The Janus Stone

CHAPTER 6

Ruth and Max are in the bar of the Phoenix. Ruth is ragingly hungry once again. She has torn open a packet of crisps (plain) and is having to force herself even to put up a pretence of sharing them with Max.

‘No thanks.’ Max waves the crisps away and takes a gulp of beer. In celebration, Ruth puts four into her mouth.

‘I’d like you to have another look at the bones when we’ve excavated them,’ says Max. ‘Is that possible?’

‘Of course,’ says Ruth, blushing and crunching.

‘After all, that’s your area of expertise isn’t it?’

Ruth agrees that it is, trying to sound like an expert and less like a contestant in a crisp-eating challenge.

‘I’d like to know how and why the body was decapitated,’ says Max. ‘Whether it was before or after death.’

‘Do you think it could be evidence of a head cult?’ asks Ruth.

‘It’s possible. Head cults are more Celtic than Roman but there have been Roman examples. Of course, heads were often preserved as holy relics in medieval times. Think of St Hugh of Lincoln. They cut off his head so it could perform miracles on its own. St Fremund too. There’s a legend that he was seen washing his severed head in a well. Of course, afterwards the well had miraculous powers.’

Max’s voice is interested, even amused, but Ruth has little time for miracles. Her parents, of course, despise anything to do with relics and shrines, seeing them as sinister papist practices. Ruth thinks of the children’s home and of Nelson’s defensiveness about the nuns. He was brought up a Catholic, she knows. She thinks of Cathbad, her friend and sometime Druid. He’d love all this.

‘They think there was a medieval church on my Norwich site,’ she says. ‘That’s why the field team was there in the first place.’

‘You know what Norwich is like,’ says Max, still sounding amused. ‘There are churches everywhere.’

‘A church for every week of the year…’

‘And a pub for every day,’ concludes Max. They both laugh. For some reason Ruth feels relieved, as if they have somehow moved away from dangerous ground. Max’s eyes meet hers and she feels herself blushing. Then the moment is ruined as her stomach gives a thunderous rumble.

‘Would you like something to eat?’ says Max. ‘The food here’s pretty good.’

Ruth assents eagerly.

It is pitch black by the time she gets back to the Saltmarsh. She drives slowly; the road has ditches on either side and one false turn of the wheel could send her plunging into the darkness. Nothingness. The flat marsh land has disappeared into the night, her headlights the only light for miles. Has the rest of the world ceased to exist? It feels like that sometimes. She drives on in her circle of light, Radio 4 muttering soothingly in her ear.

Her cottage is dark but, as she starts down the path, her untidy garden is suddenly flooded with harsh, white light. Nelson insisted on fitting this security light after the Lucy Downey case. Ruth hates it. She is always being woken up because a fox has wandered across her garden and is caught in the spotlight. She doesn’t mind the dark but the light can be terrifying.

Thank goodness Flint comes hurrying to meet her, purring loudly. Since the death of her other cat, Sparky, Ruth becomes morbidly worried if she doesn’t see Flint as soon as she comes home. What will he do when he has to share my attention with a baby, thinks Ruth, spooning out cat food. But the idea of a baby in the cottage is still unimaginable. Intellectually, she knows she is pregnant and that in six months or so she will have a baby. But she keeps catching herself wondering where she will go on holiday next year and if she might be able to take a sabbatical and go digging in the Virgin Islands. I’ll have a baby by then, she tells herself, but her imagination just can’t cope. Bring pregnant is enough to be going on with; the reality of a baby is, at present, too much for her.

She’d hoped that telling her parents might make it more real but instead their melodramatic response has made the whole thing seem fantastical. Did her father really say, ‘I’ll kill the scoundrel?’ Surely not. Did her mother really weep and say that her worst fears had been realised? Did she really declare that Ruth had been living an immoral life and this was her reward? Language like this belongs in films and not in real life. Being churchgoers her parents are used to talking about death, destruction and the wages of sin. Ruth is used to scientific facts, soberly presented. presently. She is simply not equipped to cope with the vocabulary.

She will have to tell Phil soon. She can’t have people guessing at work and she is sure that Trace will tell everyone that she was sick on the site. Phil will be fine, she’s sure. He’s a new man, always boasting about changing nappies and helping with housework. Of course, now he’s having an affair with Ruth’s friend Shona, which doesn’t do his perfect husband and father image much good. But Ruth is not supposed to know about that. She will tell Phil and sort out her maternity leave. Perhaps then she will start to believe that she is really going to have a baby.

Somehow she is hungry again and she forages in the kitchen for some biscuits. Then she sits at her desk to check her emails, scrolling down through the requests from students for extra time on their assignments, the supposedly amusing jokes sent from a colleague in the chemistry department, the new timetables for next year. Incredible to think that the academic year is almost at an end.

She is just about to delete another email from the chemistry department when she sees the name of the sender.

Michael Malone, also known as Cathbad, sometime Druid, also employed as a lab assistant in the chemistry department. Strange that she had been thinking about Cathbad only that evening, sitting in the pub with Max. But, on second thoughts, maybe not that strange. Cathbad has a habit of appearing just when he is needed. Cathbad would say that this is his sixth sense, his extraordinary sensitivity to the world around him. Ruth prefers to think of it as coincidence. As far as she is concerned, the jury is out on Cathbad’s sixth sense.

Below, in rather less high-flown language, Cathbad has written:

He finishes with a Gaelic verse to which he has kindly added a translation.

Ruth looks at this email for a long time. On one hand it is Cathbad doing what he does best, combining Celtic mysticism with an opportunity for binge drinking and dancing round a fire. On the other hand… She points her cursor at the words ‘goddess of holy wells’. It seems strange, even sinister, that this email should come just after her discussion with Max. Ruth wonders about the term ‘holy wells’. Brigid seems distinctly pagan – in what sense were her wells holy? And what’s this about ‘sacred flames’? Is Brigid another fire goddess? Sacred, holy – it is the language of the Church but she knows that there will be nothing Christian about the celebration on Saltmarsh beach.

On impulse, she types ‘St Bridget’ into her search engine. Immediately, she comes up with a Wikipedia entry for St Bridget, or Brigid. St Bridget, she reads, is considered one of Ireland’s patron saints, along with Patrick and Columba. Her feast day is the first of February.

Imbolc, according to Cathbad, is usually held on the second of February. Does the holy Bridget (a nun, she discovers) have anything to do with the earlier, pagan feast day? She reads on. Bridget founded Kildare monastery, which is sometimes called ‘the church of the oak’ after the large oak tree which grew outside Bridget’s cell. The oak, Ruth knows, is highly important in Norse and Celtic mythology. The word Druid even comes from the Celtic word for oak ‘derw’.

Another story concerns ‘St Bridget’s cross’. Apparently, Bridget made a cross out of reeds and placed it beside a dying man in order to convert him (might have been more useful to have called a doctor, Ruth thinks). Anyway, traditionally, a new cross is made every St Bridget’s day and the old one burnt to keep the maker’s house safe from fire. Clearly there is a thin line between the pagan Brigid’s fire and the saintly Bridget’s burning cross.

Max would be interested in this, thinks Ruth. Should she invite him to Cathbad’s Imbolc celebration? Max did say that he wanted to see the Saltmarsh. And it is interesting, too, from an archaeological perspective. Ten years ago, Ruth’s extutor, Erik, discovered a Bronze-Age wooden henge on Saltmarsh beach. That was where Ruth first met Cathbad. He was one of the Druids fighting to stop the henge’s timbers being removed to a museum. The Druids had lost, even though Erik had sympathised with them, and now all that is left of the henge is a slightly blackened circle of sand.

Ruth has Max’s email address. She’ll send a casual invitation to the Imbolc thing. Cathbad won’t mind, she’s sure. Druids aren’t exactly hung up on numbers and table settings. And he would like the chance of converting another academic to the ‘old ways’. Thinking of Max’s face as he described St Hugh and St Fremund, Ruth thinks that he may well be a closet Christian. Well, that won’t deter Cathbad. He is open to any form of ritual, though he does tend to alienate the more devout by referring to Jesus as ‘the great shaman’.

Ruth starts to type when suddenly a light comes on, making her momentarily shield her eyes. After a second she realises that it is the security light. She goes to the window and looks out. The garden is flooded with the glare, each blade of grass sharply defined, white against black. But there is no living creature to be seen.

The proper thing to do is to sacrifice nine black puppies to Hecate. I worried about this because, owing to my asthma, I don’t have even one puppy. And I do like to do the right thing. In the end, I killed a cat. I didn’t like doing it because I’m fond of animals. But it was old. A scrawny black cat who used to sleep in the sun outside my window. I think it belongs to some old lady in the alms cottages. Anyway, yesterday when the domus was deserted I crept out and cut its throat. It screamed and scratched and I realised that I should have hit it on the head first. Oh well, tamdiu discendum est, quamdiu vivas. We live and learn. I chased it into the bushes, caught it by its tail and finished the job. Then I hacked off the head. It was hard work but I found an axe in the outhouse which did the job admirably. The axe will be useful later so I hid it in the usual place. There was a hell of a lot of blood. Too much really. I got a bucket of water and cleaned the pathway and I buried the cat beneath the laurel bush. I was exhausted after all that and had to lie down. I just hope Hecate is satisfied.