The Dancing Druids

The Dancing Druids

Gladys Mitchell

Bradley 21

1948

To

THE NINE STONES OF WINTERBORNE ABBAS

which suggested the story

‘And he ordered the stone figure to be taken up, and placed in his room near to his bed; and as often as he looked at it he wept and said, “O that I could bring thee back to life again… !” ’

The Brothers Grimm—Faithful John

—«¦»—

and to MY DEAR ELIZABETH STAMP

for whom it was written

‘I ain would I, Chloris, ere I die,

Bequeath you such a legacy,

As you might say, when I am gone,

“None has the like !” My heart alone

Were the best gift I could bestow;

But that’s already yours, you know.’

Anonymous—17th century

Chapter One

—«¦»—

‘The young man set out with this letter, but missed his way, and came in the evening to a dark wood.’

The Brothers Grimm (The Giant with the Three Golden Hairs)

A handsome young man in dirty white running-vest and shorts paused for a moment at the crossroads of a little market town in the south-west of England and then trotted on past the obelisk which commemorated the end of the Boer War. He turned down a narrow street and encountered a child of eight or nine years of age.

‘Soppy runner!’ said the child. The young man checked, smiled, glanced behind him, and then nodded as he thrust the damp hair from his brow and looked down at his bramble-scratched shins.

‘I believe you,’ he cordially responded. He then ran on again, heading south for the sea, and, immediately he had disappeared, round a bend came a straggle of eight or ten other young men who seemed in pursuit of the first.

With an instinct to support, as he thought, the weaker side, the child pointed to an alley which ran eastward, under a Tudor arch, and cried excitedly (for he was unused to telling lies, and found the experience exhilarating):

‘That way! He run that way! I seen him go by!’

With one exception, the pursuers swung off to the left and vanished beneath the archway. The last of the group, however, ran blindly on, a long, thin, black-haired youth with a long, thin, freckled face, deep-set, intelligent eyes and a Spartan, kingly jowl.

He was, in point of fact, descended from kings, and occasionally, although not often (for most of the kingliness had been educated out of him) he reacted to the call of his blood. He settled down very easily, however, after one of these infrequent, atavistic outbreaks, to the easy mediocrity of democratic behaviour, and was behaving democratically now, for it was not a desire for princely solitude which had caused him to run in the right direction while all his companions took the wrong one. It was that he had a fair knowledge of the countryside and also of the psychology of the hare, who happened to be his cousin, and this knowledge he was prepared to place at the disposal of his team of hounds.

In the direction towards which he was heading there was an ancient hill-fort. From the top of it he proposed to survey the countryside, locate the hare, and, unless they were too far off, give the view halloo to the hounds.

This altruistic scheme was doomed to disappointment. Encouraged by what they regarded as a heaven-sent bit of information, the hounds streamed away to the east, and found themselves involved in a kind of suburb of the town from which nothing was visible but houses, more alleys, some mean factories and a tributary of the river. Undismayed, they ran on, until good luck brought them on to a major road which, acting on the directions of a signpost, they followed in what was roughly the right direction—that is, in the direction taken by their quarry; in other words, to the resort called Welsea Beaches.

Meanwhile the solitary hound, whose name was O’Hara, ran on until he came out past the cattle market and the station, and on to a road which forked south-east on one prong and south-west on the other, past what had been, in early history, a third-century Roman amphitheatre. The high, grassy banks of this ancient monument would afford, he thought, a preliminary view of the road which his cousin might have taken, so he turned aside through an iron gate and ran on to the stiff green grass. In three leaps which did credit to the iron muscles of his thin, long legs, he was up on the mound which surrounded the open space of the amphitheatre, and was looking about him.

Men were scything the grass below him, and he paused to consider their work. Before the Romans came, the amphitheatre had been a place of assembly of a different kind, a place of worship, a Neolithic or early Bronze Age meeting-place, a place of sanctuary, sacrifice (or coronation, maybe), mysterious, holy, horrible, and something of its departed glory clung about it as bright and soluble clouds will cling round the afternoon sun.

O’Hara lifted his eyes from the three men with their scythes, and, walking along the top of the mound, he looked ahead of him to where the road forked west and south and the railway kept a course as straight as a yard- stick towards the sea. He could see no sign of the hare.

‘Gone to ground; foxing us, perhaps,’ thought O’Hara; for it was what he himself would have done in his cousin’s place. ‘He’s going to throw us off his track and then run round us. But I’ll spot him all right from the fort.’

He descended the bank where the old Roman gateway had been, ran out from the enclosure through the modern iron swing-gate, and then took the road to his right, away from the railway. He crossed a hump-backed bridge, and for a quarter of a mile he followed the main road. After that he swung further to the right, and trotted along a narrow, sandy lane. At the main-road end of it were houses, but further on, past these, the road narrowed into a track, which, appearing to lead to a bell-barrow, turned southwards in a half-mile semicircle, and led, instead, to the hill-fort, grim and gloomy, and shadowed by heavy cloud, which he had chosen as the real objective from which to survey his route and spot the hare.

The track became a footpath ascending the hill. Soon it was very steep. O’Hara could do no more than drop into a walk as the slope of the hill grew shorter, for the gradient sharpened abruptly into something resembling a cliff-face, or a test hill in the Tourist Trophy race.

He saw a shepherd with his flock and dog on the western shoulder of the hill, but when these had gone, the hillside was deserted and desolate, and the young man, pausing a moment to look about him, instinctively shrugged from his shoulders the weight of its lonely vastness. Around him he saw nothing but the sky and the towering hill- top, and, between the two and defying them, the scowling mounds and ditches of primitive man’s defence against his enemies.