EIGHTY-ONE

Peter could not stop grinning as if embarrassed by what he was telling Amber. ‘It’s pretty silly. But the first thing George sent me were song lyrics. From a call and answer folk song used by Warwickshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire field workers up until enclosure. And it’s quite a salacious ditty. But George thinks the origins of the folk song are pre-Roman.

‘The version of the song we have words for includes remnants of an old fertility rite from deep midwinter. Performed to usher out the cold and darkness and bless the coming crops, that kind of thing. Apparently, a version of this rite was performed for centuries in various incarnations.

‘George’s notes are at the bottom. Here you go: “In the song, four maidens, probably low-born virgins, we can only assume, were restrained and deflowered in honour of a pagan deity, known as Black Maggie in Tudor times. Though the practice probably never survived the fifteenth century, a song about the rite was still sung until the 1800s in some counties.”

‘George can’t find any evidence of the song past the First World War. Someone wrote the lyrics down in 1908 for posterity. A priest called Mason, from out Hereford way, who bemoaned the end of rural life, blah, blah, blah, and the industrial revolution. He tried to record all the local folk songs before they were lost forever. Mason didn’t have much luck because this is all obscure stuff that George dug up.

‘But at least it’s local.’ Peter smiled and relaxed back into his chair to drink a second cup of coffee. ‘All the Black Maggie stuff I have for you is on there. You want me to try and sing the song?’

Amber’s attempt at a conciliatory smile failed. She read what Peter had pulled onto the screen.

Amber scrolled onto the next page of the file.

Peter leant forward to guide her through the notes. ‘George says there are vestiges of an older idea inside this verse. Fragments of a similar theme were found on some Roman-British ruins in Wales, that were used for storing grain around 400 AD. Wasn’t old Clarence Putnam from Wales? I seem to recall he was, but the link is so thin it’s barely there. There’s a wall mosaic. Here it is.’

Peter highlighted some text and a black and white photograph of chipped stone fragments on a square card. ‘George thinks the connection to the folk song can be found through the images of four maidens on the tiles of the ruined grain store. The fertility rite stuff is there too. And George says that these ideas always travel and change over time. But the interpretation of the painting, most widely accepted by historians, is of four maidens being laid beneath the grass. Suggesting death. Probably sacrifice. Here you go . . .’

Peter scrolled down the screen and pointed his index finger at the brief footnotes. He read them aloud:

‘“Though the maidens on the mosaic are depicted with torcs, or neck rings, in serpent form, de vermis, possibly to represent a Goddess that we have no name for.”

‘George thinks the mosaic and the folk song developed out of an even older Northern-European-wide practice, between 100 BC and about 500 AD, in which people were tied down and throttled in peat bogs. Started back in the bronze age, continued through the iron age. It’s in his notes. See here: “Often young women or common criminals were used, to ensure the end of winter and a good harvest come spring.”

‘Eerily coincidental, but I don’t think we need go back that far for the Bennets, do you? Or The Friends of Light. I mean, they were devout Christians. It’ll get our book stocked in the New Age section of Waterstones.’ Peter found this incredibly funny; Amber was nearly sick into her lap.

‘But this is all I can dredge up about your Black Maggie. You all right? You look a bit peaky.’