The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [98]
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘You’re good at readin’, intcha? Flip back near the beginning of the book.’
There was a step behind the reading stand. Riz made me drag it over and stand on it to reach the book. It had flimsy, fragile pages.
‘Keep turnin’ back to the beginning.’ He was at my side, not much taller than me now I was on the step. ‘There–read that bit. From where it says thirteen.’
‘“And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent be–beg–”’
‘Beguiled me,’ said Riz. He seemed to know it by heart.
“And I did eat.”’
‘Go on. What does it say next?’
‘“And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life…”’
‘See?’ said Riz. ‘That’s God cursing the serpent. And you know who the serpent is?’ From the lectern, I could see the stone tub, with the serpents carved around its base. The man sticking his spear into one of them was hidden on the far side. ‘That’s us. The pagans.’ He reached over my shoulder and tore the flimsy page right out of the book, flipping the pages back to hide what he’d done. ‘Upon thy belly shalt thou go, Ind. I reckon you got about thirty seconds left to leg it out of here. Before you ain’t got any legs left to leg it on.’
Keir had turned pale under his tan. He tugged my arm. We legged it and, in our hurry to put distance between ourselves and God, almost collided with the other man in the leather jacket who was coming into the porch.
He was a black man. And that was weird because although there were plenty of black people back home in Bristol, I hadn’t seen a black man in Avebury all summer long.
The sound of the church door scraping on stone hauls me back to the present, shivering, because by now I ought to know that the brighter memories of that summer all turn dark in the end. An elderly woman comes out of the porch, carrying a bucket filled with dead flowers. She nods at me as she comes towards the bench. ‘Lovely evening.’ The nod turns to a smile, and she stops. ‘India, isn’t it? Frances’s granddaughter?’
I vaguely recognize her from the film show in the Red Lion.
‘You’ve been working with that TV crew, haven’t you?’ she says. ‘Someone rang me the other day to persuade me to be interviewed. Said I’d think about it.’
‘You should do it,’ I say, moving up the bench to make room for her. ‘I’ve been trying to talk Frannie into it.’
‘Won’t stop, I must take these to the compost heap and get on home.’ Nevertheless, she puts down the bucket. ‘Those kids running towards the camera in Percy Lawes’s film? One of them was me. Your gran always seemed so grown-up to us–such a pretty girl, she was, quite the young lady, especially after she started at the Manor. And she had spirit, still does. Though it wore her down eventually, I reckon, working for that old devil.’
‘Keiller? What did he do to her?’
‘What I mean is, I shouldn’t have liked it. He used to stand on a box among the stones, bellowing instructions through a megaphone. And in the end he did the same to her as he did to the whole village.’ She picks up the bucket of dead flowers. ‘Tore the heart out of it. I remember it ever so clearly, that September he had her parents’ guesthouse demolished, and we all stood and watched.’
CHAPTER 24
September 1938
I thought it would be in the Manor. Mr Cromley said that when Mr Keiller carried the chalk phallus out that night in February, the dinner guests made a circle, and they all kissed it before Mr K presented it to the statue of Pan. You could feel the energies swirling and crackling, he said, because the stone circle is like Mr Rawlins’s big Crossley generator, making invisible power that spills over the henge banks through the whole village. But the ritual can’t be there this time: the Manor’s not private enough. If Davey and I could spy, who else