Chapter 3
3
The next morning, instinct told me to drive up to the Fairy Stane. I had the feeling that Professor O’Keefe might decide not to wait for approval and might lift the stone to evidence his own research. There was no way I could trust a smile as open and honest as his and I was right. When I drove up onto the high moor, there were Land Rovers and cars parked in the lay-by and the almost invisible path that led out onto the moor, and the stone had been trodden free from undergrowth.
I left my car and followed the trail of bruised bracken and irritated wildlife until I arrived at a collection of students, milling around uncertainly as though a fire alarm had gone off and they’d evacuated the building but had no idea what to do next.
‘Where’s Professor O’Keefe?’ I asked the nearest, a capable-looking girl wearing a Barbour with the sleeves rolled up.
‘He’s late,’ she said, looking me up and down. ‘I expect he’s on his way. Who are you?’
I walked over to the Fairy Stane. It lay, innocently attracting moss and lichen and half-overgrown with reedy grass, flat on its face on the moor, which was exactly where Professor O’Keefe would find himself if he dared touch it.
‘I’m the person who’s here to stop you,’ I said, and sat down, very firmly, on the stone.
‘Stop us doing what?’ The girl looked confused.
‘Lifting this stone.’ I drew my knees up under my chin and tried to look as though this was the sort of thing I did all the time.
A young man wandered over, his hair tumbled around his face by the breeze and a sparse beard decorating his lower jaw. ‘I thought we were here to try to suss out the likelihood of a Roman settlement,’ he said, trying to hold his hair back with one hand. ‘Prof didn’t say anything about stones.’
‘That’s because I’m still making my mind up.’ The Irish accent told me who it was, even though I couldn’t see on account of my view being blocked by students and my own knees. ‘Weighing up our options, you might say. Hello, Dr Thorpe, you all right down there, now?’
‘Fine,’ I replied tightly.
‘Well, then. We’ll go over here and talk about Roman topography, shall we? So we don’t interrupt your… sitting.’
He was laughing at me. The bastard, the smooth, Irish bastard, was laughing at me! Not with his face, of course, he was too clever for that, but he displayed his amusement in the way he stood, and even his words had held that little swing of irony that let me know he found me funny.
Well, let him. He could laugh all he wanted. What he couldn’t do was lift my stone. Especially not with me sitting on it.
The moss that formed little cushions on the stone’s surface held a surprising amount of water, which was now making its way through my jeans. I ignored it and tried to pretend that I came out this way for a quiet sit on it all the time. I leaned back on my elbows and stared up at the sky, which didn’t give me much to focus on apart from a few dots of birds gathering for late emigration and some ominous-looking clouds fluffing up the horizon. The emaciated grasses that prodded their needle tips around me prevented me from seeing where the professor and his cronies had gone, but I could hear the echo of voices on the wind: laughter and a brogue that broke over words in an unusual way. Casually, and because I didn’t have anything else to think about, I wondered whether he spoke Irish.
Then I wondered whether it was going to rain, because I didn’t have a coat on, just my ‘sitting in the office trying to look smart’ jacket.
Then I wondered what was making that particular scuffling noise in the grass behind me. I didn’t mind mice, there were enough mice at the cottage, but I wasn’t overkeen on rats.
Then I wondered why it had gone so quiet, and stood up.
The bastard had gone, as had all the students and the cars that had been parked in the lay-by. Only mine stood there now, solitary and distant under a rapidly greying sky. I wondered how I hadn’t heard them all leave, although the wind blowing from the moor meant that, if they’d come off the moor from a different direction, I probably wouldn’t have heard the engines start.
I brushed myself down awkwardly. My bottom was soaked from the mossy sponges I’d been sitting on and one of my feet had gone to sleep. Beneath me, the stone lay bland and stretched like a sunbather on a beach. Featureless, just another lump of millstone grit, the same as most of the boulders and rocks dotted around this piece of moorland, different only because of the regularity of its sides. Four feet by two, the dimensions were imprinted in my mind, I’d read them so many times in the stories that gave the place its name and reputation. Four by two. Too regular to be natural. A stone covering the entrance to fairyland. It was said – those words that led me into much of my research – that if you lay down at midnight and put your ear to the stone, you could hear the fairies partying away down in the depths. I was halfway through a rather neglected piece of work for a folklore magazine about the loose connections between fairyland and hell and the associated tales.
All was quiet and still around the stone now. No signs of fairies, partying or otherwise. Not so much as high-pitched singing or the buzz of tiny wings, unless you counted the lone bee, trundling its way through the last of the heather flowers with the determination of a shopper at the final sale of the season.
The first spots of the rain that had been bubbling under the horizon began to fall.
‘Ah, you’ll be heading back now, then. Can I beg a lift?’
The voice came from behind me, where the moorland devolved into bog, and tussocks jutted out from waterlogged soil, unnaturally green. I didn’t turn around.
‘Can’t you go back the way you came?’
‘Not really, no. And you and I ought to have a word, unless you intend to live on that stone for the next six months.’ Connor O’Keefe moved around to stand in front me, his big black coat billowing in the wind so he looked like a buccaneer on the deck of his ship, stubbled and with the breeze pulling his hair back. He’d done it deliberately, I knew, and I guessed that the windswept piratical look usually had the girls falling at his feet.
‘I’m not going back to York,’ I lied. ‘I’m driving over to Glaisdale. I want to take some pictures of a farm that featured in some stories I’ve been recording.’ I gathered my jacket more closely around me. The rain was beginning in earnest now and the mossy damp had got right through my jeans to my buttocks.
‘All the better. More time for us to talk,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I think you may have got the wrong end of the stick somewhere along the line, Dr Thorpe, and I don’t want you to be giving yourself the pneumonia sitting out here on that stone worrying I’m going to do the dirty and lift it without telling you.’
It had been beginning to dawn on me that I couldn’t, realistically, sit on the stone forever, and that I was going to have to find a more practical solution to the Fairy Stane problem, so I let him fall into step beside me as I turned to head back along the path to my car. I figured there was no point in giving permission, he was going to come anyway, and this way I could always throw him from the moving car.
‘I tried to get your mobile number from your assistant,’ Connor went on, monologuing relentlessly in the face of my silence. ‘To her credit, she refused to give it to me.’
So, that had been why Chess had been ringing me last night – to tell me he’d asked. I should have answered the phone, then I could have used all my saved-up invective.
‘Good,’ I half grunted. I wanted to think about what to do next and this man and his talking were getting between me and the peace and quiet I needed.
‘So, I figured I’d run into you soon enough, and that you’d be wanting to keep an eye on me now. I did think it might take a wee bit longer, but – here we are.’
‘Apparently so.’
‘Ah, you’re a hard woman to get around, Dr Thorpe.’
His words were almost gleeful, as though he were utterly relishing my monosyllabic replies and my distinct lack of enthusiasm for his company. He sounded happy and cheery and completely at ease and his entire personality got so far up my nose that it was wheeling around my sinuses at this point.
‘Look.’ I stopped suddenly and was mildly appeased when he skidded alongside me in an attempt to stop too. ‘You aren’t going to “get around” me. I have no intention of being “got around”. You want to lift the Fairy Stane, I cannot and will not allow that to happen. There is no middle ground here, Professor O’Keefe. The stone is on my territory. I’m working on the stories based around it, and, therefore, lifting it is out of the question.’
I’d turned around to face him down, horribly aware that the rain was beginning to drip from the ends of my hair and it had got through the seams in my jacket. He, on the other hand, had his coat shrugged up at the collar, hands in pockets, and the rain was decorating his hair with uneven beads of moisture rather than sliding down to run down the back of his neck.
How the hell did he do that?
‘Well, now,’ he said, tipping his head to one side, ‘and why don’t you tell me what you really think?’
He was so utterly infuriating that it took all my willpower not to run off and try to beat him to the car, so that I could have the satisfaction of leaving him on the moor in the rain. But he’d probably stand by the road looking billowy and craggy and get picked up by the next car, which, I thought with my teeth gritted, would be driven by three supermodels who were heading to Monaco for the weekend and who’d invite him along.
Every single aspect of Connor O’Keefe ran down my nerve endings like an electric wire.
‘If I told you what I really think,’ I snapped back, ‘you’d have me arrested.’
‘Ah, I reckon we’re only about ten minutes from that happening anyway.’ He started walking again. We were very nearly at the car and the thought of being able to sit down out of the rain made me speed up a little. ‘You really don’t like me much, do you, Dr Thorpe?’
‘You do yourself an injustice, Professor O’Keefe. I don’t actually like you at all .’
I unlocked the car, slightly smug at my comeback, and he swung into the passenger seat in a move that looked as though he would have preferred to slide in through the window like Starsky and Hutch.
‘Where’s Glaisdale?’ He didn’t follow up on my expressed dislike of him, but his tone was a little less cheery and his chin had a set to it that implied he might be clenching his teeth slightly.
‘It’s near Danby. In the heart of the moors.’ I tucked my jacket as far under my bottom as I could to protect the seat from the warm damp that my moss-soaked behind had become. This pulled the neck taut as a straitjacket and made me sit more rigidly than I might otherwise have done.
‘And you’ve a farm to take pictures of, y’said?’
‘Yes. I’ve been recording folk memories of the area round abouts, and there’s a farm still standing where there were stories of a hob working.’ Then, because I couldn’t resist the opportunity to know more than him, ‘A hob is like a brownie or a pixie, a helpful house spirit.’
‘Ah. A bowl of milk and they’d clean the kitchen for you.’
‘That sort of thing, yes. And I want to put photographs in to illustrate locations. It might be valuable in the future, when some of these sites are gone.’
‘No such luck for me. The Romans were not ones for the camera, sadly.’
‘I imagine not.’
We lapsed into silence. I was wondering why the hell I hadn’t admitted I was heading back to York. Well, because I’d thought he’d decline a lift that was apparently going to take him miles into the depths of the moors, that was why. Now I had to drive pointlessly up to the old farm, taking photographs of a place I’d photographed only the other day so I didn’t look like a liar.
The rain pounded against the car while the cloud gathered itself around us as we drove higher and higher into the moors. The occasional sheep passed into view, black faces against the fog, floating above the grass at the sides of the road, but there was nothing else. No other traffic, no walkers, no scenery. I toyed with the idea of turning round but he’d only ask questions, wouldn’t he?
It began to feel like one of those films where you realise the characters are actually dead and in Purgatory.
‘Are you sure you’re going to be able to take any pictures in this?’ Connor turned to look out of the passenger window. Because of the fog outside, I could see his face in reflection and he looked unsettled. Being driven he knew not where by a woman whose dislike filled the car like petrol fumes must be finally getting to him. ‘It’s a touch filthy out there now.’
In reply, the rain thrummed on the car roof and we drove through some standing water so deep that the car bucked like a resistant horse. ‘No, not really,’ I said grudgingly. ‘It’s worse than I thought this far up.’
But I drove on. Turning around, admitting defeat and heading back to York would be – well, admitting defeat. And I could not be defeated, not with Mr Swanky Pants in my car, waving his professorship and the Romans at me. Folklorists keep going. It was practically a motto. In fact, I’d have got it on a T-shirt, if I ever wore T-shirts, which I didn’t because one thing about being a folklorist is that everyone expects you to wear tie-dye and kaftans and lurid T-shirts and listen to Steeleye Span. So I defiantly wore Levis and tidy shirts with tailored jackets and pretended to like drum and bass and The Weeknd. The fact I preferred silence, I kept to myself.
The fog thickened to the extent that I had to drop my speed to fifteen miles an hour. I wanted to turn around so much that I had to fight my hands’ desire to take over and spin us in the road, but in the face of Connor O’Keefe’s presence, I could not. My jacket was almost strangling me and the moistness of my jeans was giving me a very unpleasant warm chafing sensation, but I’d told him I was driving up on the moors, so drive up on the moors I would. Besides, if this extended trip was inconveniencing him in any way other than keeping him away from my Fairy Stane, I was going to maximise his discomfort. My own I could ignore.
Eventually, when it would have been quicker to abandon the car and get out and walk, the decision was taken from me. We were flagged down by a man in a fluorescent jacket.
‘Lorry’s blocking road,’ he said quickly through the tiny gap that I opened in my window. ‘You’ll need to turn round.’
I could feel the waves of self-satisfaction coming from the professor in the passenger seat, almost as though he’d psychically caused the accident so we’d have to go back, but obediently I U-turned and we headed back the way we’d come, inching along the road with two wheels practically on the verge.
‘So, shall I be telling you what my plans actually are now, then?’ he said, cheerful again now that we weren’t apparently falling off the edge of the world. ‘Or wait until we get back to your office?’
I didn’t answer. I was having to concentrate hard on not driving off the road and onto the boggy moor. But, of course, he went on anyway.
‘I’m on secondment to York University from Dublin, because my speciality is lost Roman settlements and the archaeologists have LIDAR evidence of something that looks like a small town out to the east there.’ He glanced quickly at my face, but I kept my expression impassive. ‘That would be a big deal – there’s not a lot of evidence of Roman settlements out here. A few villas, and, of course, they had York and Malton, to secure the river crossings.’
My interest in the Romans and their enjoyment of bridges knew no beginning.
‘So I’ve got a team out from the university to look into it. The archaeologists are doing their test-pit thing, and I’m leading the landscape people, plus lecturing on Roman daily life out here on the fringes of empire.’ Connor went on, seemingly not caring that I was not contributing to the conversation. ‘And I found out about your Fairy Stone?—’
‘Stane,’ I interjected. ‘It’s called the Fairy Stane. I know Yorkshire dialect probably doesn’t mean a lot to you, but it’s important that places keep the names that the locals give them – a lot of history can be tied up in naming.’
There was a moment’s silence. We were dropping down now, away from the higher moor and back towards the stone’s location, with the fog thinning all the way.
‘You’re right, of course,’ Connor said, turning to look at me properly now. ‘You’re very passionate about the subject, aren’t you?’
‘Someone has to be,’ I half muttered. ‘History isn’t all treasure hoards and kings in car parks. Oral history that’s passed down through the generations, even if it’s in the form of folk stories, can tell us a lot about how real people lived. They are important too, more important than your glittery Romans or buried treasure.’
‘Hang on a minute.’ Connor held his hands up. ‘I’m not saying that they’re not, now, am I?’
‘You want to lift the stone!’ Finally my composure broke. ‘You want to ruin a piece of folkloric history just to prove your own! What’s that, if not thinking that your fancy-shmancy centurions take precedence over what the ordinary farming families believed?’
We cleared the fog level and the whole of the Ryedale valley was spread out before us, from the smooth chalk rise of the wolds along the flat plain of the ancient glacial lake. A land of myth, of story. My land.
‘It’s not that I’m wanting to lift your stone.’ Connor sounded weary now. ‘It’s more that I might have to. It could be a boundary marker, as I said, or it could be a waymarker or even mark a burial place. Wouldn’t you want to know, if you were me?’
‘Not if it meant desecrating something that’s special to others,’ I muttered. ‘Lift the stone and release the fairies, that’s how it goes. Prove that there’s no entrance to fairyland and you destroy the oral history.’
I flipped the indicator and we pulled out onto the main road. I turned for York.
‘It sounds more like a folk retelling of the myth of Pandora’s box,’ Connor said thoughtfully. ‘A mangled recital of a half-understood Greek tale. You do realise that I could lift the stone, check the underside and put it back and you’d never be any the wiser?’
‘That,’ I said tightly, ‘sounds like a threat, Professor O’Keefe.’
We drove the rest of the way back to York in silence.