Free The Buried Circle by Jenni Mills Page A

buried them and broke them up and now half the village is the stones, walls and whole cottages built out of them.
    I’m going off at a whatsit. A tangerine, as my mam used to say. That night, Davey was waiting for me at the crossroads under the trees. He gives me a kiss on the cheek, and then because he’s getting bolder by the day, one on the lips, even though anyone could have seen us in the light from the lamp on the outside of the Red Lion. Then he steps back, and looks meaningful towards the dark field.
    I shook my head. That was a step too far. In the part of the circle Mr Keiller hadn’t turned his hand to yet, which is to say most of it, the wild part where the cottage gardens ended and the trees and bushes still grew tangled, the darkness would have been full of whispers. There’d’ve been some out there doing their courting even in winter. People like to give themselves a good shiver under a big old haunted moon. Tell you summat else’d surprise you. We used to hug them stones, same as they hippies do today. They was warm, see, even on a cold day. Don’t ask me why. They held summer’s heat all winter under veils of grey-green lichen. That’s why courting couples used to go there, not just for privacy, or whatever magic was left in them–for warmth, too. That’s what it all comes down to, in’t it, needing a bit of warmth?
    But I wasn’t ready for any of that with Davey. He was my first beau, three or four years older than me. He’d been working at the stables over Beckhampton when I first saw him, on top of a big bay in a string of racehorses walking out up Green Street headed for the Gallops, but now he had a job with Mr Keiller at the Manor, looking after his cars, and sometimes he even drove Mr K about, though there was a proper chauffeur who was Davey’s boss. From horses to horsepower, Davey said. He preferred motors because they didn’t kick.
    I’d first talked to him at a village cricket match last summer, ever so clean in his whites. Not very tall, but he was sturdy at the wicket, a big hitter and he could run like blazes. Clever, too, in his bowling. He coached the younger boys on Saturdays, if he wasn’t busy with his chammy leather cleaning the cars.
    His dad had been a bookie who bullied his son into an apprenticeship at a racing stable in the hope he’d pass on useful tips. Too late: Davey were hardly started when Mr Fergusson miscalculated the odds at Brighton, couldn’t pay out, and hanged hisself with a halter under the stands. Davey’d stuck out the job at Beckhampton for two more miserable years–everyone knew the trainer took his fists to the boys when the temper was on him. But then he met Mr Keiller and somehow he wangled a job. A Scottish surname maybe helped.
    We linked arms under the trees, and he pretended to lay his head on my shoulder like he was too tired to hold it up, as we walked down the track that leads to the back of the barns and the duckpond, glimmering under the moon. He had a typical stable-lad’s build with narrow hips and strong arms; shame he hated the horses so much because he’d have been perfect for a jockey. But Mr Keiller owned racing cars, and was involved with the speedway course near Wroughton, so Davey had his taste of speed working for him.
    The great dark shape of the church loomed above the trees. Our footsteps rang on the frosty cobblestones Colonel Jenner had laid between his barns, which belonged to Mr Keiller now. In the colonel’s day there’d been Jersey cows, and pale creamy butter made at the Manor twice a week, which you could buy for a shilling a pound. Wasn’t many in the village could afford it, but we bought it for the guests. The livestock had all gone now. Mr Keiller didn’t bother with cattle and horses and hay. He’d decided to convert the building where the colonel stabled his polo ponies into a museum, to keep skelling-tons and bits of old pot, and he parked his cars in the barns, where the bats did their doings on