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‘It wouldn’t have happened. That was the whole point.’
‘Maybe not. No, really … maybe not. But the readiness was there.’
A pause. Then he slid his arms around her waist. Fran stood there for a moment, not reacting; then let herself relax against his body. He squeezed her gently; touched his cheek to hers.
‘You know what it reminds me of ?’ he said after a while. ‘Cape Canaveral. You go there now, there’s just these burned-out shells of concrete, where the rockets blasted off. Dead silence. When the clouds are like this, and there’s a wind off the desert, it’s so damn’ eerie. It feels like the end of the world.’
CHAPTER IV (#ulink_a6f9bb59-524b-54b2-b900-c7ab6a10945f)
Testament (#ulink_a6f9bb59-524b-54b2-b900-c7ab6a10945f)
1
Lyn tapped her pen against her teeth – and wondered if she’d found her man at last.
The library was hushed, as if expectant. The lamp above her recess cast a cosy golden glow. The cloudy afternoon had brought a premature dusk, like grey fog seeping inward through the windows. The lamps were beacons, keeping it at bay. Back down the unlit aisles and stacks, the gloom was growing thicker.
The manuscript before her was the fragment of a will. Ninth century West Saxon; the testator’s name was written aeelgar. She felt uncertain, rather than excited. Was it him? Perhaps – but she was never going to know. He didn’t even have a face, to match the name against.
She’d been looking for him since childhood – whether consciously or not. It went back to that holiday in Norfolk. The thesis she was writing now had been conceived that summer. Not that she had known it then: she’d just been ten or twelve. They’d visited an ancient church, for Daddy to take pictures. Martin had moped around outside, as little brothers would, but she had walked on in to look around. The place still had its medieval rood screen, with painted figures dimly visible. Pictures of saints, according to the leaflet – some of them not known outside the district.
One disfigured shape had caught her eye. It had been worn to a shadow, with the face completely gone. The presence of araven suggests Paul of Thebes or possibly Elijah. But maybe he was just another nameless local saint.
It seemed there were traditions of some link with nearby Ely. She’d heard how Hereward the Wake had fought the Normans there. Was this one of his warriors? Or a hermit of the fens who’d prayed for him?
She’d walked out of the church – and like a shadow, he had followed. Ever since that day, he’d been an element in her imagination. How had local glory turned to centuries of silence? What could be inferred about the medieval mind? The thought had slowly gelled into her topic for research: this interface of history and myth.
The study would be a social one; but still there was this itchy fascination. The twelve-year-old inside her kept on wondering. She couldn’t help but follow up the vaguest reference; the thesis grew in tandem with her search. Here, an ancient grant of land; there, a manuscript that spoke of scincræft. Cryptic mentions; fleeting clues. They’d led her to this brittle testament.
She glanced at her watch – it had just gone six – and wondered how Fran and Craig were getting on. The rain had stopped some hours ago, but the sky outside was dim. They knew that she was working late tonight. They’d be eating out, Fran said – somewhere in Oxford. She was aiming to be back by nine.
But what if she’d upset herself, revisiting the past? What if the reunion wasn’t working out … ?
Lyn realized she was doodling, and sat up straighter. She read her rough translation through again, then looked back to the text. The Old English script seemed to creep before her eyes: clinging to the page with its hooks and downward strokes. Her attention was drawn once more by the name of the testator.
aeelgar
It was different from the wills she’d seen before. Part of it was set out like a poem.
Seek a lord
whose heart is whole
And hold to him
until his days are done
Written by the man himself, or by some later copyist? This version was two hundred years more recent. So no, she couldn’t even answer that.
We know nothing at all about Æthelgar.
She re-read her last sentence with a real sense of loss. Whoever he’d been, the flow of time had carried him away. There was just this frozen glimpse on the horizon. Like Martin’s stars – so distant that you saw them in the past. ‘See that one?’ he’d told her once. ‘It could have died a thousand years ago. Now that’s the kind of ghost I can believe in …’
Dispirited, she pushed him from her thoughts – and then felt guilty. Frustration gave the knife an extra twist. She’d better take a break, before she really got upset. Gathering her papers up, she read her glum conclusion one more time. The verdict seemed to mock her: an admission of defeat.
And yet the name was curiously familiar.
2
She was still worrying it when Fran got back; the chapter only halfway pieced together. Her neatly ordered notes were strewn all over her front room: a pile on the floor, a sheaf on the arm of the sofa. One open textbook lay upon another. But the A4 sheet in front of her stayed blank. The flow of her analysis had got itself hung up.
We know nothing at all about ÆEthelgar.
Perhaps she’d seen the name before in one of Daddy’s books. Since childhood, she’d spent hours in the treasure-house of his study. The Old and Middle English texts had lured her with their strangeness; the manuscripts enchanted her like giant picture books. Martin had come and teased her: called her bookworm. She could hear her brother’s goading voice right now …
Oh, where had she seen that bloody name before? It niggled, like an itch she couldn’t scratch.
Lyn allowed herself another chocolate biscuit, and crunched it feeling guilty; then straightened as she heard Fran’s key in the lock.
She went into the hall, trying not to look too anxious. ‘How did it go?’
‘Fine,’ Fran told her, smiling. ‘Really well.’
Lyn could see that it had. Fran had been so nervous over breakfast, just picking at her cereal; but her face looked fresher now, and more relaxed. Lyn stayed where she was, admiring. ‘That jacket really suits you …’
‘I know. So can I keep it?’
‘Don’t push your luck, Miss Bennett. Do you want coffee?’
‘Mmm, please.’ Fran followed her as far as the kitchen threshold; watched as her friend got the percolator going. Lyn glanced over her shoulder.
‘You can ask him back, you know. I do quite like the man.’
‘Thanks …’ Fran murmured. She pushed her hands into the jacket pockets, and rested her shoulder up against the doorframe. Leaned her head against it too. ‘We’re trying to take things one step at a time.’
‘Where’s he staying?’
‘The Randolph.’
‘Expensive tastes.’
Fran grinned. Well he’s American, isn’t he?’
‘Help yourself to bikkies. They’re in the front room, on the table.’
Fran wandered through. The biscuit jar was doubling as paperweight for some of Lyn’s notes. ‘How’s the thesis coming, then?’ she called.
‘Slowly. Too easy to get distracted – not by you, don’t worry, I need the break.’ Lyn joined her, took a biscuit of her own. ‘I was reading someone’s will today, and it sent my mind off at a tangent. I just keep wondering who he was.’
‘Why, did he leave you anything?’
‘Hardly, since he died about a thousand years ago.’
‘Well, you’ve made a start, at least,’ Fran told her drily.
Lyn pulled a rueful face. ‘That’s just his name. I doodled that.’
Fran craned her head. ‘So how do you say that, then?’
‘Athelgar. The TH sound was written like a D, it’s called an Eth…’
‘Lithp’d a lot, the Anglo-Saxons, did they?’
Lyn didn’t deign to rise to that. ‘… And AE had an A sound – like in cat.’
‘Athelgar…’ Fran murmured, trying it out. ‘So who was he?’
‘I don’t know. No one does. He died in Wessex, but he might have been in East Anglia at one time. Maybe he’s a saint I saw a painting of once. Then again, I dug up something about shine-craft – meaning phantom-art, or magic …’ Lyn shrugged. ‘According to the will, he was an eorl.’
‘Meaning an earl, presumably?’
‘No, not then. It was more of a warrior’s term.’ She gestured. ‘A man of high degree. A man of honour.’
‘Sounds just my type,’ murmured Fran with a mischievous smile, and pinched another biscuit.
3
Both of them had dreams that night, as the slow stars turned above the silent house.
Fran took ages getting off to sleep. The barrow-mounds of Greenham were still looming in her head. Rusty iron, and crumbling concrete; cavernous black gateways. The watch-tower like a giant alien robot in the midst.
The futon creaked beneath her as she turned, and turned again. A nauseous chill had wormed into her stomach. Those silos would stand open until doomsday; she’d felt the drip … drip … drip of their decay. But what might still be lurking in their shadows; in the labyrinth of tunnels underneath?
Something could have seen her from that long-deserted watchtower. Something could have crept out of its lair, and followed them. All the way back here, to sleeping Oxford.
Fear embraced her like a ghost; she wriggled to get free. The past was in the room with her – a shadow at the foot of the bed. The part she hadn’t shared with Lyn. The part she couldn’t bear to think about.
Her fingers found the cross around her neck. A Coventry cross, of silver nails: a Christmas present from Lyn. She turned and tweaked it, listening to the hush.
But even Lyn was sleeping, in her tidy bed next door. Fran could almost hear her gentle breathing. Like a soft, recorded message. Lyn’s not home right now. You’re on your own.
The house was quiet around her. The night outside was soundless – undisturbed. She pulled the pillow close, and closed her eyes. Her mind cast round for brighter thoughts, to keep the dark at bay.
Where was it you said you’d meet the man of your dreams … ?
Wistfully she huddled up, and thought of Heaven’s Field. She’d been about thirteen when she had gone there with her parents – their final summer in Northumberland. The sky had been like heaven all right, above the gaunt black cross. She summoned back its pinkish glow – the tufts of golden cloud. There’d been a famous battle here, in Anglo-Saxon times. Northumbria freed from tyranny, and won back to the faith.
She’d wandered round the empty field, enchanted by the twilight. And over by the church, she’d had the strangest rush of feeling: a rich, exciting glow from deep inside. It was over in a moment, but had left her flushed and giddy. A sense of being needed – and adored.
Even then, she’d realized that it hadn’t been religious. The thrill was much too physical for that – tugging at the instincts that were stirred by boys and babies. She’d told Lyn so, years later, in an earnest heart-to-heart. It had felt more like the shadow of a lover; a presence in the marriage bed she hadn’t dreamed of yet. A closeness that was soul to soul, as well as skin to skin.
She’d hoped it was a foretaste of her knight in shining armour – something for the boys at school to match themselves against. But that was just an old, romantic notion; Craig was real.
And what she’d felt this afternoon was pretty much the same.
The sun was going down on Heaven’s Field. Bathing in the memory – its warmth, and rosy light – she let herself relax into oblivion.
By rights, she should have taken that bright image to her dreams. Yet what her mind threw up was something different. She found herself, in spirit, at an isolated junction, along a road she hadn’t walked for years. Not Heaven’s Field, but Salisbury Plain; a place where nothing moved. The bleak, deserted grassland of the Imber firing range.
Danger Area.
Nervously she looked around. Sullen hills rose up to left and right, cutting off the outside world. The public roads were miles away; no passer-by could see her. She was stuck here, in the middle, all alone.
The junction was smeared by tank-tracks, its approaches hedged with posts to shore it up. Set against the gloomy slopes, they made her think of First World War defences: the barbed wire stripped away to leave the pickets standing bare.
There were insects buzzing faintly in the grass – but the silence overwhelmed them. That huge, unnatural firing range silence: as pregnant with threat as the grey clouds overhead.
A wrecked tank sat atop the nearest hill: its turret painted orange, for the guns of other tanks to zero in on. She studied it uneasily; then looked away, along the eastbound road. Imber village lay in that direction – out of sight, but close enough to fill her with foreboding.
She glimpsed a moving figure then – away to the left, where the ground began to rise. It was casting round, as if in search of something. She saw that he was dressed in black. A long coat or a cloak flapped out around him.
The icy surge of panic should have shocked her awake. But something deep inside her was determined to hang on. Fascinated, petrified, she watched him scour the heath. He waded through the knee-high grass – then crouched to root around. His face was turned away from her. Despite the muffling garment, she could see his short fair hair.
He seemed to sense her presence, then – and swung around to look. He didn’t have a metal face. He had no face at all. There was just a patch of shadow, framed with gold. Fran recoiled in horror, still suspended in the dream. And then the mouthless figure spoke to her.
She didn’t understand a word – but recognized the voice. With a wail of fright, she came flailing to the surface, kicking back the duvet to sit upright on the bed. Her nightie and her briefs were damp; she was suddenly and wretchedly convinced she’d wet herself. Then realized it was only sticky sweat.
Oh God. She cupped her hands against her face.
It was the voice she’d heard in hospital; the harsh, corrupted language was the same. And so was its appealing tone: the note of desperation. She felt he’d meant to snatch at her, and drag her down with him.
But the room was silent now. She strained her ears against the hissing hush. It hadn’t really been the voice; just memory. An echo. Now that she had woken up, it wouldn’t come again. Not even if she waited until dawn.
Full of her fear, she hugged herself, and started counting minutes, one by one.
Lyn dreamed of Martin. He was waiting in the hall as she came downstairs. You look great, he said, and she could see how much he meant it in his face. The spiteful fights of growing-up were all forgotten now. Still fiddling with an earring, she let her smile grow wider. As she gave him a twirl to show off her dress, the house was spun away into oblivion.
She woke up awkwardly; her room felt unfamiliar and distorted in the dark. A piece of dream went scuttling away. Lyn recoiled, and shrank against the headboard. She felt a rush of dread from out of childhood – back in her old bedroom, with its imps and demons scurrying around. And the pale, grinning skeleton of Death behind the door.
Instinctively she turned her head – then sighed, and let her shoulders slump again. The door was safely closed, of course, her dressing gown a silky wraith against it. The demons melted back into the picture that they’d come from: the print in Daddy’s study that had scared her as a girl. Death of the Miser, by Hieronymus Bosch. It had figured in her nightmares more than once. But not for years …
Athelgar.
Sitting there, she realized where she’d seen the name before. She’d picked at it all evening, like a scab. Now, with the top knocked off at last, she was suddenly bled dry. She curled up, feeling miserable, and didn’t sleep again.
CHAPTER V (#ulink_8615997e-98f9-5d94-9627-140280c4e39b)
Heaven and Hell (#ulink_8615997e-98f9-5d94-9627-140280c4e39b)
