Chapter Fourteen
"I can see the sea! Angus - Angus - I can see the sea!"
I bounced in my car seat and pointed at the slice of blue ocean I could just make out in distance. Angus made a ‘shushing’ gesture with his hand.
I sat back, abashed. We'd been driving for hours and I was cramped and stiff and thirsty but somehow, the first glimpse of the sea had taken all my discomfort away. I craned my neck to see if I could see the other car behind us.
"I can't see Jessica."
"They'll catch us up. Stop worrying about it."
I pressed my nose up against the window. All about the road was glorious, rolling countryside, above us a wide blue cloudless sky. I wondered whether Jessica had seen the sea yet too.
The two stone cottages were nestled into the green curves of a gentle valley, side by side and facing the distant sea. The village itself was tiny, a mere strip of a main street with a pub, a tiny corner-shop and a church. Next to our cottages stood one of the four farms in the area and as we drew up, I could smell the heady reek of cow dung and hay.
"Is this ours?" I asked, wide-eyed.
Angus was busy lifting our bags from the boot of the car. I stood for a moment on the driveway, staring at the flat grey front of the house. Its windows glittered in the sun as if it were winking at me.
I heard the crunching of gravel and turned to see the McGaskills’ car draw up behind ours. The wheels had scarcely come to a stop when the back door opened and Jessica tumbled out.
"We're here," she shouted as she picked herself up off the gravel and brushed off her palms.
"So I can see," said Angus.
I pulled at Jessica's arm. I was wild to explore; the house, the garden, the farmyard beyond. I climbed the narrow stairs inside our cottage and into the two bedrooms. The one at the back of the house would be mine, I decided. It had a small wooden bed and a battered old chest of drawers, a small flower-shaped rug on the floor and a brown-shaded bedside light with a pottery base. That was all, except for the yellow curtains at the single window. I struggled with the sash window and managed to shove it upwards, leaning out to look at the cottage that stood beside ours. To my delight, I saw Jessica poke her head out from the nearest window. She was waving and giggling.
"I'm next to you!"
I reached out - we could almost touch our fingers together.
"Can you hear me if I knock on the wall?" I tried but there was nothing - the stone walls were too thick.
Jessica pouted. "Shame - we could have had a secret signal."
I was too happy to really mind. "Meet me downstairs, I want to explore."
We didn't go far that first day. We didn't go to the Men-an-Tol, I'm certain of that. There were too many interesting things closer to home. The cows in the field that came lumbering over to us as we stood by the fence, holding out hopeful handfuls of grass. The ginger farm cat that came twining round our ankles as we stood on the driveway, debating whether to go further. The remains of an old stone shed at the bottom of the garden. By the time we were called in to a late supper, we were drooping, exhausted by the long journey and the excitement of endless discovery.
After supper, the others went next door to their place. I was sent up to bed and submitted without protest, almost too tired to walk up the stairs. As I lay in my new little bed, my last conscious thought was of Jessica, lying near me, just feet away in the soft summer dark.
*
It was Jessica who first found the stones. As usual, she was the one who explored further and faster than anyone else, walking while I lazed about near the cottage. One morning, I wandered down to the river after breakfast. I was sitting dangling my fingers in the rippling water when she came panting up, eyes bright and hair flying.
"You'll never guess what I've found," she said, throwing herself down.
"What?"
She flicked water at me, giggling. "You've got to guess."
"You're a pain," I said, flicking water back at her.
"You're a pain. Go on, you've got to guess."
I rolled my eyes. "Alright. I guess that you've found... a dead badger."
She snorted laughter. "No. Even better. A magic stone."
I stopped flicking water. "What?"
Jessica smiled in triumph. "A magic stone. A sort of stone circle, up on the hill. It's probably been there for millions of years."
"Let's go and see it!"
"Wait." Jessica caught my arm as I prepared to gallop away. "We have to tell them we're going. Mummy told me off for going walking on my own yesterday."
It was about a twenty minute walk to the stone, a hard slog up a stony track that became almost vertical at one point. We slithered over loose flints in our summer sandals and rested halfway up, leaning against a rock warm from the sun.
"This had better be worth it," I said, panting.
I'd like to say that the place gave me a cold chill when first I saw it. That I had a premonition, an inkling of what was to come. It didn't. Instead, the emotion I was aware of on my first sight of the Men-an-Tol was delight. We stood looking in silence at the stone. Through the hole, I could see blue sky and, as I watched, a solitary crow flapped its slow dark way across.
“If you walk round here,” said Jessica, demonstrating. “This stone lines up with the hole. Go on, do it.”
“It does!” I said, amazed.
We stayed there for hours that first day, watching the stone shadows creep across the grass with the movement of the sun. The stone with a hole was furred with moss and lichen, one side warm beneath our palms, the shadow side damp and cool.
From the start, this holed stone fascinated us. We didn’t know its name then – we just called it the magic stone. We were standing before it that afternoon, watching the clouds blow across the space in the middle, and I put my hand out to reach through the hole.
"Don't!" Jessica cried.
I nearly shrieked. "Why? What's wrong?"
"Don't reach through the hole. You don't know what powers it has. Your hand might disappear... or when you pull it back, you might just have bones."
She had that look I knew well; half mischievous, half earnest. I knew that at least a small part of her actually believed it.
That was when we started to believe the legend. Jessica's words planted a little seed and day by day, our homespun tale began to grow. Soon the stone would become all-consuming to us - a grey monolith of myth and legend. We would draw it and photograph it and talk about it endlessly. But that first day, we just wandered about, circling the Men-an-Tol and its companion stone, and watched their shadows move like long black fingers over the whispering grass.
Chapter Fifteen
Most days, Jessica and I would wander up to the stones. We were fascinated by the ever shifting view through the centre of the Men-an-Tol. We'd stand, one on each side, and look at each other through the hole. As our tales and fantasies grew, there was always the small fear that one day I would look through at Jessica and she wouldn't be there. Some days we walked down to the tiny beach to swim and, from the little crescent of pale golden sand, we could stand and look back at the hill and see the faint grey smudges that were the two standing stones.