Judith was shaking, her arms wrapped around herself. ‘I don’t want Chloe involved with the well. I don’t want her upset in any way.’ She reached out and grabbed her daughter, snatching the pottery out of her hand and throwing it to the ground. Before anyone could respond, she swung the child up into her arms, walking quickly back towards the house. Chloe stared over her mother’s shoulder, holding Sage’s gaze until she was carried out of view. Her fingers dug into her mother’s neck, leaving little red welts.
Elliott scooped up the pot shard. ‘Are you OK?’
Sage nodded, watching the door close, hearing a lock turned. ‘Just a bit surprised.’ She rummaged in her pocket and found her spare set of keys. She dropped them into his hand. ‘Can you two put the bones in my van? I want to be prepared in case she orders us off the property.’ Then she took out a pen and one of the find record cards. She jotted down an apology and her mobile phone number and dropped it through the letterbox of Bramble Cottage.
4
5th July 1580
Stones to be cut for the new well, two masons and a master, at five pence each day and ten pence for the master mason eighteen shillings and eight pence to date
Accounts of Banstock Manor, 1576–1582
The masons have started lining the new well. The old one, being at the back of the house, is only convenient for the use of one property, and brackish at best. Banstock stands on a promontory surrounded by the sea: it creeps into the soil and shallow wells. This one is but thirty years old and is already useless for drinking, built as it was from bits of stone from the abbey. Some say it was cursed by the abbot as he was chased from his own church, beaten and left for dead in his herb garden.
The new well will be for the use of all the houses in the village of Banstock. It will be at the side of the road. The water man advises it is fed from a natural spring. The mason, Master Clintock, having much knowledge of wells but no longer able to go down the ladder, supervises the men as they set the stones into the shaft. Already the base, a great slab of limestone cut for the purpose, is covered with two feet of water, which makes the mortaring difficult. Boys heave up buckets filled by the masons each morning, and tip them into the pond in front of the church, with a choir of lamentation from the resident ducks and geese. Only then can the work resume.
As the steward of the Banstock estate I shall be asked to account for the bill for this second well, and already the masons are disputing the figure. I have told them I shall pay no more than five pence a day hire to each man but I know I would pay six for fast work, and they would manage with four. They are working fast to race the water, and so far are winning, but each night gives the spring the advantage, so I have authorised the use of extra lamps to extend the day through the whole length of the well. It is nearly two rods deep and we tasted the water before the mortaring began and found it sweet.
Viola, the youngest daughter of Lord Banstock, is with me. Her father and I deem it better that she be out of the house as her sister lies mortally affected by the red pox. Viola teaches a group of children to write their numbers in the road with a long pole. The hem of her dress is dusty, her hands are yellow with clay from helping to dig and she looks nothing like the daughter of a baron. Yet I admit I do not wish to stop her, for the long days of childhood are passing faster than she imagines, in her fifteenth year.
Five years ago the succession was assured, with two adult sons and a clutch of married daughters. Now bad fortune and illness have left us with just one male heir, and him on a perilous journey with Drake. At the manor my Lady Flora’s women are a-twitter at her belly, and Lord Banstock, yet again, prays for a healthy son.
Vincent Garland, Steward to Lord Banstock, His Memoir
5
Wednesday 27th March
There was no sign of Judith Bassett or her car when Sage arrived at the cottage to set up the following morning. As Elliott was setting up the tables under the awning – Steph was at the university, attending classes – a car pulled onto the gravel drive behind her van. A young man in torn jeans and a graffiti-covered jacket jumped out.
Elliott strode over to meet him. ‘Can I help you?’ His tone didn’t sound very helpful.
‘It’s OK, Ell, I’ll deal with this.’ Sage watched him walk back to the table, still scowling. The man fished in the pocket of his leather jacket.
‘Hi. Dr Westfield, right?’ He flashed her an ID card. ‘Paul Turpin, structural engineer. I’m here to have a look at the well.’
She shook his hand. ‘Sage. It’s over here.’
Turpin stopped just short of the edge, and scanned the hole. ‘Bloody hell. It’s way too close to the house. If it collapses, it could take the foundations and back wall out.’ He touched the top of the ladder. ‘Tell me you haven’t been down there.’
‘OK,’ Sage lied, ‘I haven’t been down there.’
‘You can’t just climb down into a well that old. It’s likely to collapse on you.’
Sage smiled at him. ‘It seems in such good condition.’
‘Of course it’s in good condition, it’s been filled in. But if you take out the stabilising fill, you have a circular five-hundred-year-old garden wall.’ He leaned over, looking down into the void. ‘You’ve gone down, what, three metres?’
‘Almost. The thing is, two metres down – easy reach with tools – we found a human bone.’
Turpin looked up at her, his fringe flopping over a row of studs in one eyebrow. If she hadn’t seen his credentials, Sage would have taken him to be an art student.
‘Wow.’ He knelt on the tarpaulin surrounding the well, and peeled it back from the edge. ‘That’s good masonry,’ he said. ‘I mean, for a five-hundred-year-old death trap. Well mortared, dressed to fit tightly.’
‘So it’s safe.’
‘Ha.’ He started scraping away at the top stone. ‘No. Have you seen this?’
Sage bent to look. The top ring of stones was flat, but Turpin’s scratching had revealed what appeared to be intentional tool marks.
‘I thought the well would have a little wall around it for safety, and might have been levelled at some point,’ she said.
‘Some wells are like that, mostly to prevent injury, but flat wells are also fairly common. This one probably would have had a capstone or wooden cover, with a hole big enough to take a bucket, but it would stop people and animals falling in.’ Turpin stood, and put one foot onto the top of the ladder they had been using to bring up buckets of spoil.
‘I thought you said it wasn’t safe?’
‘Not for you, but I’m a professional.’ He carefully climbed a few steps down the ladder, and started scraping the algae and mud away from the walls. ‘I think this was always meant to be a shallow well.’
‘How do you know?’ Sage could see his hands moving over the stones, in the light of the rigged lamp.
‘The stones are mortared very solidly at the top, well fitted together. Down here,’ his voice echoed in the tight space, ‘the mortar isn’t complete. I don’t think it was designed to be. The water table’s high in this area of the Isle of Wight, over Pleistocene clays on top of marls and limestones. The looser fit of the stones allowed water to trickle in.’ He was momentarily illuminated by a flash from his phone. ‘The water must have picked up salt at high tide. There are a lot of crystals down here.’
Sage waited until Turpin had climbed out before she spoke. ‘We need to get the infill out to completely remove the skeletons and hopefully, establish the history of the interment.’
‘Of course.’ He leaned forward and showed her the image on his phone. ‘Look at this.’
One of the blocks had a carving in it. The algae had clung to the inscription after he had scraped at the surface. The shapes were crudely scratched but complex, curves and squiggles that looked intentional. It reminded her of ancient Greek, but she couldn’t quite place it. ‘What is it?’
‘Absolutely no idea. It looks like there are other inscriptions down there. Creepy.’
&
nbsp; ‘Why creepy?’ She leaned over the edge.
‘Well, someone had to go down the well to carve them. That’s good limestone, so it would have taken some time. They would have had to do it by candle or lamp light, and the well would have had to be empty.’
Sage studied the carved shapes, brushing more mud off the stones. Curves would have been much harder to carve than straight lines; someone had gone to a lot of trouble to put them in a circle around the well. ‘I’ve never heard of a well being decorated like that. Maybe it’s for luck, or some sort of religious blessing.’ Sage called Elliott over to show him the picture. ‘Or possibly the stones were carved before they were used for the well,’ she speculated. Then her memory threw up an image. ‘I think there might be something similar on a beam inside the cottage. Over the fireplace.’
Elliott stepped forward. ‘Can we get a copy of that photo?’
‘Sure.’
‘Good idea. Could you send it to my work email, please?’ Sage considered the engineer’s words. ‘You said “good limestone”. What did you mean?’
‘Definitely not quarried on the Island.’
She reached for her project bag, and unfolded the laminated 1866 map of the area. ‘The old abbey, here, was broken up after the dissolution of the monasteries.’ She tapped the map. ‘Apparently, the site’s completely cleared now, but a lot of the local buildings have some of the blocks. I wondered if some of the stone for the cottage came from the abbey.’
‘That could be it.’
‘So maybe it was already carved, like I said.’
‘I doubt it, this isn’t fine work.’ Turpin shrugged. ‘Empty it out and have a look. There’s a contractor, Rob Greenway. He’s a caver, and he also digs and drills wells. Give him a ring. He can dig out that lot quicker, and probably more safely, than you can. But no more exploring. Just put out a tarp next to the well and Rob will bring the fill up for you.’ He pulled a colourful scarf from a pocket, and wound it around his neck. ‘It’s cold, isn’t it?’
Sage knelt down to examine more of the symbols. ‘These carvings don’t look ecclesiastical, they’re just deep scratches. They look like folk symbols, superstitious shapes for good luck. They would be well worth another look.’
Elliott bent over the image on Turpin’s phone. ‘I’ll look them up, see if I can find anything similar on a database.’
‘We’ve got dead bodies, weird carvings and ghosts,’ Sage said. ‘I’m a scientist. I just want to work out what happened here. People are already telling me the house is haunted.’
Turpin smiled. ‘Dead bodies, spooky carvings, old houses. Of course it’s haunted. Or it will be, if you go down the well and it collapses on you.’
* * *
An hour after Paul Turpin left the excavation, Sage was surprised to see Judith Bassett carrying out a tray of tea and biscuits. She handed it to Sage. ‘I’m sorry about yesterday. I just saw the well, and Chloe – I didn’t want to make her sad or frightened. The idea of those poor people down there, it upset me.’
Sage smiled, put the tray down on a worktable. ‘We understand. It must be incredibly unsettling to find bodies in your garden, especially with the other stresses you are under.’
Elliott stuffed his phone into his pocket and took a mug, nodded his thanks, then turned back to cleaning pottery.
‘He doesn’t say much, does he?’ Judith said quietly, handing Sage the second mug.
‘He’s very focused. He’s doing a PhD, and takes it very seriously.’ Sage could see Elliott turn to Steph. She immediately came over, wiggling her fingers in her nitrile gloves.
‘Ooh. Tea.’ Steph wrapped her hands around the mug. ‘Thank you, my hands were freezing in that water. I’m washing off pottery,’ she explained. ‘Some of it’s late Tudor, which is quite unusual for this part of the Island. Normally we’d get this quality of finds at big sites like manors and churches.’
‘Have you found anything new?’ Judith looked across at the tables where trays were laid out with finds. ‘No more bodies, hopefully.’
Sage answered. ‘Well, nothing we’ve found suggests a third person. It looks like one baby and one adult, probably female. The skull is neither classically male nor female, but the bits of pelvis we found suggest the remains of an adult female.’
‘So a mother and baby?’
‘Maybe. We’ll be able to tell more when we have the rest of the pelvis.’ Sage sipped her tea. ‘The sixteenth century was a time of high infant mortality, deadly diseases. Maybe the well was useless; the surveyor said it was very salty. So in an emergency, people might have used a disused well to dispose of bodies, although it seems unlikely.’
Steph chimed in. ‘People cared deeply about burial practices, they still do.’
Judith shuddered in the fresh breeze. At least weak sunshine was breaking through the clouds. ‘It’s very sad.’ She wrapped her scarf more tightly around her neck.
‘But a long time ago,’ said Sage. ‘Steph, where’s that jug piece you found?’
Steph showed Judith the handle of a jug she was cleaning up. ‘Some of these pots were imported from Europe. Good quality. The owners of the cottage were prosperous.’
Judith smiled faintly, but didn’t look interested. She followed Sage over to the awning as a few spots of rain fell, and nodded at Sage’s stomach. ‘This can’t be an easy job for you, being pregnant.’
Sage shrugged. ‘Baby’s bones are always sad, but this all happened four hundred odd years ago, going by pottery. Some pieces date from around the middle of the fifteen hundreds.’
‘How far along are you?’
Sage felt slightly uneasy at the probing. She wasn’t sure how she felt about the pregnancy herself. ‘Six months.’
Judith smiled a little more warmly, moved her hand as if to touch Sage’s curved belly, but seemed to think better of it. Sage stepped away anyway. She hated it when people thought pregnant women were public property.
‘I remember being pregnant with Chloe. James and I were so happy. Just starting out together, selling our flats and buying a house together, planning a wedding.’
A stab of yearning shot through Sage, quickly suppressed. Marcus. ‘The father and I… we don’t live together.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry.’
Sage was aware that the students were listening, then Steph turned her head away. ‘No, it’s fine. He didn’t want a baby. It’s my choice.’
Judith turned to go into the house. ‘Don’t get too cold.’
* * *
When Sage put her bag in the van Elliott followed her.
‘I was wondering if I could get a lift into Newport?’ He looked back at the cottage. ‘Steph’s finished already.’
‘I’m sorry, Elliott. I’m going straight home to Ryde. Do you have my spare keys?’
He rummaged in his jeans pocket. ‘They’re in my bag, I can get them—’
She waved a hand. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get them tomorrow. Sorry about the lift.’
‘No problem.’ He nodded to her and turned away. ‘See you.’
The van started first time, and she drove around the village to get onto the harbour road. Most of the houseboats had their lights on, and there was a drift of woodsmoke over the road from a couple of them. It was only twenty minutes or so drive to Ryde, but the road was narrow and wound through several villages. This was the Island life she liked; the different communities had their own character. Her mother had often said that each village was like its own island. Many older people only went onto the mainland once or twice a year. The isolation was one of the reasons Yana, Sage’s mother, had wanted to leave, but her father was an Islander and missed it. He wasn’t just an Islander, he was a West-Wighter, from a tiny hamlet called Five Houses.
Sage slowed down to join a couple of cars following a tractor. Finally she came over the hill and glimpsed the sea again, before driving down to Ryde seafront. Her flat overlooked the sea beyond the hovercraft terminal, and it was a relief to park beside her own car and t
rudge up three flights of stairs to the flat. This isn’t going to be easy when the baby is born. She shouldered her work bag for the last climb.
Marcus was there, of course. Sprawled on her bed, leafing through her five-year diary.
‘There you are.’ He stood up, naked and unembarrassed because his body was beautiful. It should be, the amount of time and money he spends on it. He kissed her hungrily, insistently, and it sparked an immediate response in Sage that made her annoyed at herself.
‘I thought we split up,’ she grumbled. ‘I remember throwing you out.’ She pushed him away, his skin making her hands tingle.
‘Lovers’ tiff.’ He lay on his back and picked up the diary again. ‘Is this some kind of scoring system? Am I doing well?’ He grinned up at her with an air of possession rather than humour. ‘Silly question. Why are you still dressed?’
She snatched the diary off him. ‘That’s my menstrual cycle. Was my menstrual cycle, which you saw to. Does your wife know you’re here?’
The grin slipped. ‘She’s at her mother’s. Her sister’s got some family crisis. So we have all night together.’
Sage took off her fleece and walked to the window. Her top-floor flat had a good view over the Solent, and ferries and ships passing between the Island and the south coast of the mainland. She had been born on the Island but her parents had moved to Hampshire before she started secondary school. Years at university at South Solent had left her feeling like a stranger when she was home. At least here she could see boats constantly coming and going; it made her feel less stranded. She leaned her forehead against the cold glass for a moment.
‘Marcus, I was serious. This has got to stop. Before the baby comes.’
‘Why?’
Sage turned to look at her lover, displaying himself on the bed. It was as if he was always saying ‘look at me’. He seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘It’s just sex, and great company.’
For you, maybe. The emotion she had carried, ignored by Marcus, was fading. ‘I need to get a real life, a real partner one day. Now I need to concentrate on the baby.’
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