The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [176]
‘Sorry,’ I mumble, as he stalks off towards the camera at the barrow entrance.
‘Pub, India?’ asks Ibby, at the end of the afternoon. Martin has already left, without another word to me. ‘Celebrate our last day of filming, apart from the aerials? Unless you can have another go at your grandmother to be interviewed?’ ‘I don’t think she’ll do it.’ ‘Pity. Well, come and have a drink.’ ‘Sorry. Something else I should do while I’m here.’ Why did I leave that note for Bryn? Stupid idea. With luck, it’ll have disintegrated already in the rain. As the crew car pulls away, I set out across the meadow towards the spring to make sure.
Goddess, water, willow. A late-afternoon gleam of sunlight on the broken mirror tiles, and I could swear the Goddess winked. On the branch that overhangs the water, Cynon’s red fabric collar shivers as I stand on tiptoe to pull down the branch with my scrap of blue cotton.
It’s looped loosely round the bough. I was in such a rush this morning, can’t have tied it properly, the note’s fallen out. On the ground, into the stream?
But deep inside (the place where, in all of us, the entrance to the Lower World yawns) I know that however hard I look I won’t find it. Someone took it.
John’s pickup passes as I’m waiting to cross the A4 to the stile onto the field path home. The brakelights go on, he pulls over and reverses to the lay-by. As he walks back to meet me, I can tell he’s making an immense effort to keep a smile on his face. My heart contracts.
‘You been home yet?’ he asks. Too casual.
‘Is she all right?’
‘Phoned a couple of times. Thought she must be sleeping–you said you’d woken her early. Didn’t want to disturb her, and my client was due. But afterwards…Anyway, still can’t raise her on the phone so I’m on my way over. I’m sure she’s napping, that’s all…’
He’s trying to keep it light, but there’s something he isn’t telling me.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ he says. I take him by the shoulders and stare into his eyes. His pupils are tiny black pinpricks.
‘There was no client, was there? You went into a trance.’ I’ve started to shake, with anger or fear or both. ‘For Chrissake, did you see something about Frannie?’
PART SEVEN
Killing Moon
Avebury was a place where the living walked with the dead. The landscape was dotted with earthworks, tumuli, stone settings, and palisaded mortuary enclosures where corpses were laid out for excarnation–what Tibetans call ‘sky burial’–before the defleshed bones were put into long barrows or used in rituals at the henge. People gathered in the circle year after year, to remember the ancestors and petition for their help and protection in an uncertain future.
Was ritual murder a part of the proceedings? There is no hard evidence. The skeleton of a woman, buried in the ditch near the southern entrance and surrounded by a ring of small sarsens, may have been a sacrifice, or she may have been an important person in the clan, entitled to burial in sacred ground. Charlie, the child burial found in the ditch of the enclosure at Windmill Hill, may have been killed deliberately, or died of a congenital condition that caused the distortion of the skull. Some would even like to claim that the Barber Surgeon, pinioned under his stone in the fourteenth century, was the victim of ritual murder.
But that is the way of archaeology. We dig down through the layers of history, and often as not, instead of answers, expose more questions.
Dr Martin Ekwall,
A Turning Circle: The Ritual Year at Avebury,
Hackpen Press
CHAPTER 47
29 August 1942
Hurts like buggery. But I’m good at keeping quiet when it hurts. If I try to lift my head, even an inch off the ground, everything goes woozy. Be all right if I lie still a moment; I’ll get up in a bit, if I could remember how I ended up on the floor. Cold as charity lying here. Aches summat terrible down below, and I’m sick as a bloody dog. Head thumping, and a mad bird in my chest