Moon Rising (20 page)

~~~

Since there was no need for me to be at the studio, next day Bram and I went out for our customary walk rather earlier than usual. It was a beautiful evening, very still, and most of the way from Newholm we could see the walls of church and abbey catching the last of the sun, while the sea was reflecting the sky. By the time we reached the east cliff the light had gone, and a high tide was filling the harbour; the Sunday visitors were leaving, while groups of old mariners were discussing the weather, and saying the extraordinary heat couldn't last.

In search of solitude, we walked to the far end of the graveyard to rest on Bram's favourite seat, watching fishing cobles and a small schooner going out between the piers. We were soon reduced to shadows in the dusk, deeper tones of grey against the ranks of upright stones. Voices, snatches of music reached us from below, but all was peace around us, as though we were ghosts of ourselves already. The strangest feeling seemed to have a hold on me. I couldn't have lifted a finger to dispel it, but after a while, Bram broke the stillness with a sigh that brought us both back to life.

‘Coming up here,' he murmured, ‘it seems to happen every time... there's something extraordinary about this place...' His accent, which was rarely noticeable, always became more pronounced when he was stirred, and in that moment it was rich and undisguised. ‘It draws me, makes me want to stay.'

Hearing the longing, wanting to respond, I was almost afraid to speak. ‘Then stay,' I whispered lightly, pressing myself to his side.

‘I wish I could.' Turning, he slipped an arm around the back of the seat and drew me closer. ‘At this moment, it's what I want more than anything in the world.'

I could scarcely breathe. ‘Do you?'

He brushed strands of hair away from my neck, and gazed at me with longing. ‘You know I do. This place and you – what more could I ask? You've given me so much, and I want you all the time. More than any other woman in my life...'

My heart raced. It was what I longed to hear, but that mention of other women brought his wife immediately to mind. Afterwards I could have cursed, but the words were out before I could stop them. ‘More than Florence?'

With a sudden grimace, he released me. ‘Oh, yes,' he said tersely, rising to his feet, ‘even more than Florence.'

Furious with myself, wishing I was older, wiser, more tactful – or at the very least that I could learn to simper and keep my mouth shut – I watched in despair while he left my side.

A short distance away, across the path, an old table tomb stood close to the cliff edge, a reminder of others that were no longer there. It was a dangerous spot, but tempting, and Bram paused there often at sunset, leaning against the tomb and smoking his cigarettes while waiting for me to leave the studio. He stood there now, a dark silhouette, locked into the mystery of his own private world, while I watched from the bench, wishing he would talk to me, explain things to me, tell me what he wanted, what he really planned to do. Most of all, I wished I had the courage to ask.

I watched him, trying to read his mood from the set of his shoulders. After a minute or so he relaxed, turning to beckon me towards him.

‘You're very young still, aren't you?' he murmured, kissing my forehead. ‘I tend to forget that.'

I'd have preferred him to say I was impudent, since that at least implied a certain crude wisdom; in this case to be young was to be ignorant, and I was too often aware of that. Feeling vulnerable, I perched on the edge of the tomb in silence and looked out across the harbour. Some distance below us was the East Pier and the pale strip of Collier's Hope; to the left stood Tate Hill and the short stretch of Henrietta Street.

‘It must have been a grand place to live, once upon a time,' he said musingly, following my eyes and studying the uneven line of houses below.

The street had been built as a fashionable extension to Kirkgate in the time of the third King George, on a ledge known as the Haggerlythe; now it was better known for its wooden smokehouses and oak-smoked herrings. Catching a drift of the aroma, Bram added drily: ‘But I'd have thought the view was wasted on a load of old kippers, wouldn't you?'

Glad of his change of mood, playing up to it, I pointed to the gap between cliff and pier, telling him about the collapse of Henrietta Street into the harbour. ‘It used to continue right along the Haggerlythe – as far as the steps to the pier. In those days the gap wasn't so wide.'

I had a strong memory of being plucked from my bed in the dark, clutched to my mother's bosom as she ran out of our house on the Cragg. There were yells and screams and raised voices, torches blazing across the harbour, flashes of lightning, the crash of thunder.

‘It happened one night when I was a child, not long before Christmas. There came a great rumbling and roaring, and half the cliff slipped into the sea. The far end of the street went first, taking most of the houses with it. Terrifying, it was – just like an earthquake – we could feel the noise and the shaking right the way across the harbour.

‘Everybody turned out to see what was happening. They thought the whole cliff was going. It was dreadful,' I assured him, ‘like the last trumpet-call, they say. Chasms opening up, houses cracking and sliding down the cliff, huge chunks of rock and shale tumbling down – and worst of all, the graveyard fell away. Imagine – coffins coming down like rain from above! All smashed open along the Haggerlythe and on the Scaur. They say it was hard to tell bones and skulls from
haggomsteeans
amongst the rocks.'

He'd been gazing in awe down the cliff, but at mention of a dialect word, his attention came back to me. ‘What are they?'

‘Oh, magical stones, lucky stones – the ones with perfect round holes in, that you nail to the doorpost to keep evil spirits away. You find them on the Scaur,' I said with airy unconcern, ‘along with giants' teeth and cannon balls. You know, the ones you call ammonites. But for ages you'd find skulls and bones and human teeth as well.'

‘Teeth?' With a little grunt of amazement he reached into his pocket for notebook and pencil, squinting to write in the semi-darkness, muttering something about fossils, and death and resurrection, while I peered over his shoulder.

It was a fact of life that both cliffs were unstable, and every winter brought small falls and new threats of collapse. The way I viewed things, people who fancied such extraordinary views – either in death or in life – had to be prepared to pay the price.

‘In the end, though,' I went on, as certain other gruesome facts returned to mind, ‘the sea washed everything away. Just as well, since most of the graves were from the cholera burial ground – furthest from the church, and nearest the sea. No wonder folk were afraid to clear them up.'

At the mention of cholera, he slowly looked around and put away his notebook. ‘In Ireland,' he said, ‘they had a terrible epidemic when my mother was young. Whole families died of it in Sligo. In one house close by, Ma said there was a little girl left alone. They could hear her crying piteously, and Ma begged to be allowed to help – sadly, the poor child died in her arms soon afterwards.'

‘And was your mother all right?' I asked, awed by such courage. Whenever he spoke of her, Bram made his mother sound like a woman after my own heart, one with red blood in her veins and an independent spirit. I liked the sound of Charlotte Stoker, and was always eager to hear more.

He said she'd suffered no ill-effects, adding that his grandmother was a woman who swore cleanliness was next to godliness, boiling and fumigating everything.

‘But Ma always said she was too young then to think seriously of dying. Only she was frightened of the coffin-maker – he made her flesh crawl. He used to pound on the door of their house, asking did they have bodies to bury, and if not, did they want to be measured up for a decent set of matching coffins. If they paid him now, this terrible old rogue told them, he'd see they got the best of everything...

‘They told him to go away and not to call again, but he kept on. Eventually, Ma hung out the window and said if he came again she'd throw something at him, and it wouldn't be money!

‘But he did come, so out went a great jugful of slops on his head – the man was furious! Shook his fist and said that if she died within the hour, he'd make sure she didn't have so much as a box to be buried in. So Ma said she wouldn't care anyway, and slammed the window shut.

‘He didn't come again, she said, but the looters did – and they were far worse. At first they took only small items from empty houses nearby – mostly food and money – understandable when so many were so poor. But as each day went by they were becoming bolder, arriving in gangs and with handcarts – clearing whole houses of everything, from clocks and paintings to chairs and kitchen crockery, swigging whiskey as they went. Not just men, but women as well, wild-eyed, mad – capable of anything.

‘Ma's family barricaded themselves in and kept a lookout, but by then they were becoming slightly mad themselves. It was July and the weather was hot, they'd very little food left in the house apart from flour and beans, and hardly any fuel to cook with. They were afraid to go out for fear of being stricken by the cholera or attacked by thieves, too frightened to sleep except in snatches – and it seemed these lawless gangs were now set to break in and murder them for the sake of a few sticks of furniture!

They were terrified, you understand – all of them, terrified for their lives. Then – well, something happened, and they realised they had to leave, no matter what.'

For a moment he was quite still and tense. Impatient to hear more, I stared at his profile in the gathering darkness. He was gazing across the harbour, obviously uncertain whether to reveal more. ‘Ma never mentioned this,' he confessed at last, feeling for his cigarette case. ‘One of my uncles told me – he was much younger, and saw it happen.'

Lighting up, drawing deep, Bram released a cloud of pale smoke into the sultry night. ‘A gang of looters tried to break in. It was probably a concerted attempt, with two or three attacking different parts of the house. Anyway, one tried to climb in through the skylight over the front door, and Ma was so terrified, she swung an axe at him and chopped off his hand...

‘I don't know if she meant to, or whether it was just a question of trying to beat him off, but that's what she did. The man's screams were horrific, my uncle said. Before he fell back,' Bram murmured huskily, ‘he just hung there, staring, while his blood spurted all over her face and clothes.'

Stunned into silence, I could only gape at him. He seemed an impossible distance away, beyond the harbour, beyond the present, in a time and place that belonged to neither of us.

Sickened and disturbed, I tried to shut out the image of a man wedged fast and screaming, his arteries gushing. It gave the young Charlotte Stoker a different aspect, one of fierce and ruthless determination. Suddenly, I was less sure of her, and uncertain of her son.

‘Did he die?' I asked faintly.

‘Who – the looter?' Bram stood up. ‘I don't know. Probably, yes – I doubt there'd have been medical attention.'

‘They got away? Your mother's family, I mean.'

‘What? Oh, yes. Grabbed a few things and escaped before daybreak. Had a bad time of it, trying to reach their relatives in Ballina, but yes, they got away...'

He took a step or two away from me, a shadow in the darkness, illumined by the glowing point of his cigarette. I shivered, feeling the gruesomeness of his tale as something real and close, far more so than the collapse of the graveyard, which I'd seen as a young child but knew mainly second-hand.

After a moment, he turned and said, ‘But they were lawless times, Damaris, and I expect things weren't much better here. Frightened people do horrific things.'

I nodded, at once reminded of something else. ‘Here,' I said, ‘they ferried the bodies of cholera victims across the harbour, at night, so they didn't have to carry them through town. But they had to bring them up the Church Stairs, and they're supposed to have buried at least one of them alive.'

‘How was that?' he asked, startled.

I hunched and pulled a face. ‘They said they felt him struggling as they dragged his coffin up the steps, but didn't stop to open it because
he was already nailed down.
Can you believe it?'

‘Yes,' he said quietly, ‘the awful thing is that I can.'

I tried to shrug it off: but the phrase ‘nailed down' conjured up other stories I'd heard, of murderers and malefactors – and suicides too – who were literally nailed to their coffins and the ground by oak or hawthorn stakes.

‘According to Old Uncle Thaddeus,' I said, ‘all those who could not rest easy in their graves – whose souls belonged to the devil rather than the saints – were buried near unmarked crossroads out on the moors. Or buried with a stake through the breast. To stop them breaking free of the grave and
coming again,
to find the living.'

‘Here?' Bram whispered in response, gazing at me with awed and glowing eyes. ‘Malefactors were staked
here
?'

‘So they say. Before our time,' I hastened to assure him, ‘but yes, they were staked. Some had their legs and ankles bound with chains to stop them walking again. Some even had their heads chopped off.'

‘They were
decapitated?
You mean, to stop them rising again – as a ritual, not as punishment?' As I nodded, he grasped my arm quite painfully and asked: ‘When was this, do you know?
How
do you know? Are we talking about living memory, or centuries past?'

But that was a difficult question and his avidity scared me even more than the subject itself. As he paced up and down, alarmingly close to the sheer drop below, I clung to my perch on the edge of the tomb. Nervously, I explained about Old Uncle Thaddeus and his interest in local history and folklore. He'd published several small books and articles, and such facts as I remembered were culled from items I'd heard or read as a child. Clandestinely, of course, since Grandmother disapproved of such macabre tales.