The Ghosts of Heaven (8 page)

 

5
STONE FOOT

The dance was done.

The heat of the sun had soaked into everyone, and while some sat on the grass of the field with their legs out and propped up with their hands behind, others slunk away back into the green valley, and its coolness.

The sound of Golden Beck had drawn them, and Harry Smith had forgotten to torment his twin sisters for a time while he and other boys bathed in Gaining Water.

Robert Hamill waited.

Everyone had left but Anna Tunstall, and her quiet brother Tom.

Tom had wandered away from the dance and was walking round the lines, the lines carved into the turf up by the road.

Anna watched him winding his way round and round, and then called.

Her voice drifted as far as Robert, and there was no wind, so Tom must have heard, too, for he was closer. But he didn't move.

“Tom!” she called again. “Thomas!”

The boy kept walking the lines of the maze.

Anna's shoulders dropped, and her hands, which had been on her hips, dropped to her side, then she slowly walked to where Tom was, took his hand, and started home.

The track that led from the road ran straight to the gates of the manor, and then on, right past Tunstall Cottage, but Robert saw that Anna pulled her brother the other way, back past the churchyard to the path up from the valley.

She was retracing her steps. The journey they'd made an hour or so before, with a body on a floorboard.

Robert followed, keeping his distance.

Down to the beck, where a short way away the sound of stupid boys floated over from Gaining Water.

Anna still held Tom's hand as she led him back along the path by Golden Beck, past Fuller's Mill, where tomorrow being Monday she would have to find herself again.

She didn't stop and then, just as Robert expected her to turn up the path that led through Callis Wood to the cottage that was now hers, Anna made straight ahead, past the trysting tree, and then farther, pulling Tom along with her.

They walked for half an hour along the valley floor, and only the trees and Robert Hamill saw them go. Robert wondered if she knew he was following, so he dropped way back, trying to use tree trunks to hide himself, leaning his head around only when he thought it was safe.

A little way on and finally, she stopped.

There was Stone Foot; a tiny bridge across the beck, made of two long and narrow blocks of stone laid end to end. They met halfway on a pillar that had been set into the bed of the stream. There was no handrail. At either end of the footbridge, two squat stone bollards formed an open gateway across the path. The bridge had the latent power of a Methuselah, an ancient and patient thing.

Just above Stone Foot, the stream had made a pool for itself over the course of the last ten thousand years; much smaller than Gaining Water, but much quieter, too.

Robert pulled himself in tight behind a large scrub oak, and looked.

Anna came off the path, and Tom followed her onto the grassy bank above the pool. Despite the thick woods all around the valley, this secluded pool was a rare spot in full sunshine; sunlight stole over the rippling water sending beams even as far as its shingle bed.

Anna kicked off her clogs, and Tom did the same.

They were speaking, or at least, Anna was speaking to her brother. She was pointing at the stream, and then Tom pulled his clothes off and jumped into the water without a moment's hesitation.

Anna laughed, loud enough for Robert to hear; a sound as golden as the stream.

Anna pulled the hem of her dress up and for a dizzying and eager moment Robert thought she was going to take her clothes off, too, but she merely dangled her feet over the bank and into the water, then lay back with her hands over her eyes because her face was in full sun.

Seeing his chance, Robert Hamill approached.

 

6
PRESENCE

Tom loved swimming, and Anna loved to hear him splashing and tumbling in the water; truly, simply happy. It eased her difficult thoughts. The cool water ran around her feet, sunlight poured onto her pale freckled face, and Tom's laughter took her away somewhere where she didn't have to worry about what the future held for them.

But there
was
a decision to be made.

Should she go on working for John Fuller, carrying cloth from the mill hammers up to the tentergrounds every day? Or should she try and keep her mother's gifts alive, scraping a coin here and there from the villagers who paid a call?

Fulling work was foul business. Unloading the woollen cloth from the ponies that walked up the valley from Deepdale. Hefting the cloth into the mill. The stench of the urine in the baths. The grinding of the mill gears as John slipped the hammers into action. The pounding of the hammers on the cloth, hour after hour until, in some way Anna knew not, John would announce the batch to be done. Stronger and more water-hating than it had been when it arrived.

Then the washing and rinsing in the millstream, and carrying the sodden wool up the track from the mill, past the manor lands and onto the tentergrounds.

That was the one part of the process that Anna didn't mind so much; up, out of the narrow valley, to the open dale where she would hang the fulled cloth up on posts, where it would dry, stretched out on tenterhooks. Up there, she felt a little braver and less captured.

Otherwise, she hated the job, though John Fuller was as kind to her as he'd been to her father. It was steady money, that was all, and the alternative…? To rattle around the cottage, putting some of the things her mother had taught her to practice, only making money when someone came to knock.

She knew some herbs and she had taken to the art of their preparation naturally. The ditches, riverbanks and woods of Welden Valley were overflowing with the plants that could make and mend. Knapweed: good for those who are bruised from a fall, or to heal green wounds. Feverfew, good for wounds, too. Meadow Saffron, which used indiscreetly, could be poisonous. The fresh leaves of young ferns; which purge the belly and expel waterish humors. Or cause abortions. All these powers lurking in the leaves of the valley.

With time she could become a skilful gracewife, she believed. She had assisted her mother very often, most recently to deliver Grace Dolen of the scrawny runt that had died within the month.

Anna still felt surprised by that; how such a scrappy thing had come from between the plentiful thighs of Grace. She had expected a plump calf to emerge that morning, not the sickly babe that never increased. Joan Tunstall had done everything she knew for the baby, but it would not come on, and in the end, all she could say was that she had given Grace Dolen an easy, short and painless birth for a boy who was not destined to prosper by God's hand.

Despite such setbacks, which were after all just the way of nature, Anna's heart called to her to become her mother. They had the same hair—the winding red. They had the same pale skin, with a band of freckles across the nose that looked so out of place on a woman the age that Joan had been. But most of all they had the same
desire
—to find out what was to be found out. To uncover things covered, to explain the mysterious and to put these findings to service in order to help people against the dangers of the world, which were, to put it at its plainest, legion.

And that was the way Anna's mind was wandering, through avenues alternately sunlit and leafy-dark, trying to weigh up whether to take the risk, when the sun was suddenly gone from above her.

Her eyes opened, and she expected to see a cloud; but there was someone standing, looking down at her, blocking the light, silhouetted against the hot blue sky.

“How long have you been there?” Anna said, angry at having been crept up upon.

She rolled onto her stomach and scrambled to her feet, then saw who it was.

“Oh,” she said. “I'm sorry, sir.”

Robert Hamill, second son of Sir George, stood in front of her.

It took her a moment to realize that he didn't seem cross with her.

Anna hesitated, unsure of what to do. Sir George's second son seemed to be staring at her, but to what end she had no idea. She didn't see herself as he did; her hair flaring in the sunlight, her long toes, bare and wet on the bank. The curves under her so-thin dress.

She turned, saw Tom still splashing in the pool. He ducked under for a second and then erupted in a fountain of stream water.

“Tom!” she called. “Time we went.”

But Tom didn't hear.

Anna gave Robert a small curtsy and moved along the bank, closer to her brother.

“Tom!”

“Anna Tunstall,” Robert said. “Aren't you?”

Anna stiffened slightly. What did he want with knowing that?

“That's your brother,” Robert said.

“Tom,” murmured Anna, without thought. Then she turned and shouted.

“Thomas! Get out now!”

Now Tom heard. He stood up in the shallows of the pool, and saw there was someone with his sister. Water dripped from his fingertips.

“Get out, Thomas, we have to go home.”

Tom started to climb out onto the bank, but before Anna could take him his clothes, Robert Hamill was speaking to her again.

“I'm sorry for you,” he offered.

“I ask your pardon, sir?” Anna said.

“You buried your mother today, and I'm sorry for that.”

Anna felt herself looking at Robert now, properly.

He wasn't so old and he wasn't as tall as his brother Samuel. Nor as arrogant, that was clear to see. He seemed a much gentler sort of creature, in fact, now that she risked meeting his eyes.

“Thank you, sir,” she said.

Robert ignored that.

“Here,” he said. “I've something for your brother.”

Before Anna had time to reply Robert dug into the pocket of his doublet and approached Tom, who sat on the bank staring at the water.

“Thomas?” Robert said. He bent down near him as if speaking to a lamb. “I've something for you. It's a gift.”

“What is it?” Tom asked.

“Look,” said Robert, and finding a large flat stone nearby, set it in the grass of the bank.

Then he held out the thing he was giving to Tom, a small wooden disc on a spindle. He flicked it between his fingers just above the stone and there it spun, standing up on its point.

Tom clapped his hands and laughed, watching it spin till it began to wobble then skitter away and fall off the edge of the stone.

“Do it again!”

“Do it again,
sir
,” Anna said seriously, then realized how silly that sounded. “I mean, if it pleases you to.”

She dared a smile at Robert, but Robert was already taking the little spinning top up in his fingers, sending it into its dance on the stone.

Anna came closer and now she saw that painted on the top of the disc was a line that curled in on itself just like the line of the turf maze up on the edge of the tentergrounds.

She saw that the line moved, moved inward, forever, always getting smaller but somehow always there, never disappearing. Or so it seemed.

Robert saw that she was fascinated and when the top fell over this time he picked it up and showed her the painted line.

“It doesn't move,” Anna said.

“Only when it spins,” said Robert. “It's an illusion of sorts. I found it in the market in d'Auville. That's in France,” he added, wondering if Anna might be impressed by his adventurous life.

She showed no sign of knowing what France was, or caring.

“Do it again,” said Tom.

“
Sir
,” said Anna.

Robert laughed and spun the top again, and again, and again, until he taught Tom to do it for himself.

Anna watched, unable to move. She couldn't take her brother away from Sir George's son, and he showed no sign of leaving, so she waited, watching as the young man played with her brother.

Finally, as Tom sat staring at the spinning, shrinking spiral, Robert straightened and looked at Anna.

“I have something for you, too.”

“Me, sir?”

He didn't say anything else, but fished in his pocket and pulled out something on a chain. He held it up.

It was a heart, delicate and dangling, and it spun in front of Anna's eyes. She guessed it was silver.

For some reason that she did not know, her heart began to pound.

“It's for you,” said Robert, but he held it closer to his chest. Then he reached for Anna's hand, and she tried to pull away, but he took it and put the silver heart into it as the chain fell through her fingers and swung for a moment. She'd never seen anything so precious.

“It was my mother's,” he said. “My late mother.”

Anna started shaking her head.

“No. No, sir. You cannot give me this.”

“But I do.”

Terrified, Anna didn't even hear how Robert's voice shook as he told her to keep it.

“I cannot. Why would you give this to me?”

“I would have hoped you had known that,” Robert said.

Anna shook her head again, but Robert wasn't done.

“I have seen you, Anna Tunstall,” he said. “I saw you before I went away, two years last winter. I saw you then. And I have traveled since. Across England. To the sea! To France. I did what Father bid me do and I learned the French tongue and I am back in Welden now, here, and in all that time never did I see such a woman as you.”

He stopped, and Anna knew what he was saying.

“But you can't … You … Oh!”

She pushed past Robert Hamill, who spun after her, surprised, to see that Tom Tunstall was fitting on the grass.

His eyes had rolled back in his head, his body jerked as if his arms were working front to back. He shuddered, horribly, and Anna was crying out as she tried to fish for his tongue with her fingers.

“Tom! Tom! I'm here, Tom.”

She leaned in close and spoke to him over and over.