Brodmaw Bay (36 page)

They were first courted by the Cornish enchantress Ghislane in a ceremony enacted in the stone circle during one particularly bitter winter in the fourteenth century when the sea had frozen and the village was starving for want of fish. The summoning was successful. Lots were drawn to decide the sacrifice. That was duly made and the weather broke and the bounty of the following spring and summer were without precedent.

They gained in power quite by accident. The witchfinder sent west in Cromwell’s time unwittingly assisted this. He manacled those suspected of witchcraft to the boulders of the east shore as one of his tests. The sea spirits were nourished by their innocent deaths. Thus did they become stronger than Ghislane ever imagined they would become.

There is no written record of when the Harbingers first came among us. They were so called because their appearance signified the time for fresh sacrifice was becoming due. They are somewhere between emissaries and foot soldiers in nature. Perhaps they are closer to the latter than the former because they are not capable of communication but they can inflict physical harm along with the corrosive sense of dread that just sighting them can provoke.

I now realise that one of them visited me in the days before my leave and this desolate homecoming. I was on night patrol, in the line, at the forward observation post when a private on sentry duty began to shoot rifle rounds from the fire step into no-man’s-land late on a clear and moonlit evening. My immediate concern was that our section was the target of a trench raid. But when I reached the sentry and swept the ground beyond the wire before him through a periscope, there was no movement and there were neither the muzzle flashes nor the sound of return fire that would signal enemy approach.

I ordered him to stop firing and to descend the ladder to where we could communicate out of sight and range of German snipers. I was anxious on two counts. He had fired sufficient rounds to give their mortar parties a good indication of the exact position of our forward base, our principal dugout and our forward supply dump. And practically, the noise of his rifle fire would disturb men robbed of decent rest already by the sustained enemy bombardment we had endured there in our part of the line for close to three days.

‘I saw something,’ the man insisted. ‘Sir,’ he added, as a stubborn afterthought. It was Davies, a tenant farmer’s son from Totnes, a sturdy boy of eighteen cool under fire, not given in the slightest to flights of imaginative fancy.

‘What did you see precisely, Davies?’

‘I saw a figure, sir.’

‘You saw just the one?’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘They do not attack individually, Private.’ I supposed he could have been a scout doing night reconnaissance. It seemed unlikely. I climbed the ladder and risked a look through my field glasses. They were not military issue but ship’s binoculars given me by Sharp the chandler as a parting gift when it became known in the bay I had volunteered for the fight. They were of excellent quality and the moon was bright and yet I saw nothing.

‘You must have hit him,’ I said to Davies. But Davies looked doubtful about this. ‘Describe him to me.’

‘He moved very quickly, sir. He had a loping gait, rapid, like a hare. And he had on a mask.’

‘You mean a gas mask?’

‘Burlap, it looked like. Sockets of glass stitched over his eyes, sir. Must have been glass, gave him a look like he had no eyes in his head. Altogether right strange, he looked.’

I told Davies to make his way back to the support trench and to brew himself a can of tea and to return to his post in half an hour. I would occupy his position while he took a short absence from it that I considered he had earned. He was cool and vigilant and the carrot is more useful than the stick the further forward men are ordered to go. War is enervating on the nerves. My conclusion, as the Devon boy went to get his beverage, was that he had killed a scout wearing some sort of camouflage or experimental protection.

I took and, while he was gone, examined his rifle. The weapon was clean and well lubricated; the barrel smooth and his bayonet polished and stropped to the keenest edge. He was a good soldier, disciplined and professional. I did not think he had been shooting at shadows.

Dawn and daylight revealed no body in no-man’s-land. This did not mean he had not been there. He might have crawled back unscathed to his own lines once I ordered Davies to stop firing. He might have crawled back wounded. He might have sought cover in a shell hole and drowned in the putrid water that has filled them half full after the recent rain. He might still be there, hungry and thirsty and afraid, waiting for the night, praying for cloud cover and concealment from the bright moon after dusk.

But he was not there, I know now, because he was not a man at all. He was a Harbinger, one of the grotesque apparitions that come to visit us when sacrifice is due. They come to scare and remind and prompt us and I do not think that bullets fired from a Lee Enfield rifle can conveniently eradicate them. Neither can prayer do it. He came that I should see him. I do not think it would have made any difference to the outcome if I had.

The following afternoon I was writing to the mother of a comrade killed in the earlier bombardment. I told her of course that he died bravely. In fact he died oblivious, blown to pieces while he slept in a direct hit from a howitzer shell on the dugout where he slept. The single largest piece of him recovered intact was the thumb of his left hand. I did not tell his mother this.

I felt a chill of malevolence as I wrote so cold it made me shudder. I looked up and saw something grey-faced and unblinking gazing back at me with incurious fury. It was not a human countenance. The features were crude and ragged and somehow unfinished, the mouth a vacant leer under the empty scrutiny of eyes that were little more than holes. It appeared to crouch and lurk, this creature. I blinked and looked up at the dirty sky and back again and all I saw where it had appeared to me were sandbags, shoved together in a damp and wrinkled pile against the corrugated tin wall of the officers’ quarters.

I thought that my eyes were playing tricks on me. It was the Harbinger again, of course, come to summon me home; come to remind me that the people of the bay have duties from which war provides no escape.

I find it the deepest irony of my life that I have written verse inspired by human sacrifice. The brave men who have perished on the altar of freedom have pushed my pen across the page, posthumously, in commemoration of their valour and loss.

They were my comrades, my brothers in blood and common cause and I have tried in my way to honour them and their memory and to celebrate their youth and courage and deeds. I have shared their laughter and lived among them and sung our ardent songs marching shoulder to shoulder with them and trod through their gore in the aftermath of battle. I have mourned them.

Now I mourn my sacrificed wife and daughter. Sarah was, simply, the sunlight in my life. We met at Cambridge. Romance overcame all the many and deliberate obstacles to any sort of contact between male and female students. The attraction was instant and obvious to both of us and simply would not be denied. We walked and punted and told one another of our dreams in endless talks. We made forbidden love and it was magical.

We duly married. We lived in London at first. I taught English at a prep school at East Dulwich and we found a small house in Kennington in Lambeth affordable within our means. Sarah worked as a governess, teaching her young charges Latin and Greek and giving them music lessons on the piano. She was a fair pianist, though her real gift was for fine art. She could paint and draw with wonderful accomplishment.

When she fell pregnant with Paul we were overjoyed. He was a robust infant and athletic and graceful. He walked before his first birthday and could ride a bicycle before his third.

That was a milestone he never reached. Our beloved boy was taken from us by a bout of diphtheria. Grief afflicts people in strange ways sometimes and the loss of Paul made us more determined to be parents together to a second child. Sarah duly fell pregnant just a few short months after we buried our son.

This was in the autumn of
1907
. At about that time, my cousin Edith Heart wrote to me from the bay. She mentioned in her letter that there was a vacancy for a new head at the Mount School. She inferred that were I to apply for the job, my local connections would of course count in my favour when the selection process took place among what competing candidates there were.

She said she had recently spoken to Penmarrick and that he had asked fondly about me and whether I might one day return to live in the village of my birth. Some of my early poetry had been published in a couple of the literary journals by then and he said he had seen and admired them, as indeed had his wife.

The temptation was made irresistible by my own wife’s condition. I knew that no harm would come to our baby as the child was to be born and raised in the bay. That is the way of things, the charm of it, its uncanny freedom from the pestilence and poverty and general misfortune that can befall anywhere that does not exist in a state of enchantment. London, the great metropolis with its turbulence and squalor, felt to us by then like a tainted place. We were almost anxious to escape from it. All we saw in the west was a safe and bountiful life ripe with opportunity.

Madeleine grew into a kind and beautiful child about whom there was always something dreamy and almost ethereal. As she grew up, she developed a fascination for the plateau above the bay and the standing stones that shape its enigmatic circle. Many was the day I would climb the rise to the rear of the bay with my daughter seated on my shoulders, hand in hand with my wife, to enjoy a picnic in the solitude up there.

Madeleine’s other-worldly curiosity was perhaps most pleasingly satisfied in that place. She would gambol and play among the stones in games of hide and seek. She played these with her mother or with me for hours, some days, until she was about six years old.

The most precious time I spent with my daughter was when she was put to bed at night. Then I would tell her a story until she drowsed too sleepily to listen any more. I always made up the stories. She would sometimes request favourites among them I would struggle to recall because they had never been written down. When I got a detail wrong or made an error in chronology, she would always correct it, the way a patient schoolmarm might with a dull-brained child.

The stories are all told. I shall fight nor write nor mourn no more. I am done with life. The will is quite gone in me. I died with Sarah and Madeleine. Three of us, not two, were taken. All of us perished.

Penmarrick knows this. He came to see me at the house. He left an hour ago. He sat there, goading me with his sympathy and sadness, all the more provocative because I suspected they were feelings sincerely felt. My service revolver lay on the table between us, eight soft-point shells in their brass jackets in its steel chamber and I thought about picking it up and pointing it at him and pulling the trigger and watching his skull explode and his life extinguished in a squalid mess of bone fragments and brain matter.

And he read my thoughts and smiled, knowing I would not do it. It would be retribution but it would be murder too and I want only one death on my conscience and that is my own. It will not help to have committed the sin of coldly killing a man, if I am to find my family in whatever afterlife I hope for.

I do not believe the legend of Ghislane. Neither do I believe a druidic incantation first summoned the Singers under the Sea. The druids lay fraudulent claim to all the important Neolithic sites. But the constructions at the sites pre-date the druids by thousands of years. It is reasonable to assume that the rituals for which they were erected do then also.

I think the sea demons pre-date man. I think they are creatures from a prehistoric time before magic and rationality became separate and opposed. Stand in the stone circle on the plateau above the bay and you cannot but get some sense of the remote and imponderable strangeness of the ancient past. Man is a usurper on the earth: rude, disruptive, brash. In some places the old gods must be appeased and the village at the edge of the sea from which I come is one of those places and I think has been since men first crawled out of the slime and stood erect.

I have been wondering who to tell about what has taken place. There is no arbiter of law or justice to whom I can appeal. Penmarrick rules the bay by custom and bloodline and historic right. All of them will follow his lead; even those, like the publican Abraham, who I believe secretly disapprove. My wife and child drowned. Accidents occur at sea. Every coastal community is familiar with those mundane tragedies caused when boats venture on to the water and storms gather and break suddenly and without warning.

Baxter, padre to my company, might be the man to confide in. I do not think he will be able to do anything to undermine or influence the people of the bay and I doubt he could be made to possess the inclination to travel to the place and try. But I do not want to go to my death without sharing the truth with someone.