Page 17 of The Start of the Story
So it came as something of a surprise to arrive back at Mill Cottage and find him firmly in residence, in the kitchen. There was a pleasing smell of garlic in the air, the back door was wide open and the pool of light that spilled out to illuminate the approach was studded with hopeful ducks.
‘Ah, there you are, now.’ He whirled around from the hob with a wooden spoon in his hand and a tea towel around his waist. ‘I hope you don’t mind but I made dinner.’
I wanted to ask how he dared take such a liberty, but I was hungry, and the food smelled good and the kitchen was warm and well lit in comparison to the bleak dark beyond.
‘What is it?’ I asked cautiously, hanging up my coat.
‘A recipe of my granny’s. There’s pork and garlic and – well, you’ll find out. You’re all right with those things?’
It really did smell nice and I found I was smiling. ‘I’ll eat anything someone else cooks,’ I said.
Connor looked at me, his head tipped slightly to one side and the steam from something boiling making his hair frizz. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Because I’ve no idea what it tastes like.’
‘It smells edible.’ So, he wasn’t hung-over to hell, he wasn’t moping drearily around whilst swallowing paracetamol and slumping in corners. ‘How was your evening yesterday? You could have come back; you wouldn’t disturb me.’
‘We got to talking history – they are all Cavaliers in the local Sealed Knot brigade, they do reconstructions of Civil War battles and things. So, we spent most of the evening playing “my army’s bigger than your army” and drinking beer. It was great. By then I was over in York, and it was late and a taxi would be expensive so I slept on a sofa.’ He turned back to the stove and stirred something that bubbled. ‘Not entirely altruistic on my part.’
He served up the food and we sat in the kitchen and ate, without much chat. I didn’t really want to talk anyway; I’d used up all my words during the day and he seemed to be similarly sunk in thought.
‘How did the drone go?’ I asked eventually, after we’d cleared our plates in silence.
He shrugged. ‘There’s some interesting indications. The crop marks I saw online last year weren’t visible, of course, but there are walls that could be the remains of buildings over a broad area that could have been a trading post.’
‘Not a town, then.’
He shrugged again. ‘We’ve got roads going up over the moors, we’ve got forts, but we’ve not got anywhere that people could have been living. The army would be in the forts, but what about the families? The followers and the workers?’ Now he shook his head. ‘A previously unknown Roman settlement, now that would really make Mam proud.’
‘You’re doing all this to please your family?’ I looked at him over the table. This was the first sign I’d seen of any kind of personal vulnerability.
‘Four brothers, one in the Church.’ Connor gave me a smile. ‘It takes a fair bit to rise to the top of that pile.’
Then, as though he felt he’d said too much, he got up and began clattering plates into the sink and scraping saucepans, leaving me feeling as though I had been prying into secret places. ‘Thank you for dinner,’ I said, sounding stiff and obligated. ‘It was very nice.’
‘No problem. You can wash up though.’
‘Of course.’ Then I felt awkward that I hadn’t offered straight away. ‘Absolutely.’ I got up and went to the sink.
‘Oh, and I got this.’ Connor went into the living room and came back with the cardboard parcel that I’d seen him take yesterday from the van driver. ‘I thought it might be useful.’
‘What is it?’
He slit the card that wrapped the large rectangle, and pulled out more packing material. ‘It’s a new frame. For your map.’
I froze. My arms were up to the elbows in sudsy water, cutlery was chiming and clinking off the crockery as it floated to the bottom and, for a second, it was the only sound in the room. ‘What.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘You’re right, it’s a useful resource, that map. I’d never have heard of Evercey Manor if it weren’t for that, and the Civil War history guys had some interesting stories to tell about that place. D’you know that it stayed Catholic? Apparently the family that owned it had some dirt on Henry, or possibly Elizabeth, and they carried on being Catholic pretty much underground, throughout the Reformation.’
The frame slid out of the bundled packing material. It was modern pine with protruding metal staples, a thin poor replacement for the heavy original framing that had encased my map before. No weight to it at all.
‘And I think it might well be necessary to lift your stone,’ Connor continued, as though everything he was doing were perfectly normal. ‘We won’t do any harm, we’ll lift and photograph, maybe a TLS scan of the surface so we can recreate?—’
‘You are not lifting that stone.’ I pulled my arms back out of the water, feeling angry that I’d allowed myself to be lulled by his cooking, his seeming to care. ‘You can’t.’
‘We could replace it with an identical stone,’ he carried on, sounding as though this were perfectly reasonable. ‘No one need even know it wasn’t the original. But we’d only need to do that if the stone has some detailing on that needs preserving. Come on, even you must know how important it is to make sure that we guard against the stone’s weathering into illegibility, if it gives us any clues as to what was going on out there.’
‘No,’ I said again, my voice as tight as a straitjacket. Tiny domestic bubbles of froth spilled further up my arms until my sleeves were wet. ‘You can’t.’
Here it was. Everything that separated folklore from history. Everything that showed that I stood for the people; the lost and the voiceless out on those moors, wandering in their stories, whilst he stood for the surgical, factual demand for answers.
