‘That’s another thing, look. When I was a boy, the fields all around here would flood regular, and the ditches couldn’t hold it and the lanes would be impassable. Now we got the bypass linking us to the main Leominster road — a lifeline.’
He paused, spread his arms wide.
‘It was growth done that for us. Everything we got now we owe to steady growth. That stops, people, we’re in trouble.’
The rain was driving at the windows now, pools swelling on the sills where the putty had rotted away. Pierce clenched his fists, brought them both down at once like mallets on the table.
‘And that’s why we must not throw out the wrong signals by opposing the development of Coleman’s Meadow. Why we can’t afford to listen to the ramblings of cranks from Off. They don’t care if you got nowhere to collect your pension, send off a parcel, get your prescription signed and dispensed when the village is snowbound. They don’t give a toss if this village lives or dies. They only care about what’s already dead. Dead and buried.’
‘I don’t normally want to kill people,’ Lol said to Merrily, ‘as you know.’
5
Serpent
The sunrise sprayed out from behind Cole Hill like a firework, with shivering shards of orange and gold. Jane was standing in the gateway with her bare arms raised, and she looked free and sexy as hell, like her hands were cupping the sun.
An instant of connection.
Probably her all-time favourite picture of herself. Eirion had taken it on his digital SLR, on that last September weekend, the day before he’d left for university. For a long time it had been her screensaver, until she’d realised it was only making her sad.
Now it was stashed in the Sacred folder on the laptop, along with the membership list of the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society. Jane didn’t know why she’d brought it out tonight, unless it was as a kind of prayer to God or the Goddess or whatever unimaginable force might be represented by the bursting of the light over the holy hill.
Long ago, the way to watch the Cole Hill sunrise would have been between the standing stones in Coleman’s Meadow. The stones toppled and buried centuries ago by some pious or fearful farmer but which next year could be back, ancient silhouettes against the red dawn in awesome testament to the sacred status of this place. A ritual reconnecting of the hidden wires. This was what she’d written in an essay. And like, to be here when that came about. Oh God… If it came about. If they could prevent Lyndon bastard Pierce fixing it so that future dawns would be rising instead over the fake-slate on the roofs of ranks of crappy, post-modern, flat-pack luxury executive homes.
That wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t. With a few thousand members now, worldwide, the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society was a powerful lobby.
OK, maybe not powerful exactly; councils were rarely influenced by people whose strategies involved subtle threats on the lines of If we cannot stop it by any other means, we are prepared to invoke the Site Guardian. But the word was spreading.
Jane had built up the fire in the vicarage parlour. She was sitting on the sofa with Ethel, a mug of chocolate and the laptop on the coffee table, listening to an accelerating wind driving the rain into the 17th-century timbers. At least you could rely on Mum not to take any shit from Pierce tonight. Mum finally understood.
In fact, things were good with Mum right now, had been for a while. Spiritual differences, if not exactly resolved, were acknowledged as being not insurmountable. You couldn’t, after all, operate as a vicar for very long around here without becoming at least half pagan.
Anyway, no open confrontation any more. These days Jane was kind of wincing at the memory of herself a couple of years ago, doing her cobbled-together ritual to the Lady Moon in the vicarage garden. A little girl, back then. A virgin. Pre-Eirion.
Abruptly, she killed the picture and switched off the laptop. Ethel had nosed under her arm and onto her knee, lay there purring, and Jane stroked her slowly, staring into the reddening log fire.
She picked up the mobile, almost cracked and called Eirion in Cardiff, then pulled herself together and tried Neil Cooper again. Thinking she’d leave a message on his machine so that both he and his wife would know that she definitely wasn’t—
‘Cooper.’
‘Oh—’
‘Jane,’ he said, and if she was honest she’d have to admit he didn’t sound over-excited.
‘Sorry, I thought I’d get the machine. Coops, listen, I’m not stalking you or anything. You gave me your home number, in case anything came up?’
‘And what’s come up, Jane?’
‘Erm… well, like… nothing. I mean, that’s the point. Nothing’s happening. It’s all stopped. Why’s it all stopped, Coops?’
She felt stupid, but he must surely understand how important this was to her. She was carrying the blazing torch lit by Lucy Devenish, folklorist of this parish, now dead, and if she let it go out…
‘Weather’s not helping, obviously,’ Neil Cooper said.
‘You’ve got those tent things you can put over the trenches.’
‘Yeah, but it’s not satisfactory. And there’s no desperate hurry, is there? And anyway, I keep telling you, it’s not my—’
‘There is for me, Coops, I’ll be back at school in the New Year.’
‘Jane, they can’t time the whole project to fit your personal schedule.’
‘I just want— Don’t want to interfere or anything, I just want to be there. On the fringe, quiet as a mouse. Just like want to be there when the stones are raised again.’
‘Well, yeah,’ he said. ‘I can understand that.’
There was something Neil Cooper wasn’t telling her. Or maybe he was just pissed off because the dig had been taken out of the hands of the county archaeology department: too big, too important, needed specialists in prehistory.
‘And let’s not forget,’ Jane said, ‘that if it wasn’t for me you might never’ve discovered it in the first place. I mean, I don’t like to keep throwing this at y—’
‘Jane—’
‘Sorry.’
‘None of us will miss anything, OK? It’ll be on TV. All the best bits, anyway.’
‘Huh?’
His voice had sounded damp and sick in a way that didn’t make sense. ‘What would you expect,’ he said, ‘with Blore in the driving seat?’
‘Sorry…’ Jane was on the edge of the sofa. ‘Did you say—what did you say?’
Coops said nothing.
‘Did you say Blore? As in, like, Bill Blore, of Trench One?’
‘I’d hate to think there was another one out there,’ Coops said.
‘Holy shit,’ Jane said.
‘Look, don’t get—’
‘But like, I thought the contract had gone to this… Dore Valley Archaeology?’
He was silent again.
‘Come on, Coops, who am I going to tell?’
‘Dore Valley Archaeology,’ Coops said, ‘no longer exists as an independent contractor. In mid-October it was acquired by Blore’s company, Capstone.’
‘Wow. I didn’t know that. I mean, I didn’t know he had a company.’
‘They all do. Archaeology’s a business. Like everything else. And Capstone have swallowed Dore Valley. More people, more resources, more prestige digs, plus TV documentaries on the side. Blore’s got it sewn up, money at both ends.’