The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps. Michel Faber
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she assured the Horse and Griffin’s kitchen-maid, large as life in the doorway. ‘Fine, thank you.’ She sighed. ‘Just going batty.’
‘I don’t wonder,’ said the kitchen-maid. ‘All them bodies.’
‘Bodies?’
‘The skeletons you’ve been diggin’ up.’ The girl made a face. ‘Sixty of ’em, I read in the Whitby Gazette.’
‘Sixty graves. We haven’t actually—’
‘D’you ’ave to touch ’em? I’d be sickened off. You wear gloves, I ’ope.’
Siân smiled, shook her head. The girl’s look of horrified awe beamed at her across the breakfast room like a ray, and she basked shyly in it: Siân the daredevil. For the sake of the truth, she ought to disabuse this girl of her fantasy of archaeologists rooting elbow-deep in grisly human remains, and tell her that the dig was really very like gardening except less eventful. But instead, she raised her hands and wiggled the fingers, as if to say, Ordinary mortals cannot know what I have touched.
‘Braver than me, you are,’ said the girl, unveiling the milk.
To help time pass, Siân crossed the bridge from the less corrupted east side to the more newfangled west, and strolled along Pier Road towards the sea. Thinly gilded with sunlight, the façades of the amusement arcades and clairvoyants’ cabins looked almost grand, their windows and shuttered doors deflecting the glare. Siân dawdled in Marine Parade to peer through the window of what, until 1813, had been the Whitby Commercial Newsroom. ‘The Award-Winning Dracula Experience’ said the poster, followed by a list of attractions, including voluptuous female vampires and Christopher Lee’s cape.
The fish quay, deserted just now, was nevertheless infested with loitering seagulls. They wandered around aimlessly in the sunrise, much as the town’s young men would do after sunset, or simply snoozed on top of crates and the roofs of the moored boats.
Siân walked to the lighthouse, then left the terra firma of Aislaby sandstone to tread the timber deck of the pier’s end. Careful not to snag the heels of her shoes on the gaps in the wood, she allowed herself the queasy thrill of peeking at the restless waves churning far beneath her feet. She wasn’t sure if she could swim anymore; it had been a long time.
She stood at the very end of the west pier and cupped her hand across her brow to look over at the east one. The two piers were like outstretched arms curving into the ocean, to gather boats from the wild waters of the North Sea into the safety of Whitby harbour. Siân was standing on a giant fingertip.
She consulted her watch and walked back to the mainland. Her work was on the other side.
Ascending the East Cliff, half-way up the one hundred and ninety-nine stone steps, Siân paused for a breather. Much as she loved to walk, she’d overdone it, perhaps, so early in the day. She should keep in mind that instead of going to sit at a desk now, she was going to spend the whole day digging in the earth.
Siân traced the imperfections of the stone step with her shoe, demarcating the erosion caused by the foot traffic of centuries. On just this spot, this wide plateau-like step amongst many narrow ones, the townspeople of ancient Whitby laid down the coffins they must carry up to the churchyard, and had paused, black-clad and red-faced, before resuming their doleful ascent. Only now that tourists and archaeologists had finally taken the place of mourners did these steps no longer accommodate dead people – apart from the occasional obese American holiday-maker who collapsed with a heart attack before reaching the hallowed photo-opportunity.
Siân peered down towards Church Street and saw a man jogging – no, not jogging, running – towards the steps. At his side, a dog – a gorgeous animal, the size of a spaniel perhaps, but with a lovely thick coat, like a wolf’s. The man wasn’t bad-looking himself, broad-shouldered and well-muscled, pounding the cobbled surface of the street with his expensive-looking trainers. He was dressed in shorts and a loose, thin sweatshirt, a shivery proposition in the early morning chill, but he was obviously well up to it. His face was calm as he ran, his dark brown hair, free of sweat, flopping back and forth across his brow. The dog looked up at him frequently as he ran, revealing the vanilla and caramel colouring in its mane.
I want, I want, I want, thought Siân, then turned away, blushing. Thirty-four years old, and still thinking like a child! Saint Hilda would have been ashamed of her. And what exactly was she hankering after, anyway: the man or the dog? She wasn’t even sure.
Another glance at her watch confirmed there was still a little while to fill before the first of her colleagues was likely to roll up. They all slept soundly, she gathered, in spite of the dawn chorus.
‘Hello-o!’
She turned. The handsome young man was sprinting up the hundred and ninety-nine steps, as easily as if he were on flat ground. His dog was bounding ahead, narrowing the distance to Siân two steps at a time. For an instant Siân felt primeval fear at the approach of a powerful fanged creature, then relaxed as the dog scudded to a halt and sat to attention in front of her, panting politely, its head tilted to one side, just like a dog on a cheesy greeting card.
‘He won’t hurt you!’ said the man, catching up, panting a little himself now.
‘I can see that,’ she said, hesitantly reaching forward to stroke the dog’s mane.
‘He’s got an eye for the ladies,’ said the man.
‘Nothing personal, then.’
The man came to a halt one step below her, so as not to intimidate her with his tallness: he must be six foot three, at least. With every breath his pectorals swelled into his shirt in two faint haloes of sweat, and faded again.
‘You’re very fit,’ she said, trying to keep her tone the same as if she were saying, ‘You’re out and about very early.’
‘Well, if you don’t use it,’ he shrugged, ‘you lose it.’
The dog was becoming quietly ecstatic, pushing his downy black brow up towards Siân’s palm, following her fingers with his eyes, hoping she would get around to stroking the back of his head, the right ear, the left, the part of the right ear she’d missed the first time.
‘What sort of dog is he?’
‘Finnish Lapphund,’ said the man, squatting on his haunches, as if seeking to qualify for a bit of stroking himself.
‘Beautiful.’
‘A hell of a lot of work.’
She knelt, carefully so that he wouldn’t notice any problem with her left leg. ‘Doesn’t look it,’ she said, stroking the dog’s back all the way to his plushly fringed tail. All three of them were eye to eye now.
‘You bring out his contemplative side, obviously,’ the man remarked, grinning. ‘With me, it’s a different story. I’ll be an Olympic runner by the time he’s through with me.’
Siân stroked on and on, a little self-conscious about the ardour with which she was combing the creature’s sumptuous pelt. ‘You must have known what you were taking on when you got him,’ she suggested.
‘Well, no, he was actually my father’s dog. My father died three weeks ago.’
Siân stopped stroking. ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘No need. He and I weren’t close.’ The dog, bereft of caresses, was poking his snout in the air, begging for more. The man obliged, ruffling the animal’s ears, pulling the furry face towards his. ‘I didn’t like our dad much, did I, hmm? Grumpy old man, wasn’t ’e?’
Siân noticed the size of the man’s hands: unusually large. A superstitious chill tickled her spine, like a tiny trickle of water. She distracted herself from it by noting the estuary twang of the man’s accent.
‘Did you come up from London?’
‘Yeah.’ He frowned a little, intent on proving he could please the