Closure.
Chapter Thirty-One
2000 BC
Hen swept the hut, stopping now and again to put a hand to her belly. The new life was certain now, moving with little flicks and bubbles, earlier than Drustan had quickened within her, and now the sickness she’d had to hide for fear of the others guessing had abated. She would tell them when her belly began to grow beyond her ability to hide it within her tunic. Hen swept a little more and hummed a tune. She was becoming larger by the day, already clumsier, and the walk up to the sleeping place made her breathless. She’d begun to conjure a warrior, passing by on his way from the wastes of the north, on a journey in honour of his ancestors, pausing on the far side of the dale to cook and eat and warm himself, now the days were short and the cold more lingering. She had met him, lain with him, and he had gone on his way … yes. This was not unbelievable, and Vast and Airwen would not question, although she looked forward to Caerlynn having some pointed comments to make.
A twinge in her back stopped her sweeping and she straightened with a grimace. But her home was tidy now, there was meat still hanging above the fire, the new curtain at her door stopped the winds and she had woven more rugs for the bed. Midwinter had passed and they were all still safe. Still fed.
Her mind was suddenly full of an image. One she had fought long to erase, herself tangled in feather-filled covers, a young man beside her, head bent over a book. She had woken from a nightmare to find him reading, his attention as ever on his degree, his budding career … Hen sat on the edge of her own bed, feeling once more the difference between that pampered, soft time and the rough hardness of her existence now, and a momentary fear gripped at her. What if I become ill? Drustan was delivered easily, childbirth holds no fears for me, but what if the baby takes an infection? What if … what if …
Hen laid a hand on her belly and took deep breaths. Knew this was natural, knew it was her pregnancy making her fear and dream and imagine, her desire to protect her unborn child making her worry. If the child died, he would be buried where the ancestors would protect his spirit, with the warriors and strong men who had been laid in the sleeping place for generations before she even came to this place, where the mothers who lay there would nurse him and care for him.
She shivered. Those beliefs were not hers. They were beliefs and imaginings that she had taken on from Tor, her knowledge of that other life kept stifled beneath the ritual and routine that they believed kept them safe here. Hen felt the pull she had ignored for years. That little ‘tug’ that told her she knew what happened next, could almost chart the course of the future – the coming of iron, Romanisation, invasion, war … Her past was their present and future, her knowledge was their magic. Her ‘otherness’ was her place among them. But she had a place. She was necessary.
Hen gathered her cloak from its place by the fire, pulled it around her, picked up the bucket and went to the river. All was quiet. Tor was out hunting the big wild cattle that had come down off the high hills as the weather had worsened, and Vast and Airwen were weaving together by Vast’s fire, Airwen growing in strength again now by the day. The children were gathered in Caerlynn’s hut, she had taken it upon herself to teach the little ones the songs and stories of the family. Mostly, Hen suspected, because it could be done indoors, by a big fire, and involved being bossy. She smiled to herself and dipped the bucket. A crown of frost was forming around the river edges; they would be glad of Tor’s return with fresh meat now that winter was gaining pace.
Something alerted her and she let the bucket slip back to earth. Standing over by the rocks that shielded their homes from the rain and wind was the woman. The soft woman, who had helped her save Airwen’s life, and promised never to return. Grace …
Why was she here? Her fear of Tor had been obvious, she would not have come back unless … unless … no. Hen could not reason it. Hen looked over her shoulder, as though Tor may be there, moving through the curtains of the hut, watching them. Yet the woman stayed, unmoving. Waiting. Waiting for me.
‘What do you want?’ Hen felt the words come in the old, now unfamiliar tongue. ‘Why did you come back? Tor—’
‘Has gone into the hills. I was watching. From the look of him, he’ll be gone some time, so don’t bother threatening me with him, right now.’ The words were short. Angry. There was a fire about Grace now, something that burned behind her eyes and gave her shoulders a rigidity under the bag she wore slung across her back. ‘In fact, right now, I don’t care if he’s standing right behind me with a big knife. Because I am here to get things sorted out for Duncan, and I am a furious mass of steaming hormones and fight.’ A deep breath. ‘You’re pregnant.’
Hen nodded and looked to her belly. ‘The child will be born near the Midsummer.’
‘Yes, but … I’ve only been gone a couple of days. That means time moves differently here … oh, bugger, that might cock things up a bit …’ Grace fell silent for a moment. ‘No. I still don’t care.’ She moved forward and grasped at Hen’s arm, and Hen was surprised at the strength of her grip. ‘I’ve got Duncan having a breakdown back there,’ she said, with a head-jerk towards the wall of stone, ‘and it’s all your fault.’ Hen tried to shake off the hand, but Grace tightened her fingers until Hen could feel her thumb pressing the soft flesh near her elbow. ‘You will damn well listen to me! I know Duncan didn’t behave well to you, but did you ever think how selfish you were being? Running off and leaving him to face the music?’
Hen felt the baby kick. Felt the chill of the air sweeping down from the high dales, the fingers hard on her forearm. Knew this was here and now, but the echoes of what had been and what was to come were made solid in this woman. ‘I had to get away.’
‘Oh, right.’ The hand suddenly released, and Hen’s arm fell by her side. The woman’s words were heavy and cold as the metal Tor carried. ‘So it never occurred to you that Duncan would be in trouble when you didn’t come back? You just left, then, whoopee, you meet a bloke, have a baby, a new life and … what? Leave Duncan to his fate? He loved you! He was just a young man and a bit of a bastard, but he’s suffered every day since you went.’ The voice softened a little. ‘Look. I know what it’s like to want to run away, when Jamie … when my husband died I basically could not see a future. I wanted to disappear, hide forever, but, you know what? I had a school full of kids to think about – okay, not all of them would have noticed and of the ones that did, most wouldn’t care but …’ A whisper now. ‘… for the ones that would, I couldn’t do it.’
‘You lost someone?’ Hen felt the turmoil of thoughts and history yet to come.
‘My husband. He was ill.’ A momentary dash of a wrist across her eyes; was she crying? ‘But that doesn’t matter. I need you to come back with me. I need you to help Duncan.’ Her expression changed, Hen had moved, almost unaware of her body’s reluctance to face the thought. ‘You owe him, Anya.’
Hen looked again at the woman, the new knowledge giving her a different view. Not soft. Not untouched as I thought her. She has lost a man, a lover, her pain hides behind her eyes but I see it now. So she knows, she understands a little of how it is for me – how I feel for Tor, how I cannot leave, and yet – yet she asks this of me? How can she? ‘I—’
‘And I will pay you.’
Those last words brought mirth. Hen let out a shout of laughter that surprised even her. ‘We have no coins here. Money is worthless. We trade with the further family across the dale, and at Midwinter and Midsummer with those who come to the sleeping place. You have nothing of any use to me.’ She half turned away. ‘I will not come with you. I know what I did was wrong, but this is my life now.’
‘Not even for this?’
Hen had turned her sights to the huts, to where a rime of frost was beginning to crisp the edges of the grass. A bird called, loud in the swooping air. But the tone of the woman’s voice was so definite, so sure, that she t
urned back. The bag was on the ground now, spilling its secrets in multi-coloured packets across the turf.
‘For your baby? For the others?’
Hen crept forward. Bent her head, almost in reverence. Shapes were letters, she remembered this. Slowly her mind fitted them together. Unfamiliar names, yet. She picked up one packet, wincing at the strangeness of its feel, smooth and cool and hard, like the skin of a dead snake. On the ground beside it lay one of the woman’s earrings, cast loose in her anger. Hen closed a hand around it, and tucked it in the folds of her cloak, a trifle that may amuse the children at a late-winter fireside, a totem from a long-ago life. She was surprised by her urge to hold it so close, to hook it in her own ear and admire the reflection in still water. Perhaps my tie to that time is stronger than I think? But then she was distracted by the alien containers, their regularity and lines so strange to her now.
‘Antibiotics.’ Another small rain of packets. ‘Scalpels. Some asthma inhalers. Hypodermics, Dressings.’ Grace picked up a small bag. ‘I’ve no idea what this is, probably not even legal. Oh, and some scissors. We said we were collecting for a third world country, picked up any unused medicines and stuff people didn’t need any more – I really must have words about finishing the course of tablets with some of them. Painkillers. Nothing too hardcore, but …’
Hen found herself licking her lips. Drugs. Medicines that would help them all. Reinforce my place as healer. ‘I … these—’
‘Uh uh.’ Grace bent and began stuffing them back into the bag. Hen watched them vanish, feeling her heart sink a little within her. ‘Payment, I said. Not a gift.’
‘But I cannot.’ Hen spoke slowly, the words filling her mouth like vomit, as the thoughts filled her mind.
‘Can’t? Or won’t?’ The last of the small packages disappeared, the flap covered them and Grace busied herself closing buckles. ‘Think very carefully, Anya. I’m not asking you to stay, just help Duncan.’
Hen looked from the bag to the woman’s face, then around at the wild, clear lines of the hills, the shadow of the sleeping place, the outline of the standing stone. My life. Have I been right all this time?
‘What must I do?’
Chapter Thirty-Two
‘Rich? What’s happening?’ Duncan had come down from the barrow where he’d been photographing the site, to find Richard sending all the students and volunteers off to the pub.
‘Giving everyone a half day. Pub’s having a cider festival, reckoned I might as well go with it and let them go than have everyone half-arsed and finding excuses.’ Richard straightened away from the wood he’d been examining.
‘Where’s Grace?’ Duncan scanned the horizon as, up on the ridge, cars jam-packed with people, plus the university mini-bus began pulling away in a makeshift convoy that looked more like an evacuation than an afternoon jaunt. ‘And really? Everyone going to the pub? Even that weird bunch that don’t drink, don’t smoke and are always clean?’
Richard gave him a look. It was the look he used on students who were messing about in a trench or who failed to observe the correct protocols handling artefacts. An ‘I cannot believe you are being this stupid’ look.
Duncan wondered what he’d done to deserve it, and tried to review his last three questions, because they’d sounded fine to him. He looked to see if Grace was anywhere among the deserting mob, but, although Tabitha’s Fiat was there, he couldn’t make out Grace’s shape inside it. ‘Okay then. Are we off to join them?’ Grace, half a bottle of wine, nice chat – yep, sounds like a good afternoon to me.
‘No.’ Richard teased a little more waterlogged soil, exposing another half inch of wood. ‘We’re staying here.’
‘You are getting way too dictatorial, you know that?’ Duncan was aware that this sounded a bit brusque, even from a misery guts like him, but he hadn’t seen much of Grace for a couple of days now and he had the horrible feeling he was suffering withdrawal. ‘Not even a swift half? You are a slave driver, Duggleby, you know that?’
Duncan bent beside Richard and watched the gradual uncovering. It was more obviously a platform now, at the end of a run of wooden walkway that had led, once, into a marshy pond. They were turning up ritual deposits downstream, an axe head older than the rest of the site, a bone needle, a carved stone figurine of what may have been a child, all things broken, deliberately it seemed.
‘Shit.’ Now Duncan’s eye was caught by another movement up on the ridge. ‘Now what?’ The all too familiar lines set a coldness over him, an antagonistic prickle down his spine, and he forced himself to relax. To breathe. The police car might be incidental. Maybe they were just passing by, checking out the site? He lowered his head again. Twatting Marcus frigging Sunley can shove his buggering suspicions up his Iron Age. How long is this going to go on for? Right. Well, he can bloody well walk all the way down here, I am not going up there to meet him halfway.
‘Marcus.’
‘Professor McDonald.’
The nods they exchanged were so polite as to be practically Victorian. Duncan stood away from the still-trowelling Richard; he had a good four inches in height over Marcus and reckoned he might as well use every advantage he could muster. ‘What brings you here? This time?’ He really tried not to make those last two words sound sarcastic, but was well aware that they did.
‘Shall we go up to the canteen? Have some coffee?’ Richard glanced at his watch. ‘It should be quiet up there now.’
Duncan felt confused, and, by the look of him, Sunley was equally baffled. But neither of them was going to show the other that they suspected that someone had completely lost the plot, so the three men trailed up to the marquee on the hillside. Duncan was quietly amused at the way Sunley was trying to find out what the hell was going on whilst attempting to appear in complete control of the situation, while he hoped, oh, how he hoped, that Richard was behind all this and there was going to be some form of denouement, rather than a couple of cups of embarrassed coffee and a bewildering conversation.
‘So, there was a phone call, someone asked myself to attend?’
Asked ‘me’ to attend, Duncan silently corrected.
‘Something to do with the still-outstanding suspected murder of Miss Anya Goddard?’ Now Inspector Sunley looked around the inside of the canvas structure as though he suspected a body in one of the freezers that was about to pop out like a jack in the box.
Richard brought some mugs of coffee over and looked at his watch again. ‘Well, if you’d just like to wait a—’
‘I am Anya Goddard.’
All three men jumped. Duncan’s chair fell over as he stood up. ‘Anya?’ he said, his voice faint. Grace stood, muddy and a little dishevelled, at the entrance to the tent, and beside her, ‘Anya?’ Unmistakable. Older, her skin weathered and etched like a metallurgic experiment, smaller than he remembered, and chunkier, but … ‘Anya?’
And he was aware of Marcus chiming in, with even deeper disbelief, ‘Anya?’ and he remembered that Marcus had held quite a torch for her while they’d all been students. Maybe that had been one of the reasons why he’d pursued Duncan with such dedication?
Anya stepped into the tent. Duncan’s whirling brain accepted that she was wearing clothes that looked as though they had been borrowed, and even then didn’t fit very well, and it was definitely Grace’s coat over the top, but then everything descended into a chaos of questions from Marcus, Anya’s explanation that she had joined a secluded, religious order and hadn’t realised anyone had been hunting for her. That she was here to clear Duncan’s name. Her speech was staccato, she stumbled over words like someone unused to speech, but her meaning was clear.
In the background, even whilst his mind reeled, Duncan was aware of Grace, mouthing along to Anya’s reasons for disappearing, her offers of a DNA sample to authenticate her identity, and Anya’s frequent glances both to Grace, and around herself at the
canvas walls of the tent and the kitchen hardware behind them.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. This girl, woman, he corrected himself. She’d been in his mind, in his life inescapably for the last fifteen years, and here she was, ordinary. Mudstained. Wearing handmade leather shoes and a woollen tunic poking out from beneath Grace’s coat. He wanted so much to ask her – how could she have done it? What life was truly like, three thousand years in the past? But with Richard and Marcus there, and her holding to her story of this isolated community she had joined, who spurned contact with the modern world, how could he?
How could you? It was the unspoken question that ran between them, every time he met her eye. How could she have hidden herself so far in the past? How could he have behaved so carelessly towards a bereaved young woman? Duncan couldn’t stop looking at her. Anya. If you’d stayed, by now we could have been married with a bunch of children. Or you’d have qualified and gone your way as a doctor, helping people, and I’d have carried on burying myself in the earth, in the past. He found he was shrugging his shoulders up to his ears and tried to relax. Tried not to listen to the story that Grace had obviously coached Anya into, to the vaguely Cornish accent in her voice now. She’s been away from you for fifteen years. She’s not the Anya you knew. She’s someone stronger.
She met his eye once more across the tent. Marcus had finished writing things down and was talking to Richard with an expression that suggested he had recently been struck with a large haddock, but it was only Anya who Duncan could focus on. He was aware of Grace too, a quiet presence still in that doorway, but Anya’s solid figure drew his eye, and then the rest of him. She stood as he approached, and cast her eyes down to the floor.
‘Anya.’ And then he stopped. Fifteen years’ worth of words choked his throat and all he could do was shake his head.
Living in the Past Page 26