To Dream of the Dead

Vicarage.

52 Blue Light

WHEN THE RAIN came back, it was so hard and loud it was like the scullery window was being thrashed and thrashed with old-fashioned brooms made of twigs. Jane had to hold the heavy Bakelite phone tight to her ear to make out what Coops was saying.

‘… Pure conjecture, Jane, so don’t go…’

‘No. I won’t. Honestly.’

It was like the rain was speeding up with her excitement. She was finding it hard to sit still. Alone in the scullery under the desk lamp, charged up with the importance of this. Could hear the buzz and clink of chat and crockery in the kitchen — Mum in there with Eirion, Lol and Gomer.

‘OK, say the orchard’s been there since medieval times…’

‘Do you actually know that?’ Coops said. ‘I didn’t have much chance to go into the records.’

‘Nobody knows. It’s just always been there. Can’t be the only village in the centre of an orchard.’

‘No.’

‘And it certainly wouldn’t be the only village inside a henge.’

There. She’d said it. Henge. A word you could chew. Jane had her modest collection of archaeological textbooks spread out over the desk, cross-referencing.

A kind of circular ritual monument unique to the British Isles with a ditch and a bank…

… May include megaliths, like Stonehenge and Avebury, or timber posts, as at Woodhenge and Durrington Walls.

She also had the fairly rudimentary map of the village in the centre of an old Ledwardine guidebook, produced in the 1930s when the orchard still formed most of a semicircle and neither the hestate nor the housing at the bottom of Old Barn Lane had even been thought of.

And you could see it. When you knew you could totally see it.

They were all living in the middle of a henge! The whole village part of a ritual site dating back four thousand years.

There was like a blue light inside Jane’s head.

Ledwardine was the pentagram at the heart of the apple.

‘This could mean there are more stones, Coops.’

‘It’s impossible to say. Stones get smashed, taken away, used in buildings.’

‘But even if these are the only stones, Coleman’s Meadow is only a fragment of the monument.’

‘It’s all theoretical, Jane.’

‘You weren’t saying that yesterday. You were totally convinced that Blore had found something, and you were walking all over the orchard in the rain trying to second-guess him. Come on, admit it, you were thinking henge as well.’

‘What I was thinking doesn’t really matter. It’s the purest — There are no obvious signs.’

‘That’s because they’re all under what’s left of the orchard… The orchard was actually planted to cover up the henge — maybe the henge was threatened or somebody—’

‘That’s not something we can ever know,’ Coops said.

What was wrong with him? Had he had a row with his wife or something, down there in Somerset?

‘You’d thought about it before yesterday, too, hadn’t you? You’d thought henge.’

‘Look, all right, it wouldn’t be that unexpected. A henge is just a circular area with a ditch and a bank. As you probably know, they found a massive one a few years ago not twenty miles from here, in Radnor Forest. But not this side of the English border.’

‘What the hell’s that got to do with it? There wouldn’t’ve been a border back then. Why are you being so negative, Coops?’

‘I just… just don’t go spreading this round, Jane. I mean, obviously I can’t stop you but…’

‘Hey, don’t worry, nobody’s going to take any notice of me, Coops, I’m just a disgraced applicant to the University of Middle Earth. Look, I just feel this is so right. The Village in the Orchard. Encircled by the orchard… concealing what was encircling it before.’

‘Jane,’ Coops said, ‘how can I put this? If you start going on about your feelings—’

‘If I hadn’t had any feelings in the first place, where wouldn’t—’

Jane clammed up. He was right. She had to stop claiming credit. That was how she’d fallen into Bill Blore’s net, the precocious, big-mouth teen. Yes, she was a medium for this — one of them, that was all — for something that needed to come out. But if you went round talking like that people would think you were bonkers. That was, the establishment would think you were bonkers; Blore was proof that things hadn’t changed so much since the leading archaeologists of the day had slagged off Alfred Watkins.

She just couldn’t wait for tomorrow, though. Daylight. Christmas Day. Perfect. She’d be out at first light, looking at everything with new eyes. The familiar transformed. Every time she thought about it, something new occurred to her… like where orchard faded into churchyard, she realised that what she’d thought was the remains of a burial mound might actually be part of the bank of the henge.

‘The orchard,’ she said, ‘was preserving it into the Christian era, all through the witch-hunt times. The old pagan spirituality maintained?’

A tradition. From Alfred Watkins to Jane Watkins, via Lucy Devenish.

Miss Devenish would ever wish it so.

Lol was part of this. They were all part of it.

There was only one unfortunate aspect.

‘Of course, there’s Bill Blore.’

Coops said nothing.

‘He’s going to want to keep this to himself, isn’t he?’

Coops still silent.

‘How can we get it out first, Coops, just to stuff him? I mean, come on, he doesn’t deserve it.’

‘No,’ Coops said. ‘He doesn’t deserve anything.’

‘So what can we do? I realise I’m not much use here. I’m just a—’

‘Jane… you don’t understand.’

‘So explain it to me.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Coops… what’s happened?’

‘We’ll talk about it when I get back after Christmas.’

‘No.’ Jane hugged the phone to her ear, the rain blitzing the window. She could feel her heart beating, her blood racing, or something. ‘You can’t do this to me, Coops.’

‘Jane, I know you’ve had a bad couple of days, and you’re right, Blore doesn’t deserve… anything. I just think — don’t take this the wrong way, please — but I don’t think you’re mature enough to deal with it, and I don’t mean that in any…’

Jane gripped the phone with both hands. She wanted to scream at him, but if she went down that road it would just prove him right about her state of maturity.

‘I don’t yet know the full details, OK?’ Coops said. ‘I had a call from my friend in the Chief Exec’s office, and it was very risky for her to get the information, so I don’t want any comeback on her.’