Page 3 of The Start of the Story
Connor O’Keefe bit his lip again and rolled up the sleeves of his jumper, as though he were preparing to go into the boxing ring. Although, given the symmetrical perfection of his face, I doubted he’d ever been closer to boxing than the day after Christmas. ‘“Fairy Stane”? What’s that about?’
I leaned forward across the desk, putting my elbows on the crease that concealed Pickering and Thornton le Dale.
‘There’s a legend around the name,’ I began conversationally, slightly encouraged by the tinge of nervousness in his voice. ‘“Stane” is dialect for “stone”. It’s the Fairy Stone, and the legend is that underneath it is the door to fairyland. If the stone is moved, the Little People will escape and wreak havoc in the world.’
There was a momentary silence and then he burst out laughing. ‘Oh, come on, now! You’re not after believing any of that, are you?’
I didn’t smile. Instead I just sat, arms still outstretched almost protectively over the location of the stone on his map, and waited. Then I said, in my calmest, steadiest voice, ‘It’s not a question of belief. It’s a question of lore. Our local folklore says that that stone must not be moved.’ Then I pulled my arms back and dragged the map back into a rough approximation of the shape it had been when he’d brought it out. It was as close as I dared come to saying ‘so there’. Historians and folklorists might be at loggerheads, but that was no reason to degenerate into playground talk.
Connor sat silent for a moment. I was holding the scrunched-up map out towards him, but he didn’t take it. He chewed his lip again and seemed to be inwardly considering several options, one of which appeared to be poking me in the eye. I kept the silence. I absolutely was not going to apologise or explain.
This wasmyterritory, and that wasmystone.
Eventually Chess broke our impasse by bursting in again, this time bearing three mugs of coffee. ‘Here we go,’ she trilled, oblivious to the atmosphere.
Connor stood up, swept his coat from the back of the chair and shoved the map back into his pocket, all in one move. ‘Sorry,’ he said to Chess, passing her on the only piece of floorlarge enough to accommodate two standing people. ‘I’ve got to run. Next time, eh?’
Then he winked at her, glowered briefly at me over his shoulder, and left.
I resisted, with the greatest difficulty, the urge to throw my mug at the closed door.
2
I still, after all this time, called out ‘I’m back!’ as I arrived home. And, as ever, the reply was nothing but a swirl of disturbed dust in the narrow hallway, a resettling of the silence more comfortably to include me. Outside, the water of the old mill race-petered past, reduced to shallows now by undergrowth and lack of dredging, the silty build-up housing weed and the overgrown banks providing cover for a variety of birds, the names of which I had never really bothered to learn.
It was home. An old mill cottage, all that was left now of a small settlement where a ford crossed the little river, and where generations had ground their grain. The mill itself was long gone, lost to fire and years, leaving nothing but a few burned bricks to be turned up in my garden every now and then, and an outline against my riverside wall, to mark where it had once stood.
I’d…we’dbought it ten years ago. Derelict, damp and unloved. We’d carefully restored it, with hours of research and study, to as close to its seventeenth-century origins as was compatible with twenty-first-century living. Now – now it was just me. My home. I felt a slight touch of guilt for the things Iwas leaving undone around it. There was a patch above the back door where we’d never quite got to grips with the water coming in, and peeling paint in the back bedroom. All things I should be getting fixed. The money I had wasn’t infinite and I needed to stretch it for living expenses so I’d pushed some of the lesser tasks down the list until now they were beginning to become greater tasks, which niggled at the back of my mind when I let them. One day. I’d find the money and the energy – one day.
I kicked off my shoes, collected the slump of junk mail from underneath the letter box, and shuffled my feet into sheepskin slippers to walk through to the living room, sorting the mail as I went.
‘Rubbish, rubbish, an invitation to view a residential care home – bloody cheek, I’m only thirty-five – Specsavers, local free leaflet, advert for takeaway. Why does nobody write letters any more?’
I addressed the empty air. Outside somewhere, ducks fought a quacky battle. I felt the silence and the lack of presence again and turned the TV on to provide a background for me to resonate my anger off.
Bloody historians! I punched a cushion into a more acceptable shape and sat down. Why couldn’t they accept that sometimes you had to take local folk stories for what they were, an oral tradition that dated back – well, so far I’d been able to trace some tales right back to the late eighteenth century. Stories simply didn’t need anyone poking and prodding and trying to prove this and that.
My phone rang. The display told me it was Chess, so I ignored it. She had a tendency to watch TV and need to unload at whomever was available and I really didnotwant a thriller plotline explained to me when I lived alone, out here miles from anywhere, in the dark.
The isolation of the cottage suited me now. People were kept at a distance and I could face them when I had had chance to gird my metaphorical loins. I couldn’t cope with the noise and chat and general detritus of humanity any more. It scratched at my nerves and made me feel like over-chewed gum – stretched and thin and lacking purpose other than just Being There. Here, the silence soothed me. It was my acquired backdrop and I had learned to love it and rely on it, as the thing I deserved.
Over on the wall above the inglenook fireplace, which took up far more space than was sensible in the little living room, was my map. It was browned with age and creased with use, and it had been framed and hung where I could see it, to remind me that this was my patch. Restless, I got up, went over and traced the lines:1857, the date reminded me.Malton and Pickering area.Not quite my patch, the map went from the outskirts of York and up to the edge of Middlesborough while my area extended from Durham down almost as far as the Midlands, but this bit, covered by the tea-ring-speckled, damp-crinkled map, was where I was based and where I worked. Next to the map was a very old photograph of the mill and cottage, taken when the mill had been working and the cottage had been lived in by the miller and his family. Here they were all lined up outside the cottage, bearded old man, pinafored wife and six children ranging in size from almost-adult to small girl barefoot and clutching a rag doll.
Six children. I looked up again at the beams over my head. The cottage had two bedrooms, three when the family lived here, as one had been turned into a bathroom when we’d renovated. It must have been noisy back then. Now it was almost silent, apart from the trickling of water and the ducks. From a lively family home, children, dogs and the kerchunk of the grinding wheels in the mill, to my quiet little retreat, full of carefully sourced vintage furniture. Once the place had been full of stories. Bedtime stories for the children to soothe them to sleep. Tales ofwarning and adventure from the miller, who had fought in the Crimean war in his youth. Stories of the local ghosts, goblins and fairies from his wife, told to her by her mother, passing down the generations like a thread that linked them to the area. The folk tales that brought me here and kept me, knitted into the web of words as tightly as if I’d been born here.
Now, just me. But I was making sure those stories stayed alive. Interviewing those still remaining about the tales and traditions of their childhoods, and those of their parents and grandparents. Getting it all recorded, before it was too late. That reminded me, I still had some typing up to do. I’d been interrupted by the visit of Professor Connor O’Keefe and hadn’t finished getting my notes straight. I switched on the computer.ProfessorO’Keefe, indeed. He’d only introduced himself with his title to put me on edge, of course, to flaunt in my face that he ranked slightly higher than I did, as if it would make any difference.
I got my recorder out of my bag and set it on the desk, plugged in my headphones but didn’t start typing. I was too irritated. That smooth Irish charm accompanied by the kind of face that’s used to getting what it wants and a smile that is positive that every female is going to buckle at the knees before it. I hadn’t missed the fact that his jumper had very likely been cashmere, and his coat had been wool and expensive. I hadn’t examined his trousers, but I would take any bets that they had understated stitching and a designer label and his bloody shoes were probably handmade by elves or something.
I screwed in my headphones so tightly that I nearly burst an eardrum and switched on my recorder with enough force to slide it halfway across the desk.
Bloody historians.
3
The next morning, instinct told me to drive up to the Fairy Stane. I had the feeling that Professor O’Keefe might decide not to wait for approval and might lift the stone to evidence his own research. There was no way I could trust a smile as open and honest as his and I was right. When I drove up onto the high moor, there were Land Rovers and cars parked in the lay-by and the almost invisible path that led out onto the moor, and the stone had been trodden free from undergrowth.
I left my car and followed the trail of bruised bracken and irritated wildlife until I arrived at a collection of students, milling around uncertainly as though a fire alarm had gone off and they’d evacuated the building but had no idea what to do next.
