by Liz Williams
Serena
She’d had enough. Ben hadn’t called her for days, but worse, he hadn’t called Bella either and that was just unfair. Eventually Serena unloaded her worries onto Charlie, which perhaps was a little unprofessional, but they were friends, and Eleanor, who had called round to see about a leaky gutter at the back.
“My dear,” Eleanor said, unconsciously imperious. “You’ve got to tell him his short term future or release him into the wild. Nothing else will do. Otherwise the man will just run roughshod over you.”
“I think she’s right.” Charlotte was more hesitant, but indignant all the same. “What does he think he’s playing at?”
“I imagine he thinks he’s playing at screwing someone else.”
“Perhaps it’s an early midlife crisis.”
“I don’t care.”
“You know,” Eleanor said, “everyone always gives artists far too much license. If you’re creative, you’re supposed to be marvellously Bohemian and free, especially men, but usually they just end up making a mess.”
“That would be Ben.”
“Why don’t you go off somewhere for a few days? Bella could stay with her father, I’m sure.”
“I don’t want to shove her from pillar to post,” Serena said, but in fact a weekend was coming up, and Bella had mentioned something about wanting to stay with her dad because there was a thing on. Serena had not got any further with that.
“You could go and stay with Bee. Sisters. That’s the ticket for man-trouble.”
“I think she’s right,” Charlotte said. “Maybe they could assassinate him for you.”
That, Serena thought vindictively, was by no means a bad idea.
The M3 was congested, even first thing on Friday morning. Sitting in the alleged fast lane, which had slowed to a crawl, Serena was beginning to regret taking the car, but she hadn’t wanted to put Bee to the trouble of endless lifts back and forth from the railway station and it did mean more flexibility. Then it started to rain and Serena felt her spirits give a further lurch, but this time for the better. She liked rain. At the moment, it matched her mood, but it also made her feel safe. By the time the little car came to the turn-off for the A303 and the long stretch of westward road, the downpour had slowed to a shower and there were patches of pale blue sky showing above the downs. Wiltshire, and the high country, bleached under the autumn chill. With care, Serena overtook a horse-drawn wagon, curving and colourful and surely illegal on the main road, and thought of Luna who was, as far as she knew, heading south.
When she reached Stonehenge, the rain had almost completely stopped. Serena pulled the car into the visitors’ car park, located her English Heritage membership card with ease, greatly to her own surprise, and slipped in through the turnstile and onto the bus. She passed a party of Italian tourists coming back, but everyone else must be at lunch, for Serena found herself the only person on the bus and then on the circular path that led around the monument. It was here that she finally felt able to breathe. She stood, looking at the impenetrable grey forms of the stones, encrusted with lichen and crowned by squabbling jackdaws, and took in a lungful of damp air. The short, sheep-cropped grass beneath her feet was thick with clover. She walked slowly around the perimeter of the henge, as another coach trundled along, until only the distant hum of the road and the low wire fence betrayed the presence of the modern age.
“Well,” Serena said aloud. “Well.” It had an air of finality.
In the middle of the stones, movement caught her eye. Something brown, low in the grass. A rabbit – but as Serena looked, it sat up. Much bigger than a bunny, with long, narrow ears and folded back legs. A hare. It came quite close as she stood as still as she could, a few yards, until she could look into its wise, golden eye. Then the sound of voices came from further along the path and, unhurried, the hare looped away among the stones. When Serena followed the path around, it was no longer visible. But she felt it had been a sign of some kind, a symbol, and surely of nothing that was bad. Hares and the moon, shapeshifters, Luna had said. Old stories about women who could change their form. She walked slowly back to the bus stop, as a cloud drew over the sun and the first few spots of rain touched cold on her skin.
Stella
Dartmoor always looked particularly dark, Stella thought, regardless of the time of year, as though it had its own perpetual cloud layer, its own night. They took the turn-off to Moretonhampstead, coming onto the moor itself just after midday.
“You know what we need?” Stella asked.
“What?” her sister said. Luna had drawn her knees up onto the front seat. Wrapped in layers of charity-shop woollen shawls, with her dark red henna’d dreads, she looked like a hitch-hiking Medieval peasant. Sam sat in the back, staring out at the hedges and fields.
“We need a pub.”
“Do you think we should stop?”
“I think we should grab some lunch before we start our investigation. An hour or so won’t make much difference, I’m sure.”
“Outstanding suggestion,” Sam said. “And as if by magic –”
The pub stood all alone, high on a spine of road. Below it, the moor fell away in long lines of wet bracken, the shade of Luna’s hair, and black stands of pine. Far to the south, the sky had that faint shine that appears above the sea, but the coast itself was invisible. The moor looked far larger than it actually was. Stella parked opposite the pub and they got out into a cold wind.
The pub was called the Warren House and there were old photographs of it buried up to its roof in snow. It was, Stella learned with interest, the second highest pub in the country. There were fireplaces, made of brick, at either end and rabbit stew on the menu. Sam had a pint and ordered the stew; Luna, slightly to Stella’s surprise, asked for a tonic water rather than a beer, but asked for egg and chips, which Stella also opted for. Her sister seemed on edge, a little ragged, but that was not unusual for Luna. Stella had always thought that she suffered from her anger; she could not have said why, but Luna often seemed to be fighting to keep some emotion under control. It was probably hormones, or simply being the youngest. But that was a bit patronising. Ever since she had been a teenager, Luna’s social conscience had been strong. Stella herself had confined her protest to a bit of sabbing (her teenage years had been before the badger cull, otherwise that might have been an outlet, too) and the occasional anti-war march, but Luna, after her not-very-good GCSE results, had simply bailed into the university of life and the anti-fracking protests. Fair enough.
“Sorry,” Luna said, as if catching the tail end of Stella’s thought. “This is winding me up.”
“I’m not really surprised,” Stella said. “We’ve all had a lot to put up with.”
“Must have been fucking awful,” Sam said to her now. “Having your mum vanish like that. I know what that’s like. My dad went off when I was a little kid; didn’t come back for three years. We thought he was dead.”
Stella did not say: but you’re travellers. Instead, she said, “Where’d he go?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell us, the old bugger. And we’re a bit more used to it than many, like.”
Stella nodded. Her egg and chips arrived; she applied herself to it. She found herself liking Sam. Having your little sister run away with a traveller in a van, away with the raggle taggle gypsies-o, was not the sort of thing that middle class people were supposed to approve of, but Stella didn’t do approve. She thought Sam was all right. He reminded her, very slightly, of Dark: a faint similarity in build and colouring, perhaps, but it was more of a vibe: a determination to look after people. Stella liked that, and liked his voice, too. She couldn’t place the accent, but if she’d been forced to pin it down, she’d have said that it was old fashioned, without quite knowing what that meant.
After lunch, they got back in the car and headed, with a growing sense of anticipation, towards Tavistock. Heading down the hill, Stella’s phone buzzed with an incoming text.
“Can you look
at that for me, Lune?”
“It’s from Bee,” Luna said, after a moment. “Serena’s home.”
“Oh, fantastic!”
“And she says: don’t mention Ben.”
“Oh bollocks. I wondered if that had turned to ratshit.”
The winding lanes made travel across the moor twice as long as it should have been. Towards two they pulled into Tavistock. In unspoken agreement, everyone got out of the car and went into the ticket office.
“Excuse me,” Stella said to the morose man behind the panel. She gave her best social smile. “We’re looking for a woman who might have come through here a year or so ago. She’s our mother and I’m afraid she’s missing.” She pushed a photograph of Alys under the grille.
The station master looked disapproving. “You’ve left it a while to come looking, haven’t you?”
“We’ve only just found out that she was headed this way.”
Stella’s smile remained fixed in place; she did not want to irritate the man, but he seemed determined to be unhelpful. He had no recollection of her. The station was equipped with CCTV, but this went back only three months. When asked who might have been on the desk at the time, he simply shrugged. Eventually Stella thanked him, with gritted teeth, and led the way back out into the afternoon sunshine.
“That was a waste of time,” Luna said.
“No, he couldn’t be bothered, could he?” Stella, however, was determined. “There’s a shop over there. We could try that.” She hoped they wouldn’t have to traipse round the whole of Tavistock, which was quite large.
Here, the woman behind the counter was only too happy to be drawn into a drama. “Missing person, is she? I saw it in the papers. But I didn’t see her, otherwise I’d have reported it. I did hear, though, that there was a lady staying for a few nights at the pub up the road, the White Horse, and the landlady did say that she looked a little like the one in the paper, but she had red hair and she was a lot younger.”
“It couldn’t have been her, then,” said Luna, but Stella asked, “Where’s the pub?”
It lay at the bottom of the road, on a corner. It was whitewashed, plain, with late nasturtiums in pots outside the door. They found the landlady behind the bar, and she studied the photographs carefully.
“I don’t think it was your mum, I’m afraid. I did wonder at the time, because it was a week or so before it was in the papers, but the lady who stayed here was younger.” She rifled through the photos. “Now that – that looks a lot like her.”
She pointed to a photo of Alys in jeans and a Bowie t-shirt, holding a stout infant Bee on her lap. It had been taken in the garden of Mooncote; Alys’ long ponytail swung over one shoulder, and there were narcissi growing about her feet. She looked like a rock-group version of Persephone, Stella thought.
“I’d have said that was her. You can’t tell the colour of her hair, this being black and white.”
“Did it look as though it might have been dyed? Her hair, I mean?”
“Yes, it might have been. Your mum didn’t have any sisters, anyone who looked like her?”
“She was an only child, as far as we know. My cousin Nell looks a lot like her, actually.”
“But Nell would have been in the States then,” Luna said.
Stella was thinking hard but none of the ideas that she was coming up with seemed anything other than paranoid. “She must have given you her name.”
“She did, but I can’t remember it – let me look. She might still be on the system.” She went into the back, and Stella glimpsed her scrolling down a computer screen. “Here we are. Lynette Horne.” She spelled both names out.
They looked at each other. “Mum’s middle name was Linnet,” Luna said. And they all knew about ‘Horne’. Stella felt as though the blood was rushing into her face, as though she was suddenly burning up. After all this time, after the police search and publicity, going on a dream, they had found a trace. The landlady was staring.
“So you think this might have been your mum?”
“Very possibly.”
“Oh, I do hope so. But what happened to her? You poor girls. It must be such a nightmare.”
“It’s been pretty awful.” Stella was afraid she might cry. She blinked hard, focusing on the postcards from Marbella and other places which were tacked up on the other side of the bar. She took a breath, aware of the familiar odours of polish and beer.
“You all right?” Luna said in an undertone.
Stella nodded. “So how long did this Lynette Horne stay here? Several nights, you said?”
“Three. Right at the end of August. I remember it, because the weather was so horrible – like a monsoon one day, just after the Bank Holiday, and I remember thinking what a shame it was, because it was just before the kids went back to school. But she went up onto the moor all three days, no matter how much it rained, and I do remember thinking that she was very clever because she never came back wet. Always nicely dressed – casual, you know, jeans and a jacket. But good quality. Barbour. And proper hiking boots.”
“Do you know where she went?”
“No, she didn’t say much about it, although she did say that she didn’t know the area but she’d got a map. I know she went to Postbridge, because we talked about the old bridge, and I know she was very keen to go to Wistman’s Wood. She said something about doing that before she went home, so it would have been on that day, and she didn’t come back, of course, but then we weren’t expecting her.”
“She didn’t have a car,” Sam said. “How did she get up onto the moor? On foot, I suppose.”
“There are buses. She had a timetable and I know she was asking someone questions about the bus to Newton Abbot – the wood’s on the way and there’s a bus stop.”
“Would there by anyone there who’d remember seeing her, do you think? Is there a pub or anything?”
The landlady looked amused. “No, there’s nothing there except a farm. I think they do take guests, though, so you could ask.”
“Okay.” Stella looked at Luna and Sam. “Anything else you can think of to ask?”
They could not, but Stella took the landlady’s phone number in case, and she showed them the location of the wood on the moor: some miles distant, a tiny indication of an ancient monument. “And there are the stone rows, as well.”
“Stone rows?”
“Very old. Like little standing stones. No one knows who put them there. They’re markers, I suppose, up on the moor.”
By the time they were back up on the heights dark clouds were running in from the coast, leaning a line of yellow light over the sea, and splashes of rain spattered the windscreen. They drove in silence, Luna huddled further in her shawls, like a hedgehog trying to hide. They came past the road to the prison, making Stella think of the Hound of the Baskervilles, and then the long rolling road over the moor. Stella found the track that led to the wood with some difficulty, and parked the car.
When she got out, it felt very quiet. She saw Luna looking at the information placard. “It’s National Trust.” They studied it.
“Dwarf oaks,” Stella said. “I didn’t know you could get little oaks. Like bonsai.”
The illustration on the placard was finely drawn, a twisted knot of trees above a dry stone wall. It reminded Stella of a Japanese drawing. It made her want to go into that Celtic knotwork of branches, see what there was to be found there.
The rain had blown over, for now. Stella led the way, striding over the grass with its outcrops of stone. A bare, bald landscape, honed down to the last layer before the earth itself. They saw no one except sheep, masses of dirty wool trundling over the grass, and once, a raven high against the racing cloud, its harsh honk unmistakeable. Sam looked up at that.
“Old dark lady,” he said. Stella said nothing; the raven seemed to go with the day, and she hoped it was not an omen of foreboding. It seemed strange, to be walking over the land which might have been the last place on which her mother had walked, and she
was beginning to be afraid of what they might find, in the twisted oak wood.
Serena
Serena pulled into the drive of Mooncote around lunchtime, having crawled across the landscape from Stonehenge. There had been an accident just outside the Salisbury junction, a lorry overturning and causing a tailback for miles. The enforced time in the car had given her time to think, however, without even the distraction of the radio, which was on the blink, and her attitude had gradually hardened. Enough. It had been good with Ben, when it was good, but she’d seen relationships go this way before, ending gradually and then suddenly, with a very slow deterioration in quality, and then people all of a moment not speaking to one another any more. She was finding it hard to believe that this had happened to her and Ben, but it seemed that it had. And if so, it was over, and Serena was reluctantly free.
She got out of the car and went across the lawn towards the quiet house, but halfway over the lawn she paused, and headed to the orchard instead. She had not expected to see anyone, but the girl was there: the one in the dusk-rose dress. Serena had first seen her when she was a little girl herself, perhaps even before that as a baby, because Alys had told her how she had held out her arms to someone, or something, that no one else could see.
The girl never changed. Now, she looked very young to Serena, who had not seen her for a year or more, but when Serena had been a child, she had thought that the girl was very grown up, and beautiful in her rosy gown. It was Elizabethan, being a sequence of hoops and ruffles, and there were pearls in her ears and around her neck. Her hair was a pale, satiny brown, and her eyes were hazel. Now that Serena was herself grown up, she realised that the girl was still beautiful, but there was a vulnerability in her face, a trepidation, which made Serena fear for her: foolish, because the girl was surely long dead. They had never known whether this sort of spirit, who had presumably been alive and a member of the household, was sentient, conscious and aware, or whether she was merely a kind of action replay, a loop. But she did not seem to have many set patterns, even if Serena had often seen her on the stairs, or in the attics, this had been at different times of day, and the girl’s behaviour had been different, too, sometimes faltering, sometimes smiling.