"It's so peaceful here. Just listen to how quiet it is. I mean, no rattle of carriages. No crowds. You can hear that little stream over there. And the sheep sounds. And at night! Well, I just lie there and don't hear anything. It's just wonderful. You must run nearly mad when you first come back to Hull, don't you, Damaris? Irene, you said you've been to York, didn't you? Don't you just go nearly mad the first few days there after all the peacefulness here? It's marvelous."
Mary Elaine smiled around at all of them. Damaris, Aunt Elspeth, and Irene smiled back. They were gathered on the garden lawn, with baskets of varied greenery set among them, being woven into wreaths of vervain and motherwort. "What odd names," Mary Elaine had said when they first sat down to the task. "Why vervain and motherwort of all things?"
Aunt Elspeth had been receiving Mary Elaine's unceasing flow of enthusiasms with unvaried calmness ever since Mary Elaine, her brother Robert, and James Harris had arrived two days ago; she had answered this yet-another question quietly with, "For Midsummer's Eve everyone is supposed to wear wreaths of vervain and motherwort for health and prosperity. It's traditional. We make them for our whole household, servants and all, to wear at the bonfire."
"We don't do them at our bonfire, though," Irene had said. "Mother says they're heathenish and silly. Mother is so dull."
"But why vervain and motherwort?" Mary Elaine had insisted.
"Because it's traditional," Aunt Elspeth had insisted back.
Now Mary Elaine said again, for an uncounted time since her arrival, "It's just so exciting!"
For summer holidays her family always went to Scarbororugh or Harrogate. The dale and Thornoak were a new world about which she had not stopped exclaiming during her walks and drives with Damaris and through dinner with Irene and Lauran and their mother the night before. The only time she stopped exclaiming about it was when she and Damaris were alone, sharing Damaris' bed at night; then she exclaimed about Damaris never having said how delightful her cousin Kellan and that handsome Lauran Ashbrigg were. Nevin, being married, went unnoted, Damaris noticed, but "You're too selfish by half, Damaris," Mary Elaine had chided laughingly. "Young men like them, right here where you live, and you've never said a word about them! Too, too dog in the manger is what you are!"
"I've talked about both of them," Damaris had protested, laughing, too.
"Oh, you've talked about them, but you made them sound as if they were weren't anybody in particular. You never said they were handsome! What is poor Mr. Harris going to think, finding himself with such rivals here?"
"He can think what he chooses," Damaris said with pretended prim haughtiness. Then she had laughed again. It was blessedly easy to laugh around Mary Elaine. "Mary Elaine, they can hardly be suitors. I grew up with them!"
"Well, I wish I had," Mary Elaine had said. "I wouldn't be so calm about them, I can tell you. Besides, Kellan would be all right. He's not really your cousin."
Damaris felt a biting pang of painful suspicion in her heart. "How did you come to that?"
"Irene told me," Mary Elaine answered with great satisfaction. "I was asking about him. And Lauran, of course. Even his sister can see that he's handsome. And that Kellan is, too, even if you say you don't think so."
"Mary Elaine, I grew up with them," Damaris insisted. "They've teased me too many times over the years for me to think of them as anything but nuisances."
"If you say so," Mary Elaine agreed happily, her tone saying she clearly did not believe a word of it.
Now Damaris, her hands busy with wreath-making, watched Mary Elaine and Irene talking over some new fashion of hat seen in a recent ladies book and was grateful not only for Mary Elaine's presence that was so full of sunshine and free of shadows but also that Irene had so far not confided her expectation she would marry Kellan. Mary Elaine had laughingly told Damaris this morning while they were dressing that she was trying to decide whether to lavish her attentions more on Kellan or on Lauran. So far she had not been able to make up her mind, but if Irene gave her to understand that she had some claim to Kellan, then Mary Elaine would turn all her charms on Lauran, and Lauran – as he had privately sworn to Damaris last evening after supper – would disappear until Mary Elaine, her brother, and James Harris were safely gone.
Damaris did not want him to disappear. In this while since the day he brought her home from St. Cuthbert's, he had been more often than usual in her company, and despite what she said to Mary Elaine, she had come to depend on him being there.
She had found no way to learn more about Thornoak’s secrets – was sometimes unsure she truly wanted to know more, and at her most miserable wanted to believe that simply leaving here, knowing nothing else, would be enough. Yet she could not keep her mind quiet and sought to avoid her aunt’s and uncle’s and cousins’ company all that she could. Pleading tiredness or headache or both, she spent inordinate hours alone in her room, or sometimes escaped to Irene’s company at Ashbrigg. But she had found she had no heart or heed for Irene’s light talk anymore. Only Lauran’s sharp, friendly, jibing talk were any distraction from her darker thoughts; his warm company a comfort to the unrelenting coldness of fear around her heart.
Pitty, Patty, Dirk, and Trey romped through the garden gateway, a seethe of large, bounding dogs. Mary Elaine made a small shriek and grabbed up her finished wreaths from the grass beside her to the hopefully safe shelter of her lap, but Aunt Elspeth said in a perfectly calm voice, "Stay. Sit," and the four hounds skidded to a stop just short of her skirts and dropped to their haunches, panting cheerfully. Behind them, Kellan, Robert, and James came through the gate, with far too innocent a look on Kellan’s face. The dogs were trained to follow at heel. If they came bounding ahead instead of following quietly behind, it was because he had let them, despite he had to have known perfectly well that Mary Elaine would shriek.
Or because he knew Mary Elaine would shriek, Damaris thought.
Kellan had used only his best manners to Mary Elaine thus far, but Damaris had the strong feeling that somewhere behind his politeness, he was laughing at her friend. Unfortunately, she could see why and knew there was no help for it.
"How was your ride?" Aunt Elspeth asked of them all.
Robert answered enthusiastically, "We've been to see the bonfire they're making on Lady Hill. It's huge. More than that, Kellan says there'll be bonfires all over the valley tonight!"
James came to sit on the grass at Damaris' side. His face was warm with riding and his hair was ruffled by wind. In casual clothing and more at ease than Damaris had ever seen him, he was – not as handsome as Lauran, but good to look at. And his attentions had been, beyond denying, most particular to her ever since he had arrived. Now he picked up one of the wreaths she had finished and said, "What excellent work. Very delicately done."
Damaris had not been thinking about delicate when she made it, only that there were a great many to be done and that Irene and Mary Elaine would manage very few, being more adept at talking than making. But Mary Elaine held up the wreath she was presently working on and said, "We've been making them like shop girls all afternoon. Everyone is going to wear them at the bonfire. Everyone," she emphasized and tossed hers toward her brother's head. "Mrs. Helm says they're for luck."
"For health and prosperity," Aunt Elspeth corrected mildly as Robert caught it and tossed it back.
"And we've collected simply basketfuls of things to go into the bonfire," Mary Elaine went on. "Damaris and I."
They had done that in the morning before Irene came, with Damaris surprised by the pain it caused her, reminding her as it did of the only other time she had done it – years ago, with Aunt Elspeth and Virna. She had covered the pain by telling Mary Elaine far more than Mary Elaine wanted to know about the various herbs’ virtues while they gathered them. Irene, seeing the basketful of the fennel, rue, thyme, camomile, wild geranium, and pennyroyal in the front hall when she came in, had asked what they were for and said, after Damaris told her, "We don't do that at Ashbrigg."
"Different places, different ways," Aunt Elspeth had said. "How does your mother?"
There was no way Damaris could fail, these past few days, to note how easily Aunt Elspeth took talk a different way when it went where she did not want to go. Awareness of that was a shadow in Damaris' mind even while she smiled down at James smiling up at her, while Mary Elaine exclaimed, "Can you imagine? Damaris never said a word about any of this. She's kept it all to herself all this time I've known her!"
Damaris roused herself to match Mary Elaine's teasing tone, protesting, "I didn't ‘keep it to myself’. I never went to the bonfire. The only summer I was here for it, I was too young. Which I thought was monstrously unfair." And more unfair than she had known, she thought bitterly behind her continuing smile.
"The fires aren't lighted until after sunset," Aunt Elspeth said smoothly. "This time of year that's awfully late for little girls. Since then she's been gone to school and visiting you, Mary Elaine, and hasn’t come back here until Midsummer was past."
And who was it urged me to stay with Mary Elaine at each school year’s end? Damaris thought with a flare of anger. You did, Aunt Elspeth. You did. To make certain I wouldn’t be here. And because you couldn’t get rid of me this year, you’ve let Mary Elaine and the others come, to keep me distracted.
How many other times through the years had her aunt’s seeming kindness been a lie, used to keep her secrets hidden? How much of everything about Aunt Elspeth was a lie?
The difference was that – until now – all the lies had been on her aunt's side. Now Damaris was finding how well she could lie, too, and said with outward merriment, "So it will all be as new to me as to anyone."
"Well, I can't be very happy about it all," Irene pouted. "Mother and I go to see our bonfire lighted, but we never stay for the dancing afterward. We go back to the house and that’s all I see of Midsummer or any of the other bonfires. I can promise you that after seeing the lighting of half a dozen bonfires a year, year after year, every year of my life, there’s not much pleasure in seeing another one lighted."
"Half a dozen a year?" James asked. "That many?"
"Well, maybe not quite that many," Irene admitted. She dropped her present wreath on her lap and counted on her fingers. "May Eve. Midsummer. All Hallows. One in the winter. Only four really, I guess." She picked up the wreath again. "People love them around here."
"No Guy Fawkes bonfire?" Robert asked teasingly. "No `Please to remember the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason, and plot?' That’s the one and only bonfire we have every year in Hull and every place else I’ve been."
"No Guy Fawkes," Irene said firmly. "He's just an upstart newcomer, Lauran says. Hardly two hundred years old. Our bonfires go back forever. Before kings even. Or Christians maybe, Lauran says."
"We've wreaths enough, I think," Aunt Elspeth said briskly. "Time we dressed for supper. Kellan, will you see to these and the basket in the front hall all being put in the carriage?"
Irene finished her last wreath with a few deft twists, handed it to Kellan with a pretty smile, and stood up, shaking bits of leaves from her skirts, asking, "Will you see me to my carriage, Kellan?"
Kellan held out his arm with a slightly mocking gallantry worthy of Lauran. Irene seemed to miss the mockery. So did Mary Elaine, Damaris guessed, watching her friend closely watch Kellan and Irene leave the garden together. Damaris refused to admit her own curiosity. So far as she had ever seen, Kellan showed nothing but (usually hidden) amusement toward Irene, and even if Irene knew more about his feelings than Damaris did, Damaris bitterly reminded herself that – so far as she cared – it did not matter, because nothing at Thornoak could matter to her anymore. Nothing except learning the truth behind every lie she had ever been told.
Supper was the usual misery that mealtimes had become for her. Even though her appetite was slight and her ability to hold any sustained part in conversation even slighter, she had to sit at table with everyone, pretending nothing had changed. Having guests for diversion these past few days had been a relief, and this evening James' intelligent questions to her uncle about farming in the dale and Mary Elaine's chatter about everything sufficiently filled up the time until everyone rose to go to their rooms to change for going out, warned by Aunt Elspeth they would not want their best clothing for this, by any means.
Mary Elaine’s continued talk all the while they changed their dresses made a comforting smother over Damaris’ own thoughts until they joined the others gathered outside the front door, when Damaris found her stomach and mind were clenched again with nerves.
Beyond the westward hills the sun was low in the clear and sunset-glowing sky, and Robert said to Uncle Russell, "It looks as if it’s going to be a perfect night, sir. How often are these bonfire evenings rained out?"
"Very rarely," Uncle Russell answered. "Weather favors us, it seems. Cloudiness occasionally but never rain that I recall."
"Magic," said Mary Elaine gaily. "Midsummer is supposed to be filled with magic. You're so lucky, Damaris. There's nothing at all magic about Hull."
Damaris was saved from answering by Albert driving up the open carriage, followed by two stableboys leading five saddled horses. The men would ride, to save crowding Aunt Elspeth, Gweneth, Damaris, and Mary Elaine in the carriage. Uncle Russell handed his wife up the carriage step with the same formality as if they were going to church, then moved aside for Nevin to help Gweneth in, and after him Kellan held out his hand to Mary Elaine who giggled, accepted it, and depended on him for all her balance on the carriage step as she stepped up and to her place.
James put out his hand to Damaris. Damaris smiled and took his warm and ordinary hand, finding comfort in the way he held to her a little longer than need be after she was seated.
Betty came from the hall with the basket of wreaths, and while the men went to mount their horses, the women arranged their skirts to make room for the basket on the floor among them. When everything and everyone were settled, Albert flipped the reins to start the carriage horses forward, swinging them toward the outer gateway. Uncle Russell, Nevin, and Robert ranged their horses to one side of the carriage, James and Kellan on the other.
By road rather than field paths, Lady Hill was perhaps four miles from Thornoak, their little cavalcade going first down the dale to cross the Skel by the old bridge, then turning from the main road onto a lesser one, narrow between low stone walls and used most of the year only by farm wagons. The men had to ride ahead, and Mary Elaine gave happy little cries of excited alarm whenever the carriage lurched on the somewhat rougher way. The drive should have been a pleasant one between the summer-rich pastures and fields on a clear summer's evening at sunset, but there was no pleasure in it for Damaris. She kept up her part in the talk well enough, she thought, but only with effort. All day she had been telling herself that whatever happened tonight, it would not be strange, it would betray nothing, there would surely be no taint of what she had seen at the Lady Stone. Otherwise Aunt Elspeth would never have agreed to Mary Elaine, her brother, and James being here. But about what would happen Damaris had no clear idea. Pictures from that book in Uncle Russell’s library kept crawling through her mind, but she could not make them have anything to do with her aunt, with Thornoak, with people she knew as well as herself.
People she had thought she knew as well as herself.
Mary Elaine craned sideways to see better and exclaimed, "There! That’s it, isn’t it! Lady Hill. Oh, it does look like a woman, doesn't it? You said it did, Damaris, but I didn't think it would so much. Just look at it."
Damaris was looking. The hill had not changed since the day she had discovered the men building the bonfire on it five years ago. It still had the look of woman stretched out on her side or back, the center of the hill rising to be her hip or belly, but they were soon too close to it to see its shape anymore, then were going up it by the cart track Damaris had used. The steepness made Mary Elaine squeal a little, and she gave a gasp of relief as Albert drove them onto a level place near the crest, at the outer edge of the large and growing crowd around the high-piled wood of the unlit bonfire. Sweeping a long look over the gathering, Damaris thought that nearly everyone from Thornoak’s manor and farms and village must be there. Just as they had been on Summer Hill for the May Eve bonfire. Did they come simply because it was something that had always been done here, time out of mind, the way Irene said it was at Ashbrigg? Or did this mean something more to them? The way that Damaris feared it must mean something more to whoever had been at the Lady Stone.
The sun had set while they drove up the hill, but its rich after-glow of primrose still colored nearly half the sky, giving light enough to see by as Damaris, almost unwillingly, searched the crowd for Virna, for even a glimpse of her. Since the visit to her cottage, Damaris had heard nothing about her, had never brought herself to ask Kellan for any word of her or whether she might be here tonight. If she was, Damaris did not see her – for whatever comfort there was in that.
Instead, Damaris saw that from here it was plain the hill’s woman’s shape was lying on its back, the hill separating into two low ridges sloping away eastward, making "legs".
Mary Elaine leaned to whisper in Damaris' ear. "Isn't it funny? They've built the fire right on her stomach. Do you suppose they know it?"
Damaris disclaimed any answer to that with a shake of her head. In her own mind, though, she was certain they all knew it. Mary Elaine might think the less of dale folk because they did not have Hull’s ways but they were very far from stupid: They surely knew exactly what they had done.
Seeing Aunt Elspeth had taken a wreath from the basket and given it to Gweneth and was now taking another for herself, Mary Elaine exclaimed, "Oh, the wreaths!" and snatched two from the basket, handed one to Damaris, and put the other on her own head.
Damaris, with a sense that more was needed than that, found herself copying Aunt Elspeth and Gweneth, holding the wreath in both hands and settling it on her hair as if it were a crown.
Why had she done it that way?
Even as the question started to trouble her, Aunt Elspeth, rising to leave the carriage, said, "Tradition rules that Gweneth and I have to take a little part in this. If you and Mary Elaine stay here in the carriage, you'll see everything very well. Better than if you joined the crowd. Yes, thank you," she added to James, taking the hand he offered to help her down from the carriage. He and the other men had dismounted and tied their horses to the carriage’s wheels on the side away from the crowd, and Uncle Russell, Nevin, and Kellan were already gone away. Damaris had not seen to where. Now to James and Robert, Aunt Elspeth said, leaving the carriage, "If you both stay here, too, you'll have best sight of everything, I think."
It was a reasonable, graciously-made suggestion that both James and Robert readily accepted, leaving Damaris wondering if only she had heard her aunt’s undertone that had made the suggestion closer to an order. Robert handed Gweneth from the carriage now, then at Aunt Elspeth’s request, handed the basket to her and Gweneth. Aunt Elspeth turned down his offer to carry it for them, and the two women walked away, carrying the basket with its wreaths between them. James and Robert got into the carriage, taking the seat opposite Damaris and Mary Elaine.
To Damaris’ surprise Kellan reappeared. Mary Elaine greeted him happily, patting the seat between her and Damaris, saying, "Do sit here."
He refused with, "I’ll be needed soon. I only came to see you were all well-readied and comfortable."
Twilight was deepening rapidly now. Damaris asked him, "When will they light the fire?"
He looked up at her, smiling, and her throat constricted with unspecified regrets and fears. She longed to be rid of what she knew and everything she suspected. She did not understand why she had been kept ignorant, only that her mother must have willed it, but there was nothing like that to bind Kellan in ignorance. He had to be part of it. He had to be part of the lying, making him an enemy even while he answered easily, "Tradition says a certain star has to show before we begin."
He looked southeastward, and their heads all turned to follow his gaze. Damaris realized all the crowd was looking that way, into the twilight, but it was Kellan who first called out, "There it is!" in the same moment that she saw it – the first clear silver gleam of a star against the sapphire of the darkening sky above the hills.
Others echoed his exclaim, and then from somewhere farther along the hill a single voice sang into the gathering twilight a few notes as clear and shining as the star itself.
A long shiver ran up Damaris' spine. It was not Aunt Elspeth, but it was the same kind of wordless singing – or else singing of no words she knew – that she had heard on the moor. The singing webbed into the gathering Midsummer dusk, then faded, becoming part of the silence that was suddenly there on the hilltop. The last evening birds had stilled. There was no wind. The gathering of people – even the children, even Mary Elaine – were wordless. All the laughter and talk were gone, and as if with a single mind, everyone turned toward the center of their circle, toward the high-piled wood of the bonfire-to-be.
Where the ten feet or so around the heaped wood had been left clear until now, three pairs of people now stood. Even with their backs to her, Damaris recognized the nearest of the couples as gray-haired, age-bent Mr. Thwaite and his wife May from Laver Meadow Farm. The others, spaced around the circle from them to make an even-sided triangle, were Uncle Russell with Aunt Elspeth and Nevin with Gweneth.
At some sign Damaris did not see, Mr. Thwaite, Uncle Russell, and Nevin moved forward, Uncle Russell and Nevin circling to join Mr. Thwaite and the three of them in kneeling side by side at the very edge of the piled wood. Able to see over the crowd, Damaris watched as Mr. Thwaite and Nevin gathered up and held something in their hands. Damaris guessed it was tinder because Uncle Russell – judging by his hands’ movement – was striking flint and steel together. And indeed in another moment sparks spattered between his hands and the other men’s. In the evening’s gathering darkness, the bits of fire shone rich as rubies, small and single and quickly gone. Uncle Russell struck and struck again. There were more sparks, and finally a small tongue of flame showed between Mr. Thwaite's and Nevin's hands. Together, slowly, carefully, they stood up, the small flame licking more eagerly through the tinder that Damaris could now see was held in a large pottery bowl. Mr. Thwaite and Nevin turned toward old May Thwaite who came forward to hold an unlit torch of dried moss and oil-soaked tinder tied at the stick's end to the flames in the bowl. It caught easily, blazed up, and a satisfied, "Ahhh," passed through the crowd.
Damaris heard herself sighing with them in the shared pleasure and triumph of the strengthening fire against the night now deep all around them.
Aunt Elspeth and Gweneth came out of the shadows to join May Thwaite, Aunt Elspeth taking hold on the torch below May’s hand, Gweneth taking hold below hers, and the three of them then turning to thrust the torch deep into the waiting pile of wood. The fire did not hesitate. Red and orange, the flames caught at the dry branches and in moments were running wildly through them, the whole crest of the pile kindled and blazing. A cheer and shouting from the crowd met the fire's victory, and someone with a fiddle struck up a tune as quick as the flames themselves. Folk past their dancing days drew back from the fire, hand-clapping to the music as they went, while younger folk grabbed each other into a swinging, joyous rout of dancing around the flames.
Damaris found that she had joined in the clapping and her own feet were moving to the music. Mary Elaine was clapping, too, laughing. Robert and James were clapping more tentatively but watching it all with deep interest. Damaris was on the side of the carriage farthest from the fire. None of the others seemed to notice when Kellan touched her arm, drawing her heed away. He beckoned for her to lean over, and when she had, he said softly, pointing eastward, "Look."
She did, down the dale along the recumbant length of the "woman's" legs.
"There," Kellan said, but she had already seen them. The other fires.
They had to be miles away and must be as large as this one to be easily seen. Three of them when Damaris first looked. Moments later another blossomed out of the dark, small with distance but undeniable. And then another, even farther away. Five fires in a long line straight toward the east.
Damaris looked westward but there was only darkness there.
"They’re on one of the Old Ways," Kellan said, low for only her to hear. "Our fire and those. They point straight to where Midsummer’s rising sun will clear the hills tomorrow."
Damaris stared out into the darkness at the fires toward tomorrow's dawn. Fires laid out along a Way so old it was mostly forgotten – was probably unknown to most of the folk who made the fires. She looked westward again and whispered, "There should be other fires, shouldn’t there? This shouldn't be the end."
Mary Elaine, Robert, and James were still watching the dancing, not noticing her or Kellan as he looked from the fires to her face for a silent moment before saying, "There should be other fires, yes. But they've been lost."
As if in a spell woven of starlight, fire, and words, Damaris’ and his eyes held each other. Her voice as soft as his, she said, "Forgotten. People have forgotten the fires, the way they've forgotten the Old Ways."
"They’ve forgotten," Kellan whispered. "But we remember."
Damaris, not sure what it was they were remembering, only knowing that it was real – and that it mattered – nodded.
"I want to dance!" Mary Elaine exclaimed. She grabbed Damaris’ hand, jarring Damaris’ heed and head around to her. "Damaris, we simply must dance. You'll dance if I will, won't you? James, you'll dance with her, won't you?"
James said firmly, "Not here. Not in that rout."
"Nor I," Robert said. "And certainly not you."
Mary Elaine made an impatient face at him. "Kellan, you’ll dance with me, won’t you?" She looked around to Kellan, but he had gone. Mary Elaine, pouting a little, pleaded at her brother, "Robert, don’t be dismal. Damaris, they'll dance if you say it’s all right to. Say it is!"
But Damaris knew that tonight she would be unable to give herself up to the dancing the way she had on May Eve and was shaping her refusal when Mary Elaine cried out, "There go Nevin and Gweneth! They’re dancing!" She pointed to where Nevin and Gweneth were whirling in the midst of all the rest, laughing in each other's arms, but Aunt Elspeth, appearing beside the carriage, having heard or guessed enough to understand Mary Elaine's indignation, said, "They’re newly married. They're expected to dance this Midsummer Eve. But there’s no dancing required of me, and I’m content to sit this while."
She held out her hand for Robert to help her into the carriage. Damaris and Mary Elaine made room for her between them, and as she sat down, James asked, "There was some special significance to lighting the fire that way? Some traditional meaning, I suppose?"
Damaris tensed but Aunt Elspeth smiled at him and said with his same warm interest, "Don't you find people do things that their forefathers did without understanding any more what they mean? That it's simply done because it's always been done?"
"Guy Fawkes," Robert said. "Who cares anymore that he failed to blow up some idiot king two hundred years ago? But every year there are the bonfires all over again."
"Exactly." Aunt Elspeth looked out over the dancers. "I seem to have lost my husband in all this but I suppose he'll show up eventually." And she led the conversation away to other things, coming nowhere near to answering James' question about the fire. How often had her aunt done that with her? Damaris wondered. Or maybe I was never clever enough to ask the kind of questions she doesn't want to answer.
"They’re doing something different!" Mary Elaine said. "What’s happening now?"
There was something changed. For a moment Damaris thought it was only that suddenly there were far fewer dancers, then saw that most of the men were gone. Before she could wonder much about that, there was a shout from the darkness beyond the lessening firelight around the sinking bonfire, followed by sounds of a struggle.
Mary Elaine exclaimed, "What is that?" and started to stand up.
Aunt Elspeth's put out an arm, keeping her to her seat while saying with a reassuring calm and as much to James and Robert as to her, "Wait."
The remaining folk around the fire were falling back with laughter and excited cries that told they were expecting the cluster of men who now came struggling out of the darkness into the firelight with another man in their midst, a man so wrapped in straw from head to feet that there was no telling who he was. The bundling of straw must have been sewn to cloth and put on him like a hooded suit because it held together as he wrenched against their holds and they pushed and pulled at him, dragging him toward the fire despite his efforts.
"Oh my," Mary Elaine breathed, horrified. But James said firmly, "It's all right. It's only in sport. You can see they're not actually doing him harm."
Damaris had already recognized all the men as manor folk, and surely the straw-man was another of them, and plainly whatever they were doing, it was in sport, just as James said; but she was unsure how mock the struggle was. It looked real enough from here. More than that, she could feel how tensely Aunt Elspeth was sitting beside her. In a woman so normally calm, that tension was warning of something, and now other men she knew were dragging something out of the darkness into the firelight – a large frame made of wood that they laid flat before she quite saw what it was. Then they joined the other men in dragging the struggling straw-clad man over to it. Overwhelmed by their numbers, he was pulled and pushed down on to the frame, and the men swarmed over him, laughing and shoving at each other, hiding what they were doing until all at once they had finished and drew back, leaving space for half a dozen of them to grasp the wooden frame and heave and shove it upright. Damaris could see then that it was a circle, with spokes like a wheel, and the straw-man was bound to it, his head now hanging limply, his arms and legs out-stretched and tied along the spokes. Some of the men unfolded a tripod of wooden braces fixed to the back of the "wheel", and along with the men already holding the frame they heaved it and the straw-man off the ground and into the middle of the sinking remnants of the fire that had burned down enough for them to do it safely and leap back unscathed.
Later Damaris would realize they must have soaked their shoes and trouser-legs with water to keep them safe the few moments they were near the fire. But that was later. Now, as the ever-hungry flames licked upward and caught at the straw-covered feet strapped to the spokes, Mary Elaine cried out, Robert exclaimed, and Damaris... sat back, knowing suddenly that it was all right, even before James said, in his relentlessly sensible voice, "There's only the straw now. The man's not there. Look."
He was right, Damaris saw; seeing what she had known before. The straw suit hung too slackly for there to be anyone in it. The man was gone. Only the straw-covered suit was left to the flames.
"Ah!" said Robert, understanding. "Good show!"
Mary Elaine, her alarm vanished, declared delightedly, "It’s horrible. Perfectly horrible!"
Gweneth ran up to the carriage and cried with excited laughter, "Your wreaths. Quickly!"
Aunt Elspeth nodded at Damaris and Mary Elaine, smiling encouragement at them, all her tension gone. Bemused, Damaris and Mary Elaine handed their wreaths from their heads to Gweneth who seized them and whirled away, snatching off her own as she ran back to join the women by the fire. The manor men had all drawn well back. It was the women who were closest to it now, throwing their wreaths into the flames around the burning wheel and straw-man. Gweneth flung her own and the other two into the fire as Aunt Elspeth said, "Excuse me," swung down from the carriage without waiting for either James or Robert to help her, and followed Gweneth.
As she came, the women drew aside, leaving her way to the fire clear, and beside it she was left standing alone as she took off her wreath with both her hands, again as if it were a crown she was now lifting from her head. She stood for a moment with it raised high, then cast it – last of all the wreaths – into the flames. A cheer went up from the crowd.
"Oh, this is all marvelous," Mary Elaine exclaimed. "What a wonderful show! So very rural. I simply can’t just sit here!" She gathered her skirts and got down from the carriage before either Robert or James could stop her.
"I say," Robert protested. "Mary Elaine!"
He swung down from the carriage and went after her, still protesting. James half-rose as if to follow, then must have realized it was a brother’s place, not his, and sank back into his seat at the same time that Kellan slipped out of the night shadows on the carriage’s far side, close to Damaris' elbow again. Damaris reached out unthinkingly to pluck several straws from his hair, but her gesture froze unfinished as she took in not only the straw but how badly his clothing was rumpled. With realization cold in the pit of her stomach, she said accusingly at him, "It was you in the straw suit. You were the straw-man."
He grinned and said, "We draw lots every year, every man on the manor, to see who's to do it. This year it was my lot."
"You fellows made it all look almost too believable," James said. "You gave the girls a fright, that’s certain."
Kellan moved one shoulder tenderly. "I think some of the fighting did turn too believable before it was done." The last of the straw-man crumpled from the wheel in a burst of flames and flying sparks. The three of them looked toward the fire, and Kellan said, "Poor rascal," shifted his sore shoulder again and added, "Mind you, in the old days the 'sacrifice' was probably a man for real, with no slipping out of it under cover of the struggle. A very good reason, if you ask me, for not mourning for ‘the good old days’."
The cold in Damaris’ stomach crawled into horror along her nerves, as if Kellan had actually been close to death instead of only caught up in a game. In another time, would he truly have burned?
"Ah!" said Kellan cheerfully. "Here comes the next thing."