First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (3 page)

“So be it,” he said.

He looked at his piece of paper again. Then he put out his hand. It was light and dry on my forehead, like a spider. I shut my eyes.

“By the power vested in me,” he said, “I name this child Andrew Halfnight.”

Everyone was silent. I opened my eyes again and saw the Provost stuff the paper into his pocket. He looked round the assembly.

“It’s over,” he said. “The ceremony is ended.”

And that was how I received my name.

T
HE TOWNSPEOPLE WENT
back outside. The heat made even the familiar unfamiliar. The usually delightful smell of fresh bread from MacCallum’s Bakery was now mingled with the smell of something slightly putrid. Things that had year after year rotted unnoticed in these hills now made sure the townspeople couldn’t ignore the fact of their decay.

My parents and my aunt and the townspeople walked back along the hot street. The morning was so still that the walkers could hear, even above their chatter, a steady hum. Masses of bees were gathering in the Square, organizing to set out and pillage the moors, where gorse and heather and wild flowers were in full bloom.

The procession soon arrived at the house rented by my parents. It was at the end of the main street, which was also the edge of the town. With its gothic front windows on either side of a heavy wooden door, and its lawns and hedges, it looked as out of place as a palace among the two-roomed miners’ rows on either side where most of the townspeople lived. The house was block-shaped with four large bedrooms upstairs; downstairs, the entranceway gave
onto a passageway that went past the doors of the living-room and the library and ended in the kitchen.

The townspeople could have gone round the side of the house to the backyard, but it was presumed they’d want a glimpse of the inside of the big house. They went through the front door and along the passageway. The men took off their caps, and they all, men and women, filed through quietly, looking around curiously at the grandeur of the place. Through the open doors of the living-room they could see dark leather chairs, Persian rugs, mahogany tables; as they passed the library, they could see shelves of books from floor to ceiling, more books than anyone could ever want to read. They went into the long kitchen and out through the back door into the yard, with its brown lawn and high privet hedges.

Now the women put their coats aside and the men stripped to their waistcoats. Two long wooden tables with benches on either side had already been set out. Some of the women went back into the house and came out carrying trays heaped with sandwiches and mugs of beer. The townspeople sat down at the tables. My father came out, then my mother and my aunt, who’d changed their clothes, and were carrying me and my sister. My mother now wore a long black skirt and a white blouse. My aunt had put on a plain brown dress and brown shoes. My sister and I were placed gently on the warm grass beside the tables. My mother and my aunt sat together at the table nearest the back door.

The mugs were raised and clinked together in a toast. The musician began playing. He was an elderly man, one of those who’d lost a leg at the Muirton mine disaster years before. Now he played fiddle music at gatherings like this—reels and laments, laments and reels. Each blended into the other with ease.

My father, his thin fair hair carefully in place, sat on a stool at the head of the second table. He wore the same double-breasted black suit and elegant black shoes he’d worn to the ceremony. He hadn’t taken off his gloves. They were made of black leather and glistened in the sun. He didn’t eat or drink. Some of the men tried to draw him into conversation, and he nodded a few times, that was all.

After a while, my mother signalled to the fiddler and he stopped playing. She stood up. The townspeople were silent.

“I just want to thank you all,” she said in her deep, calm voice. She had a smooth, unlined face. Perhaps she’d avoided smiling. Perhaps she hadn’t found much to smile at. “I don’t want to make a speech. Just to thank you for being here today and thank you for making newcomers such as us welcome in Stroven. Now please enjoy yourselves.”

She sat down and the guests applauded her words by banging their beer mugs on the tables.

My father applauded her words, too, his gloved hands clumping against each other. Then he stood up, and the guests thought he wanted to make a speech, too. But he didn’t. Instead he walked over to where my mother sat.

“Sarah, I’d like to hold the babies,” he said.

The townspeople were watching. The birds, even the insects, seemed to have fallen silent. My mother looked at him for a while; then she breathed deeply and rose from the table. She looked down at her two babies on the grass, considering. I was wide awake, gurgling and waving my arms. But my mother bent and picked up my sister, Johanna, who was still asleep wrapped in her shawl. My mother cradled her in her own arms for a moment, looking into the little sleeping face. Then, decisively, she held her daughter out and placed her in the outstretched arms of my father.

“Thank you,” he said. His plump face, which before had seemed sullen, was transformed by a smile. He looked down at my sister in his arms, then around at the guests, smiling at them all. He looked down at my sister again, examining her sleeping face, talking to her like a new father.

“My beautiful daughter,” he said, “my beautiful little daughter,” over and over again.

Now he wanted to show her off.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” he said to the townspeople nearest, bending to let them see his little girl. “She’s so beautiful.” He said this even to the men seated at the tables; they agreed uncomfortably, for “beautiful” was not a word the miners used in these Upland towns.

Gradually, the guests relaxed again and the general chatter began, and the clanking of mugs, and the fiddler played another reel. But my mother didn’t take her eyes off her husband. Nor did my aunt. Nor did some others of the Stroven women who must have sensed something.

They were all witnesses.

What happened was this. My father was leaning over to give Jane MacCallum, the Baker’s wife, a better view of my sister’s face. The knitted woollen shawl began to slip on the shiny leather of his gloves. Several of the women seated at the table, alarmed, stretched out their hands to help. My father clutched tighter to stop my sister from falling.

rack!
The distinctive and sharp sound, like the snap of a whip, was heard by everyone, even above the babble of conversation and the whine of the fiddle.

Everything stopped.

My mother jumped up from her seat and rushed over to where my father stood. She took the baby out of his arms. The little green eyes were wide open now, just as though my sister were awake. A trickle of red oozed between her soft lips.

My mother slumped to her knees, holding her baby to her. My father, standing before her, slowly raised his gloved hands to cover his face. One of the guests, Jamie Sprung, got up from the table discreetly. He walked quickly to the side of the house where there was a gate leading to the front. He didn’t take time to open the gate, but leaped over it and ran along the hot street to the Square. He came back with Doctor Giffen, who took the baby from my mother. He put my sister on one of the tables and performed his examination. Then he pronounced what those in the garden already knew: that she was dead. Even her flexible baby ribs hadn’t been flexible enough—they were crushed, and the jagged ends had pierced her tiny lungs.

The idea of death by crushing wasn’t strange to these townspeople. For generations, Stroven miners had been killed this way in cave-ins deep under the earth. But they were shocked that it should have happened to a baby, my sister; and that it should have happened above ground, in a garden, on a sunny day.

A
FTER THE
D
OCTOR
examined the baby, my father, Thomas Halfnight, left the garden and went into the house. My aunt followed him; she tried to talk to him even though she herself was distraught. After a while he left the house. Some people in the town saw him go along the street, past the Square, towards the sheep path that runs east into the hills. The gaunt shepherd Kerr Lawson was up by the sheep pens practising his bagpipes (the townspeople
preferred their sound at a distance); he saw my father disappear into the hills.

It was the next morning before anyone went looking for him.

At dawn, four men headed for Hadrian’s Bridge, a Roman bridge that arched over a one-hundred-foot-deep gorge. At the bottom was a stream, famous for its fat trout.

The four men had an idea this was where they might find my father. They arrived at the stream by seven o’clock. One of them was Jamie Sprung, the man who’d gone for the Doctor the day before, an agile man in his mid-twenties with sharp eyes. Always, there was an eagerness about him: his whole body seemed tensed as though ready to break into a sprint at the slightest pretext. Now, he was the first to notice the black specks in the sky, like spots in the eye of the morning sun. He pointed them out to the others.

“Crows—over there.”

The birds were milling around in the sky a half-mile up the gorge, at a place where the stream narrowed to rush under the bridge.

When the men got there, it was Sprung who saw, directly beneath the bridge, the naked body of my father sprawled on the rocks, the upper half of him out of the water. Crows were everywhere, pecking, pecking, pecking at him the same way they pecked at the carcasses of drowned sheep.

The men threw rocks at them and they scattered, shrieking.

Sprung was first to scramble down the steep bank. He waded into the fast, knee-deep water. My father’s neck was at an impossible angle, and the birds had already made a mess of him. They’d taken the eyes and the plump flesh of the face and chest. All that was left of his right arm was a bloody stump at the elbow.

The birds were squawking, wheeling around in the air above.

The men lifted the body out of the water. On the bank, they wrapped it in a tarpaulin groundsheet and dragged it to the top of the gorge. Among the bracken by the pathway, they saw black trousers and a silk shirt and other odds and ends of my father’s clothing. They considered putting the clothes back on him, to make him decent. But no one was willing, in the end, to make such intimate contact with the mutilated body. They stuffed the clothes into the tarpaulin beside the body.

In this way, they carried my father back down to Stroven.

By the time the finders of the body arrived back in the town, many of the townspeople were standing in the glare of the morning sun waiting to see them carry their load along the main street, through the Square and down to my mother’s house. The four men were sweating and tired from their efforts, but no one offered to help them. They had, by now, their own living cloud cover—swarms of blowflies enticed by the smell of death.

When they reached the big house, the men entered without knocking. They went along the passageway into the kitchen and laid their burden on the table, a deal kitchen table nicked and scarred by long service to the meat-chopper.

My mother and my aunt, who’d been watching their approach from the upstairs bedroom window, came down into the kitchen. They stood by the open door, looking at the body. When the men saw them there, they stepped aside and took off their caps.

“We found him under the Roman bridge,” said Jamie Sprung to my mother.

The kitchen was full of the buzz of flies that had followed
the men inside. My mother swayed against the door-frame. Then she came forward and loosened the tarpaulin so that my father’s face and his torso were exposed.

“The crows,” Jamie Sprung said. “They made a mess of him.”

My aunt came forward too. The skin of my father’s face was whitish blue, the eye-sockets were raw, the cheeks had been torn away from the bone. The blood around the stump of the arm was congealed.

My mother and my aunt stood looking at the body, while Jamie Sprung waved the flies away with his cap.

The inquiry into the death of my father was very brief. It took place around the deal table of my mother’s kitchen one hour after the body had been laid there. Present were: Jamie Sprung and the other three men who’d found it; my mother and my aunt; Doctor Giffen; and Constable MacTaggart.

Doctor Giffen said the cause of death was a broken neck as was very obvious from the angle of the head. My father must have plunged one hundred feet from the bridge onto the exposed rocks. The other mutilations were the work of the birds.

“The only anomaly,” Doctor Giffen said, “is the right arm.” He pointed to the stump. “See where the arm’s been removed here, where the humerus joins with the radius and the ulna.” The doctor looked uncomfortable as he tried to explain to my mother. “You can see where the crows have been pecking at the flesh. But the bone has been cut by some human instrument. In fact, it’s been sawn off. Crows are smart, but not that smart. These saw marks are quite recent. It’s hard to say whether they were made before or after death. We’d have to call in a specialist, or send the body to the City.”