Page 61 of The Start of the Story
I shivered. His tone was soft, but there was a kind of dark import behind the words, as though there really were a route to hell under this stone. ‘I…’
‘What else do priests do?’ Still quiet, still low, but spoken with suchweight.‘They baptise.’
And suddenly everything came together, with an almost audible click. Eamonn stood up, and he was holding brown and twisted stems that I could now see weren’t stems at all, and my stomach dropped.
‘Do you know what acillínis, Rowan?’ Eamonn asked and he sounded as gentle as Connor. ‘You’ll need your Irish folklore for this one.’
The name rang a vague bell, but as I’d concentrated on the folklore of northern England and my knowledge of Irish was sketchy, I had to admit defeat. I shook my head.
Connor sighed, but it didn’t sound like a sigh of annoyance, more of sadness. ‘Literally, it means “little church”,’ he said. ‘We’ve a number of them all over across the water there. I’ve never seen one in England before, that’s why I didn’t know what I was looking at for a long time.’
He turned me by my shoulder until we were looking out across the moors. ‘The house that was out there. The manor. TheCatholichouse.’ Then he turned me around until we were facing more or less the direction of my cottage. ‘The village associated with the manor. Full of Catholics, displaced from Ireland in the mid eighteen hundreds.’ Then he turned me again, just a degree or two, until we could see the spire of the local church, only the tip and the weathervane prodding the sky from the town three miles further down the valley. ‘The church. Not Catholic, but it illustrates the point.’
Eamonn joined in now, sitting carefully on the edge of the stone, nursing those brown tangled things in his lap. ‘Back in the day, if you died without the holy sacrament of baptism, you were deemed to remain eternally in limbo and the Church, in its wisdom, wouldn’t allow a proper burial.’
They both went quiet, and I looked out across the broad landscape of the hills, patchy with melting snowdrifts and the re-emergence of the skeins of heather and grassy stretches. A sheep baa rose through the stone-cold air and there was a distant noise of something mechanical working, but otherwise silence. My mouth had gone dry, and I couldn’t have said a single word if Connor had gone down on one knee and proposed right then.
He didn’t, of course, it was far too soon for that. But he did enfold me in the drapery of his big coat, firm and warm against me. ‘When a baby was stillborn, or died before they could get the holy water to their heads, the men of the settlement would carry them out to a well-marked local site and bury them with all the ceremony they could manage,’ he said. His voice echoedinside my head. ‘They tried to do the right thing, even though the Church denied them.’
Again, that silence. That blank hole in the world as I tried to comprehend the incomprehensible.
‘They weren’t allowed to bury their babies?’ I whispered.
‘Not in consecrated ground, no. They weren’t members of the Church until baptism, you see.’
‘That’s horrible.’
I saw Eamonn drop his head. Then I realised what those bundled root-like things were, and I sprang away from Connor and stared at the Fairy Stane. ‘They buried theirbabiesunder the stone?’
‘With reverence, Rowan,’ Connor said. ‘With love. They will have said prayers and made a little ceremony of it. They didn’t just dig a hole and hide them away. And the stone was here, when they wanted to come and pay their respects, it was here. The graves were marked in the only way they could. The Church…’ and he glared at his brother as though the whole thing were his fault, ‘…might have denied them, but their parents did what they could.’
‘The little people.’ I half whispered the words over the blockage in my throat. ‘It was a literal thing. I never thought…’
‘No. Nobody did. I don’t think we’ve seen acillínoutside Ireland, have we?’ Connor stopped eyeballing Eamonn. ‘I’d guess they brought the idea over with them when they escaped the Great Famine. Usually the babies were buried at night, in churchyards where those who oversee such things turned a blind eye. But with this being so isolated and the church so far to travel over bad ground back then…’
‘It’s not great ground to travel even now,’ I put in, feeling a little more robust. ‘See how we got snowed in last week.’
‘Exactly. And, what, a hundred and fifty years ago, how much worse would it have been? So they did what they could. They made their own safe, sacred place.’
‘And you knew? All this time, youknew?’ I rounded on Connor.
‘No. I began to suspect, what with you and your folk tales of the Stane, which started to sound more and more like a metaphor, and with me knowing about thecillínfrom Granda and his stories – well. I put two and two together. Then I found…’ He trailed off. ‘I knew I was right.’
We all looked at the tiny fragments in Eamonn’s lap. He was nursing them as though the children were still here, still alive.
‘So it’s not a Roman grave marker, and it never was?’
Now Connor grinned, his usual, relaxed smile. The worst was clearly over. ‘It still could be, y’know? But I’ll not be for lifting it. It’s a sacred place. We’ll look for official protection for the site. I’m notquitesure how, but Eamonn is well up on these sorts of things.’
‘Not in England, I’m not,’ Eamonn replied. ‘But I know a man.’
‘God?’ I asked.
‘Well, he’s a professor of Irish studies, so, you’re close.’ Now Eamonn grinned at me too, and the resemblance between the brothers was incredible. ‘He’ll know how to deal with all this. In the meantime…’ He pulled a small bottle out of a jacket pocket.
I was baffled. ‘We all have a drink?’
‘It’s holy water, Rowan,’ Connor said, carefully. Eamonn had gone pale. ‘Eamonn will perform a service of baptism for the babies. The baptism they never got.’
