Read Online The Wine of Angels by Phil Rickman - Free Book Online

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