by Phil Rickman
His eyes panning the dim room for support, passing over Merrily, who’d gone new-native tonight in the black velvet skirt, her cashmere sweater, the lovely terracotta silk scarf Lol had brought back from London.
Pierce had paused. It was clear that he was building up to something. ‘Any second now,’ Lol said, ‘he’s going to call us My Fellow Ledwardinians.’
Merrily smothered a smile behind her woollen glove. The smell of fresh wax wafted from the glistening coat folded on her knees. Lol had bought her that, too, her first actual non-fake Barbour, reproofed in the bathroom this morning with the rain oozing through the cracked putty around the window. She was wishing she’d kept it on now; the heating was, at best, sporadic in the village hall, circa 1964.
Was the heating functioning at all, in fact? Or had Pierce contrived to have it turned off to make the place seem even less, as he would put it, fit for purpose? Give him time and he’d be talking about a new leisure centre, part-funded by a National Lottery grant. Squash courts, pool, sunbeds.
‘So we grew,’ he was saying, ‘and we survived. But government criteria for what constitutes a viable community change all the time. Government get strapped for cash, they looks at what they can close. Think about that. Think what we got to lose.’
A rumble in the audience.
‘Think about the post offices,’ Pierce said. ‘You’ve seen how many of them’ve gone from other villages. And you’ve seen ours put out of its own building into a little cubicle, back of the Eight Till Late.’
Two rows in front, Shirley West sat up. Shirley was running the PO cubicle. Shirley who, as they came in, had peered at Merrily with disapproval – thought a priest should be wearing a cassock and dog collar for hanging washing on the line, mowing the lawn, putting out the bin sacks.
‘So how would you feel,’ Pierce said, ‘if even that was to be axed?’
‘Speaking as chairman of the Parish Council,’ James Bull-Davies said, ‘it’s the first I’ve heard of it.’
‘Colonel, with all respect to the Parish Council, it would hardly be the first body on the consultation list.’
James stood up. We have a role, he’d told Merrily once. That role is to defend. But he looked worn suddenly. Stooping over the table as if the ancestral weight, the centuries of squirearchy, were finally becoming too much for his spine.
‘I . . . suggest we stop sidetracking, cut to the main issue.’
‘This is the main issue, Colonel.’ Pierce folded his arms. ‘Grow or die, like I say. Grow or die.’
Repeating it like he expected everyone to stand up and start chanting Grow or die, grow or die, grow or die!
And then, while he had the momentum, hitting them with the big one: what if the doctor’s surgery were to go, cosy Kent Asprey replaced by whoever was on duty at the time in some soulless community clinic maybe twelve miles away? Twelve miles to travel when you were sick. How about that, people?
Merrily detected a needle squeal from Edna Huws, sometimes church organist and last headmistress of Ledwardine Primary School, afflicted with a long-term blood-pressure problem.
It had started. Rising flames consuming Pierce’s kindling.
And it was raining again, which wouldn’t help. They didn’t have rain on GetaLife/welshborder, the relocation website all about convincing city-based would-be migrants that they could have a greener, saner way of life out here in the west. So appealing this time of year, when Ledwardine uncovered its sensory time-capsule: cobbles flushed amber, cold evenings softened by carols and woodsmoke, mulled wine from the Black Swan.
Lyndon Pierce looked up at the windows.
‘That’s another thing, look. When I was a boy, the fields all around here would flood regular, and the ditches couldn’t hold it and the lanes would be impassable. Now we got the bypass linking us to the main Leominster road – a lifeline.’
He paused, spread his arms wide.
‘It was growth done that for us. Everything we got now we owe to steady growth. That stops, people, we’re in trouble.’
The rain was driving at the windows now, pools swelling on the sills where the putty had rotted away. Pierce clenched his fists, brought them both down at once like mallets on the table.
‘And that’s why we must not throw out the wrong signals by opposing the development of Coleman’s Meadow. Why we can’t afford to listen to the ramblings of cranks from Off. They don’t care if you got nowhere to collect your pension, send off a parcel, get your prescription signed and dispensed when the village is snowbound. They don’t give a toss if this village lives or dies. They only care about what’s already dead. Dead and buried.’
‘I don’t normally want to kill people,’ Lol said to Merrily, ‘as you know.’
Serpent
THE SUNRISE SPRAYED out from behind Cole Hill like a firework, with shivering shards of orange and gold. Jane was standing in the gateway with her bare arms raised, and she looked free and sexy as hell, like her hands were cupping the sun.
An instant of connection.
Probably her all-time favourite picture of herself. Eirion had taken it on his digital SLR, on that last September weekend, the day before he’d left for university. For a long time it had been her screensaver, until she’d realised it was only making her sad.
Now it was stashed in the Sacred folder on the laptop, along with the membership list of the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society. Jane didn’t know why she’d brought it out tonight, unless it was as a kind of prayer to God or the Goddess or whatever unimaginable force might be represented by the bursting of the light over the holy hill.
Long ago, the way to watch the Cole Hill sunrise would have been between the standing stones in Coleman’s Meadow. The stones toppled and buried centuries ago by some pious or fearful farmer but which next year could be back, ancient silhouettes against the red dawn in awesome testament to the sacred status of this place. A ritual reconnecting of the hidden wires. This was what she’d written in an essay. And like, to be here when that came about. Oh God . . . If it came about. If they could prevent Lyndon bastard Pierce fixing it so that future dawns would be rising instead over the fake-slate on the roofs of ranks of crappy, post-modern, flat-pack luxury executive homes.
That wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t. With a few thousand members now, worldwide, the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society was a powerful lobby.
OK, maybe not powerful exactly; councils were rarely influenced by people whose strategies involved subtle threats on the lines of If we cannot stop it by any other means, we are prepared to invoke the Site Guardian. But the word was spreading.
Jane had built up the fire in the vicarage parlour. She was sitting on the sofa with Ethel, a mug of chocolate and the laptop on the coffee table, listening to an accelerating wind driving the rain into the 17th-century timbers. At least you could rely on Mum not to take any shit from Pierce tonight. Mum finally understood.
In fact, things were good with Mum right now, had been for a while. Spiritual differences, if not exactly resolved, were acknowledged as being not insurmountable. You couldn’t, after all, operate as a vicar for very long around here without becoming at least half pagan.
Anyway, no open confrontation any more. These days Jane was kind of wincing at the memory of herself a couple of years ago, doing her cobbled-together ritual to the Lady Moon in the vicarage garden. A little girl, back then. A virgin. Pre-Eirion.
Abruptly, she killed the picture and switched off the laptop. Ethel had nosed under her arm and onto her knee, lay there purring, and Jane stroked her slowly, staring into the reddening log fire.
She picked up the mobile, almost cracked and called Eirion in Cardiff, then pulled herself together and tried Neil Cooper again. Thinking she’d leave a message on his machine so that both he and his wife would know that she definitely wasn’t—
‘Cooper.’
‘Oh—’
‘Jane,’ he said, and if she was honest she’d have to admit he didn’t sound over-e
xcited.
‘Sorry, I thought I’d get the machine. Coops, listen, I’m not stalking you or anything. You gave me your home number, in case anything came up?’
‘And what’s come up, Jane?’
‘Erm . . . well, like . . . nothing. I mean, that’s the point. Nothing’s happening. It’s all stopped. Why’s it all stopped, Coops?’
She felt stupid, but he must surely understand how important this was to her. She was carrying the blazing torch lit by Lucy Devenish, folklorist of this parish, now dead, and if she let it go out . . .
‘Weather’s not helping, obviously,’ Neil Cooper said.
‘You’ve got those tent things you can put over the trenches.’
‘Yeah, but it’s not satisfactory. And there’s no desperate hurry, is there? And anyway, I keep telling you, it’s not my—’
‘There is for me, Coops, I’ll be back at school in the New Year.’
‘Jane, they can’t time the whole project to fit your personal schedule.’
‘I just want— Don’t want to interfere or anything, I just want to be there. On the fringe, quiet as a mouse. Just like want to be there when the stones are raised again.’
‘Well, yeah,’ he said. ‘I can understand that.’
There was something Neil Cooper wasn’t telling her. Or maybe he was just pissed off because the dig had been taken out of the hands of the county archaeology department: too big, too important, needed specialists in prehistory.
‘And let’s not forget,’ Jane said, ‘that if it wasn’t for me you might never’ve discovered it in the first place. I mean, I don’t like to keep throwing this at y—’
‘Jane—’
‘Sorry.’
‘None of us will miss anything, OK? It’ll be on TV. All the best bits, anyway.’
‘Huh?’
His voice had sounded damp and sick in a way that didn’t make sense. ‘What would you expect,’ he said, ‘with Blore in the driving seat?’
‘Sorry . . .’ Jane was on the edge of the sofa. ‘Did you say—what did you say?’
Coops said nothing.
‘Did you say Blore? As in, like, Bill Blore, of Trench One?’
‘I’d hate to think there was another one out there,’ Coops said.
‘Holy shit,’ Jane said.
‘Look, don’t get—’
‘But like, I thought the contract had gone to this . . . Dore Valley Archaeology?’
He was silent again.
‘Come on, Coops, who am I going to tell?’
‘Dore Valley Archaeology,’ Coops said, ‘no longer exists as an independent contractor. In mid-October it was acquired by Blore’s company, Capstone.’
‘Wow. I didn’t know that. I mean, I didn’t know he had a company.’
‘They all do. Archaeology’s a business. Like everything else. And Capstone have swallowed Dore Valley. More people, more resources, more prestige digs, plus TV documentaries on the side. Blore’s got it sewn up, money at both ends.’
‘Bill Blore,’ Jane said slowly. ‘Wow.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Jane . . .’
‘Hey, I’m sorry, but Bill—’
‘You’re missing the point, Jane, and maybe I shouldn’t expect you to see the significance, but you’re thinking about the so-called glamorous TV presenter, while I’m seeing the man who is not Herefordshire Council’s favourite archaeologist.’
Jane thought about this for a moment, and then she started to understand.
‘The Dinedor Serpent.’
‘We still prefer to call it the Rotherwas Ribbon,’ Coops said primly. Well, he would. The council stuck to the original name, Ribbon, because that sounded less sexy than Serpent or Dragon. Easier to ignore.
But it was sexy. Unique, probably. Coleman’s Meadow, with real standing stones to uncover, might turn out to be more immediately spectacular, but the Dinedor Serpent was the only one of its kind in Europe. Seriously significant.
So significant that the philistine bastards on Herefordshire Council were shoving a new road across it.
Jane knew all about this. She’d pasted up the news cuttings as part of her A-level project, with a picture of Prof. William Blore next to the partly uncovered Serpent.
‘Coops, come on, what he said . . . the council were asking for it. You know that.’
‘Let’s not forget that if it hadn’t been for the work on the road, we wouldn’t have found the Ribbon in the first place.’
‘Serpent. Yeah, but—’
‘Same with Coleman’s Meadow and the housing plan. Same with most finds. Most archaeology today is rescue archaeology, you grow to accept that.’
‘Especially in this bloody county,’ Jane said. ‘But that’s what’s so good about Bill Blore. He doesn’t accept bureaucratic bullshit.’
In her picture, big Bill Blore was stripped to the waist, deeply tanned, hard hat at an angle. Thickset, maybe, but not fat. He’d said that Herefordshire, having been neglected for decades, was now yielding stuff that could change our whole perception of Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age societies.
And, because she’d quoted it in an essay, Jane knew exactly what he’d said about the council’s decision to go ahead with the new road, regardless.
‘He said local authorities shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions affecting major national heritage sites. Especially councils as short-sighted, pig-headed and ignorant as Hereford’s.’
‘Words to that effect,’ Coops said stiffly.
‘Those actual words . . . actually.’ Excitement began to ripple through Jane. ‘Coops, this is just so totally cool.’
‘Jane, it’s not. Blore’s got into Coleman’s Meadow through the back door, now he’s running this prestigious dig right under the nose of an authority he’s publicly trashed. That is not cool. That is a very uncomfortable situation for all of us.’
‘Only if you work for the council.’
‘They’re blaming my department, naturally. Lucky I still have a job. OK, unless Dore Valley had told us themselves, there was no way we could’ve known that Blore was quietly moving in while we were negotiating with them, but that’s not how some people see it.’
‘You wanted to leave the council anyway, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ Coops said. ‘I did.’
Another silence. Jane held her breath. She was picking up stuff she could really use – like at the university interviews? To show how seriously au fait she was with trench gossip.
She’d also be able to tell them she’d worked with Bill Blore.
Wow.
‘Just that when I was asked to join Dore Valley as a field archaeologist,’ Coops said, ‘nobody told me it’d be part of the Blore empire.’
‘But isn’t that, like . . . good?’
‘Goodnight, Jane,’ Neil Cooper said.
Bury them Deeper
SHIRLEY WEST WAS, arguably, the most sinister person here. Shirley did foreboding in a way that was supposed to have gone out with the Witchcraft Act.
Impressive in a born-again Christian.
A couple in front of Merrily and Lol had slid away, leaving a clear view of Shirley in that grey, tubular, quilted coat. A lagged cistern with no thermostat, and sooner or later – you just knew – she was going to overheat.
Directly ahead of her, at the front of the stage, two pictures were pinned to a display stand. One was a photo showing an empty field with a five-barred gate, the conical hill rising behind it under an overcast sky.
‘Coleman’s Meadow.’ James Bull-Davies tapped his pen on the photo. ‘Earmarked for development of what are described as executive dwellings – like these.’
Tapping the picture below it: an architect’s sketch of a detached house with a double garage, token timber-framing, landscaped suburban gardens, under a blue-washed summer sky.
‘Field being within the village boundaries, therefore seen by county planners as acceptable infill.’
Merrily swapped a glance with Lol. Especially acceptable to L
yndon Pierce, local councillor and chartered accountant. One of whose clients was, as it happened, the owner of Coleman’s Meadow.
It was blatant, really. And because this was a small county, so much interconnected, so many business and family links, sometimes it seemed almost normal, no big deal.
Pierce had sat down now, was examining his nails, like his part was over. Rain smacked at the windows, making the frames shiver and rattle, smearing the reflections in the glass.
‘Complication, of course,’ James said, ‘being the recent discovery in Coleman’s Meadow, of significant archaeological remains. Now, I don’t want to pre-empt the results of the excavation, but—’
‘Old stones.’ A drawly male voice uncurling from halfway down the hall. Merrily didn’t recognise it. ‘Just a few old stones, long buried.’
‘Megaliths,’ James said. ‘The remains of a Bronze Age monument four thousand years old which people interested in such relics would, understandably, like to have unearthed and conserved.’
‘Not a problem, Colonel,’ Pierce murmured. ‘As I keep saying.’
‘In situ.’
‘Ah.’ Pierce sat back, arms folded. ‘That’s the problem, yes. Should a prime site be sacrificed in its entirety for a few stones that wouldn’t’ve been discovered if it hadn’t been for this project – I think that’s right, isn’t it, Colonel?’
‘Don’t think anyone’s ever denied that. However, we now know about them, and we appear to have two options: re-erecting them as a heritage site or—’
‘Three options, in fact,’ Pierce said mildly. ‘The stones could be dug out and taken away for erection on another site – in a park or somewhere.’
‘Somewhere well away from this village,’ Shirley West said.
She hadn’t moved. All you could see was stiffly permed dark brown hair sitting on the funnel collar of the grey coat.