'Stop shaking your head, lass. I've done it a few times. It's always worked a far as I could tell. It either tells you what you already knew or it tells you to think again. And once you start thinking again, you find some new angle you hadn't noticed and that's the way ahead.'

'I wouldn't have the bottle.'

'Aye, you would. Take an owd coin and bless it and explain to God what you're doing. I use this old half-crown. Not legal tender any more, therefore not filthy lucre. I keep it in the bottom of a candleholder on the altar.'

Merrily imagined some hapless parishioner wandering in and witnessing the Rev. Owen apparently settling some vexed spiritual issue on the toss of a coin. It could overturn your entire belief-structure.

'Course, it's nowt to do with the coin,' Huw said.

'Any more than the Tarot is to do with the cards.'

'Don't go fundamentalist on me, lass.'

Merrily laughed.

'Look at Israel a a scientist, a distinguished pathologist. And they made him exorcist for the City of London. What d'you want? Oh aye, I know what you want. You want summat foolproof. You want a solution on a plate.'

'A second opinion would do.'

'If you don't like the cold, come out of the mortuary.'

'Thanks a bunch.'

'Any time,' said Huw.

Merrily sighed.

'Look, luv, give yourself some credit, eh? I'd've kicked you out of the bloody ring meself if I didn't think you were a contender.'

'You tried.'

'That were only before you got your little feet under t'table. Listen, trust your feelings and your common sense. If you want a second opinion, ask Him, not me. Like the song says, make a deal with God.'

'You're a complete bastard, Huw.'

Then she remembered that he actually was: born in a little bwthyn halfway up Pen-y-fan and then his mother escaped to Sheffield where he was raised, after a fashion.

'Sorry,' Merrily said.

Huw laughed.

At least Jane looked happier when she came into the kitchen. She'd been saving up the money she'd earned working two Saturdays a month at the Eight-till-Late shop, and she was loaded with parcels: clothes for the holiday. No alluring night-wear, Merrily hoped a though, from what she'd heard about Eirion's father's extended family, nocturnal recreational opportunities were likely to be seriously limited.

A small carrier bag landed in her lap.

'What's this?'

'It's a top. It's for you. You never get yourself any new clothes.'

'Gosh, flower... that's very...' Merrily pulled it out of the bag. It was pale orange, cotton, very skimpy. 'It's going to be, er, how can I put this... slightly low-cut, isn't it?'

'Won't go with the dog collar, if that's what you mean,' Jane said smugly.

'Well... thank you.' Merrily put the top back in its bag. 'Thank you very much. It was very thoughtful.'

'If you don't wear it, I'll be seriously offended,' Jane said. 'It's going to be a long, hot summer.'

'That's what we always say, and it never is.'

'Yeah.' Jane sat down, stretched her bare arms. 'I expect Lol'll be taking a summer break from his course about now. You do remember Lol?'

'Ye-es.'

'The greatest living writer of gentle, lo-fi, reflective songs and also a cool, sensitive person in himself.'

'Yes, flower, I think I remember.'

'No, all I was thinking was, if you found me an inhibiting presence, this would be a good opportunity-'

'Thank you, flower, for considering my emotional welfare.'

'Any time,' Jane said. 'Oh, that Amy Shelbone a I remembered a she does go to our school.'

'I know.'

'I suddenly realized who you meant. Kind of old-fashioned. Always tidy. Bit of a pain, basically.'

Merrily nodded. 'Mm-mm.'

'So, is there, like, anything I can help you with?'

'I don't think so,' Merrily said, 'at this stage.'

'Because, like-'

'Sure,' Merrily said. 'What time's Eirion picking you up?'

'Half-nine.'

'You looking forward to this?'

'Sure,' Jane said.

With the kid upstairs, Merrily went into the hall and ran a hand along the top of the tallest bookcase. It was still there, in all the dust, where she'd popped it hurriedly after they'd found it under the bath when they were having a the year's big luxury a a new shower installed.

It was thick and misshapen, the head of the monarch obscured but Britannia distinct on the other side, also the date: 1797 a over a century after the death of Wil Williams the martyr, Ledwardine's most famous vicar.

Feeling faintly ridiculous, she slipped the coin into a pocket of her denim skirt.

7.

Stealing the Light

IN THE EARLY evening, a sinister, ochre light flared over the Frome Valley before the storm crashed in, driving like a ramraider down the western flank of the Malverns.

Although there wasn't much thunder, every light on the mixing board went out at 7.02 p.m., leaving only Prof Levin incandescent.

'Some farmer guy comes on to me in the post office in Bishop's Frome: "Ah, you want to get yourself a little petrol generator, Mr Levin." These hayseeds! You imagine recording music with a bloody generator grinding away out there?'

'But think of the amazing effects,' Lol said innocently. 'The lights flicker... the tape stutters. Elemental scratching?'

'Fah! You're just being flippant because you got a new toy.'

'It's your toy. I'm just minding it.' Lol had been trying to identify the different fragments of tree involved in the Boswell guitar. Here in the studio, its range and depth were incredible.

'He's getting it back,' Prof said. 'I don't know how, I don't know when, but he's getting it back. They pulled a fast one on me. I said to Sally, "Help the boy if you can. Inspire him." That's all I said. So they palm you off with this ridiculous, overpriced-' He pulled up the master switch so that everything wouldn't happen at once if the power ever returned.

'Still... you at least know where you are now, geographically, I would guess.'

'Well,' said Lol, 'I know why Knight's Frome's all in pieces.'

Prof sniffed. 'The Great Lake,' he said.

'Conrad Lake?'

'A moral tale.' Prof went back to his swivel chair, behind the board. 'The Fall of the Emperor of Frome a that's what they called Conrad, behind his back at first, but they say he grew to like it. She told you how the gods turned against him? His problems with the wilt?'

'Actually, it wasn't the wilt as such. It seems that Verticillium Wilt only-'

'Verticillium! That's the word.'

'Only really hit these parts in the seventies. It started in Kent, and took a long time, decades, to reach Herefordshire. But there were other scourges before that: red spiders, aphids, white mould. He got them all, like the Seven Plagues of Egypt.'

They were both talking in epic terms, Lol realized, because it had seemed epic: the bountiful legacy of four generations of hop-masters wiped out in about seven years. Conrad Lake was, in effect, the last a and for a while the biggest and wealthiest a hop-master in Herefordshire. His poles and frames had surrounded Knight's Frome like a great creosoted barrier. Looking like Belsen, Sally Boswell had said disdainfully, like Auschwitz. The estate was big enough when he inherited it, and twice as big when the first disaster struck.

Lol recalled the portrait photograph of Conrad Lake in the third and smallest room at the hop museum, his smile submerged in a heavy moustache. A difficult, greedy and obsessive man, Sally had said, referred to by the locals, behind his back, as the Emperor of Frome. Twice married and both wives had left him, the second taking his infant son. They never divorced; the boy, Adam, was raised by his mother and grandparents in Warwickshire a never again saw his father, who stayed in Knight's Frome and fought all through the 1970s against the aphids, the red spiders and the white mould. And against the banks, who kept squeezing him, forcing him to sell off his estate piece by piece.

'Big drama,' said Prof laconically.

The land had then been bought by various farmers, most of them from outside Knight's Frome, which explained why there was no real community any more, why so many of the scattered houses were now owned by incomers like Prof. A few of the old hop-yards had been reinstated, but demand was no longer so great, with so many breweries importing cheaper hops from Germany and the USA. Most of it was grazed now. A pity, in a way, Sally Boswell had said, because the deep river loam in the valleys of the Frome and the Lugg was so perfect for hops. And yet, in a way, not a pity at all; it was no accident that the third room in the museum was the darkest, a sober coda to the song of the hop.

But not everyone, it seemed, believed it was over. Least of all Adam Lake, son of the Emperor.

Though the storm had passed and the evening fields were left steaming under a bashful sun, the power failed to return, and Prof announced in disgust that he was going to bed.

'You give me a call when it's dark, Laurence... if we've got the bleeding juice back. I always work better after dark, as you know.'

Lol watched him stumping across the yard to the cottage, then went back and sat for a while in the studio, trying the River Frome song again on the Boswell, and then, because he felt bad about deserting it, on his faithful old Washburn.

But the song still lacked direction, and after a while he gave up and went out into the luminous, storm-washed evening. As the trees dripped and the air glistened with birdsong, Lol made his first real foray into what remained of the community of Knight's Frome.

A soggy rug of slurry unrolled from a farm entrance towards the edge of what passed for the centre of the hamlet. Big old trees, oak and sycamore and horse chestnut, were still dripping onto the roofs of stone and timber-framed cottages that sprouted like wild mushrooms. A humpback bridge straddled the Frome, and on the other side of it was the church, sunken and settled as an old barn, and next to it the white-painted vicarage where Simon St John lived.

There was no shop here any more, but a pub survived a a pub created sixty years ago, Lol had learned, out of a row of terraced cottages, to cater for the hop-picking hordes. It hadn't changed much. There were no friendly signs promising food or coffee, no rustic fort for the kids, just a rotting bench beside the porch.

The pub was called the Hop Devil; on its sign, nothing more demonic than a red and smoking brazier. The sign was hanging from a gibbet at the road end of the dirt forecourt.

It was reassuring to see places like this still in business, but that didn't necessarily mean you had to go inside. Lol, the sometime folk singer, the traditionalist, was actually wary of country pubs a often the haunts of old men in worn tweeds and young men in stained denims, bruising you with their stares until you finished your drink too quickly and slid away.

As he padded cautiously past the pub, its scuffed and rust-studded oak door creaked open, releasing a richly brackish old-beer smell and also a man in a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, moleskin trousers stuffed into high tan boots. He came loping angrily over the puddles in the forecourt, a tall bloke with mutton-chop whiskers, swallowing his scowl when he saw he wasn't alone, glancing briefly over Lol's head.

'Evening.'

Lol took a step back into the slurry to avoid having the guy knock him down and walk over him.

'Needed that storm, I suppose,' the man called back over his shoulder. He was about thirty-five, with a lean face and a wide, beer-drinker's mouth. He gave the sky a dismissive glance. 'Getting too muggy.'

Lol nodded. 'Was a bit.'

But the big guy appeared to have finished with him, was climbing into a mud-scabbed Land Rover Defender on the edge of the forecourt, and now another voice was curling lazily out of the pub porch.

'Lol Robinson.'

Prof's unwelcome neighbour, Gerard Stock, was leaning against the door frame, a whisky glass in his right hand, a roll-up smouldering in his left.

Lol walked over a like he had a choice. The Defender crunched and clattered away through the trees and into the lane, while Stock stood watching it go.

'Wanker,' he said. 'Arsehole.'

Lol realized he was drunk.

'Wanker strolls in' a Stock tossed his cigarette into a puddle. a 'and here's Gerard Stock sidding at the bar, minding his own. Wanker barks out cursory greeting, then drifts off to the dark end of the bar, engaging Derek, the landlord, in some trivial chat. And all the time, liddle sidelong glances, corner of an eye, wondering whether this is the day to make his move. And Gerard Stock's just smiling into his glass and saying nothing. And the wanker knows that Gerard Stock knows he's a phoney liddle arsehole.'

'I don't really know too many people around here,' Lol said. 'Who was he?'

Stock swallowed some whisky. There was a powerful fug of mixed fumes around him, like, if you struck a match, the air would flare and sizzle.