The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

  It killed her instead. My lovely little mother, dancing with the tea-towel to Ambrose and Henry Hall. She waited and waited for me to do the right thing, and I didn’t. I reckon I was what killed her.

  The trees had gone and all our secret places was laid bare. It wasn’t only the blacksmith’s and the pigsties: no end of cottages came down, no end of people left the village. Why d’you want to work for that ol’ devil? Walter had said, the day we watched the blacksmith’s demolished. But there was plenty who would, a gang of maybe twenty local men already employed to start digging once the museum was finished, and others queuing behind for jobs, because Mr Keiller paid more than the farmers did, and sometimes he treated them better.

  Mrs Sorel-Taylour had a cold, a real streamer. She was all pink round the eyes, and her voice was like a piece of cracked old pot. We were in the museum. Mr Keiller was in the back room talking to Mr Young about plans for the new season–I could see the brim of his Panama through the open doorway–and Mr Piggott and Mr Cromley were on their knees unpacking another crate from Charles Street.

  ‘Blow me down,’ said Mr Piggott. ‘Alec! I’ve found Felstead.’

  Mr Keiller came through and knelt beside him. ‘Well, I’m damned. I thought I asked them to save the skeletons till last.’

  The crate seemed awful small for a whole skeleton. There was a screeching sound as Mr Cromley wrenched out the last nails, and began pulling out the protective straw. Mrs Sorel-Taylour sneezed.

  Mr Keiller looked up. ‘Mrs S-T! Would you kindly take your germs elsewhere. Any more explosions like that and Felstead will be dust.’ I was trying for a glimpse of what was in the box, but Mr Piggott’s big head was in the way.

  ‘It’s ody a head code,’ said Mrs Sorel-Taylour, trying for dignity through sinuses brimming with snot.

  ‘It sounds awfully bad,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘I’m serious. I’d rather you went home. I don’t want to delay the start of the excavation if everybody goes down with it.’

  ‘I really can’t justify–’

  ‘I can, and I will, Mrs Sorel-Taylour.’ Suddenly he was really angry, shouting at her. It was terrifying how quick he’d gone from joking to blind rage. I shrank back against the table, and Mr Piggott began edging the box of finds out of the way. ‘You work for me. At this moment, I would prefer you not to be working for me. Go home. You may come back when you’re well again.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘On your feet, Mrs Sorel-Taylour. Pick up your pencil and your shorthand pad, and walk!

  Mrs Sorel-Taylour sniffed. Mr Keiller’s jaw clenched. She walked, unhooking her coat from the peg by the door.

  They ignored me.

  ‘Bloody woman,’ said Mr Keiller, as soon as she was gone. ‘She knows my chest is delicate.’

  ‘You have to look after yourself,’ said Mr Piggott. ‘God knows, Alec, you work hard enough for ten Sorel-Taylours, and you’re irreplaceable.’

  ‘Oh, hell,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘I needed her to type some letters. Cromley, be a good chap…’ Mr Cromley jumped to his feet, delving in his jacket pocket and pulling out a small squarish package, wrapped in a brown envelope and bound with a rubber band. But Mr Keiller rocked back on his heels, shaking his head. ‘No, dammit, don’t go after her–she’d only spread her microbes over the Discavox.’

  He would notice you if he needed you.

  ‘Miss Robinson.’ There was a wheedling note in his voice. ‘How is your typing?’

  ‘Excellent, sir,’ I said, trying to answer like Mrs Sorel-Taylour would.

  The package came whizzing through the air towards me. Luckily I caught it.

  ‘Two blue carbons,’ he said. ‘Drop them with the fair copies into the Map Room for me to sign before you leave tonight. Now, Piggott, let’s get this bloody dog out of its box.’

  Canis familiaris felstedensis. I had to spell it out longhand among the Pitman’s. Then cross it out again.

  ‘Alec, you can’t label it that,’ said Mr Piggott. ‘You got into trouble before.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with naming the creature after a Derby winner. Looks like a greyhound, anyway’

  ‘Cross it out, Miss Robinson,’ said Piggy Eyes. No sense of humour. Well, he did have one, but it was silly and cruel. ‘It’s called canis familiaris palustris!

  Whatever the blazes that meant.

  I wanted to see the human skeletons that had been dug up at Windmill Hill ten years before, but those hadn’t come down from London with the dog bones. There was supposed to be a child’s skeleton, which they called Charlie, and a tiny baby.

  ‘Yooman sacrifice,’ said Mr Piggott, trying to mimic a village accent. ‘Arrr, Martha, ‘tes awful strange what our great-grandmamas was up to.’

  He and Mr Keiller were behaving like over-excited schoolboys, without Mrs Sorel-Taylour’s presence to restrain them, and that display of temper might never have happened. I had the feeling they were both vying for my attention, Mr Keiller because he could never stop until he had caught you up in his web, Mr Piggott because whatever Mr Keiller did, he had to copy.

  ‘Stop playing the fool, Stu Pig,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘Don’t pay any attention, Miss Robinson. He knows perfectly well there is no evidence how those infants died. The puzzle is why their bones are complete when the rest of the human bone we found on Windmill Hill is fragmented. Still, we may find human remains to shed some light when we dig the henge.’

  ‘You hope,’ said Stu Pig. That was a good name for him, I thought. ‘You hope, you hope, you hope.’

  ‘Nothing so abstract as hope,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘I plan. Stop giggling. Young will disapprove. I’ve set him to draw a survey of where he thinks the buried stones could lie, and if the rain’s cleared I could do with fresh air. Let’s leave the delightful Miss Robinson to get on with my letters.’

  Mr Cromley had been keeping quiet. When I got to my feet to fetch the dictation machine, I caught his eyes on me, cool, grey and thoughtful.

  The dictation machine was an extraordinary fandangle that Mr Keiller had brought back from somewhere overseas, America, I suppose, or maybe Switzerland. It was his favourite toy, housed in a polished walnut box with a hinged lid. Mrs Sorel-Taylour had shown me how to work it. It was like magic. Mr Keiller recorded his voice on it, but instead of engraving it onto a phonograph, the machine used plastic tape. She told me you had to be careful not to hold it near a magnet or somehow it would all be gone.

  By day it was kept in the Map Room, where he liked to work, but at night it was taken up to his dressing room so he could talk into it whenever the mood came over him to write a letter, which it often did. When he was full of enthusiasm he’d sometimes write to the same person several times in a day. He’d go on late into the night, his voice coming and going as he paced up and down the room, suddenly getting loud when he sat down and remembered to lean in to the recorder. It was a funny feeling being alone with him talking right in your ear, out of the machine.

  I collected it from the Map Room and took it to our office above the stable block. The packet Mr Keiller had lobbed at me contained three of his little tapes. But which came first? One was marked ’6 April, VGC. The other two had question marks pencilled on their boxes, so I picked up the one that was dated. I had never used the machine before by myself, but I set everything up like Mrs Sorel-Taylour had shown me, and sat back with my shorthand pad at the ready. Mrs Sorel-Taylour was so fast at typing she could almost keep up with the machine, but she said I shouldn’t try that because I’d make too many mistakes that way and Mr Keiller liked a nice clean copy without words xxxed out or smudges left by the correcting rubber.

  I turned the knob to start and, with a clunk, the machine let out Mr Keiller’s voice, hissy and a bit slurred, so I could tell this had been dictated late last night with a brandy in his hand.

  ‘My dear Childe,’ the machine said to me. ‘So glad you rejected cannibalism…’

  You got used to this kind of stuff. He was writing to one of his professor friends about som
e excavation up in the Orkneys. More old bones, more bits of pot. ‘If you find yourself in this part of the world in the early summer, perhaps you would care to join us for the grand opening of our museum…’ The smooth voice with its soft rs, hissing out of the machine like steam, made me sleepy. My shorthand looked like something that had been dug out of the ground too. ‘Yours, Alec’

  Another letter began. Made me smile because it was to Mr Piggott’s mother. She was always worrying about her precious Stuart–a gurt grown man, mind, and about to get married, though for the life of me I couldn’t understand what kind of woman would want him–and it was a joke between me and Mrs Sorel-Taylour that poor old Mr K had to keep writing back to reassure her Mr Piggott was well and happy and his fingers not being worked to the bone. ‘This work–I always prefer not to call it my work proprietorially–is a perfect religion to me…’

  That was him all over: our high priest, inspiring us to do The Work. If Mr Piggott laboured all hours, it was because Mr K had bewitched him, like the rest of us. Reckon I wasn’t the only one half in love.

  There was a clunk. Time to change the tape; they didn’t last long. Which came next? Judging by the question marks, Mr Keiller didn’t know either, though it wasn’t like him to be muddled. He was usually so exact.

  I eeny-meeny-miny-mo’d. But this one couldn’t be to Mrs Piggott.

  ‘…a turmoil of apprehension. I have, at different times of my life, made studies, more or less cursory and sometimes merely superficial, of various branches of the erotic impulse–’ I stopped the machine. My face was hot, and I was glad I was alone in the office. What would Mrs Sorel-Taylour have said? This had to be the wrong tape. I turned over the box. There was a date, after all, in small neat letters, half erased: ‘9 Oct’. Mr Cromley had picked up an old recording by mistake, maybe one that Mr Keiller had meant to wipe and use again. I couldn’t imagine Mrs S-T typing a letter like this, but she must have.

  What did he mean, studies of the erotic impulse? I remembered ideas Davey sometimes whispered to me. I thought of that thing made of chalk, and the giggling ladies, as they followed Mr Keiller into the hidden part of the garden.

  My fumbly fingers kept making mistakes so it was seven o’clock before I’d typed clean enough versions of the letters, with the blue copies he asked for. It was pitch black outside.

  I shut off the lights in the museum. No need to lock the door: who’d want all them bits of broken old pot? It was dark over the cobbles, but soon as I came round the end of the stable block, light spilled out of the Manor House windows onto the lawns.

  I went up the path, and knocked.

  The butler, Mr Waters, was too grand to answer the side door, so when it swung open there was the housemaid behind it. She came from over Bassett way, and was always snappy with me, for I was clerical, a career girl, and she was a domestic. ‘The master’s upstairs, dressing for dinner,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll leave everything in the Map Room, then.’ I’d brought the dictation machine over, and it was heavy. She stood back reluctantly.

  As I was lugging it through the long, dark passageway, with its old maps and engravings on the wall, I heard heels on polished wood. Mr Keiller came off the bottom of the stairs and round the corner and nearly collided with me. He was in a beautiful black suit and I thought again of film stars. He was maybe a bit old to be in the pictures but he had a lovely strong jaw and if he smiled his eyes crinkled like Errol Flynn’s. The fact he was so tall always made me feel a shy little thing. I could feel myself blushing.

  ‘Miss Robinson! What are you doing cowering in the passage?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ I could hardly bring the words out because all I could think was what he’d said in that letter. ‘…various branches of the erotic impulse…’ I imagined long lean ladies, draped in cream silk, lying back while Mr Keiller stroked their rounded breasts and soft ivory skin for his studies, turning away now and then to say a few words into his dictation machine.

  ‘Oh, the letters.’ He’d seen the machine under my arm. ‘Come into the Library and I’ll sign them.’ He held open the door for me, and I had to pass under his arm, smelling the warm scent of expensive soap that came off him. Underneath was something darker, more bullish. It was nothing like the smell of Davey when we were snuggling with our backs to the stone and our fingers lacing like cat’s cradle while I tried to keep his hands somewhere this side of decency.

  I stood while he leaned against the table and read the letters through before dashing off his signature on each. There was one to some old colonel that had written complaining because Mr Keiller wouldn’t let him bring a group to see the dig when it started.

  ‘Claimed I was placing him and his ghastly friends on a level with a cheerio coach party of trippers from the Black Country,’ said Mr K. ‘Which is exactly why I don’t want his type here. Frankly, I’d much rather have the trippers. Can’t stand snobbery.’

  The shelves in the room were arranged to make six big bays, and held more books than I’d ever seen in one place, more than there were in the Boots Lending Library in Devizes. There were some by Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling, but most were dusty old things you’d never want to read. One title leaped out on the nearest shelf–The Sexual Life of Savages–and I dropped my eyes quickly, feeling myself beginning to redden again.

  Mr Keiller put the top back on his fountain pen. I’d the feeling he was laughing at me. ‘Interested in books, are you, Miss Robinson?’

  ‘I’m a member of the lending library.’

  ‘There are some here that should never be lent. Look at this one: seventeenth century. Belonged to the Bishop of Aush.’ He pulled a fat leatherbound book off the shelf. It didn’t look really old. I said so.

  ‘Because I’ve had it rebound, you ninny. It’s a classic of witchcraft.’ He pretended to cuff me with the book; his hand skimmed my hair. ‘L’Inconstance de Demons. The faithlessness of demons.’ He sighed, and handed me the letters. ‘Now there’s a lesson for us all. Don’t sell your soul–or, at least, don’t sell it cheap. Right you are, Miss Robinson. Pop them in the envelopes and deliver them to the post, if you would, on your way to see your young man.’

  I felt myself go hot all over again. How could he know about me and Davey? And I’d been thinking of that, what we did by the stones, childish fumblings, comparing it to Mr Keiller and his studies, the dark secret things he did with ladies like Miss Chapman and, if gossip was to be believed, plenty of others, although he and Miss Chapman were supposed to be getting married.

  ‘I see I’ve hit bullseye,’ he said. ‘So pretty Miss Robinson is courting. We shall have to start calling you Heartbreaker Robinson from now on.’

  I was too young for him, I knew, but did he really find me pretty? The air outside the Manor seemed warmer than it had been, positively spring-like. Reckon I wasn’t the only one thinking that way, because when I came round the side of the barns, where the stones Mr Keiller had raised the year before loomed over the ditch, there was a soft giggle and a flash of white in the dark.

  They were the other side of the big stone nearest the gate. Would have been hard to see them in the dark, as I went past, but for the petticoat and the glimpse of pale leg, hooked around his waist. I recognized the voices, though, hers high and excited, his low and controlled.

  ‘Give I your coat to lean back on,’ she said: it was the housemaid who’d let me into the Manor. ‘This stone’s powerful rough.’

  ‘You like it powerful rough, do you?’ said Mr Cromley’s voice.

  Mam was cross with me that evening. ‘You’re late back, Frances. Where’ve you been?’

  She could always see into the belly of my thoughts. It made me sharp back. ‘At the Manor, of course. Where else would I be?’

  ‘Only asking. I made your supper…’

  ‘Well, you won’t be having to do that soon enough. When I’ve my own place, it’ll be a relief not to have to answer all these questions.’

  Mam’s eyes widened and wen
t shiny under the kitchen light. She turned her back to me and started stirring something on the stove. I didn’t care. It was my life.

  Spring was coming. The museum was almost ready. I’d thought of it as a job that would go on for ever, but now I could see I’d be let go after it opened. For all my bold talk of finding my own rooms, it looked like I’d be off to the cigar box in Devizes with Mam and Dad, come September. The thought of leaving the Manor was almost unbearable, for reasons I didn’t want to put into words. But I found myself looking up, every time the museum door opened, to see who it was. When Mr Keiller’s tall shadow fell across us, I’d feel the warmth in my face, and an extraordinary, unreasonable happiness.

  Mrs Sorel-Taylour was running out of work to give me. The flow of crates from London had dried up completely. The last one, with the skeleton of Charlie, the child they found at Windmill Hill, had been unpacked last week. Or Charlotte, said Mr Keiller. Could as well be a girl. There was something funny about the head: a clever doctor who was down from London had been brought over to the stable block to take a look, and he said the skull was distorted, too big for the body; some disease had swelled the brain and pushed the bones out of shape. The skeleton had been laid out careful, in a glass case sunk into the floor, a strange last resting place for a little boy thousands of years old. Every time I went into the museum I took a look, poor little mite. I didn’t want to believe he might’ve been killed deliberate, like Mr Piggott suggested. Yooman sacrifice: I hated the way he’d laughed, showing his large, prominent teeth. Instead I pictured Charlie’s mother laying him to sleep in the ditch as the sun sank over Cherhill and Yatesbury, stroking his clumsy misshapen head. ‘My special boy,’ she said, her eyes wet and shining. ‘You sleep quiet.’ They said he’d been laid to face the sunrise.

  It made me think different about Windmill Hill. I’d always liked sitting on the old barrow mounds, wind rippling the grasses and the wild flowers. But now I went up there and thought about Charlie. I could see him in my mind’s eye, running through the tall grass, chasing butterflies. He was as real as real to me. This morning, we’d finished the last of the labels. Mrs S-T had to go to the dentist in Swindon and she told me I could take longer for lunch, only be sure to be back by three thirty when she’d show me how to type up the excavation notes Mr Young had found from last season’s digging. I’d walked to Windmill Hill to enjoy the sunshine. Could’ve gone to look for Davey to see if he was free to come with me, but to be truthful I was no longer so keen on Davey’s poky Angers. It was someone else’s hands I’d have liked roaming, strong, manicured hands. I wondered what it would be like to be Miss Chapman, and have Mr Keiller come to my room late at night.