Free Buried Fire by Jonathan Stroud

over when you see him. I'll see what I can do. Thank you very much for the tea, my dear. Goodbye."

13
    After only a few minutes, Tom's quest ended in success. To the left of the main shelf he spotted a small bookcase with a glass front, marked REFERENCE ONLY and filled with large, old, battered volumes. And there, between 'The Stanbridge Fire of 1823 – a personal memoir' and 'Fordrace Farming', he discovered a small green-spined volume, with thick, rough-edged leaves. Opening it on the title page, he read:
    LEGENDS OF FORDRACE AND THE WERRIM
    by Harold Limmins Esq.
    Coalgate Hill Publishers, Taunton
    There was no date, but Tom already knew it was a 19th century printing. He returned to his seat and settled down with satisfaction. Turning to the next page, he was intrigued to find, beneath a Latin dedication, several patches of handwritten notes. They were written in faint blue ink, in a tight, ordered script. The first one said:
    Willis' theories of W.low, worm etc. p.51
    The next one, a little way down, read:
    The Pit. Early refs. Dangers etc. p. 68
    The book was printed with very small, close type in long thick wodges of text, and it made Tom's eyes ache to look at it. Without any system whatsoever, he moved through the book, dipping in here and there, whenever one of the reference headings, which were placed in the wide margins for ease of understanding, caught his fancy.
    Harold Limmins Esq. wrote in a slightly fussy style, very much that of the opinionated amateur scholar. He carried a lot of information about Morris Men, May Dancing on Fordrace Green (which had been banned midway through the 18th century on account of the 'excessive drunkenness attending the revels') and a strange Spring festival called 'Furring the Root' which was still performed in March in his own day. Tom enjoyed the accounts of these folk customs, many of which he had never suspected, and he had quite forgotten the vague purpose of his reading by the time he came upon another patch of handwriting, scratched tightly in the margin in faint blue ink. Just below the side heading 'The Wirrim; Geology and Etymology' were the scathing words: 'The old fool, what does he know?'
    Tom had no idea how far Harold Limmins' knowledge stretched, but the passion of the sentence was clear. It was page 51, and the inked handwriting was the same as the notes at the front. Something had greatly angered someone, and on this emotional morning, that interested Torn. So he looked to the nearest main paragraph heading and began reading from there.
    It read:
    The Wirrim itself is a ridge of limestone and Carboniferous shale extending for five miles above the Russet countryside between Hopalming and Stanbridge. In width it is narrow, rarely reaching as much as three quarters of a mile broad, and sometimes, where the side valleys and mining operations have strongly cut away, a mere five hundred feet across. It runs East-West, with its main indentations in the Eastern half. The village of Fordrace is cradled in one such, where the Wirret Stream runs south from High Raise. It is a sheltered spot, south-facing and hemmed in on three sides by the Wirrim's arms.
    Since earliest times, the Wirrim has been the focus for Man's energies in this area. Open-cast mining (for coals and limestone) began in the later stone age, particularly on the Northern side above Little Chetton. Early settlements existed near the summit of the ridge; there is a bronze age site to the south of the depression named Wirrinlow, where bracelets and pottery shards have been found. A sword was discovered there in the 17th Century. No sign of the buildings remain, but the top of the hill is dotted with some fourteen burial mounds, and various holes and hollows, of which Stoker's Hole and Wirrinlow are the largest. It is possible that some of the hollows are the traces of sunken burial mounds or barrows. Others may be geological sinkholes or ancient quarries.
    Etymologies: Some controversy exists over the