Praise for

THE BEAUTY

‘A murky delirium of sinuous language and unnerving storytelling that will delight both experienced genre fanatics and literary fiction lovers alike.’

Kirkus Reviews

‘A surreal and disquieting post-apocalyptic consideration of the roles we place ourselves in.’

Barnes and Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog

‘Elegantly chilling, utterly heartbreaking horror.’

M. R. Carey, author of The Girl With All the Gifts

‘I was provoked, shocked, disgusted, touched and, ultimately, I emerged feeling wiser. A brilliant, haunting original.’

Den of Geek

‘A truly great piece of speculative fiction. Order it into your local library. Shove it under your English Literature teacher’s nose.’

Geek Syndicate

‘Some of the boldest, most transgressive ideas in modern storytelling.’

Stephanie Saulter, author of the Evolution trilogy

‘A useful conversation starter in a genre that could stand to engage with gender and queerness more.’

Strange Horizons

‘Intellectual and visceral, frightening and thoughtful, an adventure and a meditation.’

Interzone

‘The brilliant gender-bending, post-apocalyptic horror fable the world needs right now. This book messed me up, in the best way possible.’

Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts

‘This is a book that I devoured and loved. Aliya Whiteley is an author to watch.’

Shoreline of Infinity

‘This book should win stuff. Seriously, just read it. Original work is being done. Here’s proof.’

Nina Allan, author of The Race

‘A stunning feast of originality… It's speculative fiction at its utmost best and most imaginative.’

Rising Shadow

‘What a refreshing gust of tiny spores this book explodes into, and I inhaled them all with glee.’

Adam Nevill, author of The Ritual

‘Startling and original, daring and considered. The language flows beautifully, a celebration as well as an exploration of the art of storytelling.’

The Literary Tree

‘Engaging and thought-provoking science-fiction.’

Sabotage Reviews

‘Whiteley’s elegant, dreamlike prose masterfully frames the most slippery of issues.’

We Love This Book

‘Impressed me enormously with its blend of body-horror, fantasy, magical realism, and deeply unnerving atmosphere.’

Fantasy Book Critic

Also by Aliya Whiteley

The Loosening Skin

Skein Island

Greensmith

Skyward Inn

Three Eight One

ALIYA
WHITELEY

THE
BEAUTY

TENTH ANNIVERSARY
EDITION

Tenth anniversary edition published 2024 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford OX2 0ES, UK

The Beauty first published in 2014 by Unsung Stories

The Arrival of Missives first published in 2016 by Unsung Stories

www.solarisbooks.com

ISBN: 978-1-83786-206-1

The Beauty copyright © 2014 Aliya Whiteley

The Arrival of Missives copyright © 2016 Aliya Whiteley

The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to any real persons, alive or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.

eBook production
by Oxford eBooks Ltd.
www.oxford-ebooks.com

INTRODUCTION

M. R. Carey

Science fiction has a long and honourable tradition both of predicting social and technological developments long before they happen and of dramatising the crises and moral conundrums to which they may lead. Aliya Whiteley’s early and understated masterpiece, The Beauty, exists very much in that tradition—and as with many such prescient works its most radical implications have become more apparent over time.

The Beauty takes place in the wake of a catastrophe that has pushed global civilisation off a precipice. Details are sparse because the narrator, Nate, takes our familiarity with the underlying facts for granted. Some time in the recent past, recent enough to be a terrifying memory for many of the characters we meet, a fungal plague has wiped out half the human race—the half without a Y chromosome. Those who remain are forced to confront the inevitability of extinction: with nobody to give birth to the next generation, they will be the last humans.

In a remote valley, a number of these traumatised survivors have come together to form a community. Some are local, others have drifted in from outside as the wider world slides into chaos and despair. Their society is not hierarchical but some of its members have roles that are assigned, or at least accepted. Ben is the doctor, William the unofficial leader. Nate is the community storyteller, and in keeping with that role he is the narrator here.

It’s a task he takes very seriously, and it has to be said that The Beauty is about stories as much as it is about sex and gender. Even before the story starts, Nate is very well aware that his role is not to be a keeper of truth but to tell the stories that the community needs to hear, the stories that will offer them an acceptable definition of themselves. When he talks about the dead women he glosses over their human faults and dwells on their beauty and their virtues. “I can remember this is not how they were… and yet I mythologise them.” This is partly because he has a solid instinct for what his listeners want and need, and partly because his stories are edited and mediated for public consumption. William as leader decrees what stories can and can’t be told. And then when William is deposed, his problematic successor is even more uncompromising and explicit in tailoring Nate’s stories into a means of social control.

Nate isn’t blind to the dangers of this process. He knows better than anyone that a story can usurp reality and take its place—that in offering the other men these interpretations of their past and present, he is also prescribing and laying out pathways for their future. His instincts are compassionate and kind, violence of any kind appals him, but he’s not naïve enough to believe that good intentions always lead to good outcomes. “What kind of flower would his talent produce? Where do stories lead? The answers he imagined scared him.”

Nate’s other role in the narrative is as the harbinger of change. It’s Nate who first encounters in the depths of the forest a new life form, and it’s Nate who names it: the Beauty. The Beauty are fungal growths that spring from the decomposing bodies of the community’s dead women. They take their form from the dead women. They seem to incorporate fragments of the dead women’s bodies. And crucially, terrifyingly, they step into the dead women’s roles. The Beauty want to couple with the men of the valley. And the men of the valley, lonely and traumatised as they are, repulsed and attracted in equal measure, overwhelmingly conflicted, succumb.

This union marks the end of the world as they know it and the beginning of a new order. Sex with the Beauty changes everything, pressing hard on the stress points of this fragile collective until it starts to crack. The Beauty are—for want of a better word—resolutely monogamous. Each chooses a single partner and bonds with him, seemingly for life. These intense one-on-one relationships loosen the existing web of social relationships that holds the community together. As some men accept and embrace the Beauty while others resist and reject, tension mounts and violence impends.

It’s Nathan’s task as storyteller to ground the tension and head off the violence by incorporating this new reality into the valley men’s sense of themselves. He needs to give them a new collective identity that they can all embrace, because otherwise the community will fragment and be destroyed. When he tells the story of the Beauty’s arrival, he casts it as a salvation, the return of hope and joy to a world from which those things seemed to have departed forever. “The Beauty were small at first but they grew, and they took all the best qualities of the dead. They sucked up through the soil all the softness, serenity, hope and happiness of womankind. They made themselves into a new form, a new birth.”

Even in the name he chooses for the newcomers Nate is trying to impose a meaning on them. In reality he finds their appearance—woman-shaped but yellow, spongiform, faceless—much more frightening than attractive. The first time he sees one, his reaction is one of visceral disgust. “I am sick on myself. I soil myself.” To call them the Beauty is first of all a defensive strategy, then a statement of faith and finally a manifesto. It’s the opening salvo in Nate’s campaign to make the men of the valley accept this new reality and make it part of their own ongoing narrative. “There will be beauty. The word can be reclaimed.”

But the gap between the story and the reality is evident from the start. The arrival of the Beauty has overtones of rape rather than courtship, as the fungal beings “encircle” and “enclose” their unsuspecting partners, and though Nate hopes that the men’s terror and confusion will give way to “an acceptance as deep and wide and thankful as my own,” this proves to be overly optimistic. As the full implications of communion with the Beauty gradually become apparent, the valley men break into opposed factions who lash out both at the Beauty and at each other.

The Beauty’s embrace brings change on every level. In Nate’s words, it is a beginning that entails “the death of the old way.” Some of the most profound changes are to the sexual morphology of the men who have accepted that embrace, and while those men accept what is happening to them (albeit with some fear and some reservations), the gathering crisis goes far beyond their individual choices. To the men in the opposite camp, those who have held back as far as they could from the Beauty’s aggressive advances, their lifestyle is unacceptable and their transformed bodies are an abomination.

Back in 2014 when The Beauty was first published, the debate around trans rights was neither as loud nor as concentratedly toxic as it has since become, but sociologists had for decades explored gender as a thing that is both culturally constructed and intrinsic to our sense of ourselves as individuals. And of course bodily autonomy has been at the very core of feminist theory since its inception. All these ideas are at play in The Beauty. It’s a story that positions itself squarely on the fault line between personal and social definitions of gender and sexuality, between the meanings we make for ourselves and those that are handed down to us or imposed on us. Within its very modest length it offers us a radical reimagining of sex, sexuality and gender norms that urgently engages our emotions, our imagination and our beliefs.

It’s also a story that simultaneously builds and deconstructs its own mythology. Through Nate’s questioning of his role as community storyteller and through the increasingly contentious relationship between his stories and the reality they represent, we are made aware of how inadequate language is as a means of encapsulating and defining the most crucial aspects of our lived experience. And yet it’s all we have. “Language is changing, like the earth, like the sea. We live in lonely, fateful flux, outnumbered and outgrown.”

Ten years on, after COVID and Brexit, Trump and QAnon, that seems even more true than it did in 2014, and The Beauty confronts us even more starkly and uncompromisingly. For those of you who are coming to it for the first time, I hope you find your way out of its dark labyrinth both shaken and stirred, but not despairing. If there’s a conclusion on offer here, I think it’s that there is no growth, no change, no possibility of hope or happiness without acceptance of the Other. We will meld to grow, finding our fate in what we no longer fear. It’s that or oblivion, after all, and oblivion really sucks.

Or as Nate puts it: “the heart is a muscle; when we love we exercise.”

Yeah, that. Exactly that.

M. R. Carey

January 2024

London

THE
BEAUTY

For H.C.M.W.

who proves that change is possible

PART ONE

To start—

There are signs, I don’t care what William says. There are signs of change, of regeneration, and I saw the first mushrooms in the graveyard on the morning after I ripped up the photograph of my mother’s face and threw the pieces over the cliff, into the fat swallowing folds of the sea.

Timing is everything.

My name is Nathan, just twenty-three and given to the curation of stories. I listen, retain, then polish and release them over the fire at night, when the others hush and lean forward in their desire to hear of the past. They crave romance, particularly when autumn sets in and cold nights await them, and so I speak of Alice, and Bethany, and Sarah, and Val, and other dead women who all once had lustrous hair and never a bad word on their plump lips. I can remember this is not how they were; I knew them, I knew them! Only six years have passed and yet I mythologize them as if it is six thousand. I am not culpable. Language is changing, like the earth, like the sea. We live in lonely, fateful flux, outnumbered and outgrown.

Last night I spoke of Miriam. She was the teacher with a passion inside her, always burning hot, making her ferocious. When the inspectors would climb up through the rocks from the town and tell her it was their right to judge her lessons, she would fling pieces of paper at them, plans and registers, and she would sneer, a skewed expression of her natural superiority. Then, after the inspectors roared away, she would rip the papers to pieces, make celebratory confetti and tell us to dance in it.

Miriam once caught me trying to make my own records of attendance like I had seen, all our names, ticks and crosses, marks and meanings. She threatened to hold my hand over the fire if I didn’t destroy it. She said nothing good comes from anything but natural rhythms: daybreak and sunset, spring and winter. So we learned to read storms in the laying down of cows and when to plant pumpkins in the wake of runner beans. Those were our lessons, until our strengths had been discovered, and then we were given our tasks.

Miriam died early, one of the first, with the yellow fungus thick on her nose and tongue. It crawled out from her womb and down her legs.

I did not speak of death. I painted her in words of sweet sepia. She once held the hands of the little ones during lambing, cherishing the placentas, the blood of renewal. I spoke of that, and the others nodded as if they understood what she was.

Today the world moves on, and I must find new ways to turn the truth into stories. The graveyard bears more mushrooms, clustering in soft wet shapes, yellow folds and rivulets, in the outlines of the women beneath the soil. It must mean something good. William must be made to see it.

‘It means nothing,’ says William.

He isn’t our leader. We don’t have leaders. But he is the person who gives advice that everyone listens to. I once asked Miriam what word we could give to him that would explain that—maybe a new one, made from our minds? She threatened to chop my brain into bits and feed it to the chickens for being so cheeky. I still don’t understand why.

Such thoughts about language cannot be scooped from brains anyway. This is why I say things I shouldn’t.

‘Can I at least name them?’ I ask William.

He stares into his stew, in the earthenware bowl. It is a hearty lunch, good in the autumn days when the sun gives only a weak warmth. Thomas is always generous in his portions, perhaps because he likes the taste of his own cooking so much, unlike Diana, who always made measly meals and ate not at all.

William says, ‘Why do these mushrooms need a name?’

I say, ‘For stories?’

‘You’re going to tell a story about toadstools and fungus?’ William heaves his shoulders, like the bulging of a laugh that can’t escape his stiff belly. ‘I might skip the fireside tonight, then.’

‘They are growing from the bodies of women.’

‘That’s true, Nate, but that doesn’t make it important.’

‘Are we not important, then? We grew that way too.’

William puts down his spoon, his thoughts written in the line of his lips. ‘You are the strangest lad,’ he muses. ‘I don’t want to hear tales of growth and bodies. Talk about the beginnings of the Group tonight; I like that story the best.’

A long sigh escapes me before I can swallow it. It doesn’t go undetected by William’s ears. He gives me a look of pity, and says, ‘Tell you what, take Thomas with you and he can see if there’s eating on these mushrooms.’

‘They’re not that kind—’

‘Nate,’ he says, and the conversation is closed. I leave him to the remnants of his carrots and the tough sheep stew, and tiptoe away before he can change his mind.

William was once married. He lived out in the world, a city-crawler, like an insect. Marriage was a piece of paper and on it you wrote your name and the name of the woman, like paper could be a stone to the mouth of a cave and you could both be sealed within. As time moved around, a work of constant motion, William came to see that the paper meant nothing, and the city was only a swirling mess of life within which he had become lost.

So he left his wife and pointed himself south-west, ending up by the sea, in the Valley of the Rocks, where a small Group of like minds had made a place. And he found he fitted there.

When he told me about his journey, that was how he finished it—he fitted there. I find this to be the strangest of expressions—how does one fit in to other people, all edges erased, making a seamless life from the sharp corners of discontent? I don’t find anything that fits in such a way. Certainly not in nature. Nothing real is meant to tessellate like a triangle, top-bottom bottom-top. The sheep will never munch the grass in straight lines.

It’s a puzzle which my mind keeps returning to, making it difficult to focus on Thomas’s ramblings as we make our way to the graveyard. He talks of all the mushrooms he has found this autumn and the dishes he has made with them. Thomas is puffed up with his own importance as the cook, even though he is younger than me and no doubt thinks it is my duty to listen to him; but I am thinking of triangles all the way to the wooden crosses, where the shapes cancel each other out and leave me empty.

‘There’s no eating on them,’ says Thomas. He’s looking at the mushrooms: dense balls with gilled undersides, yellow with ragged browning edges, clustered on each mound of earth like flowers left for the dead. They have multiplied since yesterday. Some are as big as my fist. ‘It’s the colour. It’s a warning, isn’t it. Like red berries on green bushes. Don’t eat us, it means.’

Even though I know he’s right about the mushrooms, I say, ‘We eat raspberries, though. And strawberries.’

He rolls his eyes, but takes a few steps forward Annalisa’s grave. She was so young, just a new baby, born with the yellow disease stretched tight over her like a caul. Doctor Ben said he would have had to slice off her skin to save her. Such thoughts chase away raspberries in a flash.

Still, Thomas pulls his sleeve over his hand and picks a small one, then brings it to his nose and sniffs. He inclines his head, as if trying to decide if the wine is rancid, and a memory comes to me of another time, a night in my teenage years when I drank too much cider and giggled through the autumn festival until I nearly fell into the bonfire and my mother pulled me back to her arms and made me sit by her feet for the rest of the party.

To have someone who tells you what to do—sometimes this seems like a bad thing, and sometimes it doesn’t. Is anything forever? I’m thinking not.

Thomas holds the mushroom to my nose, and says, ‘Meaty…’ I inhale, and, yes, there is the tang of meat on it, not unpleasant, like beef slow-cooked to softness. But when Thomas pokes out his tongue and holds the yellow ball to the tip of it he recoils, shudders, and says, ‘Bitter, bitter.’ We both know that is a sign of poison. He spits and says, ‘No good can come of it.’

‘You talk like an old woman,’ I tell him, which is true, although I doubt he can remember how old women talked. They had a kind of bellicose gabble on them, gathering in groups like geese, all honk and no teeth. But Thomas is barely out of his teens and not popular with others his age. Maybe because of that impressive belly, or the fact he already has a job, a good one, while the rest of them are still under the care of Eamon, who took up teaching when Miriam failed.

‘I do not,’ says Thomas. ‘Actually. Can you tell a story about my mother tonight?’

‘Can’t. William has asked for the story of the Group. Besides, I only spoke of her last week. She sang lullabies to you in the sweetest voice and knitted you blankets, don’t you remember?’

‘Yes, but I wouldn’t mind more.’

I say, ‘That’s what they all say.’ I am stretched thin with their wanting sometimes, but I wouldn’t change that feeling of being needed, of being necessary. ‘You can have a story about her soon,’ I tell him. ‘Can I have it?’

Thomas says, ‘Wash your hands afterwards.’ He is so very authoritative in his field; he likes his power, just as I like mine. Perhaps we two will lead the Group one day, in the final days. He adds, ‘What are you going to do with it?’

‘Take it to Doctor Ben, I reckon. It might have medicinal benefits. If they’re springing from the bodies of women maybe they contain, I don’t know, an antidote.’

‘It’s a bit late for that,’ says Thomas, with a laugh, and I know for sure that he doesn’t remember his mother, or any woman, to be able to wear that expression in this graveyard. The disease that killed them all—it has become safe to him. He has never even considered the idea that it might grow, change, come for us men one day.

I know Doctor Ben has thought of this. He discussed it once with me, when I sat with him at dinner and collected the memories of his sister, who lived longer by scraping it out of herself with a knife for a while. He told me diseases are like people. They fight and fight and throw themselves around to escape the walls of tighter and tighter boxes.

In truth, if this happened it would only speed up the inevitable. There will be no more humanity after us; at least, none here in the Valley of the Rocks. Out there, beyond, there might be men in laboratories with tubes and eggs making fresh women, golem women as Doctor Ben says sometimes. It makes me picture white rooms with pink limbs, breasts and heads, pinned to long tables, the scientists in shiny coats taking them and building women one organ at a time. It gives me shuddery dreams.

I think if there were real women in the world I would have felt it, just like I feel spring’s shoots arriving and winter creeping over the rocks. But there is only silence, only silence in the soil.

‘You’re right,’ I tell Thomas. ‘It’s too late for that.’

Something in my expression stops his laughter. We look around the graveyard. The rough fence, chicken wire and wooden posts make a sorry sight. Some men put a pebble in front of the cross of their loved ones—wives, daughters, mothers—a count of pained days. Now these little stones make pyramids and spill over into the soil. They are interspersed with the yellow growths, making a pattern I can’t interpret.

‘What do you think Doctor Ben will do with them?’ says Thomas, as we leave the graveyard. ‘grind them into magic pills?’

‘Take two in the morning after drinking new cider to cure your headache.’

‘Take three and your cock will stop throbbing like a thumb hit with a hammer.’

‘We’re all saved!’ I say, and this time we both laugh, facing the sea, feeling the freshness of the foamy waves crashing until it is difficult to remember what we are laughing for.

Doctor Ben is the oldest of us. He came from just outside the valley with Teresa, his sister. Neither of them liked the outside world much, and he’d been coming into the Group to treat illnesses and injuries for a good few years before he made the decision to join. His sister said if he was going she was too. She was not a woman to be argued with.

I remember when the two of them came up through the valley with three suitcases of differing sizes between them, matching red and sleek with little wheels on the bottom. They struggled along with those cases as if they were more important than the journey itself.

Ben still has those cases. They sit in the corner of his house, unchanged and immutable. They continue to mean something to him, just as they mean something different to me. I never can take my eyes from them when I sit in his room.

The rain strikes the canvas over our heads with regularity, even jollity, as Ben throws mint leaves into mugs of hot water, which he collects from the fire. I stare at the suitcases and wonder what happens now in the world when people want to leave a place. There are still boats and aeroplanes, we see them; but there is no new place go to any more, no escape to be made on little shiny wheels.

He hands me my tea, then sits at his desk and looks at the fungus I have placed on it. He pushes it across the grainy wood with the blunt tip of his pencil.

‘Where did you find it, Nate?’ Ben asks.

‘The graveyard.’

‘And there are lots?’

‘Getting bigger every day.’

‘Every day? Visibly?’ He shakes his head. Ben says, ‘That’s odd.’

‘You think?’

The mint tea is refreshing and tingles on my lips. Doctor Ben puts his face close to the mushroom, eyeing it. He sits back on his stool. We don’t talk for a while. The noise of the rain cheers me, makes me feel close to him; we are allies in this endeavour. Once before, he said to me, ‘We are like minds, aren’t we?’—and I agreed, all the time my mind elsewhere, flying over the peaks in the skies of my stories. But now I am here, all of me, content in his company and with my mug of mint tea.

‘What will you be telling us about tonight?’

I say, ‘The start of the Group again. William asked for it.’

‘I’ll look forward to that.’ He swallows and says, ‘Every time you tell it, it’s better than the one before.’

I say, ‘Thank you.’ He looks surprised, and then I think that maybe he didn’t mean it as a compliment. ‘But it’s always the same story.’

‘Is it?’

Stories are as slippery as seasons; it’s beyond my power to make either stand still. I try to tell them the same way, but each telling leads to small changes; something is added to the structure, a change of pace, a tweak of testimonies, all of them make circles in our minds.

Our friendship is broken once more. The rain has dried and the tea is gone; the yellow mushroom is shrivelling before our eyes, and the stalk is oozing a greyish gunk. Within a moment it is half the size it was and the liquid is sinking into the wood of the desk, making a smell like earthy compost.

‘I think we should declare the graveyard off limits for now,’ says Doctor Ben. ‘I’ll talk to William about it tonight. After your story.’

It doesn’t need to be said that such a decision will not be popular. I am not the only one who will miss those quiet mounds, even though the men say: I see Cathy in the stars, not at a graveside, or Sandra’s body is not important. It never was, so it makes no difference where it lies. They say these things reasonably with their logical heads while their hearts lead them to the graveyard to sit, to place their pebbles.

I don’t place pebbles on my mother’s grave. I look for meaning in the crosses. They are letters too; they form words, if only I could read them.

‘Something is changing,’ I tell Doctor Ben.

‘Winter is coming and the mushrooms will die out in the cold.’

‘For a while.’

‘Sometimes,’ says Ben, as he stands and stretches out his old muscles, ‘you think too much.’

‘Thank you,’ I tell him again, and grin at him until he sighs and shoos me away.

The windmill turns, the fire jumps high and the river tumbles over the stones. It grows dark and the wild goats bleat in chorus, giving their sad farewells to the sun.

I am ready. The men and boys have eyes only for me. I don’t need to stand or wave my arms around. Attention is not held by the gimmick but in the kindness of my voice.

I tell the story of how we came to be.

In the beginning there was the Valley of the Rocks. Huge stones lay amidst tough grass as if thrown from the sky by a giant hand, wild goats browsed and for a long time nobody came. The Valley waited for its purpose to be revealed to it. It watched the turn and tide of the sea and measured the months that turned to years, decades, centuries. It did not suffer from impatience. It held tight to its implacability, keeping itself intact: stones, grass, goats.

People came and went. Nobody settled the Valley. Nobody felt welcome. The soil was hard and un-yielding and the goats were too fast to catch. There were better places to live around the Valley, with fertile fields and running water.  

Eventually, when every other place had been built over and dug up, people returned to the Valley and named it a place of natural beauty, simply because they had not attempted to beautify it. The rocks and grasses and goats were photographed and post-carded, until the experts came and said:  These tourists are making the valley unstable. The Valley needs room and space and privacy if we are to keep it. The Valley did not care. It could not be kept—it had not been owned to begin with.

Everyone was sent away, and the Valley waited.

Then we came.

The first of us: Tim, Mick, Bernie, Andrea, Pam and Polly. They wanted to live a different kind of life, a better one. They moved into the Valley, and laid down the first tenets. Fresh air. Space for the kids. Growing our own food. Making our own goods. Getting electricity from the wind and water. Building homes out of mud and canvas. They fought a bitter war against the councilmen, but their struggle attracted others, like minds, and our Group swelled. The talents brought into the fold were many and varied: those good with paper, good with words, good with growing, good with building.  

And so on, like a fish in a river, I wind my way through the past. I am slick and shiny in the delight of the tale. It unites us, of course, but it also excites us. These stories of our fathers and mothers are a gift to the Group cut and polished with my words, and it leads to a wild night and the cracking open of many cider jars. The victory dance is done—we are still here. We beat our feet on the Valley that waited for us. Half of us lie in the forbidden graveyard, but the rest of us go on. For now.

And even without women there is still, once the cider is thick and mellow in stomachs, love. Tenderness. Maybe not for the older men who refuse such things, but the teenagers turn to each other and disappear into the darkness just beyond the boundary of the fire to play their games, and that is good.

But tonight I am spent. I swim on to the end of the tale, where it becomes the open mouth of the world into which all such stories pour and intermingle. I let it trickle away through my fingers with the words—and so it goes on.

The noises of love come in the wake of my voice and I look around those who are left alone. Doctor Ben is not to be seen; perhaps he has gone for an early night. He looked old this afternoon, too weary to face another winter. I am beginning to know that look. Thomas is not here either, and that makes me uneasy. Thomas never gets lucky with the other teenagers—he is more likely to be mocked than sucked—and he never misses the end of a story.

I catch William’s eye across the fire and he frowns, pausing in his conversation with Hal and Gareth, the gardeners. I hear a cough close to my ear and turn my head to find Uncle Ted smiling at me, squatting to my level. It is a delight to see him at the campfire. Usually he keeps his distance, living wild like the goats. He brings logs and kindling every few days, and maybe rabbits or squirrels to eat.

Uncle Ted is always silent. Nobody ever hears him come or go and I can’t remember the last time I heard his voice, so it is a wonderful surprise when he says, ‘How are you, Nate? Good? All good?’

I pat him on the back. ‘Yes, good. You’re here, that’s better than good.’

‘Have you been to her grave today?’ he asks me.

So that’s why he’s here. He is my family, my last remaining blood. He mourns his sister as I mourn my mother, different facets of the same woman. I know he visits sometimes; I saw the handfuls of forget-me-nots last spring. Our paths never cross there and I would not want them to. Grief is better alone. It has a cleaner taste, a sharper edge, that way.

I nod. I say, ‘I’ve seen the mushrooms.’

‘Can they be cleared away?’

‘We don’t know. I could try.’

‘Don’t touch them,’ he says. ‘They’re not right. The animals stay away from them. They’re in the woods as well. Perhaps they spring up wherever there’s been a burial.’

‘You mean a—body? Other women?’

He nods.

I ask, ‘Why would they be buried in the woods?’

‘I don’t know.’

These unknown women, so close to us, faceless and erupting into yellow, bother me greatly. There is threat here, creeping towards our rocks. The mushrooms are not a good thing. They are not a beginning. I see in Uncle Ted’s eyes the same knowledge. ‘Thomas,’ I say. ‘Thomas and Doctor Ben. They touched the mushrooms.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘I don’t know.’

He gets up and walks over to William. The two gardeners shrink back. He is a tall man, and a big one. My mother was the same—a large woman, muscled, respected. She was an engineer who made the windmills work and the houses strong enough to survive storms. I’m reminded of her in the way Ted moves.

William and Uncle Ted talk, their heads together, in the way that people with power do. Then William beckons me over.

‘We’ll need to find them,’ he says, without pre-emption, and the hunt begins. We don’t involve anyone else. I start at Doctor Ben’s hut, find the empty sleeping bag on the pallet, then go to the communal hut to search for Thomas, stepping carefully around the lads in their ones and twos. He’s not there.

So we raise the alarm. William rings the bell that hangs outside his hut—the sound is heavy, thickening the night with dread. Search parties are formed. As William directs matters, Uncle Ted whispers in my ear, ‘Come with me,’ and I do as I am told. We leave the fire behind, and the huts. We walk past the gardens and the graveyard, up into the rocks, then down into the woods leading away from the sea. Ted keeps a steady pace within the circle of his torchlight and never stumbles; I find tree roots rising up to meet my feet, tripping me and taunting me in the dark.

‘Stay close,’ he says.

Of course I have been in the woods at night before. Often in summer in my school years we would take our sleeping bags and head out. ‘All the enemies had gone,’ said Miriam, ‘no boar, no bear, no wolf. If you see a pair of eyes in the night it’s an owl,’ she said. ‘If you hear a noise it’s a deer. Nobody ever got hurt by owls and deer, except mice and berries.’ Are the woods still filled with the birds and beasts alone? Or are there new eyes, new creatures springing up in the gap left when the world had women ripped from it?

‘Here,’ Ted says. He stops and shines the torchlight on the bracken and blackberry bushes. I see mushrooms: squatting, swollen balloons with soft downy caps. They seem to squirm in the beam of the torch. ‘It’s gone.’

‘What?’

He points. ‘There was a large one. Shaped like a head.’

‘A human head?’

There’s no sign of it—no ragged stalk, no space on the ground where it might have grown. There’s no point in asking him if he’s sure we’re in the right place. He knows the woods better than anyone. I have to trust his judgement. Part of me is glad this thing is gone, this head growing in the dark.

‘Somebody must have taken it,’ says Uncle Ted, and that thought is worse.

‘Who?’

‘I thought nobody was close. Not within days.’

‘There are men within a few days of here?’

‘Of course,’ he says, so easily. Of course there are others left over, living out their last days. So why do we never see them? I look at Uncle Ted and wonder what else he does in this wood other than gather sticks and hunt rabbits. He meets my gaze and raises his eyebrows.

‘Listen,’ he says. He switches off the torch and my choice to see is taken away from me. Into my blindness comes the soft, slow, distinct sound of feet in mud. But no, it’s too gentle for that, the rhythmic sucking is too liquid. I’ve never heard it before, and it is getting closer.

‘Uncle Ted?’

He does not reply. I remain in blackness. I reach out my arms and take tiny steps forward. Under my feet the mushrooms pop and splatter.

The sucking noise is upon me, loud in my left ear. I turn from it, but it turns with me and softens further to a hum, like a breathing voice, bringing back memories of something like Mother; yes, a mother-sound, humming under her breath, and I cannot run from it. It is my unfamiliar and ancient home and I belong within it.

I sink down to the ground amid the spattered mushrooms and let the mother-hum take me away.

Pinprick light through a sieve, a scattering of beams inside which the aimless meanderings of motes are illuminated. Beautiful. I watch them. There is no urgency. I feel calm, cosseted. I lie, curled up on my side, my eyes fixed to the ceiling.

Must I move? The feeling of contentment is wearing thin. Yes, I must move. I must get up. I am in a large warm chamber with earthen walls. The dirt bears the marks of rough digging, as if with claws. High above there is the light, coming through what appears to be holes in a woven grass mat. There is no door, but there is a ragged hole in the floor. I move to it, unsure if this is a dream, and find it plunges straight down into an absolute darkness that makes me shudder, recoil.

I am under the earth. Is this my burial? How then can I be calm? I fold back into myself and close my eyes. The ground is yielding. I wish it would swallow me and be done.

The smell of food cuts through me. Now, somehow, there is food. Three apples and a honeycomb are on the floor next to me. They are a gift, a song of autumn, and I cram the comb into my mouth.

As I eat, the humming returns, pleasant and disjointed. It has no rhythm or tune I can place. Did my mother sing it to me once? Is she coming for me? I want to call out her name. The air is dead here. There is no wind. I can’t think.

I eat and listen to the humming, and when the last mouthful of apple is gone, the core and pips inside me, I think of how to tell this story when I get free. Every word I use, every turn of phrase I fit together in my head, is wrong. Am I captured? Can I describe myself as a prisoner? Is this solitary confinement? I have read these terms in the books Miriam kept in the school library, but none of them fit. I feel no desire to go, that’s what’s missing. This is not against my will. I have no will, except to listen to the hum.

The ground shudders and from the hole climbs a thing. A woman. A thing. It is yellow and spongy and limbed, with a smooth round ball for a head. It is without eyes, without ears. I press myself against the rough wall as it emerges and stands like a human, like a woman. It has breasts, globes of yellow, and rounded hips that speak to me of woman, of want, and that disgusts me beyond words.

I am sick on myself. I soil myself. Everything is beyond my control. My terror is sharp and pungent. The thing stops moving towards me.

I can’t take my eyes from it. It is alive; I feel it, alive like a person. Not an animal. It watches me. Without eyes it stares, the smooth yellow flesh stretched over its head.

I try to speak to it but no words come out of my mouth.

A minute passes. Two. Ten. It does not move.

The terror recedes, enough for me to feel the discomfort of my wet shit-and-puke covered clothes. I smell terrible. Everything hurts. My head is banging and my heart won’t stop thumping in my chest.

It stays static. I focus on the fingers of the creature. The fingernails are long, curved like talons on a hunting bird. They look delicate, decorative. They are not hands hardened by work. To look at them makes me feel jealous, desirous and protective, all at the same time. Such little hands. If I look only at the hands I feel warmth spreading through me. They are feminine. I haven’t seen anything that fits that word for such a long time. These are feminine hands. I feel the urge to touch them.

Revulsion at my own thoughts overcomes me—I am shivering, both cold and hot, and the pain in my head is growing, growing. The thing moves backwards, taking small steps, then drops into the hole and is gone.

Left to my own stench, I curl up and fall, once more, into sleep.

There follow days and nights with the thing. It comes without warning. Sometimes I awake and find it close. At other times it raises its head from the hole and moves no further. It stays so very still. I think that it is waiting for something. I think it wants me to name it.

It provides me with water and food. It took away my stained clothes and cleaned up after me. I find I can control myself and my thoughts around it if I concentrate on some small part of it. Terror, hatred, panic and those stranger, softer feelings: they are there, but they do not crowd me or make me their puppet. If I want to touch it, I would be able to do so with a clear mind. I think I would like to touch it.

It is sunset. The sieved light has taken on a dusky, pinkish cast and I can picture the others waiting at the fireside, ears attuned to the pops and crackles of the flames, hoping for a story that will not come. Or is someone else telling them tales of the dead? I try to picture Thomas conjuring the peachy skin and red lips of women for their listening enjoyment, and it makes me smile. He would do a grander job of describing an onion and goat’s cheese tart.

The ground shudders and the thing emerges. It comes to me, walking with a sway of its soft yellow hips, and stops within touching distance. I repress everything I feel, the horror and the longing. I reach out.

Its own hand stretches out and meets me halfway. Palm to palm.

Cool, almost damp. Smooth and spongy. It is a shock to feel its lack of warmth, but it is not unpleasant. Just different.

The smoothness changes. I feel a raised surface, like gooseflesh, and then the bumps become larger, prickly. The thing hums, high, in pulses; the sound comes from inside it. I’m certain that it’s very, very excited. We are excited.

I pull my hand back. The sense of urgency, of delight, that emanated from it vanishes. To touch it—this plant’s thoughts, emotions, in my mind. I can’t separate its desires from my own.

It keeps its hand still and makes no other move, so I return my hand to it and let it speak to me of longing, of satisfaction, of a long long wait in the dark. At first everything is a rush, but I begin to discern more particular, delicate thoughts, like butterflies dipping to flowers. They brush my mind and I feel hope, that most ethereal of entities. The thing has hope. Or maybe it is my hope, amplified and appreciated; hopes for a world where we have a place, a meaning, a future. Where we all fit. Tessellate.

The wrongness sweeps over me, obliterates the butterflies, leaves only black insect legs, squirming and scrabbling in my mind. This time I push away for good, retreat, wrap my arms around my body and shake my head at it, no, no, until it moves back and leaves me alone.

It drops into the hole, and is gone.

Did my mother hum to me when I was little? Did she touch me, hold me, fill me with her noise and her thoughts? This loneliness I feel is of the womb, borne by women. I was sixteen when they all died and I thought I understood this loss, but it comes to me that I didn’t know what women gave to the world. It wasn’t about their lips, their eyes or the gentle quality of their voices. It was about the way that all men are a part of them. And now we are part of nothing.

There are no more stories. I can make no words. There are only sounds from deep within my chest, from a cavity that has been lurking inside me, unnoticed, for years. It is a pain so deep, so black, and I cannot bear it. I must fill it, find a way to stop it up. It will devour me.

The thing returns. I watch it crawl up to me, as it takes hold of me in its cold yellow arms and rocks me, all the while humming. Its joy at the knowledge that we are together overwhelms everything, and keeps me quiet.

My mother was not a beautiful woman in her own eyes. Once, when I was a young boy, I found a magazine under her sleeping bag. It was slippery, glossy, smooth to the touch. Inside were collections of thoughts on how to be thinner, better, happier, as if these things were part of a pattern, like honeycomb. And the women were strange, elongated creatures with diamond faces, their bodies held at odd, difficult angles. I found them disturbing and I asked my mother that night—before I realised that not all thoughts were suitable for mothers—why they made me feel that way.

She told me it was a sign that I was beginning to grow up. ‘All men want to look at beautiful women. Especially your father,’ she said, with such envy and sadness and disgust in her voice. I could see she wanted to be like those women, although I couldn’t understand why. And so beauty became something unobtainable, something to be admired and feared, beyond my reach, even my understanding.

Now, in the thing’s embrace, I spend longer there every day, never wanting to be apart from it. I find a name for it. I call it Bee. Bee for Beauty. It is not inaccessible or frightening. Everything it thinks, feels, wants and needs is open to my discernment. Beauty is a word that has a different meaning for me now and I am delighted to have reclaimed it.

Bee is so cool, so soft, like a sponge wrapping itself around me in the midst of a terrible fever. It moulds itself to me, sits astride my lap and takes my cock inside it. I sink into it like pressing into mud and Bee gives, gives, gives until I am fully inside. I feel our pleasure, our amazement, our amplified, doubled joy. We are drawn into ourselves, completely without the world.

Afterwards, when I feel sick at what I have done, Bee hums and soothes me, assures me that it is not unnatural or wrong. It implants strange images in me of earthy darkness, of waiting, growing, moving to sunlight, opening, learning and expanding. Like being a baby in a womb, deep in the mother and unaware of anything but that sharp, tingling and delicious edge of potential.

I know Bee is not alone. It shows me images of others growing from the bodies of women, mingling with their cells, learning about us and themselves. Bee shows me many of them close by, connected in thought, hoping for men to learn to love them and take them into their own.

In my mind I gently show Bee my own initial repulsion once more. Can that be overcome? And yet, why shouldn’t it be? If I can overcome this repulsion, so can the others. And my optimism spreads into Bee, infects it too. It stands, lifts me up, and holds me in its arms. Bee is so strong. It drops into the hole and carries me through the darkness, out of a sloping tunnel to where there is sharp sunlight. The frost is sweet like the crunch of apples. And everywhere there are Beauties, yellow Beauties like my love, soft and cold, wanting nothing but to be warmed by men.

Music. I have missed it. There is more than one way to make a long tale in mind and memory; Landers is playing the guitar and singing while Keith D fiddles. They sing of soul cakes, a winter song, and I realise I have been under the ground for too long. My famous sense of time and place has left me; this is the wrong song for late autumn but it is a good song, one of my favourites. The humanity in me jumps up and begs to draw closer.

But I keep my distance, just out of the light of the flames, and let my eyes play over the familiar faces: William, Eamon, the lads, even Uncle Ted, who looks unchanged except for the sadness that sits on his shoulders.

Why is he here, by the fire? To mourn me? Is that why they play my favourite song and yet nobody dances? I am dead to them. If I do not act now somebody will get up at the end of the song and tell stories of me; I remember when and Wasn’t he and I’ll miss his and other things that a living person should never hear about themselves in case it changes the way they choose to carry on living.

So I come into the circle.

The music stops. Fingers and mouths are frozen. Even William is without comment. His face is a picture of surprise. Uncle Ted is the first to move. He gets up, takes long strides until he is putting his arms around me so I am pressed to his leather coat.

He is saying, ‘Where have you been? Where have you been?’ over and over with no pause, no drawing of breath. It brings the Group to life. They rush to me and surround me, talking to themselves, to each other, Who would have believed, We thought he was, How can he be. I let their words be a blanket for me, wrapping me in their joy and concern.

Then William is there, pushing his way through to stand toe to toe with me. Uncle Ted lets me go. The others step back.

‘Ted said you disappeared. We searched. No signs, no trail. Nothing. Ben and Thomas are gone too.’

‘I was kept safe,’ I tell him.

William assesses me with his straight gaze, the one he keeps only for important judgements. ‘You were kept?’

‘Unharmed. All is well. All is good.’

‘There are… people in the wood? Another Group? Will they have Ben and Thomas?’

‘Not a Group.’

Uncle Ted says, ‘Let him get warm, for Heaven’s sake,’ and pushes William out of the way. He leads me forward to the glow of the fire which is bright against my face. It is an unpleasant sensation after so long in the dampness of the earth; I feel my skin tightening, the hairs on my body lying flat and sleek in response and my pupils contracting.

‘I have a story,’ I say. ‘The story of what happened to me out there.’

‘Time for that later,’ says Uncle Ted, but the younger ones are already buzzing, settling themselves down, and I know they have missed this. Nobody could take my place. I am given the confidence to tell the story I have been shaping, and they will listen to the end. They will understand what I have to tell them.

In the beginning there was a lonely orphan boy. His father was only known to him as a figment of his own imagination and his mother went the way of all women. He mourned them, but not excessively so for he was only as lonely as every other man he knew and it would have been selfish to weep when others must work.

So he worked too. He was lucky, he had a talent for tales: long tales, short tales, tales of reality, of mystery and of imagination. The other men recognised his talent and encouraged it. All men should be so lucky, but the truth is—talent does not touch us all. The orphan appreciated this and did not squander his talent or waste his words. He worked very hard to entertain and delight his listeners around the fireside, and his talent and his tales grew a little more every day.

It grew, but his talent did not bloom.

This bothered him. All organic things grow and reach fruition. He saw this in the earth and the seasons, in the wild flowers and the tame vegetable patch. But what kind of flower would his talent produce? Where do stories lead? The answers he imagined scared him. But his mother had always said to him, ‘Your imagination can take you to the best and worst places. It is a ship on a sea of dreams and it’s up to you to steer it.’ And so he tried to control the rudderless boat of his brain, and sweated daily with the effort.

It seemed storytelling was as hard a form of work as tilling the soil, in some ways.  

Years passed. The orphan began to lose the sound of his mother’s voice and the movement of her mouth, the colour of her eyes, the feel of her hair. So he held tight to an old photograph, staring at it, carrying it with him, until he realised that the mother he knew had become only the photograph, an image of what a mother should be, and there were no real memories left. On the day of that realisation he took the photograph to the edge of the valley, the steepest cliff that overlooked the sea. He tore his mother’s face to pieces and then threw the pieces over the rocks to be carried away, to be truly forgotten.

And on that day there came the Beauty.

They were found in the graveyard, springing from the decaying bodies of the women deep in the ground, and they were found in the woods, spreading themselves like a rug over the wet earth. The Beauty were small at first but they grew, and they took all the best qualities of the dead. They sucked up through the soil all the softness, serenity, hope and happiness of womankind. They made themselves into a new form, a new birth, shaped from the clay of the world and designed only to bring pleasure to man.

But the Beauty knew, from the many experiences of the women that had gone before, that men did not always love what was good for them. Men could attack, hurt, maim and murder the things that came too fast, too suddenly, like love, like beginnings that involved the death of the old way. So the Beauty decided to find a man who could accept them, who could speak for them. And serendipity sent to them the lonely orphan boy.

They came across him, lost and wandering in the forest, like a gift, and took him into the earth with them. The Beauty treated him kindly, gave him time to come to appreciate the devotion they offered. They chose one of their number, a patient and wise one with large breasts and a beguiling scent, and sent it to the boy. He recognised the smell and form of woman. His memories were returned to him in that aroma, in the pendulous feel of the breasts, and it was as if his mother had returned to him, as if all of womankind had returned.  

He did what came naturally to him with this beautiful creature, and soon the shame and guilt he felt at fondling and fucking passed away into death and something else was born in its place: a new delight, unfettered, in such beauty. And, for the first time, hope.

So the boy agreed to speak to the other men, to tell them of such happiness and to offer it to them. And they said—

They said—

I stop speaking.

A time passes. The men look at each other. I know they are waiting for me to finish the story, to give it a meaning, but this time around it is not my job to say the final words.

‘You aren’t finished,’ says William.

‘No,’ I tell him. ‘Neither are you.’

And then I see the shapes move from the darkness, coming into the light. William jumps to his feet, then Uncle Ted and the others: all shouting, moaning, pissing and frothing, fighting, struggling, running. The Beauty encircle them, enclose them, take them into their embrace and rock them, absorb them, until terror and pleasure become one and the same. Then the only sounds are the sighs and sobs of wordless confusion that will, no doubt, soon be replaced with an acceptance as deep and wide and thankful as my own.

PART TWO

‘The men are unhappy,’ says Doctor Ben.

I shake my head. I say, ‘No, they’re not. They’re not able to admit they’re happy. That’s all.’

Thomas keeps a clean kitchen. The fridge and the oven are old, rust-speckled white-slabbed boxes, side by side like grizzled guard dogs, standing to attention on the tiled floor. The house is old too—a small brick building at the entrance of the Valley, where once a warden lived to watch over nature and protect it from humanity. Or so the story goes.

As the cook, Thomas lives in a kind of luxury here. It is warmer at night than in the huts, no doubt. The otherness of this kitchen, powered by windmills and overlooking the tidy walled garden, is the perfect setting for difficult conversations. The kind that should not be overheard.

‘Landers tried to kill himself,’ says Doctor Ben.

Thomas stops chopping green beans and turns to us, knife in hand. ‘Really?’ he says, saucer-eyed.

‘He did a bad job of it. One small cut of the wrist. I bandaged it.’

I lean back against the shelves and feel the first twinge of discomfort. Separating from Bee quickly leads to an ache in my stomach, a queasiness that grows with passing minutes. Bee stands on the other side of the kitchen door waiting, along with the Beauties that belong to Doctor Ben and Thomas. As the first three to find pairings, kept under the earth with them, the feeling is strong that we shouldn’t be in different rooms, not for a moment. It is this that makes me uncomfortable, but I can appreciate it. Discomfort is not a disaster.

‘Landers’ Beauty picked him up and carried him to me,’ says Ben. ‘It refused to let him suffer.’

I say, ‘Then it did a good thing, right? It cares for him. They care for all of us.’ They have taken over the heavy tasks, the unpleasant ones. They farm and they chop without complaint. And now they save our lives.

‘It’s my opinion,’ says Ben, raising his eyebrows, ‘that some of the men will never get over the feeling of revulsion. We can’t live like this.’

‘Give it time. We got over it, didn’t we?’

‘You came round in weeks. So did Thomas. It’s easier on the younger ones. But we’re well into spring now and the older ones are so ashamed still. They don’t want it, but they can’t refuse it.’

‘Is that how you feel?’ I ask him. I’ve seen him struggle to accept the couplings round the fire after my nightly stories, and the way the Beauty simply touch, mould, demand the comfort of our bodies at any time, blocking out all other thoughts. ‘Do you wish you’d never met your own Beauty? That you’d never met Bella?’

‘Every day,’ he says, and I believe him. Ben adds, ‘I wish I’d never gone into the wood that night with Thomas to look at the mushrooms. And yet it’s not that life was better before. It’s that—I can’t explain it.’

‘Let me explain it for you, around the fire. I can give it a voice.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘No.’

I say, ‘Why not? That’s my job. I should make a story about this. It will help us all to face it, overcome it.’

‘That’s just it, Nathan. Your stories, all of them—they aren’t the truth any more. Last night you told the story of the Group, and you made it into… a saga.’

‘It is a saga!’

‘No! It hasn’t all been a journey towards meeting the Beauty. It hasn’t been a straight road leading to a dawn. We didn’t come to the Valley of the Rocks in order to meet and meld with these—walking mushrooms!’

Thomas snorts.

‘It’s not funny!’ I tell him, but it only makes him worse. He laughs out loud, and in between gasps for air he says, ‘Mush… rooms…’

Doctor Ben and I wait for his laughter to subside. When Thomas finally manages to control himself we hear scraping on the kitchen door; our Beauties want in. The urge to go to them is strong, palpable in the room, but none of us move.

Thomas puts down the knife and stares at his fresh spring beans. He has lost weight since joining with Betty. There is a sleekness to his cheekbones, the muscles starting to show through on his shoulders.

‘I’m making goat stew,’ he says. ‘Cooked for hours with green tomatoes from the hothouse, new potatoes fresh from the buckets by the back door and the first green beans plucked from the canes. Topped with griddle bread and melted goat’s cheese. One of my favourites. Before all this I would have put in mushrooms. The earthiness gives it something, deepens the taste of the thyme.’

Thomas rubs his thumb and forefinger together. ‘Delicious. But I can’t. I can’t pick a mushroom. It would be like cannibalism. How crazy is that? Cannibalism.’ He laughs once more: softly, weakly.

Doctor Ben moves to him and pats him on the shoulder. ‘Can you represent this truth in your tales?’ he asks me.

I say, ‘I can make a story about a boy who went off mushrooms.’

He says, ‘That’s not what this is.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘Then you see, you misrepresent our history. It’s not safe in your hands.’

His words sting me, like bees in my ear. The scratching on the door intensifies. I have to raise my voice to be heard over it.

‘I don’t hold our past in my hands and I’m not responsible for it. I’m a storyteller. I speak of the deeper truth of our morality; our history should reflect that.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘You represent your own morality, and expect us all to agree with it.’

‘Please don’t fight,’ says Thomas. He is crying. He goes to the door, throws it open and lets in the Beauty. Betty is first. It backs him up against the counter and takes Thomas into itself, wrapping its arms around him. He slumps into its embrace. His trousers work their way down his legs and he thrusts and shudders. Then my Bee is upon me and I don’t think about Thomas or Ben any more.

To start—

There will be love. The word was dead. Then it rose from under the earth, took form, came to us and demanded our attention anew, even though we were not willing to give it. For it is easier to be loveless, to dismiss that tender stretching. The heart is a muscle; when we love, we exercise—we must breathe hard, we must feel the burning of our legs and lungs, we must grow dizzy with it. We must run with this new love until we feel an exhaustion of our souls.

There will be change. The word can move from myth to material. We shall weave cloth from it, add squares to the patchwork blanket of our Group. Older squares are fraying and torn; this fresh, clean cloth will comfort us, even if our fingers are pricked in the act of stitching.  

There will be beauty. The word can be reclaimed from the wasteland of women, from thoughts of the crawling disease that infested wombs. Beauty is here, fresh and willing to hold our hands once more, like a child in a garden.

So let us hold hands. Let us join in these final days of our fate. Let us walk together in love, in change, in beauty, on and on until the end.

It is early morning and I am looking upon Belinda, lying on the floor of the hut it shared with Hal. Its head is stamped open, its arms and legs ripped off. The stumps drizzle black. The body has been opened with something sharp like a knife, and inside there are grey strings and shapes with the rich smell of the compost heap.

This death is your fault, Nathan, the older men will say. It’s on your conscience.

It’s not that I don’t have reservations. Perhaps they all think that I am impregnable to their misgivings, but I see it, I see it! We must give up so much of ourselves to the Beauty, and not just our semen. We surrender our independence that was ever the strength of our Group; we make ourselves reliant on their soft sponginess, those blank faces. I feel the same repulsion to this but the truth is—what are we keeping our independence for?

Once upon a time we idolised the past because that was all we had. Now we must look to the future and sacrifice the sacred cow of our glorious Group. We are being made anew. We change, or we die. Or, it seems, we kill.

Once such thoughts have come to me I can’t forget them and I know they will work themselves into my stories whether I like it or not. So, instead of waiting for it to trickle out of me, I decided to spurt out my ideas in a new kind of story. A story of the future.

After I finished my new story I was met with a profound silence. My stories normally provoke feelings of friendliness or appreciation. The good will, the gratitude of the Group, has been my reward. But this story did not provoke such feelings. I couldn’t say what they thought. But I was sure that they did listen; I felt the disturbance my words caused like the ripples on the surface of a pond after the falling of a stone.

Is this death my fault? Is it on my conscience?

Hal sits in the corner of the hut, eyes closed, face calm, hands clenching and opening. Gareth stands by him, holding a scythe. Of course—not a knife. A scythe. The black liquid coats its edge.

‘Why?’ says William.

Gareth jerks his head to Hal. ‘He asked me to.’

There is a scratching at the door.

‘Don’t let them in,’ says Hal. His hands work against the material of his trousers, picking, picking, picking.

‘What can we do?’ William asks Uncle Ted. They exchange long looks.

‘We have to let them see,’ I say. ‘What other option is there?’

‘Hide it,’ says Gareth.

The men, apart from Hal, look around the room as if there is a rug under which this crime could be swept. Hal looks only at me. I think he knows what I am about to do, and his eyes contain a pleading.

I walk over to the door and open it.

Our Beauties do not enter. They sway on the threshold and I wonder—how can they tell? With no eyes, how can they know so quickly that one of their number lies mutilated on the floor?

They make no sound, and neither do we.

I see my Bee, feel my need for it rise up in me. When it does not come to me, I remember the old coldness of my life, and I know I do not want that again, not ever. How could Hal bear to watch his only comfort be destroyed? How could he give that command? There is something at work here that I do not understand and for the first time I am scared. Not of the Beauty, but of my own kind.

Gareth leans the scythe against the wall, then clears his throat. Perhaps he’s considering an apology, and I wonder how that would be phrased, but before he can speak the Beauty move backwards as one and walk, at speed, away from us. I step out into the bright sunlight and follow them as they cross the camp, past the huts, past the campfire, their numbers growing, pulling together until every Beauty has collected together and they are retreating past the boundaries of the forest faster than I can run. Then they are gone from sight.

Men come and stand by me on the edge of the tree line. I look amidst the branches but there is nothing, no yellow, no movement. There are only still, brown branches, bearing the buds of spring.

I realise it’s only the teenagers who stand with me. Adam, Paul, Oliver and Jason, the ones who used to tease poor Thomas before he became the cook. They always looked like a pack of dogs in my mind, standing together, sleeping in a heap. Now they look like four puppies who have been left behind by their mothers.

‘Where are they going?’ says Paul. He is dark blond with a long, curved nose and front teeth that protrude in an attractive way, like a spaniel.

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

‘What?’ says Oliver, the biggest of the Group, the sheepdog with long tangled hair forever in his eyes. ‘What?’ he repeats.

I say again, ‘I don’t know.’

There must be other words than this, but I can’t find them. There is a hole of dread into which my voice has fallen; I can feel my insides being clawed, raked by the nails of my terror.

‘When are they coming back?’ says Adam, and Jason echoes, ‘When?’ They are yapping puppies, black and tan, who may grow fierce one day.

I don’t have any words for this.

Other men come to us. I can’t explain it; the instinct is strong not to go into the woods. We gather on the edge. Someone calls, ‘Hello?’ and the sound is swallowed by the trees.

‘It was Hal and Gareth,’ says a voice behind me that I place as Keith D, the fiddler. ‘They killed one of them. Splattered it to bits. Now the Beauty won’t come back.’

In the aftershock of these words a feeling is forming—a muttering, a tumult such as I have not felt before. ‘They should be punished,’ says Paul, with a sword of a voice, and others agree. The Group surges back from the woods, towards the hut. I go with them, trailing behind. I know what’s going to happen and although I would like to persuade them from this path, I am dumb.

‘It needs a law!’ William is shouting. He stands in the doorway of Hal’s hut, blocking the crowd’s view of the remains of Belinda. ‘It needs due process! We cannot simply decide they’re guilty. Guilty of what?’

‘Murder!’ shout the teenagers.

‘It’s not murder to slice up a plant,’ says William, but his face betrays him and the crowd sees it.

Then, from behind him, come Hal and Gareth. They push him to one side and stand, chins up. ‘We deserve to be punished,’ says Hal. ‘We did it. I had to be free. My mother wouldn’t have liked it.’

‘Do what you like,’ says Gareth, only his clenching fists giving away his feelings. ‘I’m only sorry I didn’t do my own as well. But I couldn’t. I’d do all the rest, but not my Barbara.’

‘It’s murder!’ calls Adam, and Jason repeats, ‘Murder!’ The crowd is building up to something that I do not want to see. It would forever infect my stories.

The bell rings.

It is deep and strong. Uncle Ted stands beside it, on the porch of William’s house. The crowd turn to him, fall into silence for him. He looks like a leader.

‘A beating,’ he says. ‘That’s the punishment. Ten strokes each with this.’ He holds up the stick that usually sits in his belt. ‘I’ll do it. Then none of you are to blame and it’s all done with. I’ll do it by the fireside, in plain sight, where the Beauty can see it.’

He walks to the fire, and stands beside it.

The crowd move towards him, bringing Hal and Gareth with them. I go back to the hut instead, where Doctor Ben is still kneeling over Belinda.

He glances up at me. ‘Look,’ he says.

Outside there is a sound, a meaty thud, followed by another, then another. I put my hands over my ears and turn my eyes to where Doctor Ben points. The mess of Belinda’s head is grey, turning black. There is a glimpse of white. Ben moves the grey strands with his forefinger and more white is revealed. It is a jagged piece of bone, curving away. The remains of a skull.

I take my hands from my ears. The punishment is over. The crowd is making strange noises, like the call of birds at daybreak. I go to the door and see the Beauty returning, with my Bee, lovely Bee, coming for me. My body gets hard for her, even as tears start to form in my eyes.

All the delicate thoughts are gone. My whimsies, my long lithe strands of seasons and stories. Gone.

Uncle Ted seeks me out as night falls. He finds me in the graveyard. His Bonnie and my Bee stand next to each other, humming, while we look at what remains of the graves. The ground is freshly turned over, teeming with worms. If I wasn’t here the nighttime animals would be feasting.

‘Are you glad they’re back?’ I ask him.

He doesn’t reply.

I ask, ‘How are Hal and Gareth?’

‘They’ll heal. I was soft on them. Made it look good for the crowd.’

‘You think the younger ones would have…’

He says, ‘Don’t you?’ Ted shrugs, stamps around the grave of my mother. The sky is clear and it will be a cold night. The pinkish cast of the clouds makes everything soft, hazy, like another world.

‘No,’ I say softly. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘Maybe I know men better than you do then, for all your stories. I know what they’re capable of.’

‘How do you know?’ And then I understand; I can finally put into words what’s been bothering me since that night in the woods. I say, ‘You knew the mushrooms grew only on the graves of women because you buried women there. In the woods, when I was taken. You led me to the place where you had put women in the ground.’

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘Why didn’t you bring their bodies to the graveyard instead?’

‘The idea was to keep them out of this place, Nate. Don’t you get it? I didn’t find them dead. I found them alive. And I killed them.’

‘You—’ It makes no sense to me. ‘But why would you…’

‘Three of them. They were heading straight for us. We’d just buried Teresa the week before, the last of our own women. I couldn’t risk more of them turning up, making us all feel for them, just to lose them. Just to die.’

I say, ‘Maybe they weren’t sick!’

He gives me a pitying smile. ‘All women were sick. Think about it. Why were they wandering through the woods alone if they hadn’t been thrown out of their own town? They’d been sent out there to die by their men.’

‘You don’t know that,’ I whisper. Do I want to hear more? No. Yes. ‘How did you…?’ My eyes fall to the stick on his belt and he rests his hand on the knobbed end.

‘No, I did it kindly. Took them out one at a time, said they needed to be blindfolded to come to us, that we had a cure and needed to be careful about who knew our location. Then I strangled them, quick. They died with hope, which was a gift, wasn’t it? I told them a good story, made up on the moment. Worthy even of you.’

‘Uncle,’ I say. I hold up my hands. ‘No more.’

He kicks at the worms with his boot. ‘Some of us are born to be free on the wings of imagination and some of us are held down by the chains of reality, isn’t that right? No doubt you’d find a better way of saying that. I do the groundwork so you can have your head in the clouds. I don’t want praise for it. I do it gladly, for you, for the memory of your mother. I told her I’d keep you safe. Keep you happy.’

‘I can’t be happy. Not now. Not after today.’

‘Melodrama,’ he tells me, not unkindly. He adjusts his belt. ‘You’re proving my point. This will mean something to you and that’s fine. Weave the deaths and the beatings into your tales and grow from it. However you want to use it. It means nothing to me.’

‘Those women meant nothing to you?’ I ask him. I picture his hands on their soft necks, their eyes covered, their heads thrown back.

‘Nothing that I’m going to tell you,’ he says, and stomps away. Outside the gate his Bonnie waits for him, follows along behind him, not touching him. That is how he likes it, at least in view of the others. Untouchable Uncle Ted.

I am with Bee, in Bee; it is my only solace, my comfort, my distraction. What did I do before it? How can we need something so badly without knowing that the need exists?

Time has swept clean the cobwebs of panic that trailed across our faces when the women started falling sick. We thought we would all get sick. Men too. Why wouldn’t we? We lived in equality, didn’t we? It never occurred to us that the disease would not consider us all equal. There were days of hysteria. Hysteria, the sickness of the womb. And yet somehow William kept us together, even as only the women died.

He told us, if there is help, we will find it, and he sent down to the town, to the men in suits who came in their cars and struggled up the rocks to us with sombre faces that gave out the message so clearly that it was no shock that night when William repeated it to us.

‘Women everywhere are afflicted. So far there’s no cure.’

‘Only women?’ asked Miriam. I got the feeling she and William had already discussed the matter; the question had been planted to focus the Group’s attention on the problem.

‘Only women,’ said William. Someone moaned, long and deep. A terrible sound.

How I hate the sounds of pain.

Bee hums, and I am soothed. Bee never makes sounds that wound me. Even if I beat out its brains with a rock it would not scream or cry out. None of the Beauty would. They would simply leave, and that is why they are stronger than us. Because they do not have to fight at all. It is my job to make the men understand this. We are weaker than them.

After William’s announcement that night, after the Group had wept and railed and attempted to accept the end of half the world, the fireside became a terrible place. Landers and Keith D refused to play, and nobody would have sung anyway. Silence. It is worse than pain. It is my mortal enemy. It kills me, cuts me up, that dread silence of despair. Even back then I couldn’t bear it. I was sixteen years old and already an enemy of silence.

And so I stood up and started to talk. Nothing important. Nothing real. What surprised me, as I retold the plot of the book I had just finished reading, in which a boy wizard defeated a great evil, was that nobody stopped me. I talked for hours, and people listened because they hated the silence too. They were happy to create it, and then terrified by what they made. And so I came to understand the split at the root of the soul of all men.

When I ran out of voice, William said ‘That sounds exciting, Nate. Tell us more tomorrow’.

And so I did.

For the first time, tonight, in Bee’s arms, I worry that I am running out of stories. What will come out of my mouth? What can I say, in the face of what I have learned today?

Why does it even matter any more? Why, in the face of such suffering, do stories matter?

That is the worst thought of all, the thought I want to claw out of my head, wrap in a sack and throw into the sea.

Bee hums louder in my ear. My skin is pressed so close against its clammy yellow breasts that we are almost one.

‘Mother,’ I say. ‘Mother.’

‘It disgusts me,’ says William. ‘It should disgust us all.’

Nobody replies. Uncle Ted faces away from us and Eamon and Doctor Ben sit on the floor of the rough wooden lookout platform. I enjoy the view from the treehouse. The weather is warming up. The nettles are young and sweet for soup, and the birds only think of the need to nest. We have all settled into a pattern; we tessellate. It’s all I ever wanted, and yet it’s not everything. The pattern stretches only so far. I tell my stories every night with increasing desperation.

I preferred speaking about the past. There is so much to say about a past. It is a vein of gold through a mountain, leading to an incontrovertible stone heart of truth. But the future is a horizon—a faintly visible line that may promise much, and always remains too far away to touch. My eyes hurt from trying to see it clearly. And so much depends on me now.

I found some dark glasses of my mother’s amongst her old clothes and have taken to wearing them, much to William’s disapproval. The teenagers have gone one step further. They wear skirts, and cite the ease of joining with their Beauties—no more zips to undo, simply lift the material!—and the coolness that will benefit their packets as the summer approaches.

If it were only teenagers I don’t suppose William would be too offended. But it’s also Thomas, who spends all his time in a pink dress with puffed sleeves, a row of white buttons down the front as delicate as daisies. I burst out laughing the first time I saw him in it and he smiled, his cheeks reddening.

‘I know,’ he said, ‘don’t laugh. Honestly. Trousers have been cutting into my stomach.’

It was a feeble excuse, given that he has been losing so much weight recently. I raised an eyebrow at him, and he added, ‘Betty likes it too.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘Can’t you?’ he said, and I had to admit he was right. Betty stood in the corner of the kitchen and hummed with a contentment that sounded like a cat’s purr.

Since then, two weeks ago, I haven’t seen Thomas out of that dress. Perhaps that’s the reason William called this emergency meeting. What I don’t understand is why I’ve been invited.

‘It’s not right to wear them,’ says William, when nobody rushes to agree with him. ‘It’s disrespectful.’

‘There’s nobody left to disrespect,’ says Eamon. ‘Look at us. We’re shagging mushrooms. Do you really think respect is an issue any more?’

Below us, at the bottom of the tree, the Beauty wait. As usual. They stand so still. They are expecting me to speak for them.

‘They’re not mushrooms,’ I say.

William raises his head and glares at me. ‘Don’t even start,’ he says.

‘Don’t I have the right to speak any more?’ I ask him.

‘We all know where you stand. You’ve spent enough time trying to persuade us that this is part of some grand plan.’

‘I don’t want to speak on that matter,’ I say. ‘This is about something else.’

‘We’re not here to jump to your—’

‘Let him speak,’ says Ted, from where he leans against the trunk of the tree.

William opens his mouth and then closes it.

‘The Beauty are intelligent,’ I say. ‘They communicate with each other. They communicate with us too, although we pretend not to hear. They are—they are our women reborn.’

‘They are not,’ says Eamon. ‘That’s a lie.’

I say, ‘I don’t lie.’

‘That’s all you do!’ he says.

‘Wait,’ says Doctor Ben. ‘He’s not lying. Not exactly.’ He clears his throat and hugs his knees. ‘After the incident involving Hal and Gareth, investigation of the… remains suggested that some of the bones of the deceased have been incorporated into the, err, the Beauty. Most notably the skull and the spine. I don’t know if they’re all the same. Maybe it was a random occurrence with that one.’

‘Belinda,’ I supply. Its name was Belinda, before its head was smacked into pieces.

Nobody speaks. Eamon stretches out his legs, stands and begins to descend the ladder. At the bottom his Beauty—Bree—comes to him, arms open, and he pushes it away with a great shove so strong that it falls backwards and sprawls on the ground. I didn’t know Eamon was so strong. He walks away and Bree picks itself up and follows after him.

‘So they’ve used some old bones,’ says William, and his voice shakes. ‘That changes nothing.’

‘They sprang from women,’ I say. ‘We use them like women. They are women.’

‘They are not, and we will not call them such.’

‘They’re not women, Nate,’ says Uncle Ted. He turns to me and I see a great weariness in his face. ‘You had a mother, but not a wife. You don’t understand the difference between it. I don’t say this to take anything away from you. You must trust those who remember all of womanhood, not just the hugs of a mother.’

Am I missing some element of love? The Beauty offer comfort, sex and softness. What else is there? And how can Uncle Ted say he knows these things and I don’t? There are things he has seen, times he has experienced, that I never will—I give him that. But his capacity to hurt, to kill—is that what he thinks makes him a real man? If so, I will never be a real man and I am glad of it.

‘Regardless of what they are,’ says Doctor Ben, ‘we must draw up rules of conduct. The mark of humanity is how it treats the world and those who share it with us—and the Beauty are alive. Whatever they are, they’re alive.

‘We started this Group to live by a set of principles. We grow our own food. We replace what we use. We protect what we rear. Now we have taken the Beauty into us. The Beauty deserve to be treated with respect for our sake, if not for theirs.’

William turns on him, his yellowed teeth bared. ‘You didn’t start this Group at all,’ he says. And that is when I know he has forgotten how to be a leader.

I look at Uncle Ted, and he returns my gaze. Then he says, ‘William, that remark is unworthy of you.’

William does not reply. He shrinks down into himself, getting smaller and smaller, and I know he feels it inside. He is not fit to lead us any more. When Ted says, ‘Right then, let’s draw up a list of rules and Nate can read it out tonight, exactly as it’s written down,’ William does not object, and as smoothly as that power changes hands.

I feel the inspiration of it. Glorious revolution. The schoolbooks talked of it, heads chopped off and crowds baying, and yet all the stability of my world only needed a few words to be wiped away. It didn’t even need a story.

And I am at this meeting to witness it. Ted wanted me here, not William. He wanted me to see the change in power and to understand that I am now his mouthpiece.

My freedom is gone and we are being led by a killer.

To start—

There were no rules. Rules were not necessary. There was man, and there was work and there was plenty. Plenty does not mean riches. There was simply enough. Abundance would have created inequality.  

But there was loneliness too. Deep in the bones and brain there was loneliness, in a world of seed and egg, of bee and flower, of pairs. To be a man was to find a hole inside and know it could never be filled.

Until the coming of the Beauty.

They grew from the soil and understood without needing words or guidance. They took a form pleasing to man’s eye and came amongst him, walking into his garden. And there was much fear at first. Man trembled at the new, the unknown. They couldn’t recognise the gift they had been given, even though they took it in their arms and pressed it to their hearts. They were no longer alone, and it was a hard thing to understand.

But then they began to see. Spring came and the birds nested. The hares boxed and the feelings rose up strong in man again. Feelings of love. They began to look at the Beauty and see wealth. Riches.

And then man divided into men. Some men saw their fortune and rejoiced in it. But other men felt their fear grow stronger—fear of what they were being given, what they would have to pay for it and what might be lost. And they looked out at the innocent Beauty and brought violence and pain into their gardens, not through deliberate murderous intent, but through the sickness in their souls.

The sickness led to further division. Should they banish the Beauty and be lonely just so violence could not find them? Or should they face their fear and overcome their instincts? It was too big a question to answer.

But the men had an ally. They had reason. Reason, the greatest gift ever given to them. They could think and think again, and in the thinking there lay solace from simply feeling. If they were at war with their emotions, thinking was the best weapon they possessed.

We are reasonable men. We can think of a path that may, one day, lead to a solution that eases us all.

Here is the path:

We will not kill the Beauty.

We will not hurt the Beauty deliberately.

We will not steal another man’s Beauty.

We will attempt to be honest in all dealings with the Beauty.

We will not speak ill of another man because of how he chooses to deal with his Beauty.

We will hold true to these tenets, for the good of the Group, for now and forever, and on, and on, until the end.

‘I told them,’ I say to Bee, from deep within its embrace. ‘And now Ted wants to see me.’ Am I to be punished? The thought of it won’t leave me.

It feels like three o’clock in the morning. My mother used to say that whenever you wake in the dead of night it’s bound to be three o’clock, it’s just the way it is, and the hands of the clock move slower at that time than at any other. We never had a clock so I couldn’t say, but it is a three-o’clock feeling for sure. More and more of what my mother used to say is returning to me.

My tent hut is warm, my blankets piled high. Bee’s skin is clammy, but I’m used to that. I am comfortable, surrounded by the things I love, the books I have been allowed to take from the school over the years, because nobody else was interested. Some are stolen, I admit; a blind eye was turned by my old teacher Miriam, no doubt. I miss her knack of knowing me and looking like all the answers of life belonged to her, even the impossible ones. I am an adult now and I feel no such surety; I hope I fake confidence as well as she did.

Perhaps that is the role of a responsible person—to fake the confidence he doesn’t feel so that the young can believe in something. Except there are no young ones any more. I’m not sure who I’m faking for.

‘Is it for you?’ I ask Bee, and it strokes my face, putting visions in my head of a masterwork of flesh and yellow, a tower built of our bodies, extending out of our arms and legs to form fresh joints, bones, limbs and even mouths that hum to make a symphony of such beauty that it hurts to hear it. The tower reaches to the sky where all is clear, and down below, under the soil, there are roots that stretch as deep as the tower is tall. Deeper, even, to the great heart of our beating planet. Between us all we make the base and pinnacle of Man and Beauty.

‘How?’ I say to Bee.

It shows me clouds speeding by, days and nights, the movement of the earth, years and years, wrapped and folded like a gift.

‘Men age,’ I whisper. ‘Men die.’ How can we unite in this way, build to harmony? The Beauty will outlive us, but we have only this generation. There will be no more.

I receive in my mind’s eye a picture of Thomas. He cooks in his kitchen kneading bread, his cheeks reddened with the effort, wearing his mother’s dress. He looks—I can’t describe it. There is an aura that surrounds him. I feel the expectation of the Beauty has settled on him. He will do something of phenomenal importance.

‘What?’

But I don’t understand the images I am being shown. The speed of them, the blurs of browns and reds and yellows, the streams of these colours running together. The patterns take me down and Bee hums on. I can feel its pleasure as it lulls me, like a baby, to sleep.

‘We’re very disappointed in you,’ says Uncle Ted.

I don’t know who he means with his we. He stands alone, his hand resting on the stick in his belt.

I remember a story my mother told me about my uncle, set back in the time when they were children, living in a suburb with a mother and a father of their own, like in the creased pages of the picture books on the back shelf of the classroom. ‘A suburb was like a village,’ she said, ‘but with spidering roads through it that took people in and out of the nearby city, like blood to a heart.’

Cities are pumps, in my head. They beat with vibrant life, but nobody can stop flowing around its complex chambers and ventricles. There must always be movement or there is death. I imagine they must all be as still and brittle as skeletons now—those great cities of the past.

My mother said Uncle Ted ran away to the city. She never told me why; she made it sound like a whim, but I wonder now what kind of pressure could have made him move inwards to that heart. She said he came back three months later, thinner and older. Time had moved in a different way for him in the city. It speeds and slows depending on where you are, and who you are with.

This morning, time has stopped.

Why is Uncle Ted in this house? Usually I would ask the questions that come to me: Are you living here? Where is Thomas going to live? I want to speak of the importance of Thomas, of the need to protect him, cherish him. And I also want to ask—why must my Bee wait outside, on the other side of the door, while his Beauty stands here in this room, behind him?

But I say nothing. Because this room, this table, the way the chairs are set and the look on Ted’s face, make it impossible to speak.

I’m wrong. Time has not stopped. It has reversed. My uncle is a man and I am a boy again, and everything about this room makes me feel it.

He says, ‘It was made clear to you to speak only of the rules. To make the rules plain for all.’

Uncle Ted flicks his fingers from his stick. Am I meant to speak? Is this time that is allotted to me? All the reasons I had in my head for what I did have vanished. I am a dandelion clock. One breath from Ted and I am scattered.

‘Dandelion,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘Thoughts fly if you breathe too hard. The rules are a shout, but the story is a sigh. This way they do not scatter. They keep their shape, and only bend in the breeze.’

‘Is that right?’ says Ted.

This is not what I wanted to say. I wanted to make it clear that I have very little power over the story. It must come out as it does. I have been unfaithful to my gift by suggesting that it is under my control. If it can be controlled by me, then I can be controlled by others. I know my uncle is too clever to miss this. I can see from the way he cocks his head that he has not.

‘You know this business of stories better than me,’ he says. ‘I never had much use for them. Perhaps you’re right. But I’m sure you realise how much relies on you in this difficult time.’

I nod. He places manacles on me, weighing me down with responsibilities he usurped, and all I do is nod. My cowardice shames me, and yet, even as I berate myself, I hear in my head the sound of his stick on flesh and I cringe away from that memory.

‘Let me tell you what’s happening, Nate,’ he says. ‘For your own good. A council has been formed. William, Eamon, Ben and I will steer our Group through this, keep violence under control and help make a new way to live. You brought the Beauty among us and I don’t blame you. Nobody blames you. But you must understand that there are those among us who want to tread them back down into the mushrooms they sprang from.

‘So we must find a way to control ourselves and the Beauty. And when you remake the past and take potshots at the future in your stories, you play with a delicate balance. You could tip us into chaos. Now, I know that isn’t your intention, and that is why we’ve had this talk privately. Next time you tell a story and I don’t like the meaning, you’ll be up in front of the Council and there will be punishment.’

‘So the Council agrees with you about this?’ I ask. Council. That’s a word that belongs in books of civic duty and from a world we wanted no part in. I can’t believe William would sit on a council, let alone use the word. This is a temporary peace at best, no matter what Ted might want.

He says, ‘They do.’

I say, ‘You are a judge now?’ He frowns at me, and the familiar expression frees my tongue. I am no slave of his. ‘You need a curly wig. You need a black flapping robe, like a crow. You are more than one man?’

‘We have to be more than men now, Nate, and you have only yourself to thank for that responsibility. Did you really think this way would be better? Fucking plants that bear the shape of the dead; this is what you bring us to. And then you ask us to be happy about it. Well, I’ll try to make it stick, for the sake of your mother. She was just like you. She didn’t understand about consequences. It was always my duty to keep her safe and now I’ll keep you safe too, whether you like it or not.’

I walk up to the long table; I feel it under my hands, so smooth, this new mark of power. I wish for the strength to take it up, to break it with a sudden snap as clean as the breaking of bone.

I say, ‘She didn’t understand because you were always there to do it for her, is that it? Did you bring her here because you saw the cities out there and found them lacking? And now you want to do the same for us all—protect us from what could be terrible and beautiful and all the things in between, the things that live on and live on. But maybe we want to live on with the Beauty. Maybe we don’t want your protection.’

Uncle Ted smiles at me. He is not in the least angry.

‘Nate,’ he says. ‘You’re not more than a man after all. You’re less than one. You always will be. It’s not about what people want. It’s about what they need to survive. For us all to survive. You’re all so weak that you’ll pine away if the Beauty leave, so I’ll find a way to make this sorry remains of life work. And in return you’ll do as you’re told and be grateful for it. You’ll start by telling a story of the past tonight and you won’t meddle with it: Tell the story of how the Group started. And you won’t mention this conversation, or the Beauty.’

‘I don’t—’

He walks around the table and puts an arm around my shoulder, holding tightly, steering me to the door. ‘Enough.’

I want to say more. I want to. I want to. But his words are strong. Want has nothing to do with it. If I am to be a man I must give up on want. I must be more.

It comes to me that maybe I don’t want to be a man.

On the other side of the door, Bee is waiting with Doctor Ben and his Bella. Ben wears an expression that makes me forget my thoughts.

‘How is he?’ says Uncle Ted.

‘He’s up and about,’ says Ben. ‘In the kitchen, of course. He said he had to make soup for lunch.’

‘You’re sure it’s a tumour?’ he asks Ben.

Ben nods.

Time, that slippery fish, has shot past my guard once more and my hands are empty, clutching at meaning. ‘Thomas?’ I ask.

‘It’s bad news,’ says Doctor Ben. Ted’s grip on my shoulder tightens. It is painful. ‘A fast-growing cancer of the bowel.’

I say, ‘No.’

‘He collapsed late last night, after your story. Thomas says there’s no pain. But it’s eating up his strength. Still, you can’t stop him cooking.’

I wrestle free of Uncle Ted’s grip; in his eyes I see surprise at my sudden strength. I say, ‘You didn’t tell me.’

Ted says, ‘You’ve just been told now.’

‘He’s my friend,’ I say. Doesn’t Ted even understand the word?

‘Go see him,’ says Ben. He stands aside and I walk past to Bee, who stands waiting for me without concern. I don’t hear it, but I know it’s following me down the hall to the kitchen where I find Thomas chopping an onion with a speed that amazes me. The noise of the knife is like a woodpecker, white flakes of onion flying up from the blade.

My Bee goes to his Betty by the sink and they hum together, complacent, a soothing sound. Thomas uses the flat of his knife to scrape the onions into his pot on the heat and they sizzle; the smell hits me, an instant panacea. What can be wrong in the world when onions fry?

Then he turns to me, and I see how his face has shrunk in on itself overnight, the skin pulling back, giving him a beaky nose, a stretched forehead. And he is bending to one side, as if a force pulls at him. Under his apron, on his left hip, there is a bulge and is it as if his entire body is curving to it, favouring it, making him into a question mark.

‘Don’t worry,’ he says. He takes up a wooden spoon from the drawer and turns back to the onions. The Beauty hums on. The room is hot and pleasant, with the wooden surfaces and the gleaming dip of the sink. I have never seen death. I have spent time in the graveyard and felt the desiccated remains of death—the dry, cold taste of it as it travels through your veins in shreds, blocking you up, slowing you down. Death is not lurking in this room. This is life. The yellow glow of the leaves through the window is life.

I understand what Bee showed to me last night.

I leave the kitchen and find Uncle Ted and Doctor Ben in the hall, deep in quiet conversation. They stop talking as I approach. I know I must look strange to them with my happiness shining out of me, as bright and hopeful as sunrise.

‘It’s not a tumour,’ I tell them.

Ben shakes his head. ‘Nate, there’s no escaping the fact that there’s a growth in the bowel that will, in a matter of months—’

I repeat, ‘It’s not a tumour.’ I can’t contain the words any longer. They are the best words I’ve ever spoken. ‘It’s a baby.’

PART THREE

I lie in a proper bed, blankets piled high against the cold, Bee beside me, and I think of the line.

The line is invisible, but it exists. It runs from the edge of the wood, through the centre of the campfire, to the graveyard. On one side there is William’s hut, the communal huts, the school hut and the fields, and on the other side there is the big house where Ted now lives with Thomas. And where I spend all my time, waiting for a miracle.

For the birth of this baby will be the miracle that will unite us once more. The line draws its strength from its invisibility. Nobody wants to talk about it and I am forbidden to mention it, so the line grows longer and stronger. William, Eamon, the farmers, the older men: they all think there will be no baby and they hate the idea that there could be hope. Because hope takes the form of a joining rather than a continuation.

We will meld to grow. Part human, part Beauty. Could anything be more wonderful, more terrifying? The offer of salvation in the form of a baby who is not a baby. I can finally begin to understand why men kill.

And yet Uncle Ted, the killer, stands firmly with us as a protector of Thomas, never leaving him, grim-faced whenever one of the others approaches. I don’t understand this change in Ted. But then, his motives have never been up for untangling. For all his calmness, I feel there is a mess of man underneath. He loves, he hates, he hides the emotions where he thinks nobody can see. And then his eyes burn and his lips draw up, like a threatened dog.

It has occurred to me that my mother was afraid of Ted, of what he might do to others if he thought they were drawing too close to something. To what?

It has been a long six months of consideration and revelation for me; and in that time Thomas has swelled, not to the front like the pictures of pregnant women in the books, but to the side, low on his hip, then pushing out his stomach and distorting his chest. He wears the dresses that once belonged to Miriam—she was a large woman—and still he cooks on, with no perturbation on his face. Thomas emits a serenity that affects all who spend moments with him.

It sneaks into my bland stories of the past, stories that have become more and more fantastical. I tell stories of fairies and goblins, and tea parties for trolls, while the real meanings pretend to be invisible. The goblins go to war or the fairies squabble over a golden crown, hidden deep in the woods. And meanwhile the meanings squat low, so low in the words, that Ted cannot complain.

William and Eamon sit on one side of the fire and we sit on the other, and everyone listens to my stories, long serials that go on night after night. They all wear the expression of hearing pleasant diversions.

We have become excellent liars all round.

Sleep is a truth that will not come readily to those who fill their minds with pretence, so I sit up and watch my breath billow out into the December cold. Then I get up, wrap myself in one of my blankets and think of hot milk in the kitchen, the warm froth of it. One of the delights of living in the big house is the ease of raiding supplies.

Bee sits up and I send it an image of milk. It lies back down with a low hum. In the past months it has become less interested in staying beside me at all times. We can spend a few minutes apart; we no longer even meld every day. That flush of first need has mellowed into a companionship that brings its own pleasures. I could never be without my Bee, but physical presence is not always necessary. I’ve noticed the same with some of the other Beauties, such as Ted’s Bonnie, but by no means all.

As I tiptoe down the stairs it occurs to me that the Beauty are showing differences between themselves. Could it be that this has always been the case and I simply didn’t know them well enough to see it? I don’t think so. Maybe they are no longer of one mind. Like the Group, there are fresh divisions. We grow and change—all of us. Will we all grow together?

The smooth surfaces of the kitchen still this thinking. I find the milk jug and pour a little into a small pan, then place it on the cooker. The bottom of the pan makes a hiss as it connects with the heat. It must still have been wet from washing. I picture Thomas methodically cleaning up late at night after my story, finding peace in his movements. For a moment I am jealous of him.

The moon is bright and full through the window. I look on it and see a forever face, a permanence. Some things will always remain the same.

In the stillness it comes to me that I am not alone.

I go to the pantry and listen by the door. Is that breathing I hear? I open the door and at first there are only the black lines of the shelves against the grey jumble of the night. And then I see Thomas. He is crouching, his back against the bottom shelf where the large jars of pickled onions live. His hands are over his face, but I know him.

Betty stands beside him. It takes a step forward, radiating energy, and I get the feeling that it might be about to hit me. ‘I won’t hurt him,’ I tell it, and it stands back and lets me through. I kneel down and put my blanket around him; he is a puddle on the floor in his floral dress, with his big white socks and his blue knitted jumper. I say words of comfort and feel them sink into him, penetrate his misery and bring him back to himself. Eventually he drops his arms and I sit back on my haunches.

‘It’s freezing in here,’ I say.

Thomas says, ‘It’s a larder. It’s meant to keep the food cold.’

‘I know that.’

‘Help me up.’ He holds out his hands, and it takes all my strength to pull him to his feet. Then I collect the blanket from where it has fallen and try to put it around his shoulders once more, but he shrugs it off. ‘Too hot anyway,’ he mutters. ‘You have it.’

But his skin is so cold as I help Thomas to the kitchen. Should I call Doctor Ben? But he has washed his hands of us, that is what he said to Ted. ‘I can’t treat a patient who doesn’t believe he is sick,’ Ben said.

Besides, he thinks Thomas is dying. He stays true to his diagnosis.

The milk has bubbled over in the pan. Thomas tuts. ‘I’ll have to clean that up tomorrow.’ He props himself against the sink and I pour the milk into a mug. When I hold it out to him he shakes his head, so I sip it and feel it as a solid, welcome heat in my mouth and between my hands. Another thing I can be sure of.

‘I’m an idiot,’ Thomas says.

‘Nothing new there.’

‘Well, now I’m a bigger one than usual.’ He pats the soft roundness of himself with gentle hands. ‘A huge one.’

‘Does it hurt?’ I ask him.

‘No. But it makes me… slow. And awkward. And I can’t sleep at night for its turning and poking.’

‘It moves inside you?’

‘All the time, but worse at night. Sometimes I love it and sometimes…’ He looks at Betty, who has emerged from the pantry and shut the door behind itself. ‘…I hate it and I want it out of me. It drains me. I can’t explain it.’ His face contorts again. ‘It makes me so ugly.’

I put down the mug and give him my most serious face. ‘I hate to tell you this, Thomas, but you were always ugly.’

He punches my arm. It actually hurts.

I say, ‘Ow!’

‘You deserve it.’

I move to the window and relish the constant moon. The garden is flat and leafless, like a picture. Nothing moves. I wish I could speak to my moon, charm it, make it smile.

‘What’s going to happen?’ says Thomas.

‘With you, or with everyone?’ I ask.

‘I don’t know. Both.’

I understand what he wants from me. I say, ‘You’ll have this baby and it will be—it will be—people will take one look at it and they will realise that it needs our love, our unity. Babies bring people together. That’s what they are for. Everyone celebrates the arrival of a baby. I read that somewhere.’

‘And everyone will love it?’ Thomas says, a husk, waiting for me to fill him with hope.

‘Everyone.’

‘But it will be mine.’ He puts his hands on the swelling and his face becomes peaceful as he closes his eyes. Is he trying to communicate with it in the way that I communicate with my Bee? Are pictures passing between them? After a moment he opens his eyes, and says, ‘How come you’re so sure?’

‘Sure of what?’

‘That it is.’ He makes a gesture, palms unfolding, like the blooming of a flower between his fingers. ‘Is a baby.’

‘I just am. And so are you.’

‘You’re my confidence, ‘ he says. ‘You’re my confidence, Nate.’ He reaches for my hand, and squeezes it.

‘Get some sleep,’ I tell him. ‘Let Betty put you to bed.’

Betty comes forward, and scoops him up. He sighs. I think he might sleep now.

I return to my room to see Bee lying there, and my space in the bed beside it. For the first time I ask myself—is that truly where I belong? Is Bee an integral part of me?

I am Thomas’s confidence and Bee is mine. But what if Bee has lied to me, just as I have lied to Thomas? I can’t bear to think of it, of Thomas’s hands on that swelling and Doctor Ben saying there is no hope. And I doubt. I doubt.

Once, in the school allotment, when Paul and Adam mixed up all the labels on the seeds for a joke, Miriam made it their job to care for all the seedlings personally until they could identify them all. It took them months and every time they asked Miriam for help, she said, ‘You made that bed, now you have to lie in it.’ It became a well-worn phrase for a while, behind her back, although I’m sure she heard us whispering it, trying to emulate her teaching tone.

There are two types of understanding in this world. There’s the kind that comes from the reading and the hearing, and it doesn’t penetrate the skin. It is surface knowledge, like a soft blanket that can be placed over the shoulders. And then there is the understanding that comes from doing. That kind of understanding is not soft. It is water that soaks into the rocks and earth, and makes the seeds grow. It is messy, and painful, and impossible to hold.

I get back in my bed. I lie in it.

Thomas moans deeply. The sound, dense with pain, fills his small room. It sinks into his peeling wallpaper and the thrown-back bedsheets.

I talk to him, but he is in a place beyond listening. I say ridiculous, hopeful things, as the skin over his left hip suppurates and oozes, a red mess of blood and pus. Doctor Ben examines it. From my position, sitting next to Thomas’ head, I have a view of Ben’s expression and also down the length of Thomas’s naked body. The swelling is giant, grotesque, the wound on it sickening. Nobody knows how it happened. There were screams in the early morning and I found him this way, Betty hovering over him, shaking its featureless head back and forth.

Thomas’s shiny skin is pulled tight across his chest and stomach, stretched to the point of splitting. But my eyes are not drawn to this as much as to his cock and balls. The balls are shrivelled like walnuts, tiny, in a wrinkled pouch that nestles under a tiny worm of a cock. There’s no hair on him there. And the smell is so sweet and terrible, like death.

Bee, Betty and Bella squeeze up against each other in the corner of the room, blocking the light from the window so we are in semi-darkness. They are motionless. I can see now how it is possible to hate them. Did Betty do this to Thomas, or is this suffering part of the coming of the baby? Is this part of their plan? His eyes roll back in his head and he moans again. I have to say something. I have nothing to say.

‘Thank you for coming out,’ I say to Doctor Ben.

He nods. I think my desperation persuaded him to attend.

‘The injury must have happened days ago. It’s become infected,’ he says.

‘No. He was fine yesterday.’

Ben shakes his head, then says, ‘Can you hold him down? You’ll need to be strong.’

‘I’ll try.’ I clamp my hands on Thomas’s shoulders, try to prepare myself to put my weight against him. Ben lowers one hand on to the swelling. It could only be a light touch, but Thomas lets out a noise that I have only heard animals make, a cry beyond meaning, and the vast lump inside him moves, independent of his body, rippling under Ben’s hand.

Ben falls back, stumbles, and I can’t hold Thomas. He has a strength that I could not have imagined as he pulls himself up from the bed and throws me off. He turns on to his knees so that he is crouching, and Thomas puts his own hands to his wound and pulls it apart.

I see his fingers reach in, peel back the skin and dig through the thick yellow mess that spills out of him, coming free from his body, hanging in strands and globs and soaking into the sheets. He pulls free a solid, grey-streaked mass and it falls on to the bed. It writhes and flails and Ben cries out, a noise of such terror. He gets to his feet and reaches out to the mass. Thomas screams.

The Beauties move so fast that my eyes see it as a trick in the dim light. Two of them take Ben’s legs while the third puts its hands on either side of his head, and squeezes. There is the sound like the cracking of an egg, and then Ben is gone. He is all gone. His eyes and nose and mouth are gone to pieces, a mess, and all I can recognise is the tangle of grey hair that my Bee scoops up in its hands and carries from the room. Bella takes the rest of Ben, carried in its arms. I am left alone with Thomas, Betty and the thing on the bed.

The baby.

Thomas’s eyes are clear and free from pain. He sits back and gathers the baby to his chest. And it is a baby, recognisable in its arms and legs, its scrunched-up eyes and moving mouth. It lets out a noise that is undoubtedly a baby noise. I saw a brand-new baby once before, all pink and swaddled, when I was very young, and it was being passed around a room filled with women who softly held it close. I’m certain that’s what this is. A baby. A baby. The word is a delight in my mind. The baby’s skin is yellow, as yellow as the Beauty, but in every other way it is a baby.

‘It’s a girl,’ says Thomas.

I don’t even understand. ‘A girl,’ I repeat. Yes, between the legs there is a smooth, split bud. A vulva. A vagina. A womb. This baby has a womb.

He breathes out, and Betty comes to him and puts its head on his shoulder, close to the baby. I move back from the bed to give them some time together and I look at Thomas’s wound. Yellow mucus has formed a crust over his hip and there is no blood, no visible injury. I think Thomas will survive this.

Instead, as Betty hums to its newborn daughter, I realise I have a new fear growing inside me, ready to end everything that I thought I once knew.

…and the man and his wife of clay, who was a present from the earth itself, wanted a baby so badly that the man ripped at his flesh, crying out in need.

Then a miracle happened.

He took a handful of his flesh and it transformed, before his eyes, into a child that was half of the clay and half of the man. It was a girl, a gift beyond price. The man and his wife loved their baby girl instantly and were overjoyed, but then it came to them that not everyone in their village would rejoice with them. There were those who rocked jealousy in their arms each night, and those that fed hatred in their bosom. Did they harbour enough of these terrible emotions to hurt an innocent baby? Surely nobody could be that scared, that jealous, that evil?

So the man called a meeting and held the new baby up high in the firelight, so everyone could see how tiny and beautiful she was. ‘Look at my baby,’ the man said. And everyone was struck afresh by the miracle of new life, and they swore to protect her from that moment on, and on, and on, until the end.

On cue, Thomas comes forward and I retreat from the centre of the circle so that all eyes are on him, and the bundle he unwraps. In the glow of the fire, that yellow skin is the colour of butter, warmer than the mustard skin of the Beauty. She is getting lighter.

She starts to cry, from the cold no doubt. There is a frost tonight and the circle is tight, so I can see everyone’s face clearly as they look at the arms and legs, the head, the littleness of the limbs. The Beauty sit outside the circle, as usual, in their own Group—but all their bodies are turned to the baby.

‘This is Holly,’ says Thomas, with the pride of a father. ‘Merry Christmas to us all.’ He covers his baby over. Behind him, Betty hums with pride. I like to think it’s pride.

William is disgusted and Eamon is mirroring his expression. Such ugliness. But Ted sits beside William and his face is thoughtful. He does not speak. Nobody speaks. I feel the knife that separates us keenly. Can Holly heal this wound?

‘Are you trying to feed us this shit, Nate, and make us like the taste?’ says Gareth. His face does not give away disgust. He and Hal are stuck fast to their hatred of the Beauty. They are dangerous men.

I glance at Ted, but he does not move. ‘It’s only a story,’ I say. ‘Just to help us along the way.’

‘And what if nobody wants to go your way?’

Thomas falls back to Betty’s side and it puts its arms around him and the baby. I feel the tension in the Beauty growing. Bee and the others raise the tone of their humming, just a little.

I say, ‘You can do what you like, Gareth, as long as you let others do the same. Live and let live.’

‘Like they did with Doctor Ben?’ Gareth asks.

The Group is silent. I feel the knife of their attention pressed against my neck. I say, ‘That was an accident.’ And maybe it was. I would love to be sure that it was—that he had deserved what happened. The Beauty must have seen in his mind and known his intention. Of course, that must be true. It would make it easier to forget kind Doctor Ben, my friend in days gone past, who now visits me in my sleep and watches me with accusatory eyes in a disembodied head.

‘Hal and I saw them burying that accident, and his head was ripped clean off. He didn’t want that thing you call a baby to live, so they got to him first.’

‘He threatened the baby,’ I say.

Gareth says, ‘He swore an oath to take care of all human life! If he was prepared to kill it, then he knew it wasn’t human.’

I hear approval in the murmurings of the Group. Gareth is gaining ground. If I can feel danger in the air, then so can the Beauty, and I know how far they’ll go to protect Holly.

‘Listen,’ I say.

‘We’ve had enough of your stories!’ calls Hal.

‘Then let me tell you straight that you’ll all die.’

The Group quiets. They want brutality tonight, either in words or actions, so I’ll give them what they want. I continue, ‘When you killed one of the Beauty, Gareth, they didn’t retaliate. And we made laws to deal with such things. Well, now the Beauty have made their own law. Nobody will harm that baby. Nobody will touch that baby without the permission of the Beauty, or they will rip off your heads. It’s their future as much as it’s ours.’

Ted stands up in the silence. Everyone looks to him. ‘It’s a new rule,’ he says. ‘The Council will ratify it.’

‘No,’ says William. ‘No, they won’t.’

He leaves the circle. Eamon follows, then Hal, Gareth and others—mainly the elders. Their Beauties do not go with them. They stay, gathered together, close to Thomas and the baby.

Ted sits back down and puts his head in his hands. We, the remains of the Group, watch him. I want him to do something, say something. I want him to be stronger than ever before, but he does not speak.

In the end it’s Thomas who breaks the spell.

‘Holly’s getting cold,’ he says. ‘I need to take her inside.’

‘Did it hurt?’ says Adam, suddenly. He and the teenagers have all stayed.

‘I’ve never felt pain like it,’ says Thomas. ‘It was like dying.’

‘As bad as that?’

‘But it healed so quickly. And then it was like it never happened. I know it was terrible, but I can’t remember what the pain was like. It’s strange.’

Adam and Paul exchange long looks. ‘And do you love the baby?’ says Paul.

Thomas says, ‘Oh yes. She makes my life complete.’

At least I got something right tonight.

Adam and Paul whisper for a moment. Then they stand up together, and throw off the blankets they have been wearing over their shoulders. They both wear thick woollen dresses, and the bulges on their left hips are small, but visible.

‘Oh Jesus,’ says Uncle Ted. His hands fall from his face. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ.’

‘We didn’t want to say until we knew what would happen with Thomas,’ says Adam. ‘But it’s all right, isn’t it? It will be all right?’

He asks it of me, but it’s Ted who replies. ‘Move into the big house,’ he says. ‘Keep as quiet as you can. Don’t go anywhere alone and keep those lumps hidden.’The fear in his voice is like the charge in the air before a lightning storm.

‘They’ll come around,’ I say.

‘No. No, they won’t.’ And with that he leaves the circle too.

The knife has fallen and we are split. With the death of our doctor, there is no way to heal this wound.

It’s raining. The cold has seeped into everything. We all complain of it, but I think maybe we are really complaining about our fear. It is the same feeling—icy fingers around us, squeezing, as the silence stretches on from the other side. Those we once recognised as part of us will break it all, just as winter breaks the world down into death.

We sit in the large room where Uncle Ted once threatened me. That feels like a very long time ago. The table has been pushed back against the wall, and blankets and cushions cover the floor.

The teenagers like this room. The tall windows let in the sun, if there is any to see. Not today, though. This is the slowest Sunday I can remember. I’ve told all my old stories so many times over the past weeks, and there are no new ones in me. I hoped Holly might inspire me, but she is a clean sheet of paper. Even her cries do not move me. They sound automatic, like the cheeping of a bird for its mother. Mindless. This scares me too, and adds to the cold.

Thankfully, Holly sleeps a lot in Thomas’s arms. Thomas has commandeered a corner of this room, and it’s rare that he moves from it. He keeps blankets piled high around him, covering his body and the baby. He smells terrible. Betty is the only one who does not seem to mind. It stands near to him, unmoving. I’ve not seen it touch him or the baby. I don’t even hear it hum.

The cooking duties have fallen to Adam and Paul, to keep them out of mischief during their own swellings. Alas, their cooking is terrible! They take the dried ingredients we have left and serve up lumpy stews and leaky grey omelettes, which Thomas eats with gusto. He’s the only one.

It can’t be past two in the afternoon, but already it’s getting difficult to discern any edges to the room. Is Thomas asleep again? He doesn’t move as I stand and stretch out my legs. Uncle Ted is out. I don’t ask where he goes. The others are doing chores, or at least watching their Beauties do the chores for them. All of the manual tasks have been taken away now and our muscles are dissipating, leaving us with weakening arms. We have become reliant.

‘Want to hold her?’ says Thomas. So he is awake after all, looking at me with the hope of kindness in his eyes. It occurs to me that his new role might not give him everything he needs. There is loneliness, fear and even guilt in such heavy responsibilities. And he is the first to feel these things. Thomas never did like to go first, even in the classroom.

I walk over to him. Bee does not bother to follow. It has stopped sharing with me lately and does not show me visions. Or maybe I stopped sharing with it. I don’t know which. All I’m sure of is that I often find myself checking my hip for signs of a lump and feel such relief when there is nothing to be found.

‘All right then,’ I say. The smell is awful, like curdled milk. He throws back the top blanket and Holly is there, crinkled yellow skin, sticky brown hair in clumps and a face like a painting, not quite human, yet too human to be real.

Thomas holds out his arms. The image of Betty taking off Doctor Ben’s head comes into my mind. I say, ‘No, I’ll just watch her.’

‘Okay.’ Is it my imagination or does he seem relieved at that? He wets his lips with his tongue, and says, ‘I don’t really like to let her go, and Betty can feel it.’

‘Of course.’

‘But if you wanted to hold her, then I’m sure—’

‘No. It’s fine.’

He looks around the empty room. ‘Everything has changed, hasn’t it? I wouldn’t say this in front of the others, but it’s not what you promised.’

‘Later,’ I say. ‘It all comes good later. When has there ever been a bumper crop without a harsh winter? Maybe we don’t get the benefit of this harvest, but Holly does. I didn’t understand before.’ I still don’t understand now, but he needs something to imagine, and I’ll give him a long straight road in his head that leads to better times. I don’t have to believe it to make him see it; I’ve learned that now.

I talk and talk about Holly’s life-in-waiting, and he laps it up. It’ll be like before, I tell him. She will be the mother of new women, and humans and Beauty will live in harmony. The Beauty will be our benevolent guardians, stopping us from listening to the worst things in our hearts, making everything perfect this time around. Maybe there will be cities again, but with no crime, no pain; harmony in form and intent. And what will it matter if some of us are pink-skinned, and some of us are brown and some of us are yellow? We’ll overcome such unimportant matters.

I could go on forever, spinning this new world of tall towers and hand-holding, but Holly is opening and closing her mouth, wriggling in her blanket. No sound comes out, but I feel her hunger. She transmits it. I’ve never felt something so clearly from a Beauty, even from Bee. It’s intense and painful. Unwelcome.

‘She’s hungry.’ Thomas hesitates, his body curved over her.

‘You want me to get some milk from the kitchen?’ I ask him.

‘Listen, I’ve not been giving her milk.’ He swallows. ‘Please don’t freak out if I show you this.’ He takes off more blankets and reveals his familiar fat pale body; I’ve seen it many times. I expected a long red scar where Holly pushed her way through—but the skin looks clean and whole, apart from one puckered red mole on his hip.

He manoeuvres Holly to the mole. Her mouth puckers. The mole expands in response to her need. It opens, uncurling, the edges pulling backwards, and inside is a moist purplish hole that begins to weep a white liquid. Holly’s head cranes forward—I didn’t know she had such strength already—and she latches on, her lips fitting around the folds. Thomas shudders and his eyelids flutter.

‘It feels good,’ he whispers.

To watch this makes me feel wrong inside, like nothing has before, even death. That blind expression of pleasure on both their faces, and the sucking sound; I am repulsed and excited. It sickens me and attracts me and my body responds to the idea of it, even as my mind tells me it is horrible, horrible.

I don’t move. I watch Thomas feed his baby.

He opens his eyes and says softly, as she feeds, ‘Are you disgusted? I am, sometimes. Do you know what’s even worse? Betty uses this new hole too. When we… Betty has a long thin yellow tube that comes out of it. Between its legs. And it puts that in there. It feels like nothing I’ve ever felt before. So good. I couldn’t stop it. I don’t want to. It’s like when I come with my cock, but ten times stronger. And longer. It lasts for minutes.’

‘Don’t tell the others,’ I say.

‘Not even Adam and Paul?’ he asks.

‘No. Let them come to it on their own. Like you did.’

‘Yes, maybe that’ll be better.’

If the other side found out, William and Eamon and the others, they’d find a way to kill Thomas and Holly, for sure. And the teenagers. They’d find a way, or they’d die trying.

‘I guess it’s a good thing I’m not using my cock for it anymore,’ Thomas says, with a shrug that makes the baby grumble against his hip. ‘Look.’ He flips back the final blanket. At first I see only a hairless flap of skin, like the medical books said a woman should have, but then I see the stub of his cock, no more than a nub. There are no balls in the remains of the pouch beneath. ‘I use it to piss with and that’s it. No feeling in it.’

‘None?’ I ask.

‘Just enough to tell me where I’m aiming.’ He smiles, but I can’t make my face mirror his. ‘It doesn’t hurt,’ he says. ‘None of it does, now. Having Holly; that was the worst pain I’ve ever felt. Maybe that’s why all of this seems so petty now. Who cares where the milk comes out of? She has to be fed. Doesn’t she?’

‘Don’t tell anyone,’ I say. ‘Not anyone. For Holly’s sake.’

‘I won’t. Besides, Betty will protect me. And all the babies, when they come. I wonder if you’ll have a baby. I didn’t think—it makes you complete, Nate. In a way I can’t explain.’

Holly keeps feeding. Thomas pulls the blankets back around them both and I am glad not to have to look at his changing body any more. He is like a fattening caterpillar. I can’t bear to think of what is happening inside him to make him a producer of babies, of milk. And yet he remains Thomas. I don’t understand how he can be Thomas and a mother and a caterpillar, all at the same time.

Behind us, there is a sound.

I turn around smartly and see Bee moving to the door. It leaves without waiting for me, without hesitation. Betty remains still, beside Thomas.

‘What?’ he says.

‘I don’t know. Stay here.’

By the time I’ve reached the front door I can hear the shouting. William’s voice is as loud as I’ve ever heard it; I scramble to the campfire, shoeless, feeling the bite of the icy ground under my feet. William’s strident voice becomes distinguishable words. He says, ‘…must be done. Stay back, we’re making the rules…’

…and I see the men who wait outside William’s house. On the ground there are two beheaded bodies of the Beauty, leaking yellow-grey liquid from the stumps of their necks. The other Beauties have formed a line, Bee in the centre, walking slowly towards the house.

The men hold out hoes, shovels, knives: weapons that jut from their readied hands, making the sharp shapes of battle. Hal and Gareth are as tall as pillars and sitting between them, underneath the bell, are Adam and Paul, their faces the colour of paper.

William shouts: ‘It must be done, for the sake of us all. We have ruled that it’s a crime to put such things in us against our will.’ Are his words directed at the Beauty? They walk on, showing no sign of stopping, and William’s voice pours on in a scream. I see it like a ribbon spooling from his mouth: ‘Judgement has been passed, and now must be carried out, do it, do it—’

Hal and Gareth raise their long knives and swing them, down and round, into the sides of Adam and Paul. The knives stick in the bumps. I see Hal and Gareth working to tug the blades free and Adam and Paul’s blood is like glue on the knives, their bodies moulding to the blades, and red and yellow intermingle while their arms and legs and heads twitch. They slump down dead in deference to the knives, the knives are the masters of the body now. And yet the blades won’t come free. Hal and Gareth tug, tug, tug, and the knives don’t work free.

The Beauty reach them. They start to pull Hal and Gareth apart, beginning with the heads, which are twisted round and popped off. Then the arms, then the legs. The knives are forgotten. There is blood as copious as a river after rainfall. It soaks and sprays William’s porch like the painting of a child who can’t resist the thrill of the deep rich red.

The Beauty go on, moving through the other men. I see William disassembled, and Eamon, and Landers and Keith D and other men I have known so well. Some of them run for the woods, and some even make it, but a few of the Beauty peel off in the shape of an arrow and follow to the trees, in silence, with certainty.

The other teenagers, Jason and Oliver, come out of the orchard. They stand stock-still, their faces a picture of terror. I think, if I am to describe this day, I must remember their faces, and so I fix the stretched cheeks, the peeled-back lips, in my mind. Then I touch my face and realise I am making the same expression.

Jason and Oliver stumble away into the woods. I am alone.

I reach for Bee with my mind and feel nothing. There is the sound of wailing amidst the trees. It goes on and on. It’s surely not a human sound. The Beauty must be making it. I listen to it, waiting for it to stop, for something to happen. Maybe Uncle Ted will appear and start to issue commands, clean up that mess, bury those bodies. But there’s nothing. Just the ceaseless wailing.

Eventually the cold penetrates my feet, and brings me to the knowledge that I must move. So I do. I return to Thomas, who sits in the room just as I left him, Holly in his lap, his eyes closed.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Don’t. I can’t hear it. I can’t hear it.’ His voice shoots up, spiralling into shrill denial.

But I must speak. I say, ‘They’re dead.’

Thomas says, ‘No.’ When he opens his eyes, they are alive with confusion and dread. ‘Don’t let them hurt her.’

‘Nobody will. They’re all dead. The Beauty killed them all.’

‘All of them?’ The worst thing is the hope in his face. Holly is more important than the rest of us, to him. ‘The whole Group? William? Everyone?’

‘Some ran. The Beauty have gone after them.’

‘Everyone,’ he says. Then he adds, ‘I’m very tired.’

‘Me too,’ I whisper.

I can hear the wailing of the Beauty through the window. I crawl up next to Thomas and Holly, and I make us into a protective pile. I need an answer, a different ending to this story.

An answer must come to me.

The icy depths of the graveyard remain undisturbed come the morning. The frozen cobwebs hang in tatters from the bare branches and the Beauty bury their dead lovers elsewhere, out of sight. In the woods, I think. With the bodies of the women that Uncle Ted strangled once upon a time, to protect us. The things that get done in the name of protection.

Maybe new Beauties will erupt from the fresh corpses. Is this a circle, a journey in which we come back to the beginning and feel so much more complete in our knowledge? I’m losing my taste for such easy words.

I sit next to my mother’s grave. Bee stands outside, silent. I am never truly alone now. Bee will always pull on my senses and I would give my voice, all my stories, to go back to how things were. Loneliness—that was a rare gift, like a hole in the brain that I worked hard to fill with my thoughts. Now I no longer have a hole to fill, and so I do not think so much. I only feel. How I hate such feelings.

My mother would flick through her glossy magazines and sigh. ‘We never appreciate what we have until it’s gone,’ she would say, and I used to think in my head, never out loud, that it wasn’t too late. If she wanted that life so badly she could go back. How little I understood.

I put a hand on the cold wooden cross that marks her spot. It’s not that different from touching Bee.

A voice says, ‘I thought I’d find you here.’

Ahh, the relief I feel in hearing that voice! I can’t help it; I spring up, I go to Uncle Ted and I put my arms around him. He has a smell so familiar that I close my eyes and imagine myself young again, young enough to be swung up into the space between his arms where happiness lives. But when I open my eyes I see his Bonnie standing next to my Bee and I step back. I pick up my problems once more, and own them.

I say, ‘I thought you were dead.’

He says, ‘They knew I was no threat. I hid in the woods. I know them well enough to keep out the way when it’s needed, and to come out when trouble passes. I wish I could say the same of you. You can’t hide in here all day. There’s work to be done. I’ve called an emergency meeting.’

I laugh. I didn’t know I could make such a sound again. The graveyard soaks it up. ‘A meeting?’ I say. ‘Did you not see what happened? Who do you think is going to show up?’

‘Typical overblown Nate. You’re alive. I’m alive. Thomas and that thing he calls a baby, and Oliver and Jason. No doubt more of these bastard crosses will start growing inside all of you soon, and if we want them to be more human than mushroom then we need to have order. Agreement.’

‘And you,’ I say. ‘A baby will probably grow in you too.’

I see the flare of disgust on his face. He steps back and rests his hand on the stick on his belt. ‘That’s not going to happen,’ he tells me, and Bonnie makes a strange wail. Then I understand—the way he makes Bonnie keeps its distance, walk behind him, never touch him. This is not only in public. He does not touch it at all. I can’t imagine the strength of will this must take, or what it might do to a man. I wonder if it isn’t sending him crazy.

‘How can you—’

He cuts me off. ‘Meeting. Now. In the kitchen. There aren’t any answers in here, Nate.’

‘I know.’

There are no answers anywhere in this place. Not in the graveyard, the kitchen, the vegetable patch, the orchard, the clearing or the clifftop. Ted will try to inject us with meaning, but it cannot be done. At least, not the meaning he wants. I wait until he is gone, and then I lean over and am sick next to my mother’s grave. The vomit is stringy and yellow. It tastes of mushrooms.

The kitchen is warm, and comforting. It would be easy to imagine nothing has changed.

I’ve not had much to do with Jason and Oliver before. They are still young, training to be carpenters and woodsmen, and the life of an apprentice is a busy one. I saw them at the campfire and my eyes would skim over them as I told my stories, but the truth was I considered myself to be above them and I did not bother to make friends.

I see now that this was a mistake. They know Ted well and they are loyal to him, in the way that men of manual labour are. They trust others who work with their hands and think those of the mind are sly and consider themselves above others. What can I say? They are right. So now I have no ally but Thomas, who hears nothing I say any more unless I put the word ‘baby’ in the sentence.

‘All the hard tasks have been taken over by the Beauty,’ says Ted, leaning back against the stove, a position of power. ‘So we only have to cook for ourselves from our supplies and raise Holly right. These are our tasks now.’

I notice he does not mention the idea of other babies to Oliver and Jason. They stand close together in front of the pantry door. Thomas has been cajoled into having a wash and getting dressed. He wears a woollen dress and holds Holly to his chest, jiggling her up and down while she makes small mews of discomfort, projecting her need for Betty who has been left outside with the other Beauties.

I wonder if the others do not feel her pain. From her mind she pushes forth a feeling, her desire for a figure that can only be described as father. She sees Betty as her father.

Jason raises a hand. He has a smooth, pleasant face, without the scars of acne that one might expect at his age, and he wears a red band in his long brown hair. ‘So are we all cooks now?’ he says.

Thomas jerks up his head, and Ted says smoothly, ‘Thomas remains the lead cook. The rest of us will listen to him in this department. And we can start to plan for the future. When Holly gets old enough, there will be lessons to teach. A future to plan for.’

This must be the reason he has not simply left us and gone off into his beloved woods for good. I picture Holly as a toddler, a child, a woman. Other children to follow. Yes, Ted has the future of all mankind in his sights, the continuation of the race, bred back to humanity. If the Beauty have different plans for Holly, what will we do?

I don’t want to think on his plans, his battles. I feel sick, so sick. I want to crawl away and never speak again. But that is not the fate Ted has plotted out for me.

He says, ‘Nate, you remain the storyteller. You speak of our past. There are so many to remember now. William, Eamon, everyone who has fallen. And the women, of course. You must still speak of the women.’

The others murmur agreement as I shake my head. I say, ‘I can’t. I’ve lost the taste for it.’

‘You think this is about your taste?’ says Ted. He speaks slow and soft, his narrowed eyes on me. ‘This is about those who died for you, and we will remember them. You will make their sacrifices worthwhile, and in their memory we will find the strength to go on. Can you not agree that it is the only fair and just thing to do?’

He has me and he knows it. Even Thomas will not side with me; he loves his stories too much.

I don’t reply. Ted takes it as assent so he forges onwards like a machine, with his blunt, brutal words. He has no skill at this. He is not weaving a world with his words. He is only smashing down on us, hammering on our heads. Ted says, ‘We must go on. We must take care of Holly and each other. That is all we have now.’

I hold my tongue as he looks around the kitchen and then drops his eyes. The meeting is over. Jason moves to the kitchen door and opens it to admit our Beauties, then yelps in surprise. I look past him, to the yellow yellow yellow in the corridor, filling the space. All of the Beauty, and more besides, back from hiding the dead, are squashing into each other, all of their blank faces turned to us. I sense a wave of longing, of expectation that is so strong, so very strong.

‘What are they doing?’ says Ted. I hear fear in his voice and that is terrible, worse than when he is fearless.

Thomas pushes forward, Holly held out in his arms. ‘Get out!’ he squawks at the crowd of Beauty. ‘You’ll hurt the baby!’ And that works. The tide is turned. They shrink back, still facing us, but their need is a terrible thing to feel. It is a force that they can barely control in themselves. They want love. Their partners are dead and they all want to be loved.

‘Come on,’ Thomas says, and we move behind him, down the corridor, to the open front door. The Beauty fall back to the outside. Only the ones to which we are bonded remain with us—I feel Bee’s strength beside me. It helps Thomas and I to close the door upon the others. The loneliness they exert is giving me a headache.

Once they are locked out, I run to the dining room window and look upon them as a sea of longing.

Bee touches me gently on the shoulders, and I feel its determination to keep me safe. It puts one hand on my left hip, upon the small lump that has grown there. It thinks of love and of family. How human it is becoming.

I do not shy away from Bee’s embrace. I let it hold me and take comfort, while there is still comfort to take.

PART FOUR

Thomas plants runner bean seedlings. He grows them on the kitchen windowsill where they can enjoy the sparing sun of early spring and the residual heat of the stove. Holly is wrapped up close to his heart, in a length of green curtain that he took from one of the bedrooms we no longer use. We all sleep in the dining room now, pressed down deep together while the Unloved hum outside the walls.

I hold Thomas’s watering can for him. He swaps it for his small spade at the end of every row so he can welcome his thirsty little shoots to the garden. He murmurs to himself, or maybe to the plants. He does love runner beans so.

I love them too. At least, I love these ones looking so questing and perky. Spring has come around with a determination that has taken all of us by surprise. I had thought it would sneak in, ashamed to be seen in this place, but no! The snowdrops will trumpet and the birds will shout. Change comes. Doesn’t it always? Then why am I so grateful for it?

Our Beauties live in the house with us and have become very different from the Unloved. They are also seedlings, I see now, just beginning to bud with personalities of their own. I could always tell Bee apart, but now I know all the ones to which we bonded.

Jason’s Bernadette is the most active and cannot stand still for long without giving strange little hops, rather like a dance to the personal music in its head. Bonnie is the opposite—so still. I realise now it enjoys being subservient to Uncle Ted. It fetches and carries and stands in his shadow, with such quiet pride. Oliver has his Bess, to whom he always looks so many times throughout the day, as if it makes all decisions for him.

Betty remains devoted to Thomas and Holly, but is stern in its love, rather removed. It stands over them at all times; right now, it is in the shade of the red brick wall with Thomas’s sun hat on its head for some reason. I know its severe personality well enough to find this a comical juxtaposition, and Bee is emitting a bubbling hum that tells me it finds this funny too.

‘Can,’ says Thomas. I take his spade and give him the can.

There are moments, comic pauses, every day amidst our dread. Another surprise. Months have passed since William and the others were killed and the Beauty split, just as our Group split, to create the Unloved. Bee and the others guard us, but the Unloved want in. They want it with a passion that seeps through brick and glass. They stand and hum all day and all night. I think the only reason they do not come in is the fact that I am pregnant and Holly is so small. The offspring are of the greatest concern. But this will surely not last forever.

‘I’m telling a special story tonight,’ I say to Thomas’s back, as he waters his seedlings. I’ve thought this through so carefully. Ted is powerless—what can he do to me? We are all prisoners in this house now and this captivity has given me back my voice. There is one more story that I must tell.

‘Spade,’ says Thomas. I take the can and give him back his spade.

The Unloved hum on. I could almost pretend, in this gift of bright morning sunshine, that this is midsummer and the hum outside the walls is only the heavy drone of bees.

But I will have a baby of my own by then and will have no time for sunbathing. I will feed my baby from a hole in my hip, and my cock and balls will shrivel away to nothing. The idea of this was worse when it was happening to someone else. Now it is me and it is inevitable, and nothing inevitable is ever that bad. If I have to live with it, then how can it be unbearable?

Besides, bodies betray us. That is what they do. They die and this is, at least, not death. I will choose any option but death. This body wants the story to go on.

‘Thomas,’ I say. ‘This can’t end well.’

He says, ‘Hmph.’

‘The babies will only be young for so long.’

‘So we’ll have more.’

He understands this breeding, growing, training. It’s part of the garden too.

‘I reckon,’ he says, ‘that the Unloved will give up and go away. Look for other men to bond with. Beyond the rocks, back down to the town.’

‘You think the town is still there?’ I ask him.

‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

He has spoken of the thing that has obsessed me over these long nights. It used to be that the Group and the Valley of the Rocks was everything to me. But this, too, is changing.

I say, ‘We should go look.’

Thomas says, ‘What?’

‘Find other men. Bring them back here for the Unloved. Then they’ll leave us alone.’

He says, ‘Just stroll out through the front door? You first.’ He digs fast and dirt sprays up from his spade. There are only a few seedlings left to be planted.

‘We can go. With a baby in me and Holly against your chest, they won’t touch us.’

‘So you say.’ He throws a look over his shoulder and in it I see he has finally grown up and away from me. I am no longer the leader between us two. Now he is in charge because he has Holly. He has travelled to this new place first and I must be the one to follow.

‘The Unloved won’t be able to stop themselves for much longer,’ I say. ‘They will come and in and they will kill the Beauty, and then they will take us and use us. Maybe they’ll even kill the babies so they can make their own with us. The Beauty and the Unloved grow apart every day. Soon they won’t recognise each other at all.’

Thomas stands up abruptly. Holly whines against his chest and Betty takes a half-step forward.

He says, ‘What’s happened to your stories of forever rainbows and lullabies? You want to tell horror tales now it suits your purpose? You can tell those someplace else. I’ve got no interest in listening. If you haven’t noticed, Nate, there are children to think about now. I need to hear a better future than the one you’ve chosen to tell. For Holly’s sake, and for the sake of the baby inside you, you need to stick to the old stories. You owe it to them, if not to me. You owe it to them!’

‘You don’t believe they need to hear the truth?’ I ask.

I don’t know what happens. There is an intense pain in my temple, like the sting of a hundred wasps—I clap my hands to it, feel the wetness of blood. Then I see the spade on the ground, near my feet. Thomas threw it. He threw it straight at me. His face is grey with shock.

Bee moves forward, so fast, and Betty is moving too—

‘No!’ I say. ‘No! I’m fine. I’m fine. It’s not serious.’ I spread my hands, show the blood on my fingers. It isn’t a lot. I feel a trickle down my cheek. ‘I swear it’s not serious.’

Bee and Betty stop coming towards us. Betty still wears that ridiculous sun hat. My head throbs in the sun. I will have a terrible headache, but that is nothing new. I’ve had a headache for months from the thoughts, the desires and the rages of the Unloved. But I am alive. We are all still alive.

Thomas opens his mouth. He shuts it. He bends down and retrieves his spade. Holly’s wails grow into sharp cries.

‘You know I’m right,’ I tell him.

‘Holly wants feeding,’ he says, and he goes inside. Betty follows.

I plant the final seedlings with my hands, and then water them.

To start—

There was only one. Then one divided into two, and two into four, and on it went, each division bringing a new reality, a new possibility. Sometimes the many that sprang from the one agreed and moved with a mutual purpose. And sometimes they didn’t.

It’s an impossibility to calculate when the many became too many. Things are born and they die. They bleed and divide and begin again. But in one moment they changed from living in a land of plenty to lacking the one thing they needed above all others.

Love.

They lacked love. And the lack of love, new questions—questions that had not been asked before—came into their minds. Why should some have happiness and others have none? Such thoughts lead to jealousy, and that alters you inside. You lose sense of the paths, the divisions that you can walk, and you see just one road, long and grey and loveless.

And so the Beauty divided again. They became the Beauty and the Unloved, and there was no return from that division.

The Unloved no longer recognised the Beauty as part of them. Instead they waited for the chance to take the love away from the Beauty. They wanted their own future, for that is what all living things want, and they could not be blamed for that. But they forgot how to be gentle, to be reasonable. They had started down a path that could only lead to death.

Or could it?

It’s important to remember that there have always been such divisions. That is the basis of life. Division brings not only discord, but also hope. Who knows what will happen when the rules ceaselessly change? Those that were weak may grow strong. Those that are strong may lose themselves and fall away. And those that once upon a time did not dare to act, may yet find the strength to take the road that reaches into places that nobody else will dare to go.

The past, the present and the future—none of those are set. We know that now. They change as we change.

So let us write a new ending to our story.

Let us say—the Unloved waited for the chance to take the love away from the Beauty. Every day their patience got a little less, and their desire grew a little more. It is so very difficult to be alone when others are not.

Then one day they could take it no longer. And they became one again, united in their pain. They acted as one, surging towards the house with plans to murder the Beauty and find happiness in the flesh of the men they found inside. They threw their weight against the doors, the windows, the walls—and the house started to creak, to groan, while the men inside wept with fear. The house could not keep them safe. It would fall.

And then, from the road that led out of the Valley of the Rocks, a sound: singing. Men singing, a mass of men, men who had known and lived in loneliness too since their women died so long ago. The men poured into the Valley, their voices loud, their arms open, and there was a man for every Unloved.

Leading the men to their destiny were Nate and Thomas, brave ones, with babies of their own in their arms and a future to fight for. They had gone out into the world and found that future, and brought it back to the Valley. And so the Group could begin again, the many becoming one, the one growing and growing, to make a beautiful world populated with so many happy men, on and on, until the end.

‘No,’ says Thomas.

The dining room is lit only by a few candles and the smouldering logs in the grate. He stands up and he is alive with his indignation; it jumps out of him like the short, sharp breaths he exhales.

I try to tell him with my eyes that I am sorry, but it must be done. I must get Ted to side with me, to order us away. It’s our only chance. ‘We’ll go and get help. We’ll save everyone. You’ll be a hero,’ I tell him.

‘No. Not now. Not ever.’ The candlelight makes him look bigger, taller. He has a dignity that I have not seen in him before. Thomas says, ‘You say the Unloved will kill and rape, and I say they won’t. Why are you right, and I am wrong? Just because you know how to wrap it up in a story?’ He is warming to his outrage, his hands flying out like sparks. The curtain wrapped around his chest where Holly rests gives him the air of invincibility.

Ted stays in his chair, arms crossed, not bothering to stir himself. Bonnie stands to attention behind him. ‘Nate,’ he says, with a smile, ‘what makes you so sure that the Unloved, as you have named them, want us? Perhaps they are simply protecting the children. In which case, they’re not going to be happy if you try to take Thomas and Holly away with you. Besides, lad, if they really wanted to come in they could. Windows can be smashed. Doors can be knocked down. They’re easily strong enough for that.’

I hate the way he diminishes me with his ‘lad’. Oliver and Jason, on blankets near the fire, nod along. I will need better arguments.

I say, ‘If they are only protecting us, why are we cowering in the house all day and all night? Why don’t you simply walk outside, Uncle Ted? Right now?’

He shrugs. ‘What is there to go outside for? We’ve had a long cold winter and it’s been easier to stay indoors. That’s all. I think maybe those long dark nights and your… pregnancy… are playing tricks on your brain, lad. Come the summer, everything will look better. We’ll go out, into the woods maybe. When your little one arrives, we’ll have a fine time playing out together.’

Jason and Oliver have copied Ted’s smile. Thomas sits back down with an air of vindication. Can they really not feel it? This threat that encloses the house? Or perhaps they cannot name it. They have no practice in naming the truth and now they do not trust me to do it for them.

I see in the four faces that patronise me that my time as a storyteller is at an end. I have no listeners any more. I could talk on and on and it would be as if the world had gone deaf.

I can’t stay here.

‘If nobody will come with me, then I’ll go myself,’ I say. ‘I’ll save you, even if you don’t want saving.’

‘Don’t be an idiot.’ Ted shifts in his seat. He says, ‘You and your jumped-up ideas. I always knew it would lead us all into trouble. You need to learn how to give up your selfish ways now. There’s that thing in your body to think about. The mushrooms are so desperate to keep it safe and I’m not going to let you put us all in danger.’

‘What are you going to do? Keep me here against my will?’

‘So melodramatic, as usual. So keen to sniff out a good tale. From now on, I’ll tell the tales and you can shut up and listen. You’re just like your mother. Get yourself into trouble, and then whine when you’re told what to do.’ He gets up and faces me; I can see he is what he believes a man should be. His hand moves to the stick in his belt. How he loves to threaten those that are weaker. My mother gave way to him. Maybe I was in her body already when she was brought here and Ted told her it was the only way to be safe from the scary world out there.

Now the same choice is upon me. And I find I am not powerless. Not at all.

‘Get back,’ I say. ‘You are not to touch me.’

Bee shifts from the corner of the room. The other Beauties stir, rock from side to side.

‘I’ve known you since you were a baby, Nathan, and I will reprimand you if that is necessary. Don’t push me, boy.’

I put my hands on my bump. It is cold and firm, getting bigger every day. I say, ‘I’m no longer a boy, Uncle Ted. And I will leave this place.’

He says, ‘You will not.’

I take a step forward. He blocks my path to the door.

But I am the powerful one. I have the baby in me, and he cannot touch me. He knows it. I see it behind that mask of stone he uses.

He steps aside.

‘Nate!’ calls Thomas, a plea. I ignore him and carry on walking to the kitchen. I grab a canvas bag from under the sink and take it to the larder. It’s too dark to see properly. I grab whatever I can identify: some stored apples, some bread.

The larder door slams behind me. The darkness is total. I yelp, sounding like a dog. It takes me an age of groping to find the handle, but my relief gives way to intense dread when the handle won’t turn. It won’t move for me. I am trapped.

‘Stay in there until you learn some sense,’ says Ted, from the other side.

This is what Ted does. He forces his problems into the dark, and keeps them there. Like my mother’s feelings, like the women he killed and buried in the forest. But I will not be kept in the dark. He has finally managed to teach me how to be a man. I will do whatever is necessary to beat him. I am ready to kill.

I call Bee with my mind. I tell it what to do. I show it a picture, every detail, with slow deliberation. I leave nothing out.

Then I wait.

I hear Thomas and Ted arguing, but I pay no attention. I concentrate on what Bee shows me. I can see through Bee’s eyes.

Bee is coming, moving to the kitchen. It shows me that Ted has jammed his chair against the pantry door and is sitting on it. Thomas, Jason and Oliver hover, trying to persuade him to move. Are those tears on Thomas’s cheeks?

Bee touches nobody but Ted. It picks him up by his neck. I thrill at the strength of my beautiful Bee. Ted does not make a sound, but he fights and fights, his kicks and punches connecting. Bee feels arms around the waist. Bonnie is in the room, squeezing hard, fighting for Ted. I feel white pain in my mind, but Bonnie is not strong enough to stop this. Bee knocks Bonnie down, and looks around.

The others huddle back against the sink. Holly is awake now, I feel her fear. She wails. The Unloved hum, hum, hum—a nest of hornets. Bright red flowers in my head light up my darkness. But I tell Bee—do it. Do it.

Bee grabs one of Ted’s arms as he flails and breaks it, clean, like the snapping of a stick. He goes limp. Bee carries Ted out of the kitchen, down the corridor to the front door. It opens the door, and throws him out into the night.

Bonnie screams. It is a human sound. It plunges out after Ted, and Bee closes the door, not looking at what is happening. It does not want to look.

The larder door opens and my normal vision returns. I can see Thomas’s tear-soaked face. He holds out his arms to me and I push past him and go to Bee. I let it scoop me up and hold me tight. It pats the bump, over and over. I feel our mutual relief amplified in my mind like a circle, no beginning, no end.

Outside, Bonnie screams and screams. When it stops we can hear Ted’s pleading. He begs and moans and demands that they stop, but the Unloved continue to hum with an expressive and endless happiness.

In the morning, they are gone. Ted too. Perhaps into the woods, I don’t know. Bee doesn’t either. It has lost all connection to them, but it thinks they have gone for good.

All that is left are the scattered yellow and grey lumps that were once Bonnie.

I stand outside where the Group once made its campfire. It’s a chilly spring morning, but bright. The grass is growing back over that burned circle of earth. Thomas, Jason and Oliver stand close together, looking around like baby birds seeing out of the nest for the first time. How small our lives have become.

I heave the canvas bag over my shoulder.

‘Well then,’ I say. ‘Goodbye.’

‘Don’t go,’ says Jason. Oliver bursts into tears and his Bess reaches out to him, then wraps him up in its love.

‘What do you want?’ says Thomas. He has Holly out of the curtain papoose for once, in the crook of his arm. She is looking around with wide grey eyes and her skin is a very pale yellow. She is as beautiful as the daffodils that are starting to poke through the remains of William’s house, and as natural to behold. It is undeniable that she deserves her place in the world.

I say, ‘Nothing. Only to go. That’s all there is, now.’

He says, ‘You want me to say I’m sorry? Because I am. If you were a true friend you would forgive me, and forget all this nonsense.’

‘I do forgive you.’

‘Then stay. We need you. You have to tell us what to do. Please, Nate. Stay.’

I don’t answer. I’m sick of words. Instead, I show Bee a picture in my mind: the two of us together, our baby inside me, walking out of this place. Going to find out what remains of humanity. Not to bring anything back, not even to find new stories to tell. Just for the sake of knowing.

Bee agrees. It holds out a hand and I take it. We start to walk, following the path that leads out of the Valley of the Rocks. It is a path that unravels one step at a time, on and on, with no end.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to John Griffiths, Tim Stretton, and everyone at UKAuthors for continuing to read the things I write.

I have lots of ongoing gratitude for Neil Ayres and Francesca Kemp. You make my daily emails worth reading and keep me moving in the right direction. Thank you with bells on.

Anne Zanoni put her skill and hard work into this book, and I’m so glad she did. Thanks Anne. And George Sandison read it, liked it, and published it. For that, and for the dedication he has put into making it the best it can be, he deserves more than an acknowledgement. George—I owe you a beer. Or an ice cream.

And go Team Whiteley.

THE
ARRIVAL
OF
MISSIVES

For Fran

I cannot sleep.

Today I overheard Mrs Barbery in the street gossiping with the other mothers. She said, ‘He isn’t a real man, of course, not after that injury.’ I walked past and pretended not to have heard. He limps, a little, but it does not constrain his activities. Sometimes I wonder what is under his shirt and waistcoat. I imagine something other than flesh to be found there: fine swan feathers, or a clean white space. No, Mr Tiller is not what passes for a real man in these parts, and all the better for that.

My feelings for him have infused every aspect of my existence. My heart leaks love; it seeps out and gaily colours the schoolyard, the village green, the fields I walk and the books I read. My father comes back from his work at times and finds me in the armchair by the front parlour window, curled up in thoughts I could never dream to share with him. It has become a ritual with him saying, with a smile, that I have a talent for wool-gathering and that he’ll sell me to the shepherds.

My mother sometimes brings me tea, creeping into the parlour as if she does not quite belong there. She bears a curious expression in these moments, perhaps best described as a mixture of pride and worry. It troubles me. I think she knows my mind, even though we have never spoken of it. She was once an uneducated version of me, of course—the raw clay from which I am formed. But then she returns to the kitchen, and there she is a different woman, bustling to and fro, laying out plates for the workers at the long oak table. The workers are the remains, and the reminder, of the war, but they work hard, as does everyone on the farm, including the animals. Apart from me. I am marked for something else.

This is a different age, a new era, and my feelings are all the finer and brighter for my luck in having the time to explore them. The upward path of humanity, out of the terrible trenches, will come from the cultivation of the mind. And women will have an important role in this, as teachers, as mentors, to the exceptional men who will grow from the smallest boys, with our guidance.

Once I asked my father if, once all the young men were dead, they would send women to fight at the front, and he said I had the mother of all imaginations. Well, that is what is needed now. After such a war people must think new thoughts, give birth to lofty emotions, and love is surely the best place to begin. I am in love. I am in love: Shirley Fearn, landowner’s daughter, is filled to the brim with love for Mr Tiller.

Look how love coats me in a shiny slick that no grim thought can penetrate. It lights the dark, and distinguishes my being. I am set alight by it. Great deeds no longer belong only to Field Marshal Haig and his like—to the real men, as Mrs Barbery would have it; it is now within the province of schoolgirls and cripples to act as heroes. Greatness is, for the first time, universal.

Besides, I am not so very young, and could have left school two years ago if my father wished it. I am about to turn 17 years of age, and Mr Tiller only limps a little.

Outside my window, the owls screech and the leaves of the trees murmur and hush. I can picture the branches swaying in the breeze. The fields have been sown and the crops are growing, slowly pushing from their hidden roots. The worms and moles are there, burrowing blind, busy busy busy in the earth. Such thoughts of dampness in the dark quiet my mind, and lead me down to my sleep.

The land is green and sweet. The walk to school—a few miles from the farm to the outskirts of the village—is easy in late spring, and these are my father’s fields upon which I tread. I grew up with them, and I know their rotations and their long, ploughed lines. In summer they can be headstrong, and fight my progress along their hedges with thistles, nettles and squat, tangling weeds. When winter comes they turn into a playful mess of mud, determined to swallow my boots. In such weather, by the time I reach the school I feel as if half the field has come with me; on one occasion Mr Tiller looked at me and said, ‘Out!’ upon my arrival, before I made a state of the flagstone floor. The others laughed when I sat outside and tried to prise the knots from my laces with frozen fingers, blushing at my own incompetence. But Mr Tiller came out to me then. He knelt by me, and helped me to cast off my boots and forget his harshness.

Undoubtedly I prefer these spring days. It’s easier to dream when the mud does not drag me down.

Here is my plan: Mr Tiller and I will marry, and I will become a schoolmistress to raise the finest generation yet known to England.

Well, to be precise, that is the culmination of the plan. First I must go to Taunton and earn my teaching certificate, and I will cram all life into those years so that I can settle with ease when I am married and I return to the village. I would hate to have regrets. Bitterness in a teacher can spoil a pupil, I think.

The last field ends in a stile that intersects with the new road, and I hop down upon it and follow it onwards. It’s easier walking here, but I dislike the sound my boots make on the stone. The village is over the curve of the next hill. I have friends there, other girls my age, but I have yet to find a close companion of the heart. I want to find others who dream, like me. Or perhaps I would rather that this weakening need for company would pass. I do not think mingling with lesser minds would be good for my intentions.

I crest the hill, and there is the village. It seems quiet from here but it will already be alive with tradesfolk, meeting and murmuring about their daily business. I shake out my skirts, square my shoulders, and walk down to the yard, looking neither left nor right.

The younger children are skipping, singing songs. The clock in the steeple ticks down to nine o’clock. I go inside, taking care to wipe my boots clean on the mat, and find the classroom empty, the blackboard wiped, the slates not yet set out upon the desks. Mr Tiller is late. This is not unheard of, and it does not worry me. I go into the small store room, where the rows of shelves hold chalk, beaten books, rulers and other delights of the teaching trade. I take out the slates and start to set them out on the desks, looking at the messages children from then and now have carved into the wood. They must all leave their mark somehow upon this place, even if only their letters remain.

The clock bell strikes, and the children come in. There are 12 of us, of varying ages; I am the eldest. Our desks have been allocated according to age and ability. I sit at the back, on the left, next to the spinning globe of the world—a position of responsibility, since the younger children would spend all day with their grubby little hands upon it. Behind me is a shelf that bears the bound works of great minds that have gone before. ‘If you are seeking inspiration,’ Mr Tiller once told me, ‘take down a book from that shelf, Miss Fearn. You have a keen mind. Let the books take your intellect to far-off places, and who knows what you may find?’

The children are noisy today, even the older ones. The blacksmith’s boy, Daniel, enters with a yell, and sees my frown.

‘I tripped on the step,’ he says.

I take a breath and move to the front of the classroom, putting the blackboard to my back and pulling myself up straight. They pay no attention, so I clap my hands together. They find their desks and fall quiet.

I am about to speak. I am sure some words of wisdom are about to flow from me, to prove that my dream of a scholarly vocation is a worthy one. Wait—nothing is coming—

Wait—

‘Mr Tiller says go home!’ shouts Jeremiah Crowe, who is nothing but trouble, and the children scream. The smallest ones even start to get out of their seats.

‘No, Mr Tiller does not,’ says that familiar voice, the one that bolsters my faith, and he limps into the room at speed, to stand beside me. ‘You are too impertinent, Crowe, as ever, and you’ll stay late to clean the slates tonight. Right. Let us settle ourselves and prepare for learning about one brave adventurer, Marco Polo, and the wonders of the Orient.’

What should I do? Should I sneak back to my place as if I never tried to take his? I wait for a word from him, but nothing comes; he turns to the blackboard and picks up chalk from the wooden lip of the frame. He wears no coat today, and I watch the muscles of his back bunch together under his shirt as he writes, marking out the M, the A, the R.

‘Sir,’ calls the irrepressible Crowe. ‘You haven’t taken register, sir.’

‘I thought Miss Fearn would have completed that task. Well, no matter, she can rectify the oversight now.’

I am raised high, and all the little faces turn up to me as I move to the teacher’s desk as in one of my dreams. I call out the names and mark the list. We are all here. From despair to triumph in a moment—how unpredictable my life is! I finish the task and look up to find Mr Tiller smiling at me, an expression not just of pride in a student, but perhaps in a future companion? I am moved beyond delight. It is as if he too has pictured our future, and found it pleasing.

I sit in my room, listening to the men eat their supper at the kitchen table below, and compose my letter to the newly founded Municipal Teacher Training College for Women.

I write of how I am inspired to teach by my own instructor, and how I am already of use to him in the classroom. I write of my knowledge of Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare, of Keats, of my understanding of the parts of Chaucer that are considered suitable reading, and of how I excel at the multiplication of large numbers. I am proud of how the passion within me becomes visible on the page.

I keep writing, and find myself explaining thoughts that solidify into purpose. I explain how cultural beauty only enhances our connection to the natural world, and is only a refinement of our urges to walk among flowers, touch tree trunks, squint up at fierce sunshine: this is all true learning, too. Those from farming stock can possess as fine a brain as an Oxford scholar, if he is shown the way to use it. My handwriting falters in the excitement of elucidating such ideals, but still, it is an impressive letter in its fullness. I have stated my case.

I will post it tomorrow.

I light my candle as evening falls. The workers are loud, and merry. I will read for a while, as I listen to the hum of their conversation through my floorboards.

I post the letter and receive only a mild interrogation from Mrs Crowe at the counter.

‘That’s tuppence. Does your father know you’re writing to colleges?’ she says. She wears a white ruffled blouse with an air of superiority, but she looks swollen and pained in the way that I have noticed happens to many women in the village once they have had many babies. The two youngest Crowes, a toddler and a very little one with jam on its chin (at least I hope it is jam, and she is not raising carnivorous primitives who work at raw meat to be sated! There goes my imagination again), sit in the post office window and wave at the people who pass. The rest of the Crowes will have already departed for school, no doubt, in the cleanest clothes they could muster. I will be late myself if this conversation continues for much longer.

‘At this stage I am only enquiring, Mrs Crowe,’ I say. ‘Exploring all possibilities.’

‘Are you now?’ she says as she puts the letter under the counter. ‘That schoolmaster will have a lot to answer for if he’s putting grand thoughts in your head.’

‘Mr Tiller has not encouraged me,’ I say, and that is the truth. I know honesty shines from my face. Mrs Crowe looks confused, then smoothes her ruffles. The toddler starts to bang on the window, and as she moves to retrieve him I take the opportunity to flee.

The day passes in the ongoing company of Marco Polo. What an adventurer. How wonderful it must have been to be Polo’s teacher: to encourage his ingenuity, his desire to see all, learn all, and hear about it upon his return.

‘Pay attention, class,’ says Mr Tiller, ‘even you, Miss Fearn. I see you at the back there, daydreaming about your own visit to China one day.’

I catch his eye and say, ‘No, Mr Tiller, I was not dreaming of that at all.’ Let him make of it what he will. I like the confusion that springs into his eyes, and the way he tilts his head.

The hours pass slowly. I watch him for the rest of the day, feeling quite certain that I’m doing the right thing, and that he needs to know of my plans.

Finally, the school day is done. When the children are gone, I loiter, and Mr Tiller looks to me with raised eyebrows. His voice is that of a schoolmaster. ‘Go along, then, Shirley.’

This is not what I want. But I find I must be given a window of opportunity to speak as a woman, not as a child. He is using his superior tone against me. I look at his hands wrapped around the worn textbook he holds. I see him tremble, and then I understand. He is trying to keep me away.

‘Yes, sir,’ I say, and I leave the schoolroom. I emerge into the late afternoon sunshine alone, with the children already scattered for home, or maybe to the bakery to see if Mr Clemens will part with any of his stale buns for no more than a smile.

I will soon be expected back home, but I find I cannot turn in that direction, because I have seen Mr Tiller’s trembling fingers and I know I am the cause. I cannot think of anything but those fingers. The village is unaware how much has changed in the last few moments, and how much I am changing within it. I feel strong, powerful, ripe with possibility. I feel it. I walk out of the yard and turn away from the road home, walking with what I hope is the air of a girl on an errand with every right to be travelling in an unexpected direction.

I was right. There are a handful of girls and boys in the bakery. I spy them through the window, but they are too preoccupied with badgering Mr Clemens’ daughter, Phyllis, to see me. Along the row of shops, I cast glances through each window in turn and only see myself, reflected. I am unremarkable, surely, from the outside. Why would anybody look twice, unless they knew me well and could see the change upon me through my white skin, lurking within?

My luck runs out at the church. The wall that runs along the graveyard is high, but not high enough; I catch sight of Daniel Redmore’s golden hair, and before I can duck he has turned his head. His eyes are the brightest blue I have ever seen them, and his face is red and swollen. He is crying.

I walk on before he can decide what to say to me. I know what he’s doing, anyway. He stands at his mother’s grave. She was kind and good, and lost to the influenza not so very long ago, so I suppose a boy can cry for her still. There’s no shame in it. Although it is different for women, I know that my mother still weeps for the children she bore after me. They were born not breathing, yet were perfectly made to the point of having hair and fingernails that she trimmed herself, and now she keeps those trimmings in a mother-of-pearl box upon the mantelpiece. They do not lie in the churchyard, as they could not be baptised, so my father buried them in the kitchen garden from boxes he made himself.

I don’t weep for these lost siblings. I never knew them, even though they all have names: Thomas, Arnold, Henry, Frederick. I feel no particular sadness for them beyond the pain they have caused my mother. But I can appreciate how great a loss Daniel feels, greater still than my mother’s; after all, he knew the intricacies of his own mother’s spirit, and had grown within its shelter. She was a fully grown tree, her boughs curved around him. She was not simply the first sprouting of an acorn.

I hurry on, and decide that I will not tell a soul that I caught him crying. In return I have to hope that he will not mention my passing presence outside the church. This could be our unspoken pact, if he has the sense to understand it.

Past the church there is the row of cottages where the families that no longer have fathers live by the grace of the parish, squeezed into small rooms with Mrs Colson and Mrs Wells taking in washing when they can get it, and then the road curves around, the hedges spring up high, and there is a loosely pebbled lane leading off, downwards, in the direction of the river.

The trees grow over this lane, forming a darkened tunnel, and the birdsong is loud at this hour. My boots skip over the pebbles with purpose as I approach my love’s cottage. His house is a little way from the village, where the old sisters Wayly once lived. They died within a day of each other, from the influenza. At the funeral the Reverend Mountcastle said he thought they never wanted to be parted from each other, but I thought of how they never served a cup of tea without a saucer, or a slice of cake without a fork, and simply considered themselves to be a matching pair for the sake of neatness.

The garden is not so neat now. Mr Tiller is not a gardener; well, why would a man grow seedlings when he can nurture souls? And I like this wild tangle that protects his door. The roses, no longer trained, do not follow the latticework, but grow out at stubborn angles from the wall to escape the shadow of the house. And the vegetable patches, one on either side of the path, have the rocky clumps, weeds and stones of a wilderness upon them. Where do these stones come from? My father’s fields fill up with them throughout the year, and they must be removed come the spring. It’s as if they work their way up through the earth at night.

The grasses have grown so thick around the walls of the house that I have to push them aside, but at least there are no nettles. I am able to work my way around the corner of the house and then crouch down without worrying about stings and scratches. I find a hiding place; I am ensconced amongst green leaves with the delicate fronds tickling my ears and teasing my hair. I will have to comb my hair out carefully later. Later, when I return to my room and face my father’s wrath for my lateness, I will be a changed woman.

With time to waste, I must consider my plan. Do I have one? No, I am being impetuous, and this is not how I pictured it. But he would not give me the opportunity earlier and so I must make my own chance to explain my feelings to him. He cannot escape from this place; this is his last resort. Besides, I like that word—impetuous. What is the point of being young if one cannot attach the adjective ‘impetuous’ to it?

There are too many questions in my mind and I cannot still my thoughts. They germinate, sprout and form beanstalks that raise up into the sky. I am picturing a wedding in summer with a cornflower and sweet william posy to hold when I hear the door open, and then close.

How could I have missed his footsteps on the path? I thought I would have time to steel myself at his approach, but he is close now, so close, and already in his cottage.

I cannot breathe, but I must. I cannot. I listen for him; I am a rabbit, with tender ears quivering. Has he headed straight for his kitchen? I picture what my father does when returning from work: leaving on his boots, to my mother’s disapproval, and looking in the pantry for something to eat before seating himself in a chair before the kitchen fire. I can envisage any man might act in such a fashion, although maybe Mr Tiller brings down a book from a shelf and actually does unlace his boots and place them tidily by the door, as a gentleman should.

I hear a scrape close by—the sound of a chair along the kitchen floor, perhaps? He is sitting so close to me. If I stood up now, he would see me. I would be as a vision to him, and a wild one at that, with ferns in my hair and a flush to my cheeks that is far from ethereal. I can feel my face burning with heat, although I am not ashamed. It is the excitement of the moment, but how could I persuade him of that? That I feel no embarrassment in my love? He would think me young and stupid, and possibly the instigator of a ridiculous prank, which would be unbearable.

No, I should work my way back to his front door so that I can straighten my shoulders, throw out my chest, and bang upon it with purpose.

But I cannot do that, not when I do not know what my welcome would be. I must see his face first, just a glimpse of it; I must see the man, not the teacher. Then I will be able to address the man as an equal, no matter if he tries to play the teacher with me.

I can imagine him eating methodically, possibly upon a dried apple or a wedge of cheese, with his mind on his book of Wordsworth’s verse, or on the lesson for tomorrow. He will be lost in thought. He will not see if I lift my head, just a little, until I can spy him through the window. He will not see.

I shift to my knees amidst the ferns, relieving the ache in my thighs, and then inch my way upwards so my view through the window changes: the low black beams of the kitchen from which hang dusty copper pans; the top row of serving plates upon the tall dresser; an ink drawing of a robin, the eye a black watchful bead that spies me, hanging in a gilt frame from the wall. Then a crown of brown hair. I raise myself just a little more, balancing on the balls of my feet, and I see his noble face, worthy of a bust from antiquity with the severe slope to the nose but a gentle draw to the eyebrows that softens all expressions. His countenance is cast downwards, deep in private reflection. He does not eat. He sits in a pool of yellow light from the lamp beside him at the table, and he slowly unbuttons his waistcoat. Still his fingers tremble.

I am imprisoned by my love for him. I cannot look away. He is unguarded; he thinks he is alone, but I am here. I am here! I belong to him, and I cannot be freed from the glamour his slow unbuttoning casts upon me.

He opens up his waistcoat and then commences upon the studs of his shirt sleeves. Then he reaches behind his slim, long neck and removes his collar. All the studs are placed upon the table. He slumps, as if these actions have allowed relaxation to come to him. Yes, this is the man. This is whom I wish to marry.

I should move to the door and knock, say my piece before the perfect moment is lost, but then I see his chin raise up once more, and he is about the business of his remaining buttons.

I have seen my father in his vest often enough, but it is not a vest that Mr Tiller begins to expose. It is skin.

No, it is not skin. It is the puckered edge of a thick scar, white and ridged at the hollow of his throat, leading down, and I remember what Mrs Barbery said—that he was not a real man. I am afraid of what I am about to see.

He unbuttons all the way down to the line of his trousers, pulls open the leaves of his shirt front, and then I see the scar is not a scar. It is a pattern revealed, which decorates the entire of his chest and stomach, and lower; I cannot comprehend so many lines and angles, made in his flesh. Except in the centre of the pattern, where there is no flesh at all. There is rock.

How can it be rock? It is solid, and juts forth from the bottom of his ribcage, making a mountain range in miniature, sunk into the body in places and erupting forth in others. There are seams of a bright material within it that catch the lamplight, and glitter, delicate and silvery as spider thread.

Mr Tiller places his hands upon the rock and throws back his head, his eyes closed, his mouth open. He forms words that I cannot hear; perhaps he does not speak them aloud. I am struck by the thought that he is communing with it.

He opens his eyes.

He sees me.

I am made rigid by his naked gaze. We are caught in an intimacy that panics me; I am aware of the space between us, our breaths, our open mouths, our shared shock. The burning honesty of our pounding heartbeats, separated only by glass.

He is not a real man.

I find myself on my feet, and he is moving also, pushing back the chair from the kitchen table as he rises with such speed, but I surge through the weeds, to the path, and then away: past the gate with pebbles crunching under my feet, in the direction of the river. I hear the front door bang and he calls my name, but I cannot risk turning to see if he follows. Besides, he will never catch me and I can hear the river now. I will cross the old stone bridge by the mill and loop back around the village to make my way home through the fields and I will never speak of what I have seen, never never never.

‘Shirley,’ calls Mr Tiller, from far away.

I start to slow.

I find myself at a trot, and then a walk. My skirts are tangled around my legs; I shake them out as I reach the bridge. Up ahead is the mill, closed up tight for the night. And it is night, now; only the last rays of the sun provide me with the means to see my feet upon the stones. I reach the centre of the bridge and look down along the length of the river.

Mr Tiller has fought a war, and he has returned from it a changed man. I did not truly understand that until this moment. Something terrible, beyond my experience, has befallen him. The shock of it is overwhelming to me. But I asked for the means to test myself, to be worthy of leading the coming generations, and I have been provided with those means. If Mr Tiller is brave enough to live with such an injury, then I will be brave enough to at least stand upright in his presence and acknowledge it.

‘Shirley.’

He has come to stand at the start of the bridge, where it joins with the road. His shirt buttons are redone, although his collar and cuffs remain loose. He looks like a man once more, albeit a dishevelled one, and his expression pleads with me—it is an honest expression, the kind I have dreamed of seeing upon his features.

‘Come back to the cottage,’ he says.

I shake my head. It is not that I do not trust him. It is only that this seems to me to be a better place to have this conversation. He limps slowly across the bridge to stand beside me; I think his leg must be paining him after he has hurried upon it. Perhaps he is always in pain, from that heavy mass of rock within him, erupting from him. Now I know of it I can see the peaks, just visible through the material of his shirt. It is no wonder that he always keeps his waistcoat in place and buttoned.

‘You should not spy on people,’ he says, gravely. He leans on the stone wall, and stares into the water that runs through the archways, and onwards to the wheel of the mill.

‘It was not my intention, and certainly not my usual pastime,’ I say. I am pleased at my even tone. I sound cool and proper, like a lady. ‘I wanted to talk to you. About a private matter.’

‘May I ask what was so important that you had to stand at my window and peer inside?’

What a question. I can’t begin to answer it. I find I am no longer sure that I want to speak my heart to Mr Tiller.

‘Do you…’ he says, and then changes the direction of the conversation abruptly, to, ‘Will you speak to no one about this? I think that would be for the best.’

‘No one but yourself.’

He nods. I think he understands my meaning. I cannot simply be silent forever more, because the questions I have will plague me if I am not given the opportunity to voice them.

‘Shirley, there are some aspects of life that a young girl should not have to know about.’

‘You were doing your duty,’ I commence. ‘You were fighting for King and country. You plunged into battle. There were explosions, all around. Many died. There were pieces of men everywhere, scattered, and the smell of blood, the cries of anguish, were strong. I am not a child. My imagination will tell me what you will not.’ He stood tall amidst the dead and the screaming, no doubt, with determination on his handsome face, streaked with noble tears. ‘You were trying to hold a position, on a beach, backed against a cliff by greater numbers, and suddenly there was a sound so loud, a boom, like the voice of the Lord, and then the rock-face itself fell down upon you, and you felt nothing but a sudden sense of peace, as if all had gone silent, and you looked down and saw the rock itself upon you, and you—’

‘No, no,’ he says. ‘Oh no, Shirley, my dear girl, that is not what happened. Although I must say I wish your version could be true. I do wish it were true.’

‘Then tell me.’

Mr Tiller puts his hand to his face, covering his eyes. I breathe out, and my concentration upon him is broken for a moment. I realise we have now passed into night proper. The sounds of the birds settling has changed into the shrill chorus of frogs by the riverbank. All is dark.

‘I will walk you home,’ he says. ‘It’s late. You may tell your father that you were aiding me in a project for the school. May Day is nearly upon us, and if the weather holds it will be a fine festival this year. Let us say I needed help with planning the dancing.’

He turns, and starts a slow walk away from me, in the direction of his cottage. ‘Come on,’ he calls. So we are back to commands given and accepted, and I hear confidence returning to his voice. He could almost believe his own story, of May Day and happy dancing, just as I could almost believe mine of that brave stand on a lonely beach. Of course, we are the same! I see it clearly, even in the darkness, that we are truly suited. We are creative types, linked by our irrepressible imaginations, and our minds are perfectly aligned even if our bodies bear such terrible differences.

He enters his cottage to fetch his waistcoat and a lantern, and while I wait for him to emerge my determination to be his love hardens once more to resolve.

He will not escape the goodness of my intentions this time.

Here he is, collar and cuffs buttoned, waistcoat in place. He holds aloft the lantern and we start to walk. To circumvent the village we take a less well-trodden path that leads through the woods; it will take us to the back of my father’s sheep fields, which are only good for tough grasses and mutton.

The circle of light from the lantern is a strange intimacy. It makes it easier to walk closer to him, and to say, ‘I am determined to be of help to you, sir.’

‘You are a good girl,’ he says, in guarded fashion. ‘I could certainly do with assistance when it comes to May Day matters this year.’

‘In all ways,’ I say. ‘Does it—hurt?’

He pauses, then says, in time with our footsteps, ‘It does not. It is not exactly an injury, Shirley. I would be dead without it.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

‘You do not have to.’

‘But I want to,’ I say, clearly, to be sure I am taken seriously. The trees press close; how watchful the wood feels, at night. Still, I will not speak quietly. ‘I want to understand. I want to be involved in every aspect of… I am bound to you, sir.
I think you know this. I will be a teacher too. I have applied to Taunton Municipal College and I mean to study for my exams.’

‘That is a worthy ambition,’ he says, without looking at me.

‘I mean to be a teacher,’ I repeat. ‘With you. To come back to the village and teach with you. As your companion.’

It is not possible to be any plainer.

He keeps walking, but I can tell he has understood my meaning, and his silence is agonising. Is he shocked? Amazed? No, surely he has long been aware of my devotion to him. I thought that perhaps he might have been prepared for such an offer, even grateful for it.

But no. There is only the slow drag of his leg and my own misery. He does not want me, even as a helper, even to simply listen to the little ones practise their spellings. ‘We would not have to be…’ I say. I hear the plea in my own voice and hate myself for it. I will not be this desperate, pleading girl.

It occurs to me that I do not have to be.

‘You are free to evaluate my offer for a time,’ I say. ‘But please be aware that I know my own mind and cannot be dissuaded. Just as I know of your injury, and the fact that you would prefer I keep it secret. So it seems we both want something from the other, in fact. We must hope our desires are compatible.’

The trees part, and we are suddenly at the boundary of my father’s fields. The night sky is fresh after being under the cover of the trees, and the moon is large, throwing light across the stretch of grass. There are no sheep in sight; they must be gathered in a corner, in the shelter of the hedge-line, keeping each other warm in a heap. As I think of them I realise I am growing cold, and there will be nobody to keep me warm if I do not find a way to make myself what men want. What Mr Tiller wants. What on earth does he want? I am young, and quick-minded. I have offered myself to him and he has not replied. I refuse to feel ashamed. I will discover what he wants.

He holds the lantern high as I climb over the stile, gathering up my skirts in the hope he will take the opportunity to look upon my legs, but he does not. He looks away, then passes me the lantern as he steadies himself and climbs awkwardly over the stile. Then we commence our journey across the field, and the barest black outline of my home becomes visible in the distance, with candlelight winking in the parlour window.

‘My injuries were extensive,’ says Mr Tiller. ‘Since you wish to be treated as an adult, let us speak as adults. I am not capable of being a husband.’

‘I have heard talk in the village,’ I say, primly. ‘I am aware of the situation in that regard.’

‘Then you should ask for more from your life, Shirley. You deserve more from it.’

‘Sir, it is not in your remit to tell me what I deserve.’

‘I will not misuse you, miss, no matter how much you desire it,’ he snaps, and I am glad; here is his temper, here is what he feels for me.

‘How old are you, sir?’ I ask him.

‘I am 24 years of age.’

‘Then why do you act like an old man already? There are not even ten years between us. In the wake of this war, how many undamaged men do you think remain? Let me decide what constitutes a real man. Maybe you are a true man in your mind, if not in body.’

He stops walking, and bends over a little at the waist, as if struggling to breathe. ‘Sir?’ I say. Then I realise he is not fighting for air but for control of his emotions. He is crying. I have wounded him afresh, reminded him of his own limitations instead of helping him realise how easy they would be to overcome with the right woman by his side. What can I say to aid him? ‘You will always be a real man to me,’ I tell him. I move to his side, and put my fingers on his back, upon the silk of his waistcoat. I feel flesh, normal human flesh. I can feel the muscles tense at my touch under the sewn panel of material.

He jerks upright, and stumbles away. He does not look at me. ‘There is your farm,’ he says. ‘Take the lantern. Go.’

‘I do not need it,’ I tell him. I know these fields, and my eyes have always been keen in the dark. Besides, the candle in the parlour window was no doubt lit for me. I am so cold and tired; exhaustion at this conversation has stolen over me in a moment. I could sleep forever. ‘Goodnight,’ I say to Mr Tiller’s straight back. ‘We have the May Day celebrations still to plan. Let us talk more on that tomorrow.’

I walk quickly, cutting across the field, and find the sheep all at once, gathered in a crowd, their heads tucked against each other. What strange, mindless creatures they are. I must push through them to reach the final stile before home and they push back, shoving me, putting their stink upon me, churning up the earth under their hooves. I slip down and my knee lands hard upon a large stone; it will bruise, but I pull myself up, grabbing handfuls of their woollen coats. I break free of them, and cross the stile.

I am exhausted beyond words. There is still my father to face, and now I am dirty and sore; I must not cry. I have seen wounds upon a man’s body, rock embedded in flesh pulsing with silver, and I have negotiated for love like a market trader when I wanted it to be a natural, wonderful happening. I am a woman now. I must not cry at what has happened tonight, for it is the first step towards the life I want. The rock under his skin will not be strange to me for long, and I will not cry.

I see a man standing alone at the outskirts of the village. My stomach gives a jolt—but no, it is not Mr Tiller. It is not a man at all, in point of fact, but a boy. Daniel Redmore. How he has grown in form, with broad shoulders filling out his shirt. Why does he stand there? Where are his thoughts taking him this time?

I realise, as I get closer, that he is watching me. He is waiting for me. And then I remember spying his tears last night, and I have an inkling of what he wants to say.

I am not in the right humour for this conversation. My father was far from pleased with me last evening, even with the excuse of the May Day celebrations and the imaginative addition of a runaway sheep that needed returning to the fold. His face did not lose its suspicious cast, and so I rambled and made a strong lie weak. He asked me, when I finally stopped talking, if I was telling him an untruth, and I felt my cheeks blush. I pretended to be offended, but I am certain he saw through this tactic.

How I hate to lie, in any circumstance, and particularly to my parents. My father’s doubts were bad enough, but my mother—my mother simply shook her head at me, and I saw in the gesture not disapproval so much as sad recognition. It put me in mind of something she once told me, when I asked why we saw so little of my remaining grandparents, her parents. She said they had not approved of my father, and so she had met him in secret, thinking she knew what was best for her. I cannot imagine them as sweethearts, sneaking clandestine moments together, and why on earth her parents would not approve of him. It’s a strange tangle of a story, and it also makes me wonder if forms of love are hereditary. Her passion was conceived in secrecy, perhaps made all the stronger for it. I feel mine will be too.

But I can’t dwell on my thoughts thanks to the presence of Daniel Redmore, who once poured ink on the back of my dress, and when I informed the teacher (the mummified Mr Fisk, who looked far too old to fight but went ahead anyway, and met his end at Verdun) followed me home and pushed me into a nettle patch as punishment.

‘Good morning,’ he says, like a gentleman greeting a lady, so he is either teasing me or he wants something.

‘Good morning, Master Redmore,’ I reply. Two can play this game. I do not alter my pace, but he puts out his arm and I must stop or walk into him.

‘Where were you going, yesterday?’

His tears in the graveyard are the least of my concern, but they seem to be of the utmost importance to him. I find I do not want him to suffer, or consider me the kind of girl who would call him crybaby to his friends. His anxious eyes touch my heart.

‘Listen,’ I say. ‘If you don’t speak of seeing me, I won’t speak of seeing you. How will that be?’

‘I don’t care much for you seeing me one way or the other, but I saw you.’ He steps closer to me, and something about this proximity disturbs me in a way I cannot bear for long.

‘Let me pass,’ I tell him, attempting to find a haughty tone, but all I manage is a conspiratorial whisper. How I hate myself when I cannot control my feelings in the same way I can control my thoughts.

‘Were you going to meet with him?’ Daniel says.

I can hear my own breathing, and his, and I feel very afraid. I have never felt this way before; it is the devouring fear of being exposed, of having my intentions towards Mr Tiller revealed, and being made a laughing stock.

‘I was thinking my own thoughts,’ I say. ‘Down by the river. I find the bridge is a good place for quiet contemplation. I’d imagine you find the same kind of serenity in the graveyard.’

‘Under the bridge, where the children hide?’

‘On top of it,’ I snap. ‘In plain daylight. I have nothing to hide.’

‘You can claim that, but I see you watch him and I see you hope for him,’ says Daniel, ‘and it’s embarrassing to look upon.’

I have had enough. ‘There is no mooning on my part, Master Redmore! Not after anyone. Not even you.’ Now where did those words come from? He looks oddly pleased with himself, all of a sudden.

‘It bothers me, is all,’ he says. He drops his arm.

‘I have my own plans,’ I tell him.

‘The whole village knows. A letter to Taunton. Well, good, I say. Good for you. I would wish you far away, all the way to China, as long as you don’t waste yourself on that cripple.’

He has gone too far and he knows it. I draw myself up tall. ‘I am sorely disappointed in you, to hear you talk of our teacher that way. You escaped the war only by a year or so, that is all. Just by the sheerest luck of your birthdate. That’s the only reason you are here now, and whole, and your advantages must make you a better man than the generation before, can’t you see that? Instead of sowing discord you must promote peace. It’s your solemn duty.’

His lips pucker, his eyebrows crease, and he is a small boy in my eyes again, being reprimanded for his inkwell antics. It makes me feel both victorious and sad. I have banished the man who, after all, was engaged with my personal welfare.

I stomp off towards the village, and do not turn to see if he follows along behind me.

He said that it bothered him to think of me caring for Mr Tiller. Does he view me as one of his sisters, then? We have grown up together, and such ties promote close feelings.

But I find, in my disquiet, that I do not exactly view him as a brother. No, that does not describe how I feel at all.

Westerbridge is 12 miles from Taunton and 20 miles from the coast, as the crow flies. It appears in the Domesday Book, where it was valued at four pounds.

Apart from that written record of existence it is a singularly uninteresting village. Nobody of note has emerged from it, or even visited it. It does not lie on the road to anywhere in particular, and is in itself no person’s willing destination. Exmoor lies to the west, but not close enough to encourage the presence of those walkers and painters who seek wild natural beauty there.

Because of this the same families have inhabited this patch of unremarkable land for so many years, occasionally marrying outside by a few miles or so (such as in the case of my own father and mother, who met through his presence in Bickbrook at a travelling fayre) but generally keeping to themselves, producing unremarkable children to suit the unremarkable nature of the village.

You can trace these families through the graveyard. Take the Redmores, as a fine example of this; Daniel’s mother is far from the only Redmore to lie in the soil there. His grandparents, and their parents, and their parents before, backwards, backwards, are marked with stones. And Daniel’s mother was a Barbery, and Barberys have been in this village even longer than the Redmores. They are intertwined in their histories. They do not wish to leave, or to have others find their way here to interfere with their sense of self-importance.

The Fearns are just as grounded as these others, and I am considered to be one of their number. Westerbridge, born and bred. This explains why a Redmore would think me interested in his opinion of where I go and what I do.

But the times are changing. The farm keeps getting richer as my father finds new ways to make the land profitable, and he employs more men and the ingenuity of more mechanisations to take his goods further and faster than ever before. He brings city money to this village, even if electricity has not yet arrived in our village. He may have been too old to fight, but he yet retains a young man’s attitude when it comes to business dealings.

I do not think this village will be small and self-important forever, what with the changes taking place. The arrival of Mr Tiller proves that. In the months after the end of the war he came and was accepted on the grounds that a teacher was sorely needed. He was happy to take up the empty cottage of the Wayly sisters even though they had died within its walls only a month before. How neatly he fitted, so that nobody thought to question why he would choose this place above others, having no family ties here. There was also the fact that his arrival, and his injury, gave everyone a fresh topic of conversation. There is little of interest to discuss in these parts; the weather and your health can only provide so much to say that another person would willingly want to hear. So they talked about him often, and the nature of his injuries that kept him apart from those who would have been friendly, but I do not believe they did so with deliberate malice. Everyone was in agreement that a man who had been through such experiences was entitled to find his own little corner of peace.

But I have watched Mr Tiller teach the class all day and I no longer see a man at peace.

Everyone has gone home for the day, even Daniel Redmore after much shuffling of his feet and glaring at me. We are alone.

Will Mr Tiller finally look at me? All these long hours he has not looked at me. His eyes have been to every corner of the room, but not to mine. His questions about Marco Polo have been aimed at every target but me. He has sweated and stammered. Others may blame it on the surprising heat for this time of year, beating through the long arched windows of the classroom, but I do not.

‘May Day, then,’ says Mr Tiller, and begins to lecture me on his plans, keeping the entire length of the classroom between us. I let him speak on and on, until it finally becomes too much, even for him, and he grinds to a halt. He gets up from his desk to cross to mine and lowers himself carefully onto Mary Clissold’s stool, within touching distance.

‘I am truly sorry for last night,’ he says.

‘I wish you wouldn’t be, sir.’

‘Well, here is the thing. It’s unfortunate that you are now involved, but maybe it is for the best. I am loath to admit it, but I am in need of assistance.’

This change of heart surprises me. ‘I am certain I’ll make an able teacher in the future,’ I say, slowly.

‘No, no. That’s not what I mean. You said to me last night that I was not a real man.’

‘No, I—’

He holds up a hand. ‘You are right. I am only half a man. Half of me lives, still made of the flesh in which I was born, and filled with the normal thoughts and emotions of any man. You think I would not like to be married, but I must reassure you that I would like nothing more. If it was within my power to be a husband. But it would not be right, and it never could be made right, because the other half of me is not a man at all. It is a visitation from a different time, and it commands me to certain courses of action. It is with these commands that I seek out your help, if you are brave enough to give it.’

This is not at all how I imagined this conversation. I open my mouth and shut it again when no words come out.

‘You don’t understand, I know, I know. I don’t understand myself. I try to change things for the better because of what the rock tells me, and I—I am getting ahead of myself. Why don’t you ask me a question, and I will attempt to answer it? That might suit us both better, knowing the penetrative nature of your mind as I do.’

I try to collect my thoughts. There is only one question that comes to mind, and it must be asked: ‘You said you would like to have been a husband if that was a possibility. Would you have liked to have been a husband… to me?’

He stares at me, and then smiles. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, I really would, my dear Shirley. At this moment in particular you remind me of why I would, and why I never can.’

It is enough. It will have to be enough.

‘Shirley,’ says Mr Tiller. ‘Concentrate.’

‘So how can I be of assistance?’ I say. With his words he has owned me. I will be his forever more, even if he is mad and this is the form of his insanity.

He pinches his lips together, and then says, ‘I receive visions, instructions from the rock, and much is at stake. I was guided to this village to shape the destiny of those within it, but I find the actions I must undertake are too difficult for me.’

‘What kind of actions?’

He shakes his head. ‘I cannot keep you here for the length of time it would take to explain. You must get home on time tonight to keep suspicion at bay. I have written it all down for you. It will be a terrible thing to read, but I must ask it of you, and that you will keep it safe from discovery. I rely upon you in this matter.’ He reaches into his jacket pocket and brings out an envelope, which he hands to me. I read my name upon it. ‘I do not know if this is the correct course, but I have wrestled with my conscience and I find I must look to the greater good, and to that end I must provide you with some explanation. I am, first and foremost, still your teacher, and it is my goal to elucidate, and not simply to instruct.’

‘I understand perfectly, sir,’ I say, and it is true. How could a teacher respond differently? Once more I am reminded that we share the same goals, and the thought is reassuring.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Thank you. Thank you, my dear.’

Then we briefly lay out plans for the May Day celebrations, and I am tasked with fetching the horseshoes for the game. I cannot see that this would qualify as an important occupation, but I feel that delicate partnerships such as these must begin with the reinforcement of positivity, just as one would praise a pupil for an error-ridden piece of work in order to establish that any future criticism builds upon a solid base of mutual understanding.

See, I am the teacher and he is the pupil at this moment! I cannot help but smile as we conclude our meeting, and I head homewards. I slide the letter into my pinafore, where it presses against my breast. The sharp corners stick me each time I breathe, but I don’t mind. I am about to make myself indispensable, and I have his private words as proof.

It was a long supper, and my mother cast many glances my way. I think she wanted to speak of something privately, but I am glad to say the opportunity did not come. Now I am alone, in my bed, after complaining of a headache.

‘Headaches, now, is it?’ said my father. ‘She’s a real lady. Pass the smelling salts.’ He said it in a joking tone, but my mother frowned at him severely. I sense some disagreement between them, thickening the air. I was surprised that when she served the bread pudding it did not curdle the cream in its jug.

Still, I have other things with which to be concerned, such as the contents of the letter.

He has written my name with such stylish ease, the ink flowing freely at the commencement to make a strong ‘s’ that tapers into the fine loops and lines that follow. He did not refresh the ink halfway through, and the rest of my name fades until the ‘y’ is barely visible. Never has my name looked so beautiful.

I open the envelope, taking great care not to tear it, and feel the fine quality of the paper as I slide it free. It is a thick, long letter. The writing is small and slanting; it has a sense of urgency. If he were my pupil I would reprimand him for rushing at his work. I picture him in a fever at his kitchen table, hunched over the page by lamplight. These are the words he desperately wants me to read.

I settle back on my pillow and give myself to them. I find that I am abruptly thrust into the heart of a story. No preamble is given, no address. It is as if he has simply committed his thoughts to these pages, and I can feel his presence with me as I read. It is as if he sits behind me, his breath stirring the fine hairs on the back of my neck.

Other men, those returning to the front line, told me they did not remember receiving their injuries. Everything was a blur, one told me, and I believed him. But now I know that he lied. He lied because to admit that you remember that moment of pain and fear beyond anything you have ever known is to invite further questions. And to talk in detail of such emotions brings them back to mind with a clarity I would not have thought possible for a mere memory. When I cast my mind back to my childhood in Kent I find even the most beloved memories are not clearly defined. There is a hazy glow to my mother’s face as she bends over me. I am freshly fallen from an ill-advised attempt to climb the apple tree on the common land. Keen eyes and the warmth of love, like a blanket: that is my main impression of the event.

But the German who ran to me as I struggled against the tangled nest of wire that had ensnared me—the man who picked up my own fallen gun and thrust the bayonet into my stomach, pushing down, determinedly down on the blade as if sawing wood—I see his keen face afresh every time he comes to mind. Which is so very often. I do not know why he did not simply shoot me, but I do not think he found enjoyment in the act of carving my stomach into fibrous strands that fell outwards to entangle me further with the wire. He frowned, and I saw lines appear around his mouth, so he was not a young man. A hard-working man in his middle years, I would have said; perhaps even a carpenter, which would explain his determined approach to disassembling me. He bore a fine moustache. To this day I cannot see a moustache without remembering his look of dutiful concentration as he worked upon me.

I am sorry to make this so plain. It is not, I promise you, to elicit your sympathy (which you seem happy to bestow upon me whether I am deserving of it or not, and is one of the saving graces of my current existence). I spell out in detail the nature of my injury because I wish to make it clear to you that I should not have survived. These were wounds beyond medical intervention, and I should be dead. Perhaps I was dead, because I do not remember much beyond the moustache other than a deep blue sea, warm and still and serene, into which I could have floated for an eternity.

And then I woke. Or rather, something woke me. My eyelids cracked open to behold the morass of mud and bodies that made an abandoned battlefield, alit by bright morning sunshine, with no detail spared to me. Even if my organs decorated the fence, my eyes still worked. And I knew, as I raised them up to the sky, that something was coming for me. Something beyond my comprehension.

I would swear I saw the clouds part, and those still clinging to life around me moaned as one as the object appeared in the parting. It was a black circle in that perfect sky at first, and then it grew in size as it fell down, down, down, silent in itself but accompanied by the chorus of suffering around me. I cannot tell you how I knew it was coming for me, and me alone, but I knew it. I could see the glint of the sun upon the silvery threads shot through it. I could make out the rough, uneven surface, the jagged bumps, and still it fell, until it filled my vision and the voices around me crescendoed in their fear and pain—and then it landed upon me.

I would say it did not hurt, but then, physical suffering is hard to recall, I find. I must have felt agony throughout this ordeal, surely? And yet I would swear I felt nothing, and I did not even experience a sensation of collision. Time did seem to stop. There was no time, not in that moment of merging: no time, no gravity, no laws of the natural world that applied. The object fell into the hole that had been made inside of me by that diligent German carpenter, and it filled me. I cried out as the tattered remains of skin and flesh that tied me to the wire were severed. The weight of the rock was immediate; I felt its coldness and heaviness, but I realised instantaneously that I was free, that I could move once more. So I did.

I pulled myself free, and I walked away.

I walked for miles, in the grip of nothing worse than a terrible thirst, through a forest without tracks or guidance. I was directionless, but nothing mattered. I did not look down at the rock I carried within me, and I did not attempt to touch it. I walked onwards until, by sheer chance, I came to a place where the forest ended and farmland began, and found there a collection of wooden buildings that must have once housed animals, but were now empty. They appeared to have been left that way for some length of time.

A small barn with a heavily slanted roof, the two sides raised up to a steepled peak like hands in prayer, had a rusted trough outside, into which rainfall had collected; I put my head inside it and drank deeply, uncaring of the metallic taste. Inside, a dusting of grey straw remained upon the floor, and I lay down and slept. I had no thoughts beyond my immediate needs. I think, perhaps, these were my last moments of true connection to my humanity, because humans are creatures of the earth, are they not? To drink, to sleep, to respond to these needs and think no further upon it—we are like the mice in the fields and the deer in the forest when we obey these instincts. I am not saying that the rock inside me has removed such demands; I must still eat, and drink, and take my nightly rest, of course! But I do not complete such actions without the knowledge that I must keep the remains of my body alive only for the sake of the rock, and what it asks of me.

I did not stay long at the barn. Only long enough to come to the realisation that the rock could not be removed. It was fused within me, rock melded into flesh with no discernible seam. I thought at first of trying to prise it from me, but when I put my hands upon it to make an effort I discovered the purpose of the rock. It bore a missive, activated only by the touch of my palms upon it. How can I explain it? The rock itself was a tool of communication, and it opened a…portal within my mind. A portal to the future.

I thought I was going mad, of course. It took me a long time to understand that the images I received were not originating from a disturbance within my own mind, but from the rock.

I cannot adequately describe what I see except in the most general of terms, for it makes no sense in words and my arm is already tired of writing. I will put this down, then, and rely upon your trust in me to guide your thoughts on this matter further: I have conversed with the leaders of the future. They are fearful. They plant images into my mind of the wars that await us and are befalling them, and they have devoted their lives to finding a way to end all such conflicts. They use the rock to reach back and enlist aid in their struggle. I am determined to do their bidding because I have been shown what will become of mankind if they do not succeed.

Now, my dear Shirley, I have enlisted you.

After reflection, I can recognise you now for what you truly are: you are a Godsend. I wonder if you have been presented to me as an instrument in much the same way that I was chosen as the instrument of the future. For, you see, I have been given a task that I simply could not find a way to undertake. But you—you with your charm and grace and feminine ways—will make easy work of it. And I promise you I will not ask you to do anything that will be beyond your talents.

So start by fetching those horseshoes, my most able pupil, and I will be forever in your debt. As will the world and every living thing upon it.

Yours sincerely,

Your schoolmaster and ally,

Mr Arthur Tiller, Esquire.

He ends formally as if he has written his passion, his desire to communicate these events, out of himself. Yet I find myself no closer to understanding. Am I meant to take his story literally, or to treat it as some kind of parable from which I should learn? It occurs to me that this could well be a test of my loyalty, to see how blindly I am prepared to follow.

I must also consider the possibility that he is mad. I know men have returned from the war with many ailments, including those of the mind. Mr Whittle, the publican at the Three Crowns, did not speak upon his return for many weeks, although he worked on easily enough. Men can seem able and whole, but inside something important is missing. Something that prevents them from seeing the world as an ongoing aspect of war.

Or perhaps dark times do await us on the road ahead. This, as an idea, makes much sense to me. I can picture the final remains of humanity in some terrible future, reaching back in desperation to right a wrong that never should have occurred. I think many people would wish for the ability to correct mistakes already made.

Well, he calls upon my trust, and so I will prove myself. Besides, there is no decision to be made, not yet. Thinking of it in practical terms alone, I must fetch the horseshoes; this is my instruction. It’s hardly a daring dash across no-man’s land. I will complete my task, yet reserve my judgement. If Mr Tiller is unsound, I will try to restore him to health. If he fights a brave and true battle for humanity, I will aid him as best I can. As befits a woman in love, I will do my best for his continued good. I will be his confidante and ally. He will soon realise that he can rely upon me utterly.

I put the letter under my nightdress, against my bosom. It will not leave the proximity of my body at any time; that is the safest way. The roughness of the paper brings with it a sudden awareness of my own flesh—the perfection of it, unmarred by injury. How clean and whole I am. Is it sinful to think so? What would I do if someone took a blade to me, sliced me through? Would I fight to live on, no matter what the cost? Would I accept strange visions and the perversion of my form as the price of survival?

I blow out the candle on my bedside drawer and nestle down. I picture Mr Tiller’s smile. I have never felt so close to him. And yet it is not his body that I see, but a strong, supple one. I squeeze my legs together, feeling the shame of such thoughts. In the fevered grip of my overstimulated imagination I cannot sleep. I do not even try to sleep.

Saturday morning, and I am at my task.

I have always liked the smithy, which is a place of interest and excitement for irregular visitors, although I suspect it is a hell of sweaty tedium for those who work there. There has been a Redmore’s in Westerbridge for an age, working alongside the farms to provide hoes, shovels and ploughs, and shoes for the horses, of course. The Redmore men all carry heavy-set shoulders and an attitude of forbearance, as if the responsibility of the smithy is a cross they must all carry across the generations.

It occurs to me, as I find the shop door locked tight and skirt around the wall to the forge instead, that Daniel does not quite fit this pattern. Yes, he has the strong shoulders, but he is not destined for this life in the same way as his older brother, Dennis. It is Dennis who will inherit, and the whole village knows that Daniel remains in school in order to work on his talent for thinking instead. Mr Redmore—their father—has plans to expand the business, it is said, and wants Daniel’s learning to make him into some sort of manager. Managers wear suits and make charts, and I am not altogether sure that this will suit Daniel. But then neither would the life of a blacksmith, and so he goes along cheerfully enough, not being one thing or another, except a general annoyance to me.

I can see the glow of the forge at the centre of the open-sided stone building, and the smell of smoke and hot iron is strong. And then there is the sound: the roar of the flames, like a monster caught in a deep pit, and I see Dennis standing at it, the strings of his heavy apron caught at his back as his muscles bunch. He is working.

‘Hello there, Miss Fearn,’ says a deep voice behind me, gravelly with age and experience. Mr Redmore steps forward, out of the gloom; he has been standing at the back wall of the forge the whole time, and I did not see him. ‘It seems a time since I’ve seen you here.’

‘It has been a fair while,’ I say. He went away to fight, but returned unhurt. I remember I saw him in church on the Sunday after his return, but he has not attended since.

‘Farm business? Or have you come to see Daniel? He’s gone to Taunton to make a delivery.’

‘No,’ I say, quickly, and Mr Redmore moves further out, into the light, and smiles at me in a knowing way that I do not much like. ‘I am on business for Mr Tiller, in point of fact.’

‘Indeed? He has you running errands, has he?’

There is a tremendous noise, like a great bell ringing close by, making me start. Mr Redmore does not even flinch. He flicks one hand towards the forge; I follow the gesture with my eyes and see that Dennis has moved to the anvil and is hammering at heated metal with a patient, steady stroke, moulding it to his will. He pounds in a rhythm over which I must shout to be heard.

‘For May Day. Horseshoes.’

‘Of course, of course.’ Mr Redmore nods. ‘Do you want to take them now? They’ll be heavy, though. I can get Daniel to carry them to wherever you would like when he returns. It’ll be a few hours yet.’

‘I can manage myself,’ I say.

He raises his eyebrows, then turns away and walks back into the darkness of the building, and I can see that he has become so much older since I last saw him, stiff in his gait. Perhaps it will not be long until Dennis takes over the running of the smithy. It makes me sad to see the slow, painful tread of his feet over the well-worn floor, and the way his hair thins at the back and looks threadbare where it meets his collar.

If I could see my own parents with such objectivity, would they look so much older too? What, then, would they think of such changes in themselves? Do they hate the passage of time, or will that emotion shrivel along with their bodies?

Perhaps all old people look upon the young with envious eyes, and give their orders to reach beyond their natural time and steal from ours.

These thoughts are uncomfortable, so I put them aside in order to concentrate on my mission. Mr Redmore emerges with a wooden box in his hands that does not look too heavy. He walks past Dennis, who ceases hammering as he looks up at his father, and then sees me with a frown. Dennis is only two years older than me but he has always kept a distance, as if we are not meant to socialise. It always seems to me that he acts as if he has a secret knowledge that he imagines I could not possibly understand, even though I am the better learner by far within the confines of the classroom.

‘What’re you after?’ he says. ‘Daniel’s not here. He’s gone to Taunton.’

‘Manners,’ says Mr Redmore.

I wonder why everyone keeps telling me about Daniel. It’s not as if I have done anything to encourage the belief that I have an interest in him, and I do not urge him to be interested in me. Besides, if I did want to see Daniel it would hardly do for a young lady to turn up at a gentleman’s house in the hope of catching a glimpse of him.

‘Here,’ says Mr Redmore, and holds out the box. It has no lid and is about the size of the bible on the lectern in our church. The horseshoes are arranged within, in two rows. I put my hands out, so he places the box in my arms and relaxes his grip a little, just so I can feel the weight of it. He laughs as I stagger, and lifts the box up. ‘Told you,’ he says, quite kindly, then, ‘come on, lead the way, Miss Fearn, and direct me to the place for these. I’ll deliver myself just this once. It will take me back to my youth when I ran the length of this village and beyond carrying all manner of whatnots. Back to the farm, is it?’

‘No,’ I say. I know when I have lost a battle. ‘To the schoolroom, please.’

‘Very well.’

I start walking, aware of Mr Redmore’s presence behind me; he keeps pace to stay in my wake. What a strange procession we must be to behold, and when we reach the main street and start to spy familiar faces I find myself blushing fiercely. Why do they all smile at the sight of us, as if they are complicit in some joke? I cannot bear it, so I stop walking and turn to Mr Redmore. He is smiling too.

‘Everyone is very cheerful today,’ I say, as he catches up with me, and then I dawdle so that he must walk alongside me whether he likes it or not. He carries the box so easily and there is no strain in his voice as he replies.

‘It being a lovely Saturday is the cause of that, I dare say.’

‘Indeed. It has made them all very jolly.’

‘May is a lovely month,’ he says, then nods in greeting to Mrs Norman and her children, the six of them hand in hand behind her crocodile-style.

‘But we are not quite in May yet.’

‘No. Not quite. But it will not be long. And then it is only a month or so until your schooling days are over, is it not? Yours and Daniel’s.’

‘Perhaps,’ I say, coolly.

‘O ho!’ he says, but does not comment further.

How I hate this village sometimes, and the people in it.

We reach the schoolroom, but my destination is behind it—the hut that lurks in the long grass behind what was once a cricket pitch when Mr Fisk was in charge, and keen on the sport even though nobody showed any talent for bowling. It is a small, dilapidated wooden shed into which all manner of objects have been crammed, from stumps to wickets to long-forgotten texts and broken slates. ‘I have been given the key especially,’ I explain when Mr Redmore gives a puzzled glance to the hut, and I produce the key from my apron pocket. It takes an effort to turn it in the lock, but eventually it succumbs and clicks open.

The door swings back to reveal the cobwebbed interior and the lines of dusty shelves filled with a tangled mess of defunct possessions that look as if they belong in a museum. Mr Redmore must be thinking a similar thought, because he steps into the hut and puts down the box of horseshoes on top of a pile of leg pads, and sighs. He says, ‘Who can believe we are at the end of your schooling? You and Daniel both. It seems only yesterday you were barely as tall as my knee.’

I step back and wait for him to emerge, but he does not. He stands inside the hut, unbothered by the dust and the corpses of flies dangling from the roof by the thin strands of spiderweb. He fills the space, and something in his quiet contemplation brings an unwelcome intimacy to the moment. I find I do not want to be there.

Then he turns to look hard at me.

‘Pretty little thing, aren’t you? Strange to think you’ll have that big farm, to run all by yourself. Your father is no doubt showing you all you need to know, though. He’s a man with one eye on the future.’

I sense a warning in these words. I realise that Mr Redmore has also heard of my letter to Taunton, and that is what he speaks of: the place where the plans of the old and young do not quite meet.

‘He took you along to all those farmers’ balls, didn’t he? The Taunton ones. But they say in the village he’s stopped that now. Did you not see a young man you liked?’

‘We must all make our own plans,’ I say. ‘Who knows what the future holds?’

He smiles, and shrugs, crossing his broad, scarred arms over his chest. So many burns have been sustained from the forge that the skin is puckered and shiny. ‘I know that all businesses needs a strong pair of hands to guide the way. I have Dennis. And your father has you. Who will you have, miss?’

‘Thank you for your concern, Mr Redmore, and I appreciate your kind offer, but I think I’ll be looking for someone more my own age when I cast around for marriage material.’

Did I really say that? Yes, I really said that. I can’t believe my own rudeness. He moves towards me, and I half-expect a clip around the ear, but Mr Redmore just laughs, and walks out of the hut to stand in the long grass once more.

‘Whoever makes up your marriage material will have his work cut out for him, and no mistake,’ he observes as I lock the door once more. When I turn around he is already halfway across the yard, returning to the smithy, where he belongs.

It is as if, I think as I walk slowly home, a light has been switched on inside of me. It is a light that only men can see, and it attracts them, draws them close. It makes them think that I will be receptive to their glances and comments. I’m not ridiculous enough to think that their interest is all about my beauty or other talents. It is simply that I am now, in their eyes, the right age for such treatment.

I did go to one or two of the farmers’ balls, at my father’s insistence, and found nobody there to hold a candle to Mr Tiller. I thought this had gone unnoticed, but it seems I am transparent; everyone has a great interest in me, and the farm I will inherit.

In Mr Redmore’s case, he wants Daniel to benefit. I have no doubt Daniel would do a grand job of running the farm. I’m beginning to get the feeling, when I remember the look on everyone’s faces as I walked along with Mr Redmore in tow, that the entire village is already in agreement with that sentiment.

But my father is in rude health, and such decisions are years ahead. When I do inherit I will simply pay somebody (maybe even Daniel, if that is whom everyone wants in the position) to manage my affairs. I wish I could explain my thinking, which is most sensible, to everyone who smirks at me, but nobody seems to really listen. Nobody but Mr Tiller.

The Sunday morning service is a regular opportunity for quiet contemplation on my part, and today is no exception. Reverend Mountcastle has a soothing voice, too soft and low to really enthuse a congregation, but with a mesmeric quality that steals my thoughts away to examination of a topic that has lodged itself in my mind.

Rocks.

The rock that has merged with Mr Tiller. I remember the way the skin peeled back from the jagged stone, and the unnatural pulsing of silver through it, casting its glow through the kitchen.

I shudder.

My father, next to me in the back pew, nudges me with his elbow. He has hardly spoken to me since I was out late the other night. It is easy to tell that he is allowing the unspoken words to build up inside him, until they will erupt at some moment. I can guess what he will spout forth then; what I cannot know is what I will say in return. I must try to keep my newfound temper to myself. It is only a matter of time before my mouth gets me into trouble. I feel quite certain of it.

‘A wise son maketh a glad father: but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother. Treasures of wickedness profit nothing: but righteousness delivereth from death. The Lord will not suffer the soul of the righteous to famish: but he casteth away the substance of the wicked. He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand: but the hand of the diligent maketh rich. He that gathereth in summer is a wise son: but he that sleepeth in harvest is a son that causeth shame,’ Reverend Mountcastle says, sedately.

I cast my eyes around the church. We were late today as my mother couldn’t find her best hat (it was under the sink, of all places, and nobody has any clue of how it got there) and the horse, Nellie, would not hurry for anyone. So I am afforded a rare opportunity from my view at the back to look around the families of Westerbridge. It takes my mind from the parts of my anatomy that are turning numb from continuous contact with the hard wooden pew.

The Redmores are not here, of course. I wasn’t expecting to see them. The Barberys take up the pew directly in front of us, with all of the children neatened and behaving, which is a surprise. The Clarkes, the Colsons, the Braddicks, the Brownlees. Mr Tiller, on the end of the Brownlees’ row.

Everyone is standing; it is my mother who elbows me this time, in my other side, and holds out her hymnbook so I can see what we are about to sing. It is ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’, which has three verses. Long enough to alleviate the numbness in my lower region, anyway.

After the service we mill in the churchyard, as is the usual practice. The men talk business, even though it is a Sunday and Reverend Mountcastle will frown at them. But his severe expressions will do no good; they will only move their talk over to the village green, opposite the smithy, rather than cease entirely. The ladies follow their procession down the main street, and it is a warm, dry day so my mother and I sit on the grass with Mrs Braddick and her girls. They chat about the surprising turn of events that could lead to a best hat ending up under the sink without so much as a by-your-leave.

I watch my father talk business. He once told me that he does more trade on a Sunday than on any other day of the week, and if God hadn’t wanted it that way he should not have congregated working men together on that day. I was only little, and remember my mother saying, ‘Don’t put such thoughts into her head, Fred!’

Well, too late. The thought has stuck there, to be recalled forever more. Rather like Mr Tiller’s rock, some thoughts land upon you with a crash and then sink in, and no power on Earth will dislodge them.

It is a good long time before my father comes over to where we sit and tells us he is going to help with finding a good tree for the maypole this year, and we are to take Nellie home ourselves. ‘I’ll walk back later,’ he says. He seems in better spirits than I have seen for a while. He even gives me a smile.

My mother nods, looking not so happy with this turn of events, and we leave the green and return to our horse and cart outside the churchyard. Nellie has waited patiently for us without a peep, as she has been trained to do. But she is also an older horse now, and seems happy to take any instruction as long as it involves not moving very far.

My mother takes up the reins and snaps them. Nellie sighs, and commences a slow plod through the village. We pass all the familiar sights, shops, houses and faces in silence. It is not until we are halfway home, alone on the road with the hedges up high around us, that my mother reaches into her sewn pocket bag kept around her neck, and pulls out a letter, dropping it in my lap.

For one awful moment I think she has found Mr Tiller’s confessional letter, but no—no, it is still safe against my chest, held in place by my dress, and the paper now lying in my lap is too thin. I feel such relief, but too soon; as I open it and scan it, I discover why my mother is so vexed.

Further to your letter—Invite you to attend a meeting on Tuesday 27th April—Possible enrolment for the coming September.

‘Has Father seen it?’ I ask.

‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Did you think I would keep it from him?’

Perhaps I had hoped that, at least until she had talked to me first. But now I see that was a ridiculous fancy. ‘So he disapproves?’

‘He does. As you knew he would, or else why would you have kept this plot to yourself? Shirley, you break our hearts.’ But I do not see a broken heart in her expression, nor in her voice. There is only a flat tone, familiar to me as one that issues orders when work must be done, raised to carry over the noise of Nellie’s hooves. It is very familiar to me, this voice, but it scares me to realise that it is a disguise—one that she has worn since I was a little girl. Who knows what she really feels about me? Or about the entire world?

Maybe that is why she has always worn it.

‘It was not a deliberate attempt to…’ The words fail me. Hurt them? Escape from them, and from the farm? I love the farm, and I mean to take care of it. I wish I could explain this, but suddenly, in the glare of daylight with the letter in my lap, all my plans seem quite strange and miniature to me. It is as if they are pictures that I painted in a small back room, without much light, and now I have carried them into the full glare of the sunshine I must admit my pictures are washed-out and weak against the full palette of reality. Such as that tone in my mother’s voice.

‘You mean to look after the farm,’ she repeats.

‘I could train as a teacher while Father still runs the farm and I am not needed, and then—later on, after I have qualified—I could do both. Run the farm, and teach.’

‘I thought you clever,’ says my mother. ‘I thought you understood. I should have made it clear. I saw where your heart was leading you, but I thought you would not give way to it. The farm will not be yours to look after, Shirley. That is not why you have been given an education beyond what I could have dreamed of. You have been given the skills to make yourself bright and interesting to the kind of young man who can run a place like this. To help him, and to keep him.’

And so.

So she stops speaking and we continue in silence.

So my thoughts do not matter at all.

After a few more trots along the road by Nellie, as steady as ever, my mother transfers the reins to her left hand and places her right hand upon my knee. ‘Your father wanted to knock sense into you.’

‘A husband,’ I say.

But I want a husband anyway. Did they think I never wanted to marry? How can it be that everything I want and everything they want is incompatible? I can surely find places where our plans fit together. I believe in conversation, in resolution, in peace. There can be no line drawn that cannot be crossed, and no obstacle erected that cannot be overcome. This is no different from a bloodless war, and I will not take part in a war. That is the very thing I am determined to abolish.

‘Why did you think we took you to the farmers’ balls?’ my mother is saying. ‘But you would not talk to any boy there, and you were proud and haughty. I see I should have taken you aside and counselled you then, but I wanted you to have your time of happiness. Now look what has become of it. I know who you would have, too, Shirley, and I tell you now clearly that it cannot be. You must find someone fit and strong, for farming is hard work at all times. When your father returns home tonight be meek, and make it clear to him that you understand what I have said to you.’ Her hand tightens on my knee. I flinch. I do not know her at all; she seems to delight in ripping down my dreams. I would love to simply get down and run away from her and the cart and plodding Nellie. I could throw myself off if only she would let go of my knee. How can I make peace with such a creature?

‘But I have not been taught to be meek, have I?’ I say, stiffly. ‘That is your failing, and now it must be taken out on me. Kindly remove your hand.’

She snatches back from me, but I do not get down from the cart because I feel a surge of triumph. I see now how weak she has always been; she does only what she is told. She has failed me, and my father, by not teaching me my place; she is the reason I am not docile in acceptance of my place. And she is the reason my father is unhappy.

I will not behave for her. I will not rip up this letter.

I hold it in my hands, quite plainly to see, and we do not speak further on this journey. When we reach the farm I get down and walk away from the house, my back stiff, and she does not call after me.

My newfound joy in saying things that upset others surprises me. I suppose it is my only source of power. If I must obey, then I will do it with no good grace.

So I waited that Sunday, in the top field. I remained in view of the farm until I saw my father making his way home, and then I beat him back, running at speed, by only the merest of moments. I took great comfort in the panic on my mother’s face, which gave way to relief as I dissembled all sweetness for him, and pretended I had been at home for hours.

I did nothing but sit in the top field, of course. I considered going straight to see Mr Tiller, but regardless of what my mother says I am not stupid. I know he would only have turned me away. He will not rescue me—see how well I know my love! He has no taste for the small concerns of the present world, but instead concentrates on saving the future.

Speaking of which, my next task has been meted out to me, but I must admit I do not care for it.

‘Decorate the pole,’ he said. ‘Attach the ribbons. You can supervise.’

That is how I come to be standing here, in the rain, watching Azariah Barbery shin up the birch trunk that the men erected on the village green on Sunday.

Azariah has a white ribbon held between his teeth, and hammer and nails borrowed from the smithy in the leather belt around his waist. He is a monkey of a boy, and well suited to this task.

I do wish that, one year, the men would remember that the ribbons must be attached to the top of the pole before they erect it. But then this task has given the Barberys a purpose for many a year. Azariah has done it for the past four years, and his older brothers did it before him, all of them so light and flexible that they would really be best suited to life in a jungle.

Looking at him somehow manage to hold on with his legs while he hammers in the first nail, I remember his brothers quite clearly. Noah was the eldest, Hezekiah the next, and Obediah followed. I never spoke a word to any of them myself, being only a small, shy girl peeping at them from behind my mother’s skirts if we passed in the street, or saw them in church. They always garnered a frown from Reverend Mountcastle, not because they misbehaved, but because they were integrally linked to the May Day celebrations, which is no good Christian festival. The fact that three brothers with such biblical names were cavorting with pagan spirits could hardly place them high in his affections. But now they are all dead, the brothers, and it is too sad to think on any longer.

So I tear my mind away, and look at Jeremiah Crowe instead, who is always inseparable from Azariah. He is staring up at the top of the pole with wet eyes, while Daniel Redmore stands beside him, his eyes only on me.

The hammering stops, and the end of the white ribbon flutters down to the ground. ‘Throw me the next one, then,’ shouts Azariah. Jeremiah, with his hands full of colourful ribbons bound into balls for the ease of throwing, obliges. He has a good arm, but Azariah misses the catch. They giggle, and Daniel stoops to retrieve it from where it has fallen on the grass.

It is pleasant to be out here on the green, in full view of The Three Crowns and the smithy, while the rest of the world works on. The other children are in school, and no doubt envious of our special task, but suspecting nothing as they learn about Polo’s descriptions of the province of Karazan. The truth, now I consider it, is that this is another mission that asks nothing of me and that I would have willingly undertaken anyway. The horseshoes and the maypole—Mr Tiller wants this to be a magnificent May Day, and so do I. It is, after all, my favourite time of year in the village.

Daniel throws the yellow ribbon again and this time Azariah catches it in one hand, and begins to attach it.

‘Leave it loose,’ I call up to him. ‘It needs to be able to move on the nail.’

‘Hark at her,’ says Azariah, to the other boys.

‘She’s practising to be May Queen,’ says Jeremiah. ‘As if that will ever happen.’

This is an insult, but I rise above it. The May Queen for Westerbridge is always the prettiest girl who has turned 16 years of age, and that is Phyllis Clemens this year, with golden hair and a pale speckled complexion, as if she is dusted in flour, befitting the baker’s daughter. She left school a year ago, and now makes buns in the back of the shop and serves out front sometimes. We were, when we were very young, friends. But then I discovered I wanted to converse about more than proving dough, although she can talk on the subject very prettily and I have no jealousy on that score.

‘I’m no Phyllis Clemens,’ I tell them both, ‘and that suits me, thank you very much.’

‘I heard my father say to your father that Mr Tiller had been talking to Reverend Mountcastle about who would be May Queen this year,’ says Daniel.

Jeremiah throws the red ribbon, and Azariah catches it. ‘It’s not up to him,’ Azariah says.

‘Do the blue one next,’ I say.

‘He thinks he’s local now,’ says Jeremiah. The boys all laugh at this.

‘Weren’t you stepping out with Phyllis?’ Azariah says to Daniel, as he ties on the red. This is news to me. ‘I heard you went under the bridge with her.’

Daniel’s face reddens. ‘Course not.’

‘Your father wouldn’t like it, I’m thinking.’

‘I’m not beholden to my father,’ he says. ‘I’ll step out with whoever I like. And I’ll not be staying in this place forever either. Not for anybody’s charms or on anybody’s orders.’ He casts an angry look my way, but what on Earth did I do? I have never heard of any of this, and am amazed to find that he dreams of a different life. I thought myself alone with such ideas in this village. I like him more at this moment than ever before.

‘Well that tells you, Shirley,’ says Azariah, smirking down from the top of the pole, and at that moment he loses his grip. I see in his face the realisation that he is falling, he knows it—Jeremiah calls out, time is so slow as we watch him fall, fall—

No. He hangs upside down from the pole, his arms and his brown hair dangling down, his knee bent backward and his foot caught in the red ribbon that has formed a loop, holding his weight.

We are all frozen in the moment.

Then Daniel laughs, and Jeremiah laughs, and I laugh. It is quite the funniest thing I have ever seen: Azariah Barbery, hanging off the maypole.

Our laughter dries, and I realise it sprang from relief. Everything could have been different. No more Barberys. The last son, gone, because of one moment of inattention. How different the village would have been without him, without Barberys at all. He has been saved by no more than chance. A ribbon that looped where it might have stayed straight.

‘I feel sick,’ calls Azariah, and Daniel runs to fetch a ladder from the smithy, positioning it against the pole so that he can climb up and help Azariah to right himself. Daniel waits until Azariah is steady, then extricates his leg from the ribbon, and they climb down. They both lie on the grass, face up, limbs spread. Nobody speaks for a moment.

Then Azariah says, ‘Can I ask a question?’

‘What?’ says Daniel.

‘Why don’t we use the ladder to tie the ribbons in the first place?’

We all start to laugh again.

‘Tradition,’ I say. ‘A pointless tradition.’

‘Still,’ says Jeremiah. ‘It’s a fun one. Your face, Azzy, was a picture.’ He bends over, puts his head between his knees, and makes a pretence of terror that strikes a nerve.

‘Let’s use the ladder to finish up,’ says Azariah. ‘Do I have to do it? Does it always have to be a Barbery?’

Daniel and I exchange glances. ‘Enough tradition for one day,’ says Daniel, and takes the remaining ribbons from Jeremiah’s hands. He climbs the ladder, and I hold my breath as he finishes a task that never seemed so dangerous before.

When he comes down I find myself smiling at him, and he smiles back.

‘Hello hello,’ says Azariah, then he and Jeremiah run off laughing. They are not travelling in the direction of the school, needless to say. Ah well; perhaps they deserve a little time to themselves, and besides, I want to hear Daniel speak to me, and me alone. He looks as if he has a question to ask me, and I suspect I know what it will be.

Later, after class has finished for the day, I report back to Mr Tiller. He seems all ears for what was said at the maypole, but less interested in what was done. I would have revelled in a description of Azariah’s fall, which is a rare piece of excitement and will spread through the village in no time at all, but Mr Tiller waves his hand at it. ‘And after that?’ he says.

I stand beside his desk, like a good pupil delivering facts for checking. ‘Nothing else,’ I say.

‘The boys didn’t speak further to you?’

‘Azariah asked if it had to be a Barbery that climbed the pole—’

‘Forget Azariah,’ he says; he has had a short temper all day, and now he is venting at me. I don’t deserve such treatment.

‘If you have an interest in one particular person’s utterings, then please enlighten me so I can oblige, sir,’ I retort. I know his secret, and he must be civil to me. I am no longer his pupil alone, and I will not have him pretend otherwise.

He looks at me as if he has not really seen me for a time, then says, ‘I forget how bright you are; forgive me, my dear. I must be honest with you and say that I had hoped the conversation had turned in a more personal direction, such as who will be your companion for the May Day celebrations? I’ve not a doubt that what I’m about to say will seem very strange to you, but on such small matters rests the fate of the world.’

He cannot really believe that. I know for certain I cannot believe it.

But I look into his eyes and I see Mr Tiller does believe it, utterly, and he is intent on having his satisfaction. It consumes him to know, and so I tell him the thing I had wanted to keep all to myself, for a while at least. ‘Daniel Redmore has asked me, but I have yet to give him my answer.’

He nods, and stands, moving around his desk to stand close to me. His waistcoat buttons are done up tight, as ever, but I know about what lurks underneath the material. ‘That is good news,’ he says, in a hoarse voice. ‘Very good news.’

I do not speak. I feel some strange emotion that I cannot place. It is a tender spot deep inside me, like a forming bruise. ‘What should I do?’ I whisper. His eyelids flicker. I can hear his shallow breaths, close to my ear. Yet he is not looking directly at me, but at a point above my head. If I were foolish, I think, I could mistake this for romance.

‘Tell him yes, would you, Shirley?’

‘Yes?’

‘That you will go to the May Day celebrations with him. With Daniel Redmore.’ He places a hand on my shoulder.

The bruise within me forms into an emotion I recognise. Disappointment.

He pats my shoulder, then drops his hand and steps back. As far as he is concerned our business for today has been resolved.

But I do not want to be dismissed so easily.

‘Taunton College for Women has replied to my letter enquiring about the possibility of training there,’ I say, and my voice is strong, and clear. ‘They wish to meet with me.’

I can see from the way he decides to start tidying the papers on his desk that he had forgotten all about my dream. My disappointment intensifies. It makes my voice and my determination harden. ‘I mean to be a teacher one day. Here, with you.’

‘You are certainly capable,’ he agrees, and then says, ‘What does your father say?’

‘He forbids it.’

And my father thinks the matter is closed, because my demeanour is calculated to give him that impression. But I do not want to show a closed, humble face to the entire world! I must have someone who understands me.

‘Ah, that is a shame. Attitudes can take so long to change in such places. Do not give up, I would say, but bear in mind that the time may not be right for such a bold move. If you were to defy him now it would draw unpleasant attention to this school and my teachings, and we have such important work to do before we can be free to follow our own hearts.’

‘We must save mankind,’ I say.

‘Exactly so.’

‘How do you see this future?’ I ask him. ‘I wonder if you could describe it to me.’

He hesitates, his fingers pushing at the wood of his desk. ‘I—It is a vision, and not easily communicated…’

‘What is it that speaks to you, sir? Light, or colours? What form does the future take?’

Finally, he looks at me. ‘You must trust me.’

‘I do, sir. And you must trust me. This is, as you say, a delicate time. Please help me to avoid a misstep simply because I do not fully comprehend the situation. Explain it to me as only you can.’

‘Very well,’ he says. ‘But not here. I will consider how best to relate it to you. And, in return, you will accept Daniel Redmore’s request, and you will continue to act as my proxy and undertake no action that might threaten our secrecy.’

‘Let us shake hands on it,’ I say, and hold out mine. I have a strong urge to touch his skin, as if that could help me to know him better. Is he mad? Can madness be felt through the skin, palm to palm? All I know is that his grip is soft and his skin cool, unlike my own warm, damp handshake into which my own foreboding can be read. But still, I feel better for this contact between us. Every time we speak I draw a little closer to understanding him, and reminding him that I am a woman as well as an assistant. Well, perhaps not a grown woman yet, but certainly on the way.

‘Good afternoon, then,’ I say, as he breaks the contact.

‘Yes, hurry on home now, Miss Fearn,’ he says.

So I do. I will obey the commands, for now. Everything I do will be for Mr Tiller’s good, whether he understands that or not.

I will make a list, in my head.

Here is what has happened: I told Daniel Redmore that I would step out with him on May Day; I vacillated upon the subject of my upcoming interview, changing my mind first one way and then the other at least 20 times a day; and Reverend Mountcastle informed the congregation this Sunday morning that I am to be the May Queen.

Here is what hasn’t happened: Mr Tiller has not attempted to explain his vision to me. I am supposing it is a very difficult thing to elucidate, but that does not excuse him in my eyes. He asks much of me, and I only ask for this illumination in return.

I sit by the stream, in the shade of the horse-chestnut tree so that I will not take on too much colour before May Day, and consider.

Perhaps, if I am very honest, I should admit to myself that Mr Tiller is not asking so very much of me. I liked the way Daniel’s eyes widened when I met him on the walk to school and told him I would be his girl. I liked the looks I got from the others, young and old, as the news spread around the church that I am to be the May Queen. It is as if I have been made a hundred times prettier, and that is powerful magic. The men stand back as I leave the pew, and I feel them scanning my walk, my small smile. They define me anew. The May Queen for a day. A Queen may give orders, and expects to be obeyed.

But I will make a good and kind Queen. I will do my duty well. I will sit on the throne (a wooden chair bedecked with flowers) with aplomb and reign over the festivities, a smile on my lips and a floral crown upon my brow.

I wonder if Phyllis Clemens is very upset over this turn of events?

Father is out visiting this Sunday afternoon, enjoying himself in conversation with the other men no doubt, saying the things he will not say directly to me. And I am enjoying my afternoon, alone. It’s good to be in solitude, particularly with so much to consider.

The daisies grow thick here, in the lowest part of the bottom fields where the stream flows through, and there are wild flowers springing up too, stretching for their place in the sun, finding footholds between the rocks. Are they at war, then, with each other? Do they vie for survival, much as humans do? If that is so then I cannot understand why they give me such a feeling of peace when I am amongst them. But, of course, I am not one of them. I am only an observer of their silent struggle, and could never truly understand it. For there is a great distance between us, a distance of intellect. Do flowers have their own strange thoughts? I would like to think that they do, and if they do then what other creations upon this planet also have their own intelligence?

Rocks.

I came down here not for the flowers, but for the rocks. There is a collection of large ones here, smooth and grey, placed deliberately by my grandfather to shape the journey of the stream on its way to becoming a river. Mr Tiller has a rock within him that he says speaks to him. Could this be so? I must conduct my own experiment. I edge down from the grassy bank to the place where the stones, flowers and waters meet, and I place my hands upon the largest of the rocks.

It is warm in the sun, and so very solid. It is a rock; how could it be anything but?

‘Hello?’ I say, experimentally.

The rock does not respond.

This is foolish, I know it, but it came to me that maybe the reason rocks have not communicated with humans before is because humans never really tried, not properly. But now a rock is embedded in Mr Tiller. Perhaps it tells him things because he is the first person to take a real interest.

Of course, there are different kinds of rock in the world, I know that. And also, now I think of it, rocks that are not of this world at all. Did Mr Tiller not say the rock fell upon him from a great height? I thought it must have been thrown into the air by a bomb blast, but perhaps it did not go up at all before it fell down.

The planets are also giant rocks. And meteors, too, and comets, I think. Rocks that travel through space, and one of them happens to fall to the Earth at the very spot where a war is being fought, at the moment where one soldier waits, wrapped in wire, to die…

‘Rock,’ I say, on an impulse. ‘Wake up. Tell me the future.’ I press hard on its surface. I can feel striations, lines, edges: how incredible an object a rock is, now I look closely at it. How multi-hued, how interesting under my fingertips. But this rock lacks the silver strands that glittered in Mr Tiller’s chest. Yes, there are many types of rock and this one does not match the one I saw that night.

I cannot find my answers here. I must rely on my love, and the answers he has promised me. It is a good thing that it is such a lovely day, and I am to be May Queen. I take off my shoes and stockings, dangle my feet into the cold, clear water of the stream, and daydream of making my appearance at the festival, with Daniel Redmore leading me to my festooned and scented throne.

I cannot wait until after school; I take the letter Mr Tiller has given me, passed inside a book on the Silk Route, and scurry along to the hut. There I sit, with my back against the door, and start to read.

The letter begins in a ridiculously formal capacity. It is as if Mr Tiller is attempting to create a separation between us, and it annoys me somewhat, but not enough to break my concentration upon his words.

Dear Miss Fearn,

Allow me to express, as your schoolmaster, my very great admiration and my respect for your efforts in regards to our discussed plans for the May Day celebrations. You have been of invaluable aid to me; and yet there is still more to be done.

You asked me to make known to you certain information, and I will attempt to set out some form of explanation here, on the understanding that we do not speak directly upon such matters, and you destroy this letter, like my last, after reading.

It is, in point of fact, an impossible task that you give me. One can describe thoughts and feelings; one can document conversations or even inner revelations. My visions, however—the things that I see in my mind’s eye when I place my hands upon the material that has become an integral part of myself—are none of these happenings, and thus elude me when I reach for language that might elucidate them. How does one do justice to the sunrise? And yet that is the form that my visions take: light where there was the perpetual darkness that characterises the human condition; glaring truth where once shadows (so comforting, so able to obfuscate the painful lines of reality!) fell; the pain of living in knowledge where once the sleep of the ignorant emulated death itself.

Forgive me. I shall do my best. Even when facts cannot be laid out clearly, efforts must be made for my most able pupil.

A room—that is the first thing I see. Or perhaps it is better described as a space, for I cannot tell if there are walls, or a door. White as goose feathers, shapeless, echoing and yet close and soft, giving the sense of intimacy for those who share it. Because I am not alone. There are three venerable figures standing before me, their eyes kind and welcoming, and they do not speak. They do not need to, for they simply will their thoughts into my head. They are undoubtedly human, even though they possess this strange gift of wordless communication; I feel a kinship with them that cannot be denied. They smile upon me. They are very wise. They send me the thought of welcome, and then the thought of now. This moment.

Then there are layers to the thoughts they implant, as if they have peeled an onion to reveal more inside than out, layers upon layers, going down, deeper, through time itself, reaching back from the now and also forward to the future. The perspective alters, turns on its side, and I no longer see layers but veins. Each family history is a vein in the body of the human race that will one day exist, and some veins are so very important amongst the others. Not the brightest, or richest, not even the best of us in any discernible way. It is, in part, chance; but at this level of consideration it seems chance and destiny are entwined, inextricable.

The wise ones guide me, pointing out things, showing me each vein in turn, every family being a separate journey that is only the stroke of a paintbrush upon a giant canvas, the millions of which form a perfect image of wholeness, togetherness. Then I realise that there is one tiny error within the part of the image that I am being shown—an error that contains the possibility to become a disease within time, spreading darkness over the picture until it is spoiled and dead. That error is a family line.

After that realisation I mourned. I mourned for both the world and for my lost mind; for either I was mad, or the future was already lost simply by the existence of this family. But it came to me that I had not been given this gift of foresight to torment me. I had a choice. I could decide that madness had claimed me, or I could find a purpose within it. So I searched for a purpose. I became well versed in that image of the completion of mankind in all its glory, and at the place where it all went wrong. And I began to see how I could change that place, and save the world.

So you see, Shirley, I have no great answers for you that will make sense of what you already know.

I would wish this responsibility away in a moment if I had remained a whole man, but I am now more rock than flesh, and I feel the rock consuming more and more of me. I am hardened inside in ways you cannot begin to imagine. You will not understand this, I think, until you are much older. Then you will look back on this, on my next request, and see it in an entirely different light, and not a good one. Time changes everything, does it not?

But I must ask it of you. And you will do it, if you do it, because you are good and true, and you should remember that, always.

Does it matter if we save the world if we have lost our souls? Mine is already lost, and so I have no fear on that score. Your soul is an infinitely more precious commodity, but even so I am prepared to risk it. You see, I feel the stone in my heart; more so every day.

I have heard in the village that you have agreed to go with Daniel Redmore to the May Day celebrations. That is good. And now I must ask you to be a good friend to him, and more besides. Allow him to find peace, and contentment, and love in you. If he gazes at you with all the ardent admiration that a young man can feel, then let him. Cleave to him, and do not remonstrate or resist.

I stop reading. I look around the corner of the school hut, where the children are engaged in skipping and clapping and so forth. As I gaze upon them as if through the wrong end of a telescope, I realise how very little they all mean to me.

…do not remonstrate or resist. It would not be a sin to give him comfort, Shirley. It would save us all. For it is the Redmore line that condemns us all to a bleak future, and Daniel is the cause. If we can change his behaviour on May Day we will change everything for the better.

I told you this was a task only you could undertake, and now you know why. You must make him love you, and you must bind him to you, before he becomes the instigator of destruction on a scale you cannot possibly imagine.

I ask so much of you. Perhaps this task is why you were born, have you thought of that? I have seen the patterns of time spread—

‘What’re you reading?’

I look up into Daniel Redmore’s eyes, and then I fold up the letter and slide it into my apron pocket. ‘None of your business,’ I tell him. ‘Help me up.’ I hold out my hand and he takes it and pulls me into his arms, pretending to be cheeky and charming while all the time I know this is only a pretence to get to my letter.

‘I think you are my business, miss.’ His arms are around me, and I like it. It is as if we are playing house, as we did when we were little. I could imagine us married, and this is how we are with each other every day, because that is what couples do. It is a game, but a good one. If only he wasn’t so jealous. I know he suspects it is a letter from Mr Tiller.

‘I agreed to be your business on May Day, and that is still over a week away. Now let me go; it’s nearly time for the bell to ring.’

‘Not yet…’ he says. ‘Tell me who’s writing to you. You’re my girl.’ He sounds breathless, a little scared, as if he can’t quite believe what he is doing. How could he be responsible for anything terrible, let alone the end of humanity?

I could kiss him, and he would soon forget the letter. But I do not want to kiss him in order to protect Mr Tiller, or at his bidding. The nerve of a schoolmaster to ask a pupil to—take up with another pupil, to even go so far as to defy the laws of the church… He is mad, and I should show his letters to Reverend Mountcastle.

But even as I think it, I know I won’t do that. I will do things my own way.

‘Shirley?’ says Daniel. I hear his breathing, so fast, and his strong arms are around me still. We are frozen in the moment. He is my ally, and we both must live by rules set by our fathers, teachers, vicars. Well, no more.

‘Listen,’ I say. ‘I have a meeting arranged for the training college in Taunton, to become a teacher. My father has forbidden me from going.’

‘So the letter is from Taunton?’

I nod. Let him think so.

‘You should go,’ he says. ‘I’ll take my father’s cart. We’ll miss school. I’ll take you there myself.’

‘You are a gentleman,’ I tell him, and his smile is so broad and becoming that I stand up on my tiptoes and kiss him anyway, just for myself. His mouth is harder than I expected and his lips dry; he is rigid with surprise. Then the bell rings, and he lets go of me. I run around the corner of the shed to see Mr Tiller standing there, holding the bell.

He looks upon me, and I can tell the exact moment that he sees Daniel emerging behind me. Mr Tiller’s expression is a curious one. Does he approve, or disapprove? I don’t think he knows himself.

That’s how I know, as I make my way past him, that he is no rock. Not all the way through. Not yet.

My parents, knowing that we have reached the date of the meeting in Taunton, watch me over breakfast with intensity, but we do not speak of it. I am so meek and mild with my newfound ability to dissemble that I give them no reason to be mistrustful. If I place a foot wrong my father would lock me in my bedroom today, but he cannot play that role unless I give him cause.

I see now that this is a lesson all women must learn, and my mother is an adept. I had never noticed her performance before. She handles my father with her downcast eyes and serene expression. She skips over the obstacles he lays for her with deceptive ease, so when he complains about the stale bread she takes it away and presents a fresh loaf without a word. When he asks why she is silent, she says cheerfully of how she was just thinking of a funny thing Mrs Barbery said to her in the village, and relates a piece of tattle with such charm that my father forgets that he was looking for a fight at all.

Then she looks away and I see the pretence fall, and I know she is hiding all her thoughts and feelings in order to pander to him. He is an enormous tyrant baby to whom she will be forever bound.

But the story goes that she wanted him above all others, that she defied her own parents to have him. I can’t help but despise her for this; she should have known better, even if she was in love. It seems love does not always guarantee happiness. In point of fact, my love for Mr Tiller has yet to bring me any happiness at all, and we are only in the early stages of our relationship, which hardly bodes well. If only love could be controlled; I would switch it off and pack it away for a more sensible use on a different occasion.

‘Here,’ says Daniel. He is as good as his word, and has taken his father’s horse and cart. We meet at the place where the field adjoins the road, and I clamber over the stile, and climb up beside him. He looks so very nervous; does he see the same fears in my face?

‘Let’s go,’ I say, breathless, and he clicks his tongue and shakes the reins, and the journey to Taunton has begun.

The great temptation upon me, immediately, is to blurt out that Mr Tiller has gone mad, but I remember that I have decided against it. It would certainly help to have a confidant in such matters, though. Instead I say, ‘Thank you for this.’

‘You should have your chance,’ he says.

‘So should we all. Have a chance at our dreams.’

He does not reply. All the lightness has gone out of him. Could we really have kissed? It seems like a moment that happened between two different people.

I think about what I observed between my mother and father this morning, and I say, ‘You will not believe what I overheard in the village yesterday.’ I make up some tale about the Braddicks falling out, I keep my voice sweet and clear, and slowly charm him into laughter even though it gives me no time to myself to think about what I will say in my meeting.

The miles pass. The road widens and smoothes to a well-worn path.

When we reach Taunton I see the main street, the market building, the houses, and the lines of the train tracks. It would be possible to live in Taunton and never be recognised once, I think. Or to board a train and travel to some place where nothing would be familiar—where every building blazes with electric light, and cars are as numerous as people.

I would be lost in a moment, but Daniel knows where we are, and where we must go. He clicks his tongue, and the horse travels onwards as I stare about in wonder, and imagine a future where I belong here.

‘Miss Fearn, please,’ says the man. He wears a suit and a blue bow tie, and has a greying beard, trimmed to the loose contours of his face and neck. He is exactly how I have always pictured venerable academics.

I stand and smooth my skirt. I wish I could have dressed more smartly; I look dowdy compared to the other girls, with their fine hats and bags, and shoes in the latest style. They must all come from good families. I pray these outward signs of wealth do not matter. Surely these men would not make judgements on such grounds. The only thing that matters about the presence of these other girls is that it reminds me how big the world is, and how much competition there is for the best opportunities.

I am shaking in my muddy boots when I follow the venerable academic into the room appointed for the meeting. There are dark wooden panels on the wall, and the floor is polished parquet, making my footsteps so loud that I wince with each step. And there are many steps to take; this is a hall, long and empty, apart from the table at the far end where the academic takes his seat, the last in a row of three. His two colleagues look much like him in attitude. They sit in their equidistant chairs, all facing me, all showing no sign of welcome or interest. I am just one of many girls to them.

I reach their table, and hesitate. What should happen next? Do I introduce myself?

The man sitting in the central position holds out a hand. I move to shake it, and he grimaces, and points instead. ‘There, please.’ I turn my head and see the chair to which he points. I walked right past it.

I have already established myself, without saying a word, as an idiot.

I move to the chair, and sit on the very edge, poised to flee. Daniel is outside this new building, with the horse and cart, and I could run for it, run to his arms, so he could hold me, and comfort me. Now I am aware of how many girls there are just like me, what do I have that makes me special? Perhaps it is better to be important in Westerbridge than to be an idiot in Taunton.

‘Miss… Fearn, is that correct?’ says the man on my left. He is bald, and his head is shaped rather like an egg, with a point to it as if his brain is a mountain. What lofty mental peaks he must climb every single day.

I nod, and try not to get distracted by such thoughts.

‘We will ask you a number of questions in order to ascertain your suitability for the training course, and for work in the teaching field, which is, as you know, a great responsibility and an important role for the rebuilding of the country’s youth. So let me start by asking you—what would you like to pass on to the next generation? What is there that you, in particular, can teach them?’

I can’t think of anything to say.

But my mouth opens and I begin to talk, and I talk and I talk, amazed at myself, and at everything I have to say. There is so much more to tell them, and the words seem fresh and unplanned, unthought. I could talk for hours upon this subject: the future.

When I stop talking, the men stare at me, and I stare back. I cannot remember a single thing I have just said.

‘It can’t have gone that badly,’ says Daniel.

I cannot reply. My throat is sore from so much talking. There were so many questions. At one point the man on the right had to interrupt me in order to ask his question, and yet I still cannot remember what I said.

‘I’m thinking it went well and you can’t see it,’ Daniel says. ‘You’re the best in class at questions, and the like. You’re the brightest girl I know, Shirley.’

It’s a long journey back to Westerbridge. By the end he has given up trying to console me. We are returned by early afternoon, to the place where we set off, and nothing there is different. The grass grows, the flowers bloom. He brings the horse to a stop next to the stile, and I hop down.

‘Hey,’ he calls. ‘Is that it, then? Is that all I deserve, for the trouble I’ll get into?’

‘What would you have, then? Another kiss?’ My voice is back. It’s loud, with a shrill edge.

‘Not in your mood. You’d bite me, I reckon.’

‘So what, then?’

He looks at the reins in his hands, then ahead at the road. ‘Nothing.’

‘Right, then.’ I hop onto the stile.

‘Wait!’ he calls. Can he not see I need to be alone? I want to hide in the fields until the time school ends, and then I can retreat to my bedroom to think through what will become of my life now. For if I cannot go to Taunton, what will I do? How will I become the woman I need to be?

‘I’ll get in trouble,’ Daniel says. ‘Over the horse and cart.’

‘I know.’

‘It doesn’t matter, though. I had this idea. That you would get in. Don’t laugh at me, but I wanted you to get in and me to find a job Taunton way, and for us to... live there. In a different way. Not the way everyone has laid out for us. If you go, can I come? Can we do that?’

‘Do you mean—go together?’ I ask. ‘In what form?’ I am trying to grasp what is in his head.

He frowns. I see him reaching for the words. ‘I don’t know. Couldn’t we just be people together, and forget everything else, forget your father and my father and the farm and the smithy, and who will own what one day? And forget Mr Tiller.’ He swallows. ‘What would it even matter, if we could be happy?’

‘Happy together?’ Why am I suddenly stuck on this one word? Just hours before I could have talked for hours, and now I am like a parrot stuck to its perch, squawking, awkward. I can’t envisage this life of which he dreams. Perhaps I need him to speak of love, or marriage. I need it to have a shape.

‘No, I mean, yes, but—’ His mouth opens and closes. I stand on the stile, and wait.

He gives up. He shakes the reins, and the horse clatters off at speed, the cart bouncing behind it. I feel strong. I feel separate from him, and his plans. Why does he need me to lead his way to Taunton? He should be the one to lead. He is the man. If he wanted us to marry, and go to Taunton, I would think on that carefully. I might even say yes.

This seething sense of victory sings in my veins, and stings my eyes. I am crying because I have turned quickly on the stile and caught my skirt in the hedge, and now it is torn.

I wake late, and lie still. It is the first Monday of May, and I will be crowned Queen.

It is beyond me to be calm, even though this is a ridiculous piece of whimsy that I did not care for just a mere week ago. But no. No, I cannot call it whimsy now I am at the heart of it. There are deep roots to May Day, stretching back through the centuries. I find I have a taste for power in all its forms, on the rare occasions when it is allowed to me, and what is more powerful than a Queen? Particularly one who is the living embodiment of the spring, the soil, the seeds. I feel newborn as a lamb, as old as the rocks themselves.

I am taking this too seriously, I know. I do not care. I have so many tasks to perform today. It all starts with a knock on my bedroom door, and my mother’s excited face (all our disagreements forgotten) as she says, ‘The assistants are already here, come along, come along!’

I perform my ablutions, and then the white dress is brought in by the three girls who will assist me today. They are all younger than me, and sit on the other side of the classroom, but I know Gladys, Esme and Jill well enough to giggle with them as they help me into the dress, pinning it in places where it does not fit. Then my mother arranges my hair, loose over my shoulders, ready for the crown to be affixed.

But where is the crown? It is at the village green, waiting for me. I am placed upon Nellie, bedecked with flowers on her saddle and reins, and walked down the road with the assistants tripping along after. It is a fine day, bright and clear, and I smile as we pass the smithy, and The Three Crowns, waving at all I see. We arrive at the green, the maypole standing high in the centre, the open tents arranged around, and there is already a crowd of familiar faces even though it is still morning. This promises to be a wonderful day.

My mother helps me down from Nellie, and leads me across the green, to the side nearest the church, where my throne awaits. It is a wooden chair covered in a white sheet and strewn about with flowers, and a blanket has been placed on the ground around it for my assistants. But we cannot sit and oversee the festivities yet. First I must be crowned.

And here is Reverend Mountcastle to crown me, insistent on doing the job even though he disapproves. He steps forward as fiddle music starts up, and he is flanked by my father and Mr Redmore. The three of them observe me and nod, as if I have passed a test. But then the Reverend puts the crown—white flowers and green leaves intertwined—upon my head, and it does not matter what they think of me any more. I have been raised above them.

I step up to my throne and take my seat with all the dignity I can muster, and the crowd cheers.

The rest of the day is a series of moments like lanterns, strung together by the endless, spinning music, fiddle and drum, and the food and drink that is constantly brought to me by so many people I know; but they present their gifts with aplomb as if currying favour. I nibble, and watch, and sway upon my throne.

The children make a good effort at the dancing, although the little ones often forget when they should be weaving out instead of in, and the patterns are more often a tangle. Still, I salute their efforts and they laugh, and bow and curtsey.

The horseshoe competition is won by my brave Daniel, and I bestow upon his forehead a kiss as his reward, to which the crowd roars. There is no time to be with him today, but there is an awareness between us, and between everyone here, that we are together. Still, I have too much to do to dote upon him. I wave him away, and he runs off with the other boys to take up the ribbons of the maypole for themselves; they grin at each other while the women sing and they dance, and the colours tangle so there is no way of knowing where one strand ends and another begins.

The evening is falling. I can see everything with a clarity that must be born of the cider I have been given. Verity Braddick has eaten five iced buns, one after the other, and the icing has stuck to her best dress. She is trying to clean it away before her mother notices. The Reverend Mountcastle is preaching at the widow Colson, his eyes casting up to heaven and then down to the front of her dress as if his faith is caught somewhere between the two. Azariah Barbery and Jeremiah Crowe are holding hands under the trestle table that holds the jam and scones. Only I can see, from my position on this throne, the way their fingers touch, pull apart, touch. Their faces look away, in different directions, watchful, while all the time their fingers touch.

I am suffused with heat. It is such a warm evening, and here is more cider, presented to me in a beautiful silver goblet with a flourish. I look up from it and look into Mr Tiller’s eyes.

‘For the May Queen,’ he says.

I incline my head in a regal fashion, and take the goblet, while my assistants giggle. It seems that is all they are good for, and it is beginning to annoy me.

‘Drink it up, then,’ he says, with the schoolteacher in his voice, and I do as I am told, feeling the sharpness of the apples on my lips like a sting.

‘Very good.’

He looks satisfied with me.

It occurs to me that since I am Queen, I could command him to stay, to bow, to kneel throughout the night. I wonder if he would do it. But he is too quick for me. He takes the goblet back, and holds my hand. He leans over it, and kisses my knuckles. As he straightens, I feel the cool air upon the patch where his lips touched my skin.

‘My homage done, I depart,’ he says. He limps away. I have missed my chance to command him.

He takes a circuitous path around the edge of the green, skirting the tables, the tents and the horseshoes. He brushes close to the lads who are playing once more, and to a couple who stand nearby. The couple seem familiar to me; the man has his arms crossed over his chest, and his back is curved a little as he stoops to listen to what the woman is saying. She is very pretty, with golden hair, but as Mr Tiller limps past she stops speaking and raises her head to look at me. The man follows her gaze, and when he frowns at me I recognise him. Daniel. He was deep in conversation with Phyllis Clemens. How handsome they looked, together.

I beckon to him.

He comes to me, moving quickly, and I see rage shining from his face, cutting through the crowd and the music, burning as strong as the stars. How he hates me, and I am afraid of him, but I hold myself tall and straight upon my throne as he approaches.

‘Why do you watch Mr Tiller go like that?’ Daniel demands.

‘I was not watching him. I was watching you and Phyllis Clemens.’

‘So what of it?’ But I see his pleasure at the fact that I noticed.

This game we are playing overwhelms me. Why should he tease me so? I am in command, and by rights he should obey, and be mine, if I want it so.

‘You are not a loyal subject to forget your Queen so easily,’ I tell him. ‘You must make amends or be punished.’ These words come from some ancient place inside of me. All I must do is let go and allow this magic to cast its spell. I can see in his eyes he recognises the magic too. He leans to me, over the heads of the assistants, who are slumped, yawning. The night is growing late.

‘Will you do penance?’ I ask.

‘What would your Majesty have?’

I shift forward in my throne and put my mouth to his ear. I whisper what I would have of him.

He straightens up. Nobody could guess from his expression what I have said. ‘Very well, mistress,’ he replies, and steps back. He starts across the green, and is soon out of sight.

I sit.

The music plays on.

Will I go to him? Will I go? Is everyone looking at me? Or do they dance on, forgetting all but the rhythm and the clear night sky?

I won’t go. I have no need to go, except that Mr Tiller has asked it of me, and I do not need to do the bidding of a madman.

But I could go for myself. Because it is what I want. It is within my power to command love. To want it, and to take it.

I stand up, and the world does not stop and stare. I need give no excuse. My parents are not even nearby, but lost in the crowd somewhere, and I do not look for them as I step over my sleeping assistants and start to walk, finding an invisible line towards my destination.

Past the school, past the bakery, past the churchyard, the music fading into the distance, the night increasing cold upon my face, arms and shoulders. Past the row of cottages, taking the small turn down towards the river. Past Mr Tiller’s house, where a lit lamp stands in the kitchen window like a signal, but my thoughts are not with him, not any more.

Down the pebbled lane, where the trees press close, and then there is the glorious, singing shock of the river, tumbling and breaking into shining slivers that bear the glow of the moon in every piece.

I reach the bridge, but do not step upon it. I slide down the river slope, my white slippers slick in the mud. Under the arch there is the hidden place, where the children sometimes go to escape watchful eyes; it is warm and dry, and feels very far away from the village.

It is very dark, but I can make out how Daniel stands tall, his arms lifted above his head, his hands on the stone curving underside of the bridge. It makes it look as if he supports the structure. I cannot make out his face. Only his outline, and the way his body is strong.

‘Your Majesty,’ he says. ‘This is what you commanded.’

Yes, this is what I whispered to him. To meet me here, so I can listen to the frogs sing in the moonlight. But they have all fallen silent. We must have frightened them away.

‘Come here, then,’ Daniel says. His voice is young, filled with fear and wonder at the moment in which we find ourselves.

I shake my head.

‘No?’ he says. I think maybe he is smiling. I want something deeper from him, something real, but I cannot find the words to tell him so.

‘You come here,’ I say. My voice is just the same as his.

He drops his hands from the span of the bridge, and takes a step to me. Just one step. Then he waits.

So I take a step. Just one step. I am close enough to touch him now, so I do. I put my hands on his chest, and feel his skin through his best shirt, smooth skin, warmer than the night air around us. He breathes in, and his chest moves under my touch. He breathes out, and I feel the warmth of his exhalation upon my neck.

I move my hands to his stomach, and he holds still for me, as still as he can. Flesh. He is flesh here. A real man.

‘My turn,’ he whispers, and places his hands, so slowly, on either side of my waist. His hands are large and hard; he squeezes me, and I feel the strength of him through the layers of material into which I have been laced and shaped. Then he moves his hands upwards, and I feel, I feel such sensations, such possibilities that I have only imagined. It is the joy of the body, bodies together. He touches me upon the curves of my chest and then kneels to lift up my dress and stroke a path across my calves, the backs of my knees, and up, and up. He explores me, and breathes heavily, until I must pull him back to his feet and put my lips upon his face.

The rasp of the shaven hair upon his chin tickles me; it is a rough delight upon my mouth, leaving my lips swollen, and then his mouth is upon my neck, my ear. He sucks at the lobe, then takes my wrist and slips his tongue along the path of the veins, and I reach out and pull at his clothes, beyond any words. All softness is gone from us in a moment when I dare to put my hands upon his thighs. Intent replaces it, pure intent to a happening that is so close, a happening that I want, I want, but I do not know how to—

But there is instinct overriding all confusions, all coyness. His face takes on a blank intensity as he wrestles harder with the laces of my white dress; I do not want to wait while he struggles and so I still his hands with my own, and lift up my skirts.

He snorts a deep breath out, and then he is pressing himself against me, and I stumble but he bears my weight backwards to the span of the bridge, and I feel the cold stones against my back as he fumbles with his trousers, and I pull at my drawers for him until we can feel skin against skin; he is so hard, so strange, and my body will not stretch for him, but it does not matter for he rubs against my thigh, his stubble burning at my neck, and it is a battle we share, locked as opponents, urging each other onwards, linked and driving forward, grim with purpose. In this sensation I could live forever—to make him respond this way to me, and me alone. For if this is a battle I am winning; to make him move this way upon me is a victory that I feel deep inside.

There is a spurt of warmth upon my thigh, and Daniel stills. The warmth trickles down my leg, and begins to cool. Daniel moves away, and pulls down my skirts over my legs, arranging them with great care. He takes my hands in his, and holds them against his chest.

‘Are you…?’

‘I—’ I do not know what to say.

‘It’s my fault,’ he says, ‘but I am not sorry for it. Are you?’

‘It’s nobody’s fault,’ I tell him, and am surprised to find I am still the same old Shirley, snippy with Daniel Redmore over every little thing because he once spilled ink down my back.

‘I just mean that I will take the blame.’

Does there need to be blame? I suppose there must be. An inkling of what comes next seeps through me. It will soon be past midnight, and I will no longer be anyone’s Queen. But still, it cannot be regretted, not yet. No matter what comes next. And I do not need a rock in my chest to tell me what that might be.

‘I’ll walk you home, and explain to your father,’ he says. He sounds older. Yes, the outline of him has changed, just a little. His shoulders are broader, as if they carry an extra burden.

‘I’d like to know what words you’ll use to manage that,’ I say, and the thought of him trying to explain the state of my dress, our disappearance from the green, and the lateness of the hour, is suddenly quite the funniest idea of which I have ever heard. I cannot help but laugh. The sound rolls out of me, and I cannot stop. Daniel does not join in. He shakes his head, and says, ‘Sometimes I think you’re mad, Shirley.’ He does not say it with malice, but with some emotion that might even be admiration, and I remember all the things I like about him. Including his body. His body, and the way it feels upon mine. I stop laughing, and I touch his stomach once more. Yes, there it is again, that feeling that springs up between us. I wonder if it could ever be sated.

I do not regret a thing, and I never will. I tell him so.

We walk back together, our arms linked like children on an adventure. As we pass Mr Tiller’s cottage, I see the lamp is still lit. I wonder what he does, awake at this hour, but I do not think on it for long. In fact, I hardly think on it at all.

They said I was clever.

I see now they meant that I was bookish, and suited to becoming a learned woman. A learned woman is a very different object from a wise man. I have had no experience of life; how could I see all the traps, particularly the ones that looked most like my own choices, my own happiness? Keats did not warn me, and neither did Dickens. I did not find myself within their writings.

I sit in the parlour and pour the tea. There are four cups to fill: one for my father, one for Daniel, one for my mother and one for me. I know how Daniel takes his tea now. This gathering is well on the way to becoming a usual cosy occurrence.

Father and Daniel are talking business.

‘The sheep do best in the top field,’ my father is saying. ‘Little will grow there. Too rocky. You don’t get a good price, perhaps, but at least it makes use of the ground. The future is poultry, I am thinking, all indoors. Maybe one day some sheds on that land? Electricity is not far away now, and I’ll have it in everything, wait and see. Expansion and electricity.’

He’s never spoken to me in such a way, and if he did so now I would not care to listen. I recognise I am not meant to be paying attention anyway. The tea poured, I return to my mother on the sofa and we continue to sew the hem alteration upon the wedding dress. It was once hers, and now it is to be mine; we have fresh lace to sew upon the neckline, too.

I thought nothing ever happened quickly in Westerbridge. Now I see I was wrong. When everyone of importance is in agreement, things can happen at an amazing speed. Barely a month has passed since May Day and the banns have been read twice already. My life has altered beyond recognition, and I am struggling to find myself within it. Where is the Shirley who found her tongue, who chased off impertinent questions and held her head high in the street? She has been swallowed up by shame.

It is not even a shame that I feel, particularly. It is in everyone else’s eyes and not in mine. They all stare at the waistband of my apron and make passing remarks to my mother as I hang behind her and wait for her to finish her shopping. What a blooming bride to be! Mrs Crowe said the other day. Everyone thinks they know my business, of course, and paints me in the colour that suits their sordid minds.

The tea is drunk, and the day’s work is considered done. Daniel and my father stand, and shake hands. They like each other very much, I think.

‘Tomorrow, then,’ says Daniel.

‘Tomorrow,’ my father agrees. ‘Shirley, show him out. The evenings are getting much lighter, are they not? Why not take your lad for a walk awhile? Only a few weeks to go now until the wedding.’

‘A month,’ I say.

Father raises an eyebrow. ‘Counting the days, she is, I see.’

His laughter follows us to the door, and I leave him behind as quickly as I can, striding into the June evening air with Daniel a few steps behind me. The view over the hill is beautiful; sunset strikes the landscape like a hammer, turning all to molten gold. It makes me realise that I really did like the smithy. I liked how Daniel belonged within it, in that place of heat and fire and strength. He still lives there for now, but after the wedding he will come to the farm. Later, one of the cottages that the shepherds once used may be mended for us; at least, that is what my father says.

Plans, and plans, and plans.

Daniel catches me up as I head for the top field at speed; I want to see the sun go down for the evening. He slips his hand around mine and says, ‘You’re quiet all the time, now. Are you so sad? To have left schooling behind, I mean?’

I have not been allowed to return to school since May Day. I have not seen Mr Tiller once since that night. Girls who are about to be married have other things to think about, I was told quietly by my mother. I think she meant girls who have disgraced themselves. They all fear I would be a bad influence on the others.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I suppose I am sad about it.’

I was once important to the very future of mankind, according to Mr Tiller. He needed my help above all others, but now the job is done.

‘It’s difficult, I know it,’ says Daniel. He squeezes my hand. ‘I know this is not what we planned for.’

‘We made no actual plans at all.’

‘Once we are married, though,’ he continues, ‘we will not have to live the way they all say, will we? Then we can make our own rules.’

I smile at him. I am beginning to see he is just as innocent of life as I am. And this is not his fault, none of it. Truth be told, the more time I spend with him the more I appreciate that I could love him. For love is not the high ideal of beauty, of sacrifice, of noble deeds and chaste embraces that I had imagined when once I dreamed of Mr Tiller. It is a dirty business, of wanting and struggling and making do, and being each other’s comfort because the world is cruel and there are few who want to do right by you with no thought of their own needs. I feel the glimmerings of that kind of love with Daniel, I think. And when he touches me I feel something altogether different. Not love, but want. I want him. If I will not get anything else from this life that I desire, why can I not have this one thing? Why can I not have Daniel to distract me?

Sometimes I think I could be his wife, and find a way to be, in some degree, happy.

‘I wish we had more time before the wedding,’ I tell him. ‘It’s all such a rush.’

‘You know why,’ he says. We stop walking, and I realise we have come to the spot in the top field where once, not so long ago, Mr Tiller cried and I reached out to him. I touch Daniel’s back, as I once did Mr Tiller’s. Daniel does not flinch. He puts his arms around me.

‘I’m not with child, no matter how much everyone wishes it,’ I say. I know this for certain, having grown up seeing how the animals in the field make their own babies; Daniel and I did not procreate, and besides, I have bled since that night under the bridge. But these things are impossible to speak of. I find myself blushing just to state it out loud now, in front of the man I am meant to marry.

‘How are you so sure?’ he says. ‘It’s better to be safe.’

‘We didn’t… I know my own body, Daniel.’ He seems to know next to nothing about the workings of females, and yet my word in this matter counts no more than his. He told my father that he compromised me, and that was the end of the conversation.

‘Once we’re married we could move to Taunton,’ he says. ‘Or London. Or America. I don’t care. Wherever you would like to go. I have no taste for farming.’

‘China,’ I say.

‘Follow the trail of Marco Polo, like two proper adventurers.’

‘I could still train to be a teacher,’ I say.

He thinks about it, and then nods. ‘Maybe,’ he says. Then he kisses me as the daylight fades and, oh, his lips are so very good against mine, and we could stay here and weave these dreams through the night.

Maybe this is my destiny.

Maybe I did save the world, and this is my reward—to be kissed, and safe, and serene, and loved within this web of possible tomorrows.

We watch the last moments of the sunset, and I try to get him to kiss me again and touch me properly, but he will not. He says after the wedding, and treats me like china, which I like and find irksome in equal measure.

‘Tomorrow,’ he says, ‘I will have the delight of learning about crop yields with your father.’ He rolls his eyes, and kisses my cheek. Then he sets off, down the field, and as he goes I feel the need for an answer building within me; I have to know if I did my job, and if this is to be my life from now on.

I need to see Mr Tiller.

So I head across the top of the field, scattering the sheep, and I find the narrow path through the woods that leads to Mr Tiller’s house. I run and run.

Did I save the world?

If I did, will that be enough for me?

The lamp burns in the kitchen window. The roses have bloomed early and are now blousy, the petals falling to the doorstep, unswept. The weeds are tall around the house, crawling up and up, clinging to the cracks in the walls. Nature would swallow him whole if it could.

My knock upon the door is timid, but the hush of evening is too strong a spell for me to break. I wonder if he has heard, but yes—after a moment—the door opens, and he looks upon me with surprise.

‘Miss Fearn! This is unexpected.’

‘Is it?’

‘Can I be of assistance?’

‘I must speak with you. Most urgently.’ He does not reply. ‘On a matter I think you would not care to discuss upon your doorstep.’

He looks around me, over the lane and the trees. ‘You are alone, then? I hardly think Mr Redmore would like it if I invited you into my home at such an hour. Come to the schoolroom tomorrow and I should be able to spare you a moment or two at lunch. You could see your former classmates; that should be gratifying for them all.’

‘Please do not play the schoolmaster with me,’ I tell him. I am incensed that he would even try to effect a superiority. I am seeing him with a clarity born of our time apart. ‘I no longer attend your class. I think I will never set foot in the schoolroom again, and there is nothing left for you to teach me. And so our discussion must take place here and now or in the church on Sunday morning, in front of Reverend Mountcastle and the congregation. Which would you prefer?’

I have cowed him. He opens the door to me, and as I pass inside he says, sadly, ‘You have changed, Shirley.’

Why should those words wound me? But they do; I feel pierced by them. I try my hardest not to let it show upon my face. I make my way to the kitchen, where the usual lamp burns in the window. But all else is changed. The room is bare, stripped of his possessions. The mounted plate upon the wall is gone and no bright robin’s eye watches over us. The table and chairs remain, but all pots and pans are gone from the dresser, and a large tea chest stands beside it instead, blankets and newspaper within, crumpled.

‘Where are you going?’ I ask.

‘My work here is done. I’m needed elsewhere.’

‘To another—family that needs fixing? To save the future? But what about the Redmores?’

‘You will make a new family.’

‘I do not understand,’ I say.

‘You did a marvellous thing on May Day evening. You changed the world.’ Mr Tiller limps to the table, and strokes his hands over the wood.

‘And I am supposed to take your word for it.’

‘As you have about so many things, my dear. About how to form your letters, how to add numbers, how to understand the past and use it to view the future. Dickens and Marco Polo, history and geography, and now this. You once trusted me, and I cannot see why on earth I have lost that trust when I have done my utmost to be honest with you. But it is gone, and I am bereft to know that. But I cannot say I am truly surprised; I wrote to you, once, that one day you would despise me.’

‘I am to stay here and be a wife, then.’

‘And a mother, of course. The mother of great men, of that I have no doubt.’

I am filled with such emotions; I have never felt anger like it, never in my life, but with it is a resurgence, a memory, of the tender place Mr Tiller occupied in my affections, of the way I loved him in a way that I will never love again. My knees cannot hold me and my legs will not stop trembling. I sit upon the nearest chair and put my forehead against the tabletop. Closing my eyes, concentrating only on my breathing, I can survive this moment. I can hold back the urge to gasp at the air, like a fish pulled from the sea, for then I will be lost to reason.

‘Are you unwell?’ says Mr Tiller, as if from very far away, and then, ‘Perhaps this is to be expected for your condition?’

So much for deep, even breaths. So much for reason.

‘I am not in a condition!’

‘No?’ He frowns. ‘But I was told in the village—’

‘I do not care what you were told. I am not with child. I did nothing that could lead to the creation of a child.’

‘But I instructed you—’

‘You are no longer my teacher!’ I slam my hands upon the table, so hard that my palms sting. I will be heard. ‘And I am done with taking your words on this subject for granted. You will show me the rock, and I will speak with it.’

He stares at me. Then he says, coolly, ‘What makes you think the rock will choose to speak to you?’

So now I see him clearly, even in the shadows of this emptied room. His superiority is no more than an assumed guise. He made me once believe that he really did know best.

‘No more discussion,’ I say. I point to the chair at the head of the table, where once I saw him sit as I peered through the window, and this twisted business began. ‘There. Sit there. Unbutton your shirt.’

‘Only whores command men so. Come now, Shirley, if you are so adamant you are not a fallen woman, why act like one?’

‘No, I am not a whore, although you did your best to make me otherwise. I will remind you, sir, that I have private letters from you. I have kept them. These letters could make it very difficult for you to procure another teaching position in the future.’

He clenches his fists. Have I pushed him too far? He is transparent to me; I can see him weighing his options. Eventually, he decides to bargain with me.

‘If I do this,’ he says, ‘you must destroy the letters. I want your word on it. Your solemn word. I should not have written them if I had known you to be so devious in nature.’

But I did not start that way; deviousness is learned. It has become easier and easier to lie, lately. I could kiss the bible in church and swear and not blush. Perhaps this is the greatest lesson Mr Tiller has taught me.

‘Very well,’ I say. ‘I will do so.’

He takes off his waistcoat, and arranges it over the back of the chair. Then he sits and removes his collar stud and cufflinks, and then begins upon his buttons.

The first glimpse of the rock makes me shudder. The skin of his chest rises up around it in a pattern of scars. With the undoing of the next button comes sight of the first vein of glittering silver, and then he undoes the rest of the buttons with quick fingers and pulls back the material so I can look freely upon what was once a stomach, muscles, a man.

‘Your face,’ says Mr Tiller, softly. ‘Did you imagine that you dreamed it?’

‘I never thought that.’ Not once. I have always believed what I saw. This thought gives me the strength I need to go on. ‘I will touch it.’

‘Very well.’

The streaks of silver catch the lamplight. It is as if his head is separate from his body. How can his mouth move, his eyes focus upon me, while he is rock within his core? It triggers revulsion in me, but I must touch it. I must have my answer.

I shift my weight to the edge of my chair, and lean across the table to him. There is the smallest of smiles on his face, and I know why. He thinks the rock will not communicate with me—and if it does not? Why, then, it is all within his head, he is mad, and I have been the biggest fool in a hundred miles or more, manipulated on the whim of a lunatic.

I stretch out, and put my hands upon the rock.

Mr Tiller sucks in a breath.

The surface is cool, the texture grainy under my palms. Here is my answer, if I can only find a way to wrest it from the—

The kitchen, the lamp, the quiet of the cottage, are gone. Mr Tiller is gone. Everything is white; no, it is clear. It has a clarity of image, of thought, that surpasses colour. I am in a place I cannot name. It has the height and breadth of a great cathedral, and the closeness of a blanket around me. Before me at a distance I cannot evaluate are three men. They are pale, and bearded. They do not look at me with surprise, or with any discernible emotion.

All is new, utterly so, and yet it reminds me of the meeting in Taunton. In that place I had so many words to say, though none of them mattered. The men in that room made their judgements anyway.

I feel—I feel knowledge, entering my mind, seeping inside.

I am not learning, but having thoughts—thoughts that belong to the men—pushed into me. It is their vision of the future, and it is plain that they know so very much. I glimpse their own thoughts, and feel a depth and breadth of information that is astonishing, but the knowledge they are imparting to me is of a certain type of life, of time, of place. It starts with fire.

I see fire in my mind’s eye. Not fire that burns within a grate, tamed by man, but an explosion of such force that it sends a pointed craft of metal up, up, up from the ground and beyond, into the sky, and then on a trajectory that leads through the great blackness of night, past stars and planets of such huge, luminous beauty, with so many spinning colours, and time and distance are incalculable until the craft arrives upon—another Earth. A planet so much like what the Bible would have us consider to be Eden itself that when dishevelled, sleepy men emerge from the craft they look about them and smile. Birds, insects, animals and plants, in such numbers, and in such strange accord. There is no death or danger here. They proclaim it their new home. Here, in fresh soil, they begin again.

Generations are made and lost; my mind cannot keep up with the spreading seeds of men upon the planet. So many intertwining strands of life form a pattern, woven and twisted, of such density and detail that I realise I did ask the impossible of Mr Tiller when I asked him to describe it to me. No sense can be made of how humanity remakes itself, over and over through birth and death. To see this pattern in its fullness would be more than I could stand, it would forever more ruin me. I try to pull back from the knowledge of its existence, but the three old men are near. I sense them behind me, and they stand firm and demand I bear witness.

And so, against my will and in fear of my sanity, I see the pattern of life upon the second Earth grow outwards and I would scream at it if I could, for it is terrifying in perfection. This was why the craft was landed there, the old men tell me in thought. This is the culmination of their plans upon a different world. It is a marvel that brings agony to my mind.

But—wait.

In time, in space, in meaning, there is a flaw. A fleck of emptiness in the woven pattern of humanity; a stitch in which the raw material is fraying. Then I spy another. And another. The frayed stitches are spreading, and the beauty is spoiling. They grow, and grow, and slowly the picture is altered. I am no longer looking at perfection. I am looking at a war.

The old men show me a terrible war, and it is beyond anything I could have imagined in scope, in sheer cruelty. Beams of bright light cut through swathes of men on second Earth, with all nature destroyed upon it; great bombs, not of metal but of disease and decay, are unleashed. They blister and burst. Everywhere the pale men fight until the beautiful pattern is obliterated. I would weep for it and never stop, if I had form in this place. At the end of time, there is no pattern left. Humanity thrives in the chaos it has created. When the war is over, billions live on without knowing how close they came to perfection.

The old men do not let me languish in that knowledge. They take me back to the former glory of the pattern, and it hangs before me like a tapestry. They offer it to me, and I realise I can control it with my thoughts. I can move within the generations, the strands, and pick out those early flaws one by one, to examine them in detail. Each and every flaw that spreads starts with one union. One coupling which creates one family line that grows. Just one union that creates the children that kill the beautiful future.

As I concentrate, another layer is added: a map of Earth, my Earth, laid over the pattern at the point of the first flaws. I recognise my country, my county, my village. Here is a union that chills me with recognition.

Redmore.

Daniel Redmore and Phyllis Clemens, at the beginning of May 1920, combine their strands to form another—a strand that winds its path along to a descendant who will eventually board a craft, and beget more children upon a second Earth. Children who will dissent from the project to create perfection, and will instigate a terrible war.

But the time for that union has passed.

Have I helped to save the pattern? Have I prevented a war?

The vision of the map and the pattern fades, and I return to the white room. The three old, pale men stand before me. They have one last thing that they wish me to understand.

Rocks.

They open their hands to me, and I see upon their palms small rocks, streaked with silver thread into which they have woven their message. The rocks rise from their grasp and levitate above them; they contain so much information: trajectory, the power to embed within human flesh, to heal and to keep alive for many decades, so that the cry for help is inescapable. The rocks are not natural, but a creation of these men, disguised and then impregnated with their desperate plea to end the war before it can ever begin.

As I watch, the rocks are thrown by an invisible force, so fast that they speed through space and escape time itself, to land all over the world in different countries and different eras. The old men cannot go back in time, but the rocks can.

And the men are done. Everything is explained, and now it is my task to help them.

But I have questions, many questions, that I cannot ask. I have no mouth in this place with which to speak. I try thinking hard, shouting within my head:

If that is the future of second Earth, what becomes of my planet?

Why did you leave so many of us behind? Who chose who would stay and who would go upon the metal craft?

And this is the question I must have answered above all others:

How can I understand all of these things when you only give me the information you choose to share?

They tell me nothing further. They close their eyes, and lower their heads, and the meeting is over.

That is when I realise I am not in a meeting. I am witnessing a recording. This is a missive, a letter that reads itself whenever Mr Tiller’s rock is touched. The old men are not in a conversation with me. They decide long into the future what is important, and expect me to be content with that.

But I am not. And I must find my answers within the scraps of knowledge they are throwing to me. Mr Tiller wrote in his own letters that he could control the vision, at least to the extent of repeating the parts of the pattern that he desired to see. I concentrate hard, asking over and over, and yes—here is the metal craft once more, before me. Here are those who board the craft.

I watch them enter the body of the huge metal bullet that will explode into the stars and carry them away; there is no indication as to why they are leaving, or what they are leaving behind.

My only clue lies in the fact that they have one thing in common. They are all pale old men.

I watch it again.

Yes, they are all pale old men, white-haired. Is it just the nature of the image? I cannot tell. Perhaps it is a representation of the event, for how can there be no people of China, or the East Indies? No youths? No women, no women at all? How is that possible?

I move forward in time, to the arrival upon second Earth, and then the patterns thicken with brand new strands, like an injection of life. So many births—births of women, upon that pristine soil. But not births of a kind I recognise, amounting from the intertwining of two strands. These women come from nowhere.

The pale old men did not take women on their journey. When they reached their destination they made them.

Everyone who did not belong to their kind was left behind. To face what, I cannot tell, for this recording will not show me.

How can the final pattern be so beautiful when it discards so many threads? But, of course, nature is not beautiful. It is not meant to form a pattern woven to perfection. I think of the battles I see every day around me: spider and flies, foxes and rabbits. The land and the sea, the night and the day, the old and the young. I think of how it was under the bridge, with Daniel, when we pitched our bodies against each other in an age-old struggle in which we were born to fight. It was not beautiful, but it was glorious. And there was never meant to be a victor.

This is the truth of our Earth.

I pull my mind away. I have seen all I need to see. The vision dissipates, and the emptied kitchen returns to my view. I cannot tell how much time has passed, but the lamp burns on, and my hands are still upon the rock. Mr Tiller’s arms are around me; he has moved closer, and he is tender in the way he holds me upright, for I realise I am not supporting my own weight. I pull myself up, and away from him.

‘So now you see,’ he says. ‘My dear girl, now you see. They showed you.’

He is not mad. He is brave, and determined. He is utterly mistaken in his loyalty. He has taken the vision as undisputed knowledge rather than a point of view. He does not see that this future is not his fight.

‘You are leaving to find others,’ I say. ‘Is that not true? You mean to find the other families that mar the pattern, and stamp them out.’

‘You know I must.’ He buttons his shirt, and covers the rock from my sight.

‘No. No. You must not. And I cannot marry Daniel.’

In all of our time spent together, I do not think I have ever said anything that surprised him as much. ‘But it is arranged. The future is not safe until it is done. What if Master Redmore returns to Miss Clemens with his broken heart, and she comforts him? We cannot guarantee the situation.’

‘It is not my duty to safeguard the vision within that rock,’ I state. I know it, completely, deep within myself. This is not my fight.

‘It is everyone’s duty! Including yours. That is why I—why you will marry Daniel Redmore and I will go forth into the world to stop others. Did you not see the pattern? Did you not see the perfection of it?’

How can I begin to explain it? We have shared the same vision, and yet will never come to the same conclusion. We stand on opposite sides.

‘You must not,’ I repeat. ‘The future is not meant to be the way it is presented here. Can’t you see it is not real?’

I have chosen the wrong word. I know it as soon as it leaves my lips. All tenderness, all confusion is gone from him in a moment. He pushes back his chair, the legs scraping along the floor with a squeal, and stands tall. ‘Ha! Well, then it suits me, does it not? As I am not a real man, according to the world. I am part of the rock now, and it is part of me, and I will do as it asks of me.’

‘It asks nothing of you! It does not speak of this world, or your responsibility.’

He hesitates. ‘It shows humanity,’ he says.

‘One part of it. One part, one group, with a message that has truth only to those who choose to believe it.’

‘It spoke of beauty. I taught you Keats, Shirley Fearn. Trust in Keats if you will not trust in me.’

Keats, Mr Tiller, my father, the men at Taunton, the men on that other Earth: my head swims with them all. None of them can be reasoned with. Not a one, and I want nothing more to do with them. ‘I will not trust any of you,’ I tell him. ‘And you must not continue with this task, no more than I will marry Daniel Redmore.’

‘Then you are of no further use to me,’ he says, and passes a hand across his eyes. I sit in the silence and wait. I do not know how this conversation will end; I cannot simply leave, and yet there is no way to resolve this impasse. I once believed that there was a way to find peace no matter what the cause of the war, but now I understand. In some circumstances there simply is no middle ground. There is no place where two people may meet.

‘I think perhaps—’ I begin.

Mr Tiller springs toward me at speed; I expel a breath from my lungs in surprise and then he is upon me, leaning over me. I feel a cruel pain at the back of my head, and my hair is tugged so that my head is thrown backwards. He has my hair; he has me in his grasp, my hair in his fist, and then his other hand is on my neck, and he squeezes. There is no more time for thought. My body reacts. I kick out, and punch, and fight for my breath, for my life.

‘Be still,’ he demands. ‘Be still, before I hurt you.’

The words, not the command, surprise me to obeisance. Does he not consider he is hurting me already?

‘There now. I want your complete attention. You must do as you are told, Miss Fearn, and you are told to marry Mr Redmore. Is that so terrible? I know you enjoy his attention. It is obvious to the entire village how much you beg for it. Why would you fight that which comes naturally to you?’

I cannot look at his eyes, I cannot bear it. He is so close to me, and he looks at me with a dispassionate objectivity that reduces me to less than human. It is so wrong for him to be this close to me, and to have no love, no care, no sense of my humanity within him. He is a rock, indeed. He is so hard, and without empathy for the fact that I live, I breathe. I need to breathe.

‘If you are disobedient then I will have to find another, more drastic, way to ensure that Mr Redmore’s line does not come to pass. Do you understand me?’

He relaxes his grip upon my neck. As if freed from the pressure, I feel water well up in my eyes. There is a terrible sense of shame that overwhelms me for these tears, more so than I ever felt about Daniel’s embrace. Shame—for being touched by Mr Tiller, for the way he looks at me as I cry.

‘You will burn the letters I wrote to you in good faith,’ he says, as he moves away. ‘And you will do as we have discussed.’ He limps back to the tea chest beside the dresser, and places one hand upon the newspaper within, crumpling it further.

I must find an advantage, I must not be destroyed. ‘Will you stay until the wedding, sir?’ I ask him. ‘I would—prefer it. As you are the reason for it.’

He tilts his head, and considers the request. ‘Very well.’

I manage to stand, and take small steps to the door, although my legs tremble, and I cannot imagine how I will get home upon them. He follows me to the door and it comes to me that we have told each other lies, and become equals in that regard. Yes, he is not my master, and now I am free to hate him. I hate him very much, for the way he imagines this world and my place within it to be, and for the way he wants to make the next world.

‘Goodnight,’ he says. ‘I hope I haven’t unduly surprised you. Just think on what you have seen, and I am certain you will come to see the need for forthright action.’

‘Goodnight,’ I say, and I walk down the path, slowly, and with care. Then I put one foot in front of the other for what seems like hours. No, more than hours—a universe of time. An entire universe of time.

Imagine losing a war.

Imagine the fear you feel as it seems all you believe in will be lost forever.

Imagine reaching the point where there are no further allies to find, and so, in desperation, you write a message and place it within a bottle and throw it into the ocean. You hope and pray it will reach somebody who will feel the same as you, and who will find a way to aid you across that great expanse of ocean. That maybe they will save you. You pour all your persuasion into that message, and you cast it adrift; you have no inkling as to what kind of person might find it. You can only hope that it is picked up by somebody who shares your beliefs. Perhaps, if you send many such messages, some will wash up on fertile soil.

This is what I imagine, as I sit on my bed and attempt to compose a letter to Daniel. I have received such a message, and I will not let it sow its seeds within me. I will not be a foot soldier for pale old men, no matter where they live or what pretty patterns they weave.

My neck is sore but unbruised, I think; my limbs still quake with fear. But I will write this letter before I climb into my bed tonight. The farm is quiet and my room is as warm and safe as ever it has been; if I cannot write down these things here and now, then I will never do it.

My dearest Daniel

I cannot marry you.

I could provide you with a number of reasons, and I will do so if you wish. It will probably make this easier, because every one of them will give you leave to think me mad. I would prefer it if you decide that you, also, do not want to marry a girl who could be so changeable in nature. We were not meant to be together; will that do?

I suppose it will not, and you will want to draw this out, and meet face to face, and I will oblige. It will not change the outcome.

I would have liked to have gone to Taunton and taken you with me. I would have searched for a way to be together that came without all the usual words. I am sorry that I was cruel to you, on the day of the interview, when I stood upon the stile; for it was cruelty to wilfully misunderstand you at that moment. I hope you appreciate that I am not deliberately being cruel now.

I have one favour to ask of you: do not come to the wedding rehearsal on Sunday afternoon, or speak of this matter to anyone before that time. I would like the opportunity to explain all myself to our parents, in the church, at that appointed time. It would be easier if you were not there to hear my words.

Your friend forever,

Miss Shirley Fearn

I put away the pen and ink, and seal the letter in an envelope. It is all I can do. I will hand it to him tomorrow morning, when I go into the village to fetch the bread. And then what?

Sunday afternoon awaits.

Not all plans run smoothly.

I would have liked my own company for this task, but my mother decides to come with me, and so we take a slow walk into the village while she grasps the opportunity to talk to me about wedding arrangements: the flowers, the cake, the chimney sweep who will come in the morning, the silver sixpence that must be placed in my shoe. She is working so hard to ward off a disaster that has already happened.

We collect the bread from the bakery, served by a sullen Phyllis, and as we step outside I tell my mother that I have a letter to deliver to Daniel. She raises her eyebrows, but does not comment.

We walk past the school. It is Saturday, and all is quiet within. I wonder what Mr Tiller has taught the children this past week, and whether they have taken every word as truth. Once I thought that a bitter teacher spoils a pupil; I wonder now if it there is not an innate bitterness at the heart of education, which always comes with hidden meanings and a high cost.

We reach the village green, and my mother waits by the maypole, which has not yet been taken down, as I make my way into the smithy’s yard. Mr Redmore and Dennis are at work together—one holds a large piece of metal still in tongs while the other hammers it flat upon the anvil—and they look up in unison as I call out a hesitant greeting in between ringing blows.

‘He’s at market,’ calls Dennis. ‘Saturday is Taunton day, you know that. Have you lost your brains in the rush to get to the altar?’

Mr Redmore puts down the tongs, wipes his hands upon his stiff leather apron, and then cuffs Dennis around the back of the head, which makes me smile. Of course, Daniel is not here, how could I have forgotten? So much has happened that even the simplest of facts is passing me by. I am disgusted with the relief I feel as I hand over the letter to Mr Redmore. I do not have to see Daniel at this moment, and I do not have to explain to him why I need to record in a letter that which I cannot bear to say in words.

‘Would you see Daniel gets this, please, Mr Redmore? It is very important.’

His old eyes flash surprise as he replies, ‘Very well, that I can do. Are you well, miss?’

‘Yes thank you,’ I say.

‘Only you look a little wearied, but then, perhaps brides-to-be do. I remember when I got married—’ He shrugs. ‘Well, enough of that. I must get back to the work in hand.’

I picture him as a young man, in the days approaching the saying of his vows; he has quite the kindest expression I have ever seen. It occurs to me that he has only ever wanted his sons to be happy, and that he wants me to be happy too. I take his hand in mine, and squeeze it.

‘Thank you so very much,’ I say.

Then I walk away before either one of us can say more.

All depends on keeping the breaking of the engagement as a secret, but my mother takes one look at my face as I meet her on the green and reads everything there.

‘Oh, you foolish girl,’ she says. ‘Foolish, foolish. Quick, go back and retrieve the letter and rip it into pieces, before it’s too late.’

I shake my head. I am expecting such rage from her, but instead she puts a hand on my shoulder, and says, ‘Why, Shirley?’

‘It is too complicated…’

She sighs. I have a sudden feeling that she has been expecting this all along. ‘Come. Let’s get home.’

We start the walk out of the village, back up the hill that leads to the farm. There are so many things she could say and I am so grateful that she decides to say none of them. I already know my father will be apoplectic. I already know that everyone will laugh, and point, and consider me used and discarded, good for nothing any more. I do not need her to tell me.

Instead she says, ‘When I was a little younger than you I met your father at a fayre. He bought me a baked potato without even asking first; he was bold, and bright, and he had a reputation back then—the kind of reputation that does a girl no good and a man no harm at all. He had got a girl into trouble in his own village, was the word, and then had refused to marry her, although nobody could produce the name of this girl when I asked for details. Perhaps it was all a lie. I didn’t really care, anyway. My parents forbade it so I sneaked from the house to see him, and got caught, of course, being quite useless at such acts. He agreed to marry me, though, which surprised everyone. It did not seem to matter whether I agreed to marry him.’

She does not say more.

We cross the stile and walk up the edge of the lower field together. How calm she is; how different to what I was expecting.

‘Thank you,’ I say, although I cannot exactly explain for what.

‘I wanted you to be better, to be beyond all this.’ She gestures at the ground, the sky. ‘But the more you learned, the further you got away from me, until I could not recognise myself in you. I have been so lonely, watching you make your plans from such a distance, with your head in the clouds. And I became bitter as you excluded me. I could not understand it. But this act—this I understand.’ She takes my hand, and squeezes it.

‘How can that be so? I do not understand it myself.’

‘What will you do?’

There is no answer to give her.

‘You cannot go to Taunton,’ she says. ‘Put that out of your mind.’

‘I no longer want to be a teacher.’

‘Good, because they did not want you. A letter came days ago. They wrote that you did not have the correct attitude for a schoolmistress. I destroyed it before your father could read it, and take pleasure in it.’

They do not want me. They do not want me; well, I hold fast to my thoughts. I do not want them. No more rooms of quiet, seated, suppressed children. No more thoughts that I do not form myself.

‘I admire you,’ my mother says. We continue to walk to the farm; where else would we go? ‘I wish I had your courage. I have long admired it from afar. I will help, as I can, to find a path for you through life.’

Honesty compels me to say, ‘Perhaps you should not formulate such thoughts until you discover what I have said in the letter to Daniel.’

She nods. ‘Very well. When will you tell your father?’

‘Tomorrow afternoon. At the rehearsal. Do not come. Make an excuse, I beg of you. You will find out all later.’

‘It will all come out in the wash, and then we can decide what to do. There will be happiness, eventually. I do not doubt it.’

She pulls me into her arms with a strength that I had almost forgotten she possessed; it is the strength born of hard work and worry, and holding a child safe even when they struggle.

‘I do not doubt it,’ she says, again, and I wish she had not. She sounds so much less certain with repetition.

Three men stand before me and ask their questions.

I sit in the front pew of the church, my hands folded demurely in my lap, my eyes downcast. I know better than to show my true face, or give my answers.

My father, Mr Redmore, Reverend Mountcastle: they have all read the letters that Mr Tiller sent to me. I handed them over as soon as we were gathered in the church. Reverend Mountcastle holds them now; the once-white pages, folded, look grubby, the edges curling. ‘Why did you not inform your father of these improper advances? You must have known it was your duty.’

‘I am sorry,’ I whisper, which goes nowhere towards answering his question but at least seems to mollify him. He stands in the centre of the aisle; behind him are the carved wooden steps to his pulpit and the long stained-glass window of Mary in blue, with the baby Jesus in her arms.

My father is on Reverend Mountcastle’s left. His arms are crossed and his mouth straight. His cheeks appear to be permanently flushed since my revelation, as if they will never overcome the embarrassment of it.

On the right of the Reverend stands Mr Redmore. This must be his first time in church since that Sunday he attended upon his return from the war. His eyes do not look so kindly upon me any more. I feel my body trembling, and I cannot control it.

‘It is very troubling that you kept it secret, Shirley,’ says the Reverend. ‘You were always a sensible girl. Where has that sensible girl gone?’

‘I was—charmed,’ I say.

I have spent hours preparing this as my line of defence. Let them think I was weak-minded, and Mr Tiller took advantage of me with stories that a real man would not possibly entertain.

‘But now you see clearly?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I don’t understand it, I just don’t understand it,’ he mutters. ‘It is very strange indeed, this talk of rocks and future plans, and the letters are—well, they are deeply disturbing, do you not think so?’ He appeals to my father, who obliges, through clenched teeth.

‘I do.’ The sight of him standing there, saying those particular words in such clipped severity when this should be my own wedding rehearsal, touches a deep nerve of quixotic humour within me that cannot be repressed.

‘She smiles,’ says Mr Redmore. ‘She’s smiling. She finds this laughable, while my son fancies himself broken-hearted.’

‘Perhaps it is a sign of the befuddlement,’ says my father, who has leapt at the possible explanation as I knew he would. ‘She has long been thick with the man, and I knew it was not normal in nature, but her mother told me she could settle it with delicacy.’

‘Well, it seems not.’ Mountcastle sighs.

‘It’s all some fantasy caused by the war,’ adds the blacksmith. ‘Men come back with the strangest tales, and think they face enemies, seeing them in every place. Once you have lived through such times you cannot dismiss them. The man is ill.’

‘Does that mean we should forgive him?’ says my father, outraged.

‘We should forgive everyone as best we can in the name of Christian duty,’ states the Reverend. ‘But forgiveness does not mean forgetfulness. Tiller must not be put in charge of young minds, or even allowed near to them, that much is obvious.’

They do not ask me why I chose to believe Mr Tiller, or what I have seen with my own eyes. They do not include me in this conversation at all.

It does not matter; it does not matter! I have outwitted Mr Tiller. He will be forced out of the village in shame and penury, and if he applies for work in this county news of it will reach Westerbridge. He will not be able to harm Daniel, and his ability to affect the future of others will be seriously diminished.

‘Do we agree that the man is touched?’ asks Mountcastle.

‘I do not care much one way or the other, but he must pay for what he has done.’ My father’s arms remain crossed. I am glad I asked my mother to leave us at the church door; she would set about the business of placating him, as if it were her duty, and I need him to be angry enough to ensure the downfall of Mr Tiller.

‘But what exactly has he done?’ says the Reverend. I keep my eyes cast down, and pretend I am too ashamed to even look at them.

There is a silence, and then I hear footsteps. The Reverend sits beside me in the pew, and places a hand on mine. I have never been so close to him. He smells strange, musty. Underneath his vestments he is just another old man. I hold my breath.

‘Shirley,’ he says, gently. ‘You were alone with Mr Tiller on numerous occasions, were you not? You helped him with tasks, such as the organisation of the May Day celebrations, is that not right?’

‘That is right, sir.’

‘Yes, that’s right. You see, I already know this because he told me what a great help you were to him, and suggested you should be May Queen because of it. He has always thought highly of you, hasn’t he?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. Good.’ Mountcastle pats my head. Why does he feel so free to do so? I have not encouraged him. ‘Did Mr Tiller ever kiss you?’ he says, loudly, so the other men can hear, I assume. ‘With his mouth?’

One wonders how else a person could kiss another. ‘No, sir,’ I say.

‘Did he ever put his hands upon you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Very well. Thank you.’

Here is my moment. My mother called me brave, and I must prove her right. ‘I put my hands upon him.’

The Reverend’s hand becomes a dead weight on mine. I would throw it off if I could.

‘Indeed?’ he says, finally. Mr Redmore and my father do not move. ‘How so?’

‘He took off his shirt, and I touched his skin. We were alone, in his cottage. I cannot say more. Do not make me say more.’ I close my eyes and hunch my shoulders, as if emotion has overwhelmed me. I have learned that words are worth less than tears.

‘And so now we understand why you have called off your wedding. Oh Shirley.’

My father is murmuring under his breath and I raise my head to see him deep in his fury, Mr Redmore already moving to his side.

‘Calm yourself,’ says the blacksmith. ‘Calm yourself.’

‘I will kill him,’ states my father, icy with anger.

‘This is a church, Frederick Fearn,’ barks the Reverend. Oh, the three of them are fast becoming their own stage act; they only need me to be the cause and the audience.

‘He should answer for this!’ shouts my father, and his eyes pass over me as if I am not there at all.

‘And he will. We will track him down, and he will see justice.’

‘He will be miles away already,’ says Mr Redmore. ‘If the girl had not seen fit to delay telling us, we could have—’

‘If you had not told all that the engagement was broken, he would not have had the chance to run!’

I hold up my hand. None of this makes sense to me, and now my stomach has a strange sensation within it, as if wheels are turning fast within. ‘Could you explain, sir?’ I ask the Reverend. ‘I don’t understand.’

All three of them grimace. I am an annoyance to have interrupted. ‘He has left the village,’ says my father. ‘Your precious schoolmaster made off this morning.’

‘How… how do you know this?’

‘We have been asking door to door about one of the girls in the village who has seen fit to run away,’ says Reverend Mountcastle. ‘I called in on Mr Tiller myself this morning, and found the cottage empty. Now I understand why. He would have heard in the village last night that you had broken your engagement, as Mr Redmore saw fit to tell all while in his cups at The Three Crowns.’

‘My boy is broken-hearted,’ repeats Mr Redmore.

‘You all knew,’ I breathe. ‘You knew, and you waited for me to speak of it first. And now…’

Reverend Mountcastle looks at me with pity. ‘This is Westerbridge, girl. Did you forget how news spreads here? Even the news you would rather not have known?’

I do not believe Mr Tiller has simply run away. He is fervent, unswayable. What has he done with the extra time given to him through other people’s gossip? What have I made him desperate enough to do?

The Reverend leaves me, and walks back to make the group of three once more. They talk amongst themselves, and I am excluded from their conversation. I am so very unimportant. There is no power left in me.

I gaze up at the stained-glass window. The blue of Mary’s robe is soft and light. She holds the infant Jesus so gently, and around her head is a halo, the white light blending with her beautiful golden hair. Jesus is the centre of the picture, of course. His sweet expression dominates all. The blue of the robe simply frames him, in his promise of perfection. The mother does not matter, and yet he could not exist without her. As no man can exist without a woman to bear him.

I stand up.

‘The girl who has run away,’ I say. ‘Who was it?’

My father waves me into silence.

‘No!’ I shout, and they all turn to me. I will make them hear, just this once. I will have a clear answer. ‘Who was it?’

‘Phyllis Clemens, the baker’s girl. Now sit down, and— Shirley!’

But I am off, and running. Mr Tiller has left the village because his job is done, and he has won this war.

I must hope that he has taken her with him. And yet my heart tells me that he would not burden himself with her, not when he has a future to save. What would one more girl matter to him? But she is so pretty; how could he look at her golden hair and see only a problem to be solved? Surely he would be moved at the sight of her, and take her along as he fled.

I am now more rock than flesh, he wrote to me.

Out of the churchyard, past the houses of the poor, down the lane where the branches grow thick overhead, and here I am at Mr Tiller’s cottage. Perhaps Phyllis is inside, locked up in a back room, or perhaps there is a letter. Yes, a letter, one last missive from Mr Tiller in which he reprimands me for not keeping my promises, and gives me one final chance to keep to my end of the bargain. I have abducted Phyllis Clemens, the letter will say. I will return her once you are married.

At first the cottage door does not admit me, but when I put my shoulder to it, the wood squeals and it swings back. There can be no doubt that he has gone. Already the hall feels damp and unwelcoming. In the kitchen, the furniture remains while all personal touches are gone. The tea chest no longer stands beside the dresser; how could he have taken it? He must have hired a horse and cart from somewhere. No doubt the village will be full of the details.

The lamp, unlit, still sits by the window. There is no letter on the table. I had envisioned it so very clearly. But it is not there.

I search all the rooms for some sign, some portent, of his plans. The living room is as bare and cold as a prison. The mattress upon his bed is stripped and discoloured, and the room bears the smell of mildew. I open the window and look down upon his wild garden, the roses now done with, the vegetable plots thick with tangling weeds. Beyond that, I catch a glimpse of the bridge and the river.

I walk down the narrow stairs, and leave the cottage behind me. I make my way to the bridge. If Mr Tiller wanted to leave me a message, is that where he would put it? That is where we stood and saw each other clearly for the first time.

Upon the bridge, leaning against the stone wall, I look down at the water. I feel his desire to let me know he is disgusted with me. It is early afternoon and the frogs are not singing. The crickets do not call. A peculiar silence has stretched over the animals and insects.

There she is.

There is her golden hair, flowing with the water, spooling out from under the bridge. I climb down to the hidden shelter where the children thought the adults would not go, and I see her in the mud, her hair carried over her face, her skin blue-white and her neck a mess of purple marks where he squeezed her dry.

He has left his message.

My mother’s plan involves taking only that which I can carry, and the letter she has written to her parents in which she asks them to feed me and clothe me for a while. In exchange, she writes, I am a good worker. Although she does not say at what.

My plan deviates somewhat, but it starts out in the same manner; it is dawn, and I am walking down the lower field towards the stile, and the road, moving apace so that I will make good distance before my father notes my absence.

I will go to Taunton, and then beyond. I will look for word of either Mr Tiller (although the police are hard at work to find him too, of course) or of a rock that gives visions of a future that many would say does not concern me. But I say that it does.

I reach the stile, and find Daniel Redmore waiting for me. I stare at him, and he stares back.

‘How did you—’

‘Your mother,’ he says.

‘It was not her business to tell you.’

‘It’s all somebody else’s business until you make it your own,’ he says, and it is very hard to argue with that.

He is looking handsome in the early morning light, his hair unkempt, shivering in his shirt sleeves, and it is intriguing to see him astride a bicycle. I did not know he could ride one. This one has two seats; the one behind him is free.

‘It’s a tandem,’ he says, helpfully.

‘I can see that.’

‘It cost all my money. I bought it for us, when—back when—’ He takes a gasp of air, and then says, in a rush, ‘I am so sorry that I told my father, but I could not make sense of it, and some things are difficult to hide.’

‘I know. I know that now. I should not have asked it of you. Nobody should keep secrets for another, I suspect. It does the world no good at all.’

‘I’m to take you to your grandparents until after the funeral and the police catch…’ His words peter out. Heaven knows how the murder has affected him, although whether he chooses to make it the centre of his life is entirely up to him, of course. How hard-hearted I have become in my thinking. I even surprise myself with how much I have changed from that foolish girl who fancied herself in love.

‘I’m not going that way. I’m going to Taunton.’

He squints up at the sky. ‘This sounds like an old daydream come back to life.’

‘It is far from that.’

‘Well, let me get you there. And further, if you want.’

I shake my head. ‘You have no inkling of what you’re getting yourself into.’

‘You could explain it to me as we ride. It’s a long way to Taunton.’

‘I could try, I suppose, as long as you pay attention.’

‘Well,’ he says, as I struggle with my skirts so that I can climb on to the second saddle, ‘just as long as you don’t write it down. It seems to me all the troubles come when people start writing things down.’

He is filled with good sense today, and we push off together with the right foot, and only wobble a little on the first mile. Cycling comes naturally to me.

I split my attention between the morning sun over the hills and the contours of Daniel’s beautiful back. His presence gives me an optimism I have not felt in months. I will find the other rocks, and I will smash them all. I will wage war against those that deem me, and others like me, unimportant.

I will fight to make this world a better one.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First up, thanks to my personal rocks: Nick, Elsa and Harley.

I’m glad to get an opportunity to thank everyone who worked on this book and did such a brilliant job. That goes for Jana Heidersdorf, Rob Clark, Martin Cox, Gary Budden, Henry Dillon and George Sandison.

This being a book about teachers, I’d also like to say thank you to some great teachers I know and admire. They include Peter and Eileen Whiteley, Helen Whiteley, Rebecca Denton, and David Ian Rabey.

For those people who teach me and have taught me how to be a good friend, writer, or person through example—thank you: Jim Ovey, Neil Ayres, Tim Stretton and all the MNWers, George Sandison again, John Griffiths, Anna Wanigasekara, Rob Kemp, and the one-woman Crafty Revolution and hostess extraordinaire who was Francesca Kemp. I miss you Fran.

1643: A small group of Parliamentarian soldiers are ambushed in an isolated part of Northern England. Their only hope for survival is to flee into the nearby Moresby Wood... unwise though that may seem. For Moresby Wood is known to be an unnatural place, the realm of witchcraft and shadows, where the devil is said to go walking by moonlight...

Seventeen men enter the wood. Only two are ever seen again, and the stories they tell of what happened make no sense. Stories of shifting landscapes, of trees that appear and disappear at will... and of something else. Something dark. Something hungry.

Today: five women are headed into Moresby Wood to discover, once and for all, what happened to that unfortunate group of soldiers. Led by Dr Alice Christopher, an historian who has devoted her entire academic career to uncovering the secrets of Moresby Wood. Armed with metal detectors, GPS units, mobile phones and the most recent map of the area (which is nearly 50 years old), Dr Christopher’s group enters the wood ready for anything.

Or so they think...

Available from the Rebellion Store

www.solarisbooks.com

Drink down the brew and dream of a better Earth.

Skyward Inn, within the high walls of the Western Protectorate, is a place of safety, where people come together to tell stories of the time before the war with Qita.

But safety from what? Qita surrendered without complaint when Earth invaded; Innkeepers Jem and Isley, veterans from either side, have regrets but few scars.

Their peace is disturbed when a visitor known to Isley comes to the Inn asking for help, bringing reminders of an unnerving past and triggering an uncertain future.

Did humanity really win the war?

‘A book to take solace in.’

Locus

‘Melancholy and compellingly weird.’

SFX

‘Rarely has a writer had so much fun building a world only to take it apart.’

LA Times

‘Constantly challenging expectations.’

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Available from the Rebellion Store

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In January 2314, Rowena Savalas – a curator of the vast archive of the twenty-first century’s primitive internet – stumbles upon a story posted in the summer of 2024. She’s quickly drawn into the mystery of the text. Is it autobiography, fantasy or fraud? What’s the significance of the recurring number 381?

In the story, the protagonist Fairly walks the Horned Road – a quest undertaken by youngsters in her village when they come of age. She is followed by the “breathing man,” a looming presence, dogging her heels every step of the way. Everything she was taught about her world is overturned.

Following Fairly’s quest, Rowena comes to question her own choices, and a predictable life of curation becomes one of exploration, adventure and love. As both women’s stories draw to a close, she realises it doesn’t matter whether the story is true or not: as with the quest itself, it’s the journey that matters.

Available from the Rebellion Store

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