Chapter 25
25
Before we knew it the Christmas holiday had passed, and that charmed, secret time was over. But that was all right, I reminded myself. Life couldn’t all be bed and giggling and making our own timetable. Reality had its place.
Reality was dropping Connor off near the university and heading into my office, where Chess was working, pink and enthusiastic after the break. I sent the Fairy Stane book off for editing and half planned some trips out for when winter gave up and let spring in.
Chess had, of course, taken one look at me and known exactly what sort of a Christmas I’d had.
‘I knew it!’ She punched the air triumphantly on my arrival into the office on our first day back. ‘I knew it!’
‘What did you know, Chess?’ I asked, playing for time as I sorted through post and checked that my chair wasn’t growing mushrooms.
‘You’re glowing! And if that isn’t stubble burn, then you ought to go and see a dermatologist. Connor, right? I knew it! You’re made for each other.’
There was absolutely nothing I could say, so I did the annoying little smile that neither confirms nor denies, to keep her on edge a little longer. She obviously took it as confirmation, because she spent the whole morning fluttering about singing ‘I knew it!’ and bought me an extra-large coffee and a bun from the little café down the road.
When we’d been back about a week, Connor turned up in my office at the end of the day with someone in tow.
‘This is my brother, Eamonn,’ he said, poking a young man through the doorway. ‘Go on, Eamonn, she won’t bite you, now.’
Eamonn, whom I’d consistently pictured as a rotund, placid little man with a beatific smile and a natty line in those cape things that priests always seem to wear on TV, turned out to be the most stunningly attractive man I’d ever seen. Connor was, of course, subjectively more attractive, but Eamonn’s sheer beauty took my breath away.
‘Er. Hello there,’ he said.
Chess, who hadn’t left yet although she’d got her hat and coat on, was glued to the wall of my office, boggling. When Eamonn and Connor leaned over my desk to look at a map, she looked over at me, her mouth and eyes wide in a silent scream of astonishment.
Wow! she mouthed and fanned herself with her hand.
Priest, I mouthed back and mimed a dog-collar.
No!
I gave her a rueful smile and nodded, but she still couldn’t take her eyes off Eamonn, who wasn’t only astoundingly gorgeous, but also had Connor’s height and long-limbed frame. Then I grinned to myself at the thought of the whole of Eire coming to a halt every time he walked down the street. He’d never be short of an offer of a Christmas dinner, anyway.
‘Is it all right if Eamonn comes over tomorrow and we take him up to the stone?’ Connor asked, propping himself against my desk. ‘He’s staying in York tonight.’
‘Of course.’ I frowned. ‘But how will you get over there?’
Eamonn grinned, and it was the white-toothed grin of a Hollywood star. I gave myself a talking-to. ‘I’ve hired a car,’ he said. ‘Connor is the only one of the family who can’t drive.’ Then he gave his brother a very unpriestly smack around the head. ‘You need to learn, my friend,’ he said. ‘You’re not five.’
‘I’ve tried! You know what happened when Mrs O’Donahue took me for a spin around Dundrum. Newspapers everywhere, and a poodle that will never be the same again.’
‘He’ll certainly look over his shoulder next time he hears a Fiat Panda coming towards him.’ Eamonn nodded. Then he looked at me, and I was surprised by the depth of expression in his dark eyes. He loved his brother and was assessing me for suitability – it was a mother-in-law look, not a look I would have expected to see from a man of the cloth. ‘Perhaps Rowan can teach you.’
I wondered whether the family had sent him to check me out. Then I remembered that Connor had summoned him, and again I wondered why. As far as I knew there was nothing ungodly about the Fairy Stane, although the position of fairies within the paranormal canon might contravene something biblical. Not my field of study, thankfully.
‘Tomorrow morning?’ I gave Chess A Look . ‘I’ll work from home tomorrow, Chess.’
She was still boggling. ‘Oh, do you have to?’
‘Yes.’
Then she brightened. ‘Maybe tonight I could take Eamonn out? Show him the sights of York?’
Eamonn and Connor exchanged a similar Look . Women falling over themselves for Eamonn’s attention was clearly not an unknown occurrence. ‘That would be nice, thank you,’ Eamonn said brightly. ‘There’s a couple of churches I’d like a look over before I go back.’
Chess’s smile faded a little, but she gamely breezed on. ‘Here’s my number. I’ll pick you up from your… hotel?’
‘That would be grand.’
Connor and I left the two of them arranging a meet-up, and I clutched at Connor’s arm as we walked through the car park. ‘She’s going to try to seduce a priest! Oh, that girl is going to hell.’
‘Which you don’t believe in,’ Connor said, smoothly.
‘No, but… should we leave them alone? Chess can be – persistent.’
Connor gave me a hug in the darkness. ‘Eamonn has been there before, trust me,’ he said. ‘He’s a great one for letting them down gently. Now, I’ve got some fish here – would you like a Goan fish curry tonight?’
I drove home to the cottage and marvelled at the way we’d fallen into this routine and how comfortable it was. We still hadn’t spoken about any kind of future. I was aware that he’d got a six-month secondment and that the Romans and their possible settlement couldn’t keep him here forever. Did I even want him here forever? Even if he was great company, cooked like a dream, was completely house-trained and had even struck up an uneasy alliance with the ducks?
Did I? Could I see a future, a new, different future, with Connor? I looked down into the valley as we breasted the rise that took us down to the river and the mill cottage. Everything was dark, apart from the little glimmer of light that was the kitchen lamp, a tiny, summoning beacon across the acres of night. ‘Allegorical,’ I said to its shining hint of hope in the gloom.
‘Sorry?’ Connor twitched upright.
‘Nothing,’ I said, and steered the car down the hill to home.
The next morning was bright and sharp with frost, the ground diamond-hard and our breaths clouded the view as we stepped out over the moor towards the stone. Connor and I were wearing thick jumpers and boots, but Eamonn was evidently unprepared for the conditions in his borrowed wellingtons and a waxed jacket that didn’t have nearly enough layers underneath.
Connor pointed out sights of interest as we went. Well, of interest to him, anyway.
‘That’s where the medieval manor was, up there past the hill.’
Eamonn nodded as though this had already been discussed. Maybe it had, although I had no idea why it would have been.
‘And there would have been pretty much a whole village up here somewhere,’ Connor went on. ‘The cottage was part of the mill for the entire settlement. Probably got Domesday origins.’
Eamonn nodded again as we tramped out over the cold-crisped grass and heather.
‘This is the stone in question. Gateway to fairyland, apparently.’ Connor looked meaningfully at Eamonn.
‘Ah, no, it’s just a marker now,’ Eamonn replied. ‘The stone isn’t symbolic.’
‘If it is what we think…’
‘Still only a place to come. To remember.’ Eamonn’s tone was very even, his voice level, but I suddenly had a tremor of intuition. They were having a conversation about something that had been discussed, and I didn’t know what that was.
‘If you lie here at midnight…’ I began.
‘You can hear the fairies under the stone,’ Connor finished. ‘The Little People, partying away. And what do you think that might be about, Rowan?’
I put my hands on my hips. ‘Well, the theory that the fairies might be a folk memory of the earlier peoples of the British Isles has been more or less discredited now. So we’re left with wondering whether they’re a common myth to make sense of various meteorological phenomena or a completely contrived creation for some reasons that we don’t yet understand.’
Eamonn was staring at the stone, his eyes very dark. Connor stood next to him, taller and wirier, but his eyes were also fixed on the slab of gritstone, as though it meant something to both of them.
‘The little people,’ Eamonn said, quietly.
I had a tingle of foreboding. ‘Is this where you perform some ritual and call elemental beings into life?’ I asked, only half joking.
‘He’s a fecking priest, not Aleister Crowley,’ Connor observed mildly. ‘And anybody less likely to perform any rituals you’re never going to see.’
‘Mass is ritual, Connor,’ Eamonn said, not looking away from the stone.
‘Oh, well, if we’re going to bring religion into it…’
‘Will you two stop bickering and tell me what’s going on?’ I used my best ‘getting Chess to do some work’ voice. ‘We’re clearly not up here for our health, and, as we’ve brought a priest with us, I’m guessing there’s a bigger reason for all this than just a nice walk.’
Both of the men looked at me wearing identical expressions of sorrow and sympathy. Connor put an arm around my shoulders. ‘What do priests do, Rowan?’ he asked me, so gently that I began to really worry that the stone was about to split and reveal a Creature from the Pit.
‘They pray,’ I retorted.
‘And?’
‘And exorcise. If that’s why we’re here then I need to go home and get some better underwear on because I am not wearing my Banish All Evil knickers today.’
Connor snorted and Eamonn looked over his shoulder at both of us, rolling his eyes.
‘Not even a suspicion about what might have gone on here?’ Eamonn asked Connor, nodding in my direction.
‘No, but she’s folklore, not history. Folklore tends to deal a little more with the conjectural side of things. I’m on the bricks-and-mortar side of the old speculative razor wire.’
‘Show me where you dug.’ Eamonn moved around the edge of the stone and Connor followed him, pointing at the soft ground slightly off to one side, where the boggy, reedy soil did show signs of disturbance and there were still small piles of snow melting slowly in their heaps.
I marched up and caught Connor’s arm. ‘You dug? You didn’t tell me you were digging.’
There was an almost unbearable expression of sympathy on his face now. As though there was some terrible, dreadful secret that the two of them knew – that the whole world knew – and I wasn’t in on it.
‘I did tell you I’d been up here, scrabbling about, when I walked up, in the snow. And, to be honest, a bit before that, when I still thought the stone could be a Roman marker. I just did a wee bit of poking around under the edge there.’
‘But…’ I was too confused to be truly annoyed. ‘But this is my stone!’
‘I think…’ Connor led me gently away from where Eamonn was crouched now, pulling at the roots of some reeds carefully and staring down at the soaked earth, ‘…that you might be glad I did. What do priests do, Rowan?’
‘I told you, they pray and they?—’
‘Exorcise, yes. But there are other things.’ He was looking at me as though he was willing me to come to my own conclusions, so he didn’t have to fill in the gaps.
‘Well, they marry people.’
A sudden laugh. ‘And, when and if the time comes, I was thinking a civil ceremony might be more the mark. But there’s time, Rowan. There’s time.’ He hauled me into a sudden hug. I saw Eamonn look up, smile and shrug himself back down into the bog, his jacket scraping the stone. ‘So, what else do priests do, Rowan?’
‘Why don’t you tell me?’ His persistent questioning was raking claws up and down my spine. That feeling that there was a huge joke, an enormous answer that absolutely everyone else knew, was oddly familiar. It reminded me of just after Elliot died, when I lived in a dislocated world, a planet with the centre gone. I’d felt then as though everyone else had the comfortable, settled lives that had been ripped from me, as though they all knew what was going on while I didn’t even know what day of the week it was.
Connor looked at my face. My doubts, my memories must have been showing, because he gave me a gentle kiss on the forehead. ‘I’m sorry about the folklore, Rowan,’ he whispered. ‘But we need to close this story down.’
I shivered. His tone was soft, but there was a kind of dark import behind the words, as though there really were a route to hell under this stone. ‘I…’
‘What else do priests do?’ Still quiet, still low, but spoken with such weight . ‘They baptise.’
And suddenly everything came together, with an almost audible click. Eamonn stood up, and he was holding brown and twisted stems that I could now see weren’t stems at all, and my stomach dropped.
‘Do you know what a cillín is, Rowan?’ Eamonn asked and he sounded as gentle as Connor. ‘You’ll need your Irish folklore for this one.’
The name rang a vague bell, but as I’d concentrated on the folklore of northern England and my knowledge of Irish was sketchy, I had to admit defeat. I shook my head.
Connor sighed, but it didn’t sound like a sigh of annoyance, more of sadness. ‘Literally, it means “little church”,’ he said. ‘We’ve a number of them all over across the water there. I’ve never seen one in England before, that’s why I didn’t know what I was looking at for a long time.’
He turned me by my shoulder until we were looking out across the moors. ‘The house that was out there. The manor. The Catholic house.’ Then he turned me around until we were facing more or less the direction of my cottage. ‘The village associated with the manor. Full of Catholics, displaced from Ireland in the mid eighteen hundreds.’ Then he turned me again, just a degree or two, until we could see the spire of the local church, only the tip and the weathervane prodding the sky from the town three miles further down the valley. ‘The church. Not Catholic, but it illustrates the point.’
Eamonn joined in now, sitting carefully on the edge of the stone, nursing those brown tangled things in his lap. ‘Back in the day, if you died without the holy sacrament of baptism, you were deemed to remain eternally in limbo and the Church, in its wisdom, wouldn’t allow a proper burial.’
They both went quiet, and I looked out across the broad landscape of the hills, patchy with melting snowdrifts and the re-emergence of the skeins of heather and grassy stretches. A sheep baa rose through the stone-cold air and there was a distant noise of something mechanical working, but otherwise silence. My mouth had gone dry, and I couldn’t have said a single word if Connor had gone down on one knee and proposed right then.
He didn’t, of course, it was far too soon for that. But he did enfold me in the drapery of his big coat, firm and warm against me. ‘When a baby was stillborn, or died before they could get the holy water to their heads, the men of the settlement would carry them out to a well-marked local site and bury them with all the ceremony they could manage,’ he said. His voice echoed inside my head. ‘They tried to do the right thing, even though the Church denied them.’
Again, that silence. That blank hole in the world as I tried to comprehend the incomprehensible.
‘They weren’t allowed to bury their babies?’ I whispered.
‘Not in consecrated ground, no. They weren’t members of the Church until baptism, you see.’
‘That’s horrible.’
I saw Eamonn drop his head. Then I realised what those bundled root-like things were, and I sprang away from Connor and stared at the Fairy Stane. ‘They buried their babies under the stone?’
‘With reverence, Rowan,’ Connor said. ‘With love. They will have said prayers and made a little ceremony of it. They didn’t just dig a hole and hide them away. And the stone was here, when they wanted to come and pay their respects, it was here. The graves were marked in the only way they could. The Church…’ and he glared at his brother as though the whole thing were his fault, ‘…might have denied them, but their parents did what they could.’
‘The little people.’ I half whispered the words over the blockage in my throat. ‘It was a literal thing. I never thought…’
‘No. Nobody did. I don’t think we’ve seen a cillín outside Ireland, have we?’ Connor stopped eyeballing Eamonn. ‘I’d guess they brought the idea over with them when they escaped the Great Famine. Usually the babies were buried at night, in churchyards where those who oversee such things turned a blind eye. But with this being so isolated and the church so far to travel over bad ground back then…’
‘It’s not great ground to travel even now,’ I put in, feeling a little more robust. ‘See how we got snowed in last week.’
‘Exactly. And, what, a hundred and fifty years ago, how much worse would it have been? So they did what they could. They made their own safe, sacred place.’
‘And you knew? All this time, you knew ?’ I rounded on Connor.
‘No. I began to suspect, what with you and your folk tales of the Stane, which started to sound more and more like a metaphor, and with me knowing about the cillín from Granda and his stories – well. I put two and two together. Then I found…’ He trailed off. ‘I knew I was right.’
We all looked at the tiny fragments in Eamonn’s lap. He was nursing them as though the children were still here, still alive.
‘So it’s not a Roman grave marker, and it never was?’
Now Connor grinned, his usual, relaxed smile. The worst was clearly over. ‘It still could be, y’know? But I’ll not be for lifting it. It’s a sacred place. We’ll look for official protection for the site. I’m not quite sure how, but Eamonn is well up on these sorts of things.’
‘Not in England, I’m not,’ Eamonn replied. ‘But I know a man.’
‘God?’ I asked.
‘Well, he’s a professor of Irish studies, so, you’re close.’ Now Eamonn grinned at me too, and the resemblance between the brothers was incredible. ‘He’ll know how to deal with all this. In the meantime…’ He pulled a small bottle out of a jacket pocket.
I was baffled. ‘We all have a drink?’
‘It’s holy water, Rowan,’ Connor said, carefully. Eamonn had gone pale. ‘Eamonn will perform a service of baptism for the babies. The baptism they never got.’
I wanted to say, ‘Well, that’s a fat lot of good to them now, isn’t it?’ but didn’t. Just because I didn’t believe, and thought that the religion that had caused grief-stricken parents to have to bury their babies secretly in a resting place marked with what they probably thought was a heathen symbol ought to keep very, very quiet right now – well. It wasn’t my place. Through recording people talking I’d heard what previous generations had had to go through. Folklore wasn’t a synonym for pretty. It wasn’t all household charms and lights guiding you through a bog. There was blood at the heart of it. Folk tales were the smooth edge that made you not notice the razor underneath.
Fairyland beneath the stone. The stone that must not be lifted for fear of disturbing the Little People, who lived a life away from man, that could be heard at midnight if you put your ear to the stone. Stories told by the grieving, to help ease their consciences and their sorrow.
My throat squeezed. ‘What do we do?’
His head came up, watching his brother, who was walking around the stone now, gently sprinkling water on the site and praying in Latin. ‘First, we watch and remember,’ he said quietly. Then, with a lift of his chin and a sideways look to me, ‘Then we all head into town and have a bloody good meal, quite a lot to drink, and we talk about the future.’
I opened my mouth to protest, but a quick kiss came out of nowhere to silence me. ‘Eamonn can drive us. He doesn’t drink.’ A fond glance at his brother, who was standing praying now. ‘He’s a great lad, except for the Church thing.’
I thought of all those parents, all that guilt. All that sadness. It would have been there, even if their babies had been properly buried – they would still have felt a guilt and an awful aching unhappiness for that hole in their lives. The loss bound us together somehow – my loss of a husband and the desire to keep the Fairy Stane intact for the sake of my memories. Their loss of their babies, and the Stane standing for all the graves that would never be marked.
Grief and loss. Then I looked over at Connor, who was watching Eamonn continue to perform a baptism ritual and thought, And a future. They might have gone on to have more children, children who lived. I can go on and have a life. An end doesn’t have to mean the end of everything.
These parents had done what they could and I thought, with a tingle of possibility, to honour them I could write the story of those parents; maybe even find out their names and where they’d lived. I could give them another life, linking the folklore of the stone to what had really gone on here. Maybe, wherever they were now, they’d know that their children were not forgotten.