And the sun in her head turned suddenly black and she shuddered, head to foot.
‘No! ‘ Andy cried aloud, tears coming.
This was when the great roar went up.
IV
Once, just after dawn, the sun had come down for Annie Davies.
This phenomenon occurred early in the last century, on Midsummer’s Day, which happened to be her birthday.
It also took place on High Knoll.
Which was fair enough, as far as Marcus was concerned. Which actually, in fact, made perfect bloody sense.
However, what was upsetting was this: had it occurred almost anywhere else around the village, Annie Davies might, by now, have been some kind of saint. And the village a little Lourdes.
This was how Marcus Bacton saw it, anyway. Hoping, as he stepped out of the castle ruins and set off across the meadow, that the Knoll had a little inspiration to spare for him. That simply being there, in the energy of dawn, might somehow resolve the pressing question of what to do about Mrs Willis, his housekeeper, his best friend, his doctor.
Who, possibly, was dying.
Who might, in the end, require the nursing home she’d always sworn she’d never enter.
But who, if it came to it, he’d carry to the bloody Knoll.
It had taken Marcus years to piece together the story of young Annie Davies and the midsummer vision. Interesting, the way the village’s collective memory had filed it away under Don’t Quite Recall.
Bastards.
‘Come on then.’ Marcus walked more quickly, afraid the sun was going to beat him to the top. Getting on for seven a.m., and there was already a blush on the hill where the mist was thinning.
‘Come on. ‘
About twenty yards away, Malcolm, the brindle and white bull terrier cross, raised his bucket head briefly and went back to whatever dead and rotting item he was sniffing. A couple of sheep watched him uneasily.
‘All right, you bastard. Get your balls blown off, see if I care.’
Problem being that the Williams boy, who leased the grazing from the Jenkins brothers, could get difficult about dogs upsetting his flock. Even Malcolm, who despised sheep even more than he despised Marcus.
Eventually, the dog grudgingly ambled over and down they went, through the meadow and up the pitch towards the Knoll, until the already reddening field lay below them like a slice of toast tossed from the mountain.
And Marcus looked down, as he always did, and tried to see it as it must have looked to Annie Davies.
Wouldn’t be able to, of course, because he was now sixty, and Annie had been thirteen — by just a few hours — on the morning of her vision, in a world still recovering from the Great War.
The unheralded marriage of Tommy Davies, a farmer well advanced in years, to the local schoolmistress, Edna Cadwallader, must have provided a year’s worth of gossip for the drama-starved inhabitants of St Mary’s.
Annie was Tommy and Edna’s only child. Born ‘prematurely’, as they used to say in those days.
Amy Jenkins (related only by marriage to the Jenkins brothers, owners of the meadow, the Knoll and another hundred acres), who kept the oldest village pub, had told Marcus that her own mother used to say it was ‘a bit of a funny family’. As schoolmistress, Edna had considered herself Village Intellectual. She was a parish councillor, too, and would spend most nights at one meeting or another, putting the community to rights. And so Annie had grown up closer to her aged father.
Marcus often imagined — as if it had really happened this way — a strange, still atmosphere on the night before the vision — Annie brewing a pot of strong tea for her dad and the two of them taking a mug each and wandering companionably down to Great Meadow, watching the hayfield turn almost white in the deep blue dusk.
Thirteen, is it now? The cooling mug must have looked like a thimble in Tommy Davies’s huge, bark-brown hands. Big age, that is, girl. Sure to be.
Annie’s father probably didn’t talk a great deal. He would have been as old as most of the other village children’s grandfathers. So when he made a pronouncement it would be charged, for Annie, with a glowing significance, like the words of an Old Testament prophet.
Thirteen. Marcus saw her grinning up at Tommy Davies, laying her mug on the grass and, with a rush of coltish energy, clambering over the wooden gate and dashing off down the track dividing Great Meadow, with the first breath of the night billowing her cotton frock almost over her head. The beginning of the parting, and Tommy too old and experienced not to accept it.
Perhaps the image of Annie had become inseparable now, for Marcus, with the last picture of his own daughter, Sally, who had died of leukaemia within months of her own thirteenth birthday. Perhaps this, in truth, was what had made him so determined to get Castle Farm: the feeling that something of Sally was here, too. That if he’d known about the vision when she was dying he would have brought her here. To the natural shrine which the Church had denied.
Soon, what seemed like all of south Herefordshire was at Marcus’s feet, the crimson line of dawn drawn tight over the misty, wooded hills, cleft only by the stocky church tower of St Mary’s.
The church was built on the site of a Celtic hermit’s cell. It was probably older than the woods and the fields. For Marcus, the hills around the Golden Valley hid the lushest, richest, least-spoiled countryside in all of southern Britain. The villages had altered hardly at all, and St Mary’s was probably not so very different from when Annie was here. In those days, it might even still have been known by its original Welsh name Llanfair-y-fynydd: St Mary’s in the Mountains.
The village itself, viewed from above, seemed almost circular, in its nest of wooded slopes. From the churchyard, you could look up and see the long, dark ridge of the mountains, but the eye would always be drawn back towards a single promontory which seemed to punch the sky like a dark, gauntleted fist.
High Knoll. Or Black Knoll, as it was called in the village and now, to Marcus’s disgust, even on the maps. When you got there, it wasn’t so stark, although the grass was brown and rough around the stones.
The burial chamber on the Knoll was far older than the church and even older than the Celtic hermit’s cell. Annie Davies would have been told (by her mother, at the village school) that it was where heathen folk once came to worship the sun. Ignorant people who thought the sun was a god.
Perhaps Annie had been dismayed. Perhaps, whenever she’d tried to imagine God, she, like Marcus, had thought at once of the sun, the brightest light in the sky. Wondering if that made her a heathen?
Perhaps, as she walked up to the big, broken table of stones, she’d decided that the prehistoric people couldn’t have been so very ignorant if they could find such a perfect place to greet the day. And anyway, Jesus hadn’t been born then, so how were they to know about the true God? They were worshipping the brightest light they knew; what was so wrong about that?
Tommy Davies, who wasn’t well educated but was doubtless very wise, might have told her that the people who built the monument were his ancestors, the first farmers here. And that having the bits of old stones up there somehow kept the land in good heart.
The burial chamber had been partially collapsed for centuries. It was unlikely that even Annie would have been able to get inside. Perhaps, that morning, she had clambered on top of the chamber, the huge capstone, and turned to watch the daily miracle of the sun trickling out of the horizon. And lifted her face to the sky.
Was that when it had happened?
About a hundred yards from the Knoll, along the steepening track of stones and baked red mud, Marcus had his first tantalizing glimpse of the top of the capstone.