Sandlands Read online

  Rosy Thornton is a Fellow and Tutor of Emmanuel College, Cambridge and a lecturer in Law at the University of Cambridge, with specialisms in housing law, charitable trusts and feminist legal studies. She has published five novels, including Ninepins (Sandstone Press, 2012) and this is her first short story collection. She divides her time between Cambridge and the Suffolk sandlings.

  By the same author

  More than Love Letters

  Hearts and Minds

  Crossed Wires

  The Tapestry of Love

  Ninepins

  First published in Great Britain

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  Dochcarty Road

  Dingwall

  Ross-shire

  IV15 9UG

  Scotland.

  www.sandstonepress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright (c) Rosy Thornton 2016

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

  The publisher acknowledges support from Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

  ISBN: 978-1-910985-04-5

  ISBNe: 978-1-910985-05-2

  Cover design by Antigone Konstantinidou, London.

  Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore.

  In fondest memory of John Thornton (1935–2014), who loved the Suffolk countryside.

  Acknowledgements

  Four people read these stories in draft and encouraged me with the project: Victoria Best, Julia Chellel, Robert Dudley and of course Mike Gross. Louise Fryer ran her usual eagle eye over the text. My editor, Moira Forsyth, believed in me and gave me the benefit of her patience, precision and insight. I trust they all know how very grateful I am.

  Contents

  Title Page

  The White Doe

  High House

  Ringing Night

  The Watcher of Souls

  Mad Maudlin

  Nightingale's Return

  The Level Crossing

  All the Flowers Gone

  Whispers

  A Curiosity of Warnings

  The Interregnum

  Stone the Crows

  Silver Studded Blues

  The Witch Bottle

  Curlew Call

  Mackerel

  The White Doe

  The first visitation occurred in January, very early one morning.

  They came from the Seven-acre, which still bristled with the ruined stalks of last year’s barley, up the grass bank and through the patch of scrubby fruit trees that Fran’s mother had referred to as ‘the orchard’, before joining the track beyond the cottage and heading out to cross the road and regain the woods. In summer, the deer rarely ventured out beyond the cover of the woodland, sticking to the secret, shady places to raise their dappled young. But in the winter months, hard ground and sparse fodder forced them out into wider orbits, crossing field and farmland along well-trodden pathways – the same old ways followed, no doubt, by their mothers and grandmothers.

  At the top of the bank, each animal in turn crested the ridge with an identical movement, half lurch and half leap, head lowered and withers high. Five of them, six, eight, dark shapes on a pale canvas, and then there she was towards the back, not much more than a gap in the line, a movement, a reflection. There was a low mist, and in the bleached half-light of the winter predawn she was almost invisible, white upon white. Fran’s angle of vision also had a strange foreshortening effect, from where she leant with thighs hugged to the radiator at her bedroom window while she psyched herself to move and head along the ice-cold landing. Through the steamed-up glass the doe, that first time, appeared insubstantial, even ethereal. For a full minute after the deer had gone Fran stood stock-still and almost unbreathing, before a shifting behind her from the bed told her Mark was awake.

  His eyes were screwed up, swollen with sleep. ‘What is it? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  There was no wonder they were the stuff of mythology, she said to him later, over supper. The aberrant and anomalous, endowed by uncomprehending humans with magical meaning.

  ‘Isn’t there one in the Morte d’Arthur?’ He broke off more bread, refilled his own wine glass, then hers. ‘I remember it vaguely from school. Gawain gets sent off to hunt for it or something. One of those quests they were always having.’

  ‘Yes, but that was a stag, I think. The white hart – like the pubs. A hart is a male deer, isn’t it? Mine was a doe.’

  His attention, however, had shifted to more empirical ground. ‘We should look it up. See how uncommon it is. I wonder if it’s an albinism thing, or some other genetic quirk. Probably a recessive gene...’

  Fran’s mother would have shared her curiosity. Ever the hoarder of washhouse tales, both earthly and supernatural, she was also the self-appointed chronicler of family folklore. Birthing stories were her favourite – a grisly pleasure quite at odds with her otherwise mild, fastidious nature. There was Fran’s cousin Tom, who, born in the days before rhesus immunoglobulin treatment, had to be snatched from his waiting mother’s arms and, according to the established account, his infant blood drained out and replaced in its entirety. But for this, Aunt Pamela’s antibodies would have cannibalised her child.

  Then there was Fran herself, a breech presentation whose head stayed stubbornly lodged. When with the aid of forceps she finally emerged, the doctor and midwife could not suppress the recoil of horror at the monster they had delivered – a monster with a second head. What they saw, of course, was no such thing, but a ball of superfluous cartilage and soft tissue attached by a strand of skin: a simple birth defect, removed with a snip to leave only a tiny nubbin close to her left ear.

  ‘I wanted to call her Miranda,’ her mother would relate to anyone who’d listen. ‘My own little marvel. And the doctor said, for a moment back there we thought that Hecate might be nearer the mark.’ Then her grin would soften to a reminiscent smile. ‘It was her dad who insisted on Frances.’

  There was no chance of a similar shock with the birth of her own daughter twenty-eight years later. By the time of Fran’s confinement, obstetric ultrasound ensured that the image of her incipient daughter had been imprinted on her heart from twelve weeks’ gestation. In any case, there was no story to be told there: just the routine misery of twenty-four hours’ grinding contractions followed in the end by the caesarean she had opted against a lifetime earlier, so that when Mark leaned to lay Libby on her breast – her heart-blood, her life’s consuming joy – she was almost too exhausted to greet her.

  The appearance of the white deer, Fran discovered, was sometimes a divine manifestation. In eighth-century Ardennes, Saint Hubert rode out to hunt on the morning of Good Friday when he should have been at prayer, only to encounter an admonitory apparition – the Holy Spirit in cervine form, which warned him back to the path of piety. But it was a white stag in that story, too. The haloed creatures portrayed on the Internet seemed all to be crowned with majestic antlers.

  For the Lenape people along the banks of the Delaware River the Great White Deer was a spirit to be venerated, even though this lesson was one destined to be learned over and over by the young men. I’ll be the one, would brag the youths of each successive generation, I’ll be the one to slay the Great White Deer and carry home his pelt. It was the women of the Lenape who understood the truth: that the creature was their talisman and never to be harmed. Mothers would follow their sons out on the hunt, and wives their husbands, and when they saw the White Deer would seize their arrows from them, and stay their hands upon the bow. Always his pelt, though. The Great White Deer w
as a buck.

  Fran found only one tale in which the animal was female, and it was this one that particularly haunted her. Its source was an old French folk song, the lament of the blanche biche: the white hind, or doe. She recalled having heard it many years earlier at university, on a cassette tape belonging to an exchange student over from the Sorbonne. The ballad tells of a young nobleman by the name Renaud, who nightly hunts for deer for the table with his dogs. His sister, the fair Marguerite, dares tell no one that she is under an enchantment, compelled by night to roam the forest in the form of a white doe. Going to her mother, she implores her to tell Renaud that he must not shoot the white doe. In spite of this, the brother and his huntsmen are drawn to the mysterious creature, and at the third blast of Renaud’s copper horn, she is brought down. While in the kitchens the white doe is quartered for the spit, the cook marvelling at the fairness of her skin, the company are all seated at breakfast but for gentle, blonde Marguerite, who is nowhere to be found. As the search party reassembles, empty-handed, a voice is heard to echo from the castle walls. My head is on the serving dish, but my heart is cleft in two, my blood smears the kitchen and my bones lie charring on the black coals.

  There were more sightings after the first. Several times she glimpsed the herd in the woods, away to the left of the path. Twice they moved almost in step with Fran but along a parallel ride, separated from her by a band of silver birches; on another morning they had gathered to graze in a small open area, cleared in the autumn by volunteer coppicers. Always it was the white doe that was visible before her sisters, whose coats bore the same muted grey-brown hues as the winter woodland.

  February brought an iron freeze that silenced nature’s soundtrack and drew all evidence of life to a standstill. The mercury sank below zero and stuck there, night and day, for the best part of a fortnight. It was too cold for snow. At the forest margins, the leaves stood crisp and edged in white, like bereavement cards in negative; deeper in, the frost was colourless but its grip no less complete. The sand of the path was set to a crust which hardly yielded under the weight of Fran’s boots, the patterns of past patterings and scurryings preserved there in a strange suspended animation. Of the deer there was no sign.

  When, with the thaw, they made their reappearance it was quite sudden and at unexpectedly close quarters, as Fran was walking early on the road to the village. First one then another, they erupted from a field entrance barely five yards in front of her, their hooves striking an alarming clatter from the metalled surface; she stopped where she stood and waited for the whole string to follow, nine of them in all, then watched as they crossed the road at an angle away from her before shouldering through a gap in the hedge at the other side. It was curious how ungainly they appeared at this unaccustomed proximity; no longer the graceful spectres of the forest glade, they seemed clumsy, earthbound, heavily bovine. And the white doe was no pale ghost but specked and spattered with mud, the fur of her belly matted and yellowing.

  She’s solid, thought Fran, with a pang that was almost disappointment. Fleshly; a thing of the flesh. They used to call meat ‘flesh’, didn’t they, back in those less queasy days? Bring me flesh and bring me wine. For an instant Fran caught the flash of Renaud’s hunting knife in the firelight of the castle kitchen. When she closed her eyes she saw the blade as it sliced through hide to part the tender tissue beneath – dividing sinew, jarring against bone – and Renaud’s great wooden table, slick and darkly stained.

  Yes, her mother would have been the one to tell. But it was six months now since the funeral and the cramped gathering back at the cottage, with too much turmeric in the coronation chicken and not enough chairs for the elderly to sit down. And then there was the bleak task of sifting through her things. Fran had cleared the bureau and one wardrobe before losing courage, then boxed and bagged the remainder without examination and moved them to the attic here, where their weight pressed down from above, heavy on her conscience and her heart. For once in her life she felt the loneliness of being an only child.

  Libby would have lent a hand, but she had to get back to New York. ‘Let me help,’ Mark had offered, and meant it. He would be bracing, she knew, robustly practical, piling black sacks for the tip. And she would be grateful for it – but not just yet.

  Friends were coming for supper and Mark was thumbing his Fearnley-Whittingstall.

  ‘What is it, again, that Jo won’t eat?’

  Fran couldn’t remember. ‘Prawns?’ she hazarded. Something with shells, or maybe tentacles. ‘Squid?’

  ‘And is veal still blackballed, now they’ve stopped with the crates? There’s a recipe here where you cook it slowly in milk with sage and lemon peel, and the lemon makes it thicken and clot. Mind you, it’s a bit near the knuckle – boiled in its own mother’s milk. Like that Mexican thing, or is it Filipino, where you serve the unlaid hen’s eggs inside the mother hen. It’s all enough to make you want to go kosher.’

  Fran laughed. ‘Just as long as it’s not venison,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I could stomach that just at the moment. Let’s not have venison for a while.’

  During dessert the conversation began to fragment, crazying like a shattered mirror into a kaleidoscope of jagged, disconnected shapes – a sure forewarning of one of her migraines. Mark somewhere in the far distance, telling an anecdote she had heard ten times before, about the first time she’d brought him home for tea. ‘Fran’s mother was like a vixen with her cub. She wax-polished the shoes I’d left by the door. Her version of scent-marking.’ Then Jo, drifting in and out of focus with some medical folk tale from the Internet of vanishing twins: of fetuses, dead in utero, reabsorbed by their surviving sibling. Jo’s husband, Lucas, with a sudden flare of laughter, which appeared to Fran as vivid purple, shot through with scarlet. And Mark again, suddenly close at hand and abnormally amplified, asking her if she was all right.

  The migraine took hold in earnest later that night after their guests had gone home. These episodes had been with her for as long as she could remember, but were worse since her mother’s death. They began always in the same way, with a faint, unfocused tingling below her left temple, close to the joint of the jaw. The tingle would gather and locate itself into the first sharp pinprick of pain, bright as a point of light, experienced almost visually in her crackling nerve endings. Sometimes, just occasionally, she could halt its progress if she massaged the side of her head, tracing the hairline slowly with bunched fingertips, up from jaw to brow and back again, up and down, pausing only to linger now and then over the vestigial protrusion of cartilage. More often, the pain splintered and blossomed and spread until it exploded in a starburst of colour, depriving her of sight and filling her head with searing white fire, so that all she could do was retreat to a curtained room to lie down and wait for it to pass.

  ‘She’s a martyr to her headaches, poor thing,’ her mother used to say. ‘Always has been.’ When Fran was small she would sit by the bed and make her close her eyes, laying a wet flannel across her lowered lids. Cold water would find its way in runnels down the sides of her ears, dampening her hair and soaking the pillow. But heat and cold were topsy-turvy, indistinguishable one from the other, as in the dislocation of a fever.

  ‘Mum,’ Fran murmured now, though she knew that the figure by the shrouded lamp was really Mark.

  Allez, ma mère, allez bien promptement lui dire... Go, my mother, go at once and tell him, to call off his dogs until tomorrow at noonday.

  But still she was brought down; at the third blast of his copper horn, she fell.

  Some days later Fran was in the attic, hunting out some old jackets of Mark’s for the church jumble. Not that she was a congregant herself these days; recently with greater distance the mysteries of the broken flesh seemed morbid to her: grotesque, the ritual sharing of the body and the blood. But the rector was young, female and highly persuasive. Pushed low under the eaves along one side was the line of boxes from the clear-out at her mother’s. Just a quick start on one or two
while I’m up here, is what she told herself. Little by little: it might be more painless that way.

  The nearest box, which had once held twenty-four packs of Cadbury’s chocolate fingers, surprised her with its weight when she dragged it towards her. Books, was it, from the sitting room bookcase or the many piles beside the bed? Only six months, but the packing was a distant fog. When she slit the parcel tape with her fingernails and raised the flap, she saw that it was filled with assorted fat brown envelopes, the mainstay of her parents’ filing system. The top one disgorged nothing of greater interest than a decade’s worth of insurance documents: car, vehicle breakdown, home and contents. The next looked like old bank statements. But the one beneath that was bleached with age, soft as tissue and worn at the corners – altogether more promising.

  The first thing to slide out when she tilted it towards her was a small index card, printed across the top with the name and crest of the Ipswich Maternity Hospital, pale pink ruled in grey, filled in by hand with a blue-black fountain pen. Pink for a girl: it must have been how they catalogued them then. It bore her own name, Frances Ann, together with the date and time of delivery and her weight at birth: 6 lb 12 oz. Babies were so small, so fragile. Libby had been 7 lb 9 oz.

  Attached to the card by a paper clip, which left behind a double rust-edged groove when she pushed it aside with her thumb, was a small passport-sized print – her first ‘official’ photograph. Staring down into her own infant eyes, Fran was struck, in the angle of the brows, the familiar lines of nose and mouth, by something she must always have known but had never really seen before, or never this clearly. Her own asymmetry; her own essential incompleteness.