A Night With No Stars

by Sally Spedding

  Gradually the late daylight began to change yet again as the spreading sun outside cast the first floor’s unadorned walls the colour of egg yolk, exposing even more the cobwebbed cornices, the shabby wood-work, and when she looked down, Lucy noticed the threadbare runner which lay over what she assumed must be the original floorboards.

  She turned once more to touch that strange china rose on the door next to hers, wondering what it represented. Something feminine, certainly, and she was just about to try the handle again, to discover what lay beyond, when all at once a voice called out.

  ‘I put that there.’

  She spun round to see Hector Jones leaving the bathroom. His face was pink, clean- shaven, and his hair newly combed and still damp against his scalp. ‘For my wife. Bought it in Worcester just after we were married. Now then,’ he rested a hand on the banister’s newel post as if he was about to leave. ‘You make yourself at home and if there’s anything you need just get that son of mine moving.’

  She saw steam creeping from the bathroom and decided that now wasn’t the time to ask if she’d be sharing its facilities with the two men of the house. Surely in a place that size there’d be at least an extra shower room?

  ‘I’m sure everything’s fine,’ she smiled. ‘And thanks for letting me stay.’

  ‘Like I said my dear, our pleasure. Right,’ he steadied himself, peering down towards the open front door beyond which the sound of voices could be heard. ‘I see your sweep’s turned up. Don’t let him take advantage, mind.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ As she imagined a furtive grope by the kitchen’s range.

  ‘Shouldn’t cost you no more than twenty quid. So, watch him. It’s not London here.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said with feeling. ‘And I hope you won’t be wasting your time with the waterfall business.’

  ‘It’ll do me good to get out.’ With that, he was gone.

  She didn’t hang about either. Having done a quick recce of her new room, opened its musty velvet curtains and dumped her holdall on the double bed, she went downstairs to see what was going on outside.

  Hector had already left and in his place a hunched-over man in his sixties, who reached no higher than Mark’s chest, was opening his smart new van’s rear doors. Eschewing the sawyer’s help, he pulled out two dismantled brushes and hoisted them over his shoulder. He then stared at her as if he’d never seen a woman before in his life.

  ‘This is Miss Mitchell,’ Mark explained. ‘She’s buying Wern Goch.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Those two pinprick eyes switched to Mark. ‘Haven’t you told her, then?’

  ‘Told her what, man?’

  Nevertheless, she saw him tense up. His neck muscles taut, his pulse throbbing.

  ‘About your mam being down there.’ He shot a weasly glance in the little house’s direction.

  She knew Mam was Welsh for mother, but what did he mean by down there?

  Mark loped towards the track, kicking stones away left right and centre. This was anger management alright. Letting his boots suffer instead, each step removing him from the older man who doggedly followed. But why? she asked herself, desperate to quiz the sweep herself.

  ‘Miss Mitchell hasn’t come all this way to hear your gossip,’ Mark shouted without turning round. ‘And seeing as we’re into plain speaking, Mr Williams, she’s paying you for your work and not your tongue.’

  She waited for the other man’s response, sensing that this latest addition to her workforce wasn’t going to be deterred so easily. And she was right.

  ‘I never liked coming here before,’ he grumbled, ‘and I don’t like it now. When there’s been foul deeds in an ’ouse, I picks up on it, see? That’s just the way I am.’

  Foul deeds?

  She held her breath. How quickly dreams sour, she thought, aware that the sun had now vanished and a cloud of black birds were winging their way towards Wern Goch.

  ‘Do you mean Druids?’

  ‘No, I don’t, Missus,’ said Williams in a loaded tone. ‘Everyone knows what really went on, and I’m telling you for a fact, Wern Goch’s no place for a young woman to be living. Husband or no husband. I’ll do your chimney – fair do’s – but don’t you expect me to hang around afterwards. Folks normally give me a cup of tea for my throat but I don’t want nothing like that here. I’ll be sending on the bill next week.’

  Mark glanced back at her, his expression one of utter anguish. She overtook the sweep to catch him up and take his arm. He was trembling, and not for the first time, she felt powerless.

  ‘He’s lying, Lucy. You’ve got to believe me. Apart from Rhaca nothing else has happened there.’

  But she shook her head.

  ‘I swear I heard a scream coming from the house. Last Saturday it was, after your dad had showed me round. He seems to think these weirdos are somewhere in the area.’

  ‘I’m not denying it. And wherever they are, they’re beyond evil.’

  ‘Be careful what you say, sir,’ muttered the sweep, who then suddenly tripped up and righted himself. ‘No self-respecting Druid would do what was found in that kitchen. I know, because my brother was a bard at the Gorsedd last year, and I’ve read up on it. Bloody families, it is,’ he added, cryptically. ‘Why I’ve stayed a bachelor all my life . . .’

  She let go of Mark, gripped now by a fear so deep, so intense that her legs felt like stone. She couldn’t move even if she’d wanted to. All her questions, even any reasoning shrivelled up to nothing, while Mark’s anguish had turned to bewilderment.

  ‘Come on,’ he whispered as the sweep hustled by like some troll to reach the house first. ‘You mustn’t listen to him, or any of the other creeps who crawl out of their holes in the ground just to make trouble. They’ll say anything for effect. It’s the peasant Welsh. The worst kind . . .’

  That Hellebore author had been right again, she thought, and not for the first time.

  He reached for her hand and she took it. Warm like his arm had been. Warm and strong.

  ‘Wern Goch needs you. Christ,’ he looked at her, dark eyes as if on fire. ‘I never thought I’d hear myself saying that. Look,’ he pointed to where, as before, a row of ravens were already settled above the scullery door. ‘They’re saying, welcome.’

  ‘Can’t they park somewhere else?’ she asked. ‘I hate the way they just stare at you.’

  ‘They’re my allies,’ he replied. ‘Just like other people keep guard dogs or whatever, I have these.’

  ‘But supposing I don’t want them hanging around once I’ve moved in? I mean, I have agreed to keep that slab and the cauldron. Why can’t they hang around the Hall and poo on that instead?’

  Mark clicked his fingers and immediately they all raised themselves, ominously spread their wings, then settled back into position again.

  ‘Simple. Because they like you.’

  Even though there’d been no rain since the weekend, that same jet of water continued to spew from the bank adding to the mire around the little house. Lucy tried to keep her replacement trainers out of the worst of the mess as she approached, but a sudden urge to pee made this impossible. The only way to some privacy by the barn was through the worst of the slippery mud. Williams was waiting with Mark when she returned. He looked defeated.

  ‘That’ll soon need fixing,’ he pointed to the bank. ‘If not, then this place’ll be floating away.’

  ‘It’s all in hand,’ Mark gave her a reassuring nod. ‘There’s nothing like spring water.’

  ‘Never mind spring, man. Holy water’s what you need here.’

  ‘Please explain,’ she said, having counted seventeen ravens in all on the guttering. Each one following the sweep’s every move. But the man didn’t reply.

  ‘Sad bastard,’ whispered Mark to her, yet loud enough for Williams to hear.

  ‘That’s you, sir, if you don’t mind my saying.’

  Five minutes later, in an atmosphere of growing hostility, Williams was preparing for his task with al
l the accoutrements of his trade laid out on the kitchen’s stone floor. He’d already donned a baseball cap, which to Lucy’s urban eye, looked faintly ridiculous, and had also spread bin liners around the range. He was now assembling the bigger of the two brushes, muttering to himself yet making sure that his audience could hear.

  ‘I don’t like the atmosphere in here,’ he started up again. ‘It’s getting right to me bones. Getting to me brain, an’ all.’ He then placed his small body alongside the range and rammed the brush head up beyond the blackened brick flue. ‘Lord knows I’ve not done the chimney here for fifteen years when you boys were still in short trousers, but to me, it’s always been an odd sort of place . . .’

  Boys. Even he’d said it.

  ‘Give it a rest, man,’ Mark snarled. ‘Or I’ll shove you up there as well.’

  ‘Don’t you threaten me you half-made. Just because you live in the Hall you think you’re it, when everyone knows there’s not a tuppence to rub together. Why she’s buying, isn’t it?’

  She and Mark stared at his skinny behind as he worked the brush higher and higher. The only sweep for miles, and with most dwellings still reliant upon coal, he could pick and choose his work. And risk causing offence.

  ‘And what about this bloody cauldron, eh?’ Williams went on regardless. ‘And bloody it was too, so I heard . . .’

  Her fear returned with a vengeance. She could see the thing out of the corner of her eye. Even blacker, suddenly more significant than before. ‘What’s he saying, Mark?’ she begged him. ‘I can’t take much more of this.’

  ‘Nor can I.’

  They listened to the brush scrape repeatedly against the old brickwork, and knew that even if they left him to it and went upstairs, his voice would still follow. It would reach into every crack of old plaster, be drawn into every grain of every beam, tainting the place more than it was already. She was about to press the man further about the cauldron, when all at once his vigorous actions with the brush came to a sudden stop.

  ‘Damn and blast it. Can’t go no further.’

  She watched Mark squat down next to the swarthy dwarf-like figure and fingered some of the foul mulch which had dropped on to the bin liners.

  ‘It’s wet, that’s why,’ he said, sniffing it. ‘Probably compacted further up.’

  ‘Could be leaking brickwork,’ she added. ‘We had that problem at home once.’ Where she’d grown up in Manchester now seemed on the other side of the world. The neatness of it. The colourful garden, even in winter, and just then in this darkening kitchen with people she barely knew, she pictured her mother, on her own with a meal for one in front of her, and felt tears begin to sting.

  ‘Summat’s up there, for sure.’ Williams broke her reverie. ‘I’m going to take a look from outside.’ He got to his feet, dusted himself down and retracted the brush. Its spiky head clotted by rotting gunge which smelt of sodden earth and something indefinable but even more unpleasant. ‘Got a ladder?’ he asked Mark who then led him out to the barn without saying a word.

  While they were gone, she held her nose and examined the cauldron more carefully. She’d seen pictures of the famous silver Gunderstrup cauldron with all its mounted warriors being plunged to their deaths before re-birth, but this was totally different. At first she was loathe to touch it, but when she saw a previously unnoticed low-relief modelled head protruding from its belly, she allowed just one finger to trace over its details. She discovered long braided hair, two brow ridges above human eyes, a small chiselled nose . . .

  But what came next made her step backwards in surprise, for beneath that roughened exterior, lay a mouth. Not any ordinary mouth, but one stretched open as if in terror.

  No one will hear you scream . . .

  She shivered, recalling last Saturday, then the waterfall. But the reality was here. In Wern Goch. In this very room. Time to exit, to leave that weird receptacle behind for a moment, and as she stood by the scullery door in the gathering dusk, men’s voices reached her from the barn. Mark was clearly on the defensive, the other like a terrier with a bone, and when they emerged with the ladder between them, both men looked tense. The anger between them palpable.

  Moments later the sweep plus the smaller brush in one hand, had clambered up to the roof. When he reached the chimney and its broken cowl, Mark returned to the kitchen to wait by the range, but when she tried to join him he put up a hand.

  ‘No,’ he barked. ‘Just in case.’

  ‘In case what?’

  ‘You know, dead birds, stuff like that . . .’

  ‘I’m not some kid,’ she remonstrated. ‘And this is going to be my house.’

  Mark’s response was drowned by Williams yelling from above. His voice seemed to come from far away; primordial, echoing and curdling around the range, and before it ended, a bundle of half-burnt rags flopped down on to the existing mess below.

  Mark frowned in puzzlement as they both knelt down to examine these partially charred remains of two entirely different fabrics. Plain blue cotton and a more elaborate design of large red roses. Each piece brown and mottled like old skin.

  ‘What are they doing up this chimney, for God’s sake?’ she asked.

  He paused, then took a deep breath as if to mentally steady himself. Everything about his body language said to her, this is serious.

  ‘Look, I’d rather you hear it from me than from anyone else,’ he began. ‘It’s best you know now so you can decide what to do before the exchange of contracts.’

  ‘Know what exactly?’ She stood up, for the house had grown suddenly dark and cold, and goose bumps prickled her skin as she watched his lips.

  ‘My mother was murdered fourteen years ago . . .’

  ‘Murdered?’ She gulped. That word suddenly uglier than ever, because up to now, it had always related to someone unknown to her. This however, was grimly different. ‘Do you mean here?’

  ‘No. Of course not,’ Mark said too quickly, she thought. ‘Up at the Hall. In that room with the rose on the door.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘I’ll ask Mr Williams.’

  Mark cupped his hands round his head, his black hair covering his fingers. She could hear the ravens outside growing restless as she waited for the worst.

  ‘OK,’ he sighed. ‘It was here. Now you’ll be changing your mind, won’t you?’ His tone more desperate than challenging but she barely heard him.

  ‘My God.’ She felt that numbness again. Cold sweat erupting under her clothes. She glanced over to the salting slab lying under the back window. It had disturbed her from day one. ‘Why?’ Was all she could ask.

  ‘Someone had their reasons,’ he said bleakly and she noticed his deep dark eyes were now glazed by tears. He placed his hands on her shoulders.

  ‘Who’s this someone?’ She demanded trying not to let the sudden warmth, his very closeness distract her.

  ‘The Dagdans. A kind of Druidic cult.’

  ‘My God. Are they still around, then?’

  He gave a shrug which could have meant anything.

  She thought of the old well. What Hector had said about the area being Pagan. And yet she couldn’t put the sweep’s words out of her mind.

  ‘So why did our friend make that remark about families? It sounded pretty significant to me.’

  Mark’s hands stiffened against her skin. He pulled her towards him.

  ‘He’s jealous because he’s never had one. Look, all I want is for you to be safe here.’

  She stepped back, but he held on, drawing himself even closer.

  ‘But I’ve never felt safe here, from the moment I walked in and saw your bird’s blood all over that salting slab.’

  Mark let his mouth rest above her ear and brought it down over her cheek. Her skin seemed to burn under his lips and for the first time since she could remember, a surge of longing for closeness, even love, coursed through her damaged body.

  ‘Look,’ he murmured. ‘I know
my life hasn’t exactly been what everyone wants on their CV, but God’s truth, since the day your blue Rav arrived, things have been looking up.’

  It was hard to ignore his flattery.

  ‘What if I find out?’

  ‘At least it won’t have been me who told you.’

  ‘It’s you who’s afraid, isn’t it?’

  ‘Hell, I can’t handle this,’ he said, and she believed him. But before she could extract any more from him, a wad of soot suddenly plopped on to the pile of rags and Mark scrabbled for the buried pieces of cloth. He laid them out almost reverently on top of the range as if it was some kind of altar. How gentle he could be, how tender, she thought, watching his every movement. But what else? Could he somehow be involved in this? Could she, simply by being around and finding herself more and more drawn towards this complex character, be falling into the biggest most dangerous trap possible?

  ‘Are these bits anything to do with what happened here?’ she ventured.

  ‘Course not. This was my den, remember? I was always hoarding things, burning stuff. Didn’t you used to muck about away from the parental gaze?’

  She was too busy thinking to answer.

  ‘What will you do with them?’ she asked instead, watching him pick them up one by one and lay them in the palm of his hand. ‘Surely your dad and the police should take a look?’

  Mark spun round.

  ‘I’m begging you never to mention them to anyone. OK?’

  She shrugged, just to be free of that laser-like stare. No wonder he’d not wanted the sweep involved.

  ‘I’ll sort it out when I’m good and ready. One day, you’ll understand why.’

  She heard the ladder scrape against the wall outside as Williams climbed down to the ground, then saw Mark position himself out of sight behind the scullery door and make that odd croaking noise three times.

  ‘Corax . . . corax . . . corax . . .’