by Phil Rickman
The Prayer of the Night Shepherd
( Merrily Watkins - 6 )
Phil Rickman
At Stanner Hall, a Victorian mansion-turned-hotel, Ben Foley hosts murder-mystery weekends and strives to prove that his hotel is the house on which Arthur Conan Doyle based his immortal Baskerville Hall. As the days shorten and the weather worsens, Foley’s dabbling uncovers more than he can handle. For the history of Stanner Hall is linked not only to the Victorian fascination with spiritualism and the legacy of a terrifying medieval exorcism — but with a chain of deaths that is far from fictional.
Phil Rickman
The Prayer of the Night Shepherd
They had gone a mile or two when they passed one of the night shepherds upon the moorlands, and they cried to him to know if he had seen the hunt. And the man, as the story goes, was so crazed with fear that he could scarce speak…
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
No record in cold print can give the reader an idea of the pleasure experienced in collecting the elusive material we call folk-lore from the living brains of men and women of whose lives it has formed an integral part. In some cases, with regard to superstitious beliefs, there is a deep reserve to be overcome; the more real the belief, the greater the difficulty… The folk of the Welsh districts are more superstitious, as a rule…
Ella Mary Leather, The Folk-lore of Herefordshire
Under Stanner in the Summer
Should have known, he really should. That morning, even though it was a fine morning, coming up to high summer, the whole valley was singing with unease.
‘Oh bugger,’ Jeremy Berrows said to Danny. ‘You seen that?’
Up on Stanner Rocks, knobs of stone poked out like weathered gargoyles on an old church, or ancient skulls browned by the earth, half-buried, with scrubby trees in their eye sockets. From one side, you could sometimes see a whole body of rock that Danny reckoned looked like the remains of a dead giant thrown back into the greenery encrusting the cliff face.
But Jeremy wasn’t looking up at Stanner — likely he blamed the rocks for taking Mary Morson away, though in Danny’s view the rocks done him a favour on that one. He was staring instead at the smoky firs across the valley, the dark trees that said, This is Wales now, boy, make no mistake.
‘What?’ Danny said.
‘Big black crow. Hovering.’
‘No, really?’
‘Just flew over real low. Then he come back, flew over again.’
‘Gotter hand it to these scavengers,’ Danny said. ‘Awful thorough.’
Bollocks, he was thinking. You could drive yourself daft, seeing signs everywhere — even if you were Jeremy Berrows, with ditchwater in your veins and the valley talking to you all your life.
Could see where the boy was coming from today, mind. Even without crows, everything visible in the west seemed like a warning about Wales, a stiffened finger under your nose. But when you actually crossed the Border into Wales, the countryside relaxed into the easy, light-coloured, sheep-shaved hills where Danny Thomas had been born and bred and still lived.
Still lived. Jesus, how had that happened?
Danny was grinning in dismay, rubbing his beard, and the boy glanced at him but Danny just shook his head and tramped on down the dewy field under the fresh-rinsed morning sky, not sure any more which side of the Border they were on, or if it mattered. He was a Welshman himself, he supposed, although the way he talked wasn’t recognizably Welsh either to real Welsh people or to the English whose country was within shouting distance, and all the shouting, from either side, done in near enough the same accent as his.
Confusing, really: if Danny was from the lighter, more English-looking country down the Radnor Valley, which was actually in Wales, then Jeremy, back here under the dark firs and the knuckles of Stanner Rocks, must be…
‘You English, then, Jeremy?’
‘Me?’ Jeremy glanced warily at Danny, instinctively patting his thigh for Flag, the sheepdog, to come close. ‘Dunno. Do it matter?’
‘Matters to some,’ Danny said, ‘so they tells me.’
It was real confusing hereabouts, mind. For instance, the little town a mile or so behind them was in England, despite being on the Welsh side of Offa’s Dyke. Even so, with its narrow main street and its closed-in feel, it felt Welsh.
Kington: an anomaly.
This was Danny’s current favourite word. The naturalists he met in the pub used it about Stanner Rocks, said to be some of the oldest rocks in the country. Anomaly meant strange stuff going on, odd climatic things occurring up on the tops, resulting in plants that grew on Stanner and nowhere else in these islands. Local people rarely went up on the rocks these days, it being a National Nature Reserve protected by the Countryside Commission; mostly it was just the naturalists and a few tourists with permission.
But Mary Morson went up one day, and got a bit of a thing going with one of the naturalists and never come back to Jeremy Berrows, and mabbe the boy didn’t want reminding.
Boy. He must be late thirties now, but he had this fresh complexion, which was rare for a farmer. Most of them had skin like old brick — like Danny’s skin, in fact, what you could see of it between the grey beard and the seaweed hair. But it wasn’t only that; there was an innocence about Jeremy, and that was rare, too, in a farmer, especially a good one. Jeremy also had commitment, an intense… bonding was the word they used now, with this marginal ground. The kind of bonding that hinged on knowing that if the ash came out before the oak you were in for a soak, and that kind of stuff. Whatever you wanted to call it, it had drained out of Danny Thomas long ago, leaving a bleak old desert of regrets.
‘Down by there, it is.’ The boy was nodding his head towards the copse at the bottom of the field, where a bunch of fat lambs was gathering. ‘Other side of the ole conker tree. See him?’
They were up on a bit of a tump now, and you could see all of Jeremy’s ground, almost surrounded by the huge area owned by Sebbie Three Farms, the robber baron. And you could see the big, naked feet of the giant on the side of Stanner. Below the rock face was the main road where it turned into the Kington bypass, and a long yellow container lorry sailed past, like something out of a different time zone. Danny wondered if Jeremy even noticed the lorry — if all the boy saw wasn’t just grass and trees and the plumpening lambs and the hawthorn trees sprinkled with floury blossom.
And the intrusion. The vans that shouldn’t be there. Danny’s gaze followed a sheep track down to the bottom field, where he could make out a cool blue roof slashed by a blade of sunlight. But no movement down there, no noise.
‘Likely they won’t be up and about yet,’ he said. ‘Always stays up late, these folks, with the booze and the dope. And music. You year any music last night?’
Jeremy shook his head, and Danny looked wistfully away towards Hergest Ridge, a long arm pushing into Wales, made famous by Mike Oldfield when he named his second album after it. Mike Oldfield was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to Kington: up on the Ridge with his kites and at home in his farmhouse with — the thought of it still made Danny Thomas catch his breath — twenty guitars.
Danny had three guitars in his stone barn: two acoustics and a Les Paul. He’d sold his classic Strat last Christmas. Broke his heart, but they needed a new stove, and Greta had gone without too long. And Mike Oldfield was long gone now, and Danny was left sitting in his stone barn, riffing into the night and counting all them lost opportunities to get out of farming for ever.
‘No music, no,’ Jeremy said. ‘They was prob’ly laying low the first night.’
‘You reckon?’
In Danny’s experie
nce, laying low wasn’t what they did.
‘It’s where the ole crow was hovering,’ Jeremy said. ‘Direc’ly over that van.’
Half-past six this morning, when the boy had phoned him.
‘Hippies,’ he’d said.
Not Danny’s favourite word. There hadn’t been any hippies for over thirty years, but folks in this area loved to hang on to the obsolete. And it was what they’d always called Danny himself. Danny Thomas? Bloody hippy. We all knows what he grows in Bryncot Dingle. If his ole man was alive it’d kill him dead.
Danny had turned off the toaster, lowered the volume on Wishbone Ash and sought some clarification. To some of the old farmers, a hippy was anybody not wearing a tweed cap, wellies and green waterproof trousers.
‘Ole van,’ Jeremy said, ‘with little windows at the top. And a minibus, with one of them funny stars painted on the side.’
‘Pentagram?’
‘Sort of thing.’
‘Just the two vehicles?’
‘Far’s I can see. Could be more in the trees.’
‘You en’t been down to check?’
Jeremy had said nothing. He wouldn’t have gone near, not even after dark when he was known to move around among the sheep and the cattle looking like a poacher, but in fact a guardian. Jeremy never lost a lamb to the fox; it was like he and the fox had come to an agreement.
Greta had come into the kitchen then, flip-flopping across the stained lino. Had on the old pink dressing gown, and there was purple under her eyes, and Danny thought about the stove her’d never asked for and how it wasn’t enough.
He sighed and waited on the phone, until Jeremy coughed and said, real tentative, ‘Only, I thought as how you might… you know?’
‘Aye, I know,’ Danny said.
It had been flattering at one time. When the New Age travellers used to turn up in force, back in the eighties and nineties, the local farmers had felt threatened by the sheer numbers, and it took the police a long time to get the necessary court orders to move them on. Danny had come into his own, then — a farmer who looked like a traveller and was into their music and understood their ways. One summer night, he’d taken his Les Paul and his littlest generator and the Crate mini-amp up to this travellers’ camp by Forest Inn and hung out there jamming till dawn with a bloke called Judas, from Nuneaton. Biggest bloody audience Danny ever had. He’d donated a drum of diesel for the buses and off they’d all trundled next day, no bother.
The farmers were well pleased, even Sebbie Dacre, bigtime magistrate, who’d been about to have the invaders dealt with. Might be a raggedy-haired druggy, Danny Thomas, but he had his priorities right when it come down to it: Danny the negotiator, Danny the diplomat. The hippy-whisperer, some bugger said one night in the Eagle in New Radnor. Not imagining for one moment that when Danny Thomas was up there jamming with the travellers, he’d been screaming inside, Take me with you! Please! Get me out of yere!
And things wasn’t all that bad, then. Nowadays, agriculture was a sick joke, gasping on the life-support of EC grants. Danny wasn’t hardly replacing stock, in the hope that something would come up. Prices were laughable, and he wasn’t even looking forward to the haymaking, which seemed pointless. He was letting the docks grow, and the thistles. He’d even started doing the National bloody Lottery, and that was totally despicable.
‘All right, give me quarter of an hour, boy.’ Danny turned to his wife. ‘Jeremy Berrows. Got travellers in his bottom field.’
‘You makes it sound like a disease,’ Gret said.
Danny smiled and went off to find his classic King Crimson T-shirt.
The problem was not that Jeremy was scared, just that he was plain shy and avoided the company of other men who were cynical about farming and treated their animals like a crop. Never had nothing to do with his neighbour, Sebbie Dacre, gentleman farmer and Master of the Middle Marches Hunt. Even after his mam left the farm, Jeremy ignored the pubs, and the livestock markets when he could. Everybody thought he was coming out of it when he hooked up with Mary Morson — nice-looking girl, solid farming family. Her and Jeremy, they’d go out together, into Kington, and they had the engagement ring from the jeweller’s there — Mary flashing it around, Jeremy proud as a peacock, if peacocks wore work shirts and baggy jeans.
The van was below them now, about seventy yards away, and Danny could see most of it — light blue, with bits of dark blue showing through on the roof. Hard to say what make it was — bit bigger than a Transit, sure to be. And quite old, so that would likely rule out foreign tourists who didn’t know no better than to camp on somebody’s ground. Foreign tourists had classy new camper vans and Winnebagos.
Jeremy was looking tense already, hunched up.
‘Tell you what,’ Danny said. ‘Why don’t I go down there, talk to the buggers on my own?’
It made sense. Jeremy looked grateful and his shoulders relaxed. Flag the dog, sensing a release of tension, lay down in the grass, panting, and Danny went down there on his own, into the dip where the bank was eroded. The stream at the bottom was almost dried up. The blossomy hedge hid the bypass, though not Stanner Rocks, and Danny could still see the faces on the rocks, and the dead giant. Way back, when he was doing acid, he’d once watched the giant’s head rotting into green slime. Jesus Christ, never again.
‘Hello there!’ Danny shouted.
Now he was close up, he could tell this wasn’t travellers in the New Age sense. The van might be old and have windows punched in the sides, but it was tidy, clean and looked-after, with nothing painted on it — no slogans, no pentagrams — and the windows had proper blinds. And it was the only vehicle here. Where was the minibus, then?
Danny stepped over a bunch of elder branches, neatly sawn and stacked and left to rot, on account of Jeremy never burned elder, which was the Devil’s wood and would bring you no luck.
‘Anybody about?’
He walked over to the van and peered inside the cab, remembering how, on his own farm one time, he’d found this car — posh car, BMW — tucked up against a field gate, with the engine running and a length of hose from the exhaust jammed in the window, and a man in a black suit in there, all pink-faced and well dead.
A wood pigeon came blundering out of the hedge, making as much racket as a bunch of yobs with baseball bats. Danny spun round, and saw that they were above him. Both of them.
A woman and a girl. They were standing on the bank, in full sun, and Danny Thomas could see them clearly, and they weren’t exactly what he’d been expecting.
‘How’re you?’ he said mildly. Was he a bit disappointed because they were so ordinary-looking, both in light-coloured tops and jeans and trainers? Because they wasn’t wild-haired creatures with tattoos and chains and rings in their lips?
‘Oh hell.’ The woman scrambled down. ‘I suppose we’re trespassing.’
Danny shrugged.
‘It was late,’ the woman said, ‘and we were exhausted. I’m sorry.’
Danny said, ‘Where’d the other one go?’
The woman blinked, shook out her dark brown hair. The girl came down and joined her, sticking close like Flag, the sheepdog, had with Jeremy. The girl looked about fourteen.
‘Minibus?’ Danny said. ‘Pentagram on the side?’
‘Oh, yeah, right.’ The woman had an English accent. ‘They’ve gone. They left early. What happened, we met them last night — a girl and two guys. We both pulled into this garage forecourt, only it was closed, and we were nearly out of fuel and it was getting dark and I’m like, Oh Christ, what are we going to do if they’re all closed? I mean, obviously I don’t know this area too well, and I couldn’t think of anywhere to stop for the night. Then this girl in the bus says, “Oh, we’ve been round here loads of times, we can show you a good campsite.” And that’s how we…’ She shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. I mean, it was dark and I— We didn’t light a fire or anything. We wouldn’t do anything like that. Is this your farm? Can I pay you?’
Danny became
aware of Jeremy Berrows up on the bank.
Danny said. ‘It’s his farm, it is.’
‘Oh.’
He watched the woman approaching Jeremy. She was very thin and her bare arms were tanned. She was real sexy, in fact, in a more managed way, like a rock chick of the old school.
‘Hi, I’m, er… I’m Nat,’ she said. ‘Natalie. That’s Clancy.’
The girl nodded and said nothing.
Jeremy didn’t move at all, but he wasn’t still either. He was so much a part of this land that he seemed suspended in the air currents, and his sparse, fluffy hair was dusted by the sun. When the woman moved towards Jeremy, leaving the girl by the van, Danny would swear he saw a hell of a shiver go through the boy, as if there was a sudden stiff breeze, come out of nowhere, that no one else could feel.
Danny felt an apprehension.
For over a week, the blue van stayed in the bottom field.
Then it wasn’t there any more.
About a month after this, Gwilym Bufton, the feed dealer and gossipy bastard from Hundred House, told Danny Thomas that he’d seen a blue van parked up in Jeremy Berrows’s yard, hidden behind the old dairy. Like it was meant to be hidden.
By September, people were starting to talk.
In October, Danny saw Jeremy Berrows one lunchtime in the Eagle at New Radnor, sitting at a table in the shadows with the woman with dark brown hair. Jeremy nodded and said, ‘How’re you?’ in a nervous kind of voice, and Danny didn’t push it. The woman smiled at Danny, and it was a nice smile, no question, and she was a lovely-looking woman, no question about that either, but her eyes were watchful. Danny supposed he could understand that, the way people were talking.
Next thing he heard about the van was that it had been sold — bit of irony here — to the naturalists working up at Stanner, to use as a mobile site HQ and for overnight accommodation. Serious burning of boats here, in Danny’s view. Then he hears the woman’s gone to work for the latest London fantasists to take over the ruinous Stanner Hall Hotel. Manager, no less.
