She came down the steps and took my hand, eyeing me sharply before deciding that the gold ring I wore indicated that I was no rival for the good Captain's bantering affections.
I realised I was neither dressed nor wearing sufficient make-up to present myself as a Bright Young Thing out for a day's lark, so instead I merely asked Mrs Ross where I might find a cup of tea.
She told me that the kettle was on, and although I demurred, I did not demur all that much. She and I went inside, leaving Javitz to his gathering crowd of would-be customers.
The tea was supplemented by thick slices of a chewy, slightly sweet soda bread slathered with fresh-churned butter, and my stomach, after a moment's hesitation, woke to the aroma and savour. I ate three slabs, and only stopped there because the boy appeared at the door, panting slightly but beaming with excitement.
“May I have a ride in the Captain's aeroplane?” he begged.
“Certainly not,” she replied. “But if you wash your hands, you can have your tea. Will you two be stopping the night in Kirkwall?” she asked me as I rose and picked up my coat.
“We may, especially if the wind gets worse,” I said. “In any event, I think I'll take a turn through the town. I've never been in Orkney before.”
“If you do get caught here and have trouble finding rooms, let me know,” she said, showing me to the door. “It's the height of the season, and rooms were tight even before the hotel at the Stones burned down.”
I turned. “Do you mean at Stenness?”
“That's the one.”
“When did this happen?”
“Two days past? No, I'm a liar, it was on Tuesday, so three days. Booked to the rafters with anglers, it was, and everything a smoky mess. The owner was a day in hospital, they're staying with his wife's family in St Mary's for at least a fortnight.”
“But the place didn't actually burn down?”
“Not down, no, just left a terrible stinking mess. They boarded over the windows and everyone's moved into town until the floors dry and the roof is patched.”
“I see. Well, I certainly shan't plan on staying there,” I told her with a smile, and set off towards Kirkwall, deep in thought. If Brothers and the child boarded a steamer in Aberdeen on Tuesday, how could he be in place to set a fire by the evening? But it could not be coincidence-no, he had help on Orkney, the same assistant who'd scattered cock's blood in the cathedral whose spire I could see rising ahead of me.
As Mrs Ross had said, it being August, the facilities for tourist entertainment were laid on in strength. Shops sold knitted wear or cheese made from local cows, tea houses posted banners advertising their authentic Orcadian cakes, and coaches waited to transport visitors to the sites of Orkney.
One of these caught my ear, an enterprising coach driver trying to turn the waning day into a bonus rather than a disadvantage. “See the Ring of Brodgar in the rich light of evening, when the sun throws shadows far across the loch,” he was calling in a stentorian voice.
One glance at the sky drew his thrown shadows into question, but in fact, an evening trip was precisely what I required. An added benefit was the handful of tourists he had already attracted, three earnest Dutch couples and an adolescent belonging to one of them. I gave the man my coin, took my seat, and we were soon away.
The benefits of concealment in numbers had been suggested by my first look at the Ordnance Survey map, and was the reason I had carried a pair of field glasses in my bag all the way. As we approached, with our driver cheerfully shouting over his shoulder all sorts of misinformation about Vikings, Celts, and Druids, it became ever more apparent that my only options for concealment in daylight were to hide in plain sight among a group, or to dig a hole in the turf and pull it over my head.
From the hills down, the land was bare as an egg.
I could see at a glance why this remote site had been marked as holy by the early Orcadians. It was a between-place: neither sea nor land, neither Britain nor Europe, a stretch of solid ground between two wide lochs, one salt, the other fresh. For four thousand years, the residents had built temples in this low and brooding marshland, from the giant stone ring that capped a rise at one end of the causeway separating the lochs to the smaller but more dramatic circle nearer the road. Christianity, too, had a toehold, with a small church and cemetery laying claim to its ground in the midst of burial mounds and standing stones.
Even modern-day religion was represented, in the person of devoted anglers, scattered along the shores of the lochs.
The driver-guide pulled his coach over to a wide place near the smaller stone circle, whose dark granite slabs resembled shards of broken window-pane dropped by the gods, and informed us that these were the Stones of Stenness. On a low hill to the north-west, across the causeway, rode the Ring of Brodgar (where, he did not tell us but my telegram had informed me, cremated remains had been recently scattered). To the north-east, beyond the church, was the pregnant belly-mound of Maeshowe, where a slaughtered sheep had been found on the May full moon.
The Dutch contingent were kept occupied translating and commenting upon what the guide had to say about the artefacts we walked past: first the Stones of Stenness, then a couple of pencil-thin pillars jabbed into the ground, and the now-destroyed Odin Stone (which had been one of those venerable objects that inspire courting couples, entertain amateur antiquarians, and infuriate the farmer on whose land they lie-hence this stone's demolition). We crossed the causeway, passing farm buildings and more standing stones, until the ground began to rise, revealing the size of the lochs on either side. Ahead of us lay the wide, low Ring of Brodgar.
I left the others to their misinformed lecture and circumnavigated the ring on my own, feeling the press of ground beneath me. Many of the stones were fallen or missing entirely; those that remained were cracked and uneven; nonetheless, the original Ring had been perfectly round. Perhaps that was why, despite its wear, it retained the feel of a precise mechanism, a circle tightly calibrated to enclose and concentrate any worship carried out on this barren and wind-swept hillock. It reminded me of an ancient brass-work device in a museum, whose function remained unimpaired by the surface ravages of time.
Standing in the centre, I looked down to see traces of ash among the grass.
From the Ring's heather-grown perimeter, which had once been ditched and banked to form a henge, I studied the countryside. Water stretched out before me and at my back; to my right, the peninsula between the lochs was littered with standing stones, brochs, and earthen mounds. To my left, peninsula narrowed into causeway before joining the road; on one side were the Stones of Stenness and Maeshowe; on the other lay the burnt-out anglers' hotel. A brief spill of sun showed boards across its windows.
The Dutch were being led away by the guide, tempted after his conversational carrots that seemed to link Vikings and Druids-although I might have been mistaken, I was not listening very closely. I dawdled among the stones, allowing the others to pull ahead, before following them down the causeway towards the Stones of Stenness.
Perhaps it was the approaching dusk coupled with the racing clouds and biting wind. Perhaps it was the knowledge that, somewhere near, a man with a knife waited to loose blood on the earth. In any event, I was aware of an atmosphere here such as I had seldom felt before: not at Stonehenge, a gloomy and isolated huddle of stones, nor even Avebury-what metaphysical authority it once possessed had long since been overbuilt by barns and homely cottages. This place held another kind of aura entirely: One could feel it brooding.
The Stenness stones had been a henge as well, although this site's ditch and bank were more elliptical than the Ring, and what had once been a stone circle was little more than a collection of slabs. They were tall, one of them nearing twenty feet, and unbelievably thin-it seemed impossible that they had stood here for millennia without snapping off in the wind. One of them jutted out of the ground at an angle, then turned sharply back on itself, like a directional arrow for giants.