‘We won’t stay long,’ said Merry, authoritatively. ‘There’s something about them this summer. Aunty Ros says we’re leaving it too late to collect. She says it’s because they burned the field over at Smallcombe Farm last year. There was sedge and ragwort and sycamores, and ivy, and all sorts, now it’s all gone. Less food for the bees, you see. They’re having to work harder and they’re cross. And it’s thundery. They hate thunder.’
‘Why?’
‘They pick up the static in the air, I think. Every time the workers come back to the hive they give the queen an electric shock. It makes her awfully bad-tempered and she passes it on to them.’
‘It’s been very humid,’ I said, trying to show I understood. ‘They’ll be glad the storm’s over.’
‘More storms coming though. Aunty Ros says they were trying to swarm the other day, only they lost their nerve. She’s the one who knows about them, really.’ Merry turned, raising her shoulders up around her ears then dropping them. Her eyebrows were black hinges, her sweetly comic face alight with excitement. ‘I’m so glad you’re going to be here! Kitty won’t take it seriously, and Joss . . . oh, he takes it far, far too seriously but I don’t think he actually cares about it that much. But honestly, Janey, it’s quite something – you’ll see. Oh, you’ll see! Because you’re one of the Beloved Girls!’
‘Yes. I am.’
‘And Mummy’s the Outsider! Which is very funny as she’s not of course.’
‘Who does it normally?’
‘The Outsider is on their own. They don’t have to come from outside. They just have to be alone. Often it’s Aunty Ros. So last year it was Mrs Culney, she’s a widow. Year before it was Kitty, actually. Daddy said it’d teach her a lesson. But I think he’s making Mummy do it this year as a symbol.’
‘Of what?’
‘Oh, that she’s not from here. And of – the twins growing up, leaving home, all that.’ Merry shrugged. ‘It’s a reminder that we’re all alone.’
This is what Charles had said, almost word for word. ‘I think that’s a bit weird, if that’s what it means.’
‘Mummy said she wanted to do it,’ Merry said instantly. ‘When Daddy told her, she agreed right away. She said it was a nice idea.’
‘What’s this? Divers?’ I said, changing the subject and patting a small, brown box. It was fixed on an outside wall, at about my stomach height, and I had not noticed it on my previous visit. Carved into it were the words DIVERS FUND.
‘People pay into it. For good luck. First it was to help the lepers, then it became about paying to rescue the sailors who were washed up on the cliffs below. Now, Daddy empties it after the Collecting and he posts it off to the RNLI.’
‘Were there really lepers?’
‘Oh yes. They were driven into the woods. A whole load of tea pickers from somewhere? Far away, anyway. A really long time ago? They’d all become infected and they were taken off their ship by the captain and dumped in these woods. That was in the Reverend Diver’s day. Most of them died. They find bones, occasionally.’
We gazed down at the deep green woods, and I shivered.
‘But the ones who didn’t, they used to watch the service through that window.’ She tapped the glass slit at the side of the chapel. ‘So they didn’t infect anyone.’
‘That’s awful.’
Merry looked uneasy. ‘I never thought about it. It’s just the way it was. Then there was a colony of them. They made charcoal for the Earl of Larcombe. He put it in trust for them, built houses for them, but he died and his son was a bad one and embezzled the money.’ Her hands were running over the dark-grey stone, her eyes fixed on the woods behind us. ‘They were the first ones to keep the bees, they say. They used to put honey on their wounds.’
‘Did it work?’
Merry looked up. Her thin shoulders were hunched, her dark eyes unreadable. She gave me a small, sad smile, and she looked much older then.
‘Course not. It’s just honey.’
I put a hand onto the cold surface; the humming swell seemed to roar louder as I touched it, and I leaped away, feeling as though things were crawling over me . . .
Merry laughed.
‘Daddy said you were a bit freaked out.’
‘I wasn’t. I liked it.’
‘It’s hard for someone else, to understand how important it is. It’s kind of weird. Let’s go.’
Someone else. They were like that, the Hunters, lavishing you with affection then drawing back. I knew it, yet I kept dashing to the water’s edge, hoping to see myself reflected in their depths.
‘OK,’ I said. I gave a small shrug to show I understood, and turned my face away from her.
‘Are you cross with me?’
‘Of course not,’ I said.
There was a silence, the wind whipping around us. Merry gave a dramatic sigh.
‘Ugh. Don’t do that sad face, Kitty says it breaks her heart when you look like that. Close the door,’ Merry said.
‘Oh, please don’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t like the idea. I’m – I’m not sure I can . . . I can help at the ceremony, not any more.’
I hadn’t said this out loud, to anyone.
Merry’s expression changed. She said: ‘Don’t be afraid. There’s nothing to be afraid of, honestly, Janey. You don’t have to go in. The two Beloved Girls stand outside waiting until the combs are broken open. I go in, I’m one of the Walkers. I ring the handbells.’ She hugged herself. ‘Me, Daddy, Joss, Aunty Ros, Mrs Red, I think. Daddy always does the comb business, breaking it apart. Half for us, half for them. But this year Joss will do it. For the first time.’
‘I –’ I faltered. I gave a weak laugh, and shrugged. ‘It’s – I don’t know how to explain it.’ I didn’t want to sound rude. I was eighteen, and unable to understand it wasn’t my fault. I was out of my depth.
Merry clicked her tongue. ‘Stupid me. I forgot. I’ve got this booklet about it for you actually. Daddy asked me to give it to you. A kind of . . . information leaflet.’ She pulled something out of her denim backpack.
‘Your aunt wrote it, is that right? A sort of guide book?’
‘My aunt? Oh, I see. Pammy. Dad’s sister. She didn’t do it to be a guide book. She wrote it as an essay at Letham’s and showed it to some friends and she got into fearful trouble for it. Her headmistress said it was immoral.’
‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘Now I do want to read it.’
But Merry didn’t laugh. ‘Aunty Ros got mixed up in it. She was all set to be head girl and after this they said Ros wasn’t suitable, ’cause she was Pammy’s sister and . . . My grandparents were called in to the school, it was a big fuss.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘They never talk about it. Dad once said she was a trouble-maker. I’m not sure what happened. I think the school thought he wasn’t the sort of person a nice girl should be writing about. She was two years younger than me, after all.’
‘What’s in it then?’
She handed me a thin booklet. ‘You’ll see when you read it. He was an odd fellow, the Reverend Diver. Her spelling’s not great. Some of it’s pretty weird, to be honest.’ Her sweet dark eyes clouded over. ‘I kind of wish . . .’ And she shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. Come on, we’ll be late.’
I hesitated. ‘I’d love to read it.’
‘Now?’
‘Sure.’ I shrugged, but my heart was racing. ‘Do you mind going into the village on your own?’
I thought she’d be pleased, that I wanted to know more. But I had upset her, and I couldn’t understand why.
‘Fine. Don’t – oh I don’t know.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Well . . .’ she squinted at me. ‘It’s good to have someone else around. Someone who’s not obsessed with it all. Don’t . . . oh, don’t get too drawn into it.’
‘I won’t,’ I said, nodding at her, lips pressed together. ‘Promise.’
I looked at the cover. Typed onto mildewed, folded paper was the cover, which read:
The His
tory of the Reverend Diver and the Collecting Ceremony by Sybilla Pamela Hunter
‘This is Pammy, then?’
‘PF and Ros’s little sister. She died that summer. She was only twelve. She was very brilliant. Read at the age of three . . . she’d just started at Letham’s when it happened.’
‘Really? I didn’t know –’
‘OK then, see you later,’ she said, and turned to go.
A typewritten cross had been attempted, only partially successfully, on the page.
The staples were rusting and the paper smelled gently of damp.
On the inside, in precise printed letters:
The Property of Pamela Hunter
Lower Fourth
Davenant House
Letham’s Ladies’ College
Dolehill
Somerset
England
Great Britain
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
The British Isles
Europe
The World
The Universe
Merry disappeared down the path and I sank onto the springy turf. And, as the harebells nodded beside me and the warm breeze washed over my bare legs, I read the history of my hosts and their house.
¶
A Short History of the Reverend Diver and the Collecting Ceremony
by Sybilla Pamela Hunter of Vanes
12 years old
1938
A brief history of my family’s house and the ceromony which takes place every year.
. . .
I’ll sing you twelve, O,
Twelve come for the comb, O!
What are your twelve, O?
Twelve for the twelve new hunters,
Eleven for the eleven who went to heaven,
Ten for the ten commandments,
Nine for the nine bright shiners,
Eight for the Spring Collectors,
Seven for the seven stars in the sky,
Six for the six-sides of the comb,
Five for the five proud walkers,
Four for the honey makers,
Three, three, the rivals,
Two, two, the beloved girls,
Clothed all in green, O,
One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so.
There was a place of worship on this very spot over a thousand years ago. As you climb up to the cliffs, the ancient woodland winds like a ribbon between the village of Larcombe and the beginning of the moorland. Above these woods at the top of the cliffs someone built a chapel. No one knows quite how the building would have looked, but it was hexgonal, the same shape as a cell in a hive. At some point the building collapsed – it is not known how, but local legend said it was knocked down by a terrible storm one night, the greatest wave ever seen in England which crashed up and over the cliffs. The sea was angry, they said. Locals deserted the church – the lepers, hiding in the woods, had nowhere to go, their hives, on the edge of the wood, were all gone; the tiny rectory, set back from the cliffs, was destroyed too.
Soon after that, some time in the late eighteenth century Caradoc Diver came to the village. He had come across the country in answer to the call of the diocese for help.
In the hallway of our house, Vanes, there is a portrait of the Reverend C. Diver. We can see he was a tall, rangy man, with fierce pale-green eyes, their expresion intense, deep set within a protruding skull, against a black backdrop which has now faded to a deep kind of aubergine over the centuries. On the table next to him sit five handbells, his one long index finger resting on the middle one, as if he is about to pick it up and shake it.
From books and letters in the house and what the villagers have handed down about him we know various facts about Reverend Diver’s early life. He had grown up in Pickering, by the North Yorkshire moors, the son of an apprentice glovemaker. The family was very poor, and as a child Diver sold scraps of kid at the market; this fear of poverty followed him through his life. His father violently opposed the ‘New Dissenters’ and the visits John Wesley made to the town to spread his message of Nonconformism. I think this made an impresion on him. I think he saw what might be possible. Thanks to the aid of a rich local supporter who recognised the promise in the young man Diver studied at Trinity College, Oxford, where he sang in the choir, and become a keen apiarist which is someone who is a collector of different species of bee and their honey. I was unable to find out how he came to Somerset, how he heard of the living vacancy. But come he did, in the 1780s, and there he found a ruined church, no rectory, no incumbent for over a decade, no glebe farm.
The parish of Larcombe was rotten. For years no vicar could be found, and the Reverend Culney, vicar at Crowcombe, the neighbouring parish, refused to perform the funerals of either the lepers living in the woods or the battered bodies thrown up onto the rocks by the sea, saying he did not know if they were Christian men or not. So many men lost their lives that way, and the number of services that had to be held was dreadfuly hard on the local inhabitants – watching the ship pitch and roll in the storm, knowing the poor souls on board were doomed but for a miracle, knowing the coast was too trecherous for them to attempt to land. This same vicar also declared he would not oppose any parishioners who burned the woods in an attempt to rid them of the leper colonies – at that time there was a particularly large one, men and women enslaved in Assam and shipwrecked many years earlier, driven into the woods, who would creep out at night and steal, the poor desparate souls.
Poverty in this wild harsh country was everywhere, and a bad harvest meant certain starvation to some villagers and their families. A blind eye was turned to the foul habit of ‘wrecking’, where men, women and children risked their own lives on the rocky, violent shoreline, scrabbling for treasure from the shipwrecks. I myself find it disgraceful that such things occurred but they did I am sorry to say. The wreckers would rob dying men of their coins; they once found a heart, pierced on a rock, and one man fed it to his pig. The local landowner around these parts was then a dastardly fellow named Smythe, but he took no interest in the people and his own land, leeching from them to line his own pockets. All was as I say rotten, when Caradoc Diver arrived.
Partly to solve the problem, partly to make it go away, at Diver’s entreaties the Bishop agreed a new parish could be formed, but in his records it was refered to as ‘a parish of the damned.’ Diver was given some modest rebuilding funds – no one to this day knows where the rest of the money came from, but later people said the Devil left a small bag of gold on the door of the chapel. He rebuilt the chapel around the ancient hexagonal floor (giving it the carved wall panels and the too-elaborate vaulted ceiling which later collapsed), and it was Reverend Diver for whom the house was built – a manse in size and scale comparable to a small Manor House rather than the more modest rectory in Larcombe, greatly to the disgust of the vicar of that parish. And while building went on, every day the Revered Diver (I typed Revered – that is quite appropriate!) went to the farms and cottages, the huts and shacks thereabouts, trying to persuade people to come and worship in their own parish again, not to cross to Crowcombe or, which would be worse, to the Chapel at Winsford. He went to the woods, and talked to the lepers, and invited them to come and worship. The story goes that they gave him some of their honey, and that he carried it back to the house with him.
‘We have built a chapel for lost souls,’ he said, and it is recorded in the diary of George Red, a farmer’s son who became a great pamphleter and abolitionist in Bristol. ‘We have raised up a sanctury with money sent from the Lord.’
But no one came. Every Sunday, Reverend Diver would wait at the door, the wind blowing in his face, and no one came. Six long months came and went and no one came – the warmest summer for many years fading into one of the finest autumns in men’s memorys, with a rich harvest and much rejoicing, and then the storms began. And every month or so Diver would have to perform the funeral rites of a sailor lost at sea, would have to drag the bodies up from the
rocks with only the help of the sexton, a local man called Ned Watchet, whose family had lived in the district for many generations. The villagers could not plunder shipwrecks any more, not when the vicar was so often down at Larcombe, keeping an eye on them. Ned Watchet told everyone the vicar was a strange one, who beleived things that weren’t in the Bible, but a good ’un the same. He told them about the chapel, inlaid with carved stone panels showing scenes from the Bible, Samson breaking open the jaws of the lion and taking the honey from its corpse, St Bartholomew, tending the bees, the leper squint window for those who could not come inside, who were shunned, to partake. He told them the vicar had given him, and his family, rost beef and plum pudding on Christmas Day. But still no one came. And then it was winter, cruel and long, and more sailors died, more services were had, and Diver said nothing about his lot, but hauled the bodies up from the rocks himself, his tall frame ripling with sinew, thick hair growing longer. His funds, the mysterious money that had enabled him to build a grander house and chapel than he had ever been allotted money for, had dwindled to nothing. He received no tithe that autumn. Underneath the muscle he was thin. No one came.
And then they say one May morning, when the countryside was at the height of its beauty, when the swallows and swifts swung up and over him as he walked through the fields to the chapel, Reverend Diver found something had come. A vast swarm of bees had landed inside one of the tombs in the chapel that were tightly stacked like hives themselves.
Have you ever seen a swarm of bees, dear reader? One hundred and fifty thousand or more there can be of them. They are not yellow & gold. They are black, like a cloud, like a reptile, moving smoothly, acting as one. They understand each other, and we who have conquered the Earth and understand the skies – we still do not even understand how bees talk to each other, how they know what they know.
The Beloved Girls Page 20
