Rook by Jane Rusbridge Read Free Book Online

enthusiasm, but to keep a focus on the bow’s sweep and explain the necessity to think of the down and up strokes in terms of musical expression.
    ‘The piece is really coming on. Well done.’ Nora lifts her cello, prepared to demonstrate one or two points of technique, but Miss Macleod has her head on one side, waiting for a response. There’s no ignoring her expectancy. ‘Actually, do you know, I only remember the refrain.’
    The refrain dominates the song, a spell of repetition.
    ‘You should look up the lyrics in their entirety, my dear. Most interesting, you’ll find.’
    ‘I will, I will. Now, shall we look at the opening bars one more time? Keep checking that you are not pressing down. Allow the cello to support the weight of the bow.’
    Later, they stand in the hallway where Miss Macleod has spread A4 photographs of sections of the Bayeux Tapestry out on the table.
    ‘For years, the Tapestry was thought simply to be a piece of Norman propaganda,’ she tells Nora, ‘but we’re learning more and more about its complex and subversive nature. We’re now certain it was designed by an English artist, within a decade of the Battle of Hastings.’
    The Battle of Hastings, the battle everyone who has ever been a schoolchild in England has heard about, and the detail they all remember is Harold killed by the arrow in his eye. Nora has begun to appreciate, from listening to Miss Macleod, how much the past is multilayered and shifting. She has learned the passage of time and the surfacing of untold stories will reveal new histories, changing what was previously thought to be ‘true’. The arrow in the eye was the equivalent of a cover-up story, the image a later alteration to the embroidery; Harold II met a death far more barbaric.
    Academics began to unravel the secrets of the Tapestry decades ago. Nora imagines pale, long-nosed men donning gloves to pore over Anglo-Saxon documents, turning vellum pages headed with gilded letters and kept in high-ceilinged rooms shadowy as churches to prevent damage from the light, their discoveries written up, but buried in obscure journals. The rest of the world left in ignorance.
    From the hall table Elsa picks up the photograph which shows Harold praying at Bosham church. She translates the Latin for Nora’s benefit: ‘ Where Harold, Duke of the English, and his soldiers ride to Bosham. And look, here it says, The church —’
    Miss Macleod will never leave Bosham. Here, she can stand where Harold stood. She can step from her cottage into the churchyard next door and reach out to touch the walls of a building pictured in a work of art which is a thousand years old.
    ‘ Here Harold sailed across the sea .’ She points to a longboat with oars, bobbing on the wiggle of woollen waves. ‘What we really need to unravel, my dear, because it will help us solve at least part of the mystery, is Harold’s reason for this fated journey to France. There are several possiblilties.’
    Little woollen figures wade out, bare-legged, into the sea at Bosham. Real people, alive ten centuries ago, stitched into the fabric, captured busy with their lives, rowing, riding, carrying hounds and hawks on to the longboats.
    ‘An artistic portrayal of events, of course,’ Elsa says. ‘One has to take this into account. It’s a matter of interpretation. But here, my dear, in the anti-Norman subtext, are so many hidden histories. Most people have no idea.’
    For photograph after photograph, scene after scene, Elsa points and names characters, the events and stories which surround them until eventually Nora begins to lose track. Distracted by the fantastic creatures whose heads decorate the prows of the English longboats, she can’t interrupt to ask what they are without revealing she’s not been paying full attention.
    ‘Most exhilarating, my dear. I’ll let you know how I get on.’ Miss Macleod tightens the strap of her cycle helmet under her chin.
    ‘Good!’ Nora says, unsure whether