Rook Read online

  It was April and the rooks were in pairs everywhere. Nora drew them in charcoal or with blunt pencil on creamy cartridge paper, page after page littering every surface in her childhood bedroom, and the floor. She was compelled to draw them, to capture their beauty. She drew them gathering to mate, to nest and to roost; she drew them in fields, their feathers gleaming like shot silk in the sun as they rooted for leather jackets; she drew them in the trees, in pairs on the leafless branches; in the air, soaring and banking, swooping across the lane with twigs and grass dangling from their beaks. The creak of their caws, the wet-sheet slap of their wings at take-off, these sounds were the familiar background of her thoughts, as was the cledge of mud underfoot by the creek.

  At dusk, she took her father’s old binoculars to watch and listen as the birds swirled over the rookery. Their nests were repaired and ready for the spring. Watching the rooks gave her a reason to be out of the house, out in the flat fields under the high skies. Unable to sleep in her narrow girl’s bed, at dawn she took to walking along the creek path, an old raincoat of her father’s to keep off the mist. The hem of her nightie brushed the toes of her wellington boots. High in the poplars, where there had been a rookery for hundreds of years, bobbed the black heads of rooks. The nests themselves, chunky twigs anchored in the spindly heights of trees, had only the appearance of strength. Her father had told her rooks do not line their nests with the mud as other birds do. Consequently, without the mud to act as glue, their nests are vulnerable to every movement of the wind through high branches.

  22

  Elsa MacLeod pushes up her sleeves and picks up the rolling pin. ‘Well, of course, what we have are two fascinating local traditions associated with stone coffins in Bosham church, but it’s my opinion,’ she fixes Jonny with a severe look, ‘you may well be pursuing the tradition with the least historical significance. Excuse me, but I must get on.’ She sprinkles flour on the work surface and as she rolls out dough, Nora glimpses the half-smile on her face, hidden from Jonny’s view. Elsa’s enjoying playing him along.

  Jonny sits astride the kitchen chair, his legs and feet folded into a squashed Z. Beneath his long limbs the chair looks child-sized. Nora hasn’t told him why she’s brought him here. He’s accepted Elsa’s Earl Grey tea with one of his wide smiles, paid polite compliments on her house and garden, but now the confinement is making him restless. With his forearms resting flat along the top of the chair-back, he moves his chest forwards and back as if performing vertical press-ups; he lifts and jabs an elbow sideways, rotating his shoulder joint, massaging it with one hand, his shirtsleeve tightening over the swell of muscle, the languor in his movements suggesting he luxuriates in the tension and release of muscle.

  Jonny had phoned earlier that week, wanting to find out when he could come with his laptop to scan copies of Ada’s photographs, since she won’t allow them to be taken out of the house. Nora spoke about Elsa, explaining she was an amateur historian.

  ‘Your mother hasn’t mentioned the name.’

  ‘She wouldn’t. They don’t get on.’ More to the point, her mother will have said nothing to Jonny about Elsa’s local knowledge because his television programme is Ada’s chance to be the focus of attention.

  Jonny flexes his shoulder joint again, elbow circling in the air, the muscles in his upper arm hardening. All the men she’s known have been musicians or academics, slender men like Isaac, whose energy sparked from mental or emotional strength, rather than physical. Sex with Jonny would be different.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah – we’re talking about the second, larger coffin, found in the fifties?’ Jonny’s eyebrows lift, an upside-down V over the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Vandalised, only fragments of bone remaining.’

  ‘You’ve read Geoffrey Marwood’s pamphlet.’

  ‘Also contemporary newspaper accounts . . .’

  ‘However,’ Elsa talks across him, ‘the body was mutilated before burial, not vandalised.’

  Jonny seems not to have heard. He rubs vigorously at his hair with both hands, leaving it tousled.

  ‘The thing is, forgive me, Elsa, but we’re talking television here. A Saxon princess is pretty hard to beat. Everyone has heard of Canute, absolutely everyone. Who, apart from historians such as your knowledgeable self,’ he bows his dishevelled head of hair, ‘has heard of Earl Godwin? I, for one, had not, until recently.’

  ‘Have you, I wonder, read my own, more recent effort?’

  Copies of both pamphlets lie on the kitchen table, with Marwood’s on top.

  ‘I do apologise. I’ve not come across yours.’

  ‘I interpret the significance of the facts presented by Marwood. For example, the larger tomb was “tooled Horsham stone, magnificently finished”, from which Marwood correctly deduces a person of some importance is buried there; a person of more importance, if we compare tomb decoration, than the daughter of a king. This piqued my interest. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the burials of all the important people associated with Bosham during the eleventh century.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘The number of possible candidates for the larger tomb is actually very limited.’

  ‘I’ve always wondered,’ Nora says, ‘how they could tell the man had been powerfully built?’

  ‘From the thigh and pelvic bones, where muscle attaches to bone; the bone thickens as it grows, to support the muscle. A Saxon warrior led an extremely active life.’ Elsa’s rolling pin rests in her hands. She stares into space as if she sees her Saxon warrior mounted on his horse, straight-backed despite the weight of chain mail, his face obscured and flattened by the helmet’s nose-shield. The horse snorts; the bit clanks between its teeth.

  Jonny is thumbing through Marwood’s pamphlet. ‘This guy has some useful stuff on Canute.’

  Elsa returns from her reverie and listens to Jonny talk about the Saxon bell tower, the chancel arch and the rubble work. He waves his arms about as he talks. Nora wills him to stop, to look properly at Elsa’s pamphlet.

  ‘Of course,’ he finishes, closing Marwood’s pamphlet, ‘Canute was known to be a great builder.’

  ‘Cnut. He was a Viking. Can-newt is an attempt to Anglicise his name.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Jonny straightens his back. ‘Elsa, I’ll be frank with you. This has to be a project with substance, not mere sentiment or sensation. To be awarded funding for this project, I need sound sources.’

  ‘I can save you some trouble,’ Elsa retorts, unfazed by the reprimand in his tone. ‘Whoever it is buried in that magnificent stone coffin church, it is not the first Earl Godwin. Your “sound sources” tell us he is buried at Winchester, where he died.’

  ‘Godwin,’ Jonny repeats. He chucks a sugar cube into his mouth and at last picks up Elsa’s pamphlet, though he does nothing more than riffle through the pages without giving the content any attention before replacing it on the table. He pats the cover with the flat of his hand, about to say something, before he glances down. He stops moving.

  Is King Harold II buried in Bosham Church?

  Apart from the knock of the wooden rolling pin on the worktop as Elsa rolls out a second batch of dough, the kitchen is quiet.

  The sugar cube crunches in Jonny’s mouth. ‘Harold?’ His thigh begins to jiggle, up and down. Elsa nods.

  Jonny swivels around, his eyes meeting Nora’s, eyebrows twitching upwards in query or excitement, she can’t tell, as he unfolds his body from the chair, and in two strides is across the kitchen, beside Elsa.

  ‘Am I right, Elsa,’ he points to the pamphlet’s title, as if Elsa might be unfamiliar with something spelled out with her own hand. ‘Your title refers to our King Harold, the Harold who grew up here?’ Here Jonny looks at Nora and grins. ‘And whom the Bayeux Tapestry shows praying at Bosham Church?’

  ‘Nora has filled you in.’

  ‘Arrow in the eye, 1066 Harold?’

  ‘Debatable,’ Elsa answers, and selects a pastry cutter. �
��The arrow, that is, not 1066.’ She holds up a cutter shaped like a shooting star, but rejects it.

  ‘Could—,’ Jonny strides to the kitchen door and back. ‘Would you mind filling me in?’ He fetches his notebook from his laptop bag, sits down only to stand up again and pace the floor. He asks questions and scribbles fast, leaning against the worktop. Elsa waves the rolling pin as she talks, her face flushed with animation. The high voltage of their joint excitement thrums through the room. Sponsorship from a TV company could provide the money Elsa needs for further research; Elsa’s theory could transform Jonny’s programme into one of enormous historical significance.

  Elsa talks of ‘clues’ and ‘evidence’, the coincidence of certain dates and details recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, with an eleventh-century Latin poem entitled ‘The Song of the Battle of Hastings’ which describes what happened in 1066 between August and 25 December, when William the Conqueror was consecrated King of England. The poem, discovered in a library in Brussels in the 1800s, was written in 1067 and is the earliest record of events. Elsa refers to it with reverence in her voice as the ‘Carmen’. Jonny writes everything down in his notebook.

  The Carmen provides a more accurate version of the way Harold died, a version which was hushed up in the years immediately after the Conquest. ‘The Norman Court would have considered it bad press. William’s close involvement in the precise way Harold was slaughtered on the battlefield would have undermined the God-given legitimacy of his accession, so the true details were suppressed, kept alive only where the influence of the ruling elite could not reach, at the lowest levels of society through songs and oral tradition.’

  ‘The arrow in the eye was a lie, just propaganda?’ Jonny whistles through his teeth. ‘William had mighty good spin doctors.’

  ‘So good, that by the time of the Domesday survey, in 1086, Harold’s name was blackened, his reign wiped from the historical record. The Carmen, however, describes four knights, one of whom was William, surrounding Harold to hack him to pieces. A lance through the heart, disembowelling, one leg hacked off and decapitation.’ Elsa sees Nora’s grimace. ‘On the battlefield, such mutilation was commonplace. The problem for William was that he took part.’

  The lower border of the tapestry shows many images of decapitation, of chain mail dragged from the torsos of fallen soldiers. Edyth Swan-neck, Harold’s lover, was summoned because only she would have been able to identify what was left of his body.

  Nora stares down at the table. Isaac’s feet were high arched, with widely spaced toes. In the hollow of his back lay a triangle of hair, just above the shallow slope of his buttocks. He used to smoke after sex, stand naked at a hotel window, inhale sharply as he glanced down to a city pavement below, his mind leaping away from her already. Back at the beginning of their relationship, the contrast between his renowned ferocity and the pale-skinned vulnerability of his narrow-hipped body had fascinated her, the thrilling intimacy of being able to watch him walk around a room, naked.

  Elsa, too, has her gaze fixed once more on something outside the kitchen, beyond the dough, the rolling pin and pastry cutter in her hand. Lanterns held by whispering gravediggers. Gytha, Harold’s mother, shoulders bowed under the weight of a bear fur, weeping in the dark as she watches another burial, the remains of yet another son. Scenes from the past hold Elsa’s attention in a way nothing in the room can.

  ‘With the princess’s burial place, local tradition proved astonishingly accurate. Another tradition suggests the coffin made of Horsham stone is Earl Godwin’s. This should not be lightly dismissed. However, the presumption has always been that “Earl Godwin” refers to the first Earl Godwin. In consequence, this long-held tradition has been disregarded, forgetting,’ Elsa smiles to herself, ‘forgetting that, from 1053 to 1066, Harold himself was, in fact, the second Earl Godwin.’

  ‘Good God!’ Jonny smacks the counter.

  ‘The villagers at the time must have known Harold was buried here, surely?’ Nora asks.

  ‘The local gravediggers certainly, though it’s probable they were made to swear an oath.’ Elsa rubs more flour on to the rolling pin. ‘But here’s the thing about secrets. A secret is charged with the pressing urge to tell. Sharing a secret bestows a gift – and think, a secret of such magnitude! Thus secrets, information, a little changed or elaborated may pass between loved ones.’

  The covering slabs of the two tombs are at more or less the same level. They could have been placed within the same gravediggers’ living memory, before the floor was raised in the eleventh century.

  ‘Cnut came to England, we know from records, in 1014,’ Elsa continues. ‘So, if his little girl died aged eight, as tradition says, her burial could not have been before 1022. Her tomb is under the centre of the chancel arch, in the place of honour which would otherwise have been claimed for the occupant of the more splendid tomb, which suggests it is the earlier of the two. After the Conquest, according to Domesday, the secular estates in Bosham passed from Harold directly to King William. The fascinating point about this is,’ Elsa’s voice rises and she waves the rolling pin again, ‘of all the estates in Sussex, these were the only ones William took into his possession.’ She slides the first baking tray with its neat rows of raw biscuits into the oven before turning to Jonny. ‘You see, my dear,’ she closes the oven door with her foot, ‘William wanted to ensure the grave of King Harold II did not become a shrine. Since Bosham was a naval station at the time, secrecy here would have been simple to enforce. Furthermore, the raising of the floor in the church was instigated not long after the Conquest, and successfully sealed King Harold’s resting place from sight for 900 years.’ Elsa’s voice rings with the triumph: she has uncovered one of history’s untold stories.

  Jonny has turned to a new page in his Synchronicity Media notebook and written THE GODWIN GRAVE PROJECT. He underlines the words twice.

  Nora and Rook doze in a deckchair in the sun. When they left Elsa’s, Jonny suggested a celebratory drink in the Anchor Bleu. They arrived as Jason was outside with a blackboard and chalk, drawing a cocktail glass filled with bubbles to advertise his new champagne-by-the-glass deal.

  ‘My man!’ Jonny slapped Jason on the shoulder and sent him straight inside for some. He insisted on a bottle, though Nora drank little more than a glass. She has brought the half-full bottle home to the fridge while Jonny drives to the supermarket to buy them some bread and cheese for a picnic on the green by the church. Languid after drinking champagne at midday, Nora lies back in the deckchair, enjoying the sun on her skin. Rook is snuggled on her lap, a collapsed fluff of feathers preparing for rest, but at the sound of the side gate rattling open, his head is up, neck straining to look for an intruder.

  ‘Hello?’ Jonny calls out.

  Instantly, Rook’s body-shape transforms into a black origami of angled wings. His neck contorts and his claws scrape Nora’s bare thighs, forcing her to stand and shovel him to the ground. Jonny steps on to the terrace – smiling, talking, gesticulating – but Rook hurtles, loose-bowelled, across the paving slabs, to high-step around Jonny’s ankles, his beak jabbing forward and back in jousting thrusts. He leaps up, clinging to Jonny’s leg, claws fastened into Jonny’s calf as his beak stabs Jonny’s shin.

  Jonny staggers backwards. ‘Christ Almighty!’

  Seeing the look on Jonny’s face, his smile gone, Nora whips forward. Her hands grapple for Rook, whose feathers dust her skin as she misses, and he flails to the ground, wheeling sideways before straightening to shoot again towards Jonny’s legs. When she finally manages to scoop the flurry of wing and claw into her arms, Rook strains to get away. He scrabbles at her arms, his body heaving so much she’s frightened she’ll be the one to hurt him in the battle to hold captive his writhing strength, the springy resistance in his wings as she holds them clamped against his body. Several times, he escapes her grasp. Nora turns away from Jonny, putting herself between the bird and the man, and makes her way to the kitchen, bending over Rook, clasping
him to her with a hand and her forearm as he thrashes, his beak opening and closing.

  When she lets him down in the kitchen, Rook hurls himself at the door, which Nora closed only just in time. Legs working furiously, wings spread, he heads for the open window instead.

  ‘Rook, Rook.’ Nora tries to soothe him with her voice, attempting to stroke his wing feathers but he won’t be calmed. He’s become an unfamiliar dervish of beak and claw. In the end she closes the kitchen door and leaves him there, flinging himself in silent fury against table legs and cupboard doors.

  Outside, Jonny has taken off his socks and his expensive-looking leather shoes. The stitched and pointed toes are covered with grey-white lumps and splats of guano. His jeans are rolled up and he’s hosing down his ankles and bare feet. Steam rises from the sun-baked paving slabs.

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ he mutters, inspecting his calf.

  When he sees Nora, his expression changes to one of astonishment, then hilarity and he starts to roar with laughter, doubling up. She looks down at herself. Her dress is covered with guano – only now she notices the weight and the damp cling against her legs. Before she can move again, water hits her, full force; behind the wide arc of water, she sees Jonny’s mouth, his straight teeth as he leans back to laugh, the hose pointed in her direction as he prowls round her. In seconds, she’s sluiced from the waist downwards and the temperature of the hose water has dropped from lukewarm to icy. Her dress sucks to her body. Jonny steps closer to squirt water upwards, soaking her breasts, her hair. She yelps at the breathtaking force of it against her face but springs forward, hair swinging and heavy, into the water’s spout, tasting its saltiness. Her weight knocks Jonny back against the wall and she wrestles with him, determined to prise his hands from the hosepipe. Her fingers are far stronger than his. She has the hose. She tugs at his shirt and her hip catches on the jab of his belt buckle. He has stopped laughing. The drag of water has soaked them both. When he kisses her, their noses and lips are already wet.