The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [114]
‘I was in the Starfish. Over the other side, though.’
‘Liar. You wouldn’t have been able to see it was Liddington if you had been. You’d gone right through the Starfish and out, and you was safe, but you ran all the way back through it to find me.’
‘Think that if it makes you happy’
I put a hand on the steering-wheel. ‘I said, stop the car.’ We drew to a halt at the end of the little wood, the steel on the roof clanking away. ‘You’re a damn bloody fool, Davey Fergusson. And you’re off to kill yourself on Monday. Give us a kiss.’
A bit later he says: ‘You sure about this, Fran?’
‘Wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.’
‘Only…’ He lets out a long, juddering sigh. ‘You don’t…have to.’ Clear from the way he’s breathing there’s not much longer it’ll be a choice. ‘Oh, God!
Then, a bit after that, he says, with his face in my hair, ‘You’re my first, you know. My first girl.’
I don’t tell him he’s not my first. That everything I know about what we’re doing was taught me by Donald Cromley and his twisted uncle.
CHAPTER 28
‘You look–different,’ says Ed. ‘And make it a latte.’ He wanders off to look at the cakes. If he’s trying to make a point, I don’t know what it is. I’m not going to forgive him that easily.
Corey nudges me in the ribs. ‘He only comes in on the days you’re here,’ she hisses.
‘Rubbish.’
‘He’s mad for you. Can’t keep his eyes off you.’
Nonsense. Ed’s eyes are undressing an organic flapjack. His hand wavers over the biscuits. He makes a decision, and pushes his tray back towards the till. ‘You were blonde last week,’ he says accusingly.
‘Copper.’
‘Well, different. This is…um. Need time to adjust to you dark.’ He counts out some coins, yawning. ‘Sorry. Graham and I were out first thing–and I mean first thing–dealing with a group of witches from Bristol who wanted to dance skyclad on Silbury Hill for May Day morning. Caught up with them as they were trying to climb over the fence.’ Ed’s getting the hang of Avebury. ‘Oh, and there’s a bender again in Tolemac. No sign of the occupant. We’ll try again this evening, and move him on politely’ He looks dubiously at his coffee, and digs in his pocket for change. ‘And if politely doesn’t work…’
–a windscreen exploding into crystals of glass–
‘Isn’t much else you can do, is there?’ I say nastily.
‘Graham says politely will work,’ says Ed, looking worried.
The bender’s occupant comes to Avebury to worship the Goddess. He’s here for every one of the eight festivals, takes time off work and hitches down from Cheshire. Man of few words, mind, so it took about half an hour to glean that much. Mostly we sat in companionable silence. I felt surprisingly easy with him.
‘Saw you at the frill-moon ritual,’ he said, when I landed on his side of the fire. ‘Which Path do you follow?’
‘Um…’ I was mesmerized by his bare feet in the firelight. The ground was squelching, but they were astonishingly clean. ‘Sort of…eclectic, me. No special path. Bit of this, bit of that.’ Thumbing in my memory through The Bluffer’s Guide to Paganism.
‘The Lady’s my Path,’ he said. ‘Brid. I feel her here more than anywhere else.’
‘Here at Avebury?’
‘In this wood. And at her spring. You know where I mean?’
‘Um…’
‘The Swallowhead. You ever been there?’ I shook my head. ‘I’ll take you.’
He offered to roll a spliff. I shook my head again.
‘You don’t smoke?’
‘No.’ I hated seeing my mother stoned: that stupid giggling. When we camped in Tolemac, her laugh bounced off the trees at night as she and John sat at the campfire after I had been sent to my bunk in the van.
‘It’s good sleeping close to the stones,’ he said. ‘You feel how the Goddess uses the circle for healing.’
‘Oh, no, it’s a place of the dead.’ Goddess knows why I felt bound to correct him. ‘I’ve a friend who’s an archaeologist. He says it’s where people came to be with the ancestors. That’s what the stones represent.’ I felt no shame in embellishing Martin’s tentative conclusions about the function of Avebury. ‘A woman’s skeleton was found in the ditch, laid in a ring of sarsen. Like she was the guardian of the place. Possibly