Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

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

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

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

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

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Aye. Mabbe I do.’

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

‘And?’

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

‘Fireworks,’ said Merrily.

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

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

‘Not yet.’ Big Jim twinkling with anticipation.

‘Good evening, Ms Watkins.’

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

‘Hello,’ Merrily said, ‘Annie.’

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

‘Night off?’ Merrily said.

‘What do you think?’

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

‘You think we might be close?’

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

‘I pray that you are,’ she said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Help me, Lucy,’ Lol said.

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

It was pink.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Bessie?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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