by Ellis Peters
‘Well, no, I wasn’t. Too exposed, anyhow, for October. I was thinking of taking them up between the Westlyns.’
‘Good! Fine!’ said Eve Mallindine, satisfied, and slammed the door shut. She looked up and smiled at him through the open window. ‘No need to go yelling for trouble, is there?’ she said serenely, and shot away up Castle Wylde before the lights at the Cross could change colour again.
And he had not taken them on the Hallowmount. Once, he suspected – and the glance back at himself when younger was revealing – he would have gone there on principle, having been warned to keep away. Not now. Besides, she hadn’t pressed him, hadn’t exactly warned him off. She’d merely indicated to him that the plate was hot, so that he shouldn’t burn his fingers. She’d taken it for granted that no more was necessary where a sane and sensible adult was concerned. And whether it could be considered a sign of good sense and maturity or not, he hadn’t taken them on the Hallowmount.
But in the gathering dark over the remnants of the fire, up there in the shelter between the ridges of the Westlyns, with one ear cocked for sounds of forbidden horseplay from the Three B tents, he had turned his head to stare thoughtfully at the distant ridge of the Hallowmount, with its top-knot of trees and rocks black against the milky spaces between the stars. And he had asked the son what he had never had time to ask the mother.
‘How did it get its name – the Hallowmount? And why is it taken for granted one doesn’t take boys camping there?’
‘Is it?’ said Miles vaguely, flat on his back on a spread ground-sheet, with the faint glow of the fire falling aslant across his smooth, high-boned cheek and broad forehead. Mild wonder stirred in his tone and recalled Eve’s look and voice, but he wasn’t paying very much attention. ‘I suppose it would be, come to think of it. They wouldn’t mind by daylight, but at night they’d probably think it wasn’t the thing to do. On the principle that you never know, you know.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tom. ‘You tell me. What about the name, for instance?’
‘I don’t think anybody knows much about the name, to be honest, but a lot of them will tell you they do. It goes back into pre-history—’
‘Or thereabouts,’ said Dominic Felse dubiously, demurring at such imprecision in his friend.
‘Let’s not argue about a few hundred years. Anyhow, whenever it was, we don’t know how it arose. Something not quite canny. But all this region and its inhabitants are a bit uncanny, I suppose.’ He opened his eyes wide at the sky and sat up, feeling it, perhaps, hardly dignified to conduct a discussion from the supine position. ‘Take the old lead mines,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘There couldn’t be anything more practical, but there couldn’t be anything more haunted, either. We have knockers – like in the Cornish tin mines. And Wild Edric’s down there, too, with his fairy wife Godda. And half a dozen others, for all we know. It’s the same with the Hallowmount. Some say it’s “hallow” because it was holy, a place of sacrificial mysteries in the pre-Christian cults. And some say it’s really “hollow,” and not for nothing. They say people have stumbled on the way inside sometimes, and vanished.’
‘Or come back years later,’ said Dominic helpfully, ‘like Kilmeny, with no memory of the time between, and as young as when they disappeared.’
‘Oh, that’s common to every country in Europe,’ said Tom, disappointed. ‘Nearly every hill that has a striking shape or has been the site of occupation from very early times gets that tale attached to it. Are you sure King Arthur isn’t down there, waiting for somebody to blow a horn and wake him up?’
‘No, sir, we use Wild Edric instead round these parts, we don’t need any other saviours.’ That was Milvers, the third of his only-slightly-dragooned sixth-form volunteers for this week-end chore. A clever one, Milvers, stuffed with the history and legends of the borders, all the more because he was not himself a borderer. He might be able to tell more than Miles Mallindine about the documentation of the Hallowmount; but nothing he could say would be as revealing, as perfectly direct and simple as Miles’s mild: ‘All this region and its inhabitants are a bit uncanny, I suppose.’ Without pretensions and without reluctance he had included himself in that verdict, in just the same way as his mother dealt herself in. They found nothing incongruous in having one foot in the twentieth century and one in the roots of time.
‘And some say a witch-coven used to meet there,’ said Milvers, warming to the assignment. ‘Did you know that outcrop of rock is known locally as the Altar?’
He hadn’t known, but it didn’t surprise him. Just a place of acquired ill-omen, after all, an accumulation of ordinary superstitions.
‘So that’s it,’ he said. ‘Just bad medicine.’
‘Oh, no, not really. Not bad. Any more than lightning’s good or bad. Or fire. Or the dead.’ Miles straightened and quivered to the sudden energy of his own thoughts, the thick brown lashes rolling back widely from bright, intent eyes. ‘Did somebody tell you it was bad luck, or something?’
Tom told him, in a strictly edited version, about that lift into town. ‘Your mother evidently thought it was a place to fight shy of. I suppose that’s the legacy of the witches.’
‘I don’t believe there ever were any witches. Just that chain of lives going back so unbelievably far, and a kind of impress left from them all—’ He couldn’t find the words he wanted, and wouldn’t descend to substitutes; he shut his arms helplessly round his knees, and rocked and scowled, still mining within his mind for the means of fluency. When not stirred, he could be a little lazy; it was an effort getting into gear.
‘Then why should everyone be afraid of it?’
Dominic looked at Miles, and Miles looked at Dominic. Tom had seen just such exchanges pass before, and the two mute faces relax in absolute agreement, as now. After that it was always a toss-up which of them would do the talking, but it was a certainty he would be talking for both.
‘We’re not afraid,’ said Miles, carefully and kindly keeping his smile in check. ‘Why should we be? We were born here. We’re in the chain, we don’t have to be afraid of it. We belong to it.’
‘In awe of it, then.’
They considered that with one more bright and rapid glance, and as one man accepted it.
‘Oh, in awe, yes, but that’s quite another thing, isn’t it?’
‘Is it so far from being afraid?’ said Tom, unconvinced.
Miles scrambled to his knees, leaning over the faint glow of the fire; in a little while now they would have to smother it for the night. ‘When my mother drove you into town, did she get caught at the lights by the technical college?’
‘Yes, I remember they were at red.’ He saw no connection yet, but here again was the twentieth century taking hands simply and naturally with the primeval darkness, and he felt the continuity tightening, and his palms pricked with the foreknowledge of a revelation that would leave him mute.
‘And was my mother afraid?’
Patiently, willing to learn – and wasn’t that something new for him, too? – Tom said: ‘Of course not.’
‘No, sir, of course not. You’re not afraid of traffic lights at red, it would be silly, wouldn’t it? But you don’t drive through them, either – do you?’
And he hadn’t been able to pin any of them down more precisely than that, until Jane Darrill handed him over to the mercies of the Archaeological Society. Basely and deliberately, as it turned out, for she must have known very well that once they had received him as an enquirer they wouldn’t let him escape until he had imbibed every word that existed in manuscript or print about the Hallowmount. They wrangled among themselves, but they spared him nothing.
Well, he’d asked for it! The vicar primed him with the parish records, and dragged him along to Miss Winslow, who kept the local archives, and Miss Winslow in turn hustled them both into the damp, dark but lovely splendours of Cwm Hall, which was middle Elizabethan black-and-white, and excellent of its period.
Regina Blacklock was president of the
Archaeological Society as of most such bodies, and Peter Blacklock functioned as usual, good-humouredly and resignedly, as secretary and her dutiful echo. The weight of birth and position and money was all on her side, it was rather overdoing things that she should also have so strong and decisive a character. Who could stand against her? She was an authority on everything to do with Comerford and district; where the folklore of the borders was concerned, what she said went. She poured details over Tom’s head in a merciless stream, buried him under evidence of the Druidic goings-on which had once enlivened the Hallowmount on midsummer night and at the solstices. The vicar, pink with enthusiasm, acted as chorus whenever she drew breath. Devotees both, and no need to suspect that their passion was anything but genuine. But somehow Miles had been more convincing in his vagueness, and acceptance, and serenity.
‘You must go to the Borough Library, Mr Kenyon,’ said Regina, radiant with helpfulness and ardour, ‘you really must. I’ll telephone Mr Carling in the morning and tell him to expect you, and he’ll have the Welsh chronicles ready for you whenever you like to call him and arrange a visit. And he has the aerial photographs of the Iron Age Fort – Maeldun’s Ring, you know, the one on Cleave. You should look at those, they’re a revelation. Peter has a few here, but not all. Peter, darling, where are those enlargements now?’
And Peter darling brought them. Blessedly he brought a large whisky and soda in the other hand, and a small, mild, rueful smile that warmed his long, rather tired face into a very acceptable sympathy. A tall, slender, quiet man, of spare, gentle movements and thoughtful face. Goodlooking, too, in a somewhat disconsolate way, and even his mournfulness enlivened now and then by fleeting gleams of humour, affectionate when his eye dwelt upon his formidable wife, but satirical, too. They appeared to understand each other very well, but it was inevitable that she should be the one on top, since she was the last of the Wayne-Morgans, and proprietress of half this valley and one flank of the Hallowmount. Peter Blacklock had been a local solicitor by profession, though he didn’t practise now, being fully employed in running his wife’s estates, and making, as everyone agreed, a conscientious job of it.
How old would they be? Forty-five maybe. Not more than a year or two between them, and it could be either way. She was a very striking woman, if only she wouldn’t work so hard at it; but that tremendous energy had to go somewhere, and if there were only small channels at hand to receive it they were bound to get overcharged. She expounded the history of the border as if it was the future of man. Eve Mallindine wouldn’t have thought her forebears anything particular to shout about.
How well he remembered that evening. Regina talked with passion, leaning towards him across the deep, blonde sheepskin rug; a big woman, red-haired but greying a little, interesting bands of silver in the short, russet hair; a broad, rather highly-coloured, energetic face, smooth and blonde, ripe blue eyes, arched brows plucked rather too thinly; a plump, full, firm body in good country tweeds. And Peter Blacklock in his elderly, leathery-elbowed sports jacket and Bedford cords, comfortable and distinguished, as though he had been born to the game. And the vicar, a contemporary, hard and athletic in body, eager and juvenile in mind, genuine echo to Mrs Blacklock’s full song. There were no pretences here, these were the real people. Tom had never known such, and bludgeoned as he was, he could not fail to be fascinated by them.
And in the background, of course, distant, indifferent and aware, but as though her soul remained absent, Annet. Working a little late that night, as she sometimes did, bored, probably, with them all, waiting to go home. Large-eyed, motionless of face, thinking of God knew what, she watched them all and was herself so withdrawn that she might have been in another world. The heavy, soft curve of her hair shadowing her face was like the undulation of one of the cords that held the world in balance. The whisky had been so sympathetically large that it affected his vision, and endowed her with, or perhaps only uncovered in her, cosmic significances.
‘In the seventeenth century,’ said the vicar, glowing with ardour, ‘we’re told there was a witch-coven in these parts that used to meet on the hill-top.’ His voice sounded somehow light-weight and breathless, emerging from that big, lean, shapely body. I’ll bet he was a Rugby blue, thought Tom inconsequently, and felt a small shock again at the uncertainty and shallowness of the face. For all his regular features, he looked more like a sixth-form schoolboy than sixth-form schoolboys themselves do nowadays. And why should he be so anxious to get in his Black Mass and his coven and his devil? But of course, he had, in a way, a vested interest in these blasphemies. Where would his profession be without them?
‘Coven, nonsense!’ said Regina roundly. “There isn’t a particle of evidence for that tale, and I don’t believe a word of it.’
‘But how can you dismiss Hayley’s diary so lightly? One of my predecessors in office, Mr Kenyon, the incumbent in the mid-seventeenth century, left a very circumstantial journal—’
‘Your predecessor was a demented witch-hunter,’ objected Regina firmly. ‘He left a reputation, as well as a journal, and personally I think I’d rather be called a witch than the things some of his contemporaries called him. By all accounts he’d have had half the village searched and hanged if he’d had his way, but luckily the local justices knew him too well, and were pretty easygoing country fellows themselves, so he didn’t do much damage. But don’t quote him as evidence! No, Mr Kenyon,’ she said, fixing Tom with a smiling but authoritative blue eye, ‘the occasional people who strayed into fairyland, or limbo, or whatever is inside magic mountains, I’ll stand for. I don’t mean they necessarily happened, these Rip-Van-Winkle vanishings, but I do accept that people here believed they happened. But witches, no! There never have been and there never will be any witches on the Hallowmount!’
And that was the sum of what he had got out of the evening, that and the fifteen minutes of unbelievable anguish and bliss on the way home, with Annet silent beside him in the passenger seat. That was the night he began to realise fully that this was different, that he couldn’t make use of it and wasn’t capable of disentangling himself from it; that he would never get over her, and never again be as he had been before he had known her. What he had thought to be a mild infatuation, only a little more serious than half a dozen others he had lived through and exploited, had grown and deepened out of knowledge, until it filled all his world with its new sensitivity, inordinately painful and disturbing. Annet was like that. He should have known at sight of her. But at sight of her it had already been too late to back away.
And then this afternoon, half-term Thursday. He had had a free last period, and got away early to pick up his case and set out on the drive home; and as he slid out of the car at the gate Annet had come out in her dark-blue coat, a nylon rain-scarf over her hair, three letters in her hand. At sight of him she had checked and recoiled very slightly, and the kind, careful, palpable veil of withdrawal had closed over her face. She knew his wants, and was sorry; she did not want him, and was a little sorry for that, too, or so it seemed to him. If she had not liked him she would not have troubled to evade him, she would not have shrunk from so small an encounter; but she liked him, and preferred not to have to remind him at every touch that she had nothing to give him that could ever satisfy him.
‘You’ll get wet,’ he said fatuously, ‘it’s coming on to rain. Let me take them for you.’
‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I want a breath of air, I don’t mind the rain.’
‘I’ll run you down, then, at least let me do that.’
‘Thank you, but no, please don’t. I just want to walk.’ She saw the next plea already quivering on his lips, and staved it off rapidly and gently. ‘Alone,’ she said, the deep voice making it an apology and an entreaty, while her eyes stood him off with the blue brilliance of lapis lazuli in an inlaid Egyptian head.
‘I’m sorry!’ she said. ‘Don’t be hurt. I should only be horribly unsociable if you did come, and I’d rather not.’
S
he had even gone to the trouble to find several small, kind things to say to him, she who had no small-talk, softening her enforced rejection of him – and why had he forced it? – with reminders of his family waiting at home, of the long journey before him, and the advisability of making an early start and taking advantage of the remaining daylight to get as far as the Ml. And he had followed her lead gratefully, glad to return to firmer ground.
‘Your people must be looking forward so much to having you home again.’
He said he supposed they probably were. What could he say?
‘Have a pleasant journey! And a nice week-end!’
‘Thank you! And you, too. See you on Tuesday evening, then. Good-bye, Annet!’
‘Good-bye!’
She went up the lane towards the postbox outside the Wastfield gate. He went into the house, drank a hasty cup of tea, finished the packing of his single case, and set off again in the Mini towards Comerford.
And chancing to lift his eyes to the long, rain-dimmed hog-back of the Hallowmount as he drove, just as the clouds parted and the quivering spear of light transfixed it, he saw the moving sapphire that was Annet climb the hillside and vanish over the crest.
CHAPTER II
« ^ »
It was after eight o’clock on Tuesday evening when he lifted and dropped the knocker on the front door of Fairford, and listened with pricked ears to the footsteps that advanced briskly from the living-room to open the door to him. He hadn’t taken his key south with him. There were only two, and the whole family would be in on a Tuesday evening, so there was no question of his being locked out.
He said afterwards that he knew as soon as the knocker dropped that something was wrong; but the truth was that the hole in his peace of mind really showed itself when he recognised the footsteps as belonging to Mrs Beck. There was no reason in the world why that should be a portent of any kind; but we make our own superstitions and our own touchstones, and it had been Annet who opened the door to him first, and she should have opened it to him now. If she had, he would have believed that he was being offered another chance, a new beginning with her, if he had the wit to make better use of it this time. But the steps were heavier and shorter than hers, the hand that turned back the latch was sharper and clumsier with it; and he knew Mrs Beck even before she let him in.
