Crybbe aka Curfew

'We 'ad a dog, we did.'

'Where's it now?'

'Ran off.'

'I was your dog, I'd run off,' another kid said and the first kid punched him on the shoulder.

'Listen, what about farm dogs? Mr Preece, has he got a sheepdog?'

'Got one of them Bobcats.'

'What?'

'Like a little go-kart thing with four-wheel drive. Goes over hills. You got one of them, you don't need no sheepdog.'

'Yes,' Fay had said. 'I think I see.'

She didn't see at all.

Powys left Crybbe before seven and was back before ten, a changed man.

He wore a suit which was relatively uncreased. His shoes were polished, his hair brushed. He was freshly shaven.

He parked his nine-year-old Mini well out of sight, in the old cattle market behind the square, and walked across to the Cock, carrying a plausible-looking black folder under his arm. Taking Rachel's advice.

'Don't let him see you like that. You have to meet his image of J. M. Powys, so if you can't look older, at least look smarter. Don't let him see the car, he mustn't think you need the money – he's always suspicious of people who aren't rich. And you don't know anything about his plans.'

'Isn't Humble, the New Age minder, going to tell him he caught me nosing around?'

'I think not.'

He entered the low-ceilinged lobby of the Cock, where all the furniture was varnished so thickly that you could hardly tell one piece from another. It was like sitting in a tray of dark chocolates left on a radiator. Powys wedged himself into what he assumed to be an oak settle, to wait for Rachel.

Guy Morrison would be here, she'd told him, starting work on a documentary. He'd once worked with Guy on a series of three-minute silly-season items on Ancient Mysteries of the West for a Bristol-based regional magazine programme – J. M. Powys hired as the regular 'expert interviewee'. His clearest memory was of the day he'd suggested they look beyond the obvious. Taking Guy down to Dartmoor to see a newly discovered stone row believed to be orientated to the rising moon. He remembered the TV reporter looking down with disdain at the ragged line of stones, none more than eighteen inches high, barely below the level of his hand-stitched hiking boots. 'Let's move on,' Guy had said, affronted. Tm not doing a piece to camera in front of that.'

Presently, the Cock's taciturn licensee, Denzil George emerged from some sanctum and glanced across. He displayed no sign of recognition. Still been in bed, presumably, when Powys was sliding out of a side door into the alley just after six-thirty this morning.

'…do for you?' Denzil said heavily. Powys thought of some shambling medieval innkeeper, black-jowled, scowling, lumpen-browed.

'Nothing at all, thanks, mate. I'm waiting for… ah, this lady, I think.'

Rachel had appeared on the stairs, sleek in a dark-blue business suit. 'Mr Powys?'

'Good morning. Am I too early?'

'Only a little. We're terribly glad you were able to make it. Mr George, I'm taking Mr Powys along to the Court, so if Mr Goff calls in, tell him we've gone on ahead, will you? And lunch as arranged, OK?'

Rachel tossed a brilliant smile at the licensee, and Denzil stumped back into his lair, where Powys imagined him breakfasting on a whole loaf of bread without slicing it.

'Very svelte,' said Rachel, surveying Powys on the steps outside.

'You're surprised, aren't you? You thought I probably hadn't worn a suit since the seventies. You thought it was going to be the wide lapels and the kipper tie.'

'Had a momentary fear of flares, then decided you were too young,' Rachel said flatteringly. 'Come along, J.M.'

A few minutes later he was admiring her thighs pistoning in and out of the dark skirt, as she drove the Range Rover, impatiently pumping the clutch, long fingers carelessly crooked around the wheel.

'We're going to the Court?'

'Couple of hours before they all arrive. I thought you'd like to see the set-up, or lack of one.'

She drove directly across the square and then thrust the vehicle into a narrow fork beside the church. Powys remembered coming out of this lane last night in the same seat, nursing his nose, feeling foolish.

The nose still hurt. But this morning, he thought, with a kind of wonder, he was feeling more… well, more focused than he had in years.

And he wanted to know more about Rachel.

She swung the Range Rover between stone gateposts, briefing him about today's lunch. 'Informal gathering of the people at the core of the venture. New Age luminaries. A few supportive locals – newcomers, mostly. And Max's advisers.'

'Andy Boulton-Trow?'

Rachel parked in the courtyard. 'Of course, you know him.'

'All earth-mysteries people know each other. Andy – we were at an college together, which is where The Old Golden Land started. Both got into mystical landscapes. Auras around stone circles, Samuel Palmer moons over burial mounds on the Downs. Andy was a mature student, he'd already been to university.'

'He seems a very deep guy. Laid-back.'

'I suppose so,' said Powys.

Rachel parked outside the stable-block. 'Max says Boulton-Trow's knowledge of stones and prehistoric shamanic rituals is second to none.'

'Yeah, possibly.'

'But you wrote the book,' Rachel said.

Powys smiled. 'Andy professes to despise commercial books on earth mysteries. Comes from not needing the money.'

'Private income?'

'Inherited wealth. Something like that. Never discussed it.'

Rachel said, 'And who's Rose Hart?'

'She took the pictures for the book,' Powys said quietly.

Rachel made no move to get out of the vehicle.

'There were four of us,' Powys said, looking straight through the windscreen. 'Sometimes five. Andy and me and Rose, who was studying photography, and Ben Corby, who thought of the title – comes from an old Incredible String Band song – and flogged the idea to a publisher.'

He paused. 'Rose was my girlfriend. She's dead.'

'Don't talk about it if you don't want to,' Rachel said. 'Come and look at the crumbling pile before the others arrive.'

Rachel had keys to the Court. One was so big it made her bag bulge, 'watch where you're stepping when we go in. It's dark.'

Not too dark to find Rachel's lips.

'Thanks,' he said quietly.

Rachel didn't move. The house was silent around them.

Back from the town, around mid-morning, Fay came in quietly through the kitchen door; Arnold didn't bark. He was shut in the kitchen with Rasputin, who was glaring at him from a chair. Arnold seemed glad to see her; he wagged his tail and planted his front paws on her sweater.

'Good boy,' Fay said.