The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [93]
‘It’s a field set,’ said Mr Keiller, looking pleased as punch at my delight. ‘All the basics, so you can paint wherever you please. Open the drawer–there’s a sable brush in there and a sponge, and space for your pencils. I’ve had your name put on the lid, too.’ There was a small brass square set into the rosewood, Frances Robinson engraved in sloping script. The watercolour set was far more expensive than anything I could have afforded. I couldn’t speak, my eyes filling with tears. I had never seen anything so beautiful.
‘There,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘And now I really have to answer Doris’s call.’
‘Thank you,’ I croaked after him.
Mr Cromley had put down his jigsaw piece of stone and was staring. Miss Chapman leaned towards Mr Keiller as he came up to them, and whispered something in his ear. He looked back towards me, and waved.
‘Would you mind awfully, Heartbreaker? Doris thinks she left her sketchbook at the bottom of the Avenue. Could you fetch it? Leave it at the side door. One of the housemaids’ll take it if we’re dressing.’
The sketchbook was there, by the very last stone in Mr Peak-Garland’s field, and so was a case with a broken pencil in it, a banana skin, a glass with her lipstick on the rim, and a dirty handkerchief. Abandoned, for someone else to pick up, a menial like me. I threw the banana skin and the handkerchief into the hedge, picked up the glass and the drawing things, and set off back uphill.
Mr Cromley was waiting for me, about halfway up the Avenue, leaning against one of the tall stones that Mr Keiller had put back up when he began work at Avebury. The light was fading over Waden Hill in the west. A wind shivered the grasses.
He didn’t say anything, for once, only linked his arm in mine. We walked up the slope together. There’s a trick of the land, where Mr Peak-Garland’s field levels out: the Avenue twists, and the henge comes into view all of a sudden. It never fails to take me with a shock, and I always draw breath, like I’ve never seen it before, though I’ve come up that slope a thousand and one times. Mr Cromley’s arm tightened and drew me against him.
‘Magic,’ he said. ‘The circle builders wanted to hide it until the very last moment.’ Over a dip in the bank we could see the new stones Mr Keiller had put up that summer, and beyond them the backs of the cottages and the church tower poking through the trees. ‘But look how the terrain rises again, concealing what takes place in the inner circles. You think you’ve arrived, but there’s still a way before you’re admitted to the sanctum.’ His breath was warm on the side of my face. We crossed the road and came into the circle.
As we passed between the two big entrance stones, I dropped Miss Chapman’s sketchbook and bent to pick it up. Mr Cromley’s hand touched my back and his fingers danced along my spine. ‘I’ll take those to the Manor for you,’ he said. ‘I might owe you an apology. For some…rather wild things I said last time we talked.’
‘No apology necessary.’
‘Shall we stroll through the stones?’ His grey eyes took the clothes off me, and I didn’t care one bit.
There was a three-quarter moon rising already like a screaming face. We skirted the backs of the cottages, in the wild part of the circle the dig hadn’t yet reached. Only a few tall stones still stood there, as they had for five thousand years. It was the heart of the circle, Mr Keiller had said, where a tall obelisk had towered above everything else. A yellow lamp shone in Mam’s kitchen window; I could see her moving between refrigerator and table, setting out plates for the guests, lifting lace doilies to unveil the supper dishes. Mr Cromley’s hand was fire on my arm. A flock of sheep glimmered in the last of the light. Bats skimmed over us on their way to the ditches.
‘Your uncle,’ I said. ‘Is he really a magician?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Cromley ‘He’s taught me a