The truth of it was that, from that first solo stroll around the village, Jane had been looking for an excuse to go into Ledwardine Lore.
She’d been up to it several times, but you could see through the window that the place was too small to browse around and escape without buying something. Maybe that was why so few local people seemed to go in – made more sense than all this stuff about Miss Devenish being weird. Like weirdness was something new in the countryside.
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?’
Atrocities?
‘But he was the minister of… this church?’
He didn’t reply. He seemed suddenly to have forgotten she was here. He was staring through the window, into the mews, where Colette Cassidy still stood in her doorway and a bearded man was strolling by. The man looked at Colette’s legs.
‘This church,’ Jane said. ‘You mean the village church? Excuse me?’
‘Oh, shit.’
The shop guy folded his fingers together and squeezed hard. It was difficult to be sure in this light, but Jane thought he’d gone pale. He looked at her.
‘Look… You on your own?’
‘Well…’
She felt uncomfortable, found herself backing instinctively towards the door.
‘What I mean… you’re not with that bloke out there?’
‘What?’
The bearded man was standing in the middle of the mews, about fifteen feet away. He wore jeans and a denim shirt and those dark glasses that went all the way round. He had his hands in his pockets and was gazing at the shop window. He seemed a quite ordinary tourist-type, perhaps waiting for his wife.
‘Why would you think I should know him? I’ve never even seen him before.’
The shop man had his glasses back on. He didn’t look cool any more. He sort of… jittered. He bit his lip.
‘Yeah. Right. OK. Do me a favour, er…?’
‘Jane.’
‘Jane.’ He shook his head, in a wry you-have-to-laugh kind of way. Then the hunted look was back. ‘Jane, could I ask you to mind the store?’
‘Right,’ said little Gomer Parry through his cigarette. ‘That bit, that’s all yours, Vicar, see.’
She’d given up correcting people when they called her vicar. You couldn’t really have people calling you Priest-in-Charge anyway, could you?
Gomer was pointing to a small meadow, about two acres, Merrily reckoned, sloping gently from one end of the churchyard down to the river.
‘Now, what we done the past couple o’ years,’ Gomer said, ‘is we mowed ‘im, end of July roundabout, then we sells the bales to Powell. We could sell the ole grass standing, let Powell cut it ’isself, but bein’ as how I got the gear, where’s the point in loppin’ off the profits? Plus, Gomer Parry Agricultural and Plant Hire, we does a tidy job.’
‘And what do you charge, Gomer?’
‘Aye, well,’ Gomer Parry said. ‘Bloody retired, en’t I? Can’t charge nothing no more, see.’
As Minnie, his wife of four years, never neglected to remind people, Gomer Parry Plant Hire, in the literal sense, was no more. Which Merrily reckoned accounted for Gomer’s general air of depression.
‘But the running costs,’ she said. ‘The maintenance of all that machinery…’
‘Ah, does it good to get the ole things up and turnin’. All it is now is just a’ – Gomer struggled to cough up the contemptible word – ‘hobby.’
She felt sorry for him. Apparently, Minnie had refused to marry him unless he promised to pass on the operational side of the business to his nephew, Nev, and move these twenty miles back over the English border. But as he kept on telling you, he was only sixty-eight. What was sixty-eight in the Age of Power Steering?
Could it really be that Minnie hadn’t realized that Plant Hire was part of his name, part of who he was?
‘Mabbe you could mention me to the Ole Feller sometime,’ Gomer said. ‘In passing, like.’
‘Old…? Oh. Right.’ Merrily nodded. ‘I’m sure He does notice these things.’
‘All respect, see, but the way I sees it, it’s a better thing all round if I’m out yere getting to grips with God’s good earth than inside that ole church throwing everybody off key with my deplorable bloody singing.’
‘Mmm,’ Merrily said dubiously. ‘We’ll, er, maybe go into that argument in more detail sometime.’
‘I never argues with the clergy,’ Gomer said, putting the lid on that one. ‘Now, your ditches. As I kept pointin’ out to the Reverend Hayden, them ditches is in a mess. En’t been cleared in my time back yere, which is four years come October, and there’s all kinds o’ shit down there.’
Gomer led Merrily along a crooked avenue of eighteenth-century graves to where the churchyard met the Powell orchard. It was a raised, circular churchyard, partly bordered by a bramble-covered ditch about four feet deep.
‘Get rid o’ this lot, no big problem, Vicar. However, wise not to widen the ditch this side, on account some of these ole graves’ve slipped and slid a bit over the centuries like, and you goes into that bit o’ bank you never quite knows what’s gonner tumble out, you get my meaning.’
‘Oh.’
Merrily imagined ancient bones rattling into the shovel of Gomer’s JCB.
‘As for the other side… Well, who knows, Vicar, who knows?’
‘Who knows what?’
She hitched up her cassock to bend down and peer into the ditch. A rich, musty smell rose up. She looked across to the other side; the nearest apple tree was a good twenty yards away. Further into the tangly orchard, she was sure she recognized the twisted boughs of the Apple Tree Man and couldn’t suppress a shudder.
Gomer followed her gaze.
‘They won’t do that again, Vicar.’
‘The wassailing? No, I suppose not.’
‘Funny thing, though… You wanner see the buds on ‘im now.’
‘On the…?’
Merrily looked at Gomer. Those ridiculous, little round glasses and the often-unlit cigarette, like a baby’s dummy, made it hard to take him seriously.
‘Gonner be ablaze with blossom in a week or two, that ole bugger. You’d’ve sworn he’d given up. Makes you think, don’t it?’
She was chilled.
‘I think I’d rather not think. What did you mean just now when you said who knows? About the other side of the ditch.’
‘Ah. Well. You gotter ask yourself why the ole orchard’s still there, see. Rod Powell, he en’t a man to keep a worthless bit o’ scrub without there’s a reason for it. Well, a cider apple’s no use for nothin’ but cider, specially them stunted little buggers, and the Powells en’t made but their own in half a century. Rest of the farm’s beef and’ – Gomer growled – ‘battery chickens.’
Merrily, who also disapproved of battery chickens, kept quiet.
‘So you gotter ask yourself, Vicar, why’s he keep that ole orchard?’
‘Sentiment?’ Before the word was out, Merrily felt embarrassed.
‘Superstition.’ Gomer tapped his nose. ‘Them as don’t believe superstition counts for much in the countryside no more en’t never lived yere. Powells put in a bunch of new trees down the bottom end, to please that Cassidy, but Edgar wouldn’t grub up this bit, nor even scrat around too much in there, on account of he knows and all his family knows that there’s…’
Gomer paused, took off his flat cap. Wild white hair erected itself.
‘… the First Unhallowed Ground.’
Merrily thought she understood, but she wasn’t sure.
‘You dig up decently buried bones, see, well, that’s one thing. You just puts ’em straight back. But any bones the other side o’ that ditch… Now don’t get me wrong, Vicar, I’m not saying I goes for this ole toffee, I’m just telling you the kind of superstition you’ll encounter if you sticks around these parts… But the bones t’other side, them’s the ones you don’t wanner be diggin’ up, you get my meaning.’
On the other side of a curtain behind the counter was an iron spiral staircase leading up into what seemed like complete darkness, apparently a loft without a window. Jane stuck her head through the curtain.
‘OK, Lol. He’s gone.’
‘You sure?’
The voice was hollow with – Jane was amazed and thrilled – actual, real fear. It made her think again about the little crunch before the man had left.
‘Jane?’
‘Yeah, honest. I’m certain. Gave him two minutes, then I went to the end of the mews and he was talking to Colette Cassidy, then he was getting into this pretty smart yellow sports car. Toyota.’
‘He didn’t see you following him?’
‘Not a chance.’
His face appeared at the top of the spiral, blinking from the dark, full of suspicion and… yeah, anxiety. Definitely that. The lines around his eyes deeper.
‘You know the Cassidy girl?’
‘Only by sight’
He came down. ‘That means you’re local?’ He looked dismayed.
‘I am now,’ Jane said. ‘For my sins.’
She was still feeling rather electrified. This could be the most utterly bloody brilliant place she’d ever lived. Best of all, she felt in control. She’d saved this man from God knows what. He owed her one.
‘So what exactly are we looking at here?’ Jane said loftily. ‘Drugs?’
‘Huh?’ He slumped back on the stool behind the counter, shaking his head. He looked drained, as though he’d spent the last few minutes on the lavatory.
Pretty heavy.
‘Listen.’ Putting on her cynical smile. ‘I might be local now, Mr Robinson, but I’ve been around. Like you’re into that guy for some amount you can’t afford, and he wants his money. What are we talking? Coke? Smack?’
‘What?’
Jane said, ‘Es? Whizz?’
‘Huh?’
‘You can tell me.’
‘Oh… God.’ It was probably the last thing he felt like, but he started to laugh. ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘Don’t change the subject. My general feeling is, that wasn’t a very nice guy. Underneath all the charm and the Florida tan and the really white teeth. I can sense these things.’
‘He buy anything?’
‘He said he was looking for an old friend. He described you. Puny little guy, long hair, glasses. He said he’d been to your house and asked around and somebody said they’d seen you with Miss Devenish, and this is her shop, so…’
‘And you said?’
‘I said I didn’t know anybody called Robinson, which was true. I said I couldn’t think who he meant. So he’s like… Oh, well, he might’ve changed, got fatter, lost his hair. And I’m saying, Well, in that case he could be any one of a dozen people.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Like, I don’t think he believed me that you weren’t here. He said – in this kind of knowing way – that if I should just happen to come across you, tell you he’d be back. And he kept like looking at the curtain. As if he was wondering whether to thrust me aside and go in and drag you out.’
God, this was fun. If not so much for Mr Robinson.
‘He say when he’d be back?’
‘Nn-nn.’
‘What was his attitude?’
‘Like I said, charming. Lovely white teeth. Capped, I suppose. He imports the stuff, does he?’
‘Look…’ Mr Robinson pulled hair out of his glasses. ‘He may be into drugs, I wouldn’t know. We are not business associates. He’s what he said he was. An old… friend. Sort of.’
‘If you think I’m that dumb,’ Jane said loftily, ‘you’re spending too much time with the fairies.’
‘He’s just hard to get rid of. You must’ve had friends like that. That’s all it was. No drugs. Sorry. Oh-’ Alarm doubled back across his face. ‘You say he talked to the Cassidy girl?’
‘Briefly. Like he was asking her the way or something.’
‘Look. Seriously. Jane? You listening? If you see him again, keep out of his way, yeah? Will you promise me that, Jane?’
‘You want me to come and tell you if I see him again?’
‘No! Just stay out of his way. Tell Colette, too… No, don’t, it’d just get her interested. Leave it. Please. Forget it happened.’
Fatal instruction. ‘Bit bloody one-way, this, if you ask me,’ Jane said.
‘Suppose I give you the dirt on Wil Williams.’
‘Oh, sure,’ Jane said. ‘Change the subject.’
‘It’s one L, by the way,’ Lol said. ‘If you didn’t know. W-I-L. The Welsh way.’
‘All right then,’ Jane said. ‘Wil Williams. One L. And it better be good.’
‘It wasn’t that good for him. But I expect you’ll find it good. It’s spooky. Here, have a notebook to write it down.’
Lol reached up, flipped one from a rack behind him. A quick, nervous thing, as though he was giving his hands something to do to stop them shaking. He laid the notebook on the counter; it had an apple on the front.
‘I’ll pay for it,’ Jane said primly. ‘And what should I do about this?’
Opening her left hand over the counter. A tiny fairy looked up, stricken, from her palm, its apple-streaked gossamer wings in shreds, its matchstick spine snapped.
‘Your… old friend… knocked it off its perch. Crunched it under his shoe on his way out. Pretended not to notice, but I think he did.’
Both Lol’s hands were behind his back now. He bit his lip.
After the lady vicar had gone, Gomer Parry was down the ditch dragging some of the brambles away, sizing up the job, when the shadow fell across him.
‘What d’you think of her, Gomer?’
The hooked nose under the hat. Like some old eagle, she was.
‘The vicar? ‘Er’s all right, Lucy. Nice little girl. Don’t throw the Ole Feller in your face the whole time.’
‘Nice little girl. Pshaw! You know what I’m asking, Gomer. Is she strong?’
‘’Er gonner need t’be, Lucy?’
‘She’s a woman.’
‘Never thought to hear that comin’ from you.’
‘Because you don’t know what I mean, do you?’
Gomer tried to climb out of the ditch, slipped back, and she offered him a hand and pulled him out easy as this hydraulic winch he used to have.
‘What did you talk about? When you were looking out to the orchard?’
Ah, watching them, was she? ‘This an’ that,’ Gomer said. ‘Number of buds in the Apple Tree Man kind of thing.’
‘The Apple Tree Man?’ Face near black against the light. ‘Heaven save us, there’s no such damn thing as the Apple Tree Man! Not here. That’s Somersetshire lore. Ours is a different tradition altogether. You should know that. No apple tree man, no guns.’
‘Well, pardon me,’ Gomer said, ‘for bein’ just a humble plant-hire operative.’
‘It’s important, Gomer. These clowns move in with their twisted interpretations, and we wake up one day and we’re living in a different place – a fantasy village. It’s what happens when you get too much change too quickly. This was a terribly poor place when I was a child – miserable farm wages, children still in rags. Now it’s damn near the richest village in the county. Looks beautifully authentic, but it’s a sham. And do they care, the locals, what’s left of them? Do they hell.’
‘Money’s money,’ Gomer said, winding her up, see where this was heading. ‘Shops doin’ well. Plenty jobs for plumbers, builders, carpenters, the ole rural craftsmen. Why should they care?’
‘It’s false wealth, you know that. Cider was Ledwardine’s wealth, and it dried up long ago.’
‘But hang on yere, Lucy, if this Mr Cassidy’s out to revive it ‘In his dilettante, touristy fashion.’
Gomer studied her. She’d never been what you’d call pretty, but there was a time when she could’ve had her pick of men. And, from what he’d heard, she’d picked a fair few in her time and thrown them back a bit more out-of-breath than they might’ve reckoned on. But time passed.
‘Well’ He fished out his ciggy. ‘I wouldn’t know what that means, dilly-whatever… me bein’ just an ill-educated plant-hire man, like. But it do strike me, Lucy, as you’re bein’ a bit of a wosname in the manger. Cause you din’t think of it yourself, you don’t wannit to work. Same with the festival. You feels… what the word? Sidelined.’
Lucy Devenish blinked and brought a hand to her face, and for one terrible moment, Gomer feared she had a tear coming. But she used the hand to straighten her hat.
‘What I feel, Gomer,’ she said, ‘especially when I stand on this side of the churchyard, is a certain fear for your nice little girl.’