The Burying Ground

by David Mark

  ‘Jesus, you saved her life. She’d have been under the wheels …’

  ‘Brian, are you OK? Can you hear me?’

  I watched him shake them off. His school uniform was ripped down one knee and there was dirt on his face.

  ‘Who is he?’ asked Ronan Harper.

  ‘This is her son. Brian.’

  ‘Well, you saved your mammy’s life, boy. Christ, you’re a hero.’

  He still hadn’t spoken. Was still staring.

  I heard my own voice. ‘Brian. Why aren’t you at school?’

  Then Harper was laughing; a loud, pleasant sound. ‘Jesus, ain’t that like a mammy? Almost squashed flat and saved by her own lad and first thing is a telling off for bunking off. Jesus, wait until I tell the wife.’

  Cordelia loomed over me, face full of concern. ‘Felicity. God, you nearly killed me. I thought …’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I mumbled, embarrassed. ‘Fine.’

  ‘You’re bleeding.’ I was amazed to see tears in her eyes.

  ‘It’s nowt. Get me up, it’s soaking.’

  Between them they levered me upright. My left leg was sore and it hurt when I put weight on my hip but somehow the pain wasn’t important. I hobbled to Brian. He was standing there, face a little moon against the dark of his jacket and the gloomy sky. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to look into his eyes and ask a thousand questions but people were looking and I felt so silly and tattered that all I could do was pat him, vaguely, on the shoulder and mutter something about the state of his shoes. It would be different nowadays. We’d have cried and hugged and had a big long talk about meaning everything to each other. But you didn’t do that then. It wasn’t the way we behaved.

  ‘I reckon you’ll be getting out of doing the washing up tonight,’ said Harper, grinning at Brian. He didn’t return it. Just stood there, staring off into the distance.

  Harper checked me over again. I hadn’t been this close to another man who wasn’t family. He smelled different to John; all aftershave and onions. He was bigger than John, too. Big square face with deep lines and fleshy lips and skin the colour of wet sand. Brown eyes and two days of beard.

  ‘This is your place, yes?’ he asked, pointing over the road to my house. ‘Shall we get you in? Get the kettle on? My lad will sort out the mess, ain’t that right, Sean?’

  A smaller version of Harper appeared beside him; a copy of his father but washed on too high a heat. He had a bright smile. Might have been twenty but no more than that. It took him an effort to take his eyes off Cordelia, I remember that. Even now, I remember feeling a bit slighted that even in the midst of all that chaos, a young lad found the time to look at her and like what he saw.

  ‘Oh, what a mess,’ I said, turning to look at the scene outside Fairfax’s. The wagon had shed its load. Scaffolding poles hung from the side and the cab was at an ugly angle from the bed of the wagon, like a chicken with a broken neck. A huge stone tablet lay smashed on the kerb.

  ‘Never mind all that, would be worse with you under the wheels,’ said Harper.

  I felt Cordelia’s hand on my arm. She kept squeezing me softly, telling me I’d be OK, I’d be fine, that I’d given her such a fright.

  They got me into John’s armchair without much difficulty. I was burning with embarrassment but they wouldn’t hear any of my protests. Cordelia propped me up with cushions and then started taking my shoes off like I was a child. I couldn’t stop her. Couldn’t stop Harper walking around on the kitchen carpet with his muddy boots on either. I let them get on with it. Put my head back and closed my eyes and listened to them fuss and chatter like monkeys; the story getting grander and bigger with each retelling.

  ‘Where’s the boy gone?’ asked Harper, over the bubbling of the kettle on the stove.

  ‘I told him to go wash his hands or the cuts would get infected. Felicity, do you have a medicine box? We need to clean up some of these grazes.’

  I sighed, shaking my head. ‘I’ll sort it myself. Like I keep saying, there’s no need to fuss.’

  Harper laughed again. ‘Tough lasses round here, did you not know that,’ he said, and as I opened my eyes I saw him winking at Cordelia. ‘You’ll be Mrs Hemlock, yes? I did some work on your place. Repaved the lean-to.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘In the low orchard. Lovely summer house up against boundary wall.’

  ‘With the ivy? By the pear trees?’

  ‘Aye. Old flags were like a jigsaw. Re-set the lot for you. Did your man a good price. He happy?’

  She shot a look at me. Gave a tight smile. ‘It’s great. I don’t spend as much time there as I should.’

  ‘Aye, well, we’ve not had the weather for it. Been a bugger this week getting jobs started. Thought we spotted a break in the weather and hoped we could at least sink a couple of foundation poles on the Kinmont grave but I reckon the heavens will open again soon.’ He twisted to look at me and smiled, rubbing his hair with a big dirty hand. ‘And o’course, the wagon’s stuck in the house yonder.’

  I felt myself warming up. My heart was becoming my own again. My thoughts had been a roundabout pushed too fast; all blurs and gale. Now it was slowing. I was still sick and dizzy but I felt as though I knew where my feet were at last and I knew they didn’t belong where they were – bare and mucky and sitting on the floor in front of John’s chair. Unsteadily, I stood myself up.

  ‘Sit back down,’ urged Cordelia. ‘The tea’s nearly ready …’

  ‘I’m grand, Cordelia. Honestly, there’s no need to fuss.’

  ‘Please, Flick, for me, just …’

  She stopped and I found myself smiling. It started there, really. That’s when we became friends. It was a nice moment, like deciding on the right name for a pet or a child or clearing a debt. It was a subtle shifting of labels; a re-adjustment of my centre. I was Flick. She was Cordelia. Cordy, in a rush. And we were friends.

  Harper walked from the kitchen and returned a moment later, rubbing his hands. ‘Barely a scratch on the wagon and the house has had nowt more than a bang or two. Needs a few tiles and might need a bit of pointing but I’ve got two apprentices’ll value the work. Could be worse. Could be a lot worse.’

  ‘Yes, Flick could be under the wheels,’ said Cordelia, with a little giggle that I hadn’t heard before.

  ‘Aye, well, that would have been hard to explain to John.’

  ‘He’d probably thank you for it,’ I said, rolling my eyes and trying to make light. In truth I was imagining John’s face in that moment. Wondering how he would have lived the rest of his life. Whether he would be all right. If he’d marry again. Whether some bit of stuff would turn his head and whether he’d lay in our bed telling her about how his first wife didn’t know how babies got in bellies until she was already a few months pregnant and had no clue how they got out again until she started in labour. I coloured at the thought but kept myself focussed. Things were OK. Things were good.

  ‘John dotes on you,’ said Harper and I turned my face away to hide the smile.

  ‘You said you were going to the church,’ said Cordelia, and without being asked, she hopped up onto the counter by the sink and sat there with her bum on the draining board. She did it so suddenly and so naturally I found myself torn between telling her to get down and querying why I’d never thought to sit up there myself. She looked so stylish, like she was in one of those films with Terence Stamp; sort of dishevelled but beautiful, a rose crushed in a fist.

  ‘Aye, I was telling John just last night. Got the contract for fixing the mess the tree made during the storm. He said you ladies saw it.’

  Cordy didn’t look at me. Swung her legs like she was a nipper.

  ‘We were in the graveyard when the storm hit. Tree went right into the crypt.’

  ‘I’ll correct you there, love,’ said Harper, raising his mug and gesturing at the air in front of him. ‘A crypt’s subterranean. Underground, I mean – usually under a church floor.’

  Cordelia’s jaw tig
htened. ‘I know what subterranean means.’

  ‘Yes? Good for you, love. What the Kinmonts have is a mausoleum, of sorts, though they’re usually a damn sight bigger. They were all the rage for about twenty years but there ain’t many of ’em up here. Bit showy, I suppose. But this one were well built. I’d spied it long since. You couldn’t see ’em but the figurative work would have been stunning in its day. You look close enough you could see there was a death’s head above the first inscription.’

  ‘Death’s head?’ I asked.

  ‘Aye, people have always had funny ideas about symbols and what stuff stands for. Death’s head is a real old one but the idea is you would scratch it on to keep evil away. People still ask for them nowadays, which shows you that people are the same no matter how far forward and back you go.’

  ‘What else was on there?’ asked Cordelia.

  Harper started scratching, rummaging in his pockets. He unfolded a piece of paper with a black and white picture on it and handed it over to Cordelia. She stared, not blinking, then handed it to me. I didn’t know if I wanted to see it but took it anyway. It showed the crypt as it had been just after the war. It looked little different to the structure I had passed a hundred times while laying flowers at Mam’s grave, but for the first time, I found myself really studying the sculptures that had been wound into the grey stone.

  ‘Work of art, really,’ said Harper. ‘Half a dozen different religions in among that lot. Must have been a hell of a job for some seventeenth-century mason with a chisel and a wooden hammer.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked, gesturing at the face above the door.

  ‘Green man,’ he said, peering at the picture. ‘Pagan symbol. There’s grapes and peaches woven in too, and I doubt there were many Reivers around these parts got to feast on them that often. Down there, but the name of Meg Kinmont: that’s what they call an intaglio, an engraving on a flat surface. Two fish suspended from an anchor. That were the sign of the early Christians so the stone they used must have come from the wall. That little shape there – I’d say that’s meant to be a horse – and there’s carvings of a full moon and two running hares below the worst of the moss. Going to be a major job to make it like it was.’

  ‘Is that what you’ve been asked to do?’ I asked.

  ‘No, they just want a bodge job. Tidy it up and salvage what I can. But I’ll try and put it back best I can. Seems important. It’s stood 400 years, I don’t want to be the mason who couldn’t get it back on its feet.’

  ‘Have you cleared the site?’ I asked, and I moved closer to Cordelia. Our shoulders were almost touching. It felt nice, like there were two of us and one of anybody else.

  ‘Had the lad up yesterday. Dragged the tree free with the tractor and I’m sad to say that’ll be getting the saw. Rotten through. Hollow, like an Easter egg. We’ve stacked it at the top of the field down to the river if you want any firewood. With that out the way it’s not as bad as you’d fear. Table slab across the top is still in one piece and the door held up better than I feared. Lock snapped clean off but that’s these new locks for you, I suppose.’

  ‘It had a new lock?’ asked Cordelia. It sounded an odd question, even to me, but Harper was like any other man when it came to talking about the things he was an expert in and just seemed glad to be asked.

  ‘Aye, new lock, new hook, new bracket. First thing to break. Two of the supporting slabs have gone too.’

  I coughed, sounding feeble. ‘And the bodies?’

  ‘No bodies, love. It’s just a monument. You might think there are shelves in there with corpses laid out but it’s empty inside save dead birds and a few rat skeletons and empty lager cans.’

  Cordelia turned to me. Her hair had become entangled with an earring and I had to fight with myself not to tidy her up.

  ‘Somebody’s looked after it, then,’ I said, focussing on Harper. ‘Honest, I always thought the bodies were inside.’

  ‘A lot of people do,’ he said, finishing his tea. ‘But the bodies were more likely buried under the church or elsewhere in the grounds. There could even have been cremations now and again and the pots of ash would have been buried instead of a body. That’s more of a Roman tradition but it’s stayed in these parts through the centuries.’

  ‘Why did the Kinmonts even have a mausoleum?’ asked Cordelia.

  ‘Status symbol,’ shrugged Harper. ‘Maybe first Kinmont had a nagging wife who wouldn’t let him sleep soundly until he promised to bury himself in something to rival Tutankhamun. Maybe he were superstitious and wanted to honour whichever of the gods on the stone meant most to him. I just know it’s a fine piece of work.’

  ‘You’re pretty well informed,’ said Cordelia. I think she meant it to sound flattering but I heard it as an accusation. How did he know all this when he hadn’t read as many books as she had? She was a one for those kind of assumptions, back then. Thought she were the only one who knew which way the world spun.

  ‘I had the university commission three or four years back,’ said Harper. He had perched himself on the arm of the sofa and was looking at the teapot with the expression I knew too well. He wanted somebody to pour him a fresh mug. I would have done it had Cordelia not been there. Somehow I felt she would have judged me.

  ‘University?’

  ‘Aye, the archaeologists. Pulling Birdoswald and Housesteads to bits. They reckoned there was a Roman cemetery just by the top of the ridge. Over the river.’

  ‘More bones,’ muttered Cordelia, looking down. It seemed a strange thing to say.

  ‘Urns, actually. Ash from the pyres. Old Billy turned up a load of artefacts with his plough back in 1950, and it took until lately to persuade him to let the experts in with their trowels and their graphs and the like. They went away happy.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Pointing them in the right direction, I suppose. And there was a lot of heavy lifting to be done. Locals have been dismantling the wall and the forts for centuries. You’ll be hard pressed to find an old property around here that isn’t partly built from stones taken from the wall. Load of local masons got themselves on a sweet number before the war, helping rebuild bits of the wall to make it pretty for the tourists. There’s a lot of kids around here can tell you with absolute honesty that their dad built Hadrian’s Wall.’

  I was feeling dizzy again. I could hear Brian moving around in the tying room. I could imagine him in there with his bloody hands and dirty fingers, playing with hooks and feathers and reflecting back at himself in the dead eyes of a bird. I saw his coat hanging over the back of the chair. Suddenly I wanted to scrub it clean. I wanted to cook him his favourite tea or buy him a copy of whatever magazine he wanted. I wanted to make him happy.

  ‘They had a look in the churchyard too,’ said Harper, crossing to the teapot and pouring himself the last of the tea. ‘Every bit as interesting as the wall, they reckoned. One of them had notes by the bucketful on the place and I swear it was an education, even to Fairfax.’

  I stiffened. ‘Fairfax knew them?’

  Harper guffawed. I thought people only did that in books but that was the noise he made, I swear. It sounded like a donkey had wandered into the kitchen.

  ‘Fairfax knew every bugger, I thought you of all people knew that.’

  ‘Me of all people?’ I asked, and I heard my tone change.

  ‘A friend, I mean,’ he said, waving his hand. ‘You were like family to him.’

  I turned away and felt Cordelia squeeze my shoulder. I didn’t know what I wanted next, truth be told. It was Cordelia who kept at him.

  ‘I’m a bit rusty on my local history,’ she said, and you wouldn’t have thought it was the same girl. ‘You look like you’re good at keeping facts in that big handsome head. What was it you learned?’ Suddenly she was looking sheepish and flirty and asking the big strong man to share his big brain with poor little her. I thought I were going to blush myself to dust.

  ‘Been there since before people wrote stu
ff down,’ he said, looking like the cat who’d got the cream. ‘I might have my dates wrong but I have it in my head it was 122 AD when they started building the wall and there’s plenty sign there was a church down the road there even before that. There’s been all sorts of oddities found locally over the years – altars to the gods of Greece and Rome and plenty of native pagan deities too. Jove, Jupiter, Mars I forget them all but it boggled my mind to imagine these soldiers and natives and wives and all their camp followers getting on with their lives just like we do.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Cordelia.

  ‘Aye, well, first mention of the church as we know it was in 1190 AD. Just you think how many centuries had gone by since the Romans left. What were here? What were life like? The experts didn’t know and nor do I. But I know that long before Lanercost Priory or Westminster Abbey, there was a church 300 yards from where we now stand and when you think of all the life and death it’s seen it’s a brave man who doesn’t feel the urge to say a prayer.’

  ‘I’m not one for praying,’ I said, and I felt Cordelia nip me, like we were sisters. She wanted me to hush.

  ‘It’s a really good example of its type – that’s what they told me over a beer. Fairfax was there, scribbling away. They reckoned that folk were simple then. Not simple like dull-witted, but simple like they understood things in more black and white than we do now. So they thought Hell was just below them and Heaven just above. And the church was built to reflect that. God was the light and the Devil was the darkness. That’s how the church looked. Those about to be baptized came in through the small doorway on the north side and after the ceremony they left into the bright lights of the south. It was very literal. As a craftsman I like that. But they were the same with representations of darkness. I got a chill when they told me of the bones.’

  She made an extra effort with her breathing. Wouldn’t let herself alter the casual way she was talking with her new pal.

  ‘Bones?’

  ‘Years back the church was being repaired and the flagstones were taken up. There were more human bones found under the floor of the church than they were able to count. The archaeologists have made plenty guesses who they were but nobody knows. They were centuries old though and they died hard. The Saxons buried their honoured dead in stone coffins and there are plenty of those in the churchyard. More bones under the font too. Robert the Bruce ploughed his way through this land after the Battle of Bannockburn and there were locals who saw it as their duty to defend it. They were buried where they fell. Honestly, we think we know about where we live but we’re just passing through, really. The land knows more than we do.’