Chapter 2 #3
Enjoy was perhaps not quite the right word, Jenna thought.
The sense of an urgent need to be here, without understanding why, was even stronger now.
She felt nervous and on edge. She wondered where to start.
Should she take a look around the hall first or should she start with the priory ruins?
Somewhere, there was an unwelcome surprise waiting for her.
She sensed it was getting much closer, reaching out to her.
She gritted her teeth and told herself to get on with it.
It had been her choice to tackle this head on.
Go big or go home, Bree would have said.
That made her smile. She opened her purse and took out a pound coin.
Ruins or house? Heads or tails? It spun in the air, catching the light. Heads. The priory ruins would be first.
Green signs directed her around the outside of the building, past the remains of the convent church, and in through a stone arched doorway that was clearly medieval in origin.
Jenna knew it was the door that had led into the east cloisters walk.
The anxious sensation increased; her palms were sweaty.
For the first time an acute sense of fear and anticipation eclipsed all other awareness, making it impossible for her to focus on the present.
Memories threatened to drown her. Returning to Winterhill was having an even stronger effect on her than she had expected.
Even so, something compelled her to step through the doorway and she found herself in the cloisters.
Familiarity and difference created a sense of dissonance that made her head spin.
The dimensions of the square garth were identical to how she remembered it, as were the fifteenth-century stone arcades with their Gothic traceried openings.
Above them, however, were a range of chambers that looked different and more modern.
She had read that they had been added in the seventeenth century when the ruins of the abbey had been used by soldiers and for the stabling of horses during the English Civil War.
Now they were almost as ramshackle as the medieval ruins below.
Jenna put out a hand to steady herself against the solid stone of the nearest pillar. She felt dizzy and overwhelmed.
‘It’s quite amazing, isn’t it?’ Someone spoke beside her. It made Jenna jump. A young woman, corralling three small children, gave her a half-smile as she made a grab for a little girl who was wriggling out of her grip. ‘To think so many famous films have been made here!’
‘Oh, yeah. Amazing.’ Jenna tried to smile back but her mouth felt stiff. So that was why the children were dressed as miniature wizards and witches. Winterhill Priory as a film set. But thank goodness for the modern overlay. It helped to give her a bit of distance from the past and steadied her.
She walked slowly along the cloister. Was it only in her head that she could hear the slap of the nuns’ sandals echoing off the earthen floor?
Here on the vaulting of the roof were the stone bosses with the heraldic shields of the priory’s founders and benefactors, the fantastic beasts, grotesques and mythical creatures.
They had lost their splendour in the centuries since she had lived here.
There were lions with broken stone noses, chipped gryphons and angels crumbled into dust. Here was the night stairs that had led up to the nuns’ dormitory and here the sacristy where the vestments and sacred vessels had been kept.
The parlour and the warming house were recognisable and surely there was the lead trough they had all used to wash their hands before going up to the refectory to eat…
Jenna trailed her fingers along the smooth edge of the basin and allowed herself to remember the canonical hours, vespers, compline, matins…
the way that the repetition and predictability had lulled them all, given comfort and reassurance, until that life had been ripped apart.
She stopped as she reached the spiral stairs that had given access to the prioress’s lodging above – Marris’s lodgings.
The staircase was blocked up now but she rested her palm against the cold stone and imagined it dissolving beneath her touch so that she could ascend the steps to Marris’s chamber.
What a sanctuary that had been at times, and yet, in the end, there could be no safe place.
More whooping children galloped along the corridor, broomsticks flying, breaking the moment.
She stepped adroitly out of the way, taking a small doorway through into what had been the convent church.
Much of the stone from here had been reused in the building of the manor house, or robbed by enterprising villagers, intent on mending their garden walls.
Only a dozen stumps of pillars remained to mark out where the nave had been.
There was a mossy wall or two, and a stone slab, almost lost in the grass, that indicated the place where the high altar had once stood.
For a moment Jenna’s ears rang with the echo of the nuns’ voices raised in high, sweet plainsong, then the memory faded and she was back in the twenty-first century.
Across the frosty green and white expanse of the nave, some jarring police-style orange incident tape fluttered in the cold breeze. It startled Jenna; it looked out of place and threatening. Her stomach swooped and she knew immediately that this was the moment she had been waiting for.
‘This was why I had to come…’
She hurried over, her footprints indenting the frozen grass.
A neat square had been cut into the turf and marked out with pegs.
It was a metre wide and about half a metre deep and in the base of it were some exposed fragments of stone that matched the limestone of the pillars.
Close by, a second test pit had been marked out but not yet dug, and a third some five metres to the south of that.
All of them were fenced off with the bright orange and white tape attached to metal poles.
Jenna could see a little sign in the grass: ‘Vale Archaeology’ and the logo that was very famous in this part of the country, a stylised white horse.
She felt her heart start to race as she realised the implications.
This was an archaeological excavation. They were digging up the priory church, excavating the place where Marris, Rose and Bridget had lived and worshipped so long ago.
But the length of time that had passed did not matter; it felt extraordinary and intrusive, as though, without warning, someone was trying to pry into her life history, into her soul. It was an extraordinary sensation.
‘You’ve seen the fliers about the archaeological dig, then?
’ Jenna jumped at the chirpy voice behind her and swung around.
A woman in her early twenties in a Vale Archaeology fleece jacket, dark trousers and boots was smiling at her.
Despite the layers, she looked cold. ‘I’m afraid there are no demonstrations today because the ground is frozen,’ she added, ‘but if you’ve any questions, I’d be happy to help.
’ She paused, looking enquiringly at Jenna, head tilted slightly to one side like a curious bird.
‘Oh…’ Jenna pulled herself together quickly. ‘Actually, I hadn’t realised there was a dig going on. Is it just this small area—’ she indicated the test pits ‘—or is there more?’
Please say no… she thought. The area that the archaeologists had currently identified would be fairly harmless.
They would find some of the church’s foundations and a few graves from the medieval period, but not much else, as far as she was aware.
However, if the dig extended into the lady chapel…
Jenna swallowed hard. Then, they would be excavating a past that was far better left buried.
The woman, whose name was Alison, according to her badge, was clearly unaware of Jenna’s lack of enthusiasm, for her face broke into a smile.
‘Oh, it’s a big project. We’re conducting a geophysical survey of the entire site at this stage and digging a few test pits to get started.
Then we’ll decide on our target areas depending on the results.
Maybe we’ll DNA a few bones if we find any graves. ’
Jenna’s answering smile felt forced. ‘It’s a priory,’ she said. ‘Of course there will be graves and bones.’
Alison seemed oblivious to the sharpness of her tone.
‘Well, we’re certainly hoping so,’ she said.
‘Potentially there’s so much to discover here.
Legend says that there was a burial of a medieval saint and holy man somewhere in the priory, so that’s exciting.
The written records were all lost in a fire in the 1570s so this is crucial work to try to fill in some of the gaps in its history immediately after the Dissolution.
You may have seen Wolf Hall?’ Again, she tilted her head interrogatively. ‘That sort of time period.’
‘Yes, I do know,’ Jenna said, through gritted teeth.
Thoughts jostled through her head. A full-scale archaeological excavation was taking place at Winterhill Priory.
How on earth had she missed that news and, more to the point, how could she stop it happening?
She put a hand to her head, aware that it was starting to ache.
Why had it never occurred to her before that this might happen one day?
That would be the end of all the old secrets, buried hundreds of years ago…
She felt panic start to rise in her chest.
Alison was still chattering about Thomas Cromwell and the dissolution of the monasteries. ‘Of course, the television programme made his character very sympathetic and attractive, but by all accounts, he was an utterly ruthless manipulator—’