The words on the burnt paper stayed with me all night. I left Felicity’s just before nine p.m. and resisted John’s persistent offer to walk me home. I wanted to think. Wanted to feel rain on my face and cold air on my cheeks and see if the hunter’s moon would be red or blue. I never found out. The sky was too clogged with grey to offer a view of any lunar spectacle and in truth, the rain and the cold produced little in the way of sensory pleasure. I just ended up sniffly and damp. Two cars passed me on the way back up the hill. Neither one slowed down. The village seemed even quieter than usual as I trudged past the old vicarage, already beginning to go to seed, and past the Bridge Inn. The place was silent. No clinking glasses, no muffled songs or mumbled back-and-forth. Left, past the garage with its fleet of buses standing idle at the kerbside; their paintwork gleaming with a gloss of raindrops. Round past the church. The new church. Pretty little place built on a slope: a curve of old graves around the entrance and long, straggly grass and weeds. Newer headstones further away from the door – smaller, whiter, sadder. Children. Babies from the hospital on the hill.
I didn’t let myself linger there. The headstones were teeth, waiting to take a bite out of a part of me that was starting to come back to life. I quickened my pace. Up past the big old houses. Slender trees to my right; an inadequate fence for the miles and miles of green that stretched away to my right. Up to the hospital. The locals still called it that. It had been a convalescent home for nigh-on twenty years but during the war it had been taken on by the authorities as a safe haven where expectant mothers from bigger cities in the north east could come and give birth without fear of any bombs dropping. Close to 5,000 women did just that. Those that didn’t survive were buried, quietly, in the grounds of the new church: another layer on the endless strata of bones and blood upon which the whole vale seemed to have been constructed.
Work was going on at the spa. There was talk of it becoming a hotel. It was certainly a splendid old building; a colossal white edifice that would have looked more at home on the seafront at Brighton or Scarborough than in that little wooded area by the river. I barely looked up as I passed. I slouched my way down into the damp woods and slithered down the muddy footpath; the smell of the sulphurous water mingling with the scent of churned mud and mulched leaves. The river was raging. It took an effort of will to force myself over the bridge, placing my feet carefully on the wooden slats. Rain splattered hard and heavy on the few leaves that the autumn had not stolen and I squinted in almost total blackness as I dragged myself up the footpath on the far bank towards home. Was I afraid? I don’t think I was, no. The worst thing I could imagine had already happened to me. There was nothing more fearsome in the darkness of the wood than there was within the shadows of myself.
For the first time since Stefan died I felt almost pleased to be home. The house looked as it always did – old and sturdy and totally wrong for me. It was too symmetrical – too splendid. I wanted chaos. Mess. I wanted patterned wallpaper hung upside down. I wanted floral curtains and polka-dot drapes. I could have had it, if I’d asked. But I think I preferred wanting it than having it. However it looked, I was pleased to see it that night. Happy to push open the back door and bathe myself in light. I drank a measure of sloe gin then poured another into a mug of boiling water. Went to the library and pulled a book at random from the shelves. I couldn’t concentrate on the words. Every time I tried to focus I would again see the burnt paper and Fairfax’s scribbled words and my vision would fill with images of frightened men and women herded like cattle and a young boy draped across a Nazi vehicle like a stag.
I woke where I was; stiff and cold in a high-backed chair. I don’t know if I dreamed but when I opened my eyes I was glad to have left wherever I had just been. I was cold to the marrow. My clothes had dried to my skin and the moisture from them had seeped into my bones. I stripped and wrapped myself in a blanket while I waited for the water to heat up then ran a bath. There was only enough hot water for a couple of inches but it still felt good to ease myself over the lip of the white, wrought-iron tub and scrub the goose pimples from my skin. I washed my hair and shaved my legs and lay with a hot flannel over my eyes until the water began to grow cold. I felt better for it. The towels I used to rub myself dry were rougher than I would have wished but I had not really got the hang of doing the laundry. I brushed my hair for a while, sitting at a dressing table in one of the spare rooms and looking at myself in the burnished surface of an old Victorian mirror. Where had he found all this stuff? Who was it for? Did he know me at all? I tried not to think upon it. My marriage was not meant to be a union of souls. It was an arrangement – a solution. I was grateful to him for all he had done but there were times I felt I would have been better scratching a living by myself than trusting my whole future to the charity of a man who only needed me in his life as camouflage. If I dwelled too long upon such thoughts I grew angry. Angry at myself for being so dependent; angry at my body for making a lie of my promises to Stefan’s father. I hadn’t expected to get pregnant. Hadn’t thought my body could so blatantly disregard my wishes.
It was just after ten the next morning when I finally headed back the way I had come. Out the door, down the hill, over the swollen river. When I had first arrived I had been told to turn left at the riverbank and make my way to the Popping Stone. It was a local landmark: three rounded boulders beside the river and a popular place for courtships over the years. The poet Sir Walter Scott proposed to his sweetheart there, though local legend had it that he only did so out of spite towards a previous lover who had turned him down. He had made her a promise he would find a new object for his affections before the year was out. The spot was as popular with locals as with tourists who all put great stock in the sulphurous water’s healing powers. Several bottles of gunpowder-scented water had been left on my doorstep during my time in the village though I had barely taken more than a sip. It tasted of rotten eggs and while it may have offered long life to those who imbibed, none of the stooped, gnarled old folk who shuffled around Gilsland looked as though they were gaining much from the experience.
It took twenty minutes to reach Felicity’s. The rain had eased off but the air was still wet and the sky had the look of uncooked bread. I saw two women at the bus stop and said hello to a man I half recognized outside the post office. He seemed a little taken aback but knuckled his flat cap as if I was somebody important. It was all I could do not to curtsey in return.
There was no answer at Felicity’s so I presumed she had already made her way to Fairfax’s. I crossed the road and peered in at the kitchen window. Felicity was on her knees, surrounded by papers, like a mug on an elaborate doily. I was cautious with my knock on the window but she still jumped like a teenager caught looking at a magazine. When she turned to me her face was white; the veins in her neck standing out as if she had just escaped the noose. One hand held to her heart, she gestured me to the back door. I went inside, into chilly air that smelled like forgotten fruit and liniment.
‘Gave me a start,’ said Felicity. She seemed as cool as the room; her whole manner stiff.
‘I’m always doing that,’ I said, trying to raise a smile.
‘I don’t know if I’m doing any of this right,’ she said, leading me into the kitchen through the passageway. It was quite a nice space, designed like Felicity’s, but the table was made for two, not four, and the pictures on the walls were in better quality frames.
‘He kept it nice,’ I said, taking my coat off. The sofa was also covered in paperwork so I just held it in my hand.
‘Ha!’ said Felicity, sharply. ‘This room maybe. The room for visitors. For me! But you wait until you see the rest of the place. Bloody pigsty.’ She had made herself a space in the centre of the papers and went back to her knees, folding her pleated skirt beneath her backside and holding it there with her slippered feet.
I was surprised to see her angry. She looked pale, as though she were fighting a bout of seasickness. I wondered if she had slept last night. Whether the thought of looking deeper into the dead man had filled her sleep with terrors.
‘Probably too proud to ask for help,’ I said, as softly as I could. ‘How were you to know, eh?’
‘Aye, well,’ said Felicity, and she shifted, painfully. ‘Bloody knees are killing me. Curse in my family. Our bones go to seed after we hit thirty.’
‘It’s temper in mine,’ I said, moving closer to her. She shuffled herself. She looked suddenly like an Arab at prayer.
‘Your mam quick with the stick, is she?’ asked Felicity, turning to me. ‘Mine were a terror. Kind-hearted but knew that she shouldn’t spare the rod. She were right to do it. There’s plenty in the village could still do with a hiding but we’ve all gone soft. I should have given my two a belting years ago.’
I found myself reaching out. I put a hand on her shoulder. Tried to comfort her the way she had done for me. She stiffened under my touch but gave the tiniest nod of thanks.
‘Our Brian,’ she said, rocking back on her haunches and huffing a strand of hair from her face. ‘He’ll be the death of me. Took a tanner from John’s wallet afore school. What for, eh? What hasn’t he got? Oh he says it weren’t him, looks so bloody innocent you find yourself wondering if your eyes are the ones telling lies.’ She looked down at the paperwork and I saw her head fall forward: a horse stooping to eat. ‘I were harder on him than he’s used to. Gave him a right telling off. He looked so upset. Stomped out the house like he were nivver coming back. And God forgive me but I went into the room where he ties his flies. I thought the money might be in there. Thought I could put it back and make it like it nivver happened. But by God I forgot the money as soon as I opened the door. He’s been collecting things. I knew he liked bones. Frogs and birds and stuff. But it were like a museum. Skulls. Big ones from rams and foxes. I swear, he had a half-dead cat hanging from a string. Where did he get that, eh? And in the corner …’
I waited for more. Saw her fight with the tears that filled her eyes.
‘He had this bucket with a lid on it. There were something in there, in among all this water and scum and rotten meat that stunk like chemicals. He had these big plastic gloves and wooden tongs, like you use for salad. It scared me. Scared me half to death. My own son.’
I stood where I was, wondering how best to comfort her. Truth be told her sudden bout of extra misery was inconvenient. I wanted to get on with what we were here to do. Wanted to make sense of a dead man’s ramblings. I needed her to be useful. I felt for her, of course I did, but sometimes children are just born wrong. The sisters taught me that. Some children are wicked. It doesn’t matter how you teach them and slap them and prophesy an eternity in the bowels of Hell – sometimes a child just needs to pull the meat from the bone and take a look inside.
‘It’ll be for a school project,’ I said, brightly. ‘They do a lot more advanced kind of science at school these days. It’ll be an experiment. We did similar things when I was at school, which was more recently than you. Honestly, you’re worrying for nothing.’
I saw hope flicker in her face. Saw her lower lip wobble and two spots of colour light her cheeks.
‘Would that be it, d’you think?’
‘More likely than anything else. And even if he took that money, who’s to say it isn’t for a school trip or something else. He seemed a clever kid. Bit precocious but that’s no bad thing.
She clung to my words like they were a rope thrown to a sailor. She wanted things safe. Clean. Wanted the week of the hunter’s moon to draw to a close without any more violence slipping into her world.
‘Don’t think on it just now,’ I said, in the voice I used for bedtime stories. ‘How’ve you done? What have you got?’
She put her hand out to me and I closed my soft palm over her rough fingers. Helped her to her feet. She leaned back against the counter and managed a smile.
‘You got home safe, then? John were worried.’
‘Fine, no problems,’ I said, a little impatiently.
‘You didn’t go by the river, did you? Went the long way, I hope.’
‘I went by the river, yes. It’s quickest.’
‘Don’t know how you dare,’ she said, aghast. ‘I’d shiver meself to death. There’s all sorts in the woods. Caves in the cliff, so they say, but I wouldn’t go looking for them. Me mam would have gone berserk at the very thought.’
‘It was fine,’ I said, gesturing at the papers and indicating we should stop wasting time. ‘Bit cold and muddy but I’m not scared of the dark.’
‘The dark doesn’t know that,’ she said, and I swear I actually saw her shiver. ‘One of the popping stones was taken away after the war. Kissing Bush too.’
I think my face gave me away. I found myself half-laughing, unsure whether to simply let her finish or to push her into some useful answers. It felt like talking to a little old lady: a superstitious crone in a Highland cottage. She wasn’t more than thirty-three but she had the sudden air of somebody who should be wearing candlelight and cobwebs.
‘Used to be an extra stone,’ she said, wavering. Behind her, beyond the glass, the rain had started up again; delicately tapping on the glass like the pecking of countless birds. ‘Nobody knows where it went but it were the biggest. There one day and gone the next. Somebody cut down the bush too. Ancient hawthorn tree, all gnarled and twisted. Dug up and taken away and a great hole in the ground. Ye’d have thought it would tek a giant to shift it. Scared us half to death. It were Mrs Parker’s man who said it were a coffin stone.’
‘A coffin stone?’
‘Somewhere for the pall-bearers to rest their burden on the way to the church. Smooth, flat stone. You can imagine what some of the locals used to use it for after they’d asked their lovers to marry them.’ She twitched a nervous smile. ‘Parker, from farm next to yours – he’d only just moved here when the stone vanished, though at that time there were so much coming and going it were hard to keep track. He and Mrs Parker had already wed but he wanted to do things properly, like. Wanted to be a proper part of the village. Took her to the Popping Stone and turned white as a ghost. Told us all sorts of stories about how those old stones were centuries old and how in his country they were thought of as something to be feared – like they’d soaked up all the dregs of all the bodies who’d rested there over the years. Said the stone were like a cork in a bottle, holding bad spirits in. You can imagine what that did to us.’
‘How do you know this?’ I asked, unable to help.
‘He gave a talk at the school not long after. The headmaster had asked him special.’
‘And he spoke about proposing to his wife?’ I asked, confused.
‘No, that were just gossip, the sort of thing you pick up. But he told us about the coffin stone and what it meant and when it vanished like that we were all scared to sleep for weeks.’
Behind Felicity a tiny shaft of sunlight was trying to find a gap between clouds. A thin line of illumination cast a sudden yellow glow onto my face and the left side of my body and then was just as quickly snatched away.
‘He’s foreign?’ I asked. ‘You said “his country”.’
‘Aye, Swiss. Where the cuckoo clocks come from. You’ve not met him?’
I tried to remember. I think he waved hello shortly after I moved in: a distant stick-man in green. And perhaps I had seen him and his wife in their car once or twice. I’d never paid them any attention. I just knew him as the man who wanted to buy the house and his wife as the mousey, miserable woman who had knocked on my door.
‘I don’t really know anybody,’ I reminded her.
‘Aye, suppose. Nice man. Gave money to the Reading Rooms when it needed a new roof and always sponsors stalls at the wrestling and the cattle market. Turned that farm into a money-spinner. Her faither would have been proud.’
I clicked with my tongue; a sudden, unexpected clucking noise that betrayed my impatience.
‘Her faither?’
‘Dad. Mr Parker.’
‘Same surname?’ I asked, baffled.
‘No, look, sorry, I always forget how little ye know. It’s a horrible word but Audrey Parker were a spinster. Past thirty and not married. Quiet lass. She’d been away to school and not settled. Her faither was a military man, proper old-fashioned colonel-type though I don’t know if he was an actual colonel – that’s just what people called him. Was already a soldier before the first war. He bought the farm next to your place about 1910. Married a lass from Greenhead who didn’t want to move to wherever it were that he were from. Audrey came along during the war when he were off fighting. Her brother, Loveday, the year after. Aye, I see you looking! He paid the price for the name his family lumbered him with. Can’t say the local lads were too kind to him when he were home for the holidays. The colonel came home after the war to be a farmer though from what Mam told me he weren’t the same man who left. He’d gone grey and looked old and weren’t fit enough to lift a spade. It were his wife who made a go of the place and then Audrey and her brother took it on when she died. Always a bit touched by tragedy, so Mam said. Two of Audrey’s brothers didn’t see their fifth birthdays. And Loveday had an accident that took his arm at the elbow, though it didn’t stop him working like a Trojan. The colonel died not long after. Farm was doing OK and Audrey had come back from school and was happy to run the place with her mam and her brother. But brother went off to war …’
‘With one arm?’
‘Oh, aye, they’ll find work for ye if ye’re willing. Well, he nivver came back. All those years studying at the posh school and at university and he goes and gets blasted to bits. Her mam died not long after and Audrey were alone with a great farm to run on her own and she were already the age I am now. We all thought she’d end up a bit dotty, all alone. That were mebbe why she wrote to all the old POWs and sent them bits and bobs when they were going through hardships. Bit of company, even if it were miles away. Then next thing she’s got herself wed. Met some Swiss man while in Ireland buying a breeding bull. Were a proper local romance. There were those who reckoned she were one of those who had no interest in marriage but it just shows what little people know. He were a gent, Mr Parker, even if he weren’t the prettiest. And it were a lovely tribute, what he did.’
‘What he did?’
‘He took her name! What a thing, eh? Whatever he were called afore he were happy to be a Parker if it meant keeping the name of her faither on the deeds. Parker’s Farm it were and is still and he’s made a profitable business, like I said. Quiet man but kind and though you don’t see Audrey smile over much there’s a happiness in her that weren’t there when she were young. No children but they works so hard they’ve probably no time.’
I rubbed my lip and realized how still I had been holding myself. My joints were aching. I’d been cold too many times. Shivering, I glanced back down at the mess of papers. The words looked like so many squashed lice: a jumble of scrawls all scribbled in the same hand.
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here earlier,’ I said. ‘You must be going blind.’
Felicity sucked at her teeth, rolling her eyes. ‘Wouldn’t have made a difference, even with a big brain you need to be able to read the writing and I swear Fairfax has just done this to give me a headache. I’ve tried as well as I can to put it into order but there’s no headings and it’s only when I can make out a word that I’ve been able to make any kind of system. That pile by your feet seems to be the earliest stuff. It’s in pencil and the handwriting makes some kind of sense. It’s neat and there are initials. I reckon I’ve worked most of ’em out. Armstrong. Irthing. Sawyer, Lightfoot. Some of ’em have gone but others are still alive and I don’t suppose many of them will be worrying about their secrets being shared. It’s all just memories of school and the jobs they used to do and their mothers and faithers giving them a hiding for this or that. Just pages of how lovely things used to be, though I’ve no doubt when I’m old I’ll say the same about now.’
‘Right, well, that’s a start …’
‘Middle pile have the occasional date on them. Maybe ten years ago. Chats with the navvies, the lads who drained the bog, the charvers who built the base. Lots of people talking about how times are looking up and there’s good money to be made and wouldn’t it be a thing if it were true what people were saying – that Gilsland would be a terminus for the moon.’
‘That lot?’ I asked, pointing at the most chaotic of the piles.
‘I’d say that’s round about the point he lost his wife, God rest her, and there were nowt to keep him focussed. I can barely make any of it out but it’s not as faded as the other stuff and it’s in pen, not pencil and he’s using more pages and not cramming everything in so it must have been after rationing stopped …’
I found myself grinning. ‘That’s proper detective work,’ I said.
She shook her head at that but seemed pleased. ‘Stuff about local landmarks. The wall. The fort.’
‘The fort?’
‘Roman fort. Chats with somebody whose name I can’t make out, page after page talking about types of stone and architecture and gargoyles and the sort of stuff you’d only read if you had bugger all else to do.’
I looked a little disappointed. ‘Nothing about a Frenchman?’
‘If there is I can’t make it out. I’m disappointed, despite myself. The page under the church floor was at least legible. Like he’d made an effort with it.’
I breathed out, rolling my head this way and that. I felt stiff and cold and hungry but had no desire to warm up or eat anything. I just wanted to understand.
‘The tape recorder,’ I said, closing one eye. ‘If he’d started recording conversations then he could listen to them back and not have to scribble it all down as people were talking. Maybe the page you found was a transcript. Something from a recording.’
Felicity opened her eyes a little wider. She twitched, like Bogart, as though something suddenly pained her.
‘There’s no tape recorder here,’ she said.
‘Have you been through the whole house? Top to bottom?’
‘No, of course …’
‘Well, let’s do that.’
It took better than three hours and by the time we had finished the house looked as though a tornado had blown through. We found no tape recorder. It was a sad, dispiriting trawl. Felicity went very quiet when we found ourselves in Christopher’s old room. Little had been touched since his death. It looked as though he had simply popped out. There was a notebook on the windowsill, next to some battered paperbacks and a chunk of rock. The bed was made up with a sheet and brown woollen blanket. The cupboard and the chest of drawers were different types of wood and a sketch of Lanercost Priory hung on the chimney breast against a cold blue wall. I couldn’t bring myself to open the notebooks. Nobody had disturbed the dust in years: the thoughts of a boy dead for twenty years still safely imprisoned beneath the covers.
We were standing on the upstairs landing, looking dejected, feeling grey, when the bird hit the window. There was no warning. There was just a sudden, startling bang on the glass and then the window on the landing erupted inwards in a sudden geyser of flying glass and feathers.
I jumped backwards, my hands coming up to protect my face, shrieking like a child. Felicity’s noise was something else entirely. She gave a low, tremulous growl: the noise people make in the seconds before they die. A death rattle, they call it, and that’s the only sound I can liken it to. I felt her hands dig into my arm hard enough to draw blood. I swear I think she believed she was about to be carried away by whatever spirit had won her soul.
‘Felicity, it’s OK, it’s OK, it’s just a bird,’ I said, looking down at the sad, blood-spattered creature that was twitching on the threadbare carpet. It was brown and yellow with an eye that made me think of polished black stone. ‘It’s just a bird. A bird came through the window …’
But Felicity was scurrying down the stairs, her legs half buckling as she slithered against the bannister and dragged herself toward the front door.
‘Felicity, it’s fine, I’ll tidy up, it’s nothing …’
She pulled open the front door and ran out onto the road.
I heard a screech of brakes and then the crunch of metal hitting stone.
And then there was just the pitter-patter of the ceaseless rain.