As the pattern and purpose of the stranger’s story became clear, Edyth pulled her furs round her shoulders. Her mind shied from the remembrance of Harold’s corpse.
The Bosham Boy had dreamed a plan which he spoke to Malet in French: Harold’s body hauled in a net, far out to sea, a burial place impossible to discover. Malet hesitated. The Boy spat on the purple-wrapped body of the king then smiled up at Malet. The impermanence of the sea would allow no shrine. With that, Malet was persuaded.
Edyth pictured the boys taught alongside her sons by the elders of the church at Bosham. One of them?
‘No names,’ the stranger said.
Malet’s horse tossed his head and high-stepped on the cliff top as the Boy rowed out to sea with the purple wrappings. As soon as the net splashed overboard Malet, impatient, turned his horse to leave without witnessing the marker which bobbed to mark the place.
The Boy had family in that village, fisher folk. A few days later, wanting to pray forgiveness to Harold for his disrespect, he rowed out to the marker and transferred the royal remains to a fishing basket to allow the fish to clean the bones. The basket was checked regularly, changed often for another of tighter weft and weave, each basket made anew, woven with prayers for the king.
Edyth reached out to touch the rush woven neat as cloth. The basket gave off a smell brackish as a joined shell from the seabed cracked open in dry air, like the oysters she had shared with Harold twenty years since, their wrists tied in the binding knot of their hand-fasting.
‘All flesh has gone,’ he said.
Of this she was glad; his remains would be clean and strong. And there was no head. She was glad she would never gaze into the empty sockets of his skull. They will not return to her the heat of the man but these bones might be a different memento. Her children’s children chanted a rhyme as they played their hand-games of chance, gathering and counting and throwing small stones and bones. Her game of chance lay in the latticed dark of woven rush.
As the stranger placed the basket in her arms Edyth thought of the canons who had visited from Waltham not long ago. They told her Guillaume le Bâtard had allowed Harold’s mother to bury two of her sons at Bosham and also gave permission for Harold’s remains to be buried at the religious house he had founded at Waltham. She did not believe them. The canons’ true desire was for the abbey to become a shrine, a place of pilgrimage to which a throng of pilgrims would bring offerings of money to King Harold’s resting place.
Edyth told the canons she would not search for Harold again, knowing well that even if they did not find him, they would spin an untruth to suit their purposes. She allowed the dogs to unsettle their horses before whistling them to her.
The broad-shouldered stranger mounted his horse and left her standing in the doorway. At first light, she must ride with the hounds on the other side of the moat where the rooks swirl a cauldron of black over a stand of trees. She could keep him here, where he had ridden with her; bury his bones like twigs in the forest. Harold loved these broad horizons, had thought them not dissimilar to the flatlands of his Wessex manor. She could bury him where the rooks gather as the light thickens, a place where the men would not hunt boar because it was too marshy for the hooves of their horses. Even the dogs whined and cowered at the earth’s suck.
She turned towards the doorway and the fire beyond, the basket in her arms light as the winter air.
45
Harry swerves into the gateway of a field and gets out, leaving the engine running. They must be lost. Nora stays where she is, huddled in the van. The fan heater, turned to the highest setting, whines frantically as it whirs. Harry pulls on his woolly hat and gloves and gazes out across the flat fields towards the west, where the white sky has flattened the sunset into a rose-coloured smudge across the horizon. They are in the middle of nowhere. Harry walks round the van to the passenger side.
The door drops on its hinges as he opens it. Straight away, though she can’t see them, she hears the cacophony of rooks.
‘We’re here,’ he says.
She tugs the zipper on her fleece up to her neck. Outside the van the air is raucous with coarse croaks mixed with higher chirps and squawks, a clash of sound like the orchestra tuning before a performance. Her eyes fill with tears. Freezing air dries the back of her nose and throat as she takes a long breath. She has not ventured out much since Noah’s funeral; weary from inactivity, she thrusts her hands into her pockets and steps slowly towards the gate. Her body is stiff from the long drive and tractors have carved deep ridges in the mud at the field entrance, making it difficult to walk on. Harry reaches into the back of the van to grab her bundle of warm clothing – hat, gloves and scarf.
She has never seen so many rooks. Across the ploughed fields towards the distant trees, the furrowed earth seethes with black. She leans on the metal bar of the gate. At her feet, slabs of mud glisten in light from a low sun.
The hole they dug for Noah, though deep, was not much more than a foot long. She dropped a sprig of holly on to his wicker casket. Behind her, the churchyard was crowded with people from the village, who stood in quiet groups, their presence behind her a comfort though she was unable to look anyone in the face. In the end, though there was no court case, Nora had been cautioned, the criminal offence formally recorded; her fingerprints, photograph and DNA taken.
Clare, the family liaison officer, was right: when Nora thinks of Noah now, she sees the holly with its berries resting on basket weave. She sees the faded blue hand towel with its border of swans. And she sees the three photographs taken by Clare before the funeral. A memory, of you and Noah, Clare said. They were sitting on Eve’s terrace with the creek flowing past behind her, Noah in his wicker casket on her lap. Eve had threaded holly sprigs into the basket weave.
‘You’ll need these,’ Harry says. He holds out an extra pair of socks along with a pair of wellington boots he has fetched from the back of the van. She doesn’t answer. The air is filled with the noise of rooks, and she stands on the edge of turbulence. Harry nudges her elbow with the bundle of warm clothing, so she peels her fingers from the frozen metal, takes the extra socks from him and swaps her shoes for wellington boots.
With his hat pulled down over his ears, Harry looks different; the spray of lines at the outer corners of his eyes more noticeable. He is thinner.
Harry had washed the blue hand towel for her, pegged it out on the line to dry in the sun. Many mothers find keepsakes are important, Clare explained, as a focus for memories. We all grieve differently, she said. Just do what you feel you need to do.
Nora didn’t need to see soil thrown on Noah’s casket. She felt the spin of vertigo, saw herself on all fours, clawing back the dirt, until Harry offered his arm and they left the churchyard together. He turned right at the church gate, towards the millstream and she allowed herself to be led away from the village and the people heading home along the narrow lane. Jason was opening up at the Anchor Bleu, pushing the anvil doorstop into place with his foot. Others wandered between the gravestones in the winter sun, visiting their own dead. A man in a long dark overcoat held on to his hat as he ducked beneath the yew tree and she thought of Isaac. She dreams of him rarely these days.
She pushes her hands back into her pockets. Silhouetted on the skyline is a stand of trees where rooks cluster thick as black blossom. Those on the ground swagger and bound, spike at the earth with their beaks. More fly in to land on the telegraph wires slooping low under weight of numbers as the birds shift sideways for room, wedged together.
She and Harry walked for hours the day of Noah’s burial, until she was exhausted. He didn’t talk much, and said nothing to her about the consistory court proceedings held in the church a few days before Noah’s funeral. Permission for exhumation of the Godwin grave had been refused. She knew from Eve there was standing room only, the church filled with villagers who gathered to listen to the experts give witness. Though there were many differing viewpoints, translations and interpretations of v
arious historical documents, Elsa Macleod was a minority of one in believing Harold to be buried at Bosham.
Eve said that when Elsa was called, a slant of light from the west window fell on to the stone slabs under the chancel arch, just where the stone coffins are buried. Elsa’s voice rang out as if she was preaching from the pulpit. She described the swans depicted in the margins of the Bayeux Tapestry, how she believes many clues lie hidden in the woollen stitches, coded messages she is determined to decipher. ‘Hers was the best performance,’ Eve said, ‘ten out of ten. It was magical. She had my full attention.’
High above, streaming towards them across the sky, twists a sooty skein, the exuberant chatter of the approaching rooks building to a crescendo as they funnel downwards on to the fields.
‘There are so many.’ Her voice wavers. Harry cups her hands in his and rubs them briskly.
He places her gloves in her hands. ‘I came here with my wife.’ He turns away to rest his forearms on the gate and lifts the binoculars to look out over the field of rooks. She stares at his back, at the ill-fitting jacket made for a smaller man, one pocket half-ripped off and flapping loose. He has not mentioned a wife before.
Rooks begin to leave the trees and telegraph wires, funnel and dip in the sky before coming down to land in the fields, along the furrows, causing other birds to peel up and back to resettle. Nora hugs herself, shrinking into the downy warmth of her coat, and wonders about children.
‘Warm enough?’ Harry says.
‘Yes.’
Their space disturbed, another group lifts, a mounting wave, soaring higher to curve back and land elsewhere.
They had to clip Rook’s wings after he’d knocked himself out. His flying is too haphazard, seeming to take him by surprise when he is angry or frightened, the flurry of his wings beyond his control, sending him crashing into walls and ceilings, or up into trees, stranded. Nora took him to the man with mermaid tattoos at the bird sanctuary and was reassured when he said wing clipping was not permanent. ‘It’ll need to be done again in the spring,’ he said, as he showed her which of the long feathers to clip. ‘Unless,’ he looked up at her briefly, as if to judge her likely reaction, ‘unless, that is, the instinct for flight comes to him fully and he makes up his mind to go.’
Gradually the movement of the birds lessens. Fewer new birds arrive. It is almost dark. The rooks grow quieter, their murmurs simmering. Nora rubs her arms to warm herself.
‘C’mon,’ Harry says, startling her. He sets off down the lane at a brisk pace.
Her toes are lumpy and stiff with cold, but she wants to stay until the rooks finish roosting. ‘Can’t we stay and watch?’
Harry points across a flat field towards a copse of alders. ‘That’s where they go. We’ll guess at their flight path.’
They sit together, their backs against a tree, not talking. One side of Nora’s body, the side next to Harry, is warm, the other cold. The sun has disappeared and all movement in the fields has ceased. Harry is scanning the almost dark sky.
‘Is it over?’ she asks.
He puts a hand on her forearm.
And it starts: a whisper of feathers, a disturbance of air rippling into an explosion of sound as rooks rise in ragged clumps from the fields with the jubilant clap of wings beating, wave after wave. Nora’s stomach flips, like the lurch of love. A blizzard of clamour, the sky teems black as birds bank and roil, funnelled clockwise one moment, sucked back the next, eddies and spirals blurred against a glimmer of sky. Nora, shivering, barely registers Harry’s touch as he slips his coat around her shoulders.
The two of them get to their feet, surrounded by the applause of wing-beats, exultant as a standing ovation.
Author’s Note
This is a work of imagination inspired by the landscape, wildlife and history of Sussex, and by the richness of local oral tradition. Bosham is featured on the Bayeux Tapestry. You can visit the ancient church, and The Anchor Bleu which occasionally floods when the tide is high, but you will not meet Steve the vicar or Jason the barman. Like all the characters, they live only in this novel. Bosham village itself is fictionalised here, though locals might recognise aspects of Dell Quay, West Wittering, the dunes at East Head, and the paths along the shoreline of Chichester harbour. Within these pages, where the story demanded, I have shrunk both time and distance.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank my agent, Hannah Westland at Rogers, Coleridge and White, and all at Bloomsbury, especially Helen Garnons-Williams, Erica Jarnes, Audrey Cotterell and Greg Heinimann, all of whom gave me inspiration, support and help with producing this book.
My thanks are also due to the following people: Kathy Page, Vicky Grut, Renate Mohr, Ann Jolly, Melanie Penycate, Maria O’Brien and Karen Stevens, who were early readers and offered suggestions; David Knotts, Heather Harrison, Cecelia Bignall for allowing me to listen in to cello lessons at the Royal Academy; Erica Stewart from SANDS for sharing her story; Chris Dennis for help with the Waltham Chronicles; Joan Langhorne, for coffee and biscuits as I poured through church archives, more than once; Jo Phillips, for rook information; Jill and Karl Campbell for advice on police procedure and the law; Sharon Martin, for the visits to retirement hotels and for her wonderful session about Burns Night; Yvonne Herrington, for help with smudge sticks and auras; Jackie Buxton for tips on running; Sue Bisdee, for midwifery advice and anecdotes. Any mistakes I’ve made with all this generously given information are my own.
John Pollock’s work on the history of the stone coffins of Bosham church in ‘Harold: Rex – Is King Harold II Buried in Bosham Church?’ (Penny Royal Publications, 1996, with 2002 supplement ) first captivated my imagination. For further research, the following publications have been indispensible for both inspiration and information: ‘A Guide to Holy Trinity Church, Bosham’ by Joan Langhorne; Crow Country by Mark Cocker (Vintage, 2008); Corvus: A Life with Birds by Esther Woolfson (Granta Books, 2008); 1066: The Hidden History in the Bayeux Tapestry by Andrew Bridgeford (Walker & Company, 2006); Mstislav Rostropovitch: Cellist, Teacher, Legend by Elizabeth Wilson (Faber, 2007).
I’m very grateful to my daughter, Natalie Miller, for sharing my passion for rooks and taking photos on rooking trips. Thank you to all my family for their support, most especially David for his love and patience with all the 1066 and rook talk, as well as with the hours I spend writing.
A Note on the Author
JANE RUSBRIDGE is the author of The Devil’s Music. She lives near the coast in West Sussex with her husband, a farmer, and the youngest of their five children. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Chichester, where she was the recipient of the Philip Lebrun Prize for Creative Writing and is Associate Lecturer in English.
Also available by Jane Rusbridge
The Devil’s Music
It’s 1958 and Andy’s sister, Elaine, is born. While his father insists the baby is ‘not quite all there’ and his mother sinks into lonely despair, Andy’s rope-maker grandfather teaches him the knots that keep treasures safe. Then a young painter, hired to decorate the house, begins to call Andy’s mother back from her grief until, at the family’s seaside retreat, Andy is left in charge of his baby sister on a windswept beach where he discovers not all treasures can be kept safe forever.
Three decades later, Andrew returns to the place where his life unravelled and faces his past. The Devil’s Music is a moving novel about love, betrayal and family secrets.
‘A powerful and deeply affecting story of the bond between a mother and her children ... Jane Rusbridge is a brilliant new voice’ Alison Macleod
‘Vividly and intensely written’ Jane Rogers
‘This intricately structured, brilliantly observed modern take on a family saga is both passionate and moving and the prose snaps, crackles and pops with gorgeous detail’ Lesley Glaister
‘Sensuously written and beautifully woven together, the various strands of the story converge in a heartrending – and heartwarming – climax
’ Kathy Page
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Q&A with Jane Rusbridge
What inspired you to write Rook?
Writers sometimes describe the earliest stage, when something haunts your mind and you’re not at first sure why, as a ‘gift’ from the unconscious. My gift was rooks - birds I’d never particularly noticed properly before. They were nest-building in trees arching over the road as I drove to work, and I began to look out for them every day.
At around the same time, the untold side of a tabloid newspaper story piqued my interest. By chance I came across another, very similar case, and was niggled by the one-sided telling of both. I didn’t want to write about these ‘true life’ events: what happens to Nora is not something I have experienced myself, plus sensationalism was a danger. One day when talking to a friend about my preoccupation with these stories, in one of those weird moments of synchronicity, I learned she’d recently been involved with a very similar case at work. So my resistance in the end gave way and Nora’s story began to grow.
Rook Page 24