The Whispering Knights (Mrs. Bradley) Read online

“Oh, I’ve been into English pubs often enough even since I was sixteen.”

  “On your own?”

  “No fun on your own. Half-a-dozen of us used to go in the dinner-hour. We took some girls in once, but not again.”

  “Why not? Did they get sloshed?”

  “We didn’t buy them enough for that. The trouble was that they only drank shorts.”

  “Sherry?”

  “No fear! Gin, and doubles at that. They had us skinned by the time we came out.”

  “Couldn’t you have got sacked?”

  “Not for the drinks. Some of the fellows were eighteeen, anyway. I think there might have been trouble about the girls, though. They were from the woollen mill and pretty hot stuff. But, look here, don’t you go trying anything on!”

  “I don’t like girls.”

  “Time will remedy that. Anyway, I meant the beer when you’re under age, not the girls. You stick to boxing and football.”

  “What do you bet I get my Blue in my first year?”

  “Don’t worry. You won’t.”

  “Do you think beer puts muscle on a man?”

  “No, only superflous fat.”

  “Rugger players drink gallons of beer.”

  “Yes, but they sweat it off when they’re playing.”

  In the morning, under Henry’s directions, the party took it in turn to count the Rollright Stones and great was Capella’s satisfaction when no two tallies agreed. “My stones are magic,” she said. “Great is Capella of the magic stones! Vega, come with me. I want to register a vow, and if you make a vow you need a witness.”

  “What vow are you going to make?”

  “A lovely pagan vow. Come on! I have to make it to the King Stone. I shall kneel down, and you must kneel down, too, otherwise he won’t listen and the vow won’t be any good.”

  “Don’t be silly. You can’t make a vow to a stone. Where is the King Stone, anyway?”

  “You have to go outside the entrance of the circle. The woman said so when she took Daddy’s money for us to come in. You walk along the lane and there’s a stile and the King Stone is on top of a little hill.”

  “I’m not going to bother. Get Arc or Den to go with you. You’d better not be trotting off alone. You know how you go dreaming on and get yourself lost.”

  “It’s only a little way and you can tell them where I am if they ask. Perhaps it will be better without a witness, then it will be just between him and me.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  Capella ignored this opinion, which she had heard before, left the stone circle, and walked along the lane. The slope uphill from the stile was fairly steep and when she reached the King Stone she stood and breathed the cool upland air for a moment before she fell on her knees in front of the railings which enclosed the ugly but impressive lump of badly weathered, seemingly pock-marked oolite.

  “You are my mystic, magic king,” she said, reaching forward through the railings. “I am your vassal and you are my liege lord. For you I will see Long Compton in your name, and King of England you shall be in the great hereafter, and thereto I, Capella, pledge thee my troth and the Whispering Traitors shall look upon death.

  ‘When Long Compton I shall see,

  King of England thou shalt be,

  So rise up stick, and wake up, stone,

  For I, Capella, I alone,

  Will change these stones to men, I ween,

  And eldern tree shall be thy queen.’ ”

  She rose to her feet, bowed three times to the King Stone, and, proud of her extemporised parody on the original rhyme, she returned to the stile and then went on along the lane. There was more to be done before she returned to the stone circle of the King’s Men. Her father had told her that the legends had been created by people who had no idea of the origin or purpose of the stone circle, but to Capella the legends were the facts. The stories which had grown up around the stone circle about the King’s Men awaiting the word to advance upon Long Compton but never receiving it because of a witchcraft curse, the desolate, disappointed King and the treachery of the five whispering Knights were a matter of historical truth, so far as she was concerned. It was for her, Capella, whose star was aligned on the Rollright Stones, to swear allegiance to the thwarted and frustrated king. Having done that, the traitor knights must be faced. She walked on until she found the path alongside a field of barley. Then she came to the portal dolmen called the Whispering Knights. She put out her tongue at the stones which were huddled together behind another protective railing.

  “You plotters and traitors!” she said. “Someone shall die for this! You may be fenced round, but you are not safe from the vengeance which is to come.”

  The three upright and two fallen stones appeared unmoved by this threat, but as she made her way back to the stone circle of the King’s Men, the wind whispered in the barley and she wondered whether the Knights were pursuing her with these whisperings or were discussing among themselves what she had said.

  “I shouldn’t think those stones would roll very far, whether they rolled right or wrong,” said Deneb, when the family were returning to the caravan for lunch before setting out on the next stage of their journey.

  “Nothing to do with rolling,” said his father. “The name has been bowdlerised to something which can be pronounced by the illiterate. Rollright comes from the Anglo-Saxon, most likely, and, according to my book, simply means the property of a nobleman called Hrolla.”

  “The King was not called Hrolla,” said Capella.

  “No, he would not be called by a Saxon name,” said her father. “He lived, if he lived at all, much longer ago than that. The stones are a prehistoric monument.”

  When they went to bed that night, Capella boasted to her sister of the vow she had made.

  “You shouldn’t have uttered blasphemy or used your own name,” said Vega. “That circle is a temple. Didn’t you know? They probably offered human sacrifices there.”

  “I wasn’t inside the circle and I know about the sacrifices. There would be blood. They had to have lots and lots of blood. They collected it in sort of primitive bowls and splashed it all over themselves, rejoicing in the warmth and the stickiness. Then their gods gave them all the beauty and strength and courage the dead person had had. My King came later than that. I’m sure he was good and kind.”

  Vega was not impressed. She said, “I wish I was beautiful, but my nose is too big.”

  “Miss Weston says a big nose denotes character. Wellington had a big nose. Do you think that’s why he defeated Napoleon?” asked Capella.

  Vega aired a grievance. “Now I am sixteen I could go and visit boys in other caravans as often as I like and Dad wouldn’t be able to stop me because I am over the age of consent,” she said angrily. “We were only going to play records, but he stopped me.”

  After the Rollright Stones the rest of the tour was disappointing. The Hurlers, in spite of their name, gave no suggestion of previous energetic action, but turned out to be called Hurlers because of a local superstition that they were men changed to stone because they had desecrated the Sabbath by playing their favourite game on a Sunday. Moreover, the site was in a depressing area of abandoned mine-workings and industrial squalor and consisted of three circles close together, which mustered twenty-two recumbent stones and only seventeen upright ones.

  It proved useless for Henry to point out the importance of the site. Its surroundings and the number of fallen stones rendered it uninteresting to his wife and children, and he felt obliged to walk his party a couple of extra miles to look at Trethevy Quoit, a most spectacular closed megalithic burial chamber nine feet high, with three of its four uprights still supporting its capstone. It was not on his itinerary, but the family reported that the structure was satisfyingly grand, majestic and mysterious, so he felt happier when they had seen it.

  “Were there any bones inside?” asked Deneb. His father said that he did not know, but that there were two more stone circles on his list. Mi
riam wondered whether it was necessary to visit both of them.

  “Arc is willing, after all, to share the Hurlers with Vega,” she said, “so I think we could cut out Nant Tawr and concentrate on the Druids’ Circle for Den, don’t you? The Druids’ Circle! I love the name, although, as I said before, I doubt whether the Druids come into the picture. They would have been later, wouldn’t they?”

  “Oh, the circles were altered, added to, partially destroyed—this, that and the other—as the ages passed. My book calls the two circles at Nant Tawr 'unobtrusive,’ so I hardly think they would impress the children. It was a great mistake to introduce them first to the Rollrights,” said Henry. “I see that now.”

  “What we all want to visit is Caernarvon Castle,” said Miriam. “It would be a pity to miss it, don’t you think, as we shall be in Wales anyway?”

  So Caernarvon Castle was put on the agenda and proved, greatly to Henry’s disappointment, to be the high spot of the holiday.

  When they were home again and, except for Arcturus, who had gone up for his first term at Oxford, life had returned to normal, Henry involved himself in the question of how man, through the ages, had experimented with the measurement of time. He made a study of clocks and watches both antique and modern, theorised about the right time, true time, solar time, sidereal time (this almost brought him back to stone circles), Greenwich Mean time, standard time, and local time.

  He studied marine chronometers, the pendulum, water-clocks, sundials, scratch-dials, hour-glasses, egg-timers, light-signals, lighthouse flashes, ships’ sirens, minute-guns, and parking-meters. It was all enjoyable and most absorbing, and his interest in stone circles may be said to have died a timely death.

  There was one of his children who did not forget them, though. Capella often thought of her vow and planned that when she was older she would visit her King again. She remembered, also, her threat to the Whispering Knights.

  She was, and remained, an imaginative child and in ways to which she confessed later she was the victim of adolescent stresses and strains which, as is often the case, seemed more mental than physical. It was her mind and her emotions which posed the problems, for physically there could hardly have been a healthier, more vigorous, or less illness-prone youngster.

  However, when she grew older and the strains of adolescence were a thing of the past, it seemed as though her father’s absorption in the measurement of time had coloured her dreams.

  She became convinced, as time went on, that there was no such thing as Time; that what had happened, what was happening, and what was to happen were all, as it were, on one plane. She saw this plane as a huge sheet of paper on which the various dates, instead of appearing vertically as a historical time-chart, were horizontal and given no centuries, no guide-lines, no digits, no B.C. or A.D., but were mingled, mixed, revolving, and, in a sense, as meaningless as a kaleidoscope.

  Her dream-images were as fantastic as those of her waking mind, and yet they were very much clearer and always made a commonsense and comprehensible picture, unchaotic and inevitable. There was a recurring theme: every picture appeared to be confined inside a rectangle, and what it portrayed was bound to come true. These were the dreams that she recollected most vividly when she woke up in the morning. Sometimes the rectangle was merely a matter of four lines; sometimes it had depth and appeared in the form of a hole in the ground; at other times it had height and was enclosed by four thin slabs of stone, as was the hole in the ground; sometimes it was of indeterminate shape, hardly rectangular at all.

  The dreams were sometimes frightening, but they faded when she began to have adolescent love affairs, and they disappeared altogether when she went to College.

  CHAPTER 2

  LONG MEG AND HER DAUGHTERS

  “E’en such is Time, that takes in trust

  Our youth, our joys and all we have,

  And pays us with but earth and dust.”

  Sir Walter Raleigh

  Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley turned the gaze of a benevolent serpent upon her secretary. Laura Gavin was at her usual task of sorting out the morning’s post.

  “Looks a pretty run-of-the-mill lot today,” Laura remarked, as she finished making four small piles of envelopes, “unless one whose flap is adorned with a college coat-of-arms, addressed to you and marked Personal turns out to be of any interest. I expect it’s only to ask you to give a lecture or award a prize or adjudicate for something or other.”

  “Pray open it and let me know the worst. I thought, though, that the universities were already on Long Vacation.”

  “Perhaps it’s an invitation to a garden party or a conference, then.” Laura slit open the envelope and read its contents. “Oh, no. It’s an invitation all right, but not to a Faculty jamboree exactly. It’s signed by somebody called Q.X. Owen and he wants to know whether we—I am included and even named—would care to join a party of archaeologists who are going to spend about a fortnight studying stone circles in the north-west of England and the islands of Arran and the Outer Hebrides. We pay our own expenses and use our own car, it seems, but this Owen will make all the hotel bookings and, generally speaking, stage-manage the trip.”

  Dame Beatrice put down an empty coffee-cup and took the letter. When she had glanced through it she said, “He gives a telephone number. Ring up the college and ask for more details.”

  “Yes, we don’t accept any blind dates,” said Laura. “I don’t know why, but I distrust the letter X.”

  “Dear me! Were you poor at algebra? Besides, what of St. Francis Xavier?”

  “Also the initial Q,” went on Laura, ignoring what she recognised as flippancy. “It makes me think of spy stories, a form of literature I can’t do with.”

  “Such prejudice distresses me. What of Leonard Q. Rossiter, the inspired creator of Hyman Kaplan?”

  “It wasn’t his real name. I’ll go and phone, shall I?”

  She returned to report that Q.X. Owen was a professor—“the porter didn’t say of what”—that he was not in residence during the Long Vacation, but that all correspondence would be re-directed to his home in Exeter.

  “The Q.X. rings a bell,” said Dame Beatrice, “and Owen was his first name when I gave a lecture at his college. His surname then was Le Mans. I wonder why he changed it?”

  “The answer’s a lemon,” said Laura.

  “Well,” said Dame Beatrice, “there is nothing on hand at the moment that our London clinic cannot deal with. Do you wish to inspect the lithographs of our forefathers?”

  “Lithographs? I thought those were pictures.”

  “Many of the prehistoric stones are engraved with chevron-shaped incisions, circles, spirals, maze-cuttings, and cup-marks, all of which must have had mystic significance and would have been of ritual religious origin.”

  “Let’s go. I’m always prepared to broaden my mind. I wonder what the rest of the party will be like? Only ten of us, he says. The last of the sites he mentions, after we’ve dropped two of the lot in Inverness, is Callanish on Lewis. I’d love to go there.”

  Capella, who had the promise of a temporary tutoring post towards the end of August, borrowed the money from her father and set off for Exeter on the appointed day to have lunch with her fellow-enthusiasts. She had realised, from the wording of the professor’s reply to her letter of application, that the party would be a small one, but she was somewhat surprised to find that, including herself, only six people were present at the inaugural lunch.

  Telephone conversations had informed her that none of her college friends was to be of the party, although two said that they had applied and had been told that the required number of places had been filled. When she arrived, the members were already assembled and were having cocktails in the bar. The leader, Professor Owen, was wearing a white rose in his buttonhole as he had promised, so she went over to him and introduced herself. He was a handsome man whose white hair gave the lie to his otherwise youthful appearance. He introduced the
others, beginning with an oddly beautiful, daunting woman of about thirty whose reception of the introduction of her disdainful self as “my cousin Catherine, who, among other things, writes novels,” was an unnerving glare and a suspicious and unfriendly, “How d’you do?” Then Owen took Capella round the rest of the circle.

  There was a youngish couple who were presented under the names of Lionel and Clarissa Smith. They turned out to own one of the two cars which were to take the party northwards. They appeared to be amiable, although not very interesting, she thought, and obviously were absorbed only in one another. Clarissa giggled when Capella was introduced, and said that everybody thought of that lovely little light opera, but Lionel and Clarissa was how they had been christened and there was nothing they could do about it. When she and Lionel had first met, she informed Capella, they had decided that this was Fate, so there was nothing to be done about that, either. They simply had to like one another.

  The only other member of the party in the bar was a man named Stewart, who did not look more than twenty years old. Capella put him down as an undergraduate and took him for one of Owen’s students. He told her that he was “completely red-brick educated” and had “only come along for the ride.” That brought the party up to six, but after lunch two more members appeared. One was a small elderly lady with a reptilian smile not calculated to put anybody at ease, who was introduced as Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley. Her companion, a tall, goodlooking woman whose name was Mrs. Laura Gavin, shook hands firmly and asked whether this was all the ship’s company. Capella then heard Owen say to the elderly lady,

  “I see that you were chauffeur-driven, Dame Beatrice. Is the driver your own man?”

  “Yes, indeed,” Dame Beatrice answered. “George by name, but not a farmer by nature or inclination.”

  “Oh, dear! I am afraid no accommodation has been booked for him, and we are moving off tomorrow morning as soon as the Sisters get here,” said Owen.

  This, for Capella, disposed of one mystery. There were now eight people present and her letter of acceptance had mentioned a possible ten. If two sisters were expected (she wondered whose sisters they were, not, of course, being able to detect the capital letter in Owen’s voice), they would make up the numbers and account for the three cars. Dame Beatrice went on to explain to Owen that her chauffeur would be returning home by train and that Mrs. Gavin, “who is looking forward so much to Arran and Lewis,” would be driving their car during the tour.