Gather the Bones

by Alison Stuart

  “You look like you need a drink,” he said.

  “Cocoa. I was going to make cocoa,” Helen said in an uncertain voice.

  “I think you need something stronger than cocoa,” Paul observed. “I’ve brandy in my room.”

  She straightened her shoulders and pulling at the belt of her dressing gown, tipped her face and looked up at him with a shaky smile on her lips.

  “Brandy would be good.”

  With some hesitation, he put an arm around her shoulders, expecting her to baulk at his touch but she leaned in against him. Underneath the thin fabric of her dressing gown he could feel her shivering. Beneath his hand, her slight figure seemed to have no more substance than a bird.

  Paul guided her to one of the shabby armchairs beside the fire and fetched a blanket from his bedroom. Helen pulled it around herself as he crouched awkwardly and stoked the embers of the fire into life.

  He poured them both a brandy and as he handed her the glass the sleeve of her dressing gown fell back revealing a livid welt around her left wrist.

  “What caused that?” he asked.

  She pulled the sleeve back with a shaking hand.

  “Silly accident,” she said.

  Paul sat down in his usual chair and sipped his brandy, watching as Helen cradled the glass in both hands and took a hefty gulp, almost draining the contents.

  She had her own reasons for not telling him the truth, probably assuming he would think her a fool. Despite himself, he smiled.

  “I never met an Australian, who didn’t know how to drink. Did it do the trick?” he asked.

  Helen took another, more ladylike sip. “Thank you. Much better than cocoa.” For the first time she met his eyes and gave him a watery smile. “I’m sorry. I’m not normally given to the female vapors. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  Paul shook his head. “You didn’t disturb me. As you may have guessed, I don’t keep regular hours.” He jerked his head at an upturned book on the side table beside his chair. “I heard you walk past my door. If you were going to the kitchen, there are no kitchen stairs at this end of the corridor.”

  “I know. I... I heard a noise.”

  “A noise?”

  “It was stupid. I must have imagined it,” she said with a self-deprecating laugh. She did not, he was certain, imagine the red mark on her wrist and he saw her right hand move to rub it.

  “It’s an old house, full of creaks and groans,” Paul said. “Easy to imagine you hear things.”

  “That must have been it, but it seemed so real.”

  “What sort of noise?”

  “You’ll think I’m a fool,” She ran her hand through her hair again. It fell through her slender fingers like rivulets of gold in the light from the fire. The photographs he had seen of her did not do her justice. Helen did not possess the classic English beauty of Tony’s debutantes, rather she had a life and light in her face that drew the eye like a magnet. Paul drained his glass.

  “Try me,” he said.

  “It sounded like a woman crying.”

  “Ah...” Paul heard the note in her voice. She craved a logical explanation and he had to provide it. “Most likely an owl. They can sound uncannily like a human being at times.”

  Paul wondered for a moment how he had managed to say that with a straight face. He knew whatever she had heard had not been an owl.

  “I thought it came from the library and then I saw the light and thought you must be working late.”

  He held up a hand. “Mea culpa. I must have forgotten to switch the light off when I finished work this evening. I assure you, Helen, there’s nothing to worry about. As I said, it’s just a creaky, old house.”

  Helen finished the brandy and set the glass down on the side table. “I should leave you in peace,” she said, standing and neatly folding the blanket.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  She smiled. “I’m fine, thank you.” At the door she paused, her hand on the handle. “Thank you for the brandy.”

  “Helen.”

  She looked back at him.

  “If you are riding in the morning, be at the stable at seven,” he said. “There is something Charlie would have wanted you to see.”

  At the mention of Charlie’s name, her face brightened, as if a light had come on in her life. A shard of pain caught Paul’s breath. She still loved Charlie.

  “Thank you. I would like that. Goodnight, Paul.”

  The door closed behind her and he heard her footsteps on the crooked floorboards fading away down the gallery.

  “Goodnight, Helen,” he murmured.

  Chapter 6

  Helen woke early and left Alice still asleep in the big bed, where, craving company, she had put the sleeping child on her return to her bedroom the previous night. A gentle mist swirled up from the hollows to a clear, bright sky presaging a beautiful day. She had begun to get a sense of the rhythm of this country, so different from the blue mountains of her own beloved Terrala.

  As she rounded the corner of the stable block, Helen saw Paul already sitting on the mounting block, holding the reins of the two horses. His utter stillness caused her to pause. The early morning light leeched the color from the world and he could have been one of the statues of his ancestors in the church. She had never met anyone who seemed so solitary and she wondered if he had always been so self-contained or if the war had turned him inward as it had done to so many young men.

  Helen touched her left wrist. There had been no sign of the mark when she had woken this morning but the terror of the moment still burned in her memory. She had turned and Paul had been there, stilling her fright by his mere presence. For all his outward reserve, when Paul had taken her in his arms last night, she had been conscious of a depth of warmth and humanity. He had taken all the fear from her, absorbed it into himself.

  It had been so long since a man had held her as Paul had, even for a few fleeting seconds. As she looked at Paul Morrow, his still figure reminded her for the first time in a long time of her own loneliness. In a world where a generation of young men had died, she knew there was little chance of finding someone to fill that empty space in her life. Yes, she had Alice, but the company of the child did not fill the aching void in her heart left by Charlie’s death.

  The horses sensed her presence and turned their heads toward her, their ears pricked. Paul looked around and seeing her, jumped down from the mounting block. He winced as he landed.

  “Are you all right?” she asked as she joined him.

  “I must stop doing that,” he said, ruefully rubbing his right thigh. “I forget.” He caught the question in her face and said, “Broken femur.”

  “I’m surprised you can still ride,” Helen said.

  “So I’ve been told, but I couldn’t envisage a life without it. Want a hand?”

  “I can manage. Horses are a way of life at home,” Helen said as she took the reins from him, springing easily into the saddle.

  “Charlie told me about an annual cattle muster? It sounded like hard riding,” he replied as he mounted Hector.

  “We graze our cattle in the high country during summer and every autumn we have to bring them down. It’s rough and dangerous riding, but Charlie took to the muster as if he had been born to it.”

  “He would,” Paul replied with a smile. “Never had any respect for his own neck.”

  The birds greeted them with their morning chorus as they turned the horses out on to the narrow road. Helen turned to look at the man riding beside her. Like his cousin, Paul rode with ease and grace, at one with the horse.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “I thought I’d show you one of Charlie’s favorite places,” he said. “Stoneman’s Hill.” He cast her a sideways glance. “Unless, of course, you’ve already been up to the Standing Stones?”

  “No. I’ve tried to find them. Sam even gave me directions, but I just became hopelessly lost.”

  He smiled. “They’ll let yo
u find them, when they’re ready.”

  “That sounds like local superstition,” she said. “You don’t seem to be the type to pay heed to folk stories.”

  His gaze held hers. “I spent my early childhood in a country that thrived on spirits and had a mother who believed in the fairy folk. I don’t take anything in this world for granted.”

  Paul turned Hector’s head off the road, up a narrow hacking path Helen had never seen before, despite her morning excursions. Helen’s horse automatically fell into step behind Paul as he urged Hector up the overgrown path that wound up through the thick trees on Stoneman’s Hill. Helen had ample opportunity to contemplate his straight back and broad shoulders beneath the old sweater he wore. She noticed he carried his left shoulder slightly higher than his right and she wondered if that was another legacy of the night Charlie had died.

  The path flattened out and the trees cleared to reveal five granite monoliths silhouetted against the early morning sun, the Celtic warriors turned to stone by a druid’s curse of Charlie’s stories.

  Helen slid from the saddle and tied Minter’s reins to a tree. Almost afraid to breathe, she walked toward the ancient stones. Two had fallen on their sides and two leaned haphazardly as if they would fall if she touched them, but the last one still stood tall and straight within the circle.

  She placed her hand on the lichened and weathered surface, half-expecting to feel the beat of a living heart within the granite.

  “You’re the archaeologist,” she said at last, turning back to Paul. “How old are they?”

  He stood on the edge of the circle watching her, his hands thrust into the pockets of his trousers.

  “No one knows,” he said. “I would say a couple of thousand years at least. If not older.”

  “Are they on your land?”

  He nodded. “They were here before the Morrows and will be here long after we’ve gone. Tony will tell you that on the Wellmore land, they have seven standing stones, but they’re nothing more than an eighteenth century folly. These,” as he spoke, he walked into the circle and sat down on one of the fallen stones, “are real.” He straightened his right leg and rubbed it.

  Helen sat down next to him. A flight of birds rose from the trees above their heads, spiraling into the soft gray morning light. Charlie had loved Australia but this had been his home long before he met her, this was where he truly belonged. More than at any time since she had come to England the question nagged at her mind, the need to know how he had died, the need to lay his memory to rest and turn her face to the future.

  “Paul...” Her fingers twisted the wedding band on her left hand.

  “You’re going to ask me about Charlie?” he interrupted.

  She looked down at the toe of her riding boot. “Am I that transparent?”

  “No, but it’s the question you want answered, just as Evelyn does. That is why you came to England, isn’t it?”

  Helen opened her mouth, the denial forming on her lips. “Partly,” she admitted.

  Paul crossed his ankles and looked up at her. “I can’t give you the answer you want, Helen, because I don’t know. My memory of what happened between a mortar shell blowing up in front of me and waking up in the field hospital is a complete blank.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean...”

  He rose to his feet. “You have every right to ask, Helen, but you will just have to accept that you may never know the answer.” He started to walk away and then turned back to look at her. “And if you do find the answer, it may not be the one you want to hear. I had to write letters.” Paul took a heavy breath and looked up at the trees. “Every time one of my men was killed. The grieving mothers and widows would not have thanked me for honesty. We all take refuge in platitudes as a defense against the horror of reality. Let him go, Helen.”

  He looped the reins over Hector’s head and swung into the saddle. Man and horse had already been swallowed up by the undergrowth before Helen had time to follow him.

  As she emerged from the path, she found him waiting for her. He raised a questioning eyebrow and put his heels to Hector. Accepting the unspoken challenge, Helen urged the old horse into a gallop. Neck and neck the two horses pounded down the quiet country lane.

  They arrived back at the stables, flushed and exultant. Sam came out to meet them. He gave the panting horses a glance and shook his head.

  “Leave the horses,” he said. “I’ll see to ‘em. Sarah’s got your breakfast going and will be wonderin’ where you both are.”

  * * * *

  “You two look like you could do with a cup of tea,” Sarah said as Paul and Helen walked into the kitchen. Alice sat at the kitchen table with a glass of milk in her hand.

  “Now you’re here, I’ll put on the eggs.” Sarah bustled over to the large kitchen range. “Good ride?”

  “Paul took me up to Stoneman’s Hill,” Helen said. She kissed the top of her daughter’s head. “When that pony arrives from Wellmore, I’ll take you there.”

  “If you go through, I’ll bring you breakfast in the parlour,” Sarah said.

  “Don’t be silly,” Helen responded. “I don’t see any point in setting up in the parlour. I’m quite happy to eat breakfast here. Paul, can you pour the tea?”

  Paul looked at Helen and then at the large, brown teapot Sarah had set on the table. A smile quirked the corner of his mouth. “Of course. Pass those tea cups, Alice.”

  Sarah Pollard put her hands on her hips and glanced at Helen as the man took a chair at the end of the table and dutifully poured four large cups of tea.

  “We always eat breakfast in the kitchen at home,” Alice said as the adults arranged themselves around the table.

  “Just don’t tell Grandmama,” Helen said.

  Paul regarded Alice over his teacup. “Definitely don’t tell Grandmama. Anyone else want that last piece of toast?”

  Helen pushed the platter across to him. Sitting at the kitchen table with his sleeves pushed up, his dark hair falling across his eyes as he buttered a piece of toast, he seemed more relaxed then he did in the world beyond the green baize door.

  The outside door opened and Annie, the girl from the village walked into the kitchen.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Pol...” she stopped mid-sentence, her hand still on the door latch, staring at the breakfast crowd. She bobbed a curtsey. “Good morning, sir… madam.”

  “It’s all right, Annie,” Paul rose to his feet. “I’ve finished. I’ll leave you all in peace. Thanks for breakfast, Sarah.”

  “You go and make a start on the dining room, Annie,” Sarah said as the kitchen door swung shut behind Paul. Humming to herself the girl picked up her basket of cleaning rags and followed Paul out of the kitchen.

  Helen set down her empty cup. “I should go too. I’m holding you up,” she said, pushing her chair back from the table. “Have you finished that toast yet, Alice?”

  Alice set the crust she had been eating around, back on the plate and looked up.

  “If you’re not in a hurry, I’ve something to show the two of you.” Sarah rose to her feet and fetched a large parcel, loosely wrapped in brown paper from the sideboard. She set it down in front of Alice. The child knelt up on the chair and pulled back the wrapping to reveal a heavy old-fashioned scrapbook.

  “It’s just something I’ve kept all these years,” Sarah said, collecting the breakfast plates and carrying them over to the sink.

  Helen pulled her chair up beside Alice and they began to turn the pages. The scrapbook contained a history of the Morrow’s lives, chronicled in newspaper cuttings, yellowed invitation cards and photographs, beginning with the wedding of Sir Gerald Morrow and the Honorable Evelyn Vaughan. There followed birth announcements for Charlie, clipped from The Times, items from the social pages of the county newspaper recounting Charlie’s prowess at cricket and rugby and a photograph of Charlie playing Dick Dauntless in a school Gilbert and Sullivan production. There were newspaper photographs of Sir Gerald’s funeral, inc
luding one of the villagers turning out to line the route of the coffin to the church.

  A couple of small articles mentioned the success of the Winchester First Eight, stroked by P.N. Morrow, at the Head of the River and Paul as captain of the First Eleven in their win against Harrow in the cricket.

  Then the war, a brief item recounting that Captain Charles Morrow would be awarded a posthumous MC for gallantry in the face of the enemy and a couple of newspaper epitaphs, none of which Helen had seen before. She looked at the neat printed words recounting Charlie’s bravery and the nation’s collective sorrow at his death. They meant nothing to her, it was almost as though they talked about a total stranger.

  Helen closed the book. “Thank you for showing that to us.”

  “I want you to have it,” Sarah said. “I thought Alice may like to keep it.”

  “May I?” Alice’s eyes shone and she turned the pages slowly, revisiting each one as Helen helped Sarah with the washing up.

  Alice swiveled on the chair and looked across at the two women by the sink. “Mrs. Pollard, Uncle Tony said you know all about the Holdston ghosts,” she said.

  Helen started and nearly dropped the cup she was drying. “Alice, we’ve talked about this before. There is no such thing as ghosts.”

  “Have you ever seen any, Mrs. Pollard?” Alice persisted, ignoring Helen’s protest.

  Sarah cast Helen a quick glance. “I have to disagree with you, Mrs. Morrow. There’s ghosts at Holdston right enough.”

  Helen glared at Sarah. She did not need Sarah filling Alice’s head with such nonsense.

  Alice’s eyes widened. “So they’re real?” Sarah frowned. “They’re not real in the sense you and I understand, Alice. There’s old Ben. You never see him but you know he’s around because you can smell his tobacco. Then there’s some civil war soldiers. There was a battle near here and they reckon they was brought here and died of their wounds.”

  “Are they scary?” Alice’s eyes resembled saucers.

  “No,” said Sarah. “They’re in their own place in time, love. If I know one of them is around, I say good morning. They like to be acknowledged but they’re not scary and they won’t hurt you.”