The Anathema Stone

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘You seem to know me,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you’ve only yourself to blame for that, haven’t you? When a man of your reputation takes a letting in Spentlow, he must expect a build-up before he arrives.’

  Fourteen or fifteen? She certainly did not lack confidence or fluency.

  ‘Sorry I can’t stop now,’ she said. ‘Not that either of us would want to, in this. In any case, I’m late for rehearsal, and we have a producer who takes a wizened view of such things. But I do want to talk to you, Mr Kenworthy – some time soon. See you!’

  She was away into the dark middle distance. Kenworthy leaned into the wind and thrashed his way home. After supper he did not pick up his Trollope again; the television set that was part of their so-called amenities produced a snow-storm on every channel. He went over to the randomly stocked bookcase and came up with two slim volumes that kept him happy and quiet for the remainder of the evening.

  One was a collection of illustrated fairy-stories, printed by a firm in Staffordshire and published privately in 1861 by the Reverend Wilbur Gabbitas. They seemed fairly insipid stuff, but might have had some bite if one knew the local references. The central character was a deviously benevolent Spentlow goblin called Hob. And a strange thing about him, as about all the other characters in the Tales, was that none of them had any feet. They were always shown standing in long grass, or behind low walls and bushes. Wilbur Gabbitas had come realistically to terms with his inability to draw boots and shoes.

  They were wholesome anecdotes, reminiscent of Aesop. A common theme was revenge against mean dealing; village rascals showed through, like the tale of an elf who got his come-uppance after stealing his neighbour’s exhibition carrots, and Gabbitas had given names to warring factions of his Little People: the Sopalls and the Glitter-Betters. So this was the idiom that Dunderdale was emboldened to update – Spentlow might well be an interesting place on publication day.

  The other book was a society-published paper by a forgotten academic who attempted, by reference to archaeological finds elsewhere, to reconstruct the layout of a barrow on the outskirts of Spentlow. Hob’s Kitchen was the vernacular name for the spot, and local lore had for centuries peopled it with the family and hangers-on of the prank-playing sprite who had inspired Wilbur Gabbitas. But this historian had no time for such frivolity. He was more interested in the ancient chieftain who had been buried there, in 1800 BC or thereabouts, with his knees up to his chin, and at his side the bronze beaker whose contents were to sustain him on his last journey. But that was before an eighteenth-century (AD) Allsop had carried away one of the three great cornerstones to make a doorstep for his farm.

  Kenworthy sat with his head back and his eyes closed in seraphic speculation which he did not even seem to want to share with his wife.

  Chaper Two

  The next morning they woke uselessly early to the syncopated rhapsody of a rust-riddled downpipe. Kenworthy stretched out towards the transistor, and Radio Derby forecast another filthy day, during the course of which Elspeth braved the downpour to do essential shopping, and was gone long enough to make several friends; long enough to get herself asked out to tea that afternoon. Kenworthy emerged from the world of the nineteenth-century novel to explore the woodshed and bring in an assortment of sodden kindling to dry round the base of the boiler.

  He also received a visit from a lean and voluble creature who introduced herself as Mrs Scadbolt and informed him that she had been engaged as household help by every tenant of the cottage for the last ten years. She was a startling creature, with black hair tightly and elaborately piled on top of her head and a garish shade of rouge standing out like poster paint over her high cheekbones. When Kenworthy let it be known that nothing would bring Elspeth greater pleasure than to do her own chores, she lingered as if in the hope of a sudden change of his paternalistic mind. She also flooded him with a chronicle of the crimes of the village over the last three decades, not one of them worth more than a magistrate’s fine. That evening, an hour before the time when he had yesterday gone out for his beer, Elspeth caught him looking furtively at his watch. She pushed him out into the damp, making him button his coat collar before she released him.

  On their second morning it was still raining at breakfast time, but

  Kenworthy insisted on going out. Yesterday the newspaper boy had delivered the Mirror, and this morning nothing at all. Elspeth, turning the rashers in the pan, thought he was gone a long time. She raised a corner of the curtain and watched him let himself out of the telephone box on the Green. He came back brandishing another Mirror with mock hysteria.

  Later, the rain did stop, though water continued to filter through the trees with all the descant effects of the original downpour – and the same power to drench. Kenworthy announced his intention of going for a walk, and Elspeth was not dissuasive, being equally anxious to get outside their four allegedly furnished walls. With a scarf tied over her head and a one-inch map in Kenworthy’s pocket they skirted the standing water in the Spentlow street and exchanged greetings with unknown Brightmores and Allsops alike. On a worn corner of the Green the school bus was reversing, ready to take the older children to the secondary school some ten miles away. Kenworthy caught sight of the pixie, now in a navy blue uniform with a pudding hat. He tried to catch her eye, but she was too absorbed in comparing homework with another girl, their fluttering exercise books balanced on loaded satchels. She was unquestionably a child this morning, no hint of the illusion of two nights ago. She got out a ballpoint, and hopping on one leg to balance book and bag on her knee, wrote down some alteration.

  Out of the village, past the Pack Horse, through a farmyard where the right of way was guaranteed by an Ancient Monument signpost; the slough round a gate was such that they had to wrap themselves round the post to get through it. Elspeth did not protest, though her expression was that of a woman exercising patience. Kenworthy led her along a dry-stone wall, through a stile into an ash plantation, following a footpath over smooth-worn limestone slabs. The trees continued to shed water on them.

  ‘Only some thirty yards, and we’ll be out in the open. Look: there’s a square inch of blue in the sky.’

  Seconds later he fell headlong, smearing his trench-coat with mud and narrowly missing a tumble of some eight or ten feet down a vertical crag. But he did himself no more damage than a grazed knee.

  ‘Don’t rub it in,’ Elspeth said. ‘It’ll brush off when it’s dry.’

  He pulled something up with his hand. From tufts on either side of the narrow path long tough grasses had been knotted together, forming an inverted V that had snared his ankle.

  ‘Some kid’s trick, I shouldn’t wonder. Sorry, Elspeth, I know there isn’t much fun in this, but I’d like to see the place now we’ve come this far.’

  She did not demur, and within five minutes they were out of the wood and standing in the corner of a field by two great stones that had once stood upright: obelisks of a man’s girth and twice a man’s height that had once supported a capstone now long unaccounted for.

  ‘Apparently these had to be dragged here for miles. There are fossils in the stone, encrinites, the stems of primeval sea-lilies. They don’t belong on this hillside.’

  ‘I know. People told me that yesterday.’

  ‘Doesn’t it give you an eerie feeling to think that here, four thousand years ago, some white-bearded king –’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘It does lack atmosphere, I must say.’

  Two slabs of stone, no more, no less; no trace to the unschooled eye of a burial mound. In the next field a plover was wasting energy on decoy tactics.

  ‘They don’t even think of it as prehistoric in the village,’ she said. ‘They call it Hob’s Kitchen.’

  ‘According to the book, that’s Saxon vintage. Maybe the Saxons found squatters on the site. Odd, though, that the only weirdness comes from a fictitious yarn, not from original history.’

  ‘I don’t find that odd. A
ll I feel is wet and cold and ready for coffee.’

  ‘We’ll go home. Ha-ha, home! I just wanted to see the spot.’

  ‘And now you’re a wiser, fuller and wetter man.’

  But it was unlike her to deal in dudgeon for long.

  ‘Actually, there’s been a lot of local feeling about this barrow,’ she said.

  ‘Has there indeed?’

  ‘Because some landowner a couple of hundred years ago carted a stone off for building. And was told by the vicar of the day that there would be a curse on his descendants for evermore.’

  ‘So much I have heard.’

  ‘A preservation society tried to get an injunction not long since to make the present landlord put it back. But the case failed. The judge said that he could not undo the understandable economies of the eighteenth century. It was the farmer’s field and the farmer’s lump of rock to do what he liked with. In point of fact, the case was only brought to make mischief. There’s a dominant family in Spentlow – the Allsops. They sprawl right across the social scale. Anything worthwhile that’s ever been done here has been done by an Allsop. It’s an Allsop who owns this field. And, of course, our cottage. I know that you like a touch of history in your crimes, Simon, but even you aren’t going to find a tie-up between this year’s peccadilloes and Neolithic man.’

  He agreed with a sort of whimiscal courtesy.

  ‘No. That would need a long shot. But this little set-up was more recent than Neolithic. Bronze Age, in fact. Well, early Bronze Age – the Beaker Folk.’

  ‘The Beaker Folk?’

  For some reason, the label seemed to offend her. There was an untypical moody silence about her as they began the walk home. The rain had started again, plumb vertical now, as a change from dead horizontal. Soon there was no sky to be seen at all, only a hanging mist. In the cottage the boiler had gone out. Elspeth put a pan of water on the cooker.

  ‘I’ll make you a coffee, but I’m going out. I’ve had an invitation, but I left it open in case we could have gone anywhere together. You’re welcome to come, but you wouldn’t like the people.’

  She was noisy with the crockery, but said no more until she had reached the front door. Then she turned.

  ‘You made a telephone call this morning.’

  ‘To a duty clerk at the Yard. Message for Bill Clingo. Something he ought to know.’

  ‘About the Beaker Folk?’

  ‘They were before his time.’

  She came back into the room.

  ‘Simon, I don’t want to seem irritable, but I don’t like being treated like this. If you wanted to come here on a job, you had only to say so. If you wanted my company on a working trip, you know I’d have come like a shot. But I don’t like deceit. It isn’t like you, and it isn’t necessary.’

  ‘We are here to see the Dales. And when the weather clears, we shall see them. I assure you –’

  ‘Don’t try to maintain the act. Every man, woman and child knows you’re here for the sake of the Beaker Folk.’

  She left him, and he bent to rake clinker. Then, discarding the Trollope, he picked up The Scarlet Letter.

  Chapter Three

  The woman who pounced on Kenworthy as he pushed open the door of the Hall that same evening must surely in her time have held office in every do-gooders’organization within her field of fire. Her hand cupped his elbow as she addressed him, four inches from his ear, in a voice that would have inspired thoughts of home in Deeside cattle.

  ‘Ah! A man!’

  It had happened because on leaving the cottage he had gone not straight to the pub, but towards the overspill of light from the windows across the Green. Beaming with benign curiosity, he put his nose round the door of the Hall and negotiated a group of gossiping adolescents, prominent among them the pixie hood. The girl did not appear to notice him. Entering the Hall was rather like raising a flat stone from over an ants’nest. At a trestle table women were sewing brass rings into the hem of magenta curtains; others were working on costumes. A gang of boys managed by a man in a Fair Isle pullover were painting canvas scenery. Another man was dragging about a bank of footlights, whilst on a ladder that reached up into the rafters someone else was busy with floodlights and clamps. But the nodal point was the stage, on which a miscellany of amateur actors, large among them the vicar himself, were shouting at each other across a set comprising yellow folding chairs and one solitary baize-covered card-table. The producer was haranguing his cast with a sheaf of duplicated typescript in his hand. It was the young man with the Red Indian head-band, his costume now an emerald green caftan, constricted in the middle by what looked like a genuine Franciscan girdle.

  ‘Ah! A man!’

  She was a short woman, barrel-like and hooped into corsets. About her neck on a beaded chain hung a pair of spectacles with a flyaway superstructure that looked like a designer’s draft for a rood-screen: obviously a woman who did not leave the impact of her accessories to chance. If her teeth, chins and bosom could not hold an unruly meeting bemused, she must have known that any village heckler would think twice before challenging the malachite earrings that hung down like toy policemen’s truncheons.

  ‘Just what we want. And the Superintendent himself, if I am not mistaken.’

  She shepherded him, elbow still cupped, to the edge of the stage.

  ‘For some reason, Colonel Noakes has let us down this evening. Not like him at all. Always at the edge of the square, five minutes before time for parade: we’ve heard him say it a thousand times. Now, do be a good man and read his part for us. Gwen’s been doing her best, but it isn’t the same in a woman’s voice, and I’m sure it puts everyone off.’

  Someone thrust a script into Kenworthy’s hand. Someone else pointed halfway down the page with a hasty forefinger. The producer issued instructions in tones of saintly patience.

  ‘We’ll go back to the beginning of the scene between the two priests.’

  ‘Ah, my dear Gabbitas. Come in, come in, come in!’

  Daniel Dunderdale might have been drilling recruits, but he dropped his voice to add, ‘You’re supposed to be off-stage, Kenworthy. You come in left centre. Ah, my dear Gabbitas, come in, come in, come in!’

  Kenworthy came in and stood, looking lost mid-stage.

  ‘Try to follow the stage directions,’ the producer said. ‘And don’t forget to trip up as you come in.’

  ‘Does it matter all that much whether I trip up or not? I’m only doing this until Colonel Noakes arrives, which please God may be any minute now.’

  ‘The more you can get right, the more helpful it will be to the others. Shall we take your entrance again?’

  Kenworthy went clumsily through the required motion.

  ‘That’s better. Try to remember that Wilbur Gabbitas was a very clumsy man until Gertrude Allsop took him in hand. Always putting his thumb in his tea, and dropping bits of cake into his hat. All of which we exaggerate for the sake of a Spentlow audience.’

  This was followed by a short silence until everyone in the room reminded Kenworthy that the next line was his.

  ‘Ah, my dear Vicar. Mrs Burgess gave me your message. You wanted to see me?’

  ‘Ah, yes, dear Gabbitas. I’ll ring for tea.’

  Dunderdale moved to the chalk-line of a fireplace and tugged an imaginary cord.

  ‘Do please take your seat on that sofa. That’s the two chairs together. Cross your legs and stick your foot out. The housekeeper’s got to fall over it. Do please take a seat on that sofa. Splendid. What I have to say to you had better wait until Mrs Brightmore has been in with the tea things.’

  ‘I do hope that I have not given any kind of offence, Vicar. A fine afternoon for the time of the year, is it not?’

  ‘And a fine night last night also, did you not think? I shall be asking you presently what you thought you were about last night, Gabbitas.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘You may well say “Ah!”‘

  This was the moment chosen by the electrici
an to lift his clattering batten on to the stage.

  ‘Don’t mind us,’ the producer said.

  ‘You told me to test the filter mix.’

  ‘All right, then. You others carry on as if nothing were happening.’

  Kenworthy’s script said Gabbitas looks concerned. He opened his eyes wide and set his face in the last throes of terror. Someone in the body of the Hall tittered. The electrician went to the far end of a long snake of cable and reached up to a master-switch. There were simultaneous blue flashes in several parts of the room, and then immediate darkness. Someone on stage struck a match, someone else flicked a cigarette lighter. It was minutes before illumination was restored, and that from only one dingy bulb.

  ‘You’d better take a good look at that batten, George. Let’s carry on with Mrs Brightmore.’

  The housekeeper was played by the woman who had seized Kenworthy at the door. He failed comically to trip her up as she came in and she offered Dunderdale a tray in a voice that would have dispersed the Parisians from their barricades. Stretching out his foot, Kenworthy managed to kick her on the knee-cap as she went out.

  ‘We’ll keep that in,’ the producer said.

  ‘Indeed we will not,’ she told him sonorously.

  And then George unbent himself from the batten, holding up something that no one could see.

  ‘Look at this!’

  This was something with which he was not prepared to part, except into the hands of the vicar. It was an old sixpenny piece that had been wedged under one of the bulbs.

  ‘If we were still on that length of copper wire that the caretaker had in as a main fuse, the whole Hall could have gone up in flames.’

  As it was, there was a strong smell of scorched rubber.

  ‘Sheer vandalism,’ Dunderdale said.