The Hunted Hare

by Fay Sampson

  Mother Joan came bustling out of the tower room. She wore a large oatmeal-coloured apron over her clothes. It was splashed with sooty water.

  “My dears! I’m so very sorry. This can’t have been what you imagined when you planned to come back here.”

  Jenny held up her hand. “It’s all right, really. At least, it is for us.”

  Mother Joan seemed to have more immediate concerns than a murder and an attempted murder.

  “The Priest-Guardian gets back today. I don’t know how I’m going to face her. She leaves me in charge for just one week, and look at it!”

  “It’s not your fault. If anything, it’s mine. Caradoc Lewis did it to spite me. Because of my book.”

  “And because he hates the fact that the Christian story takes precedence here over his own fancies. Oh, I blame myself. I’m a professional counsellor, yet I got on the wrong side of him. I should have handled it better.”

  “I doubt if you stood a chance,” Aidan told her. “He’s not a listening man.”

  The nave was quieter. Jenny went to sit in one of the pews, her head bent in prayer. He joined her in the pew opposite.

  When he lifted his head, he was looking straight up at the woodwork of the rood loft separating the nave from the chancel. The carved figures of the hare and the hunters stood out in bold relief.

  Melangell was sitting next to him. “Is it the same hare?” she asked in a loud whisper.

  “Sort of,” he said. “They’re hundreds of years apart, the hare you found and St Melangell’s. But stories live on. We’ll never know what really happened when Prince Brochwel came hunting in this valley. But St Melangell is real. She truly did live here.”

  “So did my hare,” Melangell said, firmly. “I know it did.”

  Jenny had moved from the pew to walk up the aisle to the chancel. She passed St Melangell’s canopied shrine, with its freight of prayer cards, with only a brief downward look. Through the archway behind the altar was the cobbled apse, the Cell-y-bedd, the Room of the Grave. There was just enough space on the bench inside for one person to sit in prayer, opposite the coffin-shaped grave-slab set in the floor.

  Aidan drew Melangell aside to look at the row of differently sculptured hares along the north wall of the nave.

  Presently, Jenny came walking slowly towards them. He saw the light in her face, the calm joy.

  “All right?” he asked.

  She nodded and smiled.

  Mother Joan met them at the door.

  “Deep peace of the running wave to you. Deep peace of the flowing air to you. Deep peace of the quiet earth to you. Deep peace of the shining stars to you. Deep peace of the infinite peace to you. Go with God.”

  They stepped out into the morning sunshine.

  Caradoc Lewis stood between them and the gate.

  He was standing with his back to them. Like Melangell, he had laid his hand on the deeply rutted bark of the ancient yew. He seemed to be saying something to himself, or to some deity.

  They walked quietly over the grass, hoping to pass him unobserved.

  As they drew level, he swung around. His dark eyes burned in his skull-like face. The greying black hair fell forward over one eyebrow.

  “You!” he almost hissed at Jenny.

  “I thought you were under arrest for arson,” Aidan exclaimed. He drew protectively close to Jenny.

  “I was taken in for questioning. Idiots! Of course I did it. The fire, I mean. Not the other. But they’ve allowed me out on police bail. I’m forbidden to go anywhere near the church.”

  “And yet you’re here,” Jenny said.

  “Of course I’m here. What do I care about their poxy conditions? Or their church? These are what matter.” He caressed the yew lovingly. “It’s all coming back. I’ll re-erect the standing stone where it always used to be. At the foot of the waterfall. The classic place for a Celtic sacred site. We’ll have the urn and the hare bones on display…”

  “Did you steal them from the museum?”

  Caradoc turned pitying eyes on Aidan. “You don’t begin to understand, do you? You think it’s all moonshine. The product of my fevered imagination. I got them out to show her what she was looking for. Lorna understood. She knew we couldn’t let anything stand in our way.”

  “Are you saying that’s why she killed her uncle? Not because he abused her?”

  Caradoc’s face closed up. “You’ll have to wait for the trial. Yes, there were other issues between them. But she found the hare. That’s all I care about. Ask her.”

  He swung round on Melangell.

  The girl gulped.

  Jenny’s arm was round her shoulders. “Melangell knows what she and Lorna found. She doesn’t know how it got there. Just as I don’t know what really happened when Prince Brochwel Ysgithrog went hunting and found the other Melangell. But I know this. I went into the Cell-y-bedd today and knelt beside Melangell’s grave. And I felt what the hare must have felt when it hid from the hounds under her skirt. Suddenly, I wasn’t afraid.”

  Caradoc’s eyes narrowed. He seemed to be taking in for the first time her recently bald head, her thin face. He swallowed.

  Then he broke off a fragment of yew bark and solemnly presented it to her.

  “Take this. Let it remind you that we live in the presence of the sacred.”

  He stepped back to let them pass.

  “Well!” Jenny whispered when they were through the gate. “I didn’t expect that.” She stroked the ancient wood. “It’s vandalism. But I shall keep it.” She raised her eyes to Aidan’s. “Will they really convict Lorna? They haven’t much to go on, have they?”

  “Your testimony. About Lorna’s movements. Sian’s admission.”

  “How long will it take to bring her case to trial? Months? I’m not going to be there to give evidence, am I? Just my statement. And Sian will deny it.”

  Her eyes were steady. He squeezed her hand.

  They turned for a last look at the little church with its squat tower, now streaked with soot. At its screening ring of ancient yews, older than the church itself.

  Jenny said quietly, “There are thin places, where heaven and earth are only a gossamer curtain apart. Pennant Melangell will always be like that. No matter what happens to us.” She touched Aidan’s face. “Thank you for bringing me. In spite of everything.”

  Aidan could not trust himself to answer.

  He lifted his other hand and rumpled Melangell’s hair. “I know I promised you those dungeons in Warwick. But I think we’ve got a more important call to make.”

  Carefully, he lifted a cardboard box out of the boot. The contents were swathed in bubble wrap. He lifted a flap aside.

  “I rang the county archaeologist. We’re going to see him this morning. He wants you to tell him exactly where and how you found this.”

  “My hare?” Melangell’s eyes shone.

  She looked up at Jenny with a wicked grin. “Do you think I’ll get into a book, too?”

  Here follows the first chapter from Death on

  Lindisfarne, the sequel to The Hunted Hare.

  DEATH ON LINDISFARNE

  Chapter One

  “DADDY, ARE YOU sure this is a good idea?” Melangell tilted her pointed face towards her father. Her eight-year-old voice had the patient reproach of one used to dealing with a wayward parent.

  Aidan looked ahead at the line of slender poles which led the way across the glistening sands towards the southern tip of Lindisfarne. He glanced to his left. Now the tide was falling there was steady traffic of cars crossing the modern causeway to the island. But even that would be submerged at high water. Lindisfarne – Holy Island – was only intermittently linked to the mainland.

  “Of course I am. Walking across the sands is the only proper way to come to Lindisfarne. That’s how the pilgrims always came in the past. And the monks who lived here back in the time of St Aidan and Cuthbert. You wouldn’t rather drive here in a car, would you?”

  He was pleased to hear
the cheerful confidence in his own voice. He had got his calculations right, hadn’t he? He had parked the car for a week on the Northumbrian coast. He had helped Melangell pack a small rucksack with spare clothes. He had shouldered a larger one himself and his all-important camera bag. And he had consulted the tide tables with considerable care.

  The sea channel that separated the island from the coast had been falling for a while, uncovering pink-tinged sand. It was jewelled with shells and pebbles. He must try to resist the temptation to take dozens of photographs of the miraculous and unique patterns the shells and quartz revealed at every step. He needed to time this journey right, so that the channel in the middle would be low enough to cross when they got there, but not leave it so late that the tide turned and swept back in over the sands before they could complete their pilgrim crossing.

  He gave a grin of delight and drew a deep breath of anticipation.

  “Come on, then. To Holy Island.”

  The wet sand oozed slightly round his boots and Melangell’s trainers, but held firm.

  Aidan had abandoned his modern walking pole for a wooden staff. It seemed more appropriate.

  “Mummy said the king used to come and talk to St Aidan on Lindisfarne. But he only brought a few men and he never stayed to dinner, because he knew the monks were poor and didn’t have much to eat. It’s in her book.”

  Aidan stopped short. He couldn’t help himself. The loss was still too new, too raw. He glanced down at his daughter with her mop of light brown curls and her freckled elfin face. He had feared for Melangell. Seven had been terribly young to lose her mother. But she had seemed to accept the bereavement better than he had. She could talk of Jenny easily and fondly, as if her mother were still a real presence, someone she could turn to whenever she wanted.

  Perhaps she is, Aidan thought. I ought to believe that, oughtn’t I? That Jenny is here, now, watching over us. But the pain was real. They had come to Lindisfarne together, researching the first of Jenny’s books about Celtic saints and kings. There was a row of these small books in Melangell’s bedroom, her constant companions. All of them were illustrated with Aidan’s photographs. The Lindisfarne book had been a special joy for Jenny and Aidan, because the saint who founded the monastery here had shared his own name.

  The camera case hung heavy on Aidan’s shoulder. He still carried it dutifully with him wherever he went. He still took photographs. If he was lucky, he sold some of them. But the chief purpose of his photography had been taken away from him. Without Jenny’s enthusiasm, her pursuit of Celtic history and visions, he no longer knew with any certainty what he was taking photographs for.

  Just now, his attention should be concentrated on following the line of poles to mid-channel.

  When they came in sight of running water, it was Melangell’s turn to stop.

  “You told me we could walk across.”

  The seawater channel was still a few metres wide. The Easter sunlight had drifted behind a bank of high cloud. The sand looked more brown than pink, the rippling water grey and cold.

  “Memory’s a funny thing. I thought you could. But there has to be somewhere where the water drains away. We can wait and see if it runs dry. But if we want to get to the other side before the tide catches us, it might be better to get our boots off.”

  He unlaced his own and slung them round his neck. Melangell picked up her trainers and held them in her hand. He took her other hand and they stepped down into the shock of the tide race.

  “Ow, it’s cold!”

  “It’s the authentic experience, though, isn’t it? You have to imagine all the other visitors who came this way. Northumbrians, Scots, Irish, missionaries from Rome. All paddling across this little bit of the North Sea. Like us.”

  “Did they have nuns on Holy Island?”

  “Sadly, no. St Aidan was a great friend of Hilda. She would have loved to go to his school here. But she had to go and set up her own monastery at Whitby. Only hers had men as well as women.”

  The water swirled almost to his knees. With the coming of spring he had seized the opportunity to put on shorts for walking. Melangell was having to roll her jeans higher.

  “OK? Do you want a lift?”

  “I can manage,” she retorted.

  A few steps later, they climbed the shelving bank of wet sand on the far side. Lindisfarne looked suddenly much closer. All the same, Aidan turned his eyes seaward. The North Sea was a grey line along the horizon. It was hard to judge distances with no vertical features to mark perspective. How long before the tide turned? Had it done so already? How fast would that line of sea come sweeping in across the sands where they stood?

  They would be leaving behind the only refuge on this route. That was little more than a wooden box on stilts.

  The wood of the pole beside him was still dark and dank from the previous tide. There were only a few hours a day when it was possible to ford the channel safely and reach the island.

  Yet now they had crossed the mid-point, he felt sufficiently confident to unfasten his camera bag and take out his Nikon. His hand hesitated over which lens to use, rejected a wide-angle and settled on the f2.8 telephoto one.

  The outskirts of the village on the tip of Lindisfarne sprang into instant life. No longer a smudge of buildings against the grey background. He could see now how the line of poles would lead them safely up the shore.

  He moved the camera, trying to find how best to frame the shot that would capture that sense of arrival. The end of pilgrimage. As yet, the ruined abbey and the statue of St Aidan were still out of sight. But this view was not unlike the one which would have greeted King Oswald, or St Cuthbert, or all the other famous names of the past whose histories had led them to this island.

  He steadied the lens, then gave a sudden start. He had not intended to photograph people. This was all about the sense of sacred place. Yet there were two people framed in his shot. A man and a woman, perhaps? Or a girl. She looked quite slight. Even with the lens’s magnification, it was not possible to be sure of their faces or ages, or even their gender. The one he thought was a girl wore a red sweater or fleece, the larger figure something brown.

  They seemed to be holding each other. A couple of lovers? Or was the man holding on to the girl? As he watched through his viewfinder she broke away from him. Instinctively, Aidan snapped the shutter.

  She was not exactly running away from him, now. More floundering, as if through softer sand than the damp ridge he and Melangell stood on.

  He lowered the camera, and suddenly the pair were distant specks. The island shore was further away than the zoom lens of his camera had made it seem for those few moments.

  He took a few more shots, focusing this time on the composition of poles and shoreline. Then he slung the camera back on his shoulder.

  “Come on,” he said. “This is not the place to stand about wasting time.”

  “You’re a fine one to talk.” It sounded an adult phrase. Had she picked it up from Jenny?

  That pain again.

  Melangell started forward. Then she paused. “Are those people over there? If they want to walk across to the mainland, they’ll have to hurry, won’t they?”

  He looked round at her in surprise. “You’ve got sharper eyes than I have. I didn’t notice them until I used the zoom lens.”

  “I can see a little red dot and a darker one.”

  “I don’t expect they’re coming across. They’ve just come down to the beach for a walk. Perhaps they’re waiting to see if we make it across before the sea gets us.”

  “It won’t, will it?” The upturned pointed face was momentarily anxious.

  “No.” He put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Not if we don’t hang about.”

  They toiled up the gently shelving sands. He took Melangell’s hand. When at last they passed the line of sea wrack that marked the high tide point, he lifted her up and swung her round in celebration.

  “Told you! We did it. Now, wasn’t that much more
fun than driving across the causeway?”

  She tumbled down into softer sand, and let handfuls of it fall through her fingers. She sat up to see what she had found. A blue-black mussel shell, the white-ridged fan of a cockle, a scrap of amber seaweed. Suddenly she dived to capture something that had fallen into the sand by her leg. She lifted it up triumphantly.

  “She must have dropped it. One of those people we saw when we were halfway across.”

  She held out her hand, palm upward. Nestled in it was a single earring. A little golden beast with a scarlet tongue. Its tail twisted into Celtic knotwork that twined around to form a ring.

  “Interesting,” said Aidan. “It looks like something from the pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels.”

  He looked around. He hadn’t been watching the shoreline since he took that photograph. The couple he had seen briefly grappling on the beach were nowhere to be seen.