Greenwitch

  The bonfire still burned, fed carefully with wood, its warmth was very welcome in the chill night. Jane moved away to stretch her stiff legs, and saw inland a faint greyness beginning to lighten the sky. Morning would be coming soon. A misty morning: fine drops of moisture were flicking at her face already. Against the lightening sky she could see Trewissick’s standing stones, five of them, ancient skyward-pointing fingers halfway along Kemare Head. She thought: that’s what Greenwitch is like. It reminds me of the standing stones.

  When she turned back again towards the sea, the Greenwitch was finished. The women had drawn away from the great figure; they sat by the fire, eating sandwiches, and laughing, and drinking tea. As Jane looked at the huge image that they had made, out of leaves and branches, she could not understand their lightness. For she knew suddenly, out there in the cold dawn, that this silent image somehow held within it more power than she had ever sensed before in any creature or thing. Thunder and storms and earthquakes were there, and all the force of the earth and sea. It was outside Time, boundless, ageless, beyond any line drawn between good and evil. Jane stared at it, horrified, and from its sightless head the Greenwitch stared back. It would not move, or seem to come alive, she knew that. Her horror came not from fear, but from the awareness she suddenly felt from the image of an appalling, endless loneliness. Great power was held only in great isolation. Looking at the Greenwitch, she felt a terrible awe, and a kind of pity as well.

  But the awe, from her amazement at so inconceivable a force, was stronger than anything else.

  “You feel it, then.” The leader of the women was beside her again; the hard, flat words were not a question. “A few women do. Or girls. Very few. None of those there, not one.” She gestured contemptuously at the cheerful group beyond. “But one who has held the grail in her hands may feel many things. . . .Come. Make your wish.”

  “Oh no.” Jane shrank back instinctively.

  In the same moment a cluster of four young women broke away from the crowd and ran to the broad, shadowy leaf-image. They were shaking with giggles, calling to one another; one, larger and noisier than the rest, rushed up and clasped the hawthorn sides that stretched far above her head.

  “Send us all rich husbands, Greenwitch, pray thi’!” she shouted.

  “Or else send her young Jim Tregoney!” bellowed another. Shrieking with laughter, they all ran back to the group.

  “See there!” said the woman. “No harm comes to the foolish, which is most of them. And therefore none to those with understanding. Will you come?”

  She walked over to the big silent figure, laid a hand on it, and said something that Jane could not hear.

  Nervously Jane followed. As she came close to the Greenwitch she felt again the unimaginable force it seemed to represent, but again the great loneliness too. Melancholy seemed to hover about it like a mist. She put out her hand to grasp a hawthorn bough, and paused. “Oh dear,” she said impulsively, “I wish you could be happy.”

  She thought, as she said it: how babyish, when you could have wished for anything, even getting the grail back . . . even if it’s all a lot of rubbish, you could at least have tried. . . . But the hard-eyed Cornishwoman was looking at her with an odd surprised kind of approval.

  “A perilous wish!” she said. “For where one may be made happy by harmless things, another may find happiness only in hurting. But good may come of it.”

  Jane could think of nothing to say. She felt suddenly extremely silly.

  Then she thought she heard a muffled throbbing sound out at sea; she swung round. The woman too was looking outward, at a grey streak of horizon where none had been before. Out on the dark sea, lights were flickering, white and red and green. The first fishermen were coming home.

  Afterwards, Jane remembered little of that long waiting time. The air was cold. Slowly, slowly, the fishing-boats came closer, over the stone-grey sea glimmering in the cold dawn. And then, when at last they neared the wharf, the village seemed to splutter into life. Lights and voices woke on the jetties; engines coughed; the air was filled with shouting and laughing and a great bustle of unloading; and over all of it the gulls wheeled and screamed, early-woken for thievery, eddying in a great white cloud round the boats to dive for discarded fish. Afterwards, Jane found herself remembering the gulls most of all.

  Up from the harbour, when the unloading was done, and lorries gone to market and boxes gone into the little canning factory—up from the harbour came a procession of the fishermen. There were others too, factory men and mechanics and shopkeepers and farmers, all the men of Trewissick, but the dark-jerseyed fishermen, shadow-eyed, bristle-chinned, weary, smelling of fish, led the long crowd. They came along the headland, calling cheerfully to the women; no meeting could have been less romantic, Jane thought, up there in the sleepless cold under the dead grey light of the dawn, and yet there was a great light-heartedness among them all. The bonfire still burned, a last stock of wood newly blazing; the men gathered round it, rubbing their hands, in a tumult of deep voices that sounded harsh in Jane’s ears after the lighter chattering of the women all night.

  High and low in the sky the gulls drifted, uncertain, hopeful. Amongst all the bustle stood the Greenwitch, vast and silent, a little diminished by light and noise but still brooding, ominous. Despite all the raucous exchanges tossed between the men and women there was a curious respectfulness towards the strange leafy image; a clear reluctance to make any fun of the Greenwitch. Jane found that for some reason this left her feeling relieved.

  She caught sight of Merriman’s tall figure at the edge of the crowd of Cornishmen, but made no attempt to reach him. This was a time simply to wait and see what might happen next. The men seemed to be gathering in one group, the women moving away. All at once Mrs Penhallow was at Jane’s side again.

  “Come, let me show ’ee where to go, m’dear. Now, as the sun comes up, the men do put the Greenwitch to cliff.” She smiled at Jane, half earnest, half offering a self-conscious apology. “For luck, you see, and for good fishing and a good harvest. So they say. . . . But we must keep our distance, to give them a clear run.” She beckoned, and Jane followed her away from the Greenwitch to the side of the headland. She had only half an idea what this was all about.

  The men began to crowd round the Greenwitch. Some touched it ostentatiously, laughing, calling aloud a wish. For the first time, in the growing daylight, Jane noticed that the square, leaf-woven figure had been built on a kind of platform, like a huge tray made of boards, and that this platform had a heavy wheel at each corner, carefully wedged with big stones. Calling and whooping, the men pulled the stones from the wheels, and Jane saw the figure sway as the platform moved free. Greenwitch was perhaps half again as high as a man, but very broad for its height, with its huge square head almost as wide as its body. It did not look like a copy of a human being. It looked, Jane thought, like a single representative of a fearful unknown species, from another planet, or from some unthinkably distant part of our own past.

  “Heave, boys!” a voice called. The men had attached ropes to all four sides of the platform; they milled round, holding, steadying, gently pulling the swaying image towards the end of the headland. Greenwitch lumbered forward. Jane could smell the heavy scent of the hawthorn. The blossoms seemed brighter, the green boughs of Greenwitch’s sides almost luminous; she realised that inland, over the moors beyond Trewissick, the sun was coming up. Yellow light blazed out over them; a cheer rose from the crowd, and the platform with the green figure moved almost to the clutter of rocks at the edge of the cliff.

  Suddenly a shout, high-pitched as a scream, rang out over the crowd; Jane jumped, and turned to see a scuffle of jostling bodies at the edge of the crowd. A man seemed to be trying to break through; she glimpsed a dark-haired head, the face twisted with fury, and then the group closed again.

  “Another of they newspaper photographers, I shouldn’t wonder,” Mrs Penhallow said with a hint of smugness in her pleasant voice. “’Tisn?
??t allowed to take pictures of the Greenwitch, but there’s always one or two do try. The younger lads usually take care o’ them.”

  Jane thought the younger lads were probably taking good care of this year’s intruder, judging by the speed with which his threshing form was being hustled away. She looked again for Merriman, but he seemed to have disappeared. And a change in the voice of the crowd drew her eyes back to the end of Kemare Head.

  A voice called again, this time with familiar words of childhood. “One to be ready . . . two to be steady . . . three to be off!” Only the ropes at the rear and sides of the trolley were held now, Jane saw, by perhaps a dozen men each. At the last word of command the crowd buzzed and murmured, the lines of men ran forwards and sideways, Greenwitch lurching faster and faster before them; and then in one swift complex movement the trolley was jerked outwards over the edge of the cliff, and brought up short from falling by its ropes.

  And the great green tree-woven figure of the Greenwitch, with no rope to hold it back, was flung out into the air and down over the end of Kemare Head. For a split second it was there, visible, falling, in the blue and the green among the wheeling screaming white gulls, and then it was gone, plunging down, driven by the weight of the stones inside its body. There was a silence as if all Cornwall held its breath, and then they heard the splash.

  Cheers and shouts rose from the headland. People rushed to the edge of the cliff, where the rope-holders were slowly dragging the wheeled trolley back up over the rock. After a swift glance over the edge, they surrounded the heaving string of men, cheering them back along Kemare Head. When the crowd near the rocks had thinned away Jane clambered to the edge, and peered cautiously down.

  Down there, the sea washed its great slow swells against the foot of the cliff as if nothing had happened. Only a few scattered twigs of hawthorn floated on the water, rising and falling with the swells, drifting to and fro.

  Suddenly giddy, Jane drew back from the rocks to the edge of the cheerful Trewissick crowd. There was no smell of hawthorn now, only a mixture of wood-smoke and fish. The bonfire had burned out, and people were beginning to drift away, back to the village.

  Jane saw Will Stanton before he saw her. Beside her, a group of fishermen moved away and there was Will, outlined against the grey morning sky, straight brown hair flopping down to his eyebrows, chin jutting in a way that for a split second reminded her oddly of Merriman. The boy from Buckinghamshire was gazing out to sea, unmoving, lost in some fierce private contemplation. Then he turned his head and looked straight at her.

  The fierceness became a polite relaxed smile with such speed that Jane felt it was unnatural. She thought: we’ve been so chilly to him, he can’t really be as pleased to see me as all that.

  Will came towards her. “Hallo,” he said. “Were you here all night? Was it exciting?”

  “It went on a long time,” Jane said. “The exciting part was sort of spread out. And the Greenwitch—” She stopped.

  “What was the making of it like?”

  “Oh. Beautiful. Creepy. I don’t know.” She knew she could never describe it, in the sensible light of day. “Have you been with Simon and Barney?”

  “No,” Will said. His gaze slid past her. “They were—busy—somewhere. With your great-uncle, I expect.”

  “I expect they were dodging you,” Jane said, astounded at her own honesty. “They can’t help it, you know. I don’t think it’ll last long, once they’ve got used to you. There’s something else bothering them, you see, nothing connected with you. . . . ”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Will said. For an instant Jane was looking at a quick reassuring grin; then his eyes flicked away again. She had an embarrassing feeling that she was wasting her breath; that the Drews’ rudeness had not troubled Will Stanton in the least. Hastily she took refuge in prattle.

  “It was nice when the fishermen and everyone came up from the harbour. And sea gulls everywhere . . . and I saw Gumerry too, but he seems to have gone again now. Did you see him?”

  Will shook his head, pushing his hands deep into the pockets of his battered leather jacket. “We’re lucky he got us the chance to come up here. They’re supposed to go to a lot of trouble keeping visitors out, normally.”

  Jane said, remembering: “There was one newspaper photographer who tried to get up close to the Greenwitch when they were taking it to the edge of the cliff. A lot of boys dragged him off. He was yelling like anything.”

  “A dark man? With long hair?”

  “Well yes, as a matter of fact. At least I think so.” She stared at him.

  “Ah,” Will said. His amiable round face was vacant again. “Was that before you saw Merriman, or afterwards?”

  “After,” Jane said, puzzled.

  “Ah,” Will said again.

  “Hey, Jane!” Barney came skidding up, out of breath, oversize boots flapping, with Simon close behind him. “Guess what we did, we saw Mr Penhallow and he let us go on board the White Heather, and we helped them unload—”

  “Poof!” Jane backed away. “You certainly did!” Wrinkling her nose at their scale-spattered sweaters, she turned back to Will.

  But Will was not there. Gazing round, she could see no sign of him anywhere.

  “Where’s he gone?” she said.

  Simon said, “Where’s who gone?”

  “Will Stanton was here. But he’s vanished. Didn’t you see him?”

  “We must have frightened him away.”

  “We really ought to be nicer to him, you know,” Barney said.

  “Well, well, well,” Simon said indulgently. “We’ll keep him happy. Take him for a climb, or something. Come on, Jane, tell us about the Greenwitch.”

  But Jane was not listening. “That was odd,” she said slowly. “I don’t mean Will going off, I mean something he said. He’s only known Gumerry for three days, and he’s a polite sort of boy. But when he was talking about him just now, without thinking, the way things slip out naturally because you aren’t watching—he didn’t call Gumerry ‘your great-uncle’ or ‘Professor Lyon,’ the way he usually does. He called him ‘Merriman.’ Just as if they were both the same age.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IT WAS THE SKY THAT BEGAN THE ODDNESS OF THE REST OF THAT day. As the Drews walked back along Kemare Head to the harbour the sun rose higher ahead of them, but gave no warmth, for as it rose a fine hazy mist began to grow too. In a little while the mist covered all the sky, so that the sun hung there familiar and yet strange, like a furry orange.

  “Heat haze,” said Simon when Jane pointed this out to him. “It’s going to be a nice day.”

  “I don’t know,” said Jane doubtfully. “It looks funny to me, more like a kind of danger signal. . . .”

  By the time they had finished their large breakfast at the cottage, served by a sleepy Mrs Penhallow, the haze was thicker.

  “It’ll burn off,” Simon said. “When the sun gets higher.”

  “I wish Great-Uncle Merry would come home,” said Jane.

  “Stop worrying. Will Stanton isn’t back yet either, they could be talking to Mr Penhallow, or someone. What’s the matter with you this morning?”

  “Needs a nap,” Barney said. “Poor child. Had no sleep.”

  “Poor child, indeed,” said Jane, and was overtaken by a huge yawn.

  “See?” said Barney.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Jane said meekly, and she went to her room, setting the alarm clock to waken her in an hour’s time.

  When the shrilling bell buzzed through her head, it woke her into total confusion. Though the curtains were open, the room was almost dark. For a moment Jane thought it was night, and she waking early, until into her mind swam the image of the Greenwitch falling, falling down to the early-morning sea, and in alarm she jumped out of bed. The sky outside was solid with heavy dark clouds; she had never seen anything quite like it. The light was so dim that it was as if the sun had never risen that day.

  Simon and Barney were alo
ne downstairs, gazing anxiously out at the sky. Mr and Mrs Stanton, Jane knew, had left Trewissick early that morning for a two-day tour of china-clay pits; Mrs Penhallow, the boys reported, had retreated to bed. And Merriman and Will had still not appeared at all.

  “But what could Gumerry be doing? Something must have happened!”

  “I don’t know quite what we can do, except wait.” Simon was subdued now too. “I mean, we could go out to look for him, but where would we start?”

  “The Grey House,” Barney said suddenly.

  “Good idea. Come on, Jane.”

  * * *

  “He seems to be taking the appearance of a painter,” Will said to Merriman as they made their way back along Kemare Head, behind the last straggle of cheerful villagers. “A swarthy kind of man, of middle height, with long dark hair and apparently a real but rather nasty talent. A nice touch, that.”

  “The nastiness may be unintentional,” Merriman said grimly. “Even the great lords of the Dark cannot keep their true nature from colouring their dissimulations.”

  “You think he is one of the great lords?”

  “No. No, almost certainly not. But go over the rest of it.”

  “He has already made a contact with the children. With Barney. And he has a totem—he stole a drawing that Barney had done, of the harbour.”

  Merriman hissed between his teeth. “I had a purpose for that drawing. Our friend is further ahead of us than I gave him credit for. Never underestimate the Dark, Will. I have been on the verge of it this time.”

  “He has also,” said Will, “stolen Captain Toms’ dog Rufus. He left a note warning that the dog would die if the captain went near the Greenwitch—taking care Barney would see the note too. A very neat piece of blackmail. If Captain Toms had gone up to Kemare Head after that, Barney would have thought him a murderer. . . . Of course the Dark knew he would be keeping only one of the Old Ones away from the making, but it could have helped him a lot. . . . Rufus really is a marvellous animal, though, isn’t he?” For a moment Will’s voice was that not of an ageless Old One but of an enthusiastic small boy.