Chapter 2
2
I still, after all this time, called out ‘I’m back!’ as I arrived home. And, as ever, the reply was nothing but a swirl of disturbed dust in the narrow hallway, a resettling of the silence more comfortably to include me. Outside, the water of the old mill race-petered past, reduced to shallows now by undergrowth and lack of dredging, the silty build-up housing weed and the overgrown banks providing cover for a variety of birds, the names of which I had never really bothered to learn.
It was home. An old mill cottage, all that was left now of a small settlement where a ford crossed the little river, and where generations had ground their grain. The mill itself was long gone, lost to fire and years, leaving nothing but a few burned bricks to be turned up in my garden every now and then, and an outline against my riverside wall, to mark where it had once stood.
I’d… we’d bought it ten years ago. Derelict, damp and unloved. We’d carefully restored it, with hours of research and study, to as close to its seventeenth-century origins as was compatible with twenty-first-century living. Now – now it was just me. My home. I felt a slight touch of guilt for the things I was leaving undone around it. There was a patch above the back door where we’d never quite got to grips with the water coming in, and peeling paint in the back bedroom. All things I should be getting fixed. The money I had wasn’t infinite and I needed to stretch it for living expenses so I’d pushed some of the lesser tasks down the list until now they were beginning to become greater tasks, which niggled at the back of my mind when I let them. One day. I’d find the money and the energy – one day.
I kicked off my shoes, collected the slump of junk mail from underneath the letter box, and shuffled my feet into sheepskin slippers to walk through to the living room, sorting the mail as I went.
‘Rubbish, rubbish, an invitation to view a residential care home – bloody cheek, I’m only thirty-five – Specsavers, local free leaflet, advert for takeaway. Why does nobody write letters any more?’
I addressed the empty air. Outside somewhere, ducks fought a quacky battle. I felt the silence and the lack of presence again and turned the TV on to provide a background for me to resonate my anger off.
Bloody historians! I punched a cushion into a more acceptable shape and sat down. Why couldn’t they accept that sometimes you had to take local folk stories for what they were, an oral tradition that dated back – well, so far I’d been able to trace some tales right back to the late eighteenth century. Stories simply didn’t need anyone poking and prodding and trying to prove this and that.
My phone rang. The display told me it was Chess, so I ignored it. She had a tendency to watch TV and need to unload at whomever was available and I really did not want a thriller plotline explained to me when I lived alone, out here miles from anywhere, in the dark.
The isolation of the cottage suited me now. People were kept at a distance and I could face them when I had had chance to gird my metaphorical loins. I couldn’t cope with the noise and chat and general detritus of humanity any more. It scratched at my nerves and made me feel like over-chewed gum – stretched and thin and lacking purpose other than just Being There. Here, the silence soothed me. It was my acquired backdrop and I had learned to love it and rely on it, as the thing I deserved.
Over on the wall above the inglenook fireplace, which took up far more space than was sensible in the little living room, was my map. It was browned with age and creased with use, and it had been framed and hung where I could see it, to remind me that this was my patch. Restless, I got up, went over and traced the lines: 1857 , the date reminded me. Malton and Pickering area. Not quite my patch, the map went from the outskirts of York and up to the edge of Middlesborough while my area extended from Durham down almost as far as the Midlands, but this bit, covered by the tea-ring-speckled, damp-crinkled map, was where I was based and where I worked. Next to the map was a very old photograph of the mill and cottage, taken when the mill had been working and the cottage had been lived in by the miller and his family. Here they were all lined up outside the cottage, bearded old man, pinafored wife and six children ranging in size from almost-adult to small girl barefoot and clutching a rag doll.
Six children. I looked up again at the beams over my head. The cottage had two bedrooms, three when the family lived here, as one had been turned into a bathroom when we’d renovated. It must have been noisy back then. Now it was almost silent, apart from the trickling of water and the ducks. From a lively family home, children, dogs and the kerchunk of the grinding wheels in the mill, to my quiet little retreat, full of carefully sourced vintage furniture. Once the place had been full of stories. Bedtime stories for the children to soothe them to sleep. Tales of warning and adventure from the miller, who had fought in the Crimean war in his youth. Stories of the local ghosts, goblins and fairies from his wife, told to her by her mother, passing down the generations like a thread that linked them to the area. The folk tales that brought me here and kept me, knitted into the web of words as tightly as if I’d been born here.
Now, just me. But I was making sure those stories stayed alive. Interviewing those still remaining about the tales and traditions of their childhoods, and those of their parents and grandparents. Getting it all recorded, before it was too late. That reminded me, I still had some typing up to do. I’d been interrupted by the visit of Professor Connor O’Keefe and hadn’t finished getting my notes straight. I switched on the computer. Professor O’Keefe, indeed. He’d only introduced himself with his title to put me on edge, of course, to flaunt in my face that he ranked slightly higher than I did, as if it would make any difference.
I got my recorder out of my bag and set it on the desk, plugged in my headphones but didn’t start typing. I was too irritated. That smooth Irish charm accompanied by the kind of face that’s used to getting what it wants and a smile that is positive that every female is going to buckle at the knees before it. I hadn’t missed the fact that his jumper had very likely been cashmere, and his coat had been wool and expensive. I hadn’t examined his trousers, but I would take any bets that they had understated stitching and a designer label and his bloody shoes were probably handmade by elves or something.
I screwed in my headphones so tightly that I nearly burst an eardrum and switched on my recorder with enough force to slide it halfway across the desk.
Bloody historians.