if he ever saw it. Still, as even Merrily wasn’t allowed to see it ...

What the hell ... Sometimes kids should be allowed – even encouraged – to behave bizarrely. Merrily finished her cigarette then went to put some supper together.

When Jane came down to eat, she dropped the big one.

‘I’ll probably go to church tomorrow.’

‘Sorry?’ Merrily turned from the Aga, dropping a slice of hot focaccia in shock. ‘What did you just say?’

‘I think you heard.’

‘All right, flower,’ Merrily said calmly, ‘you go and lie down, I’ll call the doctor.’

‘Very funny.’

Jane walked over to the kitchen window. There was a sunset blush on the lawn. Merrily gazed out, a little bewildered, unsure how to handle this development. She’d made a point of never exerting any pressure to get the kid into a service. Admittedly, it would be politic for the minister’s daughter to be present at her mother’s official installation ceremony with the bishop next Friday, and to persuade Jane to come, she’d planned a small deal – after the service, she could go on to Colette Cassidy’s birthday party, no restrictions.

It looked as if no deal would be needed. Who was the influence? Thomas Traherne? Miss Devenish, more like. She should be delighted, but somehow she felt rather offended.

She took in a big breath. ‘Jane.’

‘Huh?’

‘What happened the day you didn’t go to school?’

Jane looked at her, almost through her. The dark blue eyes were completely blank. She’d seen eyes like that on kids a year or two older than Jane, up in Liverpool; they were usually on drugs.

Merrily tried not to panic. ‘Tell me what happened, Jane.’

‘She told you,’ Jane said almost wildly. ‘Lucy told you.’

‘I want to hear it from you.’

‘You don’t believe me.’

‘You haven’t told me anything not to believe.’

A shadow seemed to pass between them. She remembered how, as a small child, Jane would conceal small things – an old tennis ball, once, that she’d found in the garden – for fear they would be taken away from her if her mother found out. At the age of ten, she’d got hold of a thick paperback by Jilly Cooper, hiding it under a panel in the floor of her wardrobe like it was real hard porn.

‘You’re all the same.’ The kid’s face suddenly crumpled like a tissue. ‘You think you know everything.’

‘What ...’ Merrily moved towards her. ‘What’s wrong, flower?’

‘You ...’ Jane backed away, something inflamed about her eyes. ‘You stand up there in your pulpit, Mrs sodding Holier-than-thou, and you drivel on about the Virgin Birth and the Holy bloody Ghost, the same stuff, over and over and over again, and—’

‘Jane? What’s all this about?’

‘What’s the fucking use? I don’t think I’ll bother with any supper. I’ll just go to bed.’

‘You’re not making a word of sense, do you know that? What’s brought this on? Can we talk about it?’

Jane just stamped past her, gripping the copy of Traherne.

It must be ... what? Three a.m.?

The alarm clock ticking, very loud in the big bedroom with hardly any furniture. The clock – an old-fashioned one with twin bells, none of your cell-battery bleepers in this house – set for five-thirty because there was Holy Communion at eight. Only about half a dozen people last week, mainly pensioners, including Uncle Ted out of familial loyalty.

She thought about Jane, then, and her mind flooded with anxiety. Once again, the kid had a secret she was afraid might be taken away from her. This time it would not be so innocuous.

She drifted away again, with the ticking of the alarm clock. A night breeze ruffled the trees. And the sounds overhead. Footsteps. Very soft. Bare feet, slithering.

Merrily was icily awake.

The room – one pine wardrobe, one small table, one bed – was grey-washed by the moon behind clouds like smoke. She lifted up an arm, and that also was grey, as though her skin was transparent and her body was filled with moon gases which made it very light, and so she didn’t even remember getting out of bed and moving to the door. I’m dreaming, she told herself. This is a dream. But she didn’t wake up.

Outside were the doors, concealing mournful, derelict rooms that would never be filled. Rooms where even the memories were stale. She was alone on the first floor of Ledwardine Vicarage. A bathroom, a toilet and four bedrooms, only one slept in. She was alone on this level, while Jane paced overhead, angrily painting her walls by night. Was this part of her secret? Was the secret simply that she had to have secrets, a private life?

Merrily shivered; it would soon be summer and the night-house was November-cold.

The nighthouse. A different place, a colder place.

The noises overhead had stopped. Well, all right, if Jane wanted to paint in the night, that was up to her. It was the weekend; she could keep her own hours in her own apartment. Merrily, on the other hand, needed her sleep if she was going to be up and bathed and breakfasted in time for Holy Communion.

She found herself standing by the stairs, a hand on the oak rail, a foot on the first step to the third storey. She looked up quickly and thought she saw a light glowing, and then she turned away, took a step back. It was Jane’s storey, Jane’s apartment, none of her business. But in the moment she turned away, she felt an aching sense of impending loss.

She would go back to bed, try for two more hours’ sleep. She turned to her door and realized she didn’t know which it was.

She trembled, hugged herself, arms bubbled with goose-bumps. Doors. Moonlight turning their brass knobs into silver balls. She lunged at the nearest, grabbed it, turned it. Stumbled in with her eyes closed, slammed the door behind her. In dreams, you could make as much noise as you liked. When I open my eyes, I’ll awaken in my own bed. It will be nearly morning.

Cold moonlight soaked an empty room, a room she hardly recognized, been inside it no more than a couple of times. A long, narrow room, uncarpeted, its floorboards black and bumpy and ending in a long and leaded window, unseasonally running with condensation.

A figure stood by the window, its back to her.

‘Jane? What are you doing down here?’

There was a vibration in the room, running like a mouse along the floorboard from the window to where she stood; she could feel it through the soles of her bare feet, and it ran up the backs of her legs, under her nightdress to her spine.

It wasn’t Jane.

She backed up to the door, her fingers feeling behind her for the knob and gripping it and turning it. The brass knob turned and turned again, but the door did not open.

Merrily turned it harder and faster, in a panic now. The figure at the window began to shift, and she saw the head in profile and the face was a man’s.

The knob loosened, began to spin in the lock until it just came out in her hand in the very instant that the figure turned from the window to face her, and it needed no moon, it carried its own pale light.

‘Oh, please,’ Merrily whispered. ‘Please, not here.’

Sean glided towards her. He could not speak for the blood in his mouth.

Jane didn’t make it to church after all. There was no explanation. After the morning service, two parishioners commented on there being only two hymns, and Uncle Ted had told Merrily she wasn’t looking at all well. It must have been a wearing few weeks, getting used to everything and now moving into a new house. She ought to think about having a few days away. Perhaps after her installation service, when she felt more secure, more bound to the parish.

Merrily asked, in a steady voice, if her predecessor, Alf Hayden, would be at the service. There were some things she wanted to ask him. About the vicarage.

‘Ah, yes,’ Ted said. ‘Alf.’

No, he said, Alf would not be coming, as he was rather unwilling to embarrass his successor at this difficult time.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘This is difficult,’ Ted said. ‘Alf’s received a letter signed by a number of parishioners urging him to use his influence to keep Richard Coffey’s play out of the village.’

She was dismayed. ‘Why’ve they written to him?’

Ted cleared his throat, embarrassed. ‘Well, they, ah ... because they don’t feel they know you well enough yet to approach you on such a ... contentious issue.’

‘And because they think that as a trendy woman priest, I’m bound to support it! Is that right? Which of my parishioners are we talking about here, Ted?’

‘It’s causing considerable anxiety in certain areas,’ Ted said. ‘It’s only a few people, of course.’

‘But influential people, right? I suppose they know the bishop’s supporting Coffey?’

‘I shall attempt to acquaint the bishop with the way local opinion seems to be moving,’ Ted said, ‘during a dinner party to which I understand we are both invited.’

Merrily was beginning to be aware of the levels of local society she was unlikely to penetrate. Even if she wanted to. She found she was shaking with anger. It was marginally more acceptable than fear.

When she got home, Jane wasn’t there. This was no surprise.

She searched her conscience, as a parent. Then, as a parent, she walked up two flights to Jane’s apartment. Stood outside the doors on the third floor.

Went into Jane’s bedroom, where she found the bed neatly made and clothes neatly on hangers in the wardrobe. The copy of the collected poems of Thomas Traherne was on the floor beside the bed, opened spine-up. She turned it over. It was open to a poem entitled ‘The Vision’, which began,

Flight is but the preparative: the sight

Is deep and infinite.

She put the book down where she’d found it, went out and closed the door. The next door was to the so-called sitting-room/study, where Jane had been painting the Mondrian walls.

It was locked. She turned away, not entirely surprised, and went down the stairs to the first floor. A weak sun sent halfhearted beams through the landing window and through the oak balusters.

Merrily went into her own room to change into a skirt and jumper. The thought struck her that Jane, on the third floor, had risen above her. As if the third floor represented something Merrily couldn’t reach. She was on the halfway floor with her anxieties and trepidations, her earthly ties, her clinging past, her sick dreams of Sean.

She came out of the bedroom and, instead of going directly to the stairs, turned left, trying to remember which had been the door in her dream. The passage didn’t look the same at all. She opened a door at random, into a square, bare room with two small, irregular windows. Would they ever be familiar, these rooms? She tried another. The bathroom, of course. God, this was so stupid. You couldn’t control your dreams, but you must never give into them, let yourself be ruled by a runaway subconscious. Angrily, almost absently, she threw open another door.

Found herself in a long, narrow room with black bumpy floorboards and a long, leaded window.

It all came back at her then. The vague, sun-stroked morning was kicked aside by jagged memories of the night. She couldn’t stand it. With a tiny cry, she sprang back out of the room, pulling the door behind her.

As it slammed shut, she heard the handle fall out on the other side.

20 Hysterical Women

MUCH OF THE time, over the next week, Jane was fine.

She’d do nice things, like get up early, have Merrily’s breakfast made. Bring her a mug of tea when she was working on the admin stuff or her piece for the parish mag. Be pleasant to the parishioners and church wardens. Be sympathetic when Merrily got letters like,

Dear Mrs Watkins,

As you may have noticed, my wife is an excellent singer who used to perform regularly at concerts. Sadly, the village concert as we used to know it is no longer a part of community life and as church is her only opportunity to exercise her undoubted vocal talents in public, both my wife and I have been dismayed by the recent unexplained reduction in the number of hymns at our Sunday services. I trust this is only a temporary aberration and that we can expect a return to the three or four hymns we were used to during the ministry of the Reverend Hayden ...

‘Don’t back down,’ Jane said, efficiently clearing away the breakfast things. ‘From what I’ve heard, old Hayden only had lots of hymns so there’d be less for him to do. His sermons were notoriously crap, apparently.’

‘And who’ve you heard that from, flower?’

‘Oh, you know ... people.’

‘Miss Devenish?’

‘People.’

‘I see. Jane, what do you think of modern hymns?’

‘They’re still hymns, aren’t they? People don’t actually think about them. It’s like being at primary school. Like that alternative prayer book. It’s not really alternative at all, is it? You might as well stick to the old one, it’s more ...’

‘Resonant?’

‘Yeah. How far have you got with that idea for getting the punters to talk back?’

‘I’m kind of working up to it. I don’t know. Maybe I’d just be doing an Alf Hayden because I’m insecure about preaching and can’t accept that my views can be more significant than theirs.’

‘But you’re the middleman, Mum. God speaks through you.’

‘You don’t have to be sarcastic’

‘I’m not sure I was,’ Jane said.

Merrily had not told her about the six letters she’d received, four of them anonymous, urging her to not on any account allow the church to be used for the performance of a play variously described as ‘blasphemous’, ‘satanic’, ‘obscene’ and, most amusingly, ‘typical of a man who writes plays for Channel Four’.

On Wednesday, her mother phoned from Cheltenham to say she’d developed flu and seemed unlikely to make it to this induction service or whatever it was called.

Oh, sure. Nothing to do with her finding the idea of Merrily being a priest a little embarrassing. I just don’t understand. We’ve never had one of those in the family before. I mean, you never showed any interest in religion as a child.

She’d never been able to talk in any kind of depth to her mother, and she never saw her father, who’d moved to Canada after the divorce. Oh yes, had a few of those in the family, haven’t we, Mummy?

‘I gather Ted will be involved in this installation business,’ her mother said. ‘I suppose he’ll look after you.’

Service for the licensing and installation of

THE REVEREND MERRILY WATKINS

as Priest-in-Charge of the parish of Ledwardine.

7.30 p.m.

ALL WELCOME.

‘Expect a full house,’ Ted said when he turned up with the printed leaflets. ‘We haven’t had one of these for over thirty years ... and a woman, too. You’ll enjoy it. You’ll sparkle, I know you will.’

Merrily rubbed tired eyes. ‘How about if I just smoulder?’

Ted smiled. ‘By the way, was it something important you wanted to ask Alf? Because the old bugger won’t be coming. He’s in the Algarve. Timeshare villa.’

‘Easier to maintain than this place.’ Merrily noticed that the kitchen’s smallest window had been reduced, by a rampant Russian vine, to the size of one of those arrow-slits you found in castles.

‘Ah,’ Ted said. ‘It’s this house, isn’t it? You really shouldn’t have to tire yourself out trying to make the place habitable.’ He paused. ‘Look, I’ve been making a few enquiries. If you can hang on for a year, I think we’ll be able to find you something more manageable. Plans’ve gone in for a small development down by the Hereford road. Executive housing, aimed at the kind of people who’d eat at Cassidy’s, so he won’t be objecting, for once.’

Merrily said carefully, ‘Was Alf Hayden glad to get away?’

‘He was glad to retire. Even more time for golf and fishing. I don’t know about get away from the village.’

‘I meant from this house.’

‘Well, it was different for him, as I say, with that big family. He always seemed fond of this pile, even if he didn’t take care of it’

‘He actually found it a good ... atmosphere?’

‘Atmosphere?’ The lawyer’s eyes narrowing in the florid farmer’s face.

Drop it, Merrily thought. Let it go.

‘Sorry.’ She carried his cup and saucer to the sink. ‘It’s just a bit dreary, that’s all.’

‘You’ll brighten it up. And Jane. How’s her apartment coming along?’

‘I don’t really know. She’s keeping it under wraps.’

Jane had bought her own paints and brushes to do her Mondrian thing. Coming out once to meet Merrily halfway up the second stairs, arms spread wide. ‘No – stay out. You’ll only say I’m making a mess.’ Knowing her mum was far too honourable to sneak up there while she was at school.

Separate lives. My God, Merrily thought, we’re starting to lead separate lives, meeting at mealtimes like hotel guests.

On Thursday night, the night before the installation service, she was awoken by a sound from above.

A single, tentative footstep. As though someone was testing the floor, to be sure the boards were firm between the joists. Like one of those ball-bearings in a gaming machine, the sound must have been rolling around her head for an inordinately long time.

Wake up. Come on. Don’t rise to this. Wake up now.

Because she wasn’t really awake at all, was she? Every time something like this happened, she dreamed she was waking up and she got out of bed ... and there were always more doors than there really were in that passage. Doors which should never be opened. Doors to the past. The image of Sean formed again behind her eyes. Sean turning from the window, eyes full of blood, hands feeling the air like the hands of someone newly blind. Merrily remembered shrinking back against the door, knowing that if his hands had found her, he wouldn’t let go and he would always be in that room. She couldn’t remember getting out of there, only awakening, in this bed, in her terror, to the morning.

Merrily opened one eye, with some difficulty. It had been a sticky, sucking sleep, like treacle. She pulled her head from the pillow, looking for the window. A strange, terracotta moon hung low and sultry between the trees. She sat up, blinking. Pushed her hands through her hair. It was damp with sweat. Her nightdress was pasted to her skin. There was a tightness around her chest.

Another footfall. And then another, closer. And then a flurry of them before two final, emphatic steps, like someone taking up a position directly over her bed.

And then silence. What the hell’s she doing up there?

‘No. I slept really well, thank you. Didn’t get up once.’ Wrapped in her yellow towelling robe, Jane spread sunflower marge on crispbread. ‘I don’t get up in the night unless I’m ill, you know that. What time was this?’

‘I don’t know.’ Merrily carried bread to the toaster; she didn’t want any toast, just a night’s sleep. ‘After midnight, before dawn.’

‘Oh, Mum, do you remember me ever getting up in the night?’

‘Well yes, as a matter of fact, the first night we spent here you got up to go to the loo.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Jane, I’m trying to be patient. You did.’

‘No, I said I wanted to go when I first got into the sleeping bag, and you said forget about it, it’ll go away and so I did and it did.’

‘You got up in the night, flower,’ Merrily said through her teeth. ‘You wanted me to go with you. You were tugging on my hand.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Jane threw down the butter knife. ‘Where do you get this crap from? You were dreaming, for God’s sake! All right. Look. I should’ve told you. I was throwing this wild party last night. Yeah, we had this all-night binge with masses of booze and hard drugs. I’d’ve invited you, but I knew you wanted a good night’s sleep before your initiation ceremony. Christ, Mother!’

‘So you’re saying you didn’t hear anything at all last night,’ Merrily said in a small voice, bent over the toaster, her back to Jane. There was a dull ache far behind her eyes.

Jane made a clicking noise, beyond exasperation. ‘I sleep, as you used to keep pointing out, the sleep of the innocent. Perhaps it was a ghost.’

Merrily dropped hot toast.

Jane grinned slyly. ‘Place is old enough. Yeah, bound to have ghosts. Maybe you should do an exorcism. We have the book, we have the candles, don’t know about the bell, would a bicycle bell do? Hey, did you have, like, mock-hauntings at college to practise your technique?’

‘We didn’t do exorcism. The only ghost that ever got a mention was the Holy Ghost.’

‘I can’t believe it. They didn’t teach you anything useful at that college, did they?’ Jane crunched her crispbread thoughtfully. ‘Er, do you think it’s him?’

‘What?’ Merrily shovelled her toast on to a plate and brought it to the table. She didn’t want to talk about this any more. One of them was going a little mad. What did it mean when half your night seemed to be spent in some ungodly no man’s land between reality and dreams? How could you be suffocated by a house this big?

‘Wil.’ Jane smiled wistfully.

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘Hey, if I’d known I could’ve invited him to my party. There’s no decent totty in Ledwardine these days.’

‘All right. Let it go. And talking of parties, will you be coming to mine?’

‘The initiation? That’s what you call a party, is it?’

‘I know, very sad. But the Cassidys are laying on a buffet afterwards in the church itself. Should be over by about half-nine or ten. But perhaps you could slip away, get changed and drift over to Colette’s thing, up in the restaurant?’

Jane met her eyes. The kid could always recognize a deal.

‘What makes you think I want to go to Colette’s party?’

‘Don’t you?’

Jane shrugged. ‘What time would I have to be home?’

Merrily shrugged.

‘Really?’

‘I trust you to be careful. And to remember that you’re not sixteen yet.’

‘So don’t get shagged is what you mean.’

Merrily held the kid’s brazen gaze. ‘Something like that.’

‘Well. Like I said ‘ – Jane smiled ruefully, looking suddenly and disturbingly older – ‘there’s no worthwhile totty around here these days, is there?’

When Jane had left for school, Merrily sat for a while, staring at the cold, uneaten toast, and then she dragged the phone over to the table.

An admission of defeat, but what could she do? Jane, as usual, had touched a nerve. Merrily tapped out the college number from memory.

‘Is it possible to speak to Dr Campbell?’

The switchboard said David Campbell was on the phone; Merrily said she’d wait. David was the only one of her old tutors she figured would be any help. He was a liberal, but he’d also been High Church in his time, an incense-burner.

We didn’t do exorcism. The only ghost that ever got a mention was the Holy Ghost.

She felt more than a little stupid about this. Once, in Liverpool, one of her prozzies had asked Merrily what she could do about her flat, which was haunted. The flat had been supplied by the woman’s pimp, who owned the building; Merrily had interpreted this as a cry for help, found her a room in a shelter, but she’d gone back to the flat and the pimp after a week, never made contact again.

‘Putting you through,’ the switchboard said.

‘Merrily Watkins! How are you, love?’

‘Hello, David.’

‘Installation day, right?’

‘Tonight. How did you know?’

‘Word gets around. You won’t mind if I don’t come, I hate bloody parishes, as you know.’

‘I remember. David, are you alone?’

‘One always hopes not.’

He meant God. Merrily pondered the get-out option: asking him about some aspect of installation-night protocol. But she let the silence hang too long.

‘What’s the problem, love?’ David said quietly.

‘OK. I think ... Oh, Jesus, it sounds so—’ Her head thumping away.

‘Go on.’

‘All right. I think my vicarage is haunted, and I don’t know how to handle that.’

David said, ‘I see.’ She imagined him in his office, his metal-stemmed pipe sticking out of the pen-pot on the desk.

‘I’m glad you see,’ she said, ‘because I don’t. According to my Uncle Ted, churchwarden and oracle, the last incumbent had no problems in that department. And that was over about thirty-five years.’

‘What makes you think it’s haunted?’

Was she imagining a shift in his voice, a reserve setting in?

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘usual stuff. Or what I understand is usual. Footsteps in the night. Seeing things that ... that can’t be there. It isn’t imagination, although the experiences do seem to be interwoven with dreams. What I mean ... some of it happens in actual dreams – sometimes I think I’m awake when I’m really dreaming and maybe the other way around, too. And I ... Look, I know what you’re thinking, and I have been overworking a bit and things have been very fraught, what with living out of a pub and then moving into an old house that’s far too big and ... What?’

‘Hold on. Steady.’

‘I’m perfectly steady. I mean, this morning, my daughter’s saying to me, didn’t they teach you how to do an exorcism in college, and I have to say no, we didn’t even touch on it. Why didn’t we touch on it, David?’

‘How is Jane?’

‘She’s fine.’

‘She’d be ... what? Fourteen?’

‘Fifteen. What are you saying? That most poltergeist activity is caused by adolescent children? That it’s Jane who’s doing it?’

‘I’m not qualified to say anything.’

‘But why?’ Merrily demanded. ‘Why didn’t we go into this stuff? We’re supposed to be at the cutting edge, aren’t we? We’re supposed to be dealing with the supernatural on a day-to-day basis, and yet we never talked about ghosts.’

‘True,’ David said. ‘We never once discussed the area of parapsychology, and perhaps we should have, if only to examine the demarcation lines.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘All right ...’ She envisaged him shifting in his old captain’s chair, leaning an elbow on the cushion over an arm, establishing a position. ‘Let me say, first of all, that I accept entirely that certain unexplained events occur. All the time.’

‘So you’re not saying I’m nuts.’

‘Certainly not. There’s far too much evidence. What I am saying, however – and I say it as a question to which I don’t really have an answer – is, do these phenomena really fit inside our field of operation?’

‘Good or evil, they’re spiritual matters.’

‘But are they? Are we not simply talking about, say, forms of energy, which are, as yet, unknown to science? Yes, certainly, this sphere of activity was absolutely central to the work of the medieval Church. Much of what priests were up to in those days would constitute what we now dismiss as magic; illusion. They’d find it expedient to produce the odd miracle out of their back pockets to maintain their ... what you might call their street cred. What we know to be perfectly natural electrical phenomena would, then, have been seen as the work of either God or Satan. Yes, I do believe in haunted houses.’

‘But you think – let me get this right – you think there’s a scientific explanation that has nothing to do with religion and therefore nothing to do with us. So all the official diocesan exorcists are just remnants of the Middle Ages.’

‘Dangerous ground, here, Merrily. Yes, some clergy feel drawn to that kind of work. But even they are increasingly seeing what they do as a form of psychology. The Church is guarded about ghosts and demons and alleged appearances of the Mother of God as damp stains in kitchen walls, and rightly so in my view. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something happening.’

Dangerous ground indeed, Merrily thought. How far was he from saying that one day science would explain God, and then they’d all be redundant?

‘So you think I should see a scientist. Or a shrink.’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Or take Jane to one?’

David Campbell sighed. ‘You’re a sensible person, Merrily. That’s why you’re in a responsible position.’

‘Even though I’m a woman.’

‘It’s still sensitive,’ David said. Now there was an unmistakable coldness in his voice.

‘You’re saying I should keep my mouth shut,’ Merrily said. ‘Or I’ll have the diocesan chauvinists twittering to the bishop – told you what happens when you let hysterical women take over. That sort of thing.’

‘I think you should give it a few more weeks. It isn’t ... harmful in any way, is it?’

She thought of Sean peering and groping through the mist of blood. The dream-Sean. That definitely was a dream. Wasn’t it? The phone felt slippery in her hand.

‘And I wouldn’t have thought,’ David said, ‘that after all the emotional traumas you’ve come through, you would find these minor paranormal fluctuations at all frightening.’

‘No.’ She paused to bring her voice down. ‘Oh no.’

‘You say you don’t know how to handle it, as if there’s a secret technique we didn’t bother to tell you about. There isn’t, I’m afraid. Sorry, love, but you have to search your own faith, your own belief system. Look, call me again in a week or two, if it’s still worrying you.’

But he was telling her not to. He was telling her that, as far as the Church was concerned, she was on her own.

21 Tears

SHE HAULED HER headache off to the church. Was it because she didn’t like being alone in the vicarage? Because the even older church, with its tombs and the fractured skulls grinning up at you from stone flags, was actually homelier?

Frightened? Frightened of a paranormal fluctuation? Frightened for her daughter’s emotional condition, her own mental state? The Priest-in-Charge? God’s handmaiden? Good God, no. Perish the thought.

Her head felt like a foundry; she’d never ring David Campbell or anyone else at that bloody college again.

She gripped the cold ring-handle of the door into the porch. Pausing there, as she tended to these days. If Dermot Child was slowly undressing her for the benefit of the bellringers she didn’t want to be a captive audience. She opened the church door just a crack. Through it echoed a torn and stricken howl.

‘... you!’

She stopped, head pulsing.

‘... you, Liza Howells ... the night you came to me with your bruises, your torn lip, mouth smashed and teeth gone ... that night your husband beat you for your dalliance with Joseph Pritchard ...’

Her first thought was that this was something to do with the pageant the Women’s Institute was organizing for the festival, a parade of Ledwardine society through the ages.

‘OK.’ Footsteps. ‘Leave it there a minute.’

But this voice she’d heard before. Martin Creighton, the theatre director.

‘So, OK, if we had this Liza sitting somewhere in the middle, and she’s wearing ... what?’

‘A fairly simple black dress.’ Mira Wickham, the designer. ‘Nothing obvious until she’s on her feet. It’s important that the members of the audience sitting all around her don’t realize she isn’t one of them until she starts to react.’

Merrily walked in, stood by the Norman font.

‘In fact, you know, I think what would be really good,’ Mira said, ‘is if Liza and one or two of the others have been chatting to people – in character – before the lights go down. A merging of present-day villagers with their ancestors. So that it seems to several people that they know Liza and the others as individuals. And this communicates itself. We get a blur. A timeslip.’

‘Spooky,’ Creighton said. ‘But that only works if you have real locals in the audience every night.’

‘So we offer free seats to regular churchgoers. Let the vicar sort that out.’

‘You might find it just a bit more complicated than that,’ Merrily said, and there was silence.

Stefan Alder spotted her from the pulpit. ‘Oh ... Hi!’ He bounded down, loped along the aisle, grabbed her hand. ‘You’re ... Merrily Watkins, right?’

‘Mr Alder.’

Creighton and Wickham came to stand either side of him. They looked uncomfortable.

‘Look,’ Creighton said. ‘I hope you don’t think we’re being presumptuous. Obviously, we’ve got to plan as if the thing is going to happen here, but if you say no ...’ He wiped the air, both hands flat. ‘That’s it. We’ll understand.’

‘And where would you go then?’

‘Oh.’ Stefan Alder flicked back his ash-blond fringe. ‘I’m sure the bishop would fix Richard up with something. Although, personally, if we couldn’t do it here I’d be inclined to knock it on the head. You see—’

Creighton was glaring at him.

‘—no, really, Martin, I want to be up-front about this whole thing. It was my idea after all. I ... Look, are you doing anything absolutely vital, Merrily? I mean, can we talk about this? The two of us?’

Really succulent totty, Jane had described him once, being provocative. Maybe this was what she saw when she thought of Wil Williams. It was understandable. In a cream-coloured sweat-top and light blue jeans, he looked as fresh and innocent as Richard Coffey seemed seasoned and corrupt. He looked like the singer with one of those boy bands Jane claimed she’d grown out of.

Down past the last of the graves, where the church bordered the orchard on one side and the vicarage garden on the other, there was an apple tree in the hedge.

‘It could have been this one,’ Stefan said. ‘Well, I mean, obviously not this particular tree, but its ancestor. I was talking to your Mr Parry, and he said this particular spot could well have been orchard in Wil’s time. You notice how all the graves at this end are relatively modern, showing where they had to extend the churchyard.’

It was true. There was even a grave of black marble, put in before the conservationists got them banned.

‘Couldn’t be this particular tree, though, could it?’ Merrily said. ‘According to the legend, no actual apples would ever grow over the place where he lay.’

Whereas the tree in the hedge was heavily talcumed with blossom.

‘They would say that, though, wouldn’t they? All these stories are supposed to have an eerie postscript.’ Stefan plucked off a sprig. ‘I remember the first time I came here I’d read an account of it and I’d thought, you know, Poor sod. There was no emotional involvement at that stage, not until I actually came here. I just thought what a bloody shame. I mean, even if he was a witch ... damaging an apple crop? Really!’

‘Perhaps, if it had gone to court, it would’ve been thrown out. That was happening, increasingly. It’s my understanding that, by 1670, people were getting a bit wise to all these witchcraft accusations. You had a neighbour you couldn’t get on with, you’d just accuse him of making your prize bull impotent or something.’

‘You’re right. There had to be more. They wanted him dead, otherwise what was the point?’

‘They wanted him dead because he was gay?’

‘Thomas Bull wanted him dead. And James Bull-Davies knows that.’

His eyes, the colour of his jeans, were shining with a very innocent kind of fervour. He looked on the edge of tears. He looked too frail and vulnerable to be living with someone as coldly manipulative as Richard Coffey. But that was none of her business.

They walked to the churchyard wall – yes, this part was newer, some of the stone wasn’t even local – and stood leaning against it, looking back at the church whose stones, if they could speak, would be able to answer all their questions.

‘Let’s look at it objectively,’ Merrily said. ‘You’re saying, I think, that because Bull was a puritan he’d be absolutely shattered to discover his parish priest was homosexual. Now I can’t quite remember what percentage of today’s Anglican ministers are gay, but it’s a substantial one, and if they all got fired a few hundred churches would have to close overnight. Now, how different was it then, in a country area where people’s attitude to all matters sexual would have been ... well ... tolerant. Down-to-earth, shall we say?’

‘Look, I don’t know ...’ He fingered his fringe. ‘I don’t know where you stand. As a woman.’

‘For what it’s worth,’ Merrily said, ‘I think gays have always been drawn to the priesthood because it’s something they do rather well. It being a job that often calls for feminine qualities. I suppose, as we weren’t allowed in for so long, gay men have helped to hold it all together. They’ve given the Church a breadth of compassion without which it might not even have survived. That make any sense?’

Stefan Alder stepped back, striking an unselfconsciously camp pose, with one hand on a hip. She was sure she’d seen him before, not just in the village. Must have been on television, maybe a victim in The Bill or a casualty in Casualty.

‘That’s beautiful’ He smiled radiantly and handed her the sprig of apple blossom. ‘That’s a really beautiful thing to say, you know? I feel I can trust you now, I really do.’

‘Oh, well ... It was just Richard seemed to think I was prejudiced in some way. And I’m not. That’s all’

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Look, I want to explain to you ... At first – I mean, he’s committed to it, it’s his project – but at first, Richard was only doing this for me. He wasn’t especially struck by the story, or the village. We were having a few days’ break and Richard was half-looking for a holiday cottage, and we spent a night at the Black Swan. After dinner, he was tired, and he had a headache, so he went up to bed and I sat in the lounge with some coffee, idly reading some local guidebooks. It seemed odd, coming across a mention of Ledwardine Church and looking up and seeing the steeple through the lounge window. And then I saw a brief mention of Wil ... I mean, I’d read the story but I hadn’t remembered the name of the village and it was such a shock realizing I was sitting just a short walk away from where he ... died. The next thing I knew, I was just sort of ... here.’

He looked very ethereal against the apple trees which themselves, with their heavy blossom, were like the ghosts of trees. It was a cloudy morning, a fine spring drizzle beginning.

‘It’s incredible in autumn, isn’t it?’ Stefan said. ‘The air around Hereford is so full of apple scent. It seems in the evening as if the whole county’s heavy and drunk on it. And even though this orchard was looking rather sad and neglected, I felt the way it was, back then. Huge and bountiful. The absolute core of the county. The very centre of what Traherne called the Orb.’

Merrily remembered, with an unsettling feeling, what Gomer Parry had said about the Apple Tree Man. So gnarled and barren-looking in the ice, now full of thrusting buds.

‘I just knew that Wil, even if he’d had the power, would never destroy an orchard,’ Stefan said. ‘Not the biggest orchard in Hereford. It would be like poisoning the country. More than that, it ... I mean, he was a friend of Traherne. Nature was an aspect of God. It would have been blasphemy. He wasn’t a witch at all. I suddenly felt very, very close to him. He was in the air, in the scent, the whole apple-aura of this place. And then ...’

He was close to whispering. Merrily was still holding the sprig of blossom he’d given her. She was aware of being set up, dropped into a little cameo scene, but the snowy numinescence had settled on her senses; she was softened.

‘I could suddenly see him. I could see that poor, persecuted boy hanging here. All alone. All alone among the apple trees. It was spring then, like today. I could see the blossom which had fallen on his hair like stars ...’

There were big, theatrical tears in his eyes now, but it didn’t seem like a performance; she didn’t feel, somehow, that he was that good an actor. Did he really think he’d seen Wil hanging here or was he describing an exercise in imagination? Perhaps it didn’t matter.

‘Merrily, it was the most spiritual moment of my life. I just knew I’d been brought here. Just me. But why me? Who was I? Was I him? Had I been him in a previous life? No.’ He shook his head. ‘You don’t fall in love with yourself, do you? Not like that.’

God. She didn’t know how she felt about this at all.

‘I just knew in that moment what Wil was. Why I had to be here. To be near to him. To convey the truth about him. That it could be the most important thing I would ever do. I couldn’t sleep, I was tortured. I awoke early, walked all around the village – there was nothing for sale. Not a single For Sale sign. And then I saw the lodge, empty and derelict-looking and I just knew that whatever it cost ...’

He stopped speaking, looking for some reaction.

Merrily said, ‘Did Richard know why you were so anxious to live here?’

‘Oh yes,’ Stefan said. ‘If you’ve seen some of Richard’s plays you’ll know he’s fascinated by obsession. I suppose, at that time, I’d become sort of ... his. Obsession. So he bought the lodge.’

At a price. Merrily could hear James Bull-Davies. Made him pay. Made him pay.

‘I have to play him,’ Stefan Alder said very quietly. ‘I have to feel him inside me – in the purest sense. I mean, I have to be Wil. I have to be Wil here. You do understand that, don’t you, Merrily?’

After they parted, Merrily walked around the churchyard for some time, alone.

Decision time?

Well, he was a nice guy, an honest guy. But he was in love with a dead man, with a ghost, and there’d been a certain madness in those tear-glazed eyes.

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.

It was the first time they’d been face-to-face since the exchange in the vicarage kitchen.

‘Look.’ Bull-Davies shuffled slightly. ‘Glad I caught you. Fact of the matter is ... bit of a pig the other night. Tried to pressure you. Wrong of me. Want to apologize.’

Merrily said nothing. She walked out of the porch. He followed her into the churchyard.

‘Gets on top of one, the old family heritage thing. Narrows the outlook. Can’t focus. Sorry.’

‘So.’ Merrily stopped before the first grave, turned to look up at him. ‘You’ve had a think about it.’

His eyes narrowed.

‘And perhaps come to the conclusion that the idea of your family’s stature being toppled by a polemical play with an axe to grind about gay rights is something of an overreaction?’

His long face began to redden. He had not, of course, concluded any such thing.

‘Anyway,’ Merrily said, ‘on the question of the church being used, I’ve come to a decision, and I’ll probably slip it in when I say a few words at the reception tonight, OK?’

The silence lasted all of three seconds. Merrily didn’t move.

‘You have made a decision,’ Bull-Davies said heavily.

‘Yeah. Just this afternoon, actually.’

He scowled. ‘Heard you’d been talking to the actor. Alder.’

‘Sure. We had a chat.’

She wondered how he knew, who his informant was. Or perhaps he’d seen them himself.

‘Suppose he won you over. Cried on your shoulder.’

‘We had a private conversation.’

‘I don’t cry myself,’ James Bull-Davies said.

‘Well,’ Merrily said, ‘real men don’t, do they?’

‘You’re mocking me.’

Merrily thought about him in the vicarage kitchen. You make it hard for me, Mrs Watkins. And perhaps for yourself. She thought of the funeral card delivered to the Black Swan – Wil Williams was the Devil’s Minister. She thought her decision was the right decision, but, by God, some people were making it bloody hard and all her human reactions were still urging her to go the other way.

But she had to say something. So she thought what Jane would say and said that.

‘You know, James, you really are a sad bastard.’

He blinked.

‘I gave it a lot of thought. And the only decision that seemed ethically and spiritually right, in the end, was to offer Richard Coffey and Stefan Alder the village hall for their play. If that’s all right with the parish council’

‘Oh,’ he said.

‘I’m not going to explain how I decided. But I can say it had nothing to do with anything you said about the need to protect your illustrious family. And in fact ...’

She went right up to him. Looked up, a full foot, into his narrow, autocrat’s face.

‘... if you ever ... ever ... try to put the arm on me again, over anything – anything at all – I’ll ... I’ll have your balls.’

She stepped back. There was no reaction on James Bull-Davies’s face, but his back stiffened and she saw his feet come instinctively together. His eyes were focused over her right shoulder.

‘Understood,’ he said.

22 I, Merrily ...

THE FIRST PERSON Jane saw when she got off the school bus was Colette, wearing her leather jacket and a black chiffon scarf. She was with a black guy, maybe in his thirties, unloading some gear from a dirty white Transit van.

Unfortunately, Dean Wall and Danny Gittoes and a couple of their mates had spotted them too.

I’m telling you, it is,’ Danny Gittoes said. ‘I seen him in Shrewsbury. He looks different, nat’rally, with all the stuff on.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Dean said. ‘Mr Cosmopolitan. You hear that, men? Gittoes’s been to Shrewsbury. Hang on, I’ll find out. I’ll ask the slag.’

It was a dull afternoon, a slow drizzle starting. Dean Wall waddled across the square to Colette, Jane following at an angle.

‘Party then, is it?’ Dean trying to peer into the van.

Colette didn’t look at him. ‘Might be.’

‘This a mate o’ yours?’

Dean looked down at the black guy, who was short and lithe, wore a black T-shirt and white leather trousers, Dean looking like a Land Rover next to a Porsche.

Colette still didn’t look at him.

‘This is Dr Samedi,’ she said.

‘No shit,’ Dean said, reluctantly awed.

Dr Samedi lifted a big, square vinyl case out of the van and pushed it into Dean’s barrel stomach.

‘Carry dis into de restaurant fuh me, mon?’ Dr Samedi said.

‘Right,’ Dean said. ‘Sure.’

‘Don’ drop it.’

Danny Gittoes had arched over, with his big, stupid grin, and Dr Samedi allowed him to carry an even bigger black vinyl case into Cassidy’s Country Kitchen.

‘Seen you in Shrewsbury last year,’ Danny called over his shoulder. ‘Shit hot. Man.’

‘Up de stairs,’ Dr Samedi said. ‘Leave ‘im by de restaurant door. An’ no peekin’.’

When they’d gone, Colette looked at Jane and shook her head and grinned. ‘This is Jeff. Jeff, this is Janey. Her mother’s a priest.’

‘Brilliant. Yow bringing her along, too?’ His accent was now closer to Kidderminster than Kingston, Jamaica.

‘I don’t somehow think so,’ Jane said. ‘Er ... you are Dr Samedi?’

He fixed lazy eyes on Jane’s. He growled, a low, seismic rumble.

‘Long night, moonbright, burnin’on a low light, everythin’you wearin’, honey, just a liddle too tight ...’

‘Oh, wow,’ Jane said, impressed. She’d always found rap and drum ‘n’ bass stuff quite tedious after a while, but the idea of it happening in Ledwardine was something else.

‘... and de drummin’ begin, feel de drummin’ inside, fingers dancin’, dancin’, dancin’up an’downyo’spine ...’

Jeff killed the rap, yawned and stretched. ‘Excuse me, ladies, I better go make sure them sheep-shaggers don’t put that gear the wrong way up.’

Colette watched the little guy sashay towards the glass doors. ‘Isn’t he just like magnetic?’

‘I guess.’

‘He will blow you away, Janey. I promise. Heavy magic’

‘Seems a bit cheeky, getting Wall and Gittoes to carry all the stuff in when they aren’t invited,’ Jane said. ‘I mean, you know, cool. But ...’

‘I want them like really desperate to get in.’ Colette lightly tongued her upper lip. ‘And all their mates. I want them wetting themselves to be in there.’

Jane looked at her. There was this perverse side to Colette she didn’t quite understand.

‘They might cause trouble.’

‘Mmm-hmm,’ Colette agreed. ‘They just might. If they can find their balls.’

‘You want that?’

‘Sure.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Oh, Janey ...’ Colette sighed in despair. ‘When they do get in, I want them to feel like gatecrashers. Unwanted. Resentful, you know? My dipshit parents have naturally gone over the guest list, so we have a lot of nice boys from good families, that kind of thing, plus a few like Lloyd Powell on account of his old man’s a councillor. I mean, you tell me, where is the tension in that?’

‘Tension?’

‘A party,’ Colette said with heavy patience. ‘Ain’t a party. Without tension.’

The evening was still and heavy with the scent of apple blossom, which clung to the orchard trees like hoar frost. Made Lol shudder as he got out of the rusting Astra in the drive.

As he let himself into the cottage, the phone began to ring, and his spirits collapsed like a card-house. It’s Lucy, he thought. Something’s wrong.

Around his trainers, on the doormat, he saw a pale confetti.

On the mat inside. Oh Jesus, oh Jesus. Examining the soles of his shoes to make sure he hadn’t brought them in himself. The orchard was coming in on him. There’d be petals all over the carpets, on the table, over the bed, in the bath. Jesus. Calling out, in his panic, to the stern, unforgiving God of his parents, collecting the usual stab of guilt – he’d once, aged sixteen, dropped a cup washing up and muttered Jesus Christ, and his mother had slapped his face with some ferocity, wouldn’t speak to him for two days.

The phone kept on ringing and Lol kept staring at the petals on the mat.

Maybe they just came in through the cat door. Maybe Ethel brought them in. That was it: Ethel had been hunting in the orchard and returned with her fur full of apple blossom. That made sense, didn’t it?

The phone went on ringing. Who would know he was back, except Lucy?

Lucy. Who had sent him away after the thing with Jane Watkins. Seeing at once that he was in no fit state to go back to the cottage. Go off somewhere for a few days. I’ll feed the cat. Go to a city. Somewhere not like this, do you understand, Laurence? We’ll talk when you return. When you’re in a more receptive state.

In Oxford, over four days, he hadn’t even seen Gary Kennedy. Just walked the touristy streets and the parks and gardens and the riverside, dipping into bookshops and record shops and pubs.

And reading Thomas Traherne and getting as much sleep as he could take and reading more Traherne – the poet who’d found the whole universe in the fields and woods and hills within a few miles of Lol’s cottage and was completely knocked out by everything he experienced out there.

He has drowned our understanding in a multitude of wonders. Lucy had underlined this in his copy of Traherne’s Centuries, and written in pencil in the margin. Just because it’s something you can’t explain, it doesn’t have to be bad. It doesn’t have to be ominous. It might just be wonderful.

But the old strength, the conviction, had been missing. It was a worried Lucy who’d waved him off in the rusting Astra. When he’d come down from the loft and said this was a nightmare she hadn’t contradicted him. It had a fuzzy dreamlike quality when it happened, when he saw Jane Watkins lying in the orchard, but the implications were nightmarish.

The living-room door was always left ajar for Ethel, and when Lol went in, she was weaving in and out of his ankles. He picked her up and she purred into his chest as he grabbed the phone.

‘Hello?’

‘You little fuck.’ The rasp distorting in the earpiece. ‘What you trying to do to me?’

Karl Windling, the old Karl Windling sounding cracklingly close. He’d spoken to Dennis; it had made him angry. Lol felt cold sweat on his forehead. Windling could be at the Black Swan. He could be in his car, in the lane.

‘Don’t shit me, son. Do not shit me.’

Lol said, ‘Where are you?’

‘Close enough. Now you fucking stay there. You understand? You go anywhere, I’ll find you. You don’t move the rest of the night. I’m coming over. I’ll have a nice, simple contract with me. Which you are signing, son. You won’t—’

Very gently, Lol put down the phone. Thought for a moment then unplugged the wire from the wall. Went to the window: just the Astra in the drive. And blossom in the orchard.

He carried Ethel into the kitchen where he put out a bowl of wet food, a bowl of dry food and more water. He got out the litter tray, filled it and laid it by the door. He stroked the little black cat and put her down.

Not knowing how long he would have to be away before Karl Windling gave up.

When the kid walked in, Merrily was at the kitchen table with a pot of tea and an ashtray full of butts.

Jane dumped her schoolbag. ‘You have to be at the church by seven, don’t you?’

‘Yeah,’ Merrily said glumly. ‘Sure do.’

Jane sat down opposite her. ‘Second thoughts? Bit late for that, isn’t it?

Merrily lit another cigarette. When Jane was away at school, she couldn’t wait for the kid to come back. Fooling herself that her daughter was entirely on her wavelength. But looking at her now ... there was a distance. In her eyes. This was not paranoia, not isolation. Whether she knew it herself or not, part of Jane was somewhere else.

‘I had a chat with Stefan Alder today.’

‘Cool,’ Jane said non-committally. Even a couple of weeks ago, her eyes would have lit up and she’d have wanted to know all about it because, even if he was gay, Stefan was really heavy-duty totty.

‘He was telling me about the play and how they came up with—’

Merrily paused. She’d have to explain this sometime, because there was going to be a fuss about it, but she wondered if Jane was really mature enough to understand.

She put down her cigarette. ‘It’s because of Stefan that Richard Coffey wrote the play. Stefan’s gay, right? Stefan’s a homosexual’

‘I do know what gay means,’ Jane said sullenly. ‘And I know they think Wil Williams was persecuted because of that. Even if he wasn’t.’

‘Right.’ Merrily was encouraged by the last bit. ‘Stefan is ... I don’t know if his relationship with Coffey’s going through a bad patch or if he only stays with Coffey because of his career—’

‘That’s a bit cynical.’

‘I said I don’t know, Jane. What I do know, what I strongly feel, is that Stefan Alder believes that he’s been – I don’t want to use the word possessed, because he didn’t use it – chosen, by the spirit of Wil Williams, to recreate the circumstances of his death, to reveal the truth.’

‘Wow,’ Jane said.

‘It’s become an obsession.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Stefan’s in love with ... a ghost.’

‘It’s a bit beautiful, isn’t it?’ Jane said.

‘No! It isn’t beautiful! It’s unnatural and it’s dangerous, and Coffey’s only going along with it because he’s a very warped individual. And I think it would be very wrong for me to let it happen in the church.’

‘What?’

Merrily picked up the cigarette and drew on it. ‘I’m going to suggest they put it on in the village hall. I’ll tell everybody tonight. I thought I’d tell you first.’

‘You can’t,’ Jane said.

‘I have to, flower.’

‘Jesus!’ Jane stood up; the chair clattered to the floor behind her. ‘You sad cow. And I really thought you were smart.’

Lol drove twice around the village, looking for somewhere discreet to park the Astra. There were far more cars in the village than usual; the square was packed, a few dozen people walking about. Something on in the church?

Arriving at the square a second time, he panicked – suppose Karl’s car appeared in the mirror, a car which could go twice as fast, driven by a man ten times as hungry. He swung down Church Street and left the Astra by the kerb, at the bottom end, near the Ox, getting out and crossing to the shadowed side of the street.

Lucy Devenish lived in the middle of a small black and white terrace halfway up Church Street, doors opening to the street. He had reservations about going there for sanctuary. Visions of Windling finding out, busting in drunk, smashing things. But what could he do? No other options. He slid across the road, lifted the small, brass goblin knocker and rapped twice. It sounded very loud in the street, too loud.

No answer. Shit, what if Windling was to drive past now? He rapped again. Please, Lucy.

She wasn’t in. It occurred to him that, whatever was happening in the church, she might be there. He ran back across the road, sweating now. On the noticeboard was a small poster.

Service for the licensing and installation of

THE REVEREND MERRILY WATKINS

as Priest-in-Charge of the Parish of Ledwardine.

And a couple of dozen cars on the square. Yeah, Lucy would be in there, along with anybody who was anybody. Including – he spotted a familiar old blue Land Rover – James Bull-Davies. He stood on the cobbles staring at the Land Rover, recognizing the repairs in the canvas, each one stitched into his mind from the day it had been parked outside the cottage with all of Alison’s stuff inside.

...at 7.30 p.m. followed by refreshments in the church,

courtesy of Cassidy’s Country Kitchen.

ALL WELCOME.

Should he go in there and try to attract her attention? Hadn’t been inside a church since his mother’s funeral. The thought of it created a ball of cold in his stomach. Ominous. Wouldn’t help his state of mind going into a church, especially tonight. Besides, James Bull-Davies would be in there, and probably Alison.

No. Not Alison.

A small tremor went through him. Bull-Davies and Alison rarely appeared in the village together. Bull-Davies, with his sense of what was proper, would never bring her to church.

Lol looked up at the church clock. It was not yet seven-fifteen. How long did these things take? Couple of hours, at least.

Chances were, Alison would be alone at Upper Hall.

She felt completely wrong. She felt overdressed and under-qualified for the white surplice and the clerical scarf and the academic hood from theological college.

She should have been barefoot, in sackcloth. She was here to serve, and she wasn’t up to it. She was going to be a disaster. She looked out at all the pious, formal faces, fronting for the inveterate village gossips who’d always known she wasn’t going to fit in.

She’d fasted, at least – if unintentionally. A whole day on tea and coffee and cigs. Her head felt like it was somewhere in the rafters. She didn’t much care.

The bishop was ritually explaining a few basics to the congregation, as if they needed to know.

‘The Church of England is part of the One, Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church worshipping the one true God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It professes the faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds, which faith the Church is called upon to proclaim afresh in each generation.’

The word generation making her think at once of her daughter.

Oh, Jane.

The kid had stalked out and Merrily had sat there for another twenty minutes and smoked another two cigarettes. Was she being weak, uncool, pathetic? Even homophobic, for heaven’s sake, in spite of everything she’d said to Stefan Alder? And now Jane – even if, with her famous sense of honour, she wouldn’t tell anyone why – would boycott the service.

And then, just as Merrily was rising wearily from the table to go and change into her vestments, Jane had appeared in the kitchen doorway, dressed demurely in a high-necked jumper and skirt. I said I’d go and I’ll go, Mother. I’ll go on my own. I’ll see you afterwards.

A long time afterwards. They’d agreed that the kid would leave after the service, come back and change into her party gear, all laid out, presumably, in her bedroom, in her apartment, her separate life.

Meanwhile, in public, Jane would do the honourable thing, play the dutiful daughter. Oh God.

Half an hour later, while making her lonely, sorrowful, self-conscious way to the church, the fake Barbour flung over her clerical finery, Merrily had met Lucy Devenish. Or rather Lucy had blocked her path, just short of the lych-gate, the poncho spread wide like a bullfighter’s blanket.

‘I was hoping, Merrily,’ she’d said without preamble, ‘that you would have come to me. But it’s not too late. We have to talk, you and I.’

‘Oh, you really think we should talk, do you, Miss Devenish? That’s you and me rather than you and Jane.’

‘You’re angry.’

‘Just sad.’

‘My fault. I was arrogant, as usual. I truly thought that you would come to me.’

‘You said we’d quarrel,’ Merrily reminded her.

‘Pshaw!’ – she’d actually produced that archaic sound – ‘A ploy. A challenge to which I was sure you’d rise. I suppose you’ve been too busy. But we can’t put it off. I need your help. The village needs your help. And, of course, your daughter.’

Merrily had glared at the old bat for presuming to know what her own daughter needed.

‘Meanwhile, all I would say to you tonight – directly, a personal plea – is that you should announce, without delay, your decision to permit this man Coffey to stage his play in the church. Do it now. Do it tonight. Believe me, it will clear the air and alter the focus and make your life so much less complicated.’

Merrily had felt the smoke beginning to rise between her ears. She’d made herself take a long breath before reacting, even though about a dozen parishioners were converging on them.

‘Miss Devenish, I don’t have time to discuss this right now, but you can take it that I will not be announcing my decision to let Coffey’s play go ahead in the church. Not tonight, not any night.’

Fury and anxiety nudging each other as she went in to make her vows to the bishop and to God and to blessed Ledwardine.

‘Oh shit,’ Alison said.

Standing just inside the crumbling Georgian doorway, mistress of the house.

He’d come on foot, figuring that if she saw his car wheezing up the drive, she just wouldn’t answer the door. He’d followed, with some trepidation, the route Alison took in the mornings on her horse, the old bridleway alongside the orchard. Trying not to look at the apple trees, but the image of Jane Watkins going in and out of focus in his head, the smell of spring orchard powerfully everywhere and full of a mustiness that made him think of old sepia photographs.

The bridleway had come out near a pair of huge stone gateposts topped with the blurred stumps of what might once have been lions or eagles. He’d let his anger propel him between them. It had been a long time coming, this anger, and it felt strange and cumbersome, like a stiff, new overcoat. He knew he’d always been one of life’s accepters. Like when Alison had walked out, he’d accepted it must be his fault, there must some deficiency in his character, his sexual ability, his social behaviour ...

Well, all right, there was, he knew that for a fact, he was screwed up, and yet ...

‘Don’t do this to me, Lol,’ Alison said, expressionless. Echoing Karl Windling. It was always him doing it to them.

Lol looked over his shoulder, down the hill to where the spire sprang up between the trees with the big red sun almost on its tip, like a needle about to burst a balloon. Like he wanted to burst the smug bubble around Alison.

‘Figured the colonel’d be in church, doing his squire bit. I thought this would be a good time.’

‘Lol,’ Alison said gently. ‘The good times are over.’

She looked dramatically sultry in black silk trousers, a black shirt open to the unexpected freckles between her breasts. After all this time he wanted her very badly and that made him angry and sad and ...

‘Don’t I even get to come in?’

‘I don’t think that’s very wise, do you?’

This was where he was supposed to lose his temper, break down, start asking her if Bull-Davies had a much bigger dick, that kind of hysteria.

‘When I saw his Land Rover on the square, I thought maybe I could go into the church, sit next to him, ask him a few things.’

‘That would have been embarrassing for you both.’

‘But only one of us would have anything to lose.’

Alison started to close the door. He put his foot in it. Knowing this rarely worked, that if she wanted to, with a door this size, she could probably just break his ankle. It would depend on whether she wanted to hurt him any more.

She drew the door back, for momentum. He left his puny trainer in the gap.

‘Fuck you.’ Alison let the door fall open and walked away into the house, and he followed her.

The bishop said, ‘In the declaration that you are about to make, will you affirm your loyalty ...’

When they’d met before the service, the bishop had enthused about Richard Coffey’s exciting plans. A parish church should be a Happening Environment, the bishop said. He was so glad that this beautiful, vibrant village, so full of creative people, should have a priest who was young and energetic and sensitive and, yes, dare he say it ...?

Female.

It’s still sensitive, David Campbell, at the college, had said.

Sensitive. James Bull-Davies was out there, alone in his family pew. James, who had said he would support her so long as you remain sensitive to the best interests of this village.

She hadn’t said a word to the bishop about Bull-Davies’s threat. It didn’t matter now. Bull-Davies had sworn allegiance, would be her friend for life. Coffey and Alder – and maybe the bishop himself – her enemies.

She felt dangerously light-headed. She should have eaten. She shouldn’t have drunk so much coffee.

The bishop intoned,’... in bringing the grace and truth of Christ to this generation and making him known to those in your care?’

A question? Oh God, it must be her bit now. I Merrily Rose Watkins do so affirm and accordingly declare my belief ...

The bishop waited, the bright red evening sun burnishing his high forehead and the apple in the hand of Eve in the great, west-facing stained-glass window, the one so often reproduced on postcards. A congregation of over a hundred men, women and children waiting for their new minister to speak. In a woman’s voice.

Her face lifted slowly to the light. In the vivid sunset, the sandstone walls looked redder than she’d ever known them. The red of arterial blood. The red of hellfire. The red of the Pharisees Red, the traditional cider apple of Ledwardine, the Village in the Orchard.

They waited. The congregation ... the bishop ...

...God.

And Merrily shivered as, for wild, glowing moments, the walls of the church seemed to curve together, the pews warping, the congregation coalescing, faces blending into pink pulp.

As the church itself became a swelling apple, and she found she was caressing it in her hands, and its rigid stalk was the steeple, and she heard a roaring in her head and tumbled away from it, losing all sense of where she was or why.

... an acidic smell. Breath on her face.

‘Merrily?’

The bishop leaning over her, disturbed at her silence. A heavy, very earthly, pragmatic presence, the bishop: the Administrator, the Chief Executive. She could hear his breathing, faintly puffy, smell his vaguely vinegary breath. Her own body felt very light, as though she could raise her arms in her surplice and float away like a bat among the cob webbed, oaken rafters.

I’m sorry. She couldn’t even say that.

Someone coughed. She saw the congregation below her. Caroline Cassidy in her light blue jersey suit, the sun putting a sheen on Terrence’s pointed head. At the other end of the pew, Richard Coffey – here because of the bishop, his supporter – and Stefan Alder. A respectable distance between them and the Cassidys, but the fact that they were on the same pew showing how the battle lines had been drawn.

Stefan’s eyes were shining, reflecting some erotic Wil Williams fantasy and the conviction that the priest was on his side.

But you couldn’t trust a woman could you? He’d be there at the reception afterwards, with his glass of the Wine of Angels. How was she going to face him? What was she going to say to him?

I, Merrily ...

Come on. She’d learned all the replies, practised them, testing herself, but the words wouldn’t come and a part of her didn’t care, because they wouldn’t, Oh God, be coming from the heart.

Why not? And did it matter?

She heard whispers washing through the congregation. A spreading awareness of something wrong. And it was her. She was wrong. The Reverend Merrily Rose Watkins. A mistake. They were all realizing their terrible mistake. She saw Jane for the first time, right at the back, on the end of the pew, gripping the prayer-book shelf. White-knuckled. You could sense the tension in that grip.

A tension, too, under Merrily’s arms, a friction on the skin, a burning sensation and then that sudden tightening around the chest, as though someone had grabbed her from behind, grasping both breasts, squeezing and pulling them back into her ribcage. She thought of Child, felt physically sick, rocked backwards, all the breath forced out of her.

She saw James Bull-Davies’s left arm stretched along the back of the pew, no concern on his face. Priests came, priests went; the rock on which this church was founded had Bull inscribed upon it.

She saw Jane, half out of her pew now.

I, Merrily ...

But the priest could not move. Her chest was as tight and rigid as a wooden board.

A shockingly cold thrill passed from pew to pew. The vicar can’t go through with it!

The priest saw Eve in the window, holding out the apple to her. The apple which she knew instinctively was a Pharisees Red.

No.

Try. Try to speak. Draw a breath. Let it out. I ...

‘I ... Merrily Rose Watkins, do so affirm and ace—’

The breath caught in her throat like phlegm. The dregs of her voice drifted away into an empty church.

The pressure was abruptly released from her chest. She swayed, taking rapid, shallow breaths. She looked around.

She was on her own. The bishop was gone, the congregation had vanished. The church was empty. The soaring red walls had faded. There were no colours in the windows. The air was chill.

Something crawled, on hands and knees, up the aisle towards her. It was naked, pale and stark as a cold candle.

Her mouth opened as it slid towards her, its head bowed, its body racked and twisted. Its anguish crawled into Merrily’s raw and empty stomach and unravelled a dark ribbon of bile. She tried to scream but her throat filled up.

The congregation rose in horror as the priest-in-charge fell forward into her own thin vomit.

23 Black-eyed Dog II

ALMOST SULKILY, ALISON said, ‘It really isn’t complicated. I give him what he needs, he gives me what I want.’

She was sprawled in an ancient, shapeless chintzy chair, stretching out her legs, inspecting her bare toes. Finding them more interesting than Lol.

The room was lofty and colourless, with a high, tiled fireplace, and no way could he believe this was what she wanted.

None of it sounded right. He’d sat here nearly an hour and she’d talked, and it was all superficial crap. How she’d always had this fantasy of living in the country since she was a kid in Swindon and helped out at this riding school. How she’d thought that, when she and Lol got here, meaningful things to do would suggest themselves: ways of making money, finding fulfilment. But when you were living, as they had, in a little cottage with a little garden you might just as well be in some suburban villa. Whereas this, this was the real thing. Country life as it was meant to be lived.

What she was saying was profound like Hello! magazine was profound. For once, Lol couldn’t let himself accept it.

‘Hang on ...’ He moved to the corner of a sagging settee, leaned towards her. ‘You chose the cottage. You said it was perfect.’

‘So I was wrong. It was small, it was shut-in. It was worse than the city. Nothing suggested itself.’

‘Except Bull-Davies, apparently.’

Alison still didn’t look at him.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘that may not be precisely what you think, OK?’

‘What do you think I think?’

The sun was sinking below the sills of the deep Georgian windows, the room fading to dusty sepia.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I imagine you’re hurt. Wounded. You think I never really cared for you. That I just used you until someone more interesting came along.’

Took the words out of his head. It was still killing him to think she might have been this superficial all along.

‘I really didn’t want you to get hurt, Lol. I wanted you to be, you know ... angry. As in hating me. I didn’t want any of this honourable, shaking hands, let’s-still-be-friends shit.’

He stared at her.

‘I mean, that was the very last thing you needed. Aggression. You needed aggression. Bitterness. You were never bitter. I couldn’t understand that. Why were you never bitter? Dumped by your family, messed around by the system ... Where was the resentment? I wanted you to hate me, rather than ... I mean I couldn’t bear to see you just crawling away and crying into the bloody cat.’

‘How do you know I did that?’

It was not too dark to see her looking pained. He remembered how, when people started smirking at him in the shops, he thought it was because he was this really obvious townie and maybe he needed to wear a flat cap, buy a beat-up truck. Grow sideburns below the jawline.

She curled her toes at him in exasperation.

‘Somebody really should have told you. I put on a hell of a show for Miss Devenish at that Twelfth Night thing. Poor James was dreadfully embarrassed. And even she didn’t take you on one side. Jesus. Little harmless-looking guy like you and nobody has the consideration or even the bottle to tell him his woman’s screwing around.’

Lol winced. ‘Little harmless guy. Thirty-seven years old and the best I ever managed was Little Harmless Guy.’

‘And endearingly messed up. Women love men to be messed up. I really was going to sort you out. But, you know, you get a ... an opportunity ... you have to take it. I didn’t imagine it was going to come so quickly. I’m sorry.’

He felt cold. There were no visible central-heating radiators and although paper and logs were built up in the dog grate, she hadn’t attempted to light them. The message here, at least, was clear.

‘For what it’s worth,’ Alison said, ‘it was that day I went into the village and got a puncture. James was parking his Land Rover on the square. He changed the wheel for me, I said I’d buy him a drink, so we went across to the Black Swan. We talked. For ages. At one point, I said I liked riding, and he said he had horses, didn’t know why he kept them on. Just that the family always had, for hunting and things. James hates to let go of a tradition. That’s sort of admirable, isn’t it?’

‘From what I heard,’ Lol said, ‘his father seems to have kept horses so there’d always be a steady supply of stable girls.’

There was a heartbeat’s silence.

‘Where’d you hear that?’ Her voice stayed casual, he couldn’t see her expression, but he was sure he saw her toes tense.

‘A friend mentioned it.’

‘Lol, you only have one friend. What exactly did Devenish say about the old man?’

‘Does it matter? He’s dead, isn’t he?’

‘Humour me.’

‘You’ll just tell bloody James.’

‘James ...’ Alison said in a measured kind of way, ‘is the last person I’ll tell.’

‘She said disregard for the finer feelings of women was a family trait. Lucy had a friend who was one of the stable girls. Patricia somebody?’

The windows lit up.

‘Shit,’ Alison said.

Land Rover lights.

‘Get your head down,’ Alison said.

Lol didn’t move. ‘But she did suggest James was different,’ he said, more out of fairness to Lucy than consideration for Bull-Davies. ‘On account of having a conscience. Like he was the first in the family to have one, and he ought to get out of this house before—’

‘What the hell’s he doing back? He said it’d be at least half-ten.’

Maybe this was meant, Lol thought. Face-to-face in a cold triangle.

‘Listen,’ Alison hissed. ‘He finds you here, he’ll kill you. Listen to me. He’ll come in the back way, so listen ... Wait in the hall until you hear his key and then leave quietly by the front door. Just pull it to behind you.’

‘And there was me,’ Lol murmured, ‘getting all hyped up for a fight’

‘Go!’ Alison was on her feet. ‘Piss off!’

He stood up, disoriented in the gloom.

‘Please.’ Alison’s eyes glowing urgently.

‘All right.’

In the hall, he stood next to a coat stand smelling of Barbour-wax and manure. He heard a key jingling in a distant lock, but he didn’t move.

‘Utterly unbelievable,’ Bull-Davies bawled.

‘Darling?’ Her voice was pitched up the social scale. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Silly bloody bitch threw up! In the damn church!’

‘Who did?’

‘Ten minutes into the service, loses her bloody lunch. I ask you, does a real priest ever lose control of himself like that? I’ve seen Hayden in that pulpit with streaming eyes, two boxes of Kleenex for Men ...’

‘James, what are you talking about?’

‘The damn vicar. Physically sick in front of half the village. Perhaps they’ll realize their mistake when we get a notice outside the church saying All Services Postponed due to Menstrual fucking Cycle.’

Lol hung on, half-fascinated. Alison was a committed feminist; if he’d said half of that she’d be into his throat.

‘Well, darling,’ Alison said soothingly, ‘you did tell them, didn’t you?’

Lol let himself out. Stumbled down the steep drive, between the broken gateposts, the last of the sunset spread out before him like a long beach, the church spire a lighthouse without a light. Nothing left that seemed real.

They’d brought her into the vestry. She must have fainted. There was a couch in there and they’d laid her on it and someone had put a rug over her. Faces came into focus, like a surgical team around an operating table, stern and concerned and ... triumphant?

She must have passed out again and when she came round she didn’t remember whose faces those had been.

‘Stressed out, I’d say,’ Dr Kent Asprey said. ‘Overworked, neglecting herself. Mrs Watkins? Can you hear me? Merrily?’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Merrily whispered. ‘I don’t know what ... Is the bishop ...?’

‘He’s out there taking charge,’ Uncle Ted said. ‘Don’t worry about that.’

‘Where’s Jane?’

‘I’m here, Mum.’ Kid hanging back, sounding scared.

‘Oh God.’ A white, naked figure, pale as veined marble still crawled amongst her wildly flickering thoughts. ‘What have I done?’

‘You were taken ill,’ Uncle Ted said. She sensed a reserve in his voice. Not the churchwarden, now, but the old, wary lawyer.

The pale figure was inside her now, like a white worm. She tasted bile, sat up at once, clutching at her throat. Someone had removed her dog collar.

She hadn’t completed her vows.

In the church, organ chords swelled. Pause. Singing began.

Haven’t made my vows!

‘All right, Merrily,’ Dr Kent Asprey said. ‘Just relax.’

‘I’ve got to go back. I haven’t made—’

‘Someone’s going to bring you a cup of tea, and then you’re going home.’

‘No ... Please ...’ The thought of going back to the huge, empty, haunted vicarage suddenly terrified her. ‘This is my home.’

‘Just relax,’ Asprey said.

‘What am I going to do? What am I going to do?’

‘You’re going home to bed and I’m going to come and see you in the morning.’

She stared at him, all crinkly eyed and caring, the stupid, fatuous sod.

‘Just get a good night’s sleep, Merrily.’

In Ledwardine vicarage? She wanted to laugh in his face. To scream in his face. To scream and scream.

Scream herself sick.

The small shadow became detached from the hedge in Blackberry Lane. Lol thought it was a rat, until it rolled on to his shoe.

When he bent down, it produced a tiny cry.

He went down on his knees, but when he touched her she hissed and slashed at him and rolled over and tried to stand up and couldn’t. He felt wet in his fingers. Blood.

‘Oh God.’

He’d left her shut in the kitchen, with food and water and a full litter tray. Hadn’t he?

She squealed when he picked her up and when he tucked her under his jacket he could feel her trembling. When he reached the gate and heard the music, she was purring, but he knew there were two kinds of purr and one was a sign of pain.

All the lights were on in the cottage. He saw the front downstairs window had been thrown open, and the music shivered out into the lane, the late Nick Drake singing ‘Black-eyed Dog’, the death song, the stereo cranked up beyond distortion level, fracturing the already tight, brittle splinters of guitar.

He could see Karl Windling’s wide-shouldered silhouette in the chair under the open window. Facing into the room. Facing the open kitchen door.

Nick sang that there was a black-eyed dog calling at his door and it was calling for more. It called for more and it knew his name. Nick’s voice was cut up and broken by the volume. Under Lol’s jacket, Ethel, the little black cat, quaked with pain. Beyond the kitchen door there was cat-litter all over the carpet, fragments of food dish.

In a high, scared, doomed voice, Nick Drake, at twenty-six, sang that he was growing old and he wanted to go home.

There was apple blossom all over the lawn, and the white petals were huge now. The song ended and Karl Windling’s shadow filled the window for a moment before the stylus was ripped across the record with a jagged whizz of puckered vinyl.

Lol saw that the white petals on the lawn were the torn and scattered pages of a book. He bent and picked one up and held it into the light from the window.

...to love all persons in all ages, all angels, all worlds, is divine and heavenly ...To love all ...

The house invaded, the book torn down the spine, the album ruined, the cat kicked half to death. Lol’s life smashed and the fragments scattered.

And there was me, getting all hyped up for a fight.

Karl would be well-stoned by now; that was his style – a satisfying surge of violence and then a nice, fat joint to make it feel doubly all right. Lol thought, I should go straight in there – it’s my house, for Christ’s sake, my own home – and ... and ...

I wanted you to hate, Alison had said, not half an hour ago.

But Karl knew Lol Robinson from way back. Knew he didn’t fight and lacked the nerve to hate. Knew that Lol’s speciality was fear.

All the lights on, the window open. Karl Windling standing in the centre of the room now, staring directly at the window, but he couldn’t see Lol in the darkness. Karl’s bearded face unsmiling.

Lol glanced at the empty drive, wondering for a second what Karl had done to the Astra before remembering he’d parked it in the village.

Under his jacket, Ethel had gone still.

He heard his own thin whimper on the air, as he turned and walked away from his home into the darkness of Blackberry Lane.

She felt like some child molester leaving court.

As the remaining congregation sang, watched over by the bishop, Merrily Watkins was escorted from the church wrapped in the rug, surrounded by Kent Asprey and Uncle Ted and Jane and Caroline Cassidy and Councillor Garrod Powell, their bodies hiding hers.

Hiding her from the eyes of villagers who’d left the congregation before the bishop had restored order but were still bunched in the darkness, like sightseers on the scene of a fatal road accident.

‘En’t a good sign,’ an old woman whispered too loudly.

Across the square, Merrily saw the softly illuminated hanging sign of the Black Swan, a beacon of stability in what was turning into an alien world. They’d been happy there. Now she was cold and confused and frightened and she didn’t know why, and none of the people with her said a word, not even Jane; it was like a funeral procession.

They took her into the vicarage. Ted still had keys, as if he’d known she was only on probation and it might not work out.

‘I’ll make some tea.’ Caroline Cassidy looked with distaste around the grim kitchen, still partly lit by unshaded, underpowered bulbs. ‘Where’s your kettle, my dear?’

‘No,’ Jane said. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘Look.’ Merrily struggled to keep her voice level. ‘You’ve done so much already and I’ve ruined it, but if you leave now you can still go ahead with your cider launch.’

‘Merrily, I wouldn’t dream—’

‘Yes, you would. You have to. Village life goes on. Anyway, I’d be less embarrassed if I thought it wasn’t all a total disaster.’

‘Well, if you’re sure ...’

‘Yes.’ She sat down at the table. ‘All of you. Please.’

‘You go to bed.’ Dr Kent Asprey gave her a shrewdly caring look. ‘I’ll call tomorrow.’

‘I’ll call you,’ Merrily said. ‘If it’s necessary. Thank you.’

‘I’ll tell the bishop you’ll be in touch,’ Ted said ponderously. ‘When you’re well.’

‘I’ll call him tomorrow.’

Thank God Dermot Child had been detained at the organ; he’d have been less easy to get rid of. Merrily let her head fall briefly into her hands as the door closed behind them and Jane came back alone. Peered through her fingers at the kid’s face, flushed with concern, or it might have been humiliation.

‘Go and change, flower. Get off to the party.’

‘You are joking,’ Jane said.

‘I need to do some thinking.’ Merrily raised her head. ‘All right?’

‘Mum, you’re ill. If you go to bed, I’ll bring you whatever you need ... hot-water bottle.’

‘I don’t need anything, and I’m not going to bed.’

‘Well, you can’t stay in here, it’s dismal. I’ll light the fire in the parlour.’

‘Just leave me, Jane.’

Jane hung on.

‘What was it? Something you ate?’

‘I didn’t eat anything all day, did I? I expect that was the problem. And getting uptight. Anyway, I feel terrible about everything, and I’m always better feeling terrible on my own.’

‘I’m going to stay,’ Jane said.

‘All right, you light a fire and we’ll sit and have a good old discussion. We’ll talk about Miss Devenish and what happened when you went to her aid that day instead of going to school and what you talk about together. All those things we’ve been meaning to discuss.’

‘I’ll get changed then,’ Jane said.

But she wasn’t too happy about it. Throwing up in church, when you were in Mum’s line of work, was not exactly a really brilliant thing to do, and since coming to Ledwardine Mum had been, for the first time, quite hot on keeping up appearances. This was going to damage her. Maybe, in the years to come, she’d be quite affectionately known as the vicar who tossed her cookies down the nave. But maybe there wouldn’t be years to come, not now.

How did she feel about that? Bad. Because coming here had put her on to like a whole new level of life. What Lucy called a new depth of Being. Whatever this meant, it wasn’t in the Bible, which was why it was unwise to even approach the subject with Mum. Particularly tonight.

In the solitude of her apartment, Jane looked up.

At what were supposed to have been the Mondrian walls. And the sloping ceiling between the beams. Into the blue and gold. Into the otherness. It was all so strange. Made her feel ... ooooh. She shook herself.

Clothes-wise, she didn’t overdo it. Black velvet trousers and silky purple top. Not a good night for making a spectacle of herself. Plus, if it turned out to be the kind of party Colette had in mind, a quick getaway might just be called for.

She’d gone ahead and lit the fire in the drawing room. Not so much because it was cold as because it might look halfway homely in there with a few flames. Before changing, she’d brought in some logs and filled up a bucket with coal. Kind of wishing she was staying in. But that invitation to a serious discussion left her no option. Jesus, Mum, she wanted to say, I don’t know what happened that day. Or that night under the apple tree. I’m not clear on it.

But I’m getting help.

Before she left, she stoked up the fire. Mum was down on the rug in a thick bottle-green polo-neck jumper and jeans, hugging her knees. It was a May night out there, but the vicarage remained in January. Except for the top floor.

‘I won’t be too late.’

‘I’ll wait up.’

‘You mustn’t. I’ll be annoyed if you do.’

‘OK, flower,’ Mum said.

With her face washed clean of make-up and her hair pushed behind her ears, she looked awfully young and vulnerable. Younger than me in some ways, Jane thought. And feeling there’s so much she doesn’t know.

24 Uh-oh ...

AT THE CORE of a bedlam of bodies, Colette Cassidy was mouthing at her.

‘What?’

‘... you been, Janey? It’s nearly midnight.’

Jane stayed where she was and let Colette come stammering towards her through the strobe storm, through a foundry of sound. The restaurant at Cassidy’s Country Kitchen was this square, attic space with irregular beams and white, bumpy walls. There was a stage area, where the Cassidys sometimes had a pianist, but tonight the piano, like most of the tables, had been taken away and the stage had become Dr Samedi’s spectacular sound-lab.

‘Sorry. Had problems.’

‘So I heard.’ Colette’s grin was lifted by the lights and put back intact. ‘Cool’

‘What?’

‘Give the Reverend Mummy my compliments. Bet the bloody bishop wasn’t expecting that.’

Gossip seemed to spread at more than the speed of sound in this village. Jane didn’t bother to explain that it hadn’t actually been all that funny at the time.

There must be eighty or ninety people here, mostly imports, Colette’s age and a year or two older. The flashing lights were reflected in a lot of sweat on faces. Jane recognized hardly anybody, suspecting she was the youngest here. Some of the dancers looked ... well ... out of it. There was nothing stronger than Coke and Dr Pepper on the tables pushed up against the walls, but she thought she’d seen the boy from her school called Mark, who seemed to be the fourth-form’s principal dealer in Es and speed.

‘All the same, Janey,’ Colette was saying, ‘you didn’t have to spend half the night with the old girl.’

‘Sorry. Something else came up.’

Colette didn’t seem to hear. Dr Samedi was squealing something over the industrial drum ‘n’ bass on tapes. He wore a top hat, with ribbons, and a black bow tie. No shirt. Jacket open to his shiny chest with a white necklace showing. It was a jacket from a morning suit, black, with tails, and strategically torn in several places like the jackets the punks used to wear in Mum’s day. It was a scarecrow’s jacket, and that was what Dr Samedi looked like, a scarecrow animated by lightning.

‘I said,’ Jane shouted, ‘something came up!’

‘You should be so lucky. Listen—’

Colette was wearing something black and shiny and daring, naturally. A gangly guy in a white shirt was hanging around behind her. Colette moved close to Jane.

‘OK, listen, that’s Quentin the Suitable.’

‘Who?’

‘Like, the parents always have to make sure there’s a Suitable One, you know what I mean? His old man’s some kind of exalted surgeon at the General. I just wish somebody would surgically remove him.’

Quentin was tall and looked about seventeen.

‘He’s not bad,’ Jane said.

‘Especially if you’re into vintage tractors. His hobby. He also dances like one.’

Jane smiled. Quentin strobed unhappily about six feet away. Colette put her squashy lips against Jane’s ear.

‘Janey, I can’t unload the dim bastard. I go for a tinkle, he waits outside the fucking door.’

‘... you want me to do?’

‘Take him off my hands?’

‘You are joking ...’

‘Oh, come on, your night’s ruined anyway. You don’t have to snog him or anything, just keep him for two minutes while I melt away. The guy’s so sad if you tell him you have fantasies about having sex on a tractor, he’ll just ask you what make. Please, Janey ...’

Colette looked desperate, like life was running out on her. But then it was her party. On the stage, Dr Samedi hovered demonically over his mixers, moving in a vibrating swirl of lights, as though he was turning himself into light, into pure, bright energy. And Jane understood – hated the heartless music, understood perfectly about Dr Samedi’s need to become light. Dr Samedi was in his element. In his orb.

She felt suddenly half-separated from it all, as though the dance floor represented all human life and she was flickering on the edge of it. For an instant, she felt weightless, as though she might vanish into one of the cracks of darkness between strobes. She felt like this quite often now, but never inside a building before. Well, except for the church, for a moment, earlier on.

‘Janey?’ Colette clutched at her. ‘Christ, I thought you’d ...’

‘Sorry.’

‘Please, Janey ...’

‘Sure,’ Jane said, squeezing her hands together to bring herself down. ‘Whatever.’

When Merrily awoke on the sofa in front of the dying fire, she was happy for a moment. Frozen and stiff, but she’d been asleep for two, three hours and hadn’t dreamed about anything she could recall. A small miracle.

But this time, reality was the curse. The priest-in-charge had tonight been physically sick in her own beautiful and historic church in front of the biggest congregation she’d ever pulled.

How could she have just let that happen? Children did that, just threw up without warning. The priest-in-charge was not even in charge of her own metabolism.

Merrily rolled down from the sofa to the rough, industrial carpet. After a while, she sat up, shivering, and threw more lumps of coal onto the embers in the dog grate, thrusting in the poker, levering up some heat, inching closer, on this balmy May evening, to the miniature medieval hell of smoking cliffs and molten canyons.

Medieval hell. She was part of a medieval institution. Just that the modern Church refused to connect with its roots. Which was why the modern Church was losing it.

If you’d said that to her six months ago, she’d have flared up a whole lot faster than this coal, but there was no denying it any more: in a world where huge numbers of people were begging for spiritual sustenance from exotic gurus and mediums and clairvoyants and healers, the Church was getting sidelined.

David Campbell had actually asked the question, Do these phenomena really fit inside our field of operation? The Church still asking everyone to put their faith in a huge all-powerful supernatural being while loftily backing away from lesser phenomena.

Like a pale, naked figure, cold as a slug, crawling towards you up the aisle of your church. Obviously, a representation of her own perceived isolation as the first woman minister of Ledwardine?

Ha.

From far up in the soaring hollows of the house came a sudden, resonant bump.

There was a break in the music, the strobes were off. On the stage, Dr Samedi was guardedly allowing some of the boys to examine his mixers and tape decks and things. At a table near the door, Jane sat with Quentin the Suitable in his baggy cricket shirt.

It had been hard going at first, but so far he hadn’t mentioned tractors.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I didn’t really want to come tonight at all’

‘No kidding.’

‘It’s just that my parents come for dinner here quite regularly, and they’ve become fairly friendly with Colette’s parents.’

‘They must be really sad, lonely people,’ Jane said.

Quentin didn’t get it.

Jane smiled at him. ‘So tonight’s the first time you’ve actually met Colette?’

‘I tend to be away at school a lot. Only this weekend, our half-term’s started, so ... No, I’ve never actually met her before.’

Jane said airily, ‘Some bitch, huh?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Take my advice, Quentin, don’t get involved. She’s, you know, she’s kind of been around.’

Quentin looked puzzled. ‘You mean abroad?’

Jane rolled her eyes. ‘I mean been around as in eat-you-for-breakfast kind of been around.’

‘Oh,’ Quentin said. ‘I see. Well, she did seem a bit disconcerted when her father asked her to sort of ... look after me. I think she had other plans.’

‘Colette always has plans.’

‘No, I mean someone she was interested in.’

‘Oh?’ Jane sat up.

‘I may be wrong.’

‘No, go on.’ Jane looked into his soupy eyes, but he quickly averted them. ‘This is interesting. What made you think that, Quentin?’

But she didn’t find out because this quivering shadow fell across the table and she looked up into the face of a grossly sweating Dean Wall.

‘This’ll do.’ Dean pulled out a chair opposite Jane and sank into it and beamed at Jane and then at Quentin. Danny Gittoes was with him and Mark, the reputed dealer. ‘All right, are we?’

Jesus, Jane thought, who let these bozos in? She’d forgotten about Colette’s professed need for ‘tension’. Silly cow. She looked around for Barry, the manager, locating him behind the bar where a waitress was putting out things to nibble, apparently on the instructions of Colette’s mother who didn’t realize that the only things that got nibbled at parties like this were ears. To begin with.

Mark the Dealer stood by the door, hands in his pockets. Danny Gittoes sat down opposite Quentin, who seemed to be urgently wishing he was somewhere else. Like the dentist’s.

‘So, go on ...’ Dean nodded towards Dr Samedi and looked at Danny. ‘Voodoo, eh?’

‘Kind of thing,’ Danny said.

‘Where’s this then, Gittoes? Jamaica?’

‘Haiti. He was this voodoo God in Haiti. Only he was called Baron Samedi, see. God of the dead. Hung around graves. Led these tribes of zombies. And he wore that same gear – coat with tails and a top hat. Maybe a stick. Like a cane. I read this book. So that’s where he gets it from, see?’

Dean winked at Quentin, who smiled stiffly. ‘And this was, like, devil worship, right?’

‘Yeah. Well, more or less.’

“Cause Jane’s well into that, see,’ Dean said, not looking at Jane.

‘You on about?’

‘Got her ma into it now, too, from what they says.’

‘OK.’ Jane half rose. ‘Watch it.’

She saw Quentin’s hand tightening around his can of Dr Pepper’s.

‘What they’re saying,’ Dean said, ‘is that Jane’s mother, the vicar, she chucked her load in church tonight.’

Danny Gittoes said, ‘Eh?’

‘You en’t yeard? All over the village, man. ‘Er chucked up. Splatted all over the bloody bishop.’

‘Geddoff!’ Danny said theatrically. Jane smelled set-up.

‘Runs in the family, see.’ Dean’s little eyes glinting. ‘Can’t keep nothin’ down. Throws up right in the middle of’er ordination service, whatever they calls it.’

‘Never!’

Dean cackled. ‘Er’d prob’ly been on the cider!’

‘Shut your fat face!’ Jane was out of her seat. But Dean went on as if he hadn’t heard her.

‘Well, what’s that but a sign of Satanism, see. A devil-worshipper, witch, whatever you wanner call ’em, they can’t go into a Christian church without they vomits. I seen it in a film. Ole black and white job. Mark o’ the Witch, some shit like that. Chucks her—’

‘Stop it!’ Jane screamed. ‘You bastard!’

‘You year some’ing then, Gittoes?’ Dean leaned back smugly. ‘Makes you think, though, dunnit? Why don’t Jane Watkins ever go to church of a Sunday? You ever see Jane in church?’

‘Don’t go, do I?’

‘Well me neither, but my gran does and ’er says to me the other day, ’er says, You never sees the vicar’s daughter at no services, do you? En’t right, that. En’t right at all!

‘She was there tonight,’ Danny Gittoes said. ‘I seen ’er goin’ in. School uniform an’ all.’

‘Ec ... sacly,’ Dean said. ‘Exacly, boy. Special occasion, so ‘er’d need to be there, bring down the forces of darkness, innit? Now ... No, listen, this is interestin’ ... You remember that night Jane threw up on us. Where’d that happen exacly? Right outside the bloody church! In fact ... in fact... it was up agin’ the ole church wall, right? So that’s holy ground, ennit? An’ we said, we said we was all gonner go in the church porch, open a coupler cans, and that was when she done it. You think about that, Gittoes ...’

‘Fuckin’ hell, Dean—’

Danny Gittoes broke off because the lights began to fade and the strobing began from the stage, Dr Samedi demonstrating something. Dean’s voice rose placidly out of the flashes.

‘She only got to think about goin’ in the church porch, see, an’ up it comes. Splat. Well, all right, Jane never threw up tonight, see, but her evil presence in that church was enough to—’

Jane threw herself at him, knocking the glass out of his hand, seeing alarm on his fat, porous face, but, because of the strobe, when she saw it again it was wearing a grin and he was on his feet, around her side of the table and his arms were around her.

‘Wanner dance with me, is it ... devil woman?’

‘Get your filthy—’

Dean gripped her tightly; she felt something hard against her stomach. She realized that in the strobe it might look as though they were actually snogging. She couldn’t kick him because of the chair legs in the way. She wondered where she could bite him without encountering great pools of sweat.

‘All right.’ Quentin was on his feet. ‘Now let’s stop this.’

‘Hey,’ Dean said over Jane’s shoulder. ‘It fuckin’ talks. I ‘ad it figured for one ‘o Doc Samedi’s zombies.’

‘You just ... just let her go,’ Quentin said uncertainly.

‘Let her geeeow! What you gonner do about it, sunshine? Phone up your dad on the mobile, is it?’

Through the flashes, Jane saw that Danny Gittoes had pushed his chair back but was still sitting on it. The third boy, Mark, however, had moved in from the door. His hands were out of his pockets, something gleaming in one of them.

Jane screamed, ‘He’s got a knife!’

And the room went quiet.

‘Lights,’ someone snapped. Dean Wall’s arms went slack and Jane stepped away as the strobe stopped and the main lights came up.

Barry, the manager, ex-SAS, came across the room like a small tank. Behind him, Lloyd Powell.

‘Who shouted?’ Barry demanded.

Jane looked across at Mark. He was a slight, quiet-looking, mousy-haired boy. You tended not to notice him. Both arms hung by his side, the hands empty. Could she have been mistaken?

She looked away from Mark and across at Barry. ‘Sorry. I thought someone had a knife.’

‘One of these boys?’ Lloyd Powell wandered over, hooked out a chair with his foot to see if anything had been kicked under it. Lloyd looked pretty cool in a timeless sort of way; he was the only guy here who could get away with wearing a patched tweed jacket over his jeans and denim workshirt.

‘I didn’t really see,’ Jane said. ‘There was just a sort of flash. But with the strobelights ... Sorry.’

‘All right,’ Barry said. ‘You.’ Stabbing a finger at Dean Wall then Danny Gittoes, then Mark. ‘Out.’

‘Aw, come on, man.’ Dean stepped away from Jane. ‘We was only havin’ a laugh. Tell ‘im, Lloyd.’

‘You’re outer line, boy,’ Lloyd said sternly. He folded his arms, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Barry.

‘Out,’ Barry said. ‘Now.’

Danny Gittoes stood up and edged towards the door. Some of the kids began to move back towards the walls. Dr Samedi stood protectively in front of his main console. Dean Wall didn’t move.

‘You’ve got five seconds,’ Barry said, like they were terrorists or something. ‘And that includes the door closing behind you.’

It was starting to look nasty. Then Colette was there.

‘Ease up, Barry.’

There was silence. Jane reckoned that every man in the room must be looking at Colette, including Barry and Lloyd. She looked like she’d stepped out of one of those moody, sexy, Sunday-supplement fashion spreads, one of the threadlike straps of her tight, black dress just parted from the shoulder, a perfect dab of perspiration in the little cleft over her top lip. She looked about twenty-seven and drop-dead gorgeous.

‘I’d be prepared to bet these lads are not on the guest list,’ Barry said stiffly. ‘You know your parents’ rules.’

‘One of my rules, Barry,’ Colette said, ‘was that the word parents would not be mentioned in here tonight, yeah?’

‘Sorry, Colette, but they pay my wages. We have a guest list, nobody comes in they’re not on it.’

‘These are local guys,’ Colette said. ‘We don’t want to be seen as snobbish, do we?’

Dean Wall leered at Colette. ‘Tell the bastard, darlin’. These ex-SAS guys, they en’t got it out their system, see. They’re jus’ lookin’ for innocent people to beat up.’

‘Shut it, lad.’ Barry’s lips barely moved.

‘What you gonner do? You got a Heckler and Koch down your trousers, is it?’

Danny Gittoes laughed feebly.

‘Don’t push it, boy,’ Lloyd Powell said.

Dean turned on him. ‘Shit, Powell, I thought you were a mate.’

‘You’re outer line, boy.’

‘Colette, look ...’ Barry lowered his voice. ‘It’s getting late.’

‘So it is ...’

Colette’s eyes were shining with a steady, steely light that didn’t seem quite natural to Jane. Had she taken something? Well, of course she had. The eyes turned on Barry.

‘I mean, I know you army guys like your early nights, but you’re in the catering trade now, Baz.’

‘Just there’s a little ceremony planned,’ Barry said uncomfortably.

Colette gave him a hard stare. ‘What did you say?’

‘It’s your birthday party.’ Barry blushed. ‘We’ve got this ... cake.’

‘For fuck’s sake!’ Colette looked appalled. ‘Who’s idea was that?’

‘Your mother’s.’

‘Jesus wept!’ Jane saw Colette’s fists clench. ‘How old they think I am? Six?’

‘Please,’ Barry said. ‘It was supposed to be a surprise.’

‘Jesus Christ?’ Colette’s whole body went rigid and Jane saw tears of outrage and betrayal spring into her eyes. ‘They’re not coming?’

Barry gritted his teeth. ‘Just for a few minutes.’

Colette began to breathe rapidly, her breasts rising half out of the shiny, black dress, bringing a half-suppressed whimper out of Dean Wall.

‘I’m sorry,’ Barry said.

‘You little toad, Barry,’ Colette spat. ‘You little fucking toad. You lied to me! They lied to me. What time?’

‘It’s after midnight.’

‘I mean what time are they coming, shifhead?’

‘Just before one,’ Barry said. ‘Look, Colette, you’re their daughter – you can’t blame them for wanting to share just a few minutes of your party.’

‘Balls. They just want to wind things up while the place is still intact and embarrass the piss out of me at the same time.’

‘Come on, love, you’d be winding up by then, anyway.’

‘Like fuck we would.’

Colette strode away, the tips of two fingers to her mouth, thinking hard, that cold light in her eyes. A rock slide of emotions came down on Jane, a giddying combination of nervousness and extreme excitement.

She watched Colette approach Dr Samedi, the whole room in a hush. Everybody looking for the first time tonight, Jane thought, like kids, unsure of how they were supposed to react to the hostess throwing a wobbly. Colette was speaking quickly to Dr Samedi, who started to back away, making sweeping motions with his hands, Colette pursuing him, her voice rising.

‘... getting half a fucking grand for this, Jeff, remember?’

Dr Samedi glanced wildly from side to side, at the spread of his equipment, and Colette carried on advancing and talking ferociously at him, until he had his back against one of the big speakers, his top hat fallen off, and he seemed to concede, submit, whatever, his head nodding wearily. Colette smiled grimly, walked back to the centre of the room.

‘All right. Everybody listen up. Seems some of you are not, like, considered suitable.’

Dean Wall whooped.

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Colette waved a dismissive hand. ‘Wall’s first taste of fame, very sad. OK ... So if some of us are not welcome, I think we should all go, yeah?’

‘Thank God for that,’ Quentin sighed. But Jane suspected he was being seriously premature.

‘It’s not a bad night out there, right?’ Colette said.

‘Could be better,’ a boy shouted bravely.

‘It will be. I reckon we get out of this shithole, take the action into the streets, yeah?’

There was half a second of hesitation before the roars of enthusiasm started gathering their meaningless momentum.

‘Struth.’ Barry rammed his hands into his jacket pockets, glared at the floor. Jane was standing quite close to him now and she heard him mutter to Lloyd Powell out of the side of his mouth, ‘You better tag along with them, mate. I’ll make an anonymous call to the police.’

Jane thought, Uh-oh.

25 Carnival

MERRILY MOVED INTO the dark kitchen, carrying the poker.

The Aga chuntered smugly in its insulated world. She laid a palm flat on one of its hotplate covers, held it there until it felt uncomfortably warm.

What else could she do? Pinch herself? Did that really work? In the event, as she pulled away, she tripped on the edge of the rug and ... ‘Oh shit?’ dropped the poker, bumped her knee violently on a hard corner of the Aga, sending a bullet of pain spinning to the top of her head.

She staggered to the switches, slammed on all the lights, bent down, rubbing hard at her knee. Apart from severe pain, what other proof could you give yourself that you were, in fact, fully awake, not dreaming?

No, it was all real. It was quiet up there now, but the noise she’d heard from the drawing room had been real. And it wasn’t a mouse, it wasn’t a squirrel, it wasn’t a bird in the eaves, it wasn’t ...

Real. What was real? Was a minister of the Church obliged to consult a psychiatrist these days to find out?

Another small bump.

Slowly, holding back her breath, Merrily picked up the poker.

Closer, this time. Certainly not at the top of the house. She looked at the scullery door, which was never opened. The so-called scullery was a narrow room, probably something connected with the dairy in centuries past. They’d found no use for it as yet, never went in.

She lifted the metal latch and went through, wrinkling her nose as her hair mingled with greasy cobwebs. At the far end, another door opened on to a small, square hall. She found a switch and a dangling economy bulb sputtered on, curled-up white tubes like some frozen bodily organ sending shadows up walls already going black with damp. The absence of oak beams in here suggested it was a Victorian addition. Opposite her was the second back door, still boarded up.

Except it wasn’t. The boards had been prised away; they were leaning against a wall, rusty nails sticking out of them. This was recent. Very recent. Jane. The separate door to the Apartment, soon to have an illuminated bell and a dinky little nameplate: Ms Jane Watkins. The door leading up, via the disused back stairs that you would forget were even here.

The stairs came out at a black, wooden door. Her fingers found a hole to lift the latch. Of course, she knew where the stairs came out, but it seemed strange seeing it from this angle, the dim, first-floor passage with all the doors, all of them locked now, since the Sean dream, and the keys taken out and thrown into an ashtray in the kitchen.

Padding past the locked doors, she arrived at the top of the main stairs, the oak-balustraded landing with its window full of pale, night sky. She stood at the foot of the second stairway to Jane’s apartment. Why was she doing this? Despite the unsealing of the second back door, she knew there was nobody up there. Nobody real. Why was she putting herself through this?

Because I’m a priest, and priests are not supposed to be scared because they know that the strength and certainty of their faith protects them from the evil that walks by night ... don’t they just?

Oh really ... Jane came up here all the time, for heaven’s sake. Jane skipped up here, never a thought, with books and boxes and cans of variously coloured paint and brushes and CDs, to be locked away in her secret study.

It’s me. It only happens to me.

I’m a sick woman.

She thought.

Before registering that one of the doors on the landing was already half-open and a shadow-figure was watching her from the threshold.

Jane knew it was going wrong when she saw Mark and this unknown older guy in the unlit doorway of the computer shop, Marches Media.

Or maybe wrong was the way it was supposed to go. A party ain’t a party without tension.

Maybe this party was going exactly the way Colette had planned ... the plan hardening up when she learned she was being double-crossed by her parents. Actually, Jane didn’t see what was so wrong with having a sixteenth birthday cake. And if the Cassidys wanted to share the moment – well, they had paid for everything. And let her use their precious restaurant.

Maybe Colette was going just a bit over the top.

Jane watched from the cobbles, leaning against one of the oaken uprights of the market cross. With a low-burning excitement, because it was obvious what was going on down there in the shadowed doorway of Marches Media: the mousy Mark and the older guy were busy dealing drugs.

And no shortage of customers. The nice boys from good families. Going in one after another, schoolkids at the tuck-shop. Not all the guests, but enough of them to put the market square well into orbit. This would be a good, safe pitch – rich kids at a posh party in a select restaurant in a picture-postcard village encircled by hills and woodland and with no resident police. Profitable, too. Most of these guys would have no idea of current street prices.

Not that Jane did. It was just cool to watch from the shadows and speculate about these things.

She was on her own now. The craven Quentin had made a swift escape, car keys in hand, a couple of other vehicles also puttering pusillanimously away from the square. She saw Dean Wall and Danny Gittoes watching Colette, keeping a respectful distance. A heavy chick.

She and Dr Samedi were at the back of his Transit van, one rear door open. Dr Samedi backing out, arms full of something black, the size and shape of a child’s coffin. ‘Oh yes!’ Colette cried. ‘Yes, yes yes!’

Dr Samedi was still unhappy and wouldn’t let go of whatever it was. But tonight you didn’t argue with Colette; she wrapped her arms around the black thing, wrestling with poor Jeff, until they both sprang back and the black box was in Colette’s arms now.

Lloyd Powell was watching from the foot of the Black Swan steps. Mr Responsible, Jane thought. He might seem cool now, with that rangy Paul Weller look and his white pick-up truck, but Lloyd would turn, as the years went by, into his father, get elected on to the council. By which time Rod would have shrunken into Edgar, half-baked and not to be trusted with a shotgun. It was the depressing side of country life; they all seemed to know their place in the Pattern and the Pattern didn’t change.

People like Colette fascinated them because they were part of a different pattern, Jane thought. But there was no meaningful overlap. She was thinking what a really profound philosophical concept this was, when it all began.

‘All right!’

A voice crackling into the night. Dr Samedi had materialized under swathes of bunting put up for tomorrow’s festival launch. He held an old-fashioned trumpet loud hailer. His top hat was back on.

‘How you doin’? Sweatin’? Yeah!’

A few cheers. Dean Wall’s familiar whoop.

‘All right!’ Dr Samedi raised the white loud hailer up over his head. A signal, obviously. Because, at that moment, the perfectly preserved medieval market square of rural Ledwardine just ... well, just erupted.

The black thing, like a small coffin, had proclaimed itself, in the way it knew best, as a huge ghetto-blaster with about eight speakers. It was sitting on the roof of the van now, pumping tumultuous drum and bass into the square at this unbelievable volume, and Colette Cassidy was bouncing up and down beside the van and screaming, ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!’

A circle of people rapidly formed around her, everybody moving in a way it was hard not to when the big, black beat was everywhere and loud enough to pop up all the cobbles on the square. Oh my God, Jane thought, they’ll hear this in the centre of Hereford.

‘Welcome, ma friends ...’

Dr Samedi’s phoney West Indian drawl had been processed by the primitive megaphone into a deep and eerie croak.

‘Wel-come ... to ... de ... carn-i-valf

The ceiling light was blurred and swirling.

She was waking up. She’d been asleep. Dreamed it all. Again. Oh my God.

It was not possible. Hadn’t she heated her hands on the Aga, gripped the poker until it hurt, bashed her knee so hard the pain had given her a headache? Proving beyond all doubt that she was awake?

The light above her was in a warm, orange shade. Jane’s shade. Taken with her from Birmingham to Liverpool to Ledwardine ...

To the third floor.

She was in Jane’s bedroom, in the Apartment. Lying on Jane’s bed. She didn’t remember coming here. Why would she come in here, lie down on Jane’s bed? Fear streaked through her and she struggled to sit up and looked into a blank, grey, oval face with dark slits for eyes.

Merrily screamed and squirmed away. Hurled herself back against the headboard, slamming it into the wall behind.

‘It’s OK!’

The grey face was printed on a jumper, a sweatshirt. Over it was a real face behind glasses. The real face looked scared.

‘No ... look ... hey ...’ he said. ‘I’m harmless.’

She looked down, registering that she was fully dressed, the bed unrumpled.

‘Mrs Watkins ... I’m really, really sorry.’

‘Christ.’

‘I thought you might need a cup of tea ...’

One of her cups coming at her, on one of her saucers. She didn’t move.

‘What are you doing? What are you doing in ...’

Aware that, even in her fear, she couldn’t say, What are you doing in my house? It wasn’t. It was the vicarage. It was huge and alien and maybe this man lived here, too, in some derelict attic room, coming and going by the forgotten back stairs. Part of the mad, sporadic nightmare. Oh God, get me out of here.

‘I’m a kind of ... friend of Jane’s.’ He was very untogether; big, unsteady eyes behind the glasses. Like a scared version of the alien on his sweater.

‘Where is she?’

‘She went to a party. See, what happened, we met in the street, I needed to take a look at my cat, and she just like brought me up here, you know? Jane says, you know, Bring her inside, we’ll have a look at her. Obviously I didn’t realize she meant ... her room. Believe me, there is no way I’d’ve come up here.’

‘Cat,’ Merrily said.

‘Somebody gave her a kicking. We brought her up here and then she got away. We must’ve touched her in the wrong place. I’m sorry. I don’t do things like this.’

She accepted the tea with numb relief. ‘You’ve got an injured cat somewhere in the house? Wandering around, making bumping noises maybe.’

‘Probably.’

Merrily could hear heavy music coming through the trees from the square, insistent as a road drill. This wasn’t going to endear the Cassidys to their neighbours. ‘Let’s go downstairs,’ she said. ‘I need a cigarette.’

It wasn’t long before they started coming out of their homes, gathering in small groups. You could see pyjama bottoms sticking out of trouser turn-ups, one woman in an actual hairnet. Big torches, walking sticks.

‘Who’s in charge here?’ a man shouted. Not a local voice. A sort of retired colonel voice.

The music was turned up even higher. Maybe fifty people dancing. Someone grabbed hold of Jane’s arm, tried to pull her into the crush of quivering bodies.

It was Colette. ‘Aw, come on, Janey. Get your shit together. Stuff the Reverend Mumsy. Like she’s in any position to complain.’

‘You’re disturbing the peace!’ The man’s voice rose again. ‘This is noise pollution. If you don’t turn that racket off and go away now, at once, I’m going to call the police! Do you hear me?’

Jane let herself be dragged in, knowing they were all on borrowed time. If Barry hadn’t rung the police already, quite a few people were surely doing it right now; you looked up and you could see small, furious faces peering out of dark windows, could imagine outraged fingers stiffly prodding out 999. Anticipating it, Mark and his friend had already disappeared from the Marches Media doorway. But whatever they’d been selling was taking effect: all around her, open mouths and too-bright eyes.

‘We comin’ out,’ rapped Dr Samedi. ‘We comin’ back. We gonna turn, gonna turn de whole sky black.’ But he no longer sounded in control.

A boy pushed past Jane, having come out of the antique shop doorway, zipping up his jeans. ‘Did you see that?’ a woman yelped. ‘That yob’s just urinated in there!’

‘You hear me?’ the man shouted. ‘I’m calling the police!’

‘Oh, do fuck off, grandad!’ replied a girl with an equally posh voice, and there were wild peals of laughter and somebody turned the music up even higher, so that even Dr Samedi was drowned out.

But they were on borrowed time and Jane wasn’t unhappy about that because she needed to get back and find out about Lol. Lol who’d come over very weird when she’d taken him up the back stairs and he’d found himself in her room. Backing off, shaking his head, saying this was a mistake. His agitation picked up by Ethel, the cat, squirming out of his arms and disappearing into the bowels of the vicarage.

Lol was in trouble. He couldn’t go home because Karl was in there and Lol, for reasons Jane still couldn’t quite put together, was scared of Karl. And was also – for reasons even more obscure – scared of her. He’d seemed relieved to pack her off to the party, to hide out there alone in the part of the house where Mum was banned. He wouldn’t be there when she got home, he said. He’d wait until Ethel reappeared and then he’d go. She’d left him her secret key to lock the small back door behind him; he’d leave it, he said, with Lucy.

But what if Karl was still in the cottage when he got back? Where would Lol go then?

One idea had occurred to Jane. Maybe she could get a few of the guys from the party – rugby-player types – to go over to Lol’s place and force that bastard out of there. But the state they were in now, how could you even explain to them what was needed? By the time they made it to Blackberry Lane they’d have forgotten why they were going.

Chaos. Nothing more unstable than well-brought-up kids on the loose in some place they and their parents weren’t known.

The music stopped.

The silence was deafening. Beyond the hollow roaring in her ears, Jane heard the sound of car engines.

‘OK.’ Colette’s voice over the loud hailer. ‘Listen up. It’s probably the filth, yeah? We’re moving on. Don’t worry, no cars required. Follow me ... or Janey. Where’s Janey? She knows.’

It wasn’t the police. The car that turned on to the edge of the square was a Volvo like Mum’s, only about ten years younger. Both front doors opened at once.

The Cassidys.

‘Janey,’ Colette called out. ‘OK?’ And then the loud hailer was silent.

Jane didn’t move. What was Colette saying to her? She knows. What? She slipped back under the market cross as Terrence Cassidy appeared on the cobbles, panting. ‘Colette! Where are you? Please—’ and was almost pulled off his feet by the stampede from the square.

‘Colette!’

Mrs Cassidy was less circumspect. ‘The unutterable little bitch. I knew something like this would—’

‘Colette,’ Terrence implored. ‘Where are you. Why are you doing this to us?’

‘It’s ‘cause you’re such a wanker, mate,’ Dean Wall confided chattily over his shoulder and cackled and followed the others.

The music had resumed, from the top of Church Street, booming off into the churchyard. Jane’s shoulder brushed against a poster tacked to one of the pillars of the market cross, bold black and yellow lettering inside a big red apple, LEDWARDINE SUMMER FESTIVAL: OFFICIAL OPENING, SATURDAY, MAY 23. MARKET SQUARE 2.00 p.m. BE THERE!

‘Bloody hell!’

Jane found Dr Samedi next to her, the loud hailer dangling limply from his hand. Back in Midlands mode.

‘Can y’ believe it? She’s buggered off with my flamin’ box. Bloody rich kids. I hate bloody rich kids, I do. Gimme ghetto any day of the week.’

‘Sorry, Jeff. She’s hard to stop when she gets going.’

‘That don’t help me, does it?’

And suddenly, Jane knew where Colette was taking them.

‘Oh no.’ She looked around for help, but the Cassidys had rushed into their restaurant, presumably to assess the damage and take it out on Barry. Even the locals were melting away – wherever the mob was heading, it was at least out of their earshot, away from their backyards, so what did they care?

‘Thing is,’ Dr Samedi was moaning, ‘I don’t know if my insurance covers this.’

Jane saw a tall figure strolling towards the churchyard.

‘Lloyd!’

Lloyd Powell turned and waited for her under the fake gaslight, Jane found herself clutching at his sleeve.

‘You’ve got to stop them.’

‘I think we’ll wait for the police, don’t you, Miss Watkins?’

‘No!’ You could never tell with people like Lloyd whether they called you Miss out of politeness or because they were laughing at you. ‘They’re going to the orchard. You can stop them. It’s your land. You can go in there and turn them out.’

‘On my own?’

He was laughing at her. Everybody knew the Powells didn’t really care about their orchard.

But they should. They should.

‘Please. It’s not safe. It’s not respectful. You’ve got to get them out. Please, Lloyd.’

‘Hey.’ He put his big, rugged hands on her shoulders, peered at her from under his Paul Weller fringe. ‘Don’t get into a state about this. They’re just daft kids.’

‘Please.’ She was crying now.

‘All right,’ Lloyd said. ‘I’ll go and see what I can do.’ He smiled wryly, hunching his shoulders. ‘You wanner come?’

‘Oh no,’ Jane said. ‘I couldn’t.’

She stood on the edge of the cobbles, hopelessly confused, awfully apprehensive for reasons she couldn’t explain.

26 The Mondrian Walls

‘BLEEDING FROM THE mouth,’ Merrily said.

Lol Robinson held Ethel on the kitchen table. ‘That means internal injuries?’

He looked shattered. They’d found the little black cat cowering into the side of the Aga.

‘Who did this?’

He didn’t reply, which meant he knew. In the hall Merrily found an old quilted body-warmer she’d kept for gardening.

‘You know what to do with this?’

‘I’ve never actually had a cat before.’

‘You wrap her up tight, so there’s just her head sticking out. So there’s plenty between you and the claws?’

‘Er ... right’

‘Never mind. Just grab her by the scruff and don’t let go. No ... You have to be firm, Lol.’

‘I’m not really a firm person,’ Lol said.

Merrily rolled up the sleeves of her sweater. She opened out the jacket, swept it swiftly around the cat. She tucked the ends around Ethel’s claws.

‘Anybody I might know? Anybody whose soiled soul I should be praying for?’

‘Any spare prayers,’ he said quietly, ‘I would hang on to them.’

‘No prayers are wasted.’ Handing him a bundle with a small black head sticking out. ‘Hold her very tightly. God, these lights are crap.’

He glanced up at her.

‘Yeah, I know, some people would call that taking the Lord’s name in vain.’ Trying to prise the jaws apart. ‘No, tight, Lol, you’ve got a leg coming out. The way I see it, it helps keep the holy names in circulation. Especially when used in times of stress.’

Ethel’s mouth snapped open; Merrily gritted her teeth, slipped a forefinger inside.

‘Not entirely sure whether I should’ve used it in the same sentence as crap, mind ... See there? Lost a tooth. Possibly a couple. Where the blood’s coming from.’

‘Not internal?’

‘Don’t think so.’ She touched the spot; Ethel writhed. ‘Good.’

‘God,’ said Lol. ‘Thank you.’

‘One of my uncles used to be a vet. In Cheltenham.’

‘I wanted to be a vet when I was a kid, then I found out you had to put things down a lot. She’ll be OK?’

‘If you’re still worried, you can pop her over to a real vet in the morning. You can let her go now.’

They watched the liberated Ethel make like a bullet for the door to the scullery. Merrily held up her finger with blood and a tiny, white splinter on the end.

‘That’s probably the last bit of it. So ...’ She sat down and lit a cigarette. ‘Talk to me, Mr Robinson. I’m a priest.’

It was fairly quiet on the square now, but she could hear music coming from somewhere else, fainter. It didn’t seem a problem but it didn’t make sense.

Ethel had reappeared in the doorway, looking miffed but not distressed. Merrily wished Jane would also show.

She smoked in silence while he told her about this guy, now occupying his cottage, who’d been in the band, Hazey Jane, with him years ago and had come back from the States with ambitions involving Lol and some new songs and an album. Which sounded reasonable.

‘Just I have problems with this guy,’ Lol said.

‘He knows that?’

‘He doesn’t seem to realize how deep it goes.’

‘Not a sensitive person, then.’

‘That would be about right,’ Lol said. ‘And he drinks. And when he drinks he gets over-emotional.’

‘Violent temper.’

‘As you saw.’

‘And he’s in your house. He’s broken in.’

‘Right.’

‘So – pardon me if this is incredibly naive – but why don’t you just call the police?’

Almost immediately she regretted asking that. He looked like he’d rather throw himself in the river.

The police arrived, just the two of them in a car. No hurry, no panic – except on the part of the Cassidys, who came out of the alley to meet them, with Barry the manager.

Jane crept back under the market hall to listen, blending into the mingled shadows of the oak pillars.

‘Certainly seems quiet enough now,’ one of the cops said.

‘That’ – Caroline Cassidy was in tears – ‘is because they’ve gone on some sort of drug-crazed rampage. Everything was perfectly under control, all decent, well-behaved young people from good families, no strong drink. And then it was gatecrashed by some ghastly local thugs. Barry ... Barry, you tell them.’

‘Exactly as Mrs Cassidy says,’ Barry said, the crawling sod. ‘It was all fine until these lads came in. Somebody must’ve let them in, because we had the doors bolted. Well, with the flashing lights and things I didn’t notice them for a while. But they brought the drugs in, no question.’

‘Kind of drugs, Mr Bloom?’

‘Oh, well, Ecstasy, I reckon. Probably some amphetamines. Crack, maybe, I wouldn’t rule it out. They target parties, don’t they?’

‘You know them?’

‘Seen ’em around. There’s a thin lad, about seventeen. Mark ... Putley? Dad’s got the garage on the Leominster Road. Then the fat one, Dean ... Dean ... I can find out.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!’ Mrs Cassidy was close to hysteria. ‘They’ve gone into the woods. They’ve taken my daughter!’

Unbelievable. Jane longed to step out there and tell them it was the other way round, that if they pulled in Colette, it would all be sorted out. Tonight, Colette was overstepping even Jane’s mark. On the other hand, she didn’t want to get involved. She just wanted the police to get them out of the orchard.

‘And where were you while this was going on, Mrs Cassidy?’

‘My wife and I,’ said Terrence, ‘were having discussions with Mr Richard Coffey, the playwright, at his home. Earlier, we’d been to an event at the church.’

‘All right. And you think the kids’ve gone into some woods?’

‘The orchard. Down there, through the churchyard. The Powells’ land.’

‘I don’t think we’re going to get too excited about trespass at the moment, sir. You think they’ve got drugs with them, that’s going to be our main interest.’

‘And my daughter ...’

‘Quite.’

Lol was cleaning his glasses on the hem of his sweatshirt. Without them, he looked bewildered and innocent, an ageing teenager. She was supposed to turn him out now, with his injured cat in his arms?

‘You obviously can’t go home tonight.’ Teapot and cigarettes between them on the kitchen table. ‘You need to give this guy a chance to sober up and realize what he’s done. So if you don’t mind a sleeping bag, you could stay here. We’ve got masses of bedrooms, no beds.’

Lol said that was really nice of her, but it was OK, really, he’d got a car down the road. Merrily thought the state he was in he’d probably pile it into a tree.

‘Look at it this way. One of the oldest traditions of the Church is offering sanctuary. I’ve always liked to do that. I’m not good at much else. I write lousy sermons, my voice is too tuneless to lead the hymns, I get upset at funerals and I’ve had a really bad night. So just give me a break, huh?’

‘I heard about that,’ Lol said.

‘Heard what?’

‘That you ... weren’t well.’

Merrily felt for another cigarette. ‘Who told you that?’

‘I ... overheard somebody talking about it.’

‘Saying what?’ She bit on the cigarette, fumbled for her lighter.

‘That you were ill. At your inauguration service.’

‘Word travels fast in a village.’ By tomorrow half the county would know. She stood up. ‘Let’s get this sleeping bag sorted out.’

‘You’re still not well, are you, Mrs Watkins?’

‘I’m Merrily. And I’m fine. Just need to eat sometime, but it’s a little early for breakfast. I’m trying to think where we put the sleeping bags. I think Jane’s room. Jane’s apartment!

He followed her upstairs, the main stairs this time.

‘It’s a big house, isn’t it?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Would it be OK if I slept downstairs?’

‘Wherever you like.’ She waited for him on the upper landing. Glad he’d said that, she didn’t quite like the idea of a stranger up here with Jane.

The sleeping bags weren’t in the kid’s bedroom. Which left the sitting room/study, into which Merrily had been forbidden to go until the completion of the famous Mondrian walls. Well, this was an emergency, and it was Jane’s fault, so she’d have to slip in there, grab one of the bags and just not look at the walls.

But the door was locked. ‘Damn. The kid is so exasperating sometimes. I like to think I’ve never been the kind of mother who spies, you know?’

Lol said tentatively, ‘I think there was a key on the bedside table. In Jane’s room.’

‘Makes sense. She’d hardly take it to Colette’s party.’

Feeling a need to explain, she said, ‘Jane’s had this long-term plan to paint the plaster squares and rectangles between the wall-beams in different colours, so it’d be like sitting inside this huge Mondrian painting. You know Mondrian. Dutch painter? We had a couple of days in London last year and we went to this exhibition of his stuff, and when we came here she got this ambitious idea. It probably looks terrible.’

The key fitted. The sleeping bags were rolled up behind the door. Merrily could have gathered one up, brought it out with barely a glance at the Mondrian walls. Maybe she’d have done that. If they’d been Mondrian walls, nice plain squares of colour.

‘What ...?’ She froze in the doorway.

‘You OK?’

‘No.’ Merrily put on the lights.

The walls had been painted all one colour. Blue. Midnight blue, divided by the timber-framing. But the timbers were part of it. Painted branches were made to protrude from them, thicker ones closer to the floor, becoming more plentiful as they neared the ceiling where they all joined together in a mesh.

As though she’d tried to bring the timbers in the wall alive, turn them back into trees.

‘I don’t understand.’ Merrily fought to keep her voice level.

‘Must have taken her a long time,’ Lol said.

‘Must have taken her whole nights. Why? What does it mean?’

He didn’t reply. He was looking at the ceiling. Among the beams and the intertwining branches were many small orbs of yellow and white, meticulously painted. Lights in the trees.

‘Little golden lanterns,’ Lol said. ‘Hanging in the night.’

She thought he must be quoting some line of half-remembered poetry.

The police left their car on the square and walked towards the church gates. Jane followed them, about thirty yards behind.

‘Some back-up, you reckon, Kirk?’ one said.

‘In bloody Ledwardine, in the early hours? Let’s take a look around first. It turns out they’ve just gone in there for a smoke and a shag, we’re gonner look like prats.’

The first two people to come out of the orchard walked straight into the two policemen. They were Danny Gittoes and Dean Wall. They were both drunk.

‘Aw shit.’ Dean put up his hands. ‘I never done it, officer.’

‘Over by the wall, lads. Let’s have your names.’

Dean and Danny were having their pockets turned out when Jane slipped behind a row of graves and past them into the orchard. Moving not stealthily but with great care, excusing herself as she passed between the trees. Respect is the important thing, Lucy Devenish said. Individual trees can be trimmed and pruned and chopped down when they are dying, but you must always show respect for the orchard as an entity. Never take an apple after the harvest. Never touch the trees in spring. Never take the blossom. Never ever bring any into the house.

Spending hours with Lucy and Lucy’s books, there wasn’t much she didn’t know now about apples and orchards. Knowledge was the best defence, Lucy said. Knowledge or felicity. Thomas Traherne had learned felicity. Had discovered, against all the odds, the secret of happiness through oneness with nature, with the orb.

Sometimes over the past week, usually in the daytime, Jane’s worldly self had told her other self that this was all absolute, total bollocks.

But now, with the white-clothed apple trees all around her, the blossom hanging from them like robes, it was Lucy’s world that seemed like the real world.

The moon had come out, and its milky light bathed the Powell orchard, and Jane felt she was on the threshold of a great mystery.

If Dean Walls and Danny Gittoes were refusing to come quietly, Jane wasn’t aware of it. If the bassy music was still booming from Dr Samedi’s black box, she could no longer hear it. If the guests at Colette’s party were making their stoned, confused way among the tangle of trees, she couldn’t see them.

Although there were figures here, she was sure. Pale and glistening, moonbeam shapes interweaving amid the blossom branches, as though each blanched petal had a ghost, and all these spirit petals had coalesced into translucent, dancing figurines.

And you wanted to join them in the dance, far finer and more fluid than the grossness on the square. The further into the orchard you went, the lighter you felt. As though you too were made of petals and could be fragmented and blown away by a breeze, dissolving and separating, a snow of molecules, until you were absorbed into the moonbeams, disappearing from the mortal sight.

A bump. A bump stopped her.

A bump and a bouncing.

Jane bent down as it rolled almost to her feet. She picked it up. It was small and its skin was soft and puckered and withered like the cheeks of a very old woman.

She held it in the palm of her hand. It was no bigger than a billiard ball, though only a fraction as heavy. It must have been up on the tree all winter. Perhaps the only one. All winter through, and the birds had left it alone.

In most parts of Britain, according to Lucy’s books, a single apple that remained on a tree all winter was a harbinger of death.

A bloom on the tree when the apples are ripe

is a sure termination of somebody’s life.

(The fact that it didn’t really rhyme, Lucy said, was a sure sign of the truth in it.)

What did it mean when an overripe apple survived the winter to tumble from a tree in full blossom?

Jane thought back over everything that had happened tonight. The images stammering through her mind like a videotape in fast-reverse. The tape stopped at a moment in the church, Mum on her knees, bent over, then looking up, threads of vomit on her lips.

Looking up.

Jane’s arm jerked back in a spasm and she threw the mummified apple so far into the orchard she didn’t hear it land, and she turned and ran all the way to the vicarage.