Hyddenworld: Spring Bk. 1 (Hyddenworld Quartet 1)

by William Horwood

  ‘Okay.’

  Then, her brief moment of calm over, she rushed off to her room where, once more, Jack would hear her crying inconsolably.

  Only slowly, through things she herself said and other comments that Mrs Foale ventured, did Jack begin to understand the full nature of what Katherine felt. For it was a grief felt not only for the passing of Clare Shore’s courageous life, but for what the lives of Richard and Clare might have been had they both lived.

  Mrs Foale herself, though as helpful as she could be, was rather less patient with Katherine’s moods than Jack was. Clare’s death had triggered the feelings of desolation she herself had felt since Arthur had left them, and which it had seemed inappropriate to indulge, with Clare having been so ill. So she had been holding these feelings at bay since his disappearance.

  Sometimes in those days, though careful never to let Katherine see her, she stood by herself in the vegetable garden, lacking the energy to do anything but weep for the husband – and now the dear friend – she had lost.

  Then, pulling herself together, and remembering what a great gift Clare and Katherine had been to her when they came to Woolstone House, she would go to her room for the night, determined to find a way the next day to show Katherine that she still loved her.

  While Katherine, bereft as well, cast adrift upon a stormy sea, would sometimes fall silent and sit, inconsolable, in the conservatory or out in the garden listening to the chimes, whatever the weather or the time of day – or night.

  Once she put on some loud rock music, another time she started a bath which she forgot about, so everything flooded . . .

  So it was left to Jack to hold them together, one way and another.

  In doing so, as the day of the funeral approached, he began to understand that grief and loss make people vulnerable to the unseen worlds that swirl about them, but from which, normally, their psyches are geared to protect them.

  It was bad enough that by day this onset of grief had set flowing the currents of ill-temper and unreason flowing throughout the house and garden; what was worse, and far more worrying to him, after Imbolc’s warning, was that by night there was something darker sneaking about the place – something closing in.

  For it was then, when the women were inside, locked down in grief and inclined to eat their meals in frowning strained-face silence or choosing to eat nothing at all up in the privacy of their rooms, that Jack tried to find respite from them out in the garden.

  In his special places – a bed of grass that caught radiant sunlight between the three trees that encompassed it, a spring-fed pool around which grew thickets of bamboo, a spot behind one of the ruined rockeries – while lying on his back or sitting cross-legged, trying to meditate like in one of the books he had found in the library, Jack began, bit by bit, to hear the sounds of the very Earth itself.

  The events of the past days seemed to heighten his awareness and make him hear all manner of things he had barely noticed before: trees creaking softly, leaves tumbling along branches, the hop-hop scurry of a blackbird’s feet in the undergrowth, the breeze across the garden, the occasional patter of rain, the buzz of bees from one flower to the next and, more than once, the rough scurrying of hedgehogs in the undergrowth.

  These sounds, and many more, mingled with the tinkling of the glass that Clare and others had hung on the shrubs surrounding the secret henge. As they sounded, Jack began to understand how perhaps it was the way this gentle resonance fragmented things, and how the chimes’ dappling reflections of the sun and sky broke up the trees and grass and the very shadows that made it more difficult to see things clearly, and thus offered protection against the mounting sense of dark invasion he was finding hard and harder to keep at bay as the day of the funeral approached. How this might be he did not know, but he felt sure it was so.

  Which was why, in daytime, when the breeze blew, and the tinkling of glass was continuous, it felt as if there was nothing much to fear. Jack could lie back, take in the sun, forget the time and place and, most of all, the circumstances. He could feel that Katherine was safe and that Mrs Foale was calm.

  But at night, when the reflections of shards of glass and mirrors died with the light, and the loss of the breeze deprived the garden of the safety of their sound, he became ever more certain that dark life both hostile and dangerous was venturing forth from the other worlds to spy and snoop, surreptitiously, on the house and its inhabitants, slipping past where Jack watched and waited.

  Then later, returning from a different direction, as if their reconnaissance was now complete, their plans laid and unpleasant possibilities established, those same spirits retreated back past him, biding their time.

  38

  IN THE LIBRARY

  It was midnight and Jack couldn’t sleep.

  He went downstairs, fixed himself a hot drink, wandered around the ground floor of the house, went to the conservatory doors and peered out into the dark. He then opened them and stepped out onto the cracked paving stones of the terrace outside, felt nothing untoward and went back inside.

  ‘Jack?’ It was Mrs Foale.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said. Her grey hair was tousled and she wore a thick granny nightie underneath one of Arthur’s dressing gowns.

  ‘Nor me,’ said Jack. ‘I made myself tea. Would you like some?’

  She nodded her head. ‘I’ll be in the library.’

  As he loaded the tray, he heard Katherine moving about upstairs. She liked hot chocolate so he made her a cup, knowing the sweet scent of it would attract her down.

  It did.

  ‘Margaret’s up.’

  They joined her in the library, pulling chairs around to face where she sat at her desk.

  ‘I was thinking, as I lay awake, that when this is over we should all go up to Arthur’s cottage in Northumberland. It would do us good. It’s a long time since I’ve been there.’

  The last two years of Clare’s illness had put a stop to that.

  ‘And I was thinking that we must make a bonfire for Mum’s ashes,’ said Katherine. ‘She would have liked that. I mentioned it to Jack. We could head off after that.’

  It felt positive and the right thing to do.

  ‘What’s the walking like up there?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Fabulous.’

  He got up, feeling restless, studied the books on the shelves, peered out of the window, and found himself standing at last by Arthur’s chair. It was placed sideways-on to the desk, giving the unnerving impression that he had left in a hurry, intending to come back shortly. The chair itself was made of well-worn light oak and leather, with an old-fashioned, and now rusty, swivel mechanism just above the five-footed base. It looked like something from a museum of the history of furniture.

  Jack impulsively sat down in it and then sprang up, thinking it might offend Margaret.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said instinctively. ‘Arthur wouldn’t mind.’

  From this new perspective, Jack saw how the library was a room of two halves. Margaret’s desk was neat and tidy, as were the shelves on each side of it. Arthur’s section was the exact opposite – cluttered, dusty, disordered, drawers half open, an ashtray full of stubbed-out butts and the ash of a single cigarette that had burnt right through. It looked very much as if Arthur had just lit it, when he was suddenly called from his desk and never came back.

  There was, among the pile of papers which Jack eyed closely but did not touch, an opened academic journal whose yellowing pages suggested it had been lying there from long before Arthur had left. There was still the musty smell of cigarettes hovering over the desk, as well as . . . he sniffed a bit more and then spied a whisky bottle, and next to it a dusty cut-glass tumbler. He picked the glass up and sniffed it, detecting the tell-tale signs of evaporated liquid in the bottom of it.

  ‘Cigarettes and whisky,’ Jack remarked, without thinking.

  ‘He liked his drugs,’ said Mrs Foale drolly.

  Jack looked more closely at the intr
oduction to the article in the journal left open on the desk. It was one written by Arthur himself, and had an image of him looking exactly as he did in the DVD he had left behind for them.

  He found himself peering into the couple of desk drawers that were already half open.

  One drawer contained several packs of cigarettes of a brand that Jack had never heard of, their packets as yellowing as the journal’s pages. The other contained an ancient calculator, a scattering of pencils, some rubber bands, and a prismatic compass like Jack had once used when being taught to navigate his way across the Welsh mountains with an Ordnance Survey map.

  When he picked it up and studied it closely, he saw it was perfectly made, the prism in just the right place, the graduations expertly cut into the brass, the needle swinging easily. But the ring in which a user normally put his thumb, to hold the device to his eye while taking a bearing, was far too small even for his little finger.

  ‘Strange,’ murmured Jack.

  He put it back and turned his attention to the row of books on the floor-to-ceiling shelves right behind the chair he sat on. They seemed mainly about folklore and looked very well-thumbed. There were more books on the same subject on the shelves further along, and a whole lot besides on everything from astronomy to Anglo-Saxon history.

  There were box-files as well, all neatly lettered and numbered in contrast to the general mess and clutter itself, which, the more he examined it, gave a sense of Arthur’s wide range of interests. There was a pile of maps on the floor and boxes of seemingly unsorted photographs, a lot of them depicting megaliths and stone circles, and what Jack guessed to be Iron Age hill forts.

  There was an Edwardian hat stand, its enclosed base full of walking sticks of all shapes and sizes, while the hooks above held a variety of bashed-up hats. Random shoe boxes contained stones, black seaweed, a dried and curled-up adder skin. Soon the pattern became clearer: everywhere he looked there were things from outdoors, or things to wear for going outdoors; or books which might inform anyone heading outdoors.

  It seemed that archaeology involved a bit more than sitting at a desk and reading textbooks.

  ‘What exactly do you do, Margaret?’ asked Jack impulsively. ‘I mean, you never talk about it.’

  ‘People aren’t usually too interested. I’m currently working on a text which scholars call the Codex Exoniensis. When Leofric was appointed first Bishop of Exeter in the year ad 1050, he gave the codex to the cathedral library. It contains one hundred and thirty-one leaves or pages of manuscript, rescued from other books now lost, and individual manuscripts bound together with the rest for their better preservation. The text itself consists of various riddles, material about Christ himself, two biographies of saints, religious allegories, homilies, and some extraordinary elegies and lyrics.’

  ‘What’s Old English sound like?’

  ‘German, Frisian, even like Modern English in places, though you wouldn’t recognize that fact if you saw it printed.’

  ‘Read us some,’ said Katherine.

  She did better than that, she began reciting from memory:

  Wrætlic is pes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon; burgstede burston, brosnað enta geweorc. Hrofas sind . . .

  ‘Sounds really powerful,’ said Jack.

  ‘It’s a warrior language and so is meant to. Anyway that particular poem is strong stuff in its own right. It tells of a city in ruins, its well-built walls destroyed by fate, the work of “giants” and stone-smiths. It says the city’s now nothing more than mouldering dust, its citizens’ lives over, caught in “earthgrip” and “gravesgrasp” for more than fifty generations.’

  ‘“Earthgrip”,’ repeated Katherine slowly.

  ‘“Gravesgrasp”,’ murmured Jack.

  ‘Scholars call that particular poem The Ruin. The buildings the poet describes were impressive, bright with colour and light, with busy people and the flow of clear water. “Wyrd changed all that!” he declares, and destruction descended and decay came, and death too.

  ‘The poem’s incomplete because it got badly burnt. The last lines are lost. Most scholars tend to believe it describes the ancient city of Bath, which was built by the Romans but abandoned after they left in the fifth century. Needless to say, Arthur disagreed with that theory.’

  ‘So what did he think the poem was about?’ asked Katherine.

  Margaret hesitated and then sighed. ‘It was one of his more outlandish notions I’m afraid, but he thought it described the future rather than the past. He thought the poet had somehow travelled forward in time, and then come back to leave a warning to future generations.’

  ‘Did he have any particular city in mind?’

  ‘As a matter of fact he did. He interpreted it as a description of the ruins of Birmingham after some kind of extreme weather event crisis in the future.’

  ‘A holocaust happening right in the middle of England?’ said Jack. ‘That seems a bit unlikely.’

  ‘It happened before, as a matter of fact, in the middle of the seventh century ad, at the time of a legendary craftsman called Beornamund. There occurred then one of the most severe climate events ever to hit the British Isles, far, far worse than any of the local hurricanes you hear of today. It seemed like the beginning of the end of things, and Arthur believes The Ruin is intended as a warning to us that it might all happen again.’

  Jack felt a chill run up his spine, a prickling at the back of his neck.

  He stood up suddenly, Arthur’s chair spinning behind him.

  ‘Is Birmingham the same place as Brum?’ he asked.

  Margaret said nothing.

  ‘That’s where he’s gone, isn’t it? He’s gone off to the Hyddenworld equivalent of Birmingham, and he can’t get back!’

  ‘Jack . . .’

  ‘Hasn’t he, Margaret?’

  She looked suddenly bereft and helpless.

  ‘Hasn’t he?’

  ‘I . . . don’t know. He was trying . . . he wanted . . . Jack, I just don’t know.’

  ‘He needs help, doesn’t he?’

  ‘I didn’t want . . . I can’t ask . . .’

  ‘Jack!’

  It was Katherine protesting. She hadn’t yet made the connections Jack had. All she knew was that she didn’t want Margaret crying, or Jack ever again getting drawn into something that might involve him risking his life. That would be a grief too far.

  ‘We’re tired now,’ she said, ‘and we need some sleep before tomorrow. And, yes, a holiday at the cottage in Northumberland after that would be great.’

  ‘Just a few more days then,’ said Jack, not sure if he meant before they would be going away, or the time he had in which to do something about Arthur.

  In one way it seemed a very long time; in another, not nearly time enough.

  39

  FAREWELL

  On the day of Clare’s funeral, nature itself honoured the dead woman’s passing with a display of changing moods that mirrored the feelings of those who loved her.

  The day began with the clouds and cold winds that matched the sense of grief that pervaded the little congregation taking part in the service at Oxford Crematorium.

  Sudden violent showers thudded on to the roof of the chapel as the service proceeded, until, with the committal of Clare’s body to the flames, the most violent shower of all drove hard into the windows and darkened the entire building.

  Then, moments later, as Katherine rose to say a few words in celebration of her mother’s life and to speak of her lack of any fear of death, the rain stopped, the gloom lifted, and the sun came out. It projected a mosaic of colour onto the floor before the altar which, now bright, now less so, then bright again, was as alive as the memories that Katherine tearfully created for them all.

  Her final words were simple: ‘Mum was there when I needed her, right through the years of growing up. She taught me many, many things which will stay with me always, like the memory of her smile and her touch. Mum loved me all the harder because she knew Dad wasn’t there t
o share it with her, so she did it for both of them.’

  Katherine could say no more after that, though she wanted to and stood alone there weeping until Jack got up and guided her back to her place.

  When the service was over, and all Clare’s favourite music had been played, they came out into sunshine so bright it was already drying up the puddles left behind by the rainstorm.

  The sun, like the puddles, reflected the mood of Clare’s mourners, and turned out to be the start of a week of those lovely bright days and soft evenings that make for an old-fashioned late Spring. It was perfect for the building of the great bonfire which Jack, Katherine and Mrs Foale assembled slowly but steadily just outside the wood henge, by the two great conifers that marked its entrance.

  This bonfire, they hoped, would be like a fiery herald before the henge itself, serving the twin purposes of sending Clare’s ashes up into the sky over its great mystic circle as well as serving as a vivid closure to her life on earth.

  The temperature now rose with each passing day, and even old things that had been left rotting for years in the many dark, dank corners of the house, or in outbuildings and the garden, rapidly turned tinder-dry and therefore suitable for burning.

  Jack did most of the physical work, using a wheelbarrow to carry combustibles from various places all over the property. Old boxes, piles of papers and unwanted things from inside the house, an old kitchen table that had ended up discarded in the vegetable garden, apple-tree branches pruned by Mrs Foale, all of these were going to be burnt.

  These were good days, happy days, in which Jack and Katherine experienced a rebirth of that strange confusion of feeling and desire for each other that had faltered with the onset of Clare’s final hours of life. They were like two young planets whose influence on each other was as yet uncertain in its nature and power, and whose universe was, for the time being, confined here to Woolstone.

  But Mrs Foale, while sitting on the cracked old terrace at night and listening to their chatter nearby, understood better than they that it was in the nature of things they would soon be gone out into the wide world.