Chapter 8
8
1870
The women, shawls over their heads and crying, gathered inside the cottage as the men clustered outside. This was something the men must do, alone. The women would make their own journey out there to the stone, tomorrow maybe, or the day after, carrying their little offerings. But tonight was only for the men.
Jack, whose cottage this was, gathered the box inside his jacket. It had been an heirloom, given to him by his father when he’d married, containing a silver spoon – the family treasure. Now it was going to the stone, containing the weight of their hearts within it.
‘Now then, lads.’ John, who looked after the horses up at the house, was in charge tonight. ‘Stay together. If anyone asks… we’re off to greet the fairies, all right?’ He rested a heavy hand on Jack’s shoulder in a moment of solidarity. ‘All right?’
Jack nodded and adjusted the box. The torches were lit and the procession started, out along the sandy trackway that joined the estate to the neighbouring towns, and then swiftly branching off to cross the moor to where the stone waited for them.
Now
Now that autumn was vanishing, overcome by the onrush of a rapid winter, I was doing less driving about in search of first-person tales, and more cold hard research in warm, soft libraries. Many of those with tales to recount lived in deserted hamlets high in the hills, holding on to a way of life that had vanished twenty or thirty years ago with the coming of computerised farming. Elderly men still carried hay to barns full of cattle, women who’d been born before the war still baked and cleaned farmhouses and drew water from the well. It was a generation that was disappearing rapidly. Each cold winter took another few, and I had to seize my chance to record their memories of traditions and superstitions. But driving fifty miles along sleety lanes to sit in unheated rooms with my recorder during the snatched moments of daylight had taught me to do the recording during summer and spend the winter compiling and cross-referencing with other folklorists in other parts of the country. Plus, I had a cupboard full of donated diaries and observations to sort through. These cold months were a time for hunkering down, drawing the curtains and reading. I drew the line at making jam though.
But being in the office meant being in the forefront of the onslaught that was Chess. ‘He’s good looking, though. How are you getting on?’ Her questions were relentless.
‘He’s a good guest so far, but he can’t stay with me, Chess. He’s the enemy, after all.’
‘History isn’t the enemy, Rowan.’ Chess pursed her prim lips. ‘We’re complementary regimes.’
Nothing complimentary about Professor Connor O’Keefe, I thought mutinously. I’d tried to figure out various ways in which he could have sabotaged my map but couldn’t work out how it could have been done and grudgingly had to accept it as an accident. I even found myself wondering why the hell I had left him that spare key this morning whilst I was sorting through some donated papers and sneezing at the dust. He couldn’t stay much longer. He just couldn’t .
This was not right. This had to stop. I couldn’t work if I was going to be second-guessing the motives of a man whom I half suspected was already up on the moor with a crowbar and a notebook. He wanted to lift the Fairy Stane. And I wasn’t going to let him.
I realised I’d skimmed several pages of handwritten notes, taken by a lady who’d been an amateur collector of local tales, which had been given to us by her granddaughter who’d found them in the attic. There could be loads of as yet undiscovered tales amid the cramped and crinkled pages, but I wouldn’t know because I’d been too busy dwelling on having Connor O’Keefe as a lodger, and this just wouldn’t do. I needed to pull myself together and… and he needn’t think that trying to get me to open up about my reasons for studying folklore would soften me towards his attitude!
Folklore was folklore, it informed and expanded recent social history. I didn’t need to justify myself or try to explain. If he preferred to stick to solid and concrete evidential history, then good for him.
Good for him. I turned a page so quickly that it nearly tore and I carefully placed the book down onto the desk. I needed to be calm. Methodical. Chess had gone over to the main library to order some research materials so I couldn’t even go and relieve myself of some of the irritation by listening to her recitations of last night’s TV or what someone I didn’t know had said about somebody else that I’d never met and how it had caused a feud that was set to take to social media.
I put my coat on and went out into the windy, rainswept street to try to clear my head. The buildings of York leaned in, crowding above my head in their medieval glory, whilst patches of the old wall shone in the brief sun. At least my office was in a picturesque location, I thought, stomping down the road towards the coffee shop and letting the breeze cool my ears and untangle my hair. Roman, Viking, Norman, Tudor. If it hadn’t been for those pesky Scandinavians it would sound like a litany of past boyfriends’ names, I thought, resisting the temptation to poke the wall vigorously for its historical persistence. Whereas my branch of history was ephemeral, fleeting. Stories of lives that touched the supernatural, or, rather, gave supernatural shape to the as yet unknown. Stories of social warning – grey lady ghosts were always girls who’d got pregnant out of wedlock and drowned themselves. Unmarried pregnancy and suicide, those twin dark threats that hung over girls, the dual transgressions.
I bought myself a sturdy coffee to give myself an excuse for the walk, and headed back for the office, moving slowly as I sipped, aware of myself moving alone through this crowd while I daydreamed about ways of forcing Connor to leave my cottage. I wanted my space back. I wanted to be left alone in the evenings with my thwarted dreams and my books. I couldn’t mutter to myself as I moved from room to room while Connor was there, he would think I was mad – or even more mad than he obviously currently considered me to be.
I wanted my life back the way it had been.
I even stooped to reading estate agency window adverts of houses for rent, only to find that anywhere on a bus route was prohibitively expensive, and he’d been right, mostly already rented. Then I berated myself again. His accommodation problems weren’t my problems. I’d got enough on with this book that I’d told the grant providers I was writing in order to justify them continuing to pay for my research. Now I had to get on and write the wretched thing, but how was I going to do that with my brain circling around the issues of having an argumentative historian in my space?
No. He had to go.
I drained the coffee, threw the cup in the recycling, and went to tell the returned Chess that I was heading back to the cottage to work from home for the rest of the day. With a bit of luck Mr Smuggo would still be out, striding around the moors like Heathcliff in better clothes, possibly falling into a bog and drowning. I smiled to myself at the thought.
‘Heading home to spend more time with the good professor?’ Chess was tapping desultorily at her keyboard whilst really reading a fashion blog.
‘Working on a way to get him gone,’ I said. ‘And I haven’t ruled out pushing him in the river or giving him a tent either, so keep your sofa free.’
She chuckled in a way that was designed to make me angry so I snatched up my car keys and stormed out through the back door so as not to upset any of the library patrons who might be innocently browsing the shelves. I stomped across the car park, careless of the splattered mud, and threw myself into my car, seething with resentment again at the fact that I was heading back to an uncertainty of historian and having to think about meals and bathroom time and clean towels instead of my calm isolation.
Chess was obviously trying to set us up, which meant she was also now the enemy. This was ridiculous! All I wanted was peace and quiet, a useable office – which it was more or less, and nicely central – and a snug place to retreat to and finish off my work. That was all! Not too much to ask! And now I’d got – I swung the wheel sharply and the car oversteered, nearly clipping the grass verge – my assistant playing matchmaker, my downtime disturbed and my cottage…
I remembered the cottage as it had been. Raised voices, as we’d called up and down stairs for advice or tools, evenings spent looking up the best type of walling to install, the most period-appropriate paint finishes. When it had been a project, a proper historical restoration and something that had…
No. Stop it. Now was what was important. And the now contained Connor O’Keefe.
I couldn’t properly appreciate the loveliness of the storm-scoured countryside, the newly planted brown earth sprouting with a thin cover of green, like a hair transplant on a gigantic scalp, or the way the distant sun touched the tops of recently bared trees and highlighted them against the vigorous blue of the sky. But I did, as ever, catch my breath at the top of the rise that led down to the ford, when the thin silver strand of the river at the bottom captured the light and the little cottage glowed in all its whitewashed finish, snug in the landscape as it had been for centuries.
There was no sign of Connor and the door was locked. Hugely relieved, I flopped onto the little loveseat, not even taking off my coat or hanging up my bag. He wasn’t here. Good. I could actually do what I’d said I’d do and start some work before I was interrup…
‘You’re back early.’
‘I thought you’d be out.’ My eyes had found the gap on the wall where the map had hung, and they caught on the bare painted space, refusing to look at him.
‘Just popped back to pick up a delivery.’ He hesitated, as though he wanted to engage me in conversation, but the way I kept my eyes on the empty wall must have put him off, because he went back out again. I heard clattering in the kitchen for a moment and then he was outside to greet the arrival of a white van, bearing something big and wrapped in cardboard.
‘Just go away,’ I whispered. It sounded like a plea or a prayer and I hadn’t realised how much I’d been banking on having the place to myself.
He came back in. ‘Tea?’
‘No, thank you. I’ve got work to do.’
‘Oh. Okay.’ A pause while he rummaged and I heard the kettle boil. Then, ‘I put the hoover over the broken glass, by the way. It should be fine down there now.’ A clank of mugs and a pouring of water. ‘And I’m off out away back up on the moor. We’ve found something that could be the walls on your map, or what’s left of them.’
Almost apologetic at its appearance, a mug of tea slid into the edge of my vision, backed by the dark cloud that was Connor, and then he was gone to a slam of the back door and a raised voice of greeting. The tea steamed, puffs of vapour floating across to add to the ghosts of the cottage. The miller, his wife, those children – how many others might still be around?
Not the right ones. Not the wanted ones.
I sighed and it let out some of the annoyance, then I picked up the mug and began drinking the tea almost without thinking about it but imagining instead the investigations going on up on the moors that teetered above my house. In fact, if I got up and went to the window, I could almost see them, where the sand track that had once been a road crossed the ford and rose up to become another hill on the far side. Out on that ridge was the track that led to the Fairy Stane and from there, presumably, on to this putative Roman settlement.
I turned away from the window and forced another mouthful of tea between clenched teeth. At least Connor had made lifting the stone sound like a last resort. If they got concrete results from the drone search to add to his no doubt exhaustive, in- depth and scholarly previous research, then he wouldn’t need to lift it, would he?
And, really, why did I care so much?
The thought hit me, barbed and vicious. Why did I care? The stone could be lifted, checked for any revealing lettering and put back. Who would know? Only whoever lifted it, Connor O’Keefe, and me, and I’d only know if I checked for disturbed foliage. Unless… unless it turned out that the stone really was a Roman relic, and then what? Would they take it to a museum, to preserve its ancient writing? And leave me with nothing but a bare space on the moor and a huge hole in the legends? I couldn’t really write a book of local folklore based around a stone that wasn’t there any more, could I?
Besides, whatever the professor might think, memory, folk history, was important. It had to be kept. It had to be guarded and curated because otherwise what use had it been to all those people who’d kept it for all those years? To us in the twenty-first century, muttering charms as you churned the milk was pointless. Unnecessary. We knew the cream would turn to butter regardless, as long as the fat content was sufficient, the temperature was right, the cows had eaten good grass and you kept on churning. But back before science stuck its fingers in farming, so much was experience and guesswork. And charms? If someone like me didn’t keep a record of such things, if notes weren’t kept about the words used and the beliefs behind them, then they’d vanish as if they’d never been. Folklore was important . It was memory and the past and ways of life long gone, and it couldn’t be allowed to die .
The silence in the house sang in my ears. There was nothing but the gentle gloop and gurgle of the river as it caught on the edges of the ford and then swirled free back to the depths of the mill race, and the hum of the air trapped in these small rooms.
I sighed again, carefully lifted the old paper of the map off my desk and turned on the computer.