Free The Cure of Souls by Phil Rickman Page A

‘The Prof said you’d be around sooner or later.’ He unlatched the door. ‘I shall be back in about ten minutes. Enjoy!’
    The Hop Museum was set back from the main road to Bromyard, about fifty yards from the turning to Knight’s Frome. Like Prof’s place, it was the remains of farm buildings, but in this case with a few acres around it. There were two ponies and a donkey in the field in front, and a pond with ducks. Also, a gypsy caravan in green and gold.
    The River Frome passed unobtrusively under the access drive, through what looked like a culvert.
    Earlier, Lol had played the Frome song for Prof, as far as it went. The chorus had written itself, but sounded a bit trite.
    The River Frome goes nowhere in particular
    It isn’t very wide
    There’s nothin’ on the other side
…
    ***
    Pity it was pronounced
froom
, to rhyme with
doom and gloom
. Lol had decided he’d still have it sounding in the song like
home
and
loam
so as to carry the vowel in that first line:
Frome goes nowhere
. He was, after all, a stranger.
    ‘You don’t know enough about the place to finish this song,’ Prof had said flatly. ‘It might be about what a complete loser you are, but you still need some images to carry it. What do you really know about this sodding river except its name and that it isn’t very wide? You ask me, Laurence, it’s time you went to talk to Sally, down at the hop museum. The river, the hills, the woods, the people – Sally knows everything about them all.’
    ‘Sally?’ Lol had stared at him. ‘You actually know this woman? I thought you had a policy of not knowing local people unless they could play something useful?’
    ‘It was an accident,’ Prof said.
    It was about five-thirty when Lol had set off to walk the half-mile or so from the studio. The white-haired man had been closing the gates at the foot of the drive but had beckoned Lol in anyway. The only visitor they’d had all afternoon, he said. Admission was a pound, and there were a few items on sale inside.
    But not, presumably, the Boswell guitar, handmade by the great Alfonso Boswell who had given all his guitars women’s names. The same instrument on which Lol now played the slow and ghostly Celtic instrumental he called ‘Moon’s Tune’… knowing it was going to remind him of the abandoned hop-yard, the place of the wilt, and the woman he’d seen there. He’d dreamed of her since, twice in one night. Not pleasant, though, as dreams went.
    Are you all right? Then letting her approach to within a few inches before he slunk bashfully away. Registering by the rhythm of her movements and her blurred smile that she was not hurt, bar the scratches, and had not been attacked or forcibly stripped… was more likely some stoned moonbather who’d assumed she was alone but didn’t really care
.
    The low-beamed room, one of three linking up to accommodate the museum, was dim and crowded with annotated exhibits that looked at first like junk. These included the hopcribs – hammocks in frames, in which the cones were separated from the bines; the giant sausage sacks called hop-pockets, in which they were collected; a huge cast-iron furnace, rescued from some subsequently converted kiln.
    On the walls were blown-up black and white photographs of kilns like Gerard Stock’s, in which the harvest had been dried on platforms over the furnace. The atmosphere in the museum was humid and laden with a mellow, musky aroma that could only be the hops themselves. And because hops were used to flavour and preserve beer it was easy to find the smell intoxicating. It seemed to soften Lol’s senses, made it easier to accept the curious turn events had taken.
    He pulled the Boswell guitar comfortably into his solar plexus. The soundboxes of Boswells had curved backs long before Ovations became ubiquitous but, while Ovations were fibreglass, the back of the hand-crafted Boswell was like a mandolin’s. There were probably fewer than a hundred of these