Merrily dragged raggedly on her cigarette.
‘You really want it, though, don’t you?’ Jane said. ‘You really, really want it.’
‘I don’t know,’ Merrily lied.
Jane smiled.
‘I have a lot of thinking to do,’ Merrily said.
‘You going to tell
‘I think I shall be avoiding the Bishop for a while.’
‘Ha.’ Jane was looking over her mother’s left shoulder.
Merrily said wearily, ‘He just came in, didn’t he?’
‘I think I’ll leave you to it. I’ll go and have a mooch around Waterstone’s and Andy’s. See you back at the car at six?’
The waitress arrived with the tea.
‘The Bishop can have mine if he likes,’ Jane said.
4
Moon
IT WAS WHAT happened with the crow, after the rain on Dinedor Hill. This was when Lol Robinson actually began to be spooked by Moon.
As distinct from sorry for Moon. Puzzled by Moon. Fascinated by Moon.
And attracted to her, of course. But anything down that road was not an option. It was not supposed to be that kind of relationship.
Most people having their possessions carried into a new home would need to supervise the operation, make sure nothing got broken. Moon had shrugged, left them to get on with it, and melted away into the rain and her beloved hill.
There really wasn’t very much stuff to move in. Moon didn’t even have a proper bed. When the removal men had gone, Lol went up to the Iron Age ramparts to find her.
He walked up through the woods, not a steep slope because the barn was quite close to the flattened summit where the ancient camp had been, the Iron Age village of circular thatched huts. Nothing remained of it except dips and hollows, guarded now by huge old trees, and by the earthen ramparts at the highest point.
And this was where he found Moon, where the enormous trees parted to reveal the city of Hereford laid out at your feet like an offering.
Lol was aware that some people called the hill a
She was standing with her back to him, next to a huge beech tree which still wore most of its leaves. Her hair hung almost to the waist of the long medieval sort of dress she wore under a woollen shawl.
Making Lol think of drawings of fairies by Arthur Rackham and the centrefolds of those quasi-mystical albums from the early seventies – the ones which had first inspired him to write songs. The kind of songs which were already going out of fashion when Lol’s band, Hazey Jane, won their first recording contract.
Moon would still have been at primary school then. She seemed to have skipped a whole generation, if not two. Hippy
Dick Lyden, the psychotherapist, had noticed this and given his professional blessing to Moon’s plan, despite the fears of her brother Denny, who was jittery as hell about it. ‘
But she was a grown woman. What were they supposed to do, short of getting her committed to a psychiatric hospital? Lol, who’d been through that particular horror himself, was now of the opinion that it should never happen to anyone who was not dangerously insane.
When he first saw Moon on the ramparts, even though her face was turned away, he thought she’d never seemed more serene.
She glanced over her shoulder and smiled at him.
‘Hi.’
‘OK?’
‘Yes.’ She turned back to the view over the city. ‘Wonderful, isn’t it? Look. Look at the Cathedral and All Saints. Isn’t that amazing?’
From here, even though they were actually several hundred yards apart, the church steeple and the Cathedral tower overlapped. The sky around them was a strange, burned-out orange.
Moon said, ‘Many of the ley-lines through other towns, you can’t see them any more because of new high- rise buildings, but of course there aren’t any of those in Hereford. The skyline remains substantially the same.’
Lol realized he’d seen an old photograph of this view, taken in the 1920s by Alfred Watkins, the Hereford gentleman who’d first noticed that prehistoric stones and mounds and the medieval churches on their sites often seemed to occur on imaginary straight lines running across the landscape. Most archaeologists thought this was a rubbish theory, but Katherine Moon was not like most archaeologists.
‘Moon,’ he said now, ‘why do some people call it a holy hill?’
She didn’t have to think about it. ‘The line goes through four ancient places of worship, OK? Ending at a very old church in the country. But it starts here, and this is the highest point. So all these churches, including the Cathedral, remain in its shadow.’
‘In the poetic sense.’
‘In the spiritual sense. This hill is the mother of the city. The camp here was the earliest proper settlement, long before there was a town down there. Over a thousand Celtic people lived up here.’ She paused. ‘My ancestors.’
There was a touching tremor of pride in her voice.
‘So it’s kind of…’ Lol hesitated, ‘… holy in the pagan sense.’
‘It’s just holy.’ Moon still had her back to him. ‘This was before the time of Christ. Over a thousand people keeping sheep and storing grain, doing their spinning and weaving and dyeing. It would’ve been idyllic – for a time.’
‘What happened to them? The Dinedor People.’
‘Some of them never went away. And the spirit remains.’
Moon gazed down over the spread of the city towards the distant Black Mountains and Welsh border. Slowly she turned towards him.
‘And some… some of us have returned.’
He saw tears shining in her eyes.
And then he saw the black thing clasped to her stomach.
Dick Lyden, the therapist, had briefed Lol as best he could about three months ago.
After university, Dick said, Katherine had spent a couple of years freelancing on various archaeological digs across Britain. This was how she became obsessed with dead Celtic civilizations. Began wearing primitive clothing and strange jewellery, smoking too much dope, tripping out on magic-mushroom tea. When she arrived back in Hereford, the Katherine bit had gone; she was just Moon, and more than a little weird.
The reason she’d come back to Hereford was the lure of the big Cathedral Close dig. Also, perhaps, the
