‘That’s right.’
An outline drawing had been made in the surface of the clay with a sharp instrument - probably one of the knitting needles lying around on a side table. The pattern had been emphasized by pressing in holly, rowan berries and alder cones, with mosses, bark, and lichens. The flower petals were going on last, the picture being created from the bottom upwards so that the petals overlapped and the rainwater would drain off.
If Diane Fry had been here, she would have said it was just another quaint rural custom. But this was one was unique to Derbyshire, and attracted many thousands of visitors to the Peak District every year to see the displays. The pictures in the well dressings always told a story, too - often a religious theme, but sometimes subjects with more local significance.
‘What’s that background made of?’ asked Cooper, pointing at the pale grey material backing the picture.
‘It’s fluorspar. We just call it spar.’
‘Of course.’ Fluorspar was local, too - the product of a number of quarries in the mineral-rich White Peak.
The women were fussing around him, and Cooper started to feel that he was in the way. He couldn’t see yet what the picture was going to be. Only the background had been filled in. But soon a picture would appear in living colour for the display. And it would be living too - or almost, since all the materials were natural. Some of the hundreds of well dressings that appeared through the county from April through to September were astonishingly detailed and inventive, and it was no wonder they were such an attraction for visitors. Withens just seemed such an unlikely place to find one.
This is quite an early well dressing, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘We’re the earliest at this end of the county. It means we have to rely on what’s in flower.’
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‘Is the display this weekend?’
‘Of course. There wouldn’t be much point petalling now, otherwise. It’ll only last a few days.’
And the well dressings had started as a way of thanking the water goddess who provided a village’s clean water supply. Some villagers had believed that it had been their pure water that had protected them from the Black Death that had ravaged the rest of England in the fourteenth century.
Derek Alton’s hands were stained green and smelt of leaking sap from the dock plants. Their leaves were large and healthy-looking. But when he grasped them in his bare hands, he could feel both sides at once, the cold and the warmth. Another eternal duality lurking in the undergrowth to surprise him. The cold of death and the warmth of life. The darkness and the light.
Alton pulled his hand away, thinking of the slugs and snails that might be clinging to the undersides of the leaves. He wiped his palms on his trousers, and decided he should have worn his gloves. He hardly dared to pull at the leaves too hard, because they were surprisingly fragile and ripped easily in his fingers. Yet their stems were as tough as any weed he had come across, and their roots were firmly fixed, so that they clung tenaciously to the ground even when he threw all his weight into heaving on them. He ended up with pieces of shredded leaf and tiny bits of their flesh pressed into the creases of his hands, his fingers slippery and stained green by their juice. Their broken stems smelled faintly acid.
It must have presented a major engineering exercise to get the massive flat gritstone slabs into place over the graves. It was almost as if the families who had paid for them had been making absolutely sure that their dead relatives were never going to push their way up out of their graves and come back again. No person could lift one of those slabs on his own. But nature could do it. Nature was pushing them up, sliding them aside, pulling them down into the ground and tilting them at jaunty angles, making a joke of the whole thing.
Saddest of all were the stones at the western end of the graveyard. They were tiny by comparison to the gritstone slabs. In fact, they reminded Alton of the little milestones that could still occasionally be seen on the roadside in the Peak District, relics of a forgotten period when travel was slow enough to see them.
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At this time of the year, the tiny stones were just managing to peep above the bracken litter, but they were destined to disappear again within a week or two. Alton had no idea why the people who were remembered by the stones had not even earned their full names on their memorials. They bore only initials and a year. Here were G.S. and M.W., and over there C.S. All of them seemed to have died in 1849.
Was it just lack of money that had restricted the poorer families to a tiny stone with no space on it for a proper inscription in tribute to the dead? Or had it been yet another peculiar local custom?
But when he looked at the huge gritstone slabs nearer the church, with their ornately carved lettering, their biblical texts and complete family histories, Alton knew the answer. The people in Withens had not been divided by belief and tradition, but by wealth and position. So many churchyards in so many thousands of towns and villages were testament to that fact. The rich had been able to buy their way closer to Heaven.
But Christian burial was based on the belief that the dead would rise again one day. Like a seed, the body was planted in the earth to await rebirth.
The worst pest of all in the churchyard was the bracken that had spread down the hillside. Grazing sheep normally kept it down, but in the churchyard it was out of reach of the sheep because of the stone walls. Each year, the bracken grew from the debris of its own dead growth of the previous autumn. Recently, a frost had caught some of the new bracken fronds as they unfurled. They were already brown and dead and brittle, crumbling under his fingers. Even as the rest of the plant grew green and vibrant around it.
In one corner of the churchyard, a sycamore and some young hollies had claimed several graves as their own. Elsewhere, rosebay willowherb was beginning its spring offensive and the rhododendrons were threatening, the chestnuts were unfurling their leaves, the brambles, docks and thistles were spreading unhindered, and underfoot were the small, black, bullet-like heads of the plantains.
Alton knew there were a couple of dozen graves that hadn’t seen the light of day for years, and probably never would now. Their inscriptions took on an air of ironic neglect: ‘Sacred to the memory … here lieth the body … departed this life … Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord/
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The sycamores had spread through the churchyard like a plague, their whirling seed pods uncontrollable in the wind. When he had first arrived, Alton had persuaded the diocese to pay for the ^
rampant sycamores to he cut hack down to their roots, on the W,
grounds that they were damaging the graves, pushing up the hori Pj
zontal memorial stones. But already the remaining bases of the trees were shooting again - their amputated boles protruded from the edges of the gravestones like fingers trying to lift the stone slabs. Their fingernails were green - the new shoots of spring emerging from the grave.
