The familiarity of his tone worried her a bit. What delicate work it was, this business of conversing with strangers of the other sex! No wonder she hardly ever attempted it anymore …
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘You know, being an archaeologist and all that.’
‘I’m not actually a fully-fledged archaeologist. Still studying.’
‘Oh? I would’ve thought …’ He caught himself before he could say ‘at your age’ or anything like that, but the implication stabbed straight into Siân – straight into her innermost parts, so to speak. Yes, damn it, she didn’t look like a peachy young thing anymore. What she’d gone through in Bosnia – and since – was written and underlined on her face. “It pleased the Author of our salvation …” Pleased Him to put her body and soul through Hell. In order that her strength might be made perfect in weakness. In order that people she’d only just met would think she was awfully old to be studying for a degree.
‘I would’ve thought archaeology was a hands-on kind of thing,’ he said.
‘So it is. I’m a qualified conservator, actually, specialising in the preservation of paper and parchment. I just fancied a change, thought I should get out more. There’s a nice mixture of people at this dig. Some have been archaeologists for a million years. Some are just kids, getting their first pay-packet.’
‘And then there’s you.’
‘Yes, then there’s me.’
He was staring at her; in fact, both he and his dog were staring at her, and in much the same way, too: eyes wide and sincere, waiting for her to give them the next piece of her.
‘I’m Siân,’ she said, at last.
‘Lovely name. Meaning?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Siân. In Welsh, it means … ?’
She racked her brains for the derivation of her name. ‘I don’t think it means anything much. Jane, I suppose. Just plain Jane.’
‘You’re not plain,’ he spoke up immediately, grateful for the chance to make amends.
To hide her embarrassment, she heaved herself to her feet. ‘Well, it’s nearly time I started work.’ And she steeled herself for the remaining hundred steps.
‘Can I walk with you as far as the church? There’s a run I can do with Hadrian near there, back down to the town …’
‘Sure,’ she said lightly. He mustn’t see her limping. She would do what she could to prevent his attention straying below her waist.
‘So…’ she said, as they set off together, the dog scampering ahead, then scooting back to circle them. ‘Now that your father’s funeral’s over, do you have much more sorting out to do?’
‘It’s finished, really. But I’ve got a research paper to write, for my final year of Medicine. So, I’m using Dad’s house as a kind of … solitary confinement. To get on with it, you know. There’s a lot of distractions in London. Even worse distractions than this fellow …’ And he aimed a slow, playful kick at Hadrian.
‘You’re partaking of a fine Whitby tradition, then,’ said Siân. ‘Think of those monks and nuns sitting in their bare cells, reading and scribing all day.’
He laughed. ‘Oh, I’m sure they got up to a hell of a lot more than that.’
Was this bawdy crack, and the wink that accompanied it, supposed to have any relevance to the two of them, or was it just the usual cynicism that most people had about monastic life? Probably just the usual cynicism, because when they ascended to the point where the turrets of Whitby Abbey were visible, he said: ‘Ah! The lucrative ruins!’ He flung his right arm forward, unfurling his massive hand in a grandiose gesture. ‘See Whitby Abbey and die!’
Siân felt her hackles rise, yet at the same time she was tickled by his theatricality. She’d always detested shy, cringing men.
‘If the Abbey’d had a bit more money over the centuries,’ she retorted, ‘it wouldn’t be ruins.’
‘Oh come on,’ he teased. ‘Ruins are where the real money is, surely? People love it.’ He mimicked an American sightseer posing for his camera-toting wife: ‘“Take a pitcha now, Wilma, of me wid dese here ruins of antiquiddy behind me!”’
Squinting myopically, acting the buffoon, he ought to have looked foolish, but his clowning only served to accentuate how handsome he was. His irreverent grin, and the way he inhabited his body with more grace than his gangly frame ought to allow, were an attractive combination for Siân – a combination she’d been attracted to before, almost fatally. She’d have to be careful with this young man, that’s for sure, if she didn’t want a re-run of … of the Patrick fiasco.
‘Antiquity is exciting,’ she said. ‘It’s good that people are willing to come a long way to see it. They walk up these stone stairs towards that abbey, and they feel they’re literally following in the footsteps of medieval monks and ancient kings. They see those turrets poking up over the headland, and it takes them back eight hundred years …’
‘Ah, but that thing up there isn’t the real Whitby Abbey, is it? It’s a reconstruction: some tourist body’s idea of what a medieval abbey should look like.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Didn’t it all fall down ages ago, and they built it up in completely the wrong shape?’
‘No, that’s not true,’ she insisted, feeling herself tempted to argue heatedly with a complete stranger – something she hadn’t done since Patrick. She ought to dismiss his ignorance with the lofty condescension it deserved, but instead she said, ‘Come up and I’ll show you.’
‘What?’ he said, but she was already quickening her pace. ‘Wait!’
She stumped ahead, leading him past Saint Mary’s churchyard, past the cliffside trail to Caedmon’s Trod – the alternative path back to the town below, along which he’d meant to run with Hadrian. Teeth clenched with effort, she stumped up another flight of steps leading to the abbey.
‘It’s all right, I believe you!’ Magnus protested as he dawdled in her wake, hoping she’d come round, but she led him straight on to the admission gate. He baulked at the doorway, only to see his cheerfully disloyal dog trotting across the threshold.
‘Bastard,’ he muttered as he followed.
Inside, there was a sign warning visitors that all pets must be on a leash, and there was a man at the admissions counter waiting to be handed £1.70. Siân, so used to wandering freely in and out of the abbey grounds that she’d forgotten there was a charge for non-archaeologists, paused to take stock. Mack’s running shorts, whatever else they might contain, clearly had no provision for a wallet.
‘He’s with me,’ she declared, and led the hapless Magnus past the snack foods and pamphlets, through the portal to antiquity. It all happened so fast, Hadrian was dashing across the turf, already half-way to the 12th century, before the English Heritage man could say a word.
Siân stood in the grassy emptiness of what had once been the abbey’s nave. The wind flapped at her skirt. She pointed up at the towering stone arches, stark and skeletal against the sky. The thought of anyone – well, specifically this man at her side – being immune to the primitive grandeur and the tragic devastation of this place, provoked her to a righteous lecture.
‘Those three arches there,’ she said, making sure he was looking where her finger pointed (he was – and so was his dog), ‘those arches are originally from the south wall, yes, and when they were reconstructed in the 1920s, they were propped up against the northern boundary wall, yes. Rather odd, I admit. But it’s all the original masonry, you know. And at least those arches are safe now. We’d love to restore them to their original position, but they’re better off where they are than in a pile of rubble – or don’t you think so?’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry!’ he pleaded facetiously. ‘I didn’t know I was treading on your toes …’
‘I have some books and brochures that explain everything, the whole history,’ she said. ‘You can read those – I’ll give them to you. A nice parcel. Loggerhead’s Yard, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, but no, really,’ h
e grimaced, flushing with embarrassment. ‘I should buy them myself.’
‘Nonsense. You’re welcome to them.’
‘But … but they’re yours. You’ve spent money …’
‘Nonsense, I’ve got what I needed from them; they’re not doing me any good now.’ Seeing him squirm, she was secretly enjoying her modest subversion of 21st-century capitalism, her feeble imitation of the noble Benedictine principle of common ownership. ‘Besides, I can smell cynicism on you, Mr Magnus. I’d like to get rid of that, if I can.’
He laughed uneasily, and lifted one elbow to call attention to his sweat-soaked armpits.
‘Are you sure it’s not the smell of B.O.?’
‘Quite sure,’ she said, noting that two of her colleagues were, at last, straggling into view. ‘Now, I think it’s about time I started work. It was lovely to meet you. And Hadrian, of course.’
She shook his hand, and allowed herself one more ruffle of the dog’s mane. Nonplussed, Magnus backed away.
A few seconds later, when she was already far away from him, he called after her:
‘Happy digging!’
That night, Siân fell asleep with unusual ease. Instead of spending hours looking at the cast-iron fireplace and the wooden clothes rack growing gradually more distinct in the moonlight, she slept in profound darkness.
I’m sleeping, she thought as she slept. How divine.
‘Oh, flesh of my flesh,’ whispered a voice in her ear. ‘Forgive me …’ And the cold, slightly serrated edge of a large knife pressed into her windpipe. With a yelp, she leapt into wakefulness, but not before the flesh of her throat had yawned open and released a welter of blood.
Upright in bed, she clutched her neck, to keep her life clamped safely inside. The skin was unbroken, a little damp with perspiration. She let go, groaning irritably.
It wasn’t even morning: it was pitch-dark, and the seagulls were silent – still fast asleep, wherever it is that seagulls sleep. Siân peered at her watch, but it was the old-fashioned kind (she didn’t like digital watches) and she couldn’t see a thing.
Ten minutes later she was dressed and ready for going out. Packed in a shoulder bag were the books and pamphlets for Magnus: ‘Saint Hilda and her Abbey at Whitby’, A History of Whitby, the Pitkin guide to ‘Life in a Monastery’, and several others. She slung the bag behind her hip and shrugged experimentally to confirm it stayed put; she didn’t want it swinging forward and tripping her up. Getting your neck slashed in a dream was one thing; breaking your neck while trying to get down a steep flight of stairs in the dead of night was quite another.
In the event, she managed without any problem, and was soon standing in the cold breeze of the White Horse and Griffin’s side lane, cobbles underfoot. The town was so quiet she could hear her own breathing, and Church Street was closed to traffic in any case, yet still she ventured forward from the alley very, very carefully – a legacy of her accident in Bosnia. Even in a pedestrianised cul-de-sac in a small Yorkshire town at four in the morning, you never knew what might come ripping around the corner.
In the dark, Whitby looked strange to Siân – neither modern nor medieval, which were the only two ways she was accustomed to perceiving it. In the daylight hours, she was either working in the shadow of the abbey ruins, coaxing the remains of stunted Northumbrians out of the antique clay, or she was weaving through crowds of shoppers and tourists, that vulgar throng of pilgrims with mobile phones clutched to their cheeks or pop groups advertised on their chests. Now, in the unpeopled stillness of night, Whitby looked, to Siân, distinctly Victorian. She didn’t know why – the buildings and streets were much older than that, mostly. But it wasn’t a matter of architecture; it was a matter of atmosphere. The glow of the streetlamps could almost be gaslight; the obscure buildings and darkened doorways scowled with menace, like a movie backdrop for yet another version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Any alleyway, it seemed to Siân, could disgorge at any moment the caped figure of the Count, or a somnambulistic young woman of unnatural pallor, her white nightgown stained with blood.
Gothic. That’s what the word ‘Gothic’ meant to most people nowadays. Nothing to do with the original Germanic tribe, or even the pre-Renaissance architectural style. The realities of history had been swept aside by Hollywood vampires and narcissistic rock singers with too much mascara on. And here she was, as big a sucker as anyone: walking down Church Street at four in the morning, imagining the whole town to be crawling with Victorianesque undead. Even the Funtasia joke shop, which during the day sold plastic vampire fangs and whoopee cushions, seemed at this godforsaken hour to be a genuinely creepy establishment, the sort of place inside which rats and madmen might be lurking.
The house in Loggerhead’s Yard was easy to find; when she’d asked about it in the hotel, half a dozen people jostled to give her directions. Magnus’s father had been well known in the town and all the locals took a keen interest whenever a death freed up a hunk of prime real estate. Only when Siân approached the front door did she have her first doubts about what she’d come here to do. An action which, in daylight with people strolling round about, would look like a casual errand, seemed anything but casual now – the eerie stillness and the ill-lit, empty streets made her feel as if she were up to no good. She could be a thief, a cat burglar, a rapist, tiptoeing so as not to wake the virtuously sleeping world, squinting at a slit in a stranger’s door, preparing to slide a foreign object through it. What if the door should open suddenly, to reveal Magnus, still naked and warm from his bed, rubbing his eyes? Or what about the dog? Surely he would go berserk at the sound of her fumblings at the mail slot! Siân steeled her nerves for an explosion of barking as she fed the books and pamphlets, one by one, through the dark vent, but they dropped softly onto the floor within, and that was all. Hadrian was either uninspired by the challenges of being a guard dog, or asleep. Asleep on the bed of his master, perhaps. Two muscular males nestled side by side, different species but both devilishly handsome.
For goodness’ sake, she sighed to herself, turning away. When will you grow up?
Bag empty and weightless on her shoulder, she hurried back to the hotel.
Siân had never been fond of weekends. They were all very well for people with hobbies or a frustrated desire to luxuriate in bed, but she would rather be working. Half the reason she’d switched from paper conservation to archaeology was that it required her to show up, no matter what, at the appointed hour, and dig. It wasn’t easy, especially in raw weather, but it was better than wasting the whole day thinking about the past – her own past, that is.
Saint Benedict had the right idea: a community of monastics keeping to a strict ritual seven days a week, helping each other get out of bed with (as he put it) ‘gentle encouragement, on account of the excuses to which the sleepy are addicted’. Siân knew all about those.
To prevent herself moping, she spent most of her weekends wandering around Whitby, back and forth across the swing bridge, from pier to pier, from cliff to cliff. She’d walk until she tired herself out, and then lie on her bed in the Mary Ann Hepworth room with a book on her lap, watching the roof-tops change colour, until it was time for her to go to sleep and get what was coming to her.
This week, Saturday passed more quickly than usual. Her early-morning excursion to the house in Loggerhead’s Yard had been quite thrilling in its stealthy way, and afterwards she fell into a long, mercifully dreamless doze. She woke quite rested, with only three-quarters of the weekend left to endure.
In the afternoon, while she had a bite of lunch at the Whitby Mission and Seafarer’s Centre, a gusty breeze flapped the yellowing squares of paper pinned to the notice-board near the door. ‘Don’t leave Fido out in the cold,’ said one fluttering page. ‘We have a separate coffee lounge where pets are always welcome.’ Siân left the ruins of her jacket potato consolidating on her plate and walked over to the opposite lounge to have a peek inside. Her nose nudged through a veil of cigarette smoke. Strange dogs with stran
ge owners looked up at the newcomer.
On her way out of the Mission, Siân paused at the book-case offering books for 50p each, and rummaged through the thrillers, romances and anthologies of local writers’ circles. There was a cheap, mass-produced New Testament there, too. What a come-down since the days when a Bible was a unique and priceless object, inscribed on vellum from an entire flock of sheep! Siân closed her eyes, imagined a cloister honeycombed in sunlight, with a long rank of desks and tonsured heads, perfect silence except for the faint scratching of pen-nibs.
‘Now here’s a blast from the past!’ brayed the disc jockey on the radio. ‘Hands up anyone who bopped along to Culture Club when they had this hit – come on,’ fess up!’
Siân fled.
Early on Sunday morning, not long after getting her throat slit, Siân was out and about again, her hastily-washed hair steaming. She couldn’t be bothered blow-drying it, and besides, now was when she ought to be going – at exactly the same time as she’d set off for work on Friday. If Magnus and Hadrian were creatures of habit, this would send them running after her any minute now.
She walked along Church Street, quite slowly, from the hotel façade to the foot of the hundred and ninety-nine steps and back again – twice – but no chance meeting occurred.
Tantalised by the thought of the man and his dog running high up on the East Cliff, in the wild grasses flanking the abbey ramparts, she climbed Caedmon’s Trod until she could see the Donkey Field. No chance meeting occurred here, either, at least not with Magnus and Hadrian. Instead, she met a bored-looking boy and his somewhat frazzled dad, returning from what had clearly been a less than inspirational visit to the abbey.
‘Another really interesting thing that monasteries used to do,’ the father was saying, in a pathetic, last-ditch attempt to get the child excited, ‘was give sanctuary to murderers.’
Siân saw a flicker of interest in the kid’s eyes as she squeezed past him on the narrow monks’ trod.
‘Has Whitby got McDonalds,’ he asked his dad, ‘or only fish and chips?’