The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [73]
‘Stones with souls?’ scoffed Mr Piggott. ‘Sorcerer-priests? I don’t subscribe to Don’s Golden Bough fixation. That sort of thinking is twenty years out of date. The motive’s economic, not spiritual. Eighteenth-century farmers are behind the burials, freeing up more land for cultivation. Some they bury, some they break, depending on the market’s demand for stone.’
Didn’t dare join in the conversation, but I was with Mr Cromley. Anyone who’d lived among them stones knew they had souls, all right. That big bugger they were about to lift: he’d been sleeping, but you could see he was coming awake. People like Mr Piggott would think they were clever to fetter the stones, but the stones were stronger, and they had time on their side. That old stone could shrug off all them ropes and pulleys, if he felt like it.
Mr Young was supervising, puffing at a pipe too–it looked much more natural in his mouth. ‘Bring him up slowly,’ he called, waving his arm like a man directing traffic. His bandy little legs had begun to turn a deep golden brown below the turn-ups of his shorts. ‘Slowly, Reg! No bloomin’ rush about it. Ready with the timbers?’ The stone began to rise out of its bed like Lazarus. ‘That’s it! Now get that prop under there–Arthur, mind yourself, you don’t want to be under this old chap if one of those hawsers snaps–quickly now! OK, George, take the strain–and pull…’ Gradually the stone started to heave itself upright. Mr Keiller put his camera to his eye and began prowling round, looking for a good snapshot.
There was a shout from further down the field where the men were digging for another stone. ‘Mr Keiller! Come over here. You’d better see this.’
People called back and forth all the time while the digging was going on, but there was something in this shout that made everybody stop. Mr Keiller lowered the camera. Young took his pipe out of his mouth. Mr Cromley and Mr Piggott broke into a run, and Mr K wasn’t far after them. I felt a shiver go down my spine. The pencil fell out of my fingers, and the sketchbook slid off my knee.
‘Well, I’ll be blowed!’ said Mr Cromley, as they reached the diggers.
‘Bugger me!’ came Mr Piggott’s voice.
Mr Keiller stood stock still with his hands on his hips, at the edge of the excavation pit, slowly shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Hampered by my skirt, I arrived a few seconds later.
A grinning mouth full of teeth, a bony eyeless socket staring up at us from under the stone.
CHAPTER 17
‘The Barber Surgeon,’ says Martin, authoritatively, staring into the lens of the camera, ‘was a shock to everybody.’
Nobody pays the slightest bit of attention. The crew are too busy setting up, and early on a sharp April morning, there are no tourists about. The camera stands unattended, while the intense young cameraman from the film show at the Red Lion wanders round the field, looking for good angles. The soundman, wearing headphones, has propped the woolly boom microphone on its long pole against a stone, and is sitting with his back to it, playing some shoot-’em-up game on his mobile phone, his thumbs a blur. Ibby is with Michael, leaning on the bonnet of the crew’s Range Rover, deep in conversation over a map.
‘His skeleton was discovered buried with this massive stone,’ Martin continues, gesturing into empty air behind him, the camera being nowhere near the Barber Surgeon’s stone. ‘Crushed or suffocated, his leg trapped beneath it, his pelvis cracked, his neck broken, the tools of his trade, his scissors, spilling from his pocket–’ He sees me and breaks off. ‘Blossom! I rewrote the whole piece last night. Better, don’t you think? What did your grandmother have to say?’
‘Not much. Except that she drew his picture, under the stone.’
‘Not much! That’s remarkable. Where is it?’
‘She was vague. Said Keiller took it.’
‘Well, it can’t be in the archive, or it would have been published.’ Martin takes my arm and steers me across the grass towards the Range Rover parked on the high street. ‘You only