Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (15 page)

   
On the way down the field Fay
looked over her shoulder to watch the Tump disappearing and saw a man among the
trees on its summit. He was quite still, obviously watching them.

   
'Rachel, who's that?'

   
'Where?'

   
'On the Tump. I don't think
it's Goff.'

   
Rachel turned round and made no
pretence of not staring.

   
'It's Humble,' she said. 'Max's
minder. He loves it here. He used to be a gamekeeper. He prowls the woods all
the time, supposedly organizing security. I think he snares rabbits and
things.'

   
'
Very
Green, I must say,' Fay said.

   
'Max's principles tend to get
overlooked where Humble's concerned. I think he sometimes serves the need that
occasionally arises in Max for, er, rough boys.'
   
'I think I'm sorry I asked,' said Fay.

Alex awoke.

   
There was pressure on his chest.
When he was able to open his eyes just a little, with considerable difficulty,
he looked into blackness.

   
Oh lord, he thought, I've
actually entered the dark place, I'm in there with Grace.

   
Yet he was still in the
armchair. The chair was refusing to let go of him. It had closed around him
like an iron lung or something. He was a prisoner in the chair and in the dark
and there was a pressure on his chest.

   
'Grace?' he said feebly. 'Grace?'

   
The darkness moved. The
darkness was making a soft, rhythmic noise, like a motor boat in the distance.

   
Alex opened his eyes fully and
stared into luminous amber-green, watchful eyes. He chuckled; the darkness was
only a big, black cat.

   
'Ras . . . Ras . . .' he
whispered weakly, trying to think of the creature's name.

   
The cat stood up on his chest.

   
'Rastus!' Alex said
triumphantly. 'Hullo, Rastus. You know, for a minute, I thought . . . Oh, never
mind, you wouldn't understand.'

   
He wondered if it was teatime
yet. The clock said . . . what? Couldn't make out if it was four o'clock or
five. Around four, Grace always liked a pot of tea and perhaps a small slice of
Dundee cake. She'd be most annoyed if he'd slept through teatime.

   
Fay, on the other hand,
preferred a late meal. Women were so contrary. It generally saved a lot of
argument if he ate with them both.

   
Alex chuckled again. No wonder
he was getting fat.

Rachel put the bottle in the river and took off her Barbour. 'I'll be
thirty-six in January.'

   
'Happens to us all,' Fay said.

   
'I was . . . very much on top
of the situation when I took the job. Nothing could touch me, you know? I was
chief Press Officer at Virgin, and he head-hunted me. He said, you’re your price,
so I doubled my salary and he said, OK, it's yours - can you believe that?'

   
She handed Fay the glasses,
pulled the bottle out of the water and shot the cork at the bridge. It fell
short and they watched it bobbing downstream. 'Does that count as pollution?' Rachel
wondered.

   
'Why was Goff so attracted to
Crybbe?'

   
Rachel poured wine until it fizzed
to the brim of both tumblers. 'Magic'

   
'Magic?' Fay repeated in a flat
voice.

   
'Earth magic.'

   
'You mean ley-lines?'

   
'You know what all that's about?
I mean, don't be ashamed, it's all speculation anyway.'

   
'Tell me what it means in the
Crybbe context.'

   
'OK, well, presumably you know
about Alfred Watkins who came up with the theory back in the 1920s. Lived in
Hereford and did most of his research in these hills. Had the notion, and set out
to prove it, that prehistoric sacred monuments - standing stones, stone
circles, burial mounds, all this - were arranged in straight lines. Just route
markers, he thought originally, on straight roads.'

   
'I've got his book.
The Old Straight Track.'

   
'Right. So you know that where
four or five sites fell into a straight line, he'd call it a ley, apparently
because a lot of the places where these configurations occurred had names
ending in l-e-y, OK?'

   
'Like Crybbe?'

   
Rachel grinned. 'Well, he
didn't know about Crybbe, or he'd probably have called them Crybbe-lines. You
read through Watkins's book, you won't find a single mention of Crybbe.'

   
'I know. I looked. I was quite
disappointed.'

   
'Because, apart from the Tump,
there's nothing to see. However, it seems there used to be bloody dozens of
standing stones and things around here at one time, which disappeared over the
centuries. Farmers used to rip them out because they got in the way of
ploughing and whatever else farmers do.'

   
Rachel waved a dismissive hand
to emphasize the general tedium of agriculture. 'Anyway, there are places in
Britain where lots of ley-lines converge, ancient sacred sites shooting off in
all directions. Which, obviously, suggests these places were of some great sacred
significance, or places of power.'

   
'Stonehenge?'

   
'Sure. And Glastonbury Tor. And
Avebury. St Michael's Mount in Cornwall. And other places you've probably never
heard of.'

   
'But not Crybbe. You're really
not going to tell me Crybbe was ever sacred to anybody.'

   
Rachel swallowed a mouthful of
wine and wiped her mouth with a deliberately graceless gesture before topping
up her glass. Down on your knees, woman, I'm afraid you're on holy ground.'

   
The bridge carried the main
road into town and behind it Fay could see chimneys and the church tower.
Wooded hills - mixture of broadleaf and conifer - tumbled down on three
sides. From anywhere at a distance, Crybbe looked quite picturesque. And that
was all.

   
'So how come there aren't
bus-loads of pilgrims clogging the roads, then? How come this is close to being
Britain's ultimate backwater?'

   
'Because the inhabitants are a
bunch of hicks who can't recognize a good tourist gimmick when they get one on
a plate, I mean, they did rip out the bloody stones in the first place, that's
why Max brought in Henry Kettle. He had to know where the stones used to be.'
   
'Henry divines the spots?'

   
'Sure. He pinpoints the
location, then what you do is stick pole in the ground at the exact spot. And if
you're as rich and self-indulgent as Max Goff, what you do next is have lots of
lovely new stones cut to size and planted out in the fields, prehistoric
landscape-gardening on a grand scale.'

   
'Gosh.' Fay was picturing a
huge, wild rock-garden, with daffodils growing around the standing stones in the
spring. Crybbe suddenly a little town in a magic circle. 'I think that sounds
rather a nice thing to do . . . don't you? I mean, bizarre, but nice, somehow.'

   
'Except it's not quite as easy as
it sounds,' Rachel said. 'And it's going to cause trouble. Within a couple of
weeks Kettle'd discovered the probable sites of nearly thirty prehistoric
stones, a couple of burial mounds, not to mention a holy well.'

   
'Wow.'

   
'And fewer than a quarter of
the sites are on the eight and a half acres of land which Max bought with the
Court, so he's going to restore Stone Age Crybbe he's got to negotiate with a
lot of farmers.'

   
'Ah. Mercenary devils,
farmers.'

   
'And awkward sods, in many
cases.'

   
'True. So how's he going to handle
it?'

   
'He wants to hold a big public
meeting to tell the people how he plans to revitalize their town. I mean,
obviously you've got the considerable economic benefits of tourism - look how many
foreign trippers flock to Avebury. But also - unwisely in my view - he's going
to explain all the esoteric stuff. What ley lines are really all about, and
what they can do for the town.'

   
'Energy lines,' Fay said. 'I've
also read that other book,
The Old Golden
Land.'

   
'By J. M. Powys, distant descendant
of the great mystical writer, John Cowper Powys. Max loves that book. Coincidentally
- or not, perhaps - he's just bought the company which published it. So he owns
it now, and he likes to think he owns J. M. Powys ... for whom He Has Plans.'

   
'He's coming here?'

   
'If he knows what's good for him.
He'll have plenty of like-minded idiots for company. There are already nine New
Age people living in the town in properties craftily acquired by Max over the
past few months. Alternative healers, herbalists, astrologers.'

   
'Can't say I've noticed them,'
Fay admitted.

   
'That's because some of them
look quite normal. Only
they
know
they are the human transmitters of the New Energy about to flow into Crybbe.'

   
The idea being that ley-lines
mark out some kind of force field, channels of energy, which Bronze Age people
knew how tap into. Is that right?'

   
'The Great Life Force, Fay. And
so, naturally, re-siting the stones will bring new life flowing back into
Crybbe. Max reckons - well, he hasn't worked it out for himself, he's been told
by lots of so-called experts - that Crybbe is only in the depressed state it is
today because all the stones have gone. So if you put them back, it'll be like
connecting the town for the first time to the national grid. The whole place
will sort of light up.'

   
Fay thought about this. 'It
sounds rather wonderful'
   
'If you like that kind of fairy-tale.'
   
'Is it?'

   
'Oh, well, sure, what does it
matter if it's true or not, it'll bring in the crowds, be an economic boost, a
psychological panacea, create a few jobs. But you see, Fay, I
know
this guy.'
   
Rachel held up the bottle, but Fay
shook her head and Rachel poured what remained into her tumbler. 'I don't think
I can stand to watch him being baronial at Crybbe Court, with his entourage of
fringe scientists and magicians and minstrels and sundry jesters.'

   
'Is that the central point, at
which all these ley-lines are supposed to meet? The Court. Or is it the
church?'

   
'The Tump,' Rachel said, it's
the Tump. It's not a centre, it's a sort of axis. The lines come off it in a
fan shape. The Tump is like this great power station. Get the idea? I mean, really,
isn't it just the biggest load of old rhubarb you ever heard?'

   
Rachel brought an arm from
behind her head and lobbed the empty wine-bottle into the air. Arnold tensed,
about to spring after it, until he saw where it was going.

   
There was a satisfying splash.

   
'Now surely,' Rachel said,
'that's
got
to be pollution.'

CHAPTER VIII

Fay walked back to the cottage, for Arnold's sake and to clear her head,
although she hadn't drunk all that much wine - not compared to Rachel, anyway.
Arnold, however, looked as if he'd been drinking heavily, veering from side to
side on his tautened clothes-line. He was hopeless.

   
Goff had not returned when they
arrived back at the Court. She'd left Rachel carrying the triptych into the
stable-block where it was to be double-locked into a store-room. Nearly a thousand
quid's worth of less-than-fine art. Hereward and Jocasta Newsome would, for
once, have good reason to appear appallingly smug.

   
'Whichever way you look at it,
Arnie,' Fay said reflectively, 'our friend Goff is making waves in Crybbe.'
   
No bad thing, either.

   
Could she understand the guy's
obsession? Well, yes, she could. A man who'd made his first million marketing
anarchic punk-rock records in the mid-seventies. Waking up in the nineties to
find himself sitting on a heap of money in a wilderness of his own creation.
All the cars and yachts and super-toys he'd ever want and nothing to nurture
the soul.