Carved in Stone: Monochrome Destiny (5 page)

The brilliance
of the morning sun flooded into the bedroom through the small, square, glass
panes.  Robyn awoke early to the welcoming rays and watched dust motes
swirl before throwing her legs out of the bed.  The wooden floor was warm
beneath her feet, adding to her hopeful feeling about the day.

Rain
had lashed down in the night but the day was supposed to remain dry.

Robyn
walked to the window.  Refreshed, the natural beauty outside was breath-taking
and compelling.  Her work was completed for the half term and with little
else to occupy her time, Robyn decided to find the little cove that Kat was
always talking about.

Packing
a book, towel and snacks in a backpack, Robyn exited the small secluded cottage
and took a moment to glance back at her picturesque home.  It was fanciful
in many ways.  The walls had been constructed from a chaos of materials
that up close didn’t match or blend, but like all great pieces of art, it was meant
to be seen from afar, where the texture and colour of the brick, stone and
pebble gave the walls life.  Topped with thick thatch and covered in ivy,
it was chocolate box.  The cottage lay nestled all alone, down a narrow
lane, tucked into a great swathe of trees.  Great conifers shot to the sky
all around it, desperately reaching for the life giving sunlight after the
months of cloud, but mixed in between the evergreens were the dark and barren
branches of deciduous oak and beech and ash.  The winter had rid the boughs
of the golden hues of autumn and now they stood cold and proud, awaiting the
soon to come spring to clothe them in bright greens.

Robyn
sighed.  It was a sight meant for those who could see the brilliant
colours of nature but even in black and white it stole the breath.

Robyn
found the start of the path easily as it ran behind the house, but as it
continued it became more treacherous.  The recent wet weather had
saturated the ground and turned the soil underfoot into soft mud.  The
rotting detritus that carpeted the forest floor lay on top of this sodden,
slippery loam.  With each footstep, her trainers danced across this
frictionless surface and repeatedly she had to find alternative routes around
deep puddles of water or thickets of brambles.  Robyn moved slowly, grasping
low hanging branches and great, thick, ivy covered trunks to aid her balance.

As
Robyn walked deeper into the forest, rays of bright sun poured through the thin
canopy above.
 
It not only brought light but
warmth and life to the ground.
 
The
forest was vibrant underneath the sun’s glow, but when the sun ducked behind a
thin cloud, the crooked and gnarled limbs took on a darker manifestation.
 
Robyn walked in the shadows as the spindly,
withered boughs above her head appeared to claw at the sky, as if reaching for
the light, reaching for absolution.  She saw the
ivy,
that
had once coated the tree trunks with a rich hue, change and appear
black in the shadow of the clouds above.  It looked like the strands
strangled the trees rather than caressed them as its mass of thin shoots wound
around the bark.  Even the lichens, pale in the light, were transformed in
the shadows into a mottled vision of plague.
 
They became the fungal growths of incurable disease before her eyes. 
When the sun was blocked, horror filled the scene, sending shivers through
Robyn’s bones.  Then the brilliance of the sun would re-emerge from behind
the cotton cloud and the scene would lighten and brighten once again, morphing
the branches into a source of wonderment.

Robyn
couldn’t help but consider it a message. The forest was showing her how easily
a scene could change.  How easily light could completely transform not
just the vision in front of her, but the feeling of her surroundings.  Kat
was Robyn’s light, her brightness.  Robyn had come to
Porthmollek
with a darkened soul, but Kat was dragging her back towards the light.

Eventually
the canopy above began to thin and Robyn came to the edge of the trees.

The
wind hit her before she stepped out from the woodland.  She had been
walking gently uphill since leaving the cottage and now Robyn found herself not
far from a cliff edge.  She stepped out high above the sea and looked out
on wild waves breaking into white mist below.  The wind came straight off
the ocean with bracing force and washed over her face whipping her hair back
behind her.

The
smell of the woodland was immediately replaced by brine and bromine and the
smallest taint of seaweed.  Robyn could almost taste the salt on her
tongue, so she shut her mouth and inhaled though her nose. 

Stepping
closer to the edge and leaning precariously forwards, Robyn looked down to see
waves crashing against the rocks below, spraying foam and froth into the air in
a rhythmic oscillation that was accompanied by a great roar.  She could
even feel the misty moisture on her face, the water droplets driven by the
wind.  The drop was sheer and about a hundred feet so Robyn stepped back.

To
her right, a slope headed down to a little pebble beach, the beach she had come
to find.  Next to the undulating rough sea, it had a smattering of grey
pebbles and several fingers of jagged shale rock.  It was small and
pleasant but it was not what grabbed her attention.

Set
back from the beach and being overgrown by long grass, stood a church. 
The small construction stood lopsided in the valley just off of the cove. 
It was made of stone, had sunken down many years ago, at the tower end, and was
surrounded by a low stone wall.

Intrigued,
Robyn turned to the right, bypassed a lone great oak tree that stood
overlooking the cliff like a guardian, and started heading down on what
appeared to be an old path sunken into the grass.

Approaching
the church yard, Robyn could now see that the low wall she had seen from the
cliff top was not low at all.  It was, in fact, waist high.  Covered
in luscious grasses, the wall had appeared to be much shorter due to the top
third being the only visible portion.  It had clearly been built by a
skilled craftsman many years ago and was showing signs of age.  Irregular
and differently sized stones had been placed in such a way that there was
barely a gap between each and for many years the wall had stood against the
ravages of the wind coming off of the sea.  Even now, most of it stood as
true as the day it had been erected.  In a few places, and only where the
wall was not protected by the binding layer of grass, the stones had come apart
and the wall had begun to crumble.

Passing
the long wall, Robyn moved to a little gate.  Cast iron and moulded in a
filigree design, the once blackened metal gate, now leaned precariously against
nettles and grew into the grass.  It stood oxidizing in the sea air and
the salt coming off of the ocean had taken its toll.  Corroded and
fragile, the gate stood open, hanging by only one remaining hinge.  It was
a travesty that this once cared for building had been left abandoned and the
sheer loneliness of its isolation drew Robyn in.

Lifting
her knees high to walk through long grass, Robyn headed for the church,
treading carefully on the remnants of a little path of stepping stones.

Clearly
old, the church was fairly plain in construction, with no ornate carvings and
no figures on the outside.  The tower was square with a simple roof
structure and had no spire.  There were stone vents over the tower windows
to both protect the church bell from the elements and to enable the ring to
disseminate out as far as possible in order to encourage the local folk to
mass.  Lichens mottled the stonework and modern plywood boarded up the
windows and the door.  The board, bleached in the sunlight, matched the
shade of the stone walls but where screws holding the boards in place had
rusted, trails of darkness streaked down the wood.  It was clear that the
church had been abandoned for many years.  It had been left to slowly
disappear under the inevitable spread of nature as she reclaimed her
land. 

Slightly
disappointed that she couldn’t look inside, Robyn turned to the only thing she could
have a look at; the gravestones.

On
either side of the main door, two large stone slabs lay horizontal to the ground,
raised by only a couple of inches.  These marked the final resting place
of two previous vicars from the mid-1700s as far as she could make out from the
erosion of the letters. The script chosen for the lettering was difficult to
read despite the age and her visual impairment didn’t help.  Robyn turned
west and headed for the first headstone that was still standing.

Deciphering
what she could, it soon became apparent to Robyn that the headstones closest to
the door were the oldest.  She saw recurrences of names, as members of the
same family had been laid to rest near each other, and noticed the delicate
ages of those who had died.  Not many lived to what you would call ‘old
age’ back then and there were a lot of children.

Heading
further around the church, Robyn started seeing dates from the 1800s. 
Lots of the names that she now recognised, Rowe and
Yelland
stuck out immediately as the names of the Head Teacher and a pupil from one of
her classes.  Many generations of local families had been interred in the
churchyard and judging by the comparability of the names with those on her
class registers, many descendants of these people still lived locally.  It
was quite nice to think that the community had such deep roots, especially as
she wanted to plant some of her own. 

When
she found a stone from the 1850s, Robyn noticed a change in the
inscriptions.  The carvings were not so old and were therefore easier to
read, but her curiosity still had her crouching in front of a large rectangular
slab that was entirely plain and undecorated, except for a three inch diameter
circle at the top.  Putting her hand out and feeling the indentations like
Braille, Robyn read the names on the stone.  Father, Mother, Grandmother
and three children were all listed on the particular stone.

Robyn
knew of family plots, where, as members of the same family died they were added
to the stone but all these people had died on the same date.  She wondered
what could have happened to them; fire, disease, or accident?  What
tragedy befell this family all those years ago?

The
next stone had fallen but the writing was face up.  This one had two
names, husband and wife but there were no dates as the break in the stone had
cut them off.  Feeling the sorrow of the place, Robyn looked around for
more.

Moving
around the yard, Robyn took in everything that the stones had to offer.

A
Celtic cross monument listed four names, all the same family and all died on
the same date in 1877.  An intricate three sided spiral design enclosed in
a circle had been carved carefully in the centre of the cross but there was
little other detail.

She
discovered three more markers representing events that had wiped out
families.  The dates varied from the 1840s to the early 1900s.  She
didn’t know if there were any more, as many of the stones were either too
damaged, too eroded, or they had fallen face down, but they had her intrigued
enough the go back around the small churchyard and have a second look at the
five graves that depicted tragedy.

On
closer inspection, Robyn noticed that the small three spiralled symbol was
carved on all of those peculiar stones except the first, which only had the
circle.  Sometimes the symbol was carved deeply, etched cleanly and easy
to spot, but sometimes it was seemingly scratched on, as if an afterthought,
making it difficult to see.

Other
stones had the symbol too, stones with only one occupant and stones that she
could not read.

The
latest dated stone in the graveyard was 1942.  Where had the dead been
buried since?

With
nothing more to see, Robyn headed to the beach, moved some pebbles to make a
flatter surface to sit on and sat pondering.  She thought of the families
that had perished and felt sad, especially for the young children who hadn’t
really started life before it was snatched away from them.  She thought of
explanations for the deaths, but couldn’t think of many disease outbreaks or
anything else that would explain the mystery.  Robyn was pretty certain
that there hadn’t been outbreaks of plague between 1800 and 1900 but her
knowledge of flu outbreaks centred only on the one during the First World
War.  She thought of the industrial revolution and accidents.  Would
children have been working then? Would children have been mining then? Cornwall
was famous for its tin mines and they had been open throughout all of that
time.

Fire
was an obvious choice.  With no fire brigades and houses containing
substantial amounts of timber in their construction, fire would have ravaged
them in minutes.  Small windows, cramped tight staircases and no alarms
meant that if fire broke out, especially at night, it could very well claim
live, many lives.

Landslide
ricocheted through her mind.  The great hills around St Austell, now
covered in grass and seeming almost natural, were, in fact, great hills of
waste pulled out of the china clay mines.  In Wales in the 1960s, in the
village of
Aberfan
, a mountain of waste from a coal
mine had buried a school and some farms.  Over a hundred had died, mostly
children.  But these deaths were at different times.  This was no
disaster.