Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

Emerging from the lustrous oakiness of the Black Swan, Jane skipped down the five steps to the cobbles. These were mainly new cobbles, the original ones being so worn away by horses’ hoofs that they’d apparently been considered too dangerous; smart ladies en route to Cassidy’s Country Kitchen might fracture their stiletto heels.

The alleyway was just yards from the bottom of the steps. It was tres bijou, the most terminally bijou part of the village, all bulging walls and lamp-brackets. In the days when the Black Swan was a coaching inn, it was probably a mews, with stables. Now the stables and an attached barn had become Cassidy’s Country Kitchen, with its deli and its restaurant, specializing in game and salmon and things served in nouvelle-cuisine-size portions at silly prices. Jane thought she’d have preferred it in the old days when the best you could expect was a nosebag full of oats.

There were a few early tourists about. Also the famous Colette Cassidy, shrugged into the Country Kitchen doorway, looking like a high-class hooker in a short, white dress. She raised an eyebrow at Jane but didn’t smile. Jane, in jeans and an old blue Pulp T-shirt, breezed past with a noncommittal ‘Hi’.

Ledwardine Lore was at the very end of the mews, crunched into a corner by the flatulent spread of the Country Kitchen. The sign over the window was uptilted so that ‘Lore’ was almost pointing at the twisted chimney; if it had been horizontal they’d never have squeezed all the letters in. As she pushed open the door, Jane could have sworn she heard an amused snort from Colette and was disgusted with herself for blushing.

Inside the shop, there was more standing room than you found in a phone box, but not a lot more. Jane felt suddenly nervous, like when you went into a fortune-teller’s tent and it was just you and her. When she closed the door behind her, this smell went straight to the back of her throat: not the usual horrible incense, but a piercing fruity scent.

She looked around and, at first, it seemed like just the usual tourist bric-a-brac: pottery ornaments and those little stained-glass panels you put over your windows. Cellophane-covered jugs of pot-pourri and gift packs of local wine. And books. Jane’s eyes went in search of history and found the usual paperbacks: Herefordshire Curiosities, Herefordshire Castles, The Folklore of Herefordshire, The Old Straight Track, The Old Golden Land.

Plus dozens of other books about apples. Apples for Growing. Apples for Health. Identifying Apples. Books of apple-legends, apple-customs, superstitions, games, even a book of poems called Ripest Apples.

And then she saw that most of the tourist stuff was apple-shaped and apple-coloured. The pottery was little apple jugs and mugs. The pot-pourri was orchard-scented, which accounted for the pervading smell. The stained-glass panels featured Eve and what looked like an oversized Cox’s Orange Pippin. The local wine was in fact cider, twin green bottles labelled Bittersweet and Bittersharp. There were also rosy apples in small oil paintings, crudely framed. Russet apples glazed on kitchen tiles. Wax apples, apple-shaped notepads and address books and naff fluffy apples, like the dice people hung in their cars, dangling in bunches from the ceiling beams.

And clinging to the fluffy apples and the jugs and the mugs and the frames of the paintings were scores of what looked like butterflies, but on closer inspection proved to be ...

‘Fairies!’ Jane said in surprise. They were tiny and delicate with little matchstick bodies and wings of soft red and yellow and green. Apple colours.

‘Lucy makes them. Two pounds each or three for a fiver.’

‘Oh!’ She jumped. She hadn’t seen him behind the counter. Well, until he stood up you couldn’t see anything at all behind the counter because of a pile of big green and red apple-shaped candles promising to give your living room an exquisite orchard ambience.

He peered out between the candles. He had long hair tied up in a ponytail and small, brass-rimmed, tinted glasses. He didn’t seem very tall.

‘Sorry,’ Jane said. ‘It didn’t look as if there was anybody here. Just ... apples.’

‘Pick-your-own?’ He plucked a fairy from a candle wick. ‘Spend over ten quid, we throw one of these in for nothing. They’re very lucky. Apparently.’

‘I didn’t really come in for a fairy. I was looking for a book on local history.’

‘Right,’ he said uncertainly. ‘Well, they’re around. They are around. You just have to keep moving things until you find what you’re after.’

She turned to look around and everything started to rustle and jingle.

‘I’m scared to touch anything. You never know what you might bring down.’

He smiled, indicating a small sign in a wooden frame between the candles on the counter. It said,

Lovely to look at

Delightful to hold

But if you break it ...

don’t worry, it’s my own

bloody fault for daring to

run a business in such a

grotty little hovel.

‘Cool,’ Jane said, impressed.

‘Lucy’s got a bit of a thing about these really precious gift shops that have all this delicate stuff in precarious places then make you pay through the nose when you dislodge one with your elbow. You said local history ... How local?’

‘ Very local.’

‘Try up there.’

He didn’t seem to want to come out from behind the counter. A Roswell-style alien face stared impassively from his black sweatshirt. She reached up to a stack of volumes between stone book-ends featuring a sort of Gothic Rottweiler with an apple in its mouth.

‘There,’ he said. ‘That one.’

Pulling down a soft-backed book, she knocked over a stack of greeting cards displaying appley watercolours.

‘Chaos, here.’ But he didn’t come round the counter to help her pick them up. ‘It’s OK. I’ll do it later.’

The book she held was not very thick. The Black and White Villages: A short history. Jane flicked through it; it seemed to be mainly photographs.

‘I’m trying to find some information about a guy called Wil Williams.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Mmm. Right.’

‘You know who I mean?’

‘You won’t find much in there.’

‘So where would I find something?’

He shrugged. ‘Difficult.’

‘This is my only hope. I need it. School essay.’

‘Well ...’ His accent wasn’t local, but there was an accent there, a vaguely rural one. ‘It’s difficult.’

‘You keep on saying that.’ What was it with this guy? He seemed harmless but he was definitely weird. Almost like he was scared of her.

‘Problem is,’ he said, ‘Lucy’s not happy about the way the story’s been handled. Doesn’t think they’ve got it right. Lucy has very definite ideas about things.’

You’ll just get the Miss Devenish version ... Yeah, OK, Mum.

‘Look,’ Jane said. ‘I don’t need anything in any great depth. I mean, just who was Wil Williams?’

‘I thought you were doing a school essay on him.’

‘I ...’ Her mind went fuzzy.

He smiled, took off his glasses. He wasn’t as young as she’d first thought. That is, he had a young face, but there were deep little lines around his eyes. He’d be more like Mum’s age, really. Pity.

‘He was the vicar.’

‘Oh, really? When?’

‘In the seventeenth century. About 1670, something like that. I’m not sure whether they actually called them vicars in those days, but that was what he was. See, Lucy’d give you the whole bit, but she takes Saturday afternoons off when she can. I don’t know that much about it. Keep meaning to find out, but at the end of the day, I don’t really think there’s much known for certain. It’s like one of those murky areas of history. All kinds of atrocities in those days, weren’t there?’