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Derbyshire
1818
The bushes thrashed violently. Elfreda put down her trowel and sat back on her heels. The bushes began to growl.
“Wolves,” she guessed. “Two ferocious, green-eyed wolves from the Dark Peak.”
One bush gave a loud gasp: “Are there wolves in the Dark Peak?”
The other bush made a shushing noise.
“Most certainly,” said Elfreda. She liked inventing legends as much as she liked reading them. “The Dark Peak is where the wolves went when mean old Edward Longshanks tried to have them all killed. You can hear them howling when the wind blows from the north.”
Both bushes squealed.
“Is it far?” asked the one.
In an instant, Elfreda understood her blunder. She could already imagine her sisters skipping into the craggy wilds.
“Terribly far.” She adopted a commiserating tone. “And the way is closely guarded by a regiment of aunts armed with curling tongs.”
The bushes, which had been rustling excitedly, now observed a horrified silence.
It had been nearly three years since Aunt Susan had returned to Surrey, but her tenure at Marsden Hall had left an indelible mark—not the improving one that she’d intended.
“And castor oil,” added Elfreda for good measure. “These aunts won’t let anyone step foot near a wolf. They are the sort who prohibit dogs in the nursery.”
She couldn’t see her sisters’ faces, but she thought the foliage drooped. Good. Dejection was better than them running off and someone finding them a thousand years from now in a peat bog on the Howden Moors.
She turned her attention back to her work. She’d been digging for weeks, cutting trenches across the wooded bluff, a slow and solitary effort. Once Papa had lost interest, he’d stopped paying the laborers who’d helped break ground. Part of her wondered if it was folly to dig so long without assistance, and without result.
Take this trench. She’d exposed a layer of loam, and then marl, and then clay, and then something darker—possibly char from ancient cookfires. No buckles, though. No nails. No fragments of pottery. No proof.
All her hopes rested on an entry in a local annal included in Papa’s manuscript copy of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, an entry for AD 868.
This year the heathen men overran Mercia as far as Twynham, burning and breaking, so that many were slain. They remained in Mercia, and there fixed their winter quarters.
The heathen men wouldn’t have fixed their winter quarters in Twynham, a small settlement, exposed on all sides. They’d have looted St. Alcmund’s, and the abbey, and moved on, until they reached a defensive position.
This bluff. The closest to Twynham, and the highest ground for miles. It towered above the river and sloped down to what was now her family’s parkland.
A few inked lines had brought her here, and also intuition and common sense.
This was the spot. The one she would have chosen if she were a seaborne raider.
Ergo, she refused to give up.
More growls made her turn her gaze on the undergrowth. She could see Hilda’s foot protruding, a foot shod in a badly scuffed boot with trailing laces. Unless it was Matilda’s foot. The six-year-old twins shared only a passing physical resemblance, but they were equally ruinous to leather. And muslin. And velvet upholstery.
“Let me guess again.” Elfreda pretended to ponder. “I know—you are giant, growling moles!” She beckoned with the trowel. “Come, dear moles. Let us tunnel together deep into the earth, where we shall find the silver ingots of the Great Heathen Army!”
“We are bears.” Hilda crawled from the bush. She’d a long red scratch on her cheek and a moth-eaten fur tippet wrapped around her head. She rose onto her knees, hooked her fingers into claws, and bared her teeth. “And we are ravens.”
“Ravenous!” Matilda crawled after her. “We aren’t ravens bears. Ravens bears have feathers. We are ravenous bears. We have a great hunger, like the hunger of 1044. Papa says it was a sign of doom.”
Elfreda frowned. Whenever Papa was in a sulk, he had his children gather in the library after dinner so he could recite to them all the grimmest episodes in the history of the English nation.
