The Dancing Druids

Chapter Seven

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‘Thus the spell was broken, and all who had been turned into stones awoke, and took their proper forms.’

Ibid. (The Queen Bee)

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Once she had assembled her tools, Laura went to work, and some simple measurements and a complicated table of statistics produced satisfactory results. Laura, at any rate, was pleased with them, and at ten-thirty made known her findings.

‘What do you think?’ she demanded, looking up from her self-imposed task of twiddling a pair of compasses on the middle of the one-inch map. ‘Significant, I should call it, shouldn’t you?’

‘I hardly know,’ replied Mrs. Bradley. ‘Should I?’

‘Rather! You wait until I tell you!… Oh, there’s one thing I want to do, by the way, before we third-degree any villagers, and that is to go to that circle of standing stones above the farmyard. When can we go?’

‘To-morrow morning, if you wish, child.’

‘Oh, good! It had better be as early as possible, then, I think. We must leave plenty of time to do the villages properly after breakfast. What about leaving here at five for the circle of stones?’

‘As you wish,’ said Mrs. Bradley, grinning. ‘I will call you myself.’

She did this at four, and by five they were in the car with Laura driving. It was a clear grey morning with no hint of autumn in the air and not a great deal in the trees. Study of the map had taught Laura, in addition to other matters, that it was possible to drive to within three-quarters of a mile of the circle of standing stones without going past O’Hara’s mysterious farm.

The woods around the house where they were staying gave place very soon to the main road to Cuchester. Laura turned off from this about a mile to the south of the first village through which it ran, and the car mounted a long hill before it entered a narrow belt of trees on the further side.

After this the road became open, treeless and straight, and then, to avoid a high hill which was crowned by a Neolithic fort known locally as Mabb’s Mound, it took itself off southeast, but still in a line as straight as a ruler could have made, past a farm, a long barrow, and a road which petered out up a hill and ended in moorland at the top.

Soon the car found another high-road, and, by keeping to this for some miles, Laura passed through a long and beautiful village, skirted the park of a large house surrounded by trees, dropped cautiously down the steepest gradient in the county, and by-passed the town of Cuchester.

Three or four miles beyond Cuchester she made the detour which would bring her round to the west of O’Hara’s farm, and, beyond the discovery that the road had a very loose surface and in places was only fit for a sheep walk, she learned nothing that she had not known before.

She parked the car in a gateway on to a field, and then she and Mrs. Bradley set out for the circle of stones. A footpath which was crossed by two stiles led up and over the hill, for the stones were not quite at the summit.

Laura and Mrs. Bradley were walking round to inspect each stone when over the hill came two men. Mrs. Bradley called good morning as they came near, and one of them left the path and walked over towards the stone circle.

‘Interesting,’ said Mrs. Bradley, indicating the stones as though they had sprung up like mushrooms during the night.

‘Ah, they be very interesting,’ said the man. ‘Calls ’em the Druids, we do, though I dunno for why. The Dancin‘ Druids some calls ’em, and one gentleman from London, he comes up along over ’ere once every year and he watches for to see if they dances.’

‘And has he ever been fortunate enough to see them dance?’ Mrs. Bradley enquired.

‘Well,’ said the man. ‘I dunno as to that, I’m sure. Last year ’e swore as ’e did see summat, and this year e’s talked of bringin’ a film company over to see if they can’t make a picture. But I dunno! They never danced during the war, I do know that, for I used to be on Observer Corps duty up ’ere, with nothing much to look at except them stones. Stood firm enough when I looked at ’em, that I’ll swear.’

‘The Dancing Druids,’ said Mrs. Bradley, when the two men had gone on. ‘Not an uncommon superstition.’

‘Isn’t it?’ Laura enquired. ‘A most uncommon one, I should have thought.’

‘It is certainly an odd one,’ Mrs. Bradley went on, ‘but, in Cornwall, legend connects such circles as this one with girls turned into stone for impious behaviour—notably for dancing on a Sunday. The “Whispering Knights” of Little Rollright on the border of Oxfordshire are likewise believed to dance.¹ It is a striking survival, I believe, of the importance attached in early times to dancing as a religious exercise. There is also, of course, the fascinating paradox that dancing, although voiceless, is a language.² The ballet proves that.’

‘I see,’ said Laura. ‘Well, I don’t much want to be present when these dance. Do you really think anybody would be idiot enough, though, to believe that they do?’

‘Place yourself here at twelve on a night of full moon and scudding cloud; when there is mist below in the valleys and the living silence of the windless dark all around you, and I am not at all sure that you yourself would not be idiot enough to believe that they danced,’ said Mrs. Bradley.

She made a lengthy survey of the circle, looking carefully at every stone in turn, and also closely examining the ground around it. She seemed satisfied at last, and pronounced that it was more than breakfast time.

Laura, glancing at her wristwatch, was surprised to find that it was past nine o’clock. They returned to the car by the way they had come, and reached home at just after half-past ten.

‘A little late to begin exploring, I think,’ said Mrs. Bradley, to Laura’s disappointment. ‘To-morrow might be better than to-day.’

‘Oh, but there’s plenty of time!’ said Laura, setting to work upon her breakfast.

‘There is more still to-morrow,’ Mrs. Bradley replied; and from this decision not to visit the villages that day she refused to be moved.

‘What shall we do, then?’ asked Laura.

‘I shall knit,’ Mrs. Bradley replied, producing, as soon as breakfast was cleared away, the shapeless and repulsive length of jetsam which it was her custom to dignify by the name of knitting. ‘You may do anything you please, but don’t be in later than midnight because we shall need to be up in good time in the morning.’

Armed with a carte blanche, Laura spent what remained of the morning in solitary confinement (as she herself expressed it) completely surrounded by maps. After lunch, looking complacent, important and secretive, she asked whether she might borrow the car.

‘Provided you will borrow George as well,’ Mrs. Bradley replied. ‘I distrust that expression on your face. You are going to get into mischief, and George will extricate you. I have implicit confidence in him.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind George,’ said Laura. ‘In fact, we can take turns at driving, and he can mind the car if I leave it in funny places.’

Mrs. Bradley asked no questions, and, at just after two, Laura and George set out.

‘You know, George,’ said Laura, settling herself in the seat beside that of the driver, ‘I think sometimes that it’s a mistake, in a way, to work with anybody as clever as Mrs. Bradley.’

‘Do you, miss?’ George enquired, negotiating the double gates with care and skill.

‘Yes. It saps one’s intellect. One finds that one ceases to use one’s own brains at all. One merely relies upon hers.’

‘One could do worse, miss.’

‘True. Yet sometimes I think I shall be glad to be married to my comparatively moronic spouse and resume my place in the aristocracy of the non-boneheaded. I used to be quite intelligent, and against a brainless husband I ought to show up pretty well.’

‘May I enquire, miss,’ said George respectfully, but with an expression of slight concern upon his broad and sensible face, ‘what this all might be leading up to?’

‘Well,’ said Laura, ‘to put all the cards on the table, I’ve got an idea.’

‘Oh, dear, miss!’ said George, who had had experience before of some of Laura’s ideas and felt that they got her into trouble.

‘Yes, I thought you’d say that,’ said Laura, with great satisfaction. ‘But this one, George, is different. Only, I shall need a bit of co-operation. Are you on?’

‘Moderately speaking, miss, certainly. But if you’ll allow me to say so— ’

‘Oh, Mrs. Bradley would be the first to admire this great thought that I’m going to place before you, only, you see, I want to surprise her with the fait accompli. Now what I want you to do is this: I want you to take me in the car to where we parked early this morning, and then I want you to meet me at that place called Slepe Rock. Can do?’

‘Meaning that you are proposing to walk from the Nine Stones to the sea, miss?’

‘Meaning just that, George.’

‘But it’s a matter of seventeen miles, miss!’

‘I don’t think it is, except by road,’ said Laura. ‘Anyway, I’m going to find out. There’s no path marked on the map, but I’ve a hunch that there used to be an old trackway over the Downs. If I can locate it—or, rather, if I can find out how it used to run—I believe I can cut off about eleven of those seventeen miles. What do you say to that?’

‘And suppose you lose your way, miss, up on the Downs?—or suppose you find you’re on private land?—or in the middle of a field with a bull in it?’

‘Oh, George, don’t be so discouraging! You run me along to the Nine Stones, and I’ll meet you at Slepe Rock as sure as eggs are eggs.’

‘Addled, I wouldn’t be surprised, miss,’ said George, with great tolerance and good-humour. ‘But just as you say.’

The lovely September afternoon was almost too warm for walking, but Laura, full of her project, set off without any misgivings as soon as she had left George. She did not wait to see him turn the car, but climbed the hill at a rapid rate and came out by the stone circle to get her bearings.

It was sunny enough for the stones to cast firm, dark shadows. Laura took a bearing, decided upon the direction she ought to take, and began to pace carefully forward. Sure enough, at the end of half a mile of downhill walking over the Downland turf, she came to a little copse, and at the entrance to it was a monolith the shape of a spire, just one tall stone in a clearing; and through the clearing (and leading south-east in the direction which Laura wanted if she were to get to Slepe Rock) was a narrow path, white and greasily slippery on the chalk over which it had been trodden.

‘Got it!’ muttered Laura in triumph. ‘Attababy! Here I come!’

She was so pleased with the results of her reading, deductions and terrestrial navigation that she began to run down the path. Downhill it travelled until it was out of the clearing, and then it climbed up to three hundred and fifty feet above sea-level and ran along three miles of a narrow ridge until it crossed a highway which Laura, pausing, recognized as a secondary road which ran between Cuchester and Welsea Beaches.

The railway then had to be crossed, and Laura hesitated, longing to climb the embankment and see whether her track could again be picked up on the further side of the line.

She decided against this, however, as being unfair to George in case she should be run over by a train or arrested for trespassing on the railway company’s property, so she was obliged to walk northwards in search of a footbridge or a station.

Fortunately the road went parallel with the line, and by timing herself she could decide by about how much she had come off her course. By good luck, too, there was a narrow wooden footbridge not more than half a mile along the permanent way, and she soon crossed that and walked south on the other side to pick up her prehistoric trackway.

She had walked just over four miles by this time, including the extra mile up and down beside the railway. By car, she would have had to go into Cuchester, seven miles by any road along which a car could travel, and at that point she would have been no further east and the whole seven miles further north of her objective.

She had reason to congratulate herself. The invisible trackway she was following led past three tumuli and then skirted a long, narrow wood. It then climbed steeply to an ancient fortified camp, entrenched and circular, which Laura would have liked to examine. She crossed it, however, and had the immense satisfaction of finding her track dropping gradually but inevitably past an ancient dyke and then shooting upwards again to its last ridge before it reached another stone circle and then came in sight of the sea.

Laura had walked between eight and nine miles over country as lonely as the grave. She found herself on a headland, looking down at a cross-setting tide which foamed at the foot of the cliffs and thundered below into caves.

She sought a way down, and went to find George and the car. He had parked almost on to the beach. There was not the slightest doubt of his relief when Laura, very warm and with aching legs, suggested that they should drive home.

‘And so it went as you thought, miss?’ he said, as he reversed the car past the path which led up to the cliff-top.

‘Yes,’ replied Laura, ‘it did. Wait until I tell Mrs. Bradley!’

Mrs. Bradley, regaled with an account of the pilgrimage at dinner that night, was interested but seemed doubtful about the usefulness of the discovery except as a matter of (presumably) archaeological interest.

‘But you see,’ said Laura despairingly, ‘what I thought—the way I argued—well, you do see, don’t you? There’s this circle of standing stones, and there’s this place called Slepe Rock, from which somebody once disappeared, and I’ve proved you can walk from one to the other in, near enough, as straight a line as you could draw on the map with a ruler or measure off as the crow flies—and, well, don’t you see what I’m getting at?’

‘Frankly, I do not,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘After all, we knew already that Slepe Rock was on your nine-mile circle, didn’t we?’

‘Ah, yes. But we didn’t know you could walk the nine miles,’ said Laura. ‘It seems to me that there must be something different about Slepe Rock from the other places we’re interested in, because you certainly couldn’t walk from Newcombe Soulbury to the Stones, or from Easey. Look at the map, and you’ll see. Don’t you think it does single out Slepe?’

‘It is an interesting theory, child, certainly, and one to which we might well devote some thought.’

‘Well, I still say that the number nine has something about it. Take the Nine Stones, for example.’

‘Very well, child.’

‘Now regard them not as themselves, exactly, but as the centre of another and a greater circle, and what do we get, then?’

‘The nine stones as a kind of gigantic boss, child, in the centre of the circle you mention.’

‘Right. And what do you suppose then?’

‘I suppose,’ said Mrs. Bradley solemnly, ‘that somewhere or other on the circumference of that imaginary circle with the boss of the Nine Stones as its centre are to be found the homes of all the missing persons.’

‘Yes, well, there we are, then!’ said Laura. ‘Now, what’s our next move, do you think? Shall we comb out the circle and try to find out where this fat man lived? It ought to bring results, but it may take a fairly long time. I’ve worked it out, and it means a line of two hundred and fifty miles. You’d hardly think it, would you? Too tall an order, would you say?’

‘Not at all, child. I think it a most reasonable distance, and I shall enjoy a tour of the County.’

‘Well, when can we start?’ enquired Laura, after a first suspicious glance at her employer. But Mrs. Bradley seemed serious enough, and merely asked, as a reply to this question:

‘May I look at the map once more?’

‘Sure. I’ll trace out the nine-mile circle on it, shall I? It will give us something to go on. I’ve slewed the compass round but haven’t actually made any marks. I’ll make them now.’

The circle, so traced, covered a string of villages, cut across six main roads and several farms, and also enclosed some wild country of hills, woods, moorland and little streams.

‘Could be in a village, on a road, or on a farm. Goodness knows how long it will take us!’ said Laura, a little despondently, squinting down at the circle she had drawn.

‘We have plenty of time before us,’ Mrs. Bradley equably replied.

‘Plenty of time? We don’t know how much time we’ve got, do we?’

‘If your arguments are correct, child, we have very nearly nine years.’