The old woman came back and put Maud's brooch on the counter, switching on a dusty little Anglepoise to illuminate its darkness.
"I've never seen aught quite like this-though it's clear enough one of Isaac Greenberg's pieces, I reckon-there were a piece of his at t'Great Exhibition with corals and rocks on, though I've never seen a mermaid and the coral-with her little mirror and all. Where did you come by that, mam?"
"I suppose you might call it a family heirloom. I found it in the family button box when I was really quite young-we had a huge dressing-up box full of old buckles and buttons and bits and bobs- and it was just in there. I'm afraid nobody liked it much. My mother thought it was just hideous Victorian junk, she said. I suppose it is Victorian? I took it because it reminded me of the Little Mermaid." She turned to Roland. "And then lately of the Fairy Melusina, of course."
"Oh, it's Victorian. I sh'd say it's earlier than the death of the Prince Consort in 1861-there was more playful pieces before that-though always the sad ones predominated. Look at th' workmanship in that waving hair and the lifelikeness of the little tail-fins. What they could accomplish in them days. You wouldn't get work like that nowadays, not nowhere. It's forgotten and gone by."
Roland had never closely approached Maud's brooch, which depicted indeed a little mermaid seated on a rock, her glossy black shoulders twisted towards the surface, modestly obviating any need to carve her little breasts. Her hair snaked down her back, and her tail snaked down the rock. The whole was enclosed in what he had taken to be twigs and now saw, through the old woman's eyes, to be branching coral.
He said to Maud, "You inherited some of Christabel's books…"
"I know. I never thought. I mean, this brooch has always been there. I never thought to ask where it came from. It-it looks quite different in this shop. Among these other things. It was-it was a joke of mine."
"Perhaps it was a joke of his. "
"Even if it was," said Maud, thinking furiously, "even if it was, it doesn't prove she was here. All it proves is, he bought brooches for two women at once…"
"It doesn't even prove that. She could have bought it for herself."
"If she was here."
"Or anywhere they were sold."
"You should look after that piece," the old woman put in. "That's unique, I should say, that is." She turned to Roland. "Won't you have the flower-language piece, sir? It would be a real companion-piece to the little mermaid."
"I'll take the FRIENDSHIP brooch," said Maud quickly. "For Leonora."
Roland wanted badly to own something, anything, in this strange sooty stuff which Ash had touched and written about. He did not in fact want the ornate flower-piece and could think of no one to whom he might give it-these things were definitely not in Val's style, not in either of her styles, old or new. He found, in a green glass bowl on the counter, a pile of loose unrelated beads and chips which the old woman was selling at 75p each and sorted out for himself a little heap of these, some round, some flattened and elliptical, a hexagon, a highly polished satin cushion.
"Personal worry beads," he told Maud. "I do worry."
"I noticed."
Chapter 14
They say that women change: 'tis so: but you
Are ever-constant in your changefulness,
Like that still thread of falling river, one
From source to last embrace in the still pool
Ever-renewed and ever-moving on
From first to last a myriad water-drops
And you-I love you for it-are the force
That moves and holds the form.
-R. H. ASH, Ask to Embla, XIII
My dearest Ellen,
Today I varied my regimen of dissection and magnification by a long stride from foss tofoss, or force to force, around the Dale of Goathland or Godeland - do you not admire the way we here see language in the making, in the alternativenames,bothaccepted, for these things. These names were given by the ancient Vikings - the Danes settled these parts and embraced Christianity, whilst the wilder Norwegian pagans tried to invadefrom Ireland and the North - to meet defeat at Brunanburh. They leftfew traces of their 250 years of farming and fighting here - only words and names, which vanish and decay as IV. Wordsworth has observed.
Mark! how all things swerve
From their known course, or vanish like a dream;
Another language spreads from coast to coast;
Only perchance some melancholy Stream
And some indignant Hills old names preserve,
When laws, and creeds, and people all are lost!
There are two constituent brooklets of the Mirk Esk, the Eller Beck and the Wheeldale Beck, which have theirjuncture at a place called Beck Holes - and along these Becks aremanyfine fosses - the Thomasine Foss, Water Ark and Walk Mill Fosses - and then the Nelly Ayre Foss and Malyan's Spout - a particularly impressive hundred-foot fall into the sylvan ravine. The effect of light and shade, both in the changing green of thepensile foliage and the depths of thepools, and in the racing clouds which bring dark, light and dark again, was particularly fine. I climbed up onto Glaisdale and Wheeldale moors - where these becks have their sources in small rills which bubble up amongst the heather andgrit. The contrast between the cool dappled world of the little dales - and the shady caverns and pools into which the forces rush and hurry to be swallowed in quiet - and the open spaces where for dark mile upon mile nothing seems to stir and nothing sounds save a surprising harsh wailing cry of a bird - or a chipping sound ofanother - this contrast is so absolute and yet so natural - and the water running from one world to another - a man might think that here, in this rough north was, if not Paradise, the original earth- rocks, stones, trees, air, water - allso solid and immutable, apparently - and yet shifting andflowing andfleeting in the race of light and the driving cloaks of shadow, that alternately reveal and conceal, illuminate and smudge its contours. Here, dear Ellen, and not in the fat valleys of the south, one has a sense of the nearness of those remotest men whose blood and bones made our blood and bones and live still in them - Briton and Dane, Norseman and Roman - And of things infinitely more remote - creatures who once walked here when the earth was hot - Dr Buckland investigating the cave of Kirkdale in 1821 discovered a den of hyenas with bones of tiger, bear, wolf, probably lion and other carnivora, elephant, rhinoceros, horse, ox, and 3 species of deer as well as many of the rodentia and birds, consumed by the hyenas.
I cannot describe the air to you. It is like no other air. Our language was not designed to distinguish differences in air; it runs the risk of a meaningless lyricism or inexact metaphors - so I will not write of it in terms of wine or crystal, though both those things came into my mind. I have breathed the air of Mont Blanc - a chill light clean air that comes off the remote glaciers and has the purity ofthose snows, touched with theresin of pine and the hay of the high meadows. Thin air, as Shakespearesaid,the air of vanishing things and refinements beyond apprehension by our senses. This Yorkshire air, the moorland air, that is, has nosuch glassy chill - it is all alive, on the move, like the waters that thread their way through the heath, as it does with them. It is visible air- you see it run in rivers and lines over theshoulders of bald stones - you see it rise inaeryfountains and tremble over the heath when it is hot. And the scent of it - sharp, unforgettable -clean rain tossed and the ghost of ancient woodsmoke - and the cold clearnessof brook water - and something fine and subtle all of its own - oh, I cannot describe this air, it expands a man's mind in hishead, I do believe, and gives him extra senses he knows nothing of, before coming on these heights andranges…