The Stone Book Quartet (3 page)

Mary wriggled past the flake and stood up. The passage went on beyond her light. Father’s candle made a dark hole of where she had come, and she could see his boots and one hand. He pushed the bobbin of bad ends through to her, and six candles. He kept hold of the loose end of silk.   

‘What’s up?’ said Mary. ‘What are we doing?’

‘You still want a book for Sundays?’ said Father. ‘Even if you can’t read?’

‘Yes,’ said Mary.

‘Then this is what we’re doing,’ said Father. ‘So you listen. You’re to keep the lucifers dry, and use only one candle. It should be plenty. Let the silk out, but don’t pull on it, else it’ll snap. It’s to fetch you back if you’ve no light, and that’s all it’s for. Now then. You’ll End you go down a bit of steep, and then the rock divides. Follow the malachite. Always follow the malachite. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘After the malachite there’s some old foxbench, then a band of white dimension, and a lot of wet when you come to the Tough Tom. Can you remember it all?’

‘Malachite, foxbench, dimension, Tough Tom,’ said Mary.

‘Always follow the malachite,’ said Father. ‘And if there’s been another rockfall, don’t trust loose stuff. And think on: there isn’t anybody can reach you. You’re alone.’

‘What must I do when I get to the Tough Tom?’ said Mary.

‘You come back and tell me if you want that book,’ said Father. ‘And if you do, you shall have it.’

‘Right,’ said Mary.

The crack in the hill ran straight for a while and was easier than the first part. She held her candle in one hand and the bobbin in the other. She had tucked the other candles and the lucifer matches into her petticoat. She went slowly down the rock, and the silk unwound behind her.

The steep was not enough to make her climb, and water trickled from above, over the rock, and left a green stain of malachite. She stopped when the passage divided, but there was nothing to worry her. She went to the left, with the malachite. The other passage had none.

She took the silk through the hill. The green malachite faded, and she passed by a thin level of foxbench sand, hard and speckled.

Then the walls were white. She was at the dimension. The crack sloped easily downward and was opening. She no longer had to move sideways. Her feet scuffed in the sand, but in front of her she could see brown water. Mary held her candle low. At the bottom of the wall she saw the beginning of a band of clay, the Tough Tom red marl that never let water through. She went forward slowly into the wet. The floor was stiff and tacky under her boots, and behind her the silk floated in curves. But the crack went no deeper. The ground was level, and her light showed a hump of Tough Tom above the water, glistening.

Mary stopped again. There was nothing else, over, behind, below; only the Tough Tom humping out of the water, and the white dimension stone. And the crack finished at the end of her candlelight.

‘Father!’

There was no reply. She hadn’t counted how much silk had unwound.

‘Father!’

There was plenty of candle left, but it showed her nothing to explain why she was there.

‘Father!’

Not even an echo. There wasn’t the room for one. But she turned. There hadn’t been an echo, but her voice had sounded louder beyond the Tough Tom.

Mary scrambled up the hump, slithering in the wet. Then she looked around her, and saw.

The end of the crack was as broad as two stalls and as high as a barn. The red Tough Tom was a curved island above its own water. The walls were white and pale yellow. There was no sound. The water did not drip. It sank through the stone unheard, and seeped along the marl.

Mary saw Father’s mason mark drawn on the wall. It was faint and black, as if drawn with soot. Next to it was an animal, falling. It had nearly worn itself away, but it looked like a bull, a great shaggy bull. It was bigger than it seemed at first, and Father’s mark was on it, making the mark like a spear or an arrow.

The bull was all colours, but some of the stone had shed itself in the damp air. The more Mary looked, the bigger the bull grew. It had turned around every wall, as if it was moving and dying.

Mary had come through the hill to see Father’s mark on a daubed bull. And near the bull and the mark there was a hand, the outline of a hand. Someone had splayed a hand on the wall and painted round it with the Tough Tom. Fingers and thumb.

Mary put the candle close. A white dimension hand. She lifted her own and laid it over the hand on the wall, not touching. Both hands were the same size. She reached nearer. They were the same size. She touched. The rock was cold, but for a moment it had almost felt warm. The hands fitted. Fingers and thumb and palm and a bull and Father’s mark in the darkness under the ground.

Mary stood back, in the middle of the Tough Tom, and listened to the silence. It was the most secret place she had ever seen. A bull drawn for secrets. A mark and a hand alone with the bull in the dark that nobody knew.

She looked down. And when she looked down she shouted. She wasn’t alone. The Tough Tom was crowded. All about her in that small place under the hill that led nowhere were footprints.

They were the footprints of people, bare and shod. There were boots and shoes and clogs, heels, toes, shallow ones and deep ones, clear and sharp as if made altogether, trampling each other, hundreds pressed in the clay where only a dozen could stand. Mary was in a crowd that could never have been, thronging, as real as she was. Her feet made prints no fresher than theirs.

And the bull was still dying under the mark, and the one hand still held.

There was nowhere to run, no one to hear. Mary stood on the Tough Tom and waited. She daren’t jerk the thread to feel Father’s presence; he was so far away that the thread would have broken.

Then it was over. She knew the great bull on the rock enclosing her, and she knew the mark and the hand. The invisible crowd was not there, and the footprints in the Tough Tom churned motionless.

She had seen. Now there was the time to go. Mary lifted the thread and made skeins of it as she went past the white dimension, foxbench and malachite to the candle under the fall.

Father had moved to make room for her.

‘Well?’

‘I’ve seen,’ said Mary. ‘All of it.’

‘You’ve touched the hand?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought you would.’

They went back to the shaft, and up, and out. The sky seemed a different place. All things led to the bull and the mark and the hand in the cave. Trees were trying to find it with their roots. The rain in the clouds must fall to the ground and into the rock to the Tough Tom.

‘That’s put a quietness on you,’ said Father.

They came over Glaze Hill.

‘Why did you set your mark on?’ said Mary.

‘I didn’t. It was there when I went.’

‘When did you go?’

‘When I was about your size. My father took me same as today. We have to go before we’re too big to get past the fall, though I reckon, years back, the road was open; if you knew it was there.’

‘When did you go last?’ said Mary.

‘We go just once,’ said Father. ‘So that we’ll know.’

‘Who else?’

‘Only us. Neither Leahs nor Allmans. Us.’

‘But there were ever so many feet,’ said Mary. ‘The place was teeming.’

‘We’ve been going a while,’ said Father.

‘And that bull,’ said Mary.

‘That’s a poser. There’s been none like it in my time; and my father, he hadn’t seen any.’

‘What is it all?’ said Mary.

‘The hill. We pass it on: and once you’ve seen it, you’re changed for the rest of your days.’

‘Who else of us?’ said Mary.

‘Nobody,’ said Father, ‘except me: and now you: it’s always been for the eldest: and from what I heard my father say, it was only ever for lads. But if they keep on stoping after that malachite the way they’re going at the Engine Vein, it’ll be shovelled up in a year or two without anybody noticing even. At one time of day, before the Engine Vein and that chap who could read books, we must have been able to come at it from the top. But that’s all gone. And if the old bull goes, you’ll have to tell your lad, even if you can’t show him.’

‘I shall,’ said Mary.

‘I recollect it puts a quietness on you, does that bull. And the hand. And the mark.’

Mary went to wash the Tough Tom from her boots in the spring when they reached home. The spring came out of the hill and soaked into Lifeless Moss, and Lifeless Moss spilled by brooks to the sea.

Father sat with Mother for a while. Old William had picked up his usual rhythm, and the loom rattled, ‘Nickety-nackety, Monday-come-Saturday’. Then Father collected his work tools and sat down at the table and sorted through the pebbles.

He weighed them in his hand, tested them on his thumbnail, until he found the one he wanted. He pushed the others aside, and he took the one pebble and worked quickly with candle and firelight, turning, tapping, knapping, shaping, twisting, rubbing and making, quickly, as though the stone would set hard if he stopped. He had to take the picture from his eye to his hand before it left him.

‘There,’ said Father. ‘That’ll do.’

He gave Mary a prayer book bound in blue-black calf skin, tooled, stitched and decorated. It was only by the weight that she could tell it was stone and not leather.

‘It’s better than a book you can open,’ said Father. ‘A book has only one story. And tomorrow I’ll cut you a brass cross and let it in the front with some dabs of lead, and then I’ll guarantee you’d think it was Lord Stanley’s, if it’s held right.’

‘It’s grand,’ said Mary.

‘And I’ll guarantee Lizzie Allman and Annie Leah haven’t got them flowers pressed in their books.’

Mary turned the stone over. Father had split it so that the back showed two fronds of a plant, like the silk in skeins, like the silk on the water under the hill.

And Father went out of the room and left Mary by the fire. He went to Old William and took his ophicleide, as he always did after shouting, and he played the hymn that Old William liked best because it was close to the beat of his loom. William sang for the rhythm, ‘Nickety-nackety, Monday-come-Saturday’, and Father tried to match him on the ophicleide.

William bawled:

‘ “Oh, the years of Man are the looms of God

“Let down from the place of the sun;

“Wherein we are weaving always,

“Till the mystic work is done!” ‘

And so they ended until the next time. The last cry went up from the summer fields, ‘Who-whoop! Wo-whoop! W-o-o-o-o!’

And Mary sat by the fire and read the stone book that had in it all the stories of the world and the flowers of the flood.

GRANNY REARDUN

They were flitting the Allmans. Joseph sat at the top of Leah’s Bank and watched.

The horse and cart stood outside the house, by the field gate. Elijah Allman lifted the dollytub onto the cart first and set it in the middle. Then Alice and Amelia climbed into the dollytub, and Elijah packed them round with bedding. Young Herbert was carrying chairs.

The Allmans loaded the cart with furniture, stacking from the girls in the dollytub, so that the load was firm. Mrs Allman came out of the house backwards on her knees. She was donkey-stoning the doorstep white, and when she had done she stood up, and reached over the step and pulled the door to.

Elijah helped her up onto the carter’s seat. Young Herbert sat next to her, holding the reins. Elijah took the bridle and walked the horse through the field gateway, down the Hough and onto the Moss.

Joseph listened to them go. He went to the top corner post of the field, ran three strides and slid down Leah’s Bank. It was such a steep hill, and the grass so hard and slippery, that he could slide for yards at a time, standing. And when the grass was brogged by old cow muck, he had only to keep his balance, skip, and be away again.

He pushed the door open.

The house smelt wet with donkey—stone and limewash. The rooms were enormous empty. All the floors were white, all the walls and beams and the ceilings white. The stairs were sand-scoured, and the boards too. There was no dirt anywhere.

Joseph looked out of the bedroom window. The Allmans were away across the Moss. He left the house and went home for breakfast. He lived at the bottom of the hill.

Grandfather had finished his breakfast and was smoking a pipe of tobacco in his chair by the fire. His hard fingers could press the tobacco down hot in the bowl, without burning himself.

‘They’ve flitted Allmans,’ said Joseph.

‘Ay,’ said Grandfather.

‘What for?’ said Joseph.

‘The years they’ve been there,’ said Grandfather. ‘It’s a wonderful thing, them in their grandeur, and us in raddle and daub.’

‘Why?’ said Joseph.

‘Eat your pobs,’ said Grandmother.

Grandfather knocked the ashes of his pipe out onto his hand and pitched them in the fire. He raised himself. ‘Best be doing,’ he said. ‘Damper Latham’s getting for me. And think on,’ he said to Joseph, ‘I’ll have half an hour from you before school. Is your mother coming up for her dinner today?’

‘And fetching Charlie,’ said Joseph. ‘She promised.’

Grandfather picked up his canvas bass and took his cap off the doornail. The chisels and hammers clinked together in the bass. ‘Be sharp,’ he said to Joseph.

Grandfather was old. But he still turned out. He was building a wall into the hedge bank of Long Croft field, down the road from the house, under the wood.

Joseph washed his basin and spoon at the spring in the garden, and ran down the road to Long Croft.

Grandfather was rough-dressing the stone for the wall, and laying it out along the hedge. Joseph unwound the line and pegged one end in the joints Where Grandfather had finished the day before, and pulled the line tight against the bank. His job was to cut the bank back to receive the stone and to run a straight bed for the bottom course.

He chopped at the bank.

‘Sweep up behind you,’ said Grandfather. ‘Muck’s no use on the road. It wants to be on the field.’