Pavane

Fourth Measure LORDS AND LADIES

The group of people clustered round the bed had something of the sculptured stillness of a stage tableau. A single lamp, hung above them from one of the heavy beams, threw their faces into sharp relief, accentuated the pallor of the sick man as he lay with one end of Father Edwardes’s violet stole tucked beneath his neck, the fabric stretched between them like a banner of faith. The old man’s eyes rolled restlessly; his hands plucked at the covers as he breathed in short, painful gasps.

Beyond the group, framed in the window against the bluing dusk sky of May, sat a girl. Her long dark blonde hair was bound in a chignon at the nape of her neck; one wisp had escaped, lay curling on her shoulder. It brushed her cheek as she turned her head; she pushed it aside irritably, looked down across the long roofs of the engine sheds to where the late train swung into the yard with a rattle and clash, manoeuvred towards its bay. Some scent from it floated up to the casement; Margaret seemed to feel momentarily the warmth from the steamer brush her face, tinging the mild air with giants’ breath. She looked back guiltily into the room. Her mind, seeming half dazed, translated snatches of the priest’s rumbling Latin.

‘I exorcise thee, most vile spirit, the very embodiment of our enemy, the entire spectre… In the name of Jesus Christ… get out and flee from this creature of God,..’ The girl twined her fingers in her lap, compressing them to feel the knuckle joints grind into each other, and lowered her eyes. The Dutch lamp hanging from the ceiling swayed slightly, its flame leaping and flickering. There was no wind.

Father Edwardes paused and lifted his head quietly to stare at the lamp. The flame steadied, burning again bright and tall. A muffled sob from old Sarah at the foot of the bed; Tim Strange reached forward to squeeze her hand.

‘He Himself commands thee, who has ordered thee cast down from the heights of heaven to the depths of the earth. He commands thee, who commands the sea, the winds, and the tempests… Hear therefore and fear 0 Satan, enemy of the faith, foe to the human race…

Down below the loco chattered again, softly. Margaret turned back unwillingly. Strange how the very sound of oiled steel could evoke such a tapestry of images. The summer-night roads, whitish-grey ribbons trailing into darkness, warm still with the sun’s heat, owl and bat haunted; buzz of early insects in the air, churr of feeding birds; grass knee-long, rich as black velvet under the moon; tall wild hedgerows heavy with the blood-pouring scent of the may. She wanted in an intense flash of longing to be clear of the room and the house, run and dance, roll in the grass till the stars spun giddy sparks above her face.

She swallowed and made instinctively and automatically the sign of the Cross. Father Edwardes had counselled her very closely against any such levity of thought, any aberration that might herald the advent of a possessing and vengeful spirit. ‘For my child,’ the priest had warned solemnly, quoting from the Enchiridion of Von Berg, ‘they may approach mildly; but afterwards they leave behind grief, desolation, disturbance of soul, and clouds of the mind…’

A vein throbbed in Father Edwardes’s temple. Margaret bit her lip. She knew she should go to him now, join the force of her prayers with his, but she couldn’t move. Something stopped her; the same Thing that held her tongue at confession, wouldn’t have her near the box. It seemed, if such a thing were possible, that the long room was skewed; twisted in some strange way, its walls discontinuous, the floor curving and waving hinting at dimensions beyond the senses. As if the short distance that separated her from the group by the bed had become a gulf across which she had stepped to another planet. She shook her head, irritable at the idea; but the fancies persisted. She felt a moment of giddiness; the swinging over nothing, the awful fetch and check of the falling nightmare.

The room steadied on its new dimensions; ‘up’ was now clearly represented by two differing directions. The lamp, hanging still, seemed to be twisted towards her; at her back the window leaned away. She caught her breath, feeling stifled, and the scents and visions came again, soothing and lulling, profferings from hell. Sweet musk of the may, fresh brown stench of new furrows where bread and other things were buried in defiance of Mother Church…

She wanted to call out, take the robes of the priest and beg forgiveness, tell him to stop his mummeries because the fault and the evil lay in her. She tried to scream and thought she had but a deep part of her knew her lips hadn’t moved. She could still see Father Edwardes as if through darkened glass, the hand falling and rising, making again and again the sign of the Cross; she could hear the voice grind on but she herself was a million miles away, out among the cold burning of the stars and the balefires on the mounds of the dead where the Old Ones watched for a time. She was conscious dimly of a knocking and rattling rising to crescendo, the curtains flapping sudden and nauseating across the window. The lamp flame waned again, browning.

‘YIELD THEREFORE; YIELD NOT TO ME, BUT TO THE MINISTER OF CHRIST. FOR HIS POWER URGES THEE, WHO SUBJUGATED THEE TO HIS CROSS. TREMBLE AT HIS ARM…’

The clanging in the room was thunderous. Margaret fell upward, into night.

A voice calling in the darkness, strident and bright.

‘Margaret!’

‘Margaret!’

A waiting; then, ‘Will you come this minute…’

But the voice could be ignored, until its final utterance. ‘Margaret Belinda Strange, will you come…’ That, the mystic invocation of the second name, must never go unheeded. To defy it would be an open invitation to slapping, to bed-without-supper; and that was a terrible thing on a bright summer night.

The small girl stood on tiptoe, fingers clutching the edge of the desk top. Its surface stretched away from an inch before her nose, rich with wood grain, greasy, shiny, magical with the special magic of grown-up things. ‘Uncle Jesse, what are you doing?’ Her uncle put his pen down, ran his fingers through thick hair still black, touched with grey now at the temples. He shoved his steel-framed spectacles up to pinch at the bridge of his nose. His voice rumbled at the child. ‘Makin’ money, I guess…’ Nobody could have told whether he was smiling or not.

Margaret turned up her button nose. ‘Pooh…’ Money was an incomprehensible affair; the word made a shape in her mind, bulky and brown as the ledgers over which her uncle toiled. Something far-off and uninteresting yet vaguely sinister. ‘Pooh…’ The grubby fingers curled on the desk edge. ‘Do you make a lot of money?’

‘Fair bit, I reckon…’ Jesse was working once more, fist half obscuring the lines of the

neat figures crawling into existence on the thick cream paper.

Margaret cocked her head at him, trying to see his face, wrinkling her nose again. That last was a new accomplishment and she was proud of it. She said suddenly, ‘Do I annoy you?’

Jesse grinned, figuring in his head. ‘No, lass…’

‘Sarah says I do. What are you doing?’

Steadily. ‘Makin’ money…’

‘Why do you want so much?’

The burly man stopped openmouthed, arms half raised; an odd gesture. He stared at the low ceiling, the total lost now in his mind, then turned to scoop the child onto his knee. Grinning again. ‘Why? Well, I reckon little maid… I reckon I couldn’t rightly say now.’

Margaret sat watching, frowning a little and smelling the tobacco-nearness of him, chubby legs stuck out, well-picked scabs on the knees, the seat of her knickers black where she’d made a slide with Neville Serjeantson in the orchard behind the warehouses, out of some boxes and old steel rails. The yard foreman placed the rails for the children, to keep them quiet awhile. They were forever in the sheds, and underfoot when they backed the great iron engines; they were the bane of his existence.

‘I reckon…’ said Jesse. He stopped again, thinking and laughing. ‘Well, so’s one day I could put a hundred thousand where once there were only ten. Only you wouldn’t understand that, see?’ He shoved vaguely at her hair, frowning at a tuft that had been yellow, was stuck together now with a dob of axle grease. ‘You bin in they sheds again? Sarah’ll give thee summat, dang me if she don’t…’

‘Not going with Sarah. Staying with you.’ The child wriggled, reached out for a rubber stamp and plonked it onto the blotter; then lacking further damageable surfaces, the back of Jesse’s hand. Words showed faintly, bright blue against the brown seaming and wrinkling of the skin. Strange and Sons of Dorset, Hauliers… ‘Margaret Belinda Strange…’

Jesse swung her down and laughed, dusted her drawers for her as she ran.

The memory stayed with Margaret; one of those odd, arbitrary moments out of childhood that seem to become enshrined in consciousness, never to be forgotten. Her uncle’s lined, hard face, blue-jawed, close above her; the sunlight lying across the desk, Sarah calling, the stamp with its bulging black handle and the little brass stud that showed which way round it was when you pressed it down. A rare enough moment it was too, for Jesse was not an expansive man. His niece called good night to him later, standing at her window to see him leave the house, jacket slung across his shoulder, on his way to drink beer with his men at the Hauliers’ Arms just along the street. But he’d changed again then; all she got back was the faint sour pulling of the mouth corners, the grunt he’d use to answer anybody as he slammed the door arid tramped with a scraping and crunching of boots across the yard.

Jesse Strange had few words, in those days; and nobody willingly crossed him. He was a driver; he drove his hauliers, he drove his machines, but most of all he drove himself. If he chose to drink, he’d put the best man under the table; that happened sometimes of a night down in the village inn. But he’d walk home steady; and the boys, rolling across the street at chuck-out time, would see the light burning in his office or in the sheds, where like as not he’d be stripping the valve gear on one of the locos or cleaning her boiler or mending her massive wheel treads. They’d wonder then if Jesse Strange ever tired, and when he slept.

He’d made his hundred thousand a long time back, then his first half million. It seemed to him work was a sacrament, a panacea for all ills. The firm of Strange and Sons grew, spreading out beyond Dorset with depots as far away as Isca and Aquae Sulis. Jesse broke Serjeantson, his one competitor in Durnovaria, running his trains at cutthroat rates, stealing load after load from under the old man’s nose. They said at the height of the war no train showed him a profit for nearly a year; there were battles and beatings among the drivers, blood spilled on the footplates; but he broke Serjeantson and bought him out, added forty steamers to the huge Strange fleet. The sheds and warehouses that joined the old house at Durnovaria were extended again and again till they sprawled across more than an acre; and still it wasn’t enough. Jesse broke Roberts and Fletcher at Swanage; then Bakers, and Caldecotts, and Hofman and Keynes from over Shaftesbury way; and then he bought outright Baskett and Fairbrother of Poole, with more than a hundred Burrells and Fodens on the road, and Strange and Sons owned the West Country haulage trade. And after that even the routiers let their trains be; because money works wonders in high places, and one swipe at a Strange loco would bring a hornet swarm of cavalry and infantry down round their ears and the game wasn’t worth the price. The maroon nameboards with their oval yellow plaques were known from Isca to Santlache, from Poole to Swindon and Reading-on-the-Thames; drivers gave way to them, the Serjeants cleared the roads for them. In the end Jesse won respect even from his enemies. He paid his way, gave nothing; and what you stole from him, you were welcome to keep… A lot of men wondered what drove him. At college he’d been a dreamer, head in the clouds; but somebody somewhere had taught him what life was about. Some whispered he killed a man once, a friend, and the empire he built was somehow his atonement; there was even a rumour he was jilted by a barmaid, and this was his answer to the world. Certainly he never married, though there were women enough later on who found they could put up with his ways, and men who would have sold their daughters fast enough to tie their family to the name of Strange; but none of them got the chance. Nobody ever dared ask outright, except his niece; and though she remembered, as he’d warned her she didn’t understand.

Margaret seemed suddenly to be moved forward in time. She was going away to school, a whole twenty miles to Sherborne for her first boarding term. A half mile through the streets of Durnovaria, a little scrappet stumping along clinging to Sarah’s arm, wearing a new uniform, leather satchel swinging from her shoulder, apples in the satchel and sweets, pitiful little bits of home. Head stuck high, face set, sniffing to stop from bawling at the wrongness of everything, on her way to death and worse… Sarah seemed huge, the paving slabs huge and the cobbles and the old leaning houses, as afternoons and mornings had seemed huge, each bulking a separate entity in her mind as she crossed off the frightened days to start-of-term. The last night, last morning, an inevitability against which she seemed suspended, in a dream within a dream. The September dawn was blue with mist and cold, she buzzed with the chill of it while images floated unconnected and remote and her body was a machine, forgotten legs pumping her along. A road train passed at the end of the street and the light from the loco firebox glowed back on her steersman and driver and the child wanted in sudden bitterness to run forward and be swept away, snuggle under a load tarp in the rumbling and darkness to end some mysterious closed circuit in her own room at home; but instead she turned left mechanically to the station, still hanging onto her nanny’s arm. Old Sarah, hated often, seemed lovable now; but there was no help in her. The train was waiting, crowded and dank; Margaret was hustled onto it, stood pressing her face to the windows smudging the breath-steam with her fingers while Sarah and station and the whole of existence swept into a dot that dwindled behind her and vanished for all time.

And there was school, the big house dark and cold, and the strangeness of the nuns with their startling starched white cowls, the whisper and shuffle of them crossing the stone-floored rooms. A twilight of loneliness, sombre and unbearable, shot through at last with little gleams of hope; letters from home, a cake, a box of fruit standing on the table in the hall. Frosty vividness of games days, whispered dormitory conversations, first stirrings of friendship…

Time passed quickly while Africa became a continent and? r2 was forced to equal the area of a circle and Caesar fought the Gauls. Other days and months declined impossibly and Christmas was near. A concert, services for end-of-term in the great hall; candles burning in their sconces through the short December days, issuing of rail vouchers, excitement of packing and waiting; the last morning, when Margaret was taken mysteriously in charge by her house-mistress Sister Alicia. Shoutings in the grounds, noises rendered crystalline by the bright winter air; flapping and chuffing of the butterfly cars thronging the front of the school while Anne waited feeling lost, the Sister secretive and smiling. And the great surprise; first a rumbling, distant but known, a sound her blood could never forget; and a plume of steam, a wink of brass as the loco, hugely unbelievable, edged her way along the drive, rutting Mother Superior’s precious gravel with her great treads, hooting and shouldering and bluffing her way through the butterfly cars, her wheels as tall as the highest of their masts. She was towing a single trailer, its flat bed nearly empty, and her uncle was driving and Margaret knew he’d come specially for her and started, hating herself, to howl, while Sister Alicia muttered ‘ridiculous child… ridiculous child…’ and prodded sense back into her with painfully bony fingers.

She was lifted up wincing with expectation to pull the cord that woke the Burrell’s huge deep voice; while the children clustered round the wheels ogling and laughing till Jesse drove them back with shouts and thrust forward reversing lever and regulator and they were on their way with a fussing of valves and crossheads, a great jetting of steam. Margaret clung to the hornplate staring back and waving as school receded, swept away by the windings of its drive to be lost and forgotten for a lifetime of three whole weeks. Often after that her uncle fetched her, or told off one of the men to detour. If he came it was always with Lady, the old Burrell that was still the pride of the fleet, and Margaret would boast endlessly to her friends and the mistresses that the loco had been named after her, she was her own special train. Jesse would laugh at that sometimes and shove her hair and say it were funny the way things worked themselves through. For the child’s mother too had been called Margaret; her dad kept a pub out Portland way and when he died and left her no place to live she’d been glad enough to settle for a man years her junior. Though it had cost Tim Strange his job and his home…

But it hadn’t taken the woman long to tire of being the wife of a common haulier; two years later she’d run off with My Lord of Purbeck’s jongleur, and Tim had come trailing back with his scrap of a kid and Jesse had laughed quiet and long, and made over to him the half of his business. But that had been in the long ago, before Margaret grew a remembering brain. Other later things were still fresh to her, other facets of her strange and wayward uncle. She remembered how one day she’d gone running to him with a shell, told him to listen and hear the waves inside. He’d taken time off from his endless making of money and driven her way up into the hills and found a quarry and dug a fossil out the rocks and made her put that to her ear as well; she’d heard the same singing and he’d told her that was the noise the years made, all the millions of them shut inside buzzing to get free. She kept the stone a long while after that; and when more time had passed and she knew the whispering and piping were only echoes of her blood she didn’t care because she’d still heard what she heard, the sound of trapped eternities.

The making of the firm had aged Jesse a lot; that and a bursting steam union that poached the skin half off his back before he could stagger clear. The locos took their toll odd times of the men who used them; he’d been up and about far too soon, passed out on the footplate trying to haul a load of stone single-handed to Londinium. Margaret had been a gangling thirteen then, all legs and arms, her nipples already pushing marks into her dress. She’d nursed him well, sitting reading through the long quiet evenings of a summer holiday while Jesse lay and frowned and brooded at the ceiling and thought God alone knew what. But the thing had changed him for all time; and so soon it seemed he was an old man on a bed, clammy and yellow and waiting to die, and the priest waving thin hands across him in the stink of incense, saying the grumbling words… The falling stopped. Margaret looked round dazed; she’d lived through years, but the room was quite unchanged. Her father watching down, thin face haggard in the lamplight, old Sarah sitting pudgy and anxious twining her fingers in her lap. Father Edwardes still intoning book in hand, the stole stretched tight; the lamp flame was steady again now, clear in the spring dusk. She wiped her face furtively then, her hand on her dress, pressed her knees together tight to stop the trembling.

This last week had been bad. The house shadowed, haunted… Margaret’s mind shied away from the word. ‘Possessed’ was a worse one it hadn’t till now occurred to her to use. The noises, the rattlings and tappings, night sighings and unease; like the shadows of an ancient wrong, unrequited and unchangeable. While death stepped closer, inexorable, like the flowing of the rivers, the red night plunge of the sun behind the standing stones of the heaths.

Once Jesse sat up terrified and stark, moving his hands, seeing things that weren’t there to see; once a maid shrieked at the icy fondling of the empty kitchen air; once the landing reeled under Margaret, an accident of Time maybe that let her see flitting ahead the doppelganger, shadow of herself, alien in the warm night. Margaret was the name on the old man’s lips now and his niece thought for a while he meant her, but it wasn’t so. His hands waved, pushing at nothingness; his eyes watched frightened as the spring breeze passed through the room, setting swaying the brasses on the beams, moving the lamps so the spindles’ yellow gleams shifted on mantel ornaments and bed rail. The steamer, Sarah thought he meant; poor old thing to be frightened of her now, see her shadow in the swinging lamps and brass. But no, there was a rumour…

Watching alone, the girl sat shuddering; she’d lived with the hauliers long enough to soak their daft tales in through her pores. The Burrell wouldn’t fetch her master, she was down below locked in the engine sheds, fires drawn, tarps across her boiler, oak chocks hammered under her wheels. There was a steamer that came though, that was how the legend ran; Cold Bess, swaying and black in the night and tall, hell in her belly and her running lamps for eyes.

There’d been a real Cold Bess once, far down in the west, and her driver strapped her safety valve to win a bet and she blew him to kingdom come; but after that you still might hear her homing, her flywheel clanking and the rumble of the train wheels, her whistle shouting nights out on the hills. That was years back, nobody could say how long; but the rumour stuck, grew into a silly story to scare the kids to bed with. When the hauliers spoke of Cold Bess, they meant Death. Margaret, educated, still crossed herself hopelessly and shivered. Cold Bess was in the room…

They took the brasses out and the candlesticks and ornaments and draped the bed rail top where it caught the light, and the silly old man lay quieter; but the Presences wouldn’t leave. Margaret could feel them tugging and whispering; cold spots floated on the stairs, once her shoes were snatched from her hand and slammed against die wall. That was when they sent for the priest; and Father Edwardes made his feelings clear by the service he chose to read. Prayers existed for the exorcism of the Noisy One, the Poltergeist; but he had ignored them. The good Father had no doubt where the trouble lay; he was conducting the rite for the expulsion of a devil. But he’s wrong, Margaret told herself, wrong; and cried inside silently…’ Therefore I adjure thee, draco nequissime, in the name of the immaculate lamb, who trod upon the asp and basilisk, to depart from this man.. to depart from the Church of God…’ The voice faded, lost beneath more dreaming.

Margaret, sweating again, tried to fight back because nightmare was coming and as in all such dreams she drifted closer and ever closer to the thing she most wanted not to see. She asked herself could they then, the Things that knocked and fretted, the haunters, the Old Ones her mind whispered, the Old Ones… could they do this thing? Snatch her out of Space and Time, from under the very fingers of the priest? Dare they? She groaned helplessly. These were the People of the Heath, the Fairies; they who once had known an ancient power.

She was sitting on a beach. The sun, pouring and hot, struck her shoulders and arms and her knees under the little tabard that was the season’s fashion must. Fair, she still tanned easily, the freckles exploding round her mouth and nose and across her back. She liked herself brown, she liked to loll on the beach and soak in warmth and light; she’d fought for her day out, haggling with Tom Merryman to detour his Foden, drop her and pick her up. Sarah, faithful and complaining, had tagged along, jounced on the flat bed of the trail load, half choked by dust from the rutted white roads. Behind them the cars careered, veering and jostling, tiny engines sputtering, striped lateens filling in the puffs of breeze; Margaret swung her long legs and laughed at the drivers all the way down from Durnovaria.

At Lulworth Tom offloaded a case of machine tools before turning along the coast to Wey Mouth. Beyond the town the Foden swung inland again, routed for Beaminster; Margaret had dropped down, lugging Sarah, intent on her day on the beach, stood and waved till the Foden vanished under its own trailing cloud of dust. Then Sarah had come over queer because of the heat and been taken to sit down under a tree and hear a band, and Margaret scampered off to the water and sat by herself till the boat came in and all the people started running.

She asked herself then, why she always had to head into the centre of trouble. Privately she believed she must be a coward; reality was never as bad as the horrors of her imaginings. The time old William lost half his fingers in a workshop lathe: she’d heard the dreadful sound he made, seen the countershafts stop spinning as the foreman hit the emergency brake and had to run fast into the dimness to where Will stood ashen-faced holding his wrist; and seeing the blood pump bright from the finger stumps, patter and ribbon on the floor, was nearly a relief. They’d told her later how good she’d been, she might have basked in the praise and enjoyed it but she knew it wasn’t deserved. She hated, she sickened, but she just had to see…

They took the tourists out from Wey Mouth, from the beaches and the harbour there, fishing for sole and lobster and sharks sometimes when the season was right, the little basking sharks that did no harm to anyone but made good sport. It was a fishing boat that was coming in, and the boy on her had caught his arm in a winch and made the land somehow. Margaret pushed through the crowd wriggling and shoving, sickness coming already and dark shadows at the edges of her sight, not able to stop; she saw the mess, tendon and bone showing in spikes and the man, reddened, holding himself with a hideous dignity, and didn’t know what to do.

The car drove churning onto the beach, throwing sand, stopped for its driver to vault the door and come shouldering into the crowd. He must have taken Margaret for a midwife or something, her throat was too dry to tell him he was wrong. She found herself in the back seat of the motor, squeezing the tourniquet, propping the injured man, seeing the blood run rich and soak into the upholstery. Just out of town a little station run by a half dozen Adhelmians served as the nearest thing to a hospital; the driver pulled in there and she sat while the boy was carried through the door and wondered whether to be sick then or later. After a time she got out, not really conscious of what she was doing, and started to walk. Sarah was forgotten; she was in a desolate mood where she seemed to see all humanity as bags of skin waiting to be burst and die in pain, herself a woman trapped in a fragile body, bleeding in childbirth, bleeding in coition. She was very shocked, and felt like death.

The beach she reached finally seemed to stretch for miles. She followed the cliffs above it, walking from headland to headland, seeing the vistas of white and blue, sparklings of salt spray in the wind, aimless and objectless. She got to the sea by a sandy slither, thought she might bathe then remembered instead she had something to do and was formally sick behind a stand of gorse. Then she sat on a rock that hurt her behind and brooded, picking pebbles from round her feet and flicking them at the water, seeing the sun burn off the sea in skeins and dancing loops of light. The voice when it came hardly penetrated her consciousness; the stranger had to shout again. ‘Hi…!’

He was heavy and bearded, red-faced and not used to being ignored. Margaret

turned, and regarded him despondently.

‘What the devil d’you think you’re doing?’

She shrugged. Her shoulders indicated ‘Sea…’ and ‘Throwing pebbles in it…’

‘Just come up here, will you?’

Another shrug. You come down…

He did, with a crashing and a rattle. ‘Fine bloody dance you’ve led me…’ He pulled up her chin insolently with a thick-fingered hand. ‘Yeah,’ he said, nodding. ‘Pretty good…’ Her eyes burned at him. Then, ‘Is he dead?’ She asked the question listlessly; the moment of anger had passed, leaving her drained out and flat.

The stranger laughed. ‘Not him, plebeian bastard… Blood poisoning might sort him out but I shouldn’t think so. They generally live ‘What did they do?’ A husk of interest in her voice.

The Norman - for they were speaking, almost unconsciously on Margaret’s part, Norman French - shrugged. ‘Nothing to it. Over in a flash. Pantryman’s cleaver, pot of tar. You leave the vein sutures sticking out, pull ’em through when they rot…’

She rolled her lips, squaring the corners. His hand was on her again instantly. She knocked it off. ‘Just leave me alone…’

A tussling. ‘You’re a good-looking little bit,’ he said. ‘Where d’you hail from then,

haven’t seen you about…’

She swung a fist at him. ‘Fils deprêtre…’

He reacted as if she’d stabbed him with a bayonet. He flung her away, stood over

her; for a moment she thought she was in for a beating, then he turned away in disgust.

‘That,’ he said, ‘wasn’t smart…’ Sand had got in his eye; he knuckled it furiously, swearing, then started to climb back up the cliff. Halfway to the top he turned and shouted. ‘You’re scared…’

Silence.

‘You’re a little prig…’

No reaction.

‘It’s a bloody long walk back…’

Margaret got up, nostrils pinched with fury, and followed him to the car.

It sat seething faintly, straps across the bonnet vibrating, seeming to hunch between its widespread wheels. He handed her in - the door was about five inches deep - got in himself, released the brakes, and shoved at what she supposed was the regulator. The Bentley gathered speed with a vicious thrusting, in a silence that was nearly eerie, trailed by the faintest wisp of steam.

Margaret was rigid, sunwarmed leather under her thighs, wondering why she’d never been able to resist a dare, whether it was something in her that couldn’t grow up. The driver looped away from the coast and turned east again. The rutted roads were unkind to the motor; he leaned across one and shouted something about ‘Do two hundred on macadam,’ then relapsed into silence. Margaret realised more fully what she’d known before, that he came from no ordinary stock. Technically steam cars were permissible; but only the wealthiest dare own them, could in fact afford them. Petroleum Veto had long been tacitly recognised as a bid to restrict the mobility of the working classes.

Passing through Wey Mouth she thought of old Sarah still scraping about looking for her charge, driving the local peelers crazy no doubt by this time. She yelled to stop but the driver ignored her; only the sidelong gliding of his eye, bright and bad-tempered, showed he had heard. Outside the town the rain came. Margaret had seen it building up for some time; the storm clouds ahead, dusty yellow and grey, piling against the midsummer blue of the sky. She yelped as the first drops hit her, slashing over the tiny windscreen. He bellowed back. ‘Didn’t bring the bloody hood…’

A mile further on he lost steam and condescended to stop under a huge oak but by then she was so wet she didn’t care anyway. She was glad when he drove on, away from the booming of the branches. Corvesgeat showed on the horizon, a cluster of towers like fangs of stone. The rain was easing. They passed through the village the focus of a yapping herd of dogs; the Bentley’s burners hit them in the ultrasonic, drove them wild. Her driver crossed the square and swung into the castle, under the portcullis of the outer barbican.

The gatekeeper saluted as the car bounced past. A fair had camped in the outer bailey; Margaret saw golden dragons, caryatids rainwet and erotic against grey stone. Show engines stood about, only slightly more ornate than the Lady Margaret herself. The Bentley thumped across the grass, blasting folks from her path with her twin brass horns. At the Martyr’s Gate the portculli were grounded to keep the people from the upper baileys and the precincts of the donjon; Margaret saw steam jet from the high stone as the winches raised the iron trellises for the car. Then they were through, sidling up a slope that looked one in one, the bonnet higher than their heads. The Bentley docked finally in a stone garage set below the soaring walls of the keep.

Above them, dizzyingly far off, floated banners; the oriflamme, ancient and spectacular, flown only on Saints’ days and holidays, the bright blue of Rome, the swallow-tailed Union flag of Great Britain. The leopards and fleurs-de-lis of the owners of Purbeck were absent, so His Lordship was not in residence. Margaret caught glimpses of the flags and the high walls, sunlit now, through roofless passages as she scurried behind her captor, one wrist gripped in his paw, too breathless to argue any more.

She lost all sense of direction; the castle was a great confusing mass of stone, hall after hall, building after building stacked and added round the colossal massif of the donjon. She saw through arrow slits past a spurred drum tower, across a vastness of heathland clear to the harbour of Poole; she climbed a stair set curling into a buttress to a chamber where Lord Robert of Wessex, son of Edward Lord Purbeck, swung irritably at a bellrope that threatened to disintegrate under his attentions.

Margaret was given, kicking, into the charge of a burly female in the brown and scarlet livery of the House. ‘Do something with it,’ swore Robert, flapping his arms. ‘Take it off and bathe it or something, before it starts to sneeze. It stinks of the sea…’

Margaret, furious, tried to swing round on him but the iron-studded door had already slammed. At her spluttered accusations of kidnapping the servingwoman laughed. ‘What, with his mother at home? He keeps his own nest clean, ye can be sure of that… Oof… Come on now m’lady, don’t be cross-grained… Ow, you little beast

The room to which Margaret was lugged, and in which she was deposited spitting, was by the standards of the place small. Delicate perpendicular arches supported windows of stained glass that repeated glowingly the heraldic motifs of leopards and lilies. Brocade drapes covered part of the walls; in the floor was a massive bath built of slabs of polished Purbeck marble. Over it loomed an ornate geyser, black japanned, replete with rings and polished curlicues of copper. Grilles in the walls covered what were evidently the vents of a warm-air system. Margaret was impressed in spite of herself; her home at Durnovaria was well equipped, but this was a standard of luxury she had never seen.

Two girls attended her. She frowned, half minded to send them packing; she was distinctly unused to being bathed. Sister Alicia used to scrub her sometimes when she was first away at school; ‘Come along,’ she’d say, ‘you unsavoury little thing,’ and bang her down in one of the great square tubs, already swilling with icy water, and let fly at her with a large hard-bristled brush, and sometimes she nearly enjoyed it; but that was years ago, a lot of things had changed.

Margaret shrugged, and started to wriggle out of the tabard. If this crazy young nobleman cared to waste the time of his house-people on her then the chance was too good to waste; it would probably never come again.

The bath was filled rapidly, with much snorting and hissing from the geyser; the maids bound her hair, and one of them added to the water a handful of something that produced great towering masses of iridescent foam. That intrigued her, she’d never seen anything like it. An hour later she was feeling nearly inclined to be civil again; she’d been scrubbed and kneaded and massaged, and had to kneel upright while they poured on her shoulders something that smelled of sandalwood and ran and burned like fire and left a splendid glow in the muscles of her back that soaked away stiffness and tiredness. There was a dress laid put for her, a formal thing with a wide scooped neckline and miles of frothy skirt, and a diamante circlet for her hair. The clothes fitted; she wriggled, feeling the satin-cleanness of her skin against the cloth, and wondered a little wildly just how well Robert had equipped the castle with the apparatus of seduction. She found out later he’d ordered his absent sister’s wardrobe ransacked for the occasion; whatever his faults, he certainly never did things by halves. She was badly worried now about Sarah and her parents, but events seemed to have passed her at the gallop; it was bad enough just trying to keep pace.

It was evening before she was through, the sinking sun throwing mile-long shadows across the heath, waking blazing reflections from the tier on tier of diamondlighted and mullioned windows; the castle seemed to butt against the huge western haze like the prow of a stone ship. Sounds from the fair floated across the baileys; shouts, the din of the organs, the grumbling vibration of the rides.

Dinner was served in the sixteenth-century hall built alongside the donjon; the diners promenaded outside it, richly dressed, arm in arm in the warm air. Margaret was vaguely disappointed when she learned the great keep had been disused for centuries except as storehouse and armoury. On high days and holidays the Lords of Purbeck were accustomed to take their meals in the ancient way reintroduced by Gisevius; the less favoured guests sat at long tables in the body of the hall while the family and their personal friends ate on a raised dais at one end. Lamps burned in profusion, lighting the place brilliantly; the minstrels’ gallery was occupied by a small orchestra; servingmen and girls scurried about tripping over the dogs, brackets and mastiffs, that littered the floor.

Margaret, still a little dazed, was introduced to the Lady Marianne, Robert’s mother, and to the half dozen or so important guests. Her mind, whirling, refused to take in the names. Sir Frederick something, His Eminence the archbishop of somewhere else… She curtsied automatically, allowed herself to be steered finally to a place at Robert’s right. A cold nose shoved into her lap warned her she was attended; she fondled the bracket absentmindedly, tickling beneath the ears, and drew from her host a grunt of surprise. ‘You’re honoured, y’know that? Doesn’t take kindly to anybody, not that one. Had a swipe at one of the Serjeants the other day.’ He grinned broadly. ‘Two fingers…’

Margaret gently withdrew her hand. Mutilation seemed for Robert a major source of fun.

He’d heard her name more than once, introduced her by it a dozen times, but it seemed it hadn’t sunk in. She asked him, with as much dignity as she could muster, for a message to be sent to her home. Her eyes hadn’t missed the semaphore rigged beside the keep, or the chain tower on the nearby hill. He listened looking faintly surprised, bending his head to catch the request, then snapped his fingers to the Signaller-Page hovering nearby. ‘Who’d ye say, Strange?’

‘My father,’ said Margaret coldly, ‘is Timothy Strange of Strange and Sons, Durnovaria.’

The bombshell was not without effect. Robert grunted, raised his eyebrows, swigged wine, drummed a tattoo on the linen cloth. ‘Well, damme,’ he said. ‘Damme. Well, I’ll marry a bloody Bulgarian…’

‘Robert…!’ That from the Lady Marianne, a little further along the board.

He bowed to his mother, unabashed. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, you’re a bad-tempered young bitch, I suppose that goes a way to explaining it…’ He scribbled on the pad proffered by the Signaller. ‘Look lively with that, lad, or we shall lose the light.’ The boy departed, scampering; a few minutes later Margaret heard the clack and bang of the semaphore, the answering clatter from the great tower on the hill. An acknowledgement was back-routed before nightfall; just a frosty ‘Message received and understood.’ From that, she presumed she was in disgrace.

The night passed quickly enough, too quickly for Margaret; she could imagine well enough the surly reception waiting for her at home. The dinner was followed by an entertainment by a troupe of acrobats and fairground people. Trained dogs bounced through hoops, ran on their back legs in kilts and breeches; the affair was a great success. The near-demise of one of the performers, caught and tossed by Robert’s delicate tempered hounds, scarcely dampened proceedings.

The animal act was followed by a jongleur, a long-faced, mournful-looking man who, evidently primed by Robert, delivered a series of rhymes in a thick patois that Margaret perhaps fortunately couldn’t follow but that set Robert roaring with amusement. Then trays of nuts and fruit were passed, and more wine; the party broke up well past midnight, Robert bellowing for linkboys to escort Margaret to the room he’d had prepared.

She decided abruptly, trying to stand without swaying, that it was just as well nobody was fetching her tonight; the rich Oporto, once restricted to the tables of kings and the Pope, had nearly proved too much for her. She collapsed in a warm haze, mumbling good nights to the woman who relieved her of her clothes, and was asleep within minutes.

She woke soon after dawn, lay listening for the sound that had roused her. She heard it again; a dog barking, far off and bright. She got up fuzzily, draped an embroidered counterpane round herself and padded to the long slit of a window. She saw far below over a tumble of roofs Robert, two brackets circling the heels of his horse, ride across the lower bailey to the gate, falcon sitting his wrist like a little blind and bright-plumed knight. The ringing barks of the dogs sounded on the quiet air a long while after their master had gone from view.

At eleven that morning a Foden, maroon-liveried, puffed its indignant way through the outer barbican, its driver demanding the person of one Miss Strange; and shortly after Margaret bade good-bye, regretfully, to the great castle of Corfe Gate. Once home she found things weren’t as bad as she’d feared; the family, with the exception of Sarah, were more impressed by her jaunt than annoyed. It took a lot to impress a Strange; but the Lords of Purbeck owned most of Dorset, their demesne stretched to Sherborne and beyond. Once they’d been landlords to Jesse himself, until he’d scraped and saved and bought the place in fee simple. Her uncle approved, in his silent way; and that counted for a lot. He sat with her that night while she told him how things had gone, pulling at his pipe and frowning, throwing the odd quick question that brought out every last detail. But Jesse was an ailing man already, illness marking and greying his face.

Again Margaret was scurried forward in time. It was as if the images presented themselves with all the ghostly, flickering speed of the yet-to-be-invented cinematograph. She remembered the brooding and waiting, the hoping for some sign that Robert hadn’t forgotten her totally. She tried to analyse what she felt about him. Was it just his craziness that appealed to her, was she attracted to the sheer animal maleness of him, or was it something deeper? Or more reprehensible, the simple urge to sell herself in the best market possible, set herself up above the rest, above her own family, as mistress of Corfe Gate? She told herself if it was that, to forget it, stop dreaming third-form dreams. Because she never would belong in that great place down there on the hill.

Autumn came and the carrying-in of the sheaves, the services for Harvest Home. The hauliers plaited new corn dollies out in the sheds, hoisted them into the house eaves to replace the old dusty shapes of last year that were ritually burned. Margaret was kept busy in the kitchens supervising the laying-in of preserves for the winter ahead, the bottling and jam-making and salting-down of meat; and the locos came in one after another off the freezing, rutted roads, travel-stained, rusting, to be refurbished in the sheds, greased and oiled and polished and painted for the next year’s work. Every bolt must be checked, worn wheel treads replaced, valve gear stripped and reassembled, steering chains examined and tested.

The forges bellowed all day long, fanned by blackened imps of hauliers’ boys; lathes hummed, men swarmed over the towering Burrells and Clayton and Shuttleworths. There was labour to spare; for Strange and Sons, alone in the haulage trade, didn’t lay their people off. Jesse as ever worked with his men, listening head cocked to the huge beating of the locos, touching and diagnosing; only from time to time the gripping pains doubled him and he swore and went off and rested and drank his beer, and buckled to it again.

The days shortened to midwinter; Christmas was barely a week away when a bailiff, breath steaming, cantered into the house yard. Margaret cracked the seals off the letter when it was brought her, hands shaking. She frowned over the scrawled, ill-spelt lines; written, she realised with a sudden furious rush of feeling, by Robert himself. She pelted to the engine sheds, to tell her uncle first of all. She was bidden forth to the Christmas celebrations at Corvesgeat, to be one of the hundred-odd guests at a house party that if it ran to the form of other years could easily last till March. Her acceptance was put into the bailiff’s hand while he was still puffing in the kitchen and swigging at a jug of mulled ale.

She hunted Jesse out again next day before she left, when the horses were already snorting in the yard. He was working as usual in the sheds refitting the head of a piston to its shank by the blue light that filtered through the long frost-muffled windows. She felt pain when she saw the peaked sharpness of his face, lines drawn and set round the hard mouth; suddenly she didn’t want to go but he was gruff with her. ‘You bugger off,’ he said directly, ‘while you’m got the chance…’ He brushed her forehead with his lips, slapped her behind like he used to when she was a kid. He walked with her to the door, stood waving till she was out of sight; then turned grimacing, leaning on a bench and rubbing his side, a half-unconscious gesture to ease pain. The spasm passed, the shadows stopped being redtinged; he wiped his face, and went heavily back to his work again.

At the outskirts of Durnovaria an escort was waiting. Margaret, muffled in the biting cold, thrilled at the troop of crossbowmen before her, the outriders scouting the heath to either side for signs of the routiers; the Lords of Purbeck evidently took no chances with the safety of their guests. It was a long ride, the wind biting at her face and ears, the hooves of the horses ringing on the hard ground; the light was fading before she saw the castle again, grey stone against an iron-grey sky, touched with a thin high powdering of frost. At the outer barbican the portcullis was down; the wind skirled, the great place above stared with blazing eyes of windows. The party waited, horses snorting and stamping, while the chains creaked, the iron ground out of sight into the stone. Excitement had made Margaret forget her uncle; she laughed at the crash of the gate behind her, the challenges of the sentries on the inner walls. The castle was invested alike by winter and the dark.

She remembered dancing and talk and laughter; Masses in the tiny chapel of Corfe Gate, rides down to the coast to see the storm-flattened Channel; fires roaring in the Great Hall, warmness of her bed on moaning nights of wind. She learned partially to fly a hawk, the little gentle-falcon deemed fit for the sport of ladies. Robert gave it to her but she refused it; she had no place to keep it, no mews, no liveried falconer to see to its needs. Finally it escaped, winging high and strong, and she was glad; it seemed to belong to the wind.

Robert, largely to impress his guests, attempted to train a golden eagle, brought down at his request from the wild hills of Scotland. On its first flight the wretched bird took refuge in a tree, and all efforts to dislodge it proved in vain. Two servants of the household were left to watch it but they came back empty-handed; the creature had given them the slip in the gathering dark, refusing the lure. The thing finally returned two nights later, to perch forlornly on a tower on the outer barbican; and Robert, swearing vilely and drunk as a newt, vowed the prodigal should be fittingly greeted. Nothing would suffice but that the castle’s one demicannon, an ancient piece never fired in living memory, be laid and trained, and shot and powder broken out from the armoury. The ball knocked a cubic yard of masonry from the wall by the gate, nearly decapitating the Serjeant of the pantry and frightening a female guest into hysterics while the benighted bird, blown by the concussion from its perch, winged heavily away, never to be seen again.

On New Year’s Eve Robert took Margaret on the long climb to the heights of the ancient keep. They stood at a slitted window, five hundred feet and more above the heath, the wind burning their faces and keening at the stone while Robert laughed at the witchfires burning all round, twinkling on the horizon like eyes. Somewhere a wolf called, quavering and high; Margaret shivered at the ancient lost noise coming in from the dark. He saw the movement and wrapped his cloak round the both of them, standing behind her, arms crossed in front of her waist; she turned snuggling, feeling his warmth and the slow movement of his hands, pushing her face at his shoulder while he stroked the hair that flicked round her eyes and she wanted to cry for the passing of Time and all transient things. They stood an hour while the bells pealed in the village, doors and windows opened yellow rectangles far below and the fires sank and vanished. On more than one calendar, a new year had begun.

After that she went down to Corvesgeat again and again, while winter turned to spring and spring to high summer. She watched the Morrismen dance in the bailey Midsummer’s Eve, fed the hobbyhorse with coins its clacking wooden teeth couldn’t hold; once Robert, the Bentley in dock with a smashed front spring after some spree, damnblasted a butterfly car as far as Lyme Village before, his temper shattered, he fulfilled his own threat to push the thing off Golden Cap. Through the year the notes would come to Durnovaria, brought by a soldier or a bailiff on his rounds. Margaret puzzled the future Lord of Corfe, maybe worried him a little. She wasn’t of his blood; but neither did she think like a commoner, the serfs he would blow from his path with blasts of the Bentley’s horn. She didn’t blush and simper, giggle like a village slut when he stroked her breasts; she was grave and quiet and always it seemed had some sadness in her eyes. For her part Margaret felt unspoken things to exist between them, understandings deeper than words. In his own way, under the blustering and hell-raking, he needed her; one day, formally, he would ask her to be his wife.

She shuddered, remembering the end of her world. An August night, the grasshoppers making their endless shrieking; the sound seemed to soak into brain and blood, compelling with its insistent strangeness, now heard, now unheard and heard again. The castle bulked high in the warm dark and all round, in the baileys, on the walls and motte, far below in the tree-grown wet ditch, the glow-worms burned like lime-green sequins stitched onto the black velvet of the grass. She cupped one in her hand; it glowed there still, distant and mysterious. There was a smell in the air, warm and heavy, the tang of early autumn. A breeze touched her face; it seemed to her excited fancy the wind blew from some strange past.

Robert was brooding, silent, in a mood she hadn’t seen. A fire was burning up by the kitchens, the glow wavering on stone, limning the huge pile of the donjon. Flakes of ash were whirled up sparkling in the sky; he said to her they were like the souls of men moving through endlessness, shining awhile then vanishing in the dark. He didn’t use his born language; instead he spoke an old tongue, a clacking gutteral she’d never realised he owned. She could answer him; she stood close giving sentence for sentence, trying to comfort. She spoke of the castle. ‘Rude, ragged nurse,’ she said, ‘old sullen playfellow for tender princelings…’

He seemed surprised at that. She laughed, her voice muted in the night. ‘One of those minor Elizabethans, we had to do him at school. I forget his name; I thought he was rather good.’

‘How does it finish?’

‘Use my babies well… ‘ She spoke almost wonderingly, aware for the first time of the chill under the words. ‘So… . foolish sorrow bids thy stones… . farewell…’ It made him angry, unaccountably. ‘Auguries,’ he said, and spat. ‘You’re like a priest in a bolt-hole, mumbling bloody spells…’

‘Robert…’ She was close to him, she moved closer. She laid her face against his, lips parted to let tongue and teeth touch his jaw, trying to stop the sadness in him, feeling his hands move tracing beneath her thin dress the course of her spine. She’d touched him often enough and kissed; his fingers used her familiarly, enjoying her as his eyes enjoyed the keen head of ‘a hound or the flight of a hawk, as his mouth savoured the taste of food and good wine. She thought, this time it is different. If he goes on now, and if I let myself go on, there’ll be only one end. And is it so important after all?

She swallowed, closing her eyes; and it seemed then for the first time the turning and twisting, the falling, the sense of dimensions and Time skewed, plagued her. She clung tighter whimpering, feeling herself not standing on solid turf but bowled solemnly end over end through a void, haunted by all dead things and sorrows and future fears, lumped and bundled and blown along a Norman wind. She thought, perhaps I shall saint. What’s happening to me…

She tried to call up images to set against the dark; her father, Sarah, her uncle Jesse, people she’d known back at school, even old Sister Alicia. It seemed to her obscurely that what she wanted to do involved more than herself, her body and her pain. It was to them, all the people she’d ever known, she had to answer; for their sake her choice had to be right. She felt a hotness on her cheek and knew it was a tear; though whether for herself or Robert or all humankind she couldn’t say. She lay with him that night, coming to him again and again, comforting and being comforted, sometimes mother-giving, sometimes a child wrapped away from the dark; till even her lover drifted from her, lost behind a sleep too deep for dreams.

Lord Edward’s seneschal roused her — he of all people — with the story that Robert had been called off on the King’s business, that he was to see her home. She lay quiet in the bed, still half dazed with sleep; and slowly the anger grew. She read in his queer eyes and chiselled-cat face, the face she could oddly never recall once he had turned away, what she already knew deep inside. That the enchantment, if it was enchantment, had ended; that she’d sold herself for a pretty song, that Robert was in his senses now, that a Lord of Purbeck would never mix his blood with a girl of the rank and file. She drove the seneschal away snarling and spitting, rose and looked at herself, turning the mirror to show her new slut’s body; she washed herself, splashing the water from the ewer angrily on the floor. The bed was marked; she wrenched the covers back raging, left them for all the world to see. She swore at the seneschal when he fetched her, stamping and vowing revenges she knew she could never call down; not herself, not her father, not the mighty firm of Strange with all its money and power. Because there was no law in this land, not for commoners. Rich and poor alike they held their places by the whim of their lords; and the lords got theirs in feoff from the English King, and he sat his throne by the grace of the Throne of Peter. The demicannon, glaring out there through the gates, that was the law…

In the outer bailey she thought a houseservant smiled; if she had had a weapon in her hand she would have killed. She left riding like the wind, slashing her horse till the blood ran, hurting herself in the jolting saddle, the seneschal pacing her impassively twenty yards behind. They’d marked her up, like they’d mark a split crate off the road trains; soiled goods, return to sender… She turned a mile away. from the castle, saw it watching her and cursed. There were tears on her face again and on her throat; but they were tears of rage.

‘FOR THEE AND FOR THY ANGELS IS PREPARED THE UNQUENCHABLE FIRE; BECAUSE THOU ART THE CHIEF OF ACCURSED MURDER, THOU ART THE AUTHOR OF INCEST… GO OUT. THOU SCOUNDREL, GO OUT WITH ALL THY DECEITS… GIVE HONOUR TO GOD, TO WHOM EVERY KNEE IS BENT…’

Why, thought Margaret haggardly, he’s talking about me… The journey and the castle had been in her mind; the tears were real. They ran down hot, wetting her neck. Is this the best you can do? she asked Father Edwardes silently. To plague this old man with your mumming while I sit here free who’ve brought the evil and the wrong into this house? Of course, her mind answered itself scornfully. Because he like the Church he serves is blind and empty and vainglorious. This God they prattle on about, where’s His justice, where’s His compassion? Does it please Him to see dying people hounded in His name, does He snigger at His bumbling priests, is He satisfied when men drop dead chopping stone out for His temples, twisted little God dying tepid-faced on a cross…

She thought, I’ll go out and look for other gods, and maybe they’ll be better and anyway they can’t be worse. Perhaps they’re still there in the wind, on the heaths and the old grey hills. I’ll pray for Thunor’s lightning and Wo-Tan’s justice, and Balder’s love; for he at least gave his blood laughing, not mangled and in pain like the Christos, the usurper… The house trembled and went out like a candle flame in a draught. She was falling again, dropping through space where sparks that were like stars or glowworms burned. She seemed all in the same instant to see Corfe loom at her with its skull face, the sea beyond whipped white by breaking waves, the cliffs tall in the droning wind; the Dorset wind, ancient and cold and keen, in from all the miles on miles of ocean.

The rushing stopped; and she stood and stared round her in wonder. From the past she had moved to the future, or to some Time that had never been and never would be. Above her was a whirling sky; and round about on either side rose pillars hacked from rough stone, old and textured, leaning mighty, fretted and worn, tortured by the centuries into holes for the wind to nest in. The cloud scud swirled, driving past them; beyond the wind seethed across a grey circle of grass. Beyond again was nothingness; a void into which she might tumble, fall off the sudden edge of the world.

In front of her, seated with his back against the farthest of the pillars was a man. His cloak swirled; his hair, long and light, lifted and blew about his round skull. She put a hand to her head. The face, she’d seen it before but where…

Even as she watched it seemed to alter, running and shifting, becoming the face of a thousand men, of no one. Of the wind.

She walked, or seemed to walk, towards him. In the dream she could speak; she made words, a question. The stranger laughed. His voice was reedy and thin, as if it came from a great distance. ‘You called on the Old Ones,’ he said. ‘Who calls on the Old Ones, calls on me.’

He gestured for her to be seated. She squatted in front of him feeling her hair flack round her face. The wind scourged at the strange place; then as she stared it seemed suddenly there was no wind, that she and the stones and the grass they stood on were being whirled at immense speed through an endless sea of cloud. The thought was giddying; momentarily she closed her eyes. ‘You called upon our gods,’ said the Old One quietly. ‘Maybe it was their pleasure to answer…’

She’d seen now, in the stone over his head, the mark she’d known must be there; the circle, the crab lines inside, overlapping and incomprehensible. She said faintly, ‘Are you… real?’

Amusement showed in his face. ‘Real?’ he said. ‘Define reality and I can answer you.’ He waved a hand. ‘Look into solid earth, into rock, and see the galaxies of all Creation. What you call reality melts; there is a whirling, a spinning of forces, a dance of motes and atoms. Some of them we call planets, one of them is Earth. Nothingness within nothingness enclosing nothing, that is reality. Tell me what you want, and I can answer.’

She put a hand to her forehead again. ‘You’re trying to confuse me…’

‘No.’

She blazed at him. ‘Then leave me alone…’ She beat her fists on the grass helplessly. ‘I haven’t done anything to you, stop… playing with me or whatever it is you do, just go away and let me be…’

He bowed, gravely; and she became suddenly terrified the whole strange place would snap out of existence and plunge her back into a life she knew she could no longer bear. She wanted now to run forward, hold his cloak as she had wanted to hold the cloak of the priest, but it was impossible. She tried to speak again, and he stopped her with a raised hand.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘and try to remember. Do not despise your Church; for she has a wisdom beyond your understanding. Do not despise her mummeries; they have a purpose that will be fulfilled. She struggles as we struggle to understand what will not be understood, to comprehend that which is beyond comprehension. The Will that cannot be ordered, or charted, or measured.’

He pointed round him, at the circling stones. ‘The Will that is like these; encompassing, endlessly voyaging, endlessly returning, enfolding the heavens. The flower grows, the flesh corrupts, the sun circles the sky; Balder dies and the Christos, the warriors fight outside their hall Valhalla and fall and bleed and are reborn. All are within the Will, all are ordained. We are within it; our mouths close and open, our bodies move, our voices speak and we are not their masters. The Will is endless; we are its tools. Do not despise your Church…’

There was more, but the sense of it was lost in the raving of the wind. She watched the face of the Old One, the moving lips, the strange eyes burning reflecting light from distant suns and other years. ‘The dream,’ he said finally, ‘is ending. If it is a dream. The great Dance finishes, another will begin.’ He smiled, and touched with his fingers the carved mark above his head.

‘Help me,’ she said suddenly. Begged. ‘Please…’

He shook his head, it seemed to her pityingly, watching her as she had watched the glowworms pulsing their lives out on the grass. ‘The Sisters spin the yarn,’ he said, ‘and mark, and cut. There is no help. It is the Will…’

‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Please. What will happen to me? You can do it, you’ve got to. You owe it…’

His voice droned at her, splitting the wind. ‘It is forbidden…’ His eyes seemed to veil themselves. ‘Watch from the south,’ he said. ‘There will be life for you, coming from the south, and death. As for all creatures born, so for you. There will be joy and hope; there will be fear and pain. The rest is hidden; it is the Will…’

She screamed at him. ‘But that’s no good, you haven’t told me anything…’

It was useless; man and stones were fading, diminishing, as she herself was whirled back and away. It seemed for an instant the face of the Old One glowed bronze and glorious till she saw the Christos, or Balder in his majesty, staring out the clouds; then he blackened, a darker shade among shadows of stones that dwindled to a point and were gone.

‘NOW THEREFOR DEPART, THY ABODE IS THE WILDERNESS, THY HABITATION THE SERPENT; NOW THERE IS NO DELAY… FOR BEHOLD THE LORD GOD APPROAGHETH QUICKLY, AND HIS FIRE WILL GLOW BEFORE HIM, FOR IF THOU HAST DECEIVED MAN, THOU CANST NOT MOCK THY LORD… ‘HE EXCLUDES THEE, WHO HAST PREPARED FOR THEE AND THY ANGELS EVERLASTING HELL; OUT OF WHOSE MOUTH THE SHARP SWORD WILL GO, HE WHO SHALL COME TO JUDGE THE QUICK AND THE DEAD AND THE WORLD BY FIRE…’

The thing was finished; and Margaret stared round at the faces of the others and at their hands, and knew. The room was quiet again.

She waited watching long after the others had gone, Father Edwardes sitting at the bedside and the nurse, the old man breathing slow, all effort ended. She stood with crossed arms at the window, feeling the night air move on her face, watching out over the house roofs at the blur of the heath and the thin pale line of horizon down to the south. Seeing with the clearness of hallucination Robert flogging his horse and swearing, cursing all women to the devil and beyond, riding to fetch her back to his hall. Her lips once nearly quirked into a smile. For the flower grows, the flesh dies, the sun circles the sky and we are within the Will…

She frowned, puzzling her head, but couldn’t remember where she’d heard the words.

Jesse Strange died with the dawn; the Father prayed, and laid the Host on his tongue. And in the harsh light the nurse pulled back the covers and counted the cancers showing like blue fists against the pallor of the old man’s skin.