Chapter 12
12
1898
Betsy was on her way back to the village when she saw May.
Bit of a stuck-up so-and-so May was, everyone thought so. Had ‘ideas above her station’, Mam always said, just because she was a lady’s maid to the young misses up at the house. Always said her haitches, like she was proper posh, and stuck her nose in the air when the parlourmaids tried to talk to her.
So, when Betsy saw her, standing up at the Fairy Stane, she was of half a mind to stick her own nose in the air and keep walking. Let madam stand there on her own, doing whatever, pretend she hadn’t noticed. Until she drew closer, curious as to what May could be doing, and saw that she was crying.
‘All right, love?’ Betsy was a soft-hearted lass, Dad always said. She had no reason to talk to May at all, but she couldn’t leave a girl up there, crying like that, not without trying to make sure she wasn’t hurt.
Obviously surprised at being addressed, May took a step back. ‘I’m well, thank you, Betsy,’ she said, stiff as a broom and trying to hide her face.
‘You don’t look well. You look mazed, lass. What’s up?’ Then, with a growing suspicion, ‘It’s not Master Jack, is it? He been trying to get you round the back in the laundry room?’ There had been rumours about the son of the house and his tendency to try to bed any of the maids that couldn’t run fast enough. ‘Just tell him to get to…’ Betsy lowered her voice so that nobody passing would hear her use of bad language and tell Dad, ‘… hell .’
May gave a straight-mouthed smile through her tears. ‘I shall remember that,’ she said, then added more quietly, ‘for next time.’
‘Ah, lass, you come on away with me.’ Betsy took May’s arm. The girl resisted at first, then relaxed. ‘Come on. Me mam will have tea on, come and have a cup with us and a warm by the fire. It’s nithering out here tonight. What were you doing up at the stone?’
May looked down at her feet, and Betsy saw a small rag doll flopped face down in the sharp needles of reeds that grew up around the stone. It looked home sewn, loosely stuffed limbs and a stitched petticoat with an embroidered face. ‘Leaving a gift,’ May almost whispered.
Betsy was wise for her years. She’d heard a thing or two that went on up here, the men coming out late at night and the women following a few nights later with flowers and little offerings. Sometimes women came alone, stepping heavily along the worn path that led to the stone. Nobody asked. Nobody talked about their reasons. The fairies took their offerings, that was all anybody needed to know. Things were kept safe.
Betsy looked at the doll again, then picked it up. ‘You know that little Cecilia has just lost her ma,’ she said, straightening the doll’s skirts. ‘Her sister has taken the four little ones and the boys have gone up to Home Farm to help their pa with the cows and the rabbits.’ She didn’t look at May. ‘But little Cissy has gone to old Mother Sleightholme.’ Now she did look up. ‘Reckon she’d love a little poppet like this to play with.’
May opened her mouth as though she was about to speak, but then closed it again and rubbed her wrist over her eyes.
‘After all, the fairies has got each other up here,’ Betsy went on. ‘Little Cissy now, she’s got no one.’
There was a long moment. Eventually May stretched out her hand and took the doll from Betsy. She tweaked its skirts straight and knocked out some grass that had got tangled in the string hair. ‘Yes,’ she said, tiredly. ‘You’re right. Poor little girl.’
Betsy looked at the stone. ‘Aye,’ she said quietly. ‘Poor love. It can’t be easy.’
‘No.’
The two girls shared a look of understanding. Then May gave a small, thin smile. ‘I think a cup of tea sounds like a very good idea,’ she said, linking her arm through Betsy’s. ‘Thank you very much, Betsy.’
Arm in arm they walked off the moor and down towards the village, where smoke spiralled from chimneys into the autumn air. Betsy noticed May look back, just once, but she kept her counsel, as the fairies would, no doubt, keep theirs.
Now
In the morning I took one look out of the window and decided to work from home. Chess had texted me to say that she was poorly and wouldn’t be in. I had everything I needed for the work I was currently doing, and I honestly didn’t fancy spending the scant daylight hours alone in that subterranean office, watching the rain run down the brickwork outside and pinging off all the little green ferny growths.
I’d dreamed of Elliot again. The dreams had almost stopped – those awful, cruel dreams where I’d had him back with me and we’d been doing ordinary, domestic things, or the dreams of him leaving, where I’d watched him pack for a long journey and not known how to say goodbye. This dream had been different, in that he was here, but I was angry with him. In life, our arguments had been few and mostly annoyances about wet washing left in the machine or similar stupid domestic upsets. This time, however, my anger had boiled and ricocheted and turned on Elliot, whilst he had been unconcerned and blank-faced about my fury, carrying on his normal routine as though I weren’t there.
I woke with the anger still scratching at the back of my neck, the rain cascading down the window, a text from Chess in which I could almost hear the snuffling, and decided that I’d stay right here.
I could hear Connor moving about, a bumping presence in the other room, and felt, oddly, better. After three years, I’d come to terms with waking up from dreams of Elliot to a house that echoed with the lack of him, the absence of his bleary face next to me and no random movement of limbs under the duvet. He was gone. But I didn’t have to like it, and hearing Connor shuffle his way to the bathroom and then begin a muttered mumble to himself under the whine of his shaver was somehow comforting.
He couldn’t stay, obviously. I didn’t want him here, and he was irritating in the extreme, but at least I knew what was happening with the dig on the moor and my stone when he was under my eye. Maybe I could get a cat when he went? Just another living presence in the house, so the emptiness didn’t feel so, well, empty . It would be something to come home to, something to greet me at the end of a long day and be pleased to see me. Yes. I would get a cat, in the spring, when the days were lengthening.
I pulled on a fleecy dressing gown and slouched downstairs, past the bathroom door where Connor was now sluicing water in a fashion that boded damp patches on the carefully sanded and sealed floorboards, although he did always clear up after himself in an almost unnaturally assiduous way.
I flipped bread into the toaster, put the kettle on and went to stand by the window, where the large white duck that seemed to be the ringleader of the avian gang eyeballed me sternly from the water beneath. It was paddling ferociously to maintain crust-grabbing position, an arrowhead pointing upstream, as the water rushed past, its level raised by the night-long rain pouring down off the high moor, swirling it into the colour of bad coffee.
‘You not in today?’ Connor said over my shoulder. ‘You’re usually dressed by now – you not well?’
He sounded surprisingly concerned. ‘Given the weather, I thought I’d work from home; there’s no need for me to be in the office.’
‘Okay, good. Don’t want you getting ill, now. D’you fancy taking me to the site of the old manor up on the moor today? As you’re not going in?’
I sighed. ‘What part of “working from home” is passing you by, Connor?’ I turned around to see him catching the toast as it popped out of the toaster. ‘It’s not a day off. Anyway, why do you want to see the old manor site? There’s nothing left, a bit of a hole where the cellars were, maybe, but all the material was taken down and sold to anyone who needed medieval brick. They bought…’ I stopped. I’d been about to say that the reclamation yard where Elliot had worked had bought several tonnes of the brick and, despite the fact that this had been back in the sixties, there had still been some there. We’d bought a load to repair the back wall of the cottage. This cottage was part of the manor, and I’d liked that idea.
But after that dream, bringing Elliot into conversation felt unnatural and I was half enjoying this casual breakfast. It was warm and domestic with Connor scraping butter over toast while I made tea and I had a sudden wish that it really were a day off and we could sit and chat at the table without the relentless pressure of time; that I didn’t have to switch on my computer and spend a day alone digging through old documents. With that dream still haunting my memory, I wanted someone to keep me from going back over it and pulling out emotions that had already faded, brushing them down and examining them with an intensity they didn’t deserve.
‘Yeah. Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.’ Connor was already dressed for the moor, his long black coat gone in favour of some unattractive waterproofs that made the noise of an entire campsite being disassembled whenever he moved. ‘I’m away up there anyway. I’ll have a wee poke around by myself.’
Suddenly I couldn’t face a quiet house. ‘Look, I’ll give you a quick tour around the manor site,’ I said. ‘If it’s important. I could do with a bit of atmosphere myself.’
He laughed and glanced at the window, where light was beginning to break over the far hills in a bluster of storm-driven cloud. ‘I don’t think we’re short of that.’
‘I’ll just get dressed. Why do you want to see the manor anyway?’ I picked up my toast and my tea and prepared to head up the stairs.
‘I was thinking – what if the manor was built on the site of Roman remains? It’s the way people go – a good spot is a good spot and people have a tendency to build where there’s stone and a good flat site that’s sheltered from the wind. It would be within the boundaries of my possible location, so it might be worth checking out in case there’s any indications. Clues.’
I scampered up the stairs, dressing gown swinging and trying not to spill my tea, mentally rearranging my day in my head. A quick walk on the moors would be good for me anyhow, to get the remnants of that dream blown away, and then I could come back and get to work without this lingering feeling of resentment. And I hadn’t lied, I really could do with a little bit of local feeling in my writing – I’d got so wrapped up in the legends that I hadn’t really put much colour in; all those bits that people liked to read about when they got home from their holiday, reminders of the moors they’d walked or even admired from a distance. A pouring-wet day with a force eight gale probably wasn’t the reminder that they’d want, but I could edit it down to a smell of peat, the gurgle of streams and the occasional grouse clucking its way into the air.
I came back down the stairs to find Connor lounging around near the front door. ‘Wow. I thought I was dressed for it,’ he observed as I rustled my way into the hall.
‘You’re wearing tourists’ clothes,’ I said, adjusting my oilskins. ‘If you want to do any real work up there on the moor through winter, you need proper waterproofs.’
‘I’m going to check on a potential site not… not… gut herring on a trawler.’ He opened the front door and wind drove a particularly intrusive squall in to examine my furniture.
I raised my eyebrows at him and gave him a ‘you’ll find out’ smile. The rain up here wasn’t a soft, view-obscuring drizzle. On the high moors it came at you from every direction simultaneously and, at this time of year, it had ice on its edges too. Connor was wearing good walking gear, waterproof trousers and a half-decent coat, but I knew the way the rain got in through seams and waistbands. Our rain was the mosquito of precipitation, it got everywhere, even when you thought you’d protected yourself against it.
We splashed to the car, Connor rustling lightly whilst I walked like a reanimated corpse, as the oilskins meant bending my arms and legs was difficult, and climbed in. Visibility was almost nil in the driving rain.
‘Are you sure you want to go up there today?’ I asked, starting the engine and staring out through the windscreen wipers’ frantic attempts.
‘Ah, it’ll be grand. I’m only here for six months, two of which are nearly gone. I can’t imagine the weather is going to improve mightily in the next few weeks, so might as well do it now.’
He smiled again, and I felt a little jolt. Of course. He was only here for six months, presumably until the memory of his transgressions in Dublin had faded safely into the past. By the spring, and the slow, gradual improvement in the weather, he’d be gone.
‘Oh, yes. And we ought to get up there before the ford gets too full to drive through and we have to go the long way round. Right.’ I let the clutch out and the car slithered onto the more solid surface of the ford edge, crept through the building water, and began the climb up onto the moor, throwing gobbets of sandy mud around us as we went.
‘They’re forecasting it getting colder. Does it snow often out here?’ Connor asked idly.
‘Most winters we get some. We’re pretty high up, so it dumps on us in preference to the towns lower down.’
‘Do you get snowed in?’
‘Once or twice.’
‘Cosy.’ Connor went back to staring out at the bleak grey expanse. The low cloud meant that the rain had less distance to travel so was even heavier up here and the view was cut to what was immediately in front. ‘Cosy’ was not the word that sprang to mind when I considered being stuck in the house with a questionable electricity supply and no idea when a passing farmer with a plough on the front of a tractor would get around to clearing the road to the cottage.
‘Don’t you get snow in Dublin?’ I asked as I pulled the car onto the edge of the track so that we could walk out to the manor site.
‘Ah, it’s like any city. It snows, now and then, but you don’t really feel it, other than that the bus comes late and the bars get busy early.’
I opened my door, and the wind took it from my hands and snatched it to its furthest extent. I’d grown up in a city. Elliot and I had met in Leeds, got jobs in York, and decided that we wanted to live – I tried very hard not to think ‘and raise our children’ – out in the countryside. Right now, with rain trying to get into the car with me, I couldn’t quite remember why.
‘Remind me again why we’re here?’ I had to half shout the words above the noise of the wind, which hit our ears like the sound of a practising piper. ‘Are you going to want to dig around the site of the old manor? Only I don’t think you’ll be able to get much of a hole before it becomes a pond.’
‘I’m a historian,’ Connor said vaguely, shrugging his back to the wind. ‘Not an archaeologist. I mean, I’ve done my time on digs when I was a student, but I mostly deal with digging in libraries and archives now. I’m the person that points the archaeologists at places.’
We tramped along a small trackway that once would have been the approach to the manor. It lay at the top of a shallow valley and away towards the bottom of the slope I could see signs of activity. A dig tent had been erected, blown down, and was being stared at by a group of people as it flapped its collapsed edges in the wind like a half-manifested ghost.
‘They’re getting started, that’s good.’ Connor shaded his eyes against the driving rain and peered out through the mist at the group. ‘They won’t get much done at this time of year but it might be enough for them to establish what they need to do when the weather improves.’ He wriggled his shoulders. ‘About July should do it.’
I was pleased to note that all the activity was a decent distance from my stone, which was about a quarter of a mile away from us, stretching its length invisibly in the tangled and waving undergrowth.
‘This is roughly the site of the manor,’ I said, my pointing finger describing a rectangular shape. ‘Foundations were fifteenth century, but I think the site was originally established in the fourteenth. Wooden then, of course, but rebuilt in locally made brick around about 1520.’
Connor looked at me. ‘It’s all right, you don’t need to give me the lecture, now,’ he said, pulling his hood further forward over his head so that he was not much more than a nose tip and some hair. ‘I’ve got the degree.’
A hot rise of embarrassment made the inside of my waterproofs damper than the outside for a moment. ‘Yes. Sorry, of course. I was forgetting for a minute.’ My oilskins cracked in the wind like sails. ‘I was thinking of…’
Elliot. I’d been thinking of Elliot, who’d worked for a heritage building company, sourcing materials to rebuild and repair ancient houses. He’d come down more on the ‘builder’ side, where I was on the ‘historical’ side, and he’d look at stone and tell me where it was quarried and where to look for masons’ marks. I’d tell him about the people, the changing fashions, the building to ‘keep up with the de Joneses’. Actually, it was nice to have someone who already knew. It cut out a lot of the talk, which was difficult anyway because of the wind.
‘The terracing could be original Roman.’ Connor held his hood in place. The gale was not cutting his toggles any quarter.
I nodded. I was dry enough but the oilskins were like being a boil-in-the-bag cod and I was heating up. I hoped Connor wasn’t going to take too long.
‘I’m going for a walk around. You’ll wait here? Only if you move, I might not be able to find you again and I can’t bear the thought of trudging around calling pathetically.’ He gave me another smile, which I could only see the edges of, and set off away across the manor site, with his hood pointing downwards to indicate that his eyes were on the ground.
Mist swirled. The far-off group of archaeologists came and went as the air thickened and then dispersed, cloud settling over the hills for a good long downpour but being displaced by the constant pressure of the wind, and Connor became a black shape crouching occasionally over the peat. I could have called over to him, but the wind was too strong for my voice to have carried. It was currently whipping the hood of my oilskins, so the material dipped and bulged and flicked water into my eye.
I turned my back to the wind and leaned into it with my hands in my pockets. The pressure was somehow pleasing, pushing at me until I had to step or lose my balance, almost like another presence. Almost like a hug, I caught myself thinking. Almost as though the wind were a crowd, a shoulder against mine here, a force in my lower back there, making me move along with it.
How long since I’d had a hug? A long time. People had hugged me at the funeral, but those had been brief arms across me, embraces of sympathy. Since then I’d actively repelled any attempt at bodily contact, because it hadn’t been Elliot. The last time I’d had one of those full-on squeezes that threatens to knock the breath from you, it would have been that final day. Elliot, leaving for work because ‘I can’t let them down, we’ve got wainscotting up to our eyeballs’, despite the fact that he was off colour and lacking in his usual energetic frenzy.
I stepped again, one foot landing in a peaty squelch where water was wearing away at the moor’s surface. I’d thought it all through before. If Elliot had stayed at home, would I have stayed with him? Would I have been there when his heart had stopped so catastrophically? Could I have got help to him in time, while I punched and pummelled away at his chest trying to keep him alive long enough for an ambulance to arrive?
Or would I have trusted that he’d be fine and left him in bed with a thermos of tea, instructions to call me if he felt worse, and gone to the office anyway? To come home and be faced with…
I shook my head and the rain splattered off my hood in a mist of diamond drops. I went over this regularly, less regularly now, of course, but still, whenever I dreamed of Elliot the dreams would be followed by this relentless examination of my actions. Could I have done anything differently? Would it have changed anything? The doctors had said no, that nothing could have been done, Elliot had been dead within seconds. Even if I had been standing over him with a defibrillator and oxygen tank, I couldn’t have saved him. It was a message that, even now, I wasn’t sure had sunk in.
I stood with the wind hugging me and the rain crying alongside me. The nearest I got to physical contact these days, the nearest I could stand.
I suddenly felt very, very lonely.
‘I see what you mean.’ The words were shouted at me across the moor. ‘Nothing left of the manor.’
‘I did warn you.’ I brought myself back from the brink of self-pity. ‘The whole site was stripped bare more than seventy years ago.’
‘I did have a bit of a poke.’ Connor advanced on me, rain running down his waterproofs. ‘And I found this.’
He came closer still and formed enough of a windbreak for me to be able to raise my hood to look at what he was holding out. Balanced on his palm, as though he were offering a lump of sugar to a nervous horse, was a tiny square object, with a glazed top.
‘I give in.’ I stepped again to keep my balance.
‘Tessera.’ The small square blew off his hand and bounced down into the heather and mud at his feet. ‘Bugger and feck.’
We both crouched and began patting our way through the undergrowth, the wiry heather stems flicking more water up into our faces as the rain ran into new angles of our clothing. Connor was as black and shiny as a seal, rustling his way through the whin bushes in a desperate attempt to retrieve his tile, and it was all so incongruous and ridiculous that I let out a short laugh that I hadn’t intended.
‘You finding this funny?’ He didn’t sound as irritated as his words suggested.
‘Ludicrous, really,’ I said, tugging my hood further down over my face. ‘So you’ve found a Roman mosaic? In the manor?’
‘No, just a – ah, here it is.’ He grabbed at the mud for a moment and then straightened up so suddenly that a raft of spray caught me in the eye. Caught by surprise, I flicked my head back and more rain got under my hood, blinding me, so I stayed down, shaking my head. ‘Are you all right there?’
‘Water in my eyes,’ I muttered.
‘Come on up, now.’ Connor took my arm, oilskins crumpling into a greasy second skin under his touch, and pulled me to my feet. I rose from the depths of the twiggy heather, shedding water like Venus arising, and had to take several tiny steps to balance myself so that I didn’t hurtle into him. I did tread on his foot but we were both wearing boots so stout that you could have shod a horse with them, so he probably didn’t feel it.
I did. I felt the unexpected contact all the way from that clutched arm to the stompy toes. Touch. A presence.
‘So…’ I tried to keep my voice light, but it bent under the weight of worry and also a little from the water that ran into my mouth, channelled from my hood, ‘…there’s definite sign of Roman occupation?’
Connor took half a step back so our waterproofs were no longer crackling against one another. ‘A tessera does not a villa make,’ he said. ‘It could have come in on soil from somewhere else. But it does mean I’m going back to the documents. If there was a villa out here, then there’s every chance there might have been a town close by. A farming settlement associated with the villa, anyway.’
I couldn’t help it, I turned my head towards the site of my stone, still stretched out somewhere in the undergrowth further along the hillside. ‘And… more research?’
‘Oh, yes. Goes without saying. This could be a really important discovery, a Roman settlement out here. Not quite the “fringes of Empire”, but close.’
Then he set off back towards the car, a stomping black object trudging over the shrubby undergrowth as the rain streamed down around him, leaving me biting my lip and worrying for the future of my folkloric stone.