Crow Stone. Jenni Mills
the first week at university because we didn’t find each other threatening. Going drinking with him is the nearest I get to a night out with the girls. He wasn’t out then, even to himself, and certainly not to his father who was a vicar, but I guessed he was gay the night we met. I chatted him up because he was studying archaeology; still sometimes wish I’d chosen that instead of geology and engineering. When I turn my hand to re-erecting Bronze Age stone circles for him, or rebuilding Roman siege engines, I can kid myself I’ve got some level of archaeological knowledge, but he just uses me for the practical stuff: he’s the big thinker. He jokes about not enjoying writing his book, but he adores it, really, teasing out all the esoteric stuff about Roman religion.
Firelight glints, red, gold, on my glass, brimming with pale yellow wine. I raise it to him. ‘Here’s to lots of busy little Californian Christmas elves. On rollerskates.’
‘Mmm.’ Martin drinks deeply. ‘Though naturally I would hope Santa decides to explore your chimney too.’
I cough as my wine goes down the wrong way. ‘I can’t keep up.’
‘That’s what Santa says, too.’
‘Stop it, Martin. It gets tedious.’
‘You’re just jealous. When was the last time you got laid?’
‘None of your business.’
Martin looks like a puppy that can’t understand why no one finds scratchmarks on the furniture appealing. He’s happier if he can come up with a reason for my lack of interest in sexual banter.
‘Have you been getting calls again from Nick?’
‘No, thank God. Splitting the money from the London house seems to have shut him up for a bit. And I changed my mobile number.’
‘You should have divorced him as soon as you broke up. I resent him getting half of what that house is worth now when he pissed off to Wales nearly ten years ago.’
‘More than half. It’s only fair–I’m keeping the place in Cornwall, don’t forget.’ I shouldn’t feel I have to justify myself to Martin, but I always do where Nick’s concerned.
‘You’re too soft on him.’ Martin’s frowning. He once threatened to punch the lights out of Nick on my behalf, even though I can’t imagine he has ever punched the lights out of anyone. ‘He’s always taken advantage of you.’
‘Pity you didn’t tell me that before we got married.’
‘I thought it.’
‘I’m not psychic. Next time say it aloud.’
We lapse into silence. It occurs to me that if I hadn’t come back from the flint mine this afternoon, Nick would have had the lot. I haven’t got round to changing my will.
Martin settles back in his leather chair with the scuffed arms. I get out my cigarettes, glancing over to check he isn’t in one of his antismoking moods, gearing up for California. He frowns, but doesn’t stop me lighting up.
‘So what’s this new job, then?’ he asks. ‘I thought you were looking for something abroad. What changed your mind?’
The trouble with sitting on the hearthrug in a four-hundred-year-old cottage is that you freeze on one side from the draughts and roast on the other. The left half of me’s sweating like a side of pork, but my right side keeps shivering.
‘It’s Bath,’ I say, sitting on my right hand to stop it shaking. ‘Green Down.’
‘The stone mines? I didn’t think they’d got the funding yet.’
‘They haven’t, but they’ve already started emergency work. The consultants reckon the whole lot could come down at any time.’
‘What you’d call a big headache.’
‘And technically they’re quarries, not mines, even though they’re underground. Stone is quarried, not mined.’
‘They’re going to fill them all?’
‘That’s the plan.’
Martin spits a fragment of cork from his wine into the fire. ‘Criminal. Burying three hundred years’ worth of industrial archaeology.’
‘What about all the people living on top?’
‘I don’t suppose they’d fancy moving? … No, I guess not.’ He sighs heavily. ‘Not really my period, but fascinating stuff. You know they were dug out in the eighteenth century by Ralph Allan? He and his pet architect, John Wood–mad bastard with a penchant for freemasonry–were effectively responsible for developing Georgian Bath.’
‘And Wood’s son. John Wood the Younger.’
Martin nearly kicks over the pile of plates in his surprise. ‘Blimey, Kit, you’ve been doing your homework.’
I don’t tell him that I did the homework a long time ago, that I was at school in Bath and we used to go on educational walks round the Circus and the Royal Crescent and all the other famous buildings that the John Woods, Elder and Younger, designed between them. Martin thinks I was brought up in Bournemouth. But there’s quite a lot I haven’t told him.
‘You know,’ he says, leaning forward to poke the fire into a roaring blaze, ‘I reckon there’s something deeply perverse in your nature, Kit. This afternoon you nearly get yourself killed in a roof fall, and now you’re about to take a job where it’s possible an entire suburb will land on your bonce.’
I stare into the fire. ‘Glutton for punishment, I suppose.’
‘Anyway,’ Martin continues cheerfully, ‘we’ll call the AA out first thing in the morning so they can come with their lock-picking gear and get you on the road.’
Lying always gets me into this kind of mess.
And knocking back too much wine always stops me sleeping.
Martin’s snores echo down the stairwell while I prowl the kitchen in search of tea. Proper tea, that is, the sort that comes in bags, not the poncy caddy full of Earl Grey leaves Martin insists on.
‘You get bored in the night, flower, read this,’ he said, thrusting into my arms a hot-water bottle and a pile of manuscript. ‘Tell me if you think it’s too racy for Oxford University Press.’
How did he know I’d be awake at two in the morning?
Maybe it’s the wine. Maybe it’s what happened this afternoon. Every time I turn on to my back I think of my chalk coffin, the suffocating air full of coccoliths and the light from my head-torch getting dimmer and dimmer.
The teabags are in the canister marked Flour. Last time I stayed they were in the biscuit tin.
Mug of tea at my elbow, I settle down at the kitchen table with the latest chapter in Martin’s book. ‘My very favourite mystery cult. You’ll like it,’ he said. ‘Big butch soldiers. Lots of gender-bending. And ravens.’ ‘I can do without ravens.’
‘No decent mystery cult that doesn’t have a raven or two.’
In Persia, where Mithraism originated, ravens were associated with death because it was customary to expose corpses for excarnation–known as ‘sky burial’ in other cultures–leaving the flesh to be stripped away by birds and other scavengers. Symbolically, the neophyte has to die and be reborn before he can be admitted to the mysteries of the cult.
‘I love this kind of stuff,’ he said to me earlier, when we stopped discussing my next job and turned to what he’s researching. ‘Weird as hell, nothing written down, so everything has to be pieced together from the archaeological evidence. Our best guesses come from wall paintings and mosaics in Italy, but there are temples up by Hadrian’s Wall, and one was excavated in London too. Seven stages of initiation. Ordeals at every stage. Men only but, of course, the big laugh is that most of it’s nicked from an even older eastern mystery religion, the