The Hollow Land (5 page)

A glorious cold salmon slid out of the basket on a long dish and was placed upon the table. “Wow!” said several people at once, and “Oh my goodness!” said Mrs. Bateman blushing pink.

“But food is not enough,” said Mr. Kendal, “to save a day. Especially a day like this one. Just hark!”

Rain still beat on the little house on the fell and the wind knocked and pushed ominously at the chimney pot. “Sometimes,” said Kendal, “I'd reckon it was worse up here in August than at any other time. There's something demented about dark storms in midsummer. More salmon? Yes indeed. All must be consumed. Food does go some distance towards happiness in bad weather. My, but I've not ever eaten such grand potatoes.”

“Oh, I'll miss the potatoes for the salmon any time,” said the London father. “We can eat potatoes at home.”

“Then I'll have the recipe for Mrs. K,” said the sweep. “We grow tired of chips.”

One of James's London friends said he couldn't believe in being tired of chips, though the salmon was wonderful.

“So's the little fishes,” said Harry.

“But not enough. Not enough,” said Kendal, “like I and the Bible were saying. Not even on a dark night with good friends in an old house with the wind round it. Food is not enough. There's things I could tell you about this house, given time.”

“Is it haunted?” said James.

“Not at all. Not like yonder. But there's a tale or two—”

“Where is yonder?” Mr. Bateman leaned back in his chair and sighed with pleasure, for he felt so fit and well—the fresh rain, the clean air, the salmon, the family all around him (“Yes—up in the north again this year. Oh yes—terrible weather but good for fishing. For trout fishing, you know, rain is what we like,” he was saying in his mind, back in London).

“Oh—here and there. Just about everywhere round here. Plentiful ghost stories in Stainmer and North Westmorland. Deficient in much but plentiful in stories. Some of them old'uns. None I'd say not known to me. Kendals has been here seven hundred years and they say we've never done much or made money, but the one thing we do aright is tell stories. Apart from fish, that is, and sweep. They're all fairly ancient occupations.”

“Were there chimneys in the thirteenth century?”

“There were Kendals so there were chimneys,” said Kendal. “Well, Kendals probably got called in long before—to the Celts, messing about with holes in the roof and doors fore and aft for winnowing grain. Very dangerous and unscientific but you can't expect a great deal of Celts. Some of them peat hags is as old as Celts. You can probably pick out their spade marks. There's a Celtic settlement above this house.”

“
Now?
” suddenly said Harry.

“Oh yes. Still there. Just a ring of green old turf now. Kind of place you could position machine guns if you've a mind.”

“Would they have had fires? Celts up there?”

“They'd have died of cold else,” said Kendal. “Curious old wigwam things they had—like Indians. You can see them still if you look over Yorkshire way on the moors. Mind you, them fellers were real savages, them Celts. No better than Russians. Maybe they were Russians.”

“Maybe Kendals were Russians,” said one of James's friends.

Kendal looked very put out.

“You mean you wouldn't have cleaned their chimneys if they were Celts?” said Mr. Bateman thinking out a short article for his paper.

“We would, but we'd have charged the more.”

“You mean then that if a Welsh family or an Irish family came to a holiday cottage up here you'd charge more than you do us? From London where we can be anything? That's most interesting. And I'm afraid it's racism.”

“No it ain't,” said Kendal, “no Welsh family would come up here to start with and the only Irishman I ever saw on North or South Stainmer or Hartley or Nateby Birket had to leave after a week on account of the farm having good bath, sink and taps but he'd omitted to see if there was water.”

“It was not kind of you not to tell him,” said the London mother. “Would you have told a Welshman?”

“A Welshman would have been too proud to ask. And if it was a Scotsman—though it wouldn't have been—we'd have said the house was sold already.”

“That
is
racism,” said Mrs. Bateman. “It's dreadful. It's what people say about the north of England. The trouble is I can never tell if you're joking. I must say you've always been very kind to us.” (She thought briefly of a first fuming hay-time when abominable things had nearly happened.)

“There's reasons for that,” said Kendal.

“What?” James asked—because it's always nice to know why people like you.

“One,” said Kendal, “you eat local. You don't come stacked up with London frozen stuff. Two, because you're not too grand to pass the time of day, and three”—he thought of the London mother's very nice letter of apology two or three years back which everyone had heard about above and below the church and as far away as Mallerstang and Whaw—“because you're sociable folk. Which is more than can be said for some visitors and incomers. Did you ever hear of the incomer over Stainmer Old Spital?”

“Never,” said all of them—all but Harry, full of fish on the sofa, who had fallen asleep like a kitten.

“Wait a moment,” said his mother. “I'll make some tea. Clear the worst away all of you and we'll wash up tomorrow. Some of you stack up the fire. Mr. Kendal, do please take off those wellington boots—you're sure you won't ring Mrs. Kendal? It's eleven o'clock at night.”

“She knows me thank you. I'll be moving the minute I've finished my tale. But not till—for it's a tale you should hear from me or you'll go reading it in some book or other published in Oxford or Cambridge or Cardiff and places and no good for owt but reference libraries.

“Now then—

“On a night not unlike this one a couple of hundred years ago there was a knock on a door not unlike the one behind me as I'm sitting. A door at the top of some stone stairs, a flight not unlike that of Light Trees again. The old farmer answered the door and let in an old woman in a long black cloak. She blew in rather than walked in, groaning and complaining. Groaning and complaining about being lost on Stainmer, that was no more of a friendly place then than it is now, and it was a night not fit for Christians. Not fit for devils.

“The old farmer's wife gave the poor thing a bowl of milk and showed her the kitchen settle to sleep on—they were very used to lost travellers—and they all went to bed.

“And the wind howled and the rain lashed—rather after the style of now—and no fish, mind, no wine, no grand french potatoes. No electrics in the kitchen—only tallow candles and the dogs howling as guardians in the yard. Very noisy restive dogs they were too that night. The farmer twice thought he'd get out there to quiet them, but it were late and he were tired and so he slept.

“Now there were a servant girl—and my granny knew her. When that lass were an old woman my granny knew her, so what about that? She had no room to herself them days but slept int' kitchen by the fire back, twirled up in a bit of a blanket. Lil'e wee bit of a lass, so small it's likely the old traveller din't see her at the start. Sharp-eyed lass, however, for lying there int' fire back she sees, on a level with her eyes, that this old woman, all bent over double, had the biggest female feet you ever did see—and she were wearing man's boots!

“‘Hello,' says the little lass to herself—and she watches. Next she listens. Out of the pocket of her cloak the old woman takes a candle. All's quiet—even the dogs without. So she stands up straight and she flings off the cloak, and underneath there's the figure of a great, strong, ferocious ruffian of a man.

“The man then takes from his pocket something small and solid and unwraps it from a rag, and the girl sees that it's a—human hand. Pale grey. A greasy thing not unlike the candle. The man places the candle in the fingers of the dead hand and he lights it. The candle stays fixed in the fingers. Then this hand the ruffian sticks in a jar. He slowly bends over the girl he's just that moment seen and he passes the light before her eyes. Then he says these words:

 

Let those who rest more deeply sleep:

Let those awake their vigil keep.

Oh Hand of Glory, shed thy light,

Direct us to our spoil tonight.

 

And there's not a child at Stainmer or in Kirkby school nor yet a conductress on the GNE buses over Stainmer doesn't know that verse to this day. So what happens?”

The London mother was sitting up straight.

“He walks to the window, draws back the curtain and holding the candle he says:

 

Flash out thy light, oh skeleton hand,

And guide the feet of our trusty band

 

and the light shoots up as if there's been pure cane sugar put on it, and the man walks to the door, draws back the bolts and steps outside to call in his assistant thieves. And he whistles.

“And up jumps the little lass, runs to the door and pushes him wham-bang in the middle of his back off the top of the steps and thump into the yard. Then she runs in and bolts the door and tries to wake the family up.

“But the spell is still on them—the candle still burning. So she picks up the bowl of milk and pours it over the candle and out it goes—it wouldn't go out with blowing—and ten shakes of a whisker and the family's up and downstairs and firing off blunderbusses from the window. There's groans and terrible cries from down below in the yard and some sort of a talk going on, and at last one of them, the leader of the gang, shouts up, ‘Give up the Hand of Glory and we shall not harm you.' Off go the blunderbusses again, however, from the farm windows and a number of strong remarks, I'd reckon, and the thieves run off.

“Now that hand and that candle were in the inn called The Old Spital over Stainmer many a long year. The hand is in the Whitby Museum to this day. And I hear tell there's another one in a museum westward.”

Mr. Kendal picked up his teacup and finished his tea, looking very satisfied and lively.

“I am glad,” said the London father, Mr. Bateman, “that Harry is asleep.”

“I don't like it,” said one of James's London friends, “I don't much like that story. I don't know that I believe it either.”

“It's an old one. It's a story you can hear with little differences all along the old Bowes road. The candle had to be made from the fat of a hanged man. The flame held in the hand was unquenchable.”

“It reminds me of something,” said Mr. Bateman, “it reminds me of another story—a light in a dead hand. Why, but it's Roman, Kendal, isn't it? Or it might even be Ancient Greek?”

“It's both,” said Kendal. “Both. The Romans had it from the Greeks and when the Romans came a-conquering up here and sat for years in all the signalling posts along the road between Penrith and Greta Bridge they told it to all of us—giving thanks no doubt that they were among civilized folk and not on that other road farther north built by Hadrian where there was hardly a human being fit to tell a tale to. They told the story hereabouts again and again over the years, long after the Romans left. And there was still a trade in dead hands a hundred year ago. Well, my granny knew that servant. Bella, her name was. Old George Alderson was her master. Not very long since—just between the wars there was a hand discovered in somebody's thatch over in Yorkshire. They were taking down the thatch to put a tile roof on after he'd died, and they found the hand hidden. He'd been a very rich feller, the owner of the house. Nobody had known where he got his money from, nor why he were always out at night.”

“That story, Kendal,” said the London father, ruminating, “must be old as Agamemnon. It's a wonderful story.”

“Aye,” said Kendal, “folks do get excited by it. I thought it might amuse.”

“I don't know about amuse exactly,” said the London mother, picking up Harry and carrying him off to bed, and shivering.

“Well no” said Kendal “it's a bit of a chestnut to tell you the truth round here. There's one or two more I could tell you more guaranteed for shuddering. Ghosts and horrors. As for things that has happened here in your house of Light Trees—my, but if you knew about the dead body that once lay in your dairy yonder for two weeks in the snow, stiff as a board on your cheese shelf—”

“I'll say goodnight, Mr. Kendal.”

“Stiff as a tree among the hams and the Wensleydale. Poor old chap, he'd be Joss Atkinson's auntie's father, they couldn't get him down to the cemetery. They sledged him down at last, right down Quarry Hill to the carpenter's. Made a sledge from old bits of your cow stalls in the byre—you can still see the marks out there if you look. Dreadful thing to do you know. That cow house is eighteenth-century woodwork—the stable's got carved columns would grace a church. Oh this is a very historical house you've found. There's folks watching you through every chink.”

“
Goodnight
, Mr. Kendal.”

“And I dare say you're going to greatly enjoy it over the years and time to come yourselves'll be looking out of the chinks at others now unborn.”

“
Goodnight
. Mind the steps. Watch your feet over the yard. Can we light you to the gate?”

The wind and rain had stopped at last. It was a still, black night. Not a light to be seen, not a star in the sky. The roadless fells rolled like unseen seas all about them as they stood on the old stone outdoor staircase. From far below and far away came up the twelve strokes of the Kirkby church bell as it had struck for hundreds of years.

“Midnight,” said Kendal. “End of a grand and cheerful day.”