The Ghosts of Heaven Page 6

  On the procession went, all the way down to Gaining Water, and as they turned to take the path back up through Horsehold Wood to St. Mary’s Church, someone started to sing the song.

  So it was, singing, that they carried Joan Tunstall’s body into the churchyard, and placed her in the hole that Anna had paid Old Harry threepence to dig.

  They left Joan Tunstall in the ground then, and while Old Harry started to pile earth in on top of her, the villagers went across the track to the field at the edge of the tentergrounds, to dance.

  Anna hung back awhile, watching the earth go in.

  She glanced at the little mound, much smaller, nearby; that was where Grace Dolen’s baby had gone, a month ago. She wondered if it was just bones in the soil now, and she saw them in her mind—tiny white bones in the dark earth.

  By the time she pulled herself away, saw that her brother had gone ahead, and went to join the others, the dancing was well started.

  The villagers formed a circle, an open circle, holding hands all, but with a gap.

  They faced inward, toward each other, and moved to the right, to the right hand, and stepped sideways, spinning the circle round and round, always to the right. Anna joined them, as she should, putting her left hand into Helen Fuller’s right. Now Anna led, dancing and dancing, to the right, to the right, trying to meet the end of the open circle, but never, never reaching it.

  They danced to the right “in the same way they believed blood spirals to the right,” through the generations, passed from parent to child, but always to the right.

  They sang, and they danced the spiral dance, and three people watched them.

  The first was Robert Hamill. Second son of Sir George, recently returned from France.

  Watching Robert watch the dance was Grace Dolen, who had come across the valley from Dolen’s Farm to scowl out of the woodland edge.

  And watching all of them, from his stifling seat, was the minister, Father Escrove, whose carriage had just then arrived in Welden Valley.

  4 A MIND SMEARED ACROSS THE HEAD OF THE MILL HAMMER

  Grace Dolen’s thirsty eyes were still on Robert Hamill as the Smith twins approached her. Hettie and Hester Smith weren’t dancing with their brother and the others. They didn’t want to dance. They were still and cool girls, who watched and whispered. Though barely eight, something dry in them had identified Grace Dolen as a source that they might be interested in. They latched on to her without knowing why, but now stood a few feet away, watching her watch Robert watch the wake dancers at Joan Tunstall’s funeral.

  Their brother Harry was dancing; he was a loud, energetic boy, tugging too hard at the hand to his left as he pulled to the right.

  The sun was slowing the pace of the dance; foreheads ran with sweat and bare feet crushed the dying grass as they circled on.

  Grace knew, as everyone there knew, that the dance had a purpose. Whoever was the first to fall could be asked a question, any question, and not only did they have to answer, they had to tell the truth.

  Someone had fallen, and it was enough to distract Grace from gazing at Robert for a moment. From the distance at which Grace watched, it seemed a dream as Anna Tunstall stumbled in the heat haze and put her hands to the harsh grass. Young Simon Bill was the first to hop over in front of her.

  Grace sucked her lip, wondering what question it was that Simon put to Anna. She knew what she’d have asked her, given the chance.

  “You’re Grace with the dead baby,” announced Hester Smith.

  “Aren’t you,” added Hettie, in an equally empty voice.

  Grace shifted her gaze back to Robert Hamill. She was wondering how much she could see of him at the manor house. He was just returned, the week before, from France, where his father had sent him to learn something about trade and travel.

  The twins didn’t twitch so much as an eyelid as they considered Grace Dolen. She leaned against a tree at the edge of Horsehold Wood, slowly chewing a thin stalk of pale brown grass.

  “Why did your baby die?” asked Hester Smith.

  “Did you kill it?” asked Hettie.

  Grace didn’t appear to have heard either question.

  She shifted her weight from one hip to the other and her fingers unconsciously stroked her belly where the baby had been. So something good had come of the death, then, she thought. How lucky for her that the boy had died just as Lady Hamill was looking for a wet nurse for her own son.

  Lady Hamill, the second Lady Hamill, young wife to Sir George, with a child that needed milk, and there was Grace on the doorstep of the manor the following morning with her baby gone in the ground and milk hanging in her breasts, ready. What luck.

  Of course Grace had taken a clip round the ear for being so bold as to stand on the front doorstep of the manor, but once she’d found her way to the back, she’d been installed in the nursery to feed Lady Hamill’s son. That meant, from time to time, that she was even allowed in the house proper, even as far as her Lady’s bedroom, to show the baby to its mother once in a while.

  Grace knew where Robert Hamill’s bedroom lay. She had seen the door, and though it had been closed, she thought powerfully about how to get beyond it. Robert was young and not half the men that the vigorous Byatt brothers were, whichever of them it had been who had given her a baby. But Robert was rich and, unlike his older brother Samuel, he was unwed, and Grace held unlikely desires of securing him.

  The twins made one more try.

  “Ma Birch says you killed your baby so you could let her ladyship’s baby suck at you instead.”

  That was Hester Smith.

  Grace slowly turned her head to look down at the Smith twins, who stood upright in their rough, long white dresses, their eyes as unblinking as owls.

  “Did you do that?” asked Hettie.

  Grace spoke so quietly that the twins barely heard.

  “It was Joan Tunstall that killed my boy,” she said, and then she pushed herself away from the tree and started back to the manor house, for she had only been home across the valley on an errand, and could not afford to be gone long. The Hamill baby would want feeding soon.

  5 STONE FOOT

  The dance was done.

  The heat of the sun had soaked into everyone, and while some sat on the grass of the field with their legs out and propped up with their hands behind, others slunk away back into the green valley, and its coolness.

  The sound of Golden Beck had drawn them, and Harry Smith had forgotten to torment his twin sisters for a time while he and other boys bathed in Gaining Water.

  Robert Hamill waited.

  Everyone had left but Anna Tunstall, and her quiet brother Tom.

  Tom had wandered away from the dance and was walking round the lines, the lines carved into the turf up by the road.

  Anna watched him winding his way round and round, and then called.

  Her voice drifted as far as Robert, and there was no wind, so Tom must have heard, too, for he was closer. But he didn’t move.

  “Tom!” she called again. “Thomas!”

  The boy kept walking the lines of the maze.

  Anna’s shoulders dropped, and her hands, which had been on her hips, dropped to her side, then she slowly walked to where Tom was, took his hand, and started home.

  The track that led from the road ran straight to the gates of the manor, and then on, right past Tunstall Cottage, but Robert saw that Anna pulled her brother the other way, back past the churchyard to the path up from the valley.

  She was retracing her steps. The journey they’d made an hour or so before, with a body on a floorboard.

  Robert followed, keeping his distance.

  Down to the beck, where a short way away the sound of stupid boys floated over from Gaining Water.

  Anna still held Tom’s hand as she led him back along the path by Golden Beck, past Fuller’s Mill, where tomorrow being Monday she would have to find herself again.

  She didn’t stop and then, just as Robert expected her to
turn up the path that led through Callis Wood to the cottage that was now hers, Anna made straight ahead, past the trysting tree, and then farther, pulling Tom along with her.

  They walked for half an hour along the valley floor, and only the trees and Robert Hamill saw them go. Robert wondered if she knew he was following, so he dropped way back, trying to use tree trunks to hide himself, leaning his head around only when he thought it was safe.

  A little way on and finally, she stopped.

  There was Stone Foot; a tiny bridge across the beck, made of two long and narrow blocks of stone laid end to end. They met halfway on a pillar that had been set into the bed of the stream. There was no handrail. At either end of the footbridge, two squat stone bollards formed an open gateway across the path. The bridge had the latent power of a Methuselah, an ancient and patient thing.

  Just above Stone Foot, the stream had made a pool for itself over the course of the last ten thousand years; much smaller than Gaining Water, but much quieter, too.

  Robert pulled himself in tight behind a large scrub oak, and looked.

  Anna came off the path, and Tom followed her onto the grassy bank above the pool. Despite the thick woods all around the valley, this secluded pool was a rare spot in full sunshine; sunlight stole over the rippling water sending beams even as far as its shingle bed.

  Anna kicked off her clogs, and Tom did the same.

  They were speaking, or at least, Anna was speaking to her brother. She was pointing at the stream, and then Tom pulled his clothes off and jumped into the water without a moment’s hesitation.

  Anna laughed, loud enough for Robert to hear; a sound as golden as the stream.

  Anna pulled the hem of her dress up and for a dizzying and eager moment Robert thought she was going to take her clothes off, too, but she merely dangled her feet over the bank and into the water, then lay back with her hands over her eyes because her face was in full sun.

  Seeing his chance, Robert Hamill approached.

  6 PRESENCE

  Tom loved swimming, and Anna loved to hear him splashing and tumbling in the water; truly, simply happy. It eased her difficult thoughts. The cool water ran around her feet, sunlight poured onto her pale freckled face, and Tom’s laughter took her away somewhere where she didn’t have to worry about what the future held for them.

  But there was a decision to be made.

  Should she go on working for John Fuller, carrying cloth from the mill hammers up to the tentergrounds every day? Or should she try and keep her mother’s gifts alive, scraping a coin here and there from the villagers who paid a call?

  Fulling work was foul business. Unloading the woollen cloth from the ponies that walked up the valley from Deepdale. Hefting the cloth into the mill. The stench of the urine in the baths. The grinding of the mill gears as John slipped the hammers into action. The pounding of the hammers on the cloth, hour after hour until, in some way Anna knew not, John would announce the batch to be done. Stronger and more water-hating than it had been when it arrived.

  Then the washing and rinsing in the millstream, and carrying the sodden wool up the track from the mill, past the manor lands and onto the tentergrounds.

  That was the one part of the process that Anna didn’t mind so much; up, out of the narrow valley, to the open dale where she would hang the fulled cloth up on posts, where it would dry, stretched out on tenterhooks. Up there, she felt a little braver and less captured.

  Otherwise, she hated the job, though John Fuller was as kind to her as he’d been to her father. It was steady money, that was all, and the alternative…? To rattle around the cottage, putting some of the things her mother had taught her to practice, only making money when someone came to knock.

  She knew some herbs and she had taken to the art of their preparation naturally. The ditches, riverbanks and woods of Welden Valley were overflowing with the plants that could make and mend. Knapweed: good for those who are bruised from a fall, or to heal green wounds. Feverfew, good for wounds, too. Meadow Saffron, which used indiscreetly, could be poisonous. The fresh leaves of young ferns; which purge the belly and expel waterish humors. Or cause abortions. All these powers lurking in the leaves of the valley.

  With time she could become a skilful gracewife, she believed. She had assisted her mother very often, most recently to deliver Grace Dolen of the scrawny runt that had died within the month.

  Anna still felt surprised by that; how such a scrappy thing had come from between the plentiful thighs of Grace. She had expected a plump calf to emerge that morning, not the sickly babe that never increased. Joan Tunstall had done everything she knew for the baby, but it would not come on, and in the end, all she could say was that she had given Grace Dolen an easy, short and painless birth for a boy who was not destined to prosper by God’s hand.

  Despite such setbacks, which were after all just the way of nature, Anna’s heart called to her to become her mother. They had the same hair—the winding red. They had the same pale skin, with a band of freckles across the nose that looked so out of place on a woman the age that Joan had been. But most of all they had the same desire—to find out what was to be found out. To uncover things covered, to explain the mysterious and to put these findings to service in order to help people against the dangers of the world, which were, to put it at its plainest, legion.

  And that was the way Anna’s mind was wandering, through avenues alternately sunlit and leafy-dark, trying to weigh up whether to take the risk, when the sun was suddenly gone from above her.

  Her eyes opened, and she expected to see a cloud; but there was someone standing, looking down at her, blocking the light, silhouetted against the hot blue sky.

  “How long have you been there?” Anna said, angry at having been crept up upon.

  She rolled onto her stomach and scrambled to her feet, then saw who it was.

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  Robert Hamill, second son of Sir George, stood in front of her.

  It took her a moment to realize that he didn’t seem cross with her.

  Anna hesitated, unsure of what to do. Sir George’s second son seemed to be staring at her, but to what end she had no idea. She didn’t see herself as he did; her hair flaring in the sunlight, her long toes, bare and wet on the bank. The curves under her so-thin dress.

  She turned, saw Tom still splashing in the pool. He ducked under for a second and then erupted in a fountain of stream water.

  “Tom!” she called. “Time we went.”

  But Tom didn’t hear.

  Anna gave Robert a small curtsy and moved along the bank, closer to her brother.

  “Tom!”

  “Anna Tunstall,” Robert said. “Aren’t you?”

  Anna stiffened slightly. What did he want with knowing that?

  “That’s your brother,” Robert said.

  “Tom,” murmured Anna, without thought. Then she turned and shouted.

  “Thomas! Get out now!”

  Now Tom heard. He stood up in the shallows of the pool, and saw there was someone with his sister. Water dripped from his fingertips.

  “Get out, Thomas, we have to go home.”

  Tom started to climb out onto the bank, but before Anna could take him his clothes, Robert Hamill was speaking to her again.

  “I’m sorry for you,” he offered.

  “I ask your pardon, sir?” Anna said.

  “You buried your mother today, and I’m sorry for that.”

  Anna felt herself looking at Robert now, properly.

  He wasn’t so old and he wasn’t as tall as his brother Samuel. Nor as arrogant, that was clear to see. He seemed a much gentler sort of creature, in fact, now that she risked meeting his eyes.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said.

  Robert ignored that.

  “Here,” he said. “I’ve something for your brother.”

  Before Anna had time to reply Robert dug into the pocket of his doublet and approached Tom, who sat on the bank staring a
t the water.

  “Thomas?” Robert said. He bent down near him as if speaking to a lamb. “I’ve something for you. It’s a gift.”

  “What is it?” Tom asked.

  “Look,” said Robert, and finding a large flat stone nearby, set it in the grass of the bank.

  Then he held out the thing he was giving to Tom, a small wooden disc on a spindle. He flicked it between his fingers just above the stone and there it spun, standing up on its point.

  Tom clapped his hands and laughed, watching it spin till it began to wobble then skitter away and fall off the edge of the stone.

  “Do it again!”

  “Do it again, sir,” Anna said seriously, then realized how silly that sounded. “I mean, if it pleases you to.”

  She dared a smile at Robert, but Robert was already taking the little spinning top up in his fingers, sending it into its dance on the stone.

  Anna came closer and now she saw that painted on the top of the disc was a line that curled in on itself just like the line of the turf maze up on the edge of the tentergrounds.

  She saw that the line moved, moved inward, forever, always getting smaller but somehow always there, never disappearing. Or so it seemed.

  Robert saw that she was fascinated and when the top fell over this time he picked it up and showed her the painted line.

  “It doesn’t move,” Anna said.

  “Only when it spins,” said Robert. “It’s an illusion of sorts. I found it in the market in d’Auville. That’s in France,” he added, wondering if Anna might be impressed by his adventurous life.

  She showed no sign of knowing what France was, or caring.

  “Do it again,” said Tom.

  “Sir,” said Anna.

  Robert laughed and spun the top again, and again, and again, until he taught Tom to do it for himself.

  Anna watched, unable to move. She couldn’t take her brother away from Sir George’s son, and he showed no sign of leaving, so she waited, watching as the young man played with her brother.

  Finally, as Tom sat staring at the spinning, shrinking spiral, Robert straightened and looked at Anna.