Free Humpty's Bones by Simon Clark Page A

crushing…

12. Friday Morning: 11.00
     
     
    Any effective work at clearing the attic of unwanted junk came to an end with the discovery of the documents.
    ‘My mother’s ,’ Heather announced. ‘I remember when I was a young girl my mother always saying that she wouldn’t allow her brain to go to seed living out here in the middle of nowhere.’ Heather pulled files from a box. ‘She got a bee in her bonnet about this. Night after night she’d sit at the kitchen table bashing away at a portable typewriter.’
    ‘What language is it?’ Eden peered at a clutch of handwritten pages.
    ‘Latin. The typescript is the translation. What made her so obsessed with it I’ll never know, perhaps sheer loneliness. After all, for years your grandmother and I were the only people living in the house.’
    They sat side by side in the attic on an old steamer trunk that bore stickers announcing its travels to places like Alexandria, Cape Town and Hong Kong. In the attic were boxes of Christmas decorations, an exercise bike (no longer used), vac-pacs of clothes and stacks of rural life magazines. Eden angled a typewritten file so the light from the bulb fell on it.
    ‘It must have taken years,’ Eden marvelled. ‘There’s hundreds of pages.’
    ‘The fruits of an obsessive,’ Heather sighed. ‘Sometimes people can become fixated on the oddest passions.’
    Like you excavating your own garden. Five minutes ago, Eden Page would have pointed out Heather’s obsession, too. This file, however, interested Eden. It suddenly seemed important, even if she couldn’t explain why.
    ‘So what is this?’ she asked. ‘A novel?’

    ‘No. Daisy, your whimsical, pixie of a mother, has all the imagination in the family. I was only about eight when my mother stopped work on this. All of a sudden if I remember rightly. As if it made her angry. Perhaps she realised it had been frivolous.’ She picked out more files from the box. ‘Every day my mother went to the church where the village archive is kept. The documents go back centuries; lots of them are in Latin. My mother took it on herself to translate them. These are records of marriages, births and deaths. Look, this page is for December 1642.’ She began to read a section highlighted in red. ‘“Moses Grander, his wife Susan, seven daughters and two sons died, twenty third day of December as a result of inundation; Dog Dyke End water mill.”‘ Heather rifled through the box. ‘See, there’s more of it. File after file. Sheesh. This is a register of parish priests going back to 870 AD.’
    ‘Can you find the most recent file?’
    ‘Does it matter?’
    ‘If your mother stopped work all of a sudden perhaps she learnt something that troubled her. Whatever it was, it’ll be in that last file.’
    ‘Eden, don’t we have an agreement? You stop the Werewolf talk. I’ll lay off how your apartment caught fire.’
    ‘Did I mention the word “Werewolf”?’
    ‘Just a warning.’
    ‘If anything, I thought she might have discovered some secret that was an embarrassment to the village.’
    ‘Eden, I strongly suspect the reason she stopped work on this was because she became pregnant with your mother. Even before she was born Daisy was trouble. My mother was so sick most mornings she couldn’t get out of bed, never mind translate volumes of Latin into English.’
    ‘Were you bitter about my mother being born?’
    In lieu of answer Heather delved into the box again. ‘According to the date this is the latest. See, she’d written the month and year on the file.’ Heather read the title. ‘“ The First English Translation of The Secular and the Sacred Balk of Elmet ; subtitled: The Hermit of Kirkhampton’s History of our Village” . Ah... this must be the last file my mother worked on. See, it’s just a mass of rough jottings. If anything, it’s mainly chapter headings from the Hermit’s book, which, according to this was written by a local man in 1488.’ Heather leafed