The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

  ‘Don’t let her hear you say so,’ said Mr Keiller, flicking back through the pages of my sketchbook. ‘In all fairness, though, you’re right. The portraits are awfully smart. Look at this one: it’s the Brushwood Boy. You’ve really caught a likeness, Heartbreaker. May I have it?’

  It was a sketch of Davey. I’d never heard him called the Brushwood Boy; maybe the name came from his mop of wiry hair. Mr Keiller didn’t wait for my nervous nod, and tore the portrait out. He placed it carefully between the pages of his own notebook, and something about the way he did it made me uneasy. Why would he want to keep a picture of Davey? I remembered the two of them on that motorbike, disappearing over the brow of the hill and into the trees.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said, his eyes crinkling in a smile. ‘How would you like to help us out on the excavations? What d’you think, Young? Reckon we’ve got room for another artist on the team?’

  I couldn’t help it, I was grinning like a mad sheep. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Mr Cromley watching me again. He made me uncomfortable too. I never knew how to read his expression.

  Mr Keiller had given the village some land for their cricket pitch, outside the circle on the other side of the bank. Evenings, he goes to watch the game. He stands under the limp leaves of the chestnut trees with their white candles poking through the green, watching the men practise. They’ve been home to wash the dirt of the digging off, and put on clean white shirts and trousers, dazzling against the grass. One or two wear grey flannel bags, and the bowler, a brawny farmhand, is in a navy blue singlet, sweat glistening on his hairy shoulders.

  Mr K watched the men, but I was watching him. I’d never seen a tiger except in pictures, but I thought that was what he reminded me of, fierce and sometimes angry and always dangerous.

  ‘Why does he call you the Brushwood Boy?’ I asked Davey, beside me, waiting his turn to bat. He was all in white.

  He shrugged. He’d been trying to catch hold of my hand, but I shoved it firmly in my cardigan pocket. ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘One of his funny ways. Come with me to the dance at the Red Lion?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We–there’s guests arriving that night, promised I’d help Mam.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he said sulkily, his golden-green eyes like bruises.

  A woman was making her way down the path. She was in trousers, something you didn’t often see women wear then. She was tall and they suited her figure; they’d have concertina’d round my ankles like a comic turn. As she came closer, I recognized her.

  ‘Miss Chapman’s all dressed up,’ said Davey. I’d seen her often enough at the Manor, but never to speak to, not that she’d have noticed someone like me. Her usual outfit wasn’t so smart: skirt and clumpy shoes, with paint under her fingernails. She was a major-general’s daughter, people said, who’d studied art in Paris.

  ‘Alec,’ she called. Mr Keiller took his eyes off the men at practice, and smiled. It lit up his serious face. At the same time, he saw Davey and me.

  ‘Doris,’ he said. ‘Someone here you should meet. Heartbreaker!’

  I trotted over, little lamb that I was.

  ‘This is Miss Robinson,’ he said to her. ‘You remember, I showed you her sketches.’

  Close up, she was languidly pretty. She had a haughty nose, and wide, knowing eyes, with long lashes and lids that drooped seductively. Those eyes slid over my face. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I remember. Not a trained hand, but she has an eye. You should keep practising, my dear.’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘Especially now Mr Keiller’s asked me to help with the drawing at the dig.’

  Her mouth froze. ‘You didn’t tell me you’d offered her a job, Alec’

  ‘You couldn’t have been listening. I said to you we need another artist because you’re not here all the time.’

  ‘And Piggott, I suppose, can’t be everywhere at once.’ She said it with a little laugh, making like she was following his thinking, how sensible he was, but she was grinding the words out between her teeth. ‘Pity Donald isn’t any good with a pencil’

  ‘Donald has other talents. And Stuart may not be here the whole season, if he marries Peggy in the autumn.’ Mr Keiller was losing interest in the conversation: his eyes kept slipping back to the men on the cricket pitch. ‘So give Miss Robinson what assistance you can, won’t you?’

  There was factions at the Manor, I’d come to understand that already. Best to know who was in with who. I wasn’t sure I was as good at drawing as Mr Keiller believed, and I thought I’d better improve, quick, on my own, because I could tell Miss Chapman wasn’t going to be any help to me. So I’d gone to the museum to practise. Mr K was in London again, and Davey with him.

  I’d brought a chair out of the back room, and perched on it to draw Charlie in his glass case. His skull, distorted and almost as big as an adult’s in spite of his tiny child bones, fascinated me. Miss Chapman’s speciality was facial reconstructions: she imagined what the dead had been in life, and painted them. I’d heard her tell visitors that the shape of the skull determined the shape of the fleshed face. What had Charlie looked like? I wanted to give him the soft gaze of a baby deer, but that swollen head brought to mind instead Charles Laughton’s froggy face and bulging eyes. That sent me off on another train of thought altogether: I’d seen Vessel of Wrath at the Palace cinema in Devizes with Davey, and somehow Laughton’s slack, drunk mouth in that film had become associated with Davey’s attempts to give me a kiss in the darkness.

  Mam had been right. I was outgrowing Davey. It had all started to go wrong that day I’d seen him and Mr Keiller on the motorbike. He was a good-looking lad, but that was the problem: he seemed only a boy, compared to the others at the Manor. He kissed in a soft wet way that could sometimes make me queasy. In the cinema foyer there’d been a poster advertising Mutiny on the Bounty: Charles Laughton’s full-lipped face next to Clark Gable. No prizes for who he reminded me of. Davey was devoted to me, but there in’t anything about devotion makes the heart beat faster.

  The overhead light reflected off the top of the glass case, making it hard to see Charlie clearly. I stood up to turn it off and found myself inches away from a shirtfront.

  ‘Mr Cromley! Didn’t know you’d come in!’ Didn’t even have to lift my eyes to his face because, up close, Mr Cromley had a smell all of his own, a pleasant, tangy, floral scent different from Mr Keiller’s spicy hair oil, and Stu Pig’s cabbagy old-socks stink. ‘Was you–were you watching me?’ Trying to mind my grammar like Mrs Sorel-Taylour told me.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, Miss Robinson.’ Ever so respectful, unlike Mr K and Stu Pig, who’d taken to calling me Heartbreaker most of the time. Polite, but I still had a funny feeling he was laughing at me. ‘Alec’s right. You might not be trained, but your pencil captures the soul of what you draw.’

  ‘Have you been watching long?’

  ‘Only a minute or two.’

  But I’d a feeling it’d been much longer. And my pencil had been idle, with me musing about Davey. Mr Cromley’s special gift seemed to be to catch me at those moments when my thoughts ran naked across my face. No comfort that my back had been to him–every last little frown and pout would’ve been reflected in Charlie’s glass coffin.

  He picked up my sketchbook. ‘See? You’ve drawn a small boy, probably disabled, possibly hydrocephalic. If that’s not capturing a soul, I don’t know what is. Charlie’s tribe would have been terrified of your power.’

  ‘Oh.’ Didn’t know what to say to any of that. Didn’t seem to me I’d ever been thought of as powerful by anyone before.

  ‘Though that’s not actually Charlie’s own skull,’ he said. ‘It’s a copy, a plaster cast. Alec keeps the original in his dressing room.’

  ‘What for?’ I asked, shocked.

  ‘No idea. Maybe he drinks out of it, as sorcerers do.’ He tossed the sketchbook back onto the seat of my chair. ‘Do you know what aboriginal people believe about souls? That they can literally be caught. In the Pacific
islands, sorcerers set snares for them, with netting sized to suit the different measures of soul. Big fat loops for big fat souls, tiny loops for thin ones. What’s your soul like, Miss Robinson?’

  ‘A strong soul,’ I said, surprising myself with my daring. ‘One that would rip through the net to be free.’

  He shook his head. ‘Impossible to escape. There are knives and sharp hooks in the traps, which tear and rend the poor soul. The more it struggles, the more likely it is to die. In Hawaii, the sorcerers shut the soul in a calabash, then give it to someone to eat.’

  ‘That’s horrible,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve seen a soul eaten,’ he said. Such long eyelashes, for a man, sweeping downwards. ‘They say it’s very tasty, a bit like an oyster.’

  I laughed uneasily. ‘I wouldn’t know what an oyster tastes like.’

  ‘Salty and slippery’ His pale grey eyes were deep traps, sucking me in. ‘Alec’s a man for oysters.’

  We were very close to each other. All through the conversation, he hadn’t stepped back, and nor had I. There were tiny beads of moisture above his light brown moustache, and the pupils seemed huge in his clear grey eyes. In a moment–

  But I turned away and picked up my sketchbook. ‘I was finished,’ I said.

  ‘No, you aren’t. I’m sorry. I startled you.’

  ‘I was going to turn the top light out,’ I admitted.

  ‘Is that wise?’ He laughed. ‘People will talk.’ He caught sight of my expression. ‘Oh, Miss Robinson, I know I’m safe with you. After all, I’m not Mr Keiller, am I?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I was suddenly hot and panicky.

  ‘Don’t worry, your secret is safe.’ He tapped the side of his narrow, aristocratic nose. ‘Mum’s the word. I won’t tell the Brushwood Boy’ In one quick movement he pulled the Kirby-grip out of my hair so my fringe fell across my forehead. ‘Poor old Alec. He’s no idea what he’s missing.’ Then he was gone.

  I sat down on my chair by the glass case, plonk. I didn’t understand what had just happened. Charlie’s sightless eyes bored into mine, like Mr Cromley’s had. I felt a lot safer with Charlie, even if he did look like Charles Laughton.

  The dig had begun. First, all manner of stuff came out of the ground: broken crocks, coins so worn you couldn’t read the dates, a whole brown glazed beer mug Mr Piggott said was two hundred year old, even a marmalade jar, Keiller’s, of course, and that gave us all a laugh. He and Mr Cromley went about pushing pegs into the ground, probing for hidden sarsens, then marked where they found them on pages of squared paper in what they called the Plotting Book. When the buried stones were uncovered, lying in their shallow graves, they looked like the pits in a fruit.

  ‘Question is, why?’ The usual warmth flooded me when I heard Mr Keiller’s voice. ‘If eighteenth-century entrepreneurs like Robinson, Fowler and Green are profiting by breaking up stones for building material, why were these buried?’

  I looked up from my sketchbook to see if he was talking to me, but no: he had his acolytes tagging along. ‘Don, what’s your theory?’

  The field was humming with activity. One gang of men was returfing the bank. Another group was digging down to uncover a new stone further along. In front of us, the workmen had a big stone already bared and trussed up in ropes and pulleys, and Mr Keiller and his young men had arrived in time to watch them struggle to lever it upright.

  Mr Cromley had affected a pipe, a useful prop for a young man who wanted to be taken serious like. He took a long draw on it, exhaled slowly, and said, ‘Concealing the stones is about power, of course. They’re buried to break the geometry of the circle, and to destroy their mystic hold over the community–to wither the stone’s souls, if you like. The priest takes their power instead.’

  ‘Stones with souls?’ scoffed Mr Piggott. ‘Sorcerer-priests? I don’t subscribe to Don’s Golden Bough fixation. That sort of thinking is twenty years out of date. The motive’s economic, not spiritual. Eighteenth-century farmers are behind the burials, freeing up more land for cultivation. Some they bury, some they break, depending on the market’s demand for stone.’

  Didn’t dare join in the conversation, but I was with Mr Cromley. Anyone who’d lived among them stones knew they had souls, all right. That big bugger they were about to lift: he’d been sleeping, but you could see he was coming awake. People like Mr Piggott would think they were clever to fetter the stones, but the stones were stronger, and they had time on their side. That old stone could shrug off all them ropes and pulleys, if he felt like it.

  Mr Young was supervising, puffing at a pipe too–it looked much more natural in his mouth. ‘Bring him up slowly,’ he called, waving his arm like a man directing traffic. His bandy little legs had begun to turn a deep golden brown below the turn-ups of his shorts. ‘Slowly, Reg! No bloomin’ rush about it. Ready with the timbers?’ The stone began to rise out of its bed like Lazarus. ‘That’s it! Now get that prop under there–Arthur, mind yourself, you don’t want to be under this old chap if one of those hawsers snaps–quickly now! OK, George, take the strain–and pull…’ Gradually the stone started to heave itself upright. Mr Keiller put his camera to his eye and began prowling round, looking for a good snapshot.

  There was a shout from further down the field where the men were digging for another stone. ‘Mr Keiller! Come over here. You’d better see this.’

  People called back and forth all the time while the digging was going on, but there was something in this shout that made everybody stop. Mr Keiller lowered the camera. Young took his pipe out of his mouth. Mr Cromley and Mr Piggott broke into a run, and Mr K wasn’t far after them. I felt a shiver go down my spine. The pencil fell out of my fingers, and the sketchbook slid off my knee.

  ‘Well, I’ll be blowed!’ said Mr Cromley, as they reached the diggers.

  ‘Bugger me!’ came Mr Piggott’s voice.

  Mr Keiller stood stock still with his hands on his hips, at the edge of the excavation pit, slowly shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  Hampered by my skirt, I arrived a few seconds later.

  A grinning mouth full of teeth, a bony eyeless socket staring up at us from under the stone.

  CHAPTER 17

  ‘The Barber Surgeon,’ says Martin, authoritatively, staring into the lens of the camera, ‘was a shock to everybody.’

  Nobody pays the slightest bit of attention. The crew are too busy setting up, and early on a sharp April morning, there are no tourists about. The camera stands unattended, while the intense young cameraman from the film show at the Red Lion wanders round the field, looking for good angles. The soundman, wearing headphones, has propped the woolly boom microphone on its long pole against a stone, and is sitting with his back to it, playing some shoot-’em-up game on his mobile phone, his thumbs a blur. Ibby is with Michael, leaning on the bonnet of the crew’s Range Rover, deep in conversation over a map.

  ‘His skeleton was discovered buried with this massive stone,’ Martin continues, gesturing into empty air behind him, the camera being nowhere near the Barber Surgeon’s stone. ‘Crushed or suffocated, his leg trapped beneath it, his pelvis cracked, his neck broken, the tools of his trade, his scissors, spilling from his pocket–’ He sees me and breaks off. ‘Blossom! I rewrote the whole piece last night. Better, don’t you think? What did your grandmother have to say?’

  ‘Not much. Except that she drew his picture, under the stone.’

  ‘Not much! That’s remarkable. Where is it?’

  ‘She was vague. Said Keiller took it.’

  ‘Well, it can’t be in the archive, or it would have been published.’ Martin takes my arm and steers me across the grass towards the Range Rover parked on the high street. ‘You only ever see the photographs Keiller took–there’s a splendid one of Piggott holding the skull, pretending to be Hamlet–alas, poor Barber Surgeon…’ He bows me through the gate with a flourish.

  ‘…the ground’s too wet,’ Michael is saying as we close on the Ran
ge Rover. ‘We’d achieve better results later in the summer when there are clear parch marks.’

  ‘I need aerials sooner than that,’ says Ibby, her tone firm and confident. Like the first time I saw her, she’s wearing red–a long-sleeved T-shirt, this time, under a khaki waistcoat with lots of bulging pockets, a walking store-cupboard for batteries, videotapes and fold-up headphones. Sunglasses nestle in her short dark curls, and reading specs dangle on a chain round her neck. ‘Shit, Harry doesn’t look happy.’

  The cameraman, on the other side of the field, is giving the sky over Cherhill a worried once-over. Trails of high cirrus are forming against the blue. There’s something flat and unappealing about the light.

  ‘We need to crack on with the PTC,’ says Ibby. ‘Michael, if it pours, can we film in the museum?’

  ‘Shouldn’t be a problem.’ Michael checks his watch. ‘Sorry I can’t hang around–meetings.’

  Ibby folds her map and puts it into another of her bottomless pockets. And rostrum the Keiller stills?’ she calls, to Michael’s retreating back.

  ‘She speaks an entire new language,’ whispers Martin, in my ear. ‘I’m terrified of her already.’

  I heard that,’ says Ibby. ‘Good. It might persuade you to do what I tell you. Now get your arse over there and put your mind to this piece to camera. India, the mini-DVC’s on the back seat. Can you film at the same time as Harry from the other side?’

  ‘Oh, God, it’s going to be modern,’ says Martin. ‘Funny angles and jump cuts.’

  ‘It’s for Channel 4, Martin,’ says Ibby. ‘They like to push the boundaries of technique. And for a man who claims not to know the language, you seem remarkably versant already with the basic grammar.’ One side of her mouth goes up in a kind of smile. Arse. Gear. Joined by the preposition “in”. Harry! Can you come and set up?’