First the band who had brought the bones from the crypt put them in a heap on the ground. Then from someone in the crowd on the other side of the bonfire they obtained a cockerel. This the Twins held by the legs over the heap of bones while Leo slaughtered it by cutting off its head. There was an eerie silence from the assembly while this was done. The blood from the slain bird dripped on to the dead man’s bones, and the weird signs of the zodiac chanted again, but this time the words were different and undoubtedly hinted at a pagan origin.
‘Crops for your blood,
Blood for our good,
Soul, take your rest,
And give the Dear best.
Us buries you deep,
Not long for to sleep,
And when Judgment Day come,
The Lord take ee home.’
Fenella tried to shake off the nightmare effect which all this primitive ceremonial was having upon her by quoting to herself, ‘This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard,’ but she knew that this was a lie. Blood, fire, the mournful chanting, the weird costumes of the celebrants, the midnight hour, the hilltop setting above the banks and ditches raised and hewn out by who knows what sweated labour or exactly how long ago, combined to fill her with a horrid kind of superstitious awe which she could not shake off or rationalise.
She saw why the hole had been made so wide. Libra, the absurd pair of scales on his head-dress waggling in the light of the bonfire, jumped down into it and the bones were handed to him by the others in what seemed to be a ritual order, finishing up with the skull, so that, by the time everything was in place, there lay in the wide grave a skeleton which, if not quite complete, was so nearly so that even the rib-cage was indicated by a number of small thin bones spread out above the pelvic girdle and almost touching the breast-bone.
Before the ceremony was completed, however, from somewhere in the crowd came the incongruous sound of an alarm-clock going off. The women in front of Fenella groaned softly and one of them whispered to another, ‘ ’Tis May-Day! They ain’t got it done up to time. That’ll bring bad luck, you see if it don’t!’
At the sound of the alarm-clock the whole crowd of villagers was galvanised into movement. Some began streaming down the hill towards the village. Others – the young ones – began to play a game of tag, the boys running after the screaming, laughing girls and chasing them away from the glow of the bonfire towards the woods which lay on the other side of the hill. May-Day had come to Seven Wells, and Fenella escaped into the darkness, dreading that some bucolic youth might fancy her fair game in the screaming, shouting free-for-all which seemed to be going on all over the hillside.
Fortunately, owing to her late appearance on the scene, she was on the edge of the crowd, and the young men she was anxious to avoid were all moving away from her and away from the village. Thankfully she added herself to a knot of sober men and women who were hurrying downhill on the track along which the bones had been carried as though they, too, wanted no part in the future proceedings, and so, in the wake of this quiet and respectable company, her heavy coat rendering her inconspicuous in the darkness, she made her way back to the More to Come, slipped in by the big door and mindful of the trapdoor – she had forgotten that she had seen it closed down – she crept up the spiral stone stair to her room, flung off her clothes and, having previously barred the door as she had been instructed to do, she fell into bed, suddenly conscious of extreme exhaustion.
Her only regret was that she had not stayed to see the end of the ritual burying, but she comforted herself with the thought that nothing remained for the zodiac figures to do except to heap earth upon the blood-bedabbled skeleton and stamp the ground flat. She did wonder, however, whether there would have been a last bit of doggerel chanted over the finished grave, and what her great-aunt, Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, consultant psychiatrist to the Home Office, would have made of the bizarre goings-on.
‘One thing she would have noticed,’ thought Fenella. ‘I wonder whether it was by intention or by accident that they buried a hermaphrodite? Those legs, and possibly the arms, were those of a man, and I’m not sure about the breast-bone, but I know they added a woman’s pelvis. I remember the pictures I wasn’t supposed to look at in the medical book at home when I was ten.’
Nobody disturbed her rest, neither did she have bad dreams. She woke at seven to find that the morning was clear and sunny. At half-past there came a tap at the door.
‘Managed you some early tea arter all,’ said Clytie, cheerfully, ‘and bathroom be vacant and breakfast at eight-thirty, and master bin over to Croyton about your car, and that’ll be ready soon as you’ve ’ad your dinner. Be you goin’ out to see the finish o’ the Mayerin’? Started at dawn, that did, arter Mayerin’ Night in the woods, and goin’ on nice, that is.’
‘People spent the night in the woods at this time of year?’
‘Oh, there’s ways of keepin’ warm,’ said Clytie, with a lascivious little giggle,’ and a goodly old flourish of christenin’s round about the turn of the year.’
CHAPTER SIX
Mayering Morn
‘Everything was conducted with great decorum and broke up in good time.’
James Woodforde – Diary of a Country Parson
‘Clytie,’ said Fenella, ‘what really goes on in the village on Mayering Eve?’
‘I just told you,’ replied the young servant, with a reminiscent grin.
‘Oh, I know all about the woods and the lovers, and I suppose, when dawn
