The Fever of the World, page 20
‘Not damaged,’ Sorrel said. ‘Too young. But very much changed… perhaps changed is a better word. Although what happened to her wouldn’t be known for some time.’
Sorrel said she’d cleared it with the woman on the phone that she could tell Jane what she knew of the back-story. The woman didn’t live in the Wye Valley any more but was apparently a close relative of the smallholder, Pam Farrowman, who had moved away with her.
‘Close how?’ Jane asked, determined to get this unravelled.
‘All right.’ Sorrel released a taut breath. ‘I’ll tell you. I don’t suppose it’ll do any harm. Pam had two children: Sam… and Liz, who came along later. Another baby was probably Pam’s attempt to rescue her failing marriage. But it didn’t work. Pam was more successful as a mother than a wife. She adopted Sam and Mona’s daughter, when they were drowned.’
‘This was Diana?’
‘Her orphaned granddaughter. Although they were different generations, Liz and Diana grew up like sisters, Liz the elder by just three years.’
‘So…’ Jane made some lightning connections. ‘Liz is the woman who called me?’
‘Yes.’
A complex family, Jane realized. The matriarch, Pam, was Liz’s mother and Diana’s gran? So where was Pam now?
‘Living up in Shropshire with Liz.’ Sorrel paused. ‘Having left Diana behind. Diana, who’s now grown-up and married to a wealthy estate agent. And about to live in a house that she believes was built by her own rich ancestor…’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Have you heard of Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick?’
An image flared in Jane’s head of the prominent gatehouse of an enormous castle that had completely vanished.
‘Bloody hell!’
Jane was aware of her voice weakening.
‘Mona’s ancestor is believed to have been one of Meyrick’s druid friends in Wales,’ Sorrel told her. ‘Nothing official, he must have made sure of that.’
‘Things are…’ Jane ’s voice was down to a whisper ‘…coming out.’
‘It’s the pandemic,’ Sorrel said. ‘People are passing on old secrets…’
‘Before they die?’
‘Nobody is saying that.’
‘Sorrel, they don’t have to.’
After a silence, Sorrel said, ‘Peter Portis’s house is one of a number of properties built by Meyrick in the area to support his enormous new castle, Goodrich Court. This was originally a hunting lodge. Mr Portis bought it some years ago as his climbing base.’
‘And now he’s dead,’ Jane said bleakly. ‘Presumably leaving the house to his son… and his wife.’
And Mum would be the priest at his restricted funeral.
Jane felt cold. Through the shop window, the black and white buildings in Ledwardine high street seemed stilled in time. No traffic, no people… only nature moving: birds pecking among the budded trees.
Jane saw Gomer Parry, crossing the road from the Eight Till Late, unwrapping a pack of cigarette papers. A thought struck her.
‘Where was Diana when her parents died in the Wye?’
Sorrel’s reply was casual.
‘Didn’t I tell you?’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘Truth is, I don’t know. Nobody knows for sure.’
‘She wasn’t at home?’
‘No, she was with her parents. They often walked by the river at sunset before she was put to bed. Her mother seems to have made a sudden decision to take a quick dip, presumably leaving the child on the bank in full sight. But then, Diana could virtually swim before she could walk.’
‘In the river?’
‘I don’t know. Why not? She was precocious in all kinds of ways. But I believe she stayed out of the water that night. The police eventually found her some distance away.’
‘On the bank?’
‘No. They found her somewhere it seemed unlikely she’d got to by herself. On the bank, where they deduced she’d been left, they found a few clothes. And small tracks where she’d… toddled away. Though how she finished up in the cave… I mean I’ve got kids and I—’
‘Cave?’
‘The big one. King Arthur’s Cave. That part of it never came out,’ Sorrel said. ‘Not even at her parents’ inquest. It couldn’t be explained and probably many people didn’t believe it. It’s actually not that far to go. Up into the Doward, beyond the Seven Sisters rocks. Not far for an adult, perhaps, with a light. But a few people wondered how a child could get there on her own, with only the moon for light?’
Silence in the phone. Jane felt disturbingly alone here in Lucy’s shop, burdened by too much information. She wanted to end this call, do some thinking. She just hadn’t known about the drowning.
‘Sorrel, somebody must know something. Somebody must’ve have carried her up to the cave. Did nobody ever talk about it?’
‘No, and still nobody talks about it unless they have to.’
More silence. Jane felt she was separate, not part of all this, the mobile phone full of its own world. Gradually, she felt her mind moulding a question.
‘I’ve been to that cave,’ she was saying. ‘Just the once. With my mum.’
‘The exorcist?’
‘Yes.’
And the copper, Vaynor, had been. And didn’t think he’d been alone there.
Jane stared at the phone, on speaker. Last night’s disclosures had already been swollen by this morning’s revelations.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ she said. ‘Is it true? Like, did it really happen? Did Diana remember any of it afterwards?’
‘It’s unlikely that she did.’ Sorrel’s voice came up from the speaker in the phone, now lying on the shop table. ‘Probably not in any rational way. She didn’t go in the water. And nobody local would ask her about it, this tragic child, growing up only yards from where her parents perished.’
‘…parents perished.’ The words shimmered in the silent shop. Jane didn’t touch the phone. Had there been nothing in the papers about the miracle baby who’d lost both parents and survived?
‘She must’ve said something to somebody at the time. Her gran – she must’ve learned something.’
‘It was said that Diana, as she grew up,’ Sorrel said, ‘made a practice of going back to the big cave.’
‘Like it had some special significance for her?’
‘Her gran, Pam, didn’t like her doing that… or some other things she did, other places she went. But she couldn’t stop her. She was much younger, more agile and always fit. A good, sure climber.’
‘Like her future father-in-law?’
‘Exactly. Scaling the Seven Sisters and other places where climbing was forbidden. She was like a goat from the age of about seven, and probably far younger.’
‘You remember her then?’
‘I saw her occasionally. Flitting past our house. I…’
Jane waited. There was something Sorrel wasn’t saying.
And she couldn’t wait any longer.
‘Sorrel, is she a direct descendant of Sir Samuel Meyrick?’
‘I don’t know. His family seems to have died away. His son died first, and there were no more children. Meyrick died nearly two hundred years ago and his enormous estate was divided between various nephews, and the court itself was finally demolished. Scattered buildings, like the pub in Goodrich and the stables and the gatehouse and this hunting lodge, kept changing hands and their origins were obscured.’
‘Did Diana’s family inherit any of the Meyrick estate?’
‘I wouldn’t think so. It all just got split up and—’
‘Sorrel, is Diana some kind of genuine druid? Brought up in the religion, not just pursuing an interest, like members of the Pod.’
‘Are you saying…’ Something was hardening Sorrel’s voice. ‘Are you suggesting the Pod’s not a serious group?’
‘No, but—’
‘We’ve been in existence for over fifteen years! We observe all the local pagan festivals, we conserve the sacred stones and ancient holy wells, pass on the secret traditions to our children…’
Jane was detecting a growing outrage, not how she wanted things to go.
‘Sorrel, I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to demean the work of the Pod…’
‘In which case…’
‘I revere Lucy Devenish and all she stood for. I’m trying to revive her village shop. But living with Mum makes me aware of another side to all this, a deeper level of… of…’
‘Evil?’ Sorrel snapped out the word.
‘With this pandemic, everything’s going to pieces, coming apart. I’m just trying to find out where this Portis woman’s coming from. Because if she inherited anything from Meyrick, maybe it was his religion.’
‘We only know that, like a lot of people a couple of hundred years ago, he was fascinated by druids.’ Sorrel was calming down. ‘This has always been a strong druidic area and we were told Diana Portis was descended from a druid family.’
‘But she wasn’t a member of the Pod?’
‘We thought that because all our members are pagans, that she’d be happy to join us… come and address one of our meetings. But…’
‘But she didn’t want to be associated with the Pod?’
‘No. But also she was married by then, to the son of a well-off estate agent from Hereford. We thought maybe her new husband didn’t want it broadcast among his posh friends about her family’s druid past.’
‘What does that mean? Druids are paganism-lite these days. You can dress up and prance around Stonehenge at the solstice, but you don’t have to do anything risky. Calling yourself a druid isn’t any more significant now than when William Wordsworth called himself one. Which was like calling yourself a hippy to show you weren’t conventional. In Wordsworth’s time it was about appreciating amorphous Nature rather than worshipping a personal God, wasn’t it? It was… cool.’
‘I suppose it was,’ Sorrel said. ‘We didn’t know much about the druids so we made them what we wanted them to be. History actually records a good deal more about people who opposed the druids and fought against them than about the druids themselves. People like the Romans who put many druids to the sword. Julius Caesar had a lot to say about them, most of it bad. The Romans said they practised all kinds of cruelty.’
An unwanted image sprang into Jane’s mind: the late actor Christopher Lee in a field near the sea in the film he’d always said he preferred to all those Dracula movies he’d starred in.
‘They had the wicker man.’
‘Exactly,’ Sorrel said. ‘The sacrificial wooden cage into which people and animals were herded and then burned to death. By the druids, according to the Romans. But was that the druids? Or was the celebrated wicker man invented to blacken the image of the ancient British healers and astronomers while the Roman invaders were busy killing them off?’
Jane had a picture of scores of people squashed in with farm animals, all squirming and screaming as the flames rose in the wooden cage. Obscene.
‘All right, if the wicker man never existed…’
‘That’s what you think, Jane?’
‘There aren’t any left,’ Jane said. ‘So we’ll never know. If the cages were made of wood, they’d have rotted away. Unless they were replaced by stone altars, and how would we know that?’
Sorrel said, ‘Do you know the Queen Stone, for instance?’
‘What?’
‘The stone at Goodrich?’
Jane considered. It was the biggest standing stone in the Wye Valley. She’d seen old photographs of it, but…
‘It’s on private farmland,’ she said. ‘You can’t get near it any more.’
‘It’s been on private land for over four hundred years,’ Sorrel said. ‘Sometimes it’s hidden by tall crops. And visiting it would be trespass, so people don’t. Have you ever been, Jane?’
‘No. There are no signs to it or anything.’
‘But a few local people know what used to happen there and remain a bit scared of it. And there’s a photo in Alfred Watkins’s book that hints at its history.’
‘The Old Straight Track?’
‘No, Alfred Watkins’ Herefordshire. The book his biographer and his wife published quite recently, with loads of Watkins’s old photos in it. Including the one where he’s giving some kind of lecture near the Stone?’
Jane’s gaze was suddenly on the bookshelf. There was the valuable Garnstone Press hardback of The Old Straight Track, published half a century ago. Jane had two copies, would sell one, if necessary. She hadn’t looked at Watkins’s famous work for years. But she desperately wanted to take it down. Now. And the soft-backed Alfred Watkins’ Herefordshire next to it. She didn’t remember the photo of his lecture there, though she must’ve seen it.
‘Don’t you think that’s interesting, Jane? By the time that picture was taken, nobody was associating those Bronze Age stones with the druids any more. But here’s Alfred Watkins with a recreated wicker man. Makes you think, doesn’t it?’
‘Think what?’
‘What he knew.’
‘What do you think he knew? I don’t remember him actually saying anything about the Queen Stone and a wicker man.’
‘He didn’t,’ Sorrel said. ‘He let his picture say it all.’
‘What?’
‘I think,’ Sorrel told her, ‘that I’ve said enough.’
36
Wild surmise
JANE CLIMBED INTO the Land Rover, two books under her arm.
‘I‘ve got to tell you, Gomer, that we could be breaking the law here.’
Gomer nodded and drove them out of the village onto the bypass. Jane watched the last two cottages disappear into the left-hand wing-mirror.
‘Is that OK with you, Gomer?’
‘Sure t’be.’
‘You don’t want a police record at your age.’
Gomer had his flat cap on. It looked like his grin went all the way up to its brim.
‘Ow you know I en’t got a record already?’
‘Because you’re too smart ever to get caught trespassing,’ Jane said.
‘Dunno if that’s true, Janey…’
‘But you’re not going to contradict me.’
‘Sure to,’ Gomer said. ‘Where you say we’re goin’, again? Need to know I got enough diesel in yere, ’fore we gets past all the pumps where I got pals.’
‘Goodrich, if that’s not too far. Down past Ross?’
‘Ent no problem at all, Janey.’
Gomer sucked on the stub of his ciggy. Jane would normally have felt unhappy about the number of cigs he was continuing to roll, but she’d heard on the radio that people in hospital with the virus tended not to be smokers. The world was a weird, contradictory place.
She said, ‘You know the Queen Stone?’
Gomer thought about it. He wouldn’t need to. There wasn’t anywhere in this county he couldn’t find driving blindfold through a snowstorm.
‘That’d be the ole stone standin’ up next to the river? Big grooves down him?’
Is there nothing he doesn’t know?
‘I think so, yes, though I’ve only seen pictures.’
‘This feller…’ Gomer tapped one of two books lying between Jane’s knees ‘… I never met him. Before my time, see.’
‘He died in 1935.’
‘But his grandson… he rung me once.’
‘He didn’t really, did he?’
‘Twenty or so years ago. He had this relation from down south wanted to come up and take photos of a few of the ole stones as was hard for some folks to find, so…’
‘Alfred Watkins’s grandson hired you to drive the guy around?’
‘And findin’ this yere Queen Stone, that meant driving across a few fields, but I reckon I done it.’
‘Of course, you did,’ Jane said. ‘I never for a minute thought you wouldn’t have.’
A great cure for scepticism was Gomer Parry.
She’d have persuaded him to take her a couple of years ago if she seen the picture in the book under her arm and made the druid connection that was now getting her so excited.
Bloody hell.
*
Lol would say that, seen from a distance, it looked like a very big stone guitar plectrum sticking out of the soil. And you could see it from a distance. It was the only standing stone in the lower valley, set in a wide field, in a deep curve of the Wye.
Inside her head, the music began. Then the words.
I am a simple trackway man
Who walks the lanes by ancient plan
Leading the people from beacon to steeple
And steeple to stone
And all the way home.
Lol Robinson’s voice. His song. The one he’d written as Alfred Watkins.
She looked up and saw the middle-distant steeple of the village church at Goodrich. It was hardly Lol’s finest song, but many people knew it now and sang along at gigs. Back in the day when you were allowed to hold gigs.
From moat to mound
We’ll mark the ground
From barrow to camp
We’ll carry the lamp
For some reason, Jane suddenly found all this slightly sinister. There was no path to the Queen Stone, no signs to it. You actually were not supposed to visit it.
An approaching vehicle could be seen only from a boat or canoe on the winding river.
Gomer had parked discreetly inside a field gate and followed Jane under a heavy dark-grey sky. You couldn’t avoid the sensation of your progress across the grass being carefully watched by the monument.
‘The ole stone d’know we’re comin’,’ Gomer said.
‘You feel that, too?’
The stone was said to resemble, from some angles, the dumpy, middle-aged Queen Victoria, but Jane couldn’t see it. She stopped and opened The Old Straight Track.
Alfred Watkins had written,
The legend of this one was that it was a sacrificial stone of the Druids. The deep grooves make to me some grim suggestions connected with Caesar’s report of the Druids burning their victims in wicker cages.
But this is all wild surmise…
Jane closed The Old Straight Track. She, too, was good at wild surmise.
