Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

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

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

Stefan paused.

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

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

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

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

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

Teresa said, ‘Twelve. Twelve year old.’

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

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

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

‘It was.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How long did she cry at night?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Sixteen,’ Teresa whispered. ‘Sixteen that day, sir.’

In the long, hollow silence that followed, Merrily was aware of Gomer Parry edging out of his pew and then Stefan Alder was leaning over her, his lips against her ear. She could smell his sweat.

‘The light, please, Merrily. The spot. Five minutes?’

He was so screwed up he couldn’t think. He kept walking around the room, pulling books from the shelves. He didn’t know where to start. He had so little time and no idea where the hell to start.

He made himself sit down.

Traherne. Start with Traherne. How did Traherne come to know Wil Williams? Help me, Lucy. Just remind me.

Thinking back to when Lucy had first introduced him to Traherne, who had a link with Ledwardine through Wil Williams and ...

Hopton.

Susannah Hopton. The patroness.

It took Lol nearly twenty minutes to discover, from the various histories of Herefordshire, that Susannah Hopton had been the wife of a judge on the Welsh circuit who lived right on the border at Kington and was a devout high Anglican with some kind of circle of disciples. During the puritan Cromwellian years, Mrs Hopton had moved towards Roman Catholicism but returned after the Restoration of the monarchy. She had a strict and punishing regime of daily worship, which began before dawn. She was very fond of clergymen and her best-known protege was Thomas Traherne.

But Wil Williams, Lucy said, had become virtually a part of her household.

His background had equipped him to meet her schedules without difficulty.

‘I was born,’ Stefan said, ‘on a grey and wind-soured hill farm at Glascwm in Radnorshire.’

He looked down at his fingernails, as if remembering a time when they were black and ragged.

‘My father held seventy acres of rocky, boggy, clay-heavy, God-deserted earth. My father had little faith. No hope. And no conception of charity ...’

Stefan moved around the church; you could hear the crackling of his footsteps, the only sound, and wherever he would stop light would flare.

Candles.

All around the church, faces were lit by little, oval spears, and in this timeless light, the centuries dissolved, and you saw that essentially nothing had changed, farming faces no less rough and reddened than ever they were, than the stones themselves. And no face more severely stony than Garrod Powell’s. An axe to grind ... Merrily recalled the councillor’s fist striking the table in the village hall ... Let him grind it somewhere else, sir. Not in our church. And would he say a word tonight? Probably not. No muscle would twitch in Rod’s puritan face, no eyebrow rise.

There were no stray breezes in the church tonight, and the flames were vertical, sending up wispy tapers of smoke and that faintly bitter, singeing aroma.

Faces. She saw the moon-bland countenance of Dermot Child. He had not looked at her. She saw the pert, urban features of Caroline Cassidy made gaunt and austere by the wan and waxy light and the anxiety that many a mother knew in the seventeenth century when so many children would expire in infancy. Caroline had not noticed her.

Then she saw Alison Kinnersley. Who had slipped into the back central pew occupied, at the other end, by Annie Howe.

Behind them, Jane hovered. Merrily walked over, made a little signal with a forefinger to tell her to put on the left-hand spot. She could easily have done the lights herself, but it was an excuse to have the kid safely in the building. Jane nodded.

By the time the spot came on, a dusty yellow tunnel from the rafters to the area below the pulpit, Stefan was there, sitting on the second step, half in the beam, half in shadow. He began to speak conversationally, as though to friends, about his adoption by a rich and pious woman who recognized in him an intelligence, a longing and a purity of spirit so rare it required special nurturing.

He had everyone’s attention. The world of Wil Williams. But he spoke boastfully, and that wouldn’t go down well. Herefordshire people were generally laid-back and self-effacing.

All around her, Merrily felt a cloudy, ancient atmosphere, but when she looked at Stefan she saw ... an actor.