by Liz Williams
At the end of the lane, the church rose up, squat behind the gathering yews. Unlike a lot of Somerset churches, with their improbably tall fortress turrets, Hornmoon was small and grey. Stella was reminded of Dylan Thomas’ poem comparing churches to snails. She pushed open the creaking gate and went inside. In early spring, the churchyard was starry with snowdrops, but now there was only a row of Japanese anemones along the wall, the faded pink of old curtains, and chrysanthemums on a few graves. Stella shut the gate behind her, and brushed underneath the yew branches to her grandfather’s tomb.
A pyramid. Pointed, so that the devil would not be able to sit on top, her grandfather had told her: there were similar, older, graves in the churchyard. An astrolabe was etched on one side of the pyramid; on its base, rested her grandfather’s name: Abraham Bendigneid Fallow, and his dates. It made him sound very patriarchal, Biblical, and he hadn’t been like that at all.
“Hello, Grandpa,” Stella said, and grinned.
Bee
Together, the two women stood looking at the box.
“How old is it?” Nell asked.
“Elizabethan.” Bee smiled. “I think. It’s not as though I’m an expert on antiques. But look.” She turned the box around. In the middle of the back panel, beneath a galleon in full sail, the numbers ‘1570’ were inscribed in curly, flaking paintwork.
“I like the cute little ship,” Nell said. “Where does it come from?”
“We don’t really know. It’s always been in the family.” The galleon sailed across the lid of the box, a swallow flew towards one corner: on its side was a bowl of roses, their petals drooping. “Granddad Fallow told me it was a wedding gift for a Fallow bride, but we don’t know who she was.”
“What’s inside it?”
“Take a look.” Bee put the box down on the windowsill and lifted the lid. Inside, bands of painted herbs followed the contours of the box: buttercup, juniper, fennel, rosemary, others which Bee could not so readily identify. And there was a bag of ancient black velvet, reposing like a mole at the bottom of the box.
“Better and better! What’s in the bag?”
“Another bag. No, actually, it’s these.” Bee undid the drawstring and tipped the contents of the bag into the box. “These aren’t supposed to be taken out of the box for long, so we don’t.” She picked up one of the stones, rough and tumbled, a clear toffee brown. “Jasper. And this is a topaz.” She held up a black oval. “This is onyx.”
“It’s quite a little collection,” Nell said.
“There are fifteen of them.” Bee drew the string tight and replaced the bag. As she closed the lid, she could see the faint tracery of stars among the herbs, visible only in certain lights. “But Grandfather once told me that one was missing.”
“What a lovely thing,” Nell said. “It’s a house full of treasures, really.”
“It’s an old house,” Bee said.
Later, when Nell had gone up to her room, Bee sat with the box in her lap. In her mind’s eye, her mother sat at the kitchen table, with herself and Stella. It was years before. Bee was eighteen, or thereabouts, Stella five years younger. They had been doing their homework after school, but Alys had been reading a letter. Eventually Stella, whose powers of concentration were not great when it came to the academic and trying to create a distraction, said, “Who’s that from?”
Her mother waved the letter. “This, Stella, is from a professor in Oxford. Her name is Frederica Rimington and she is a lecturer in English lit, specialising in Elizabethan poetry. She is a friend of your grandfather’s – she’s quite elderly now. I sent her something in Latin. It used to be in the box with the gemstones and I think it and the stones really should be kept together, but the parchment on which this was written originally is about four hundred years old and when we last looked at it, Abraham said it was starting to fade. He thought it was too fragile to stay there, so he took it out a few weeks ago. I copied it out and sent it to Freddie to ask if she would translate it. So she did.”
“What does it say?” Bee asked.
“I’ll read it out.” And she did. It had been a sonnet, Bee remembered, and although she could not recall the words she had been left with a lasting impression of stars and herbs and gleaming things, of gardens and running deer.
“Wow! Who wrote it?”
“A very minor Elizabethan poet called William Fallow.”
“Oh, Grandpa told me about him,” Stella said. “He’s a great umpteenth great grandfather, isn’t he? He wrote a play and it was terrible and everyone hated it, so he returned home to Somerset and never went anywhere ever again.”
“Yes. But he did do something when he came home. He met a girl in an orchard and he married her and she was your umpteenth great grandmother, and mine. I’m going to show you something else,” Alys said. “I put this on this morning.” She reached into the neck of the kaftan and pulled out a locket. It was dull gold, etched with concentric lines, and in the middle was a star.
“I’m not going to open this, because what’s inside it is very fragile. But it’s a portrait of William Fallow and one day I’ll show it to you.”
Now, years later, Bee wondered what had become of that locket.
She packed for London, wondering what to take. All of her clothes seemed, over the years, to have narrowed down into a selection of old skirts, jeans, moth-eaten jumpers. Really, she was starting to dress like a fifty year old and not a modern one, either. A fifty something from the fifty somethings. Serena was right to despair. She did have a couple of smart black dresses, and one in deep green: these would have to do, with Spanish riding boots. But you didn’t really have to bother in the country and it wasn’t as though she was into the dating game. Dark – well, Dark didn’t care, did he? But London was a different kettle of fish. She put all the dresses into her case, then took one of the black ones out again. Outside, a blue dusk was beginning to settle.
Stella
Stella’s grandfather had become a star. She might have known, really, although she had been surprised when she first found out. He hovered, a small blue light, above the tip of the pyramid.
“How is that working for you?” Stella asked, perched on a nearby, flatter, tomb. She had apologised to its inhabitants, hoping they would not mind. The yews dripped steadily, revoking rain.
The star danced. Inside her mind, her grandfather’s voice said, “You came back.”
“You knew I’d gone away?”
“Bee told me.”
“Ah.”
“We had – a bit of a row. Actually, a lot of a row. Over Mum.”
“Ah.”
“I think I ought to apologise but we’re pretending it didn’t happen, so... You don’t know where Alys is.” It was not a question.
“She didn’t tell me where she was going.” The blue star danced.
“She said she was going on a hiking trip, which was a load of old cobblers.” Stella examined a chewed thumbnail. “I think she’s dead.”
“Do you? I think I’d know if she was. I think she would have come home, if death had overtaken her.”
Stella watched a burnet moth climb laboriously up the side of the pyramid, fairy-tale monochrome and red against the black marble.
“If she’s not dead, then where is she? It’s completely bloody inconsiderate to just push off without telling any of us where she went.” Oh, you know, darling. Hills and stuff. I’ll leave Bee all the details. But she hadn’t. Luna had mentioned something called the Gipsy Switch, some kind of horse-trading route, and Stella herself had an inkling that Alys had gone to Dartmoor, but she couldn’t have said why: just a hunch. It was part of the Switch, apparently. She’d even gone down to the moor and asked around, feeling sleuthy and foolish, but to no avail. The police had looked into it, as well, with similar results, and it had been a splash across the papers for a week or so, before other news had pushed a missing woman aside.
“No one would hold a middle-aged mother of four prisoner, would they? It’s not as
though we’re fantastically rich.”
“She has not cried for help, or if she has, I haven’t heard her,” the blue star remarked.
“I suppose that’s something.”
The yews rustled, murmuring, but Stella could not hear what they said. The blue star sank into the pyramid, which glowed for a second or two, then faded to black. But Stella was somewhat comforted, all the same.
That night, she dreamed of traps.
There was a hollow in the side of the hill, surrounded by the roots of beeches, so exposed and smooth that they seemed closer to stone, a medusa’s coils. The trap stood in the middle of the hollow and in it, caught by the leg, was a white vixen.
“Don’t move, lovely.” Stella skidded down the slope, slipping on damp black earth. She was back in her sabbing days, outwitting the local hunt. “Don’t move – I’ve got you!”
In the dream, the vixen made no sound, only looked up at Stella out of suffering golden eyes. Stella put one hand on the trap, its cold sharp teeth, and one on the nape of the fox. The vixen bared her fangs and fell apart, horribly, in Stella’s hands, jointing into rawness and sinew. There was no blood. The vixen’s mask dropped floppily onto the earth and Stella found herself putting it on. Seeing through the vixen’s blind eyes, she looked down at the trap and saw a shark’s row of teeth jutting up through the soil. Stella stumbled back, but the lamprey mouth was coming up after her, arching over her head – she screamed, and woke.
Bee suggested leaving the car, but Stella liked the idea of being stranded for a couple of days. It removed the necessity of making decisions, and Bee could leave the Landrover at the station car park for a few quid. She sat, still with the remnants of her dream about her, at the kitchen table with a stoneware mug of tea. Warming her hands seemed to diminish the chill of the trap; the ticking clock drowned out the echo of the vixen’s cry. She could hardly wait for Nell and her sister to leave and when they had done so, she took the tea, closed the top half of the back door so that the house was sealed against the cold and wandered up the stairs. There was a cat on each bed: Fly, Sable, Tut. Both the spaniels were curled in their basket and to Stella’s secret pleasure, it had started to rain again. Her mobile would not receive a signal, here in the hollow of the hills. No one was expecting anything of her, and would not get it if they had. She found a paperback book, an ancient edition of The Dawn Treader, in a bookcase, where it had always been, and settled onto the bedroom window seat to read it.
She looked up often, but it seemed the Behenian stars were not visiting today.
Towards noon, a sound from the yard roused her and she looked out to see a Landrover, not Bee’s and almost indistinguishable from the surrounding mud, pulling into the yard. The dark figure of Tam Stare got out and stood, hesitating, on the flags. For a moment, Stella was tempted to pretend she was out, but she thought it might be better to let him know that there was someone on the premises. She knew a dodgy geezer when she saw one. By the time he had his hand on the kitchen bell, she was downstairs.
“Hello.” He looked at her with open admiration. Not a leer, nothing so obvious, but Stella could tell what he was thinking.
“Hi.” She smiled politely at Tam, who, after all, was guilty of nothing but being iffy and attractive: the kind of combination which Stella was starting to recognise as a pattern, and problematic.
“I brought your sister’s scrap cash.” He handed over an envelope, thick with notes. “Two hundred and fifty. I kept twenty, as agreed – you can check it with her. I’ve written it down.”
His pale eyes were owlish, round with the effort to show honesty, but there was a flicker of something behind them. He couldn’t quite pull sincerity off. “It’s cool,” Stella said. “She can sort it out with you when she gets back.”
“You’re a DJ, aren’t you?” Tam said.
“Yes. Well, it’s one of the things I do.” A bit of admin, a bit of care work. Things that made ends meet. It struck her that they might not be all that different. He seemed to acknowledge it, giving her his lopsided smile.
“I do all sorts, meself.”
Stella leaned against the dresser. “You’re a friend of Jamie’s?”
“Sort of. I suppose you all know each other.”
She nodded. “My sister goes out with his brother.”
“Ben, yeah?”
“Yes. At least, I think she does. It’s been going a while, but I think it’s a bit up and down, on and off, these days.” She felt a pang of disloyalty.
“She’s got a daughter, hasn’t she, your sister? If it’s the one I’m thinking of.” The pale gaze was suddenly direct; the irises ringed with a faint fire. His skin, she saw, was very white: Celtic skin, even though he must spend much of his time outside. There was a flicker of silver at one ear.
“Yes. Her name’s Bella.”
“But Ben’s not her dad, is he?”
Stella smiled. “No. She went out with Ward Garner for a bit – Richard Amberley’s cousin, the actor?” He nodded; Ward was, after all, famous. “Then she had her little girl with someone else but that didn’t last. She started going out with Ben a few years ago.” Fallow women do that, she nearly said, run off, but caught herself in time. And why was she telling a stranger all this? It felt as though he was spinning the words out of her. Well, Rumpel-bloody-stiltskin, Stella thought, it’s time to keep your trap shut.
“My sis knows Ben,” Tam said. “Dana.”
“I don’t think I’ve met her.”
“You’d know if you had.”
“Is that in a good way or not?”
“Hard to tell. She’s – mercurial,” he said, surprising Stella with the choice of adjective. “Quicksilver.” His accent, which up until now had been bog-standard sarf-east, suddenly sounded a lot plummier.
“That sounds good, to me. I like quick people.”
“Maybe.” He did not seem sure. He said, suddenly awkward, “I’d better be on my way.”
It was only later that it occurred to Stella that she could have offered him tea. On the whole, she thought it best that she hadn’t.
Serena
Serena stood very still, not wanting to breathe. Eleanor touched a tiny tip of gold to the fin of the dolphin, and sat back in her chair.
“It looks so fragile,” Serena said. “How could anyone bear to touch it?”
“It’s not nearly as delicate as it looks, you know. That’s the beauty of metal. Secretly strong.” The table was crowded with objects: the dolphin salt cellar, a small bronze faun, spoons and handles and a huge tarnished platter. Eleanor sat, dishevelled, among them, in a man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her hair, iron grey, was piled onto her head and her dark-eyed hawk’s face was focused on Serena. The rent for the Portobello house lay on the table between them; Eleanor had an old-fashioned preference for cash, and it gave the two women an excuse to meet every month.
“I suppose so.”
“Whereas those frippery things you make, all flimsy…”
“They’re not nearly as delicate as they look, either.” Serena reached out and picked up a tiny silver spoon. “Look at this. It’s like a fairy’s spoon.”
Across the room, a cabinet took up the whole of the opposite wall: an apothecary’s case containing shells, ammonites, roots, geodes. Eleanor, an alchemist, transformed them into silver and gold: the heads of spoons, the handles of cups, the curving body of a bowl. At the centre of the table stood an enormous piece: a silver boy riding a porpoise and bearing up a cornucopia that overspilled with golden grapes.
“It’s for one of the vintner’s associations,” Eleanor said.
“It’s amazing.”
At the far end of the room a door opened, and a young man glided in; Ethiopian, dressed in white. His head, balanced on his long neck, was as graceful as a cat’s. He smiled vaguely at Serena, drifted through the room and disappeared down the palm-fringed fire escape. She did not know if he was adopted son, lodger, lover, and did not feel able to ask. Eleanor behaved as tho
ugh he was not there. Briefly, Serena wondered if the other woman could even see him.
“Would you like more tea?”
“I’d love some, but I’ve got to get back. My sister’s coming to stay for a day or so, with our cousin. She’s American; she’s over for a bit.”
“I like Americans,” Eleanor said, unexpectedly. “So go-ahead.”
Eleanor herself was hardly slacking in that regard, Serena thought. The certificate proclaiming her a member of the Goldsmith’s Guild stood on the cabinet: someone had been obliged to cross out ‘boy’ and substitute ‘girl’, in copperplate.
“Nell’s great,” Serena told her. “She writes. I’ll bring you a copy of her book.”
“Books are always very welcome guests.”
Serena made her way down the fire escape, difficult to negotiate in heels, into the back yard and out onto the street. The rain had blown out overnight and left London pallid and washed in its wake. She pulled her scarf tighter against a sharp east wind and turned the corner into Red Lion Square.
The square was empty apart from a girl on a bench. Serena, minding her own business, paid her no attention as she walked past but then the girl looked up and Serena saw that it was Dana Stare.
“Oh,” Dana said. She gave a twisted little smile that, oddly, looked more genuine than the effusive greeting she had given Serena two nights before, at the club. “There you are,” – as though she’d been looking for Serena. Today, she wore a tight black leather jacket with a high collar, and a long black skirt. Her hair sprayed out around the collar in a polished fan.
“Hello,” Serena said, warily.
“Cold, isn’t it? Where are you off to?”
“The Tube,” Serena said.
“I’ll walk with you.” It wasn’t an option.
Dana Stare had a long stride, not a townswoman’s step, Serena thought, despite her spiky heels. She said to Serena, “So how long have you and Ben been an item?”
