IF TIME STANDS STILL ANYWHERE, IT’S AT BEDE. IF GHOSTS HAUNT ANYWHERE, IT’S IN BEDE HALL.
But ghosts are nothing compared to the challenges haunting a curmudgeonly building with a desire for eternal life.
History comes and goes. Empires rise and fall, civilizations flourish and cultures collide. The laws of probability converge and stir up trouble. Geological time advances. Volcanoes explode and cool, seas flood and subside and turn to ice. Ice melts. Species evolve and mutate. Land rumbles into hills and valleys, and grass grows over everything. And in spite of the flowering of art and the inevitable clashes of war, science advances and retreats, Bede’s heart continued to animate each new age, according to its true nature.
From first to last, Bede Hall reigned over the ashes of its ancestors: from a sacred henge built of trees to the great hall of a Saxon lord and a succession of fine houses each grown more grand with human progress.
But before all of it… before Bede Hall inhaled its first thought as a stone pyramid, before Snow was born, it was a primordial hill emerging from a timeless sea. A mound of muddy memories, sheltering the seed of a dying civilization where humanity could sprout anew.
Each of the Hall’s successive constructions grew phoenix-like from the energy of its previous bones. Which meant its latest incarnation was both ancient and new – the oldest and the youngest at the same time.
Within its mystical boundaries, the hamlet of Bede formed an island without a sea. Hadrian’s Wall defended the Hall’s back, the Green Lady’s Forest safeguarded its eastern border, an Iron Age ditch protected it to the west, and a low fence of robbed stone from a medieval monastery defined the southernmost cottage of Bede Village, marking the edge of the old world.
Saltwater breezes from the west and the sweet scent of Lindisfarne’s holy isle to the north, swept through breaks in the ancient wall to play in the Hall’s gardens. Lady Nan told her grandchildren, that on the solstices, it was possible to see a candle burning on Lindisfarne if you put your mind to it.
Bede thrived in its isolation, separate from the bustling world of London, three-hundred-miles to the south. From the air, the old Roman road, Dere Street, still cut a straight grey swath through the forests where Saxons and Normans once traveled as the falcon flies. Long ago, Vikings had pillaged from the eastern shore and Scots had raided from the north,
Faint traces of prehistoric circles, lines, and squares lay etched into the fields. Phantoms of early Bronze Age ditches encircled mounds and barrows that shimmered to life after the rains, and the hillocks of Iron Age settlements played hide-and-seek in the long nettles. Saxon gold shuffled deep under the earth with Neolithic flint arrowheads, dagger blades made of iron, and mosaic tesserae from Roman villas. And all the while, the tips of abandoned cairns poked their noses from mossy hillocks into the sunlight.
For thousands of years, crude dwellings and settlements crumbled into ruins until a maze of grassy banks sectioned the landscape of Bede into a creased map of curious lumps and bumps, covering the secrets of the ancestors.
Long ago, Bede’s natural water features, the sources of ancient power, had been stolen by the Romans for their formal spas and new temples. Springs and streams were rededicated, displacing the old guardians, renamed to merge with a pantheon of Roman gods – immortals ‘borrowed’ from the Greeks without permission. They built forts over the shrines of the green gods and clogged the sacred wells with sacrificial animal bones and amulets, vanquishing the local water spirits to trickle away underground in disgrace.
In time, their abandoned pagan settlements were absorbed by the dark ages and subsided into shallow impressions left in the clay underbelly of the rich topsoil.
Emperor Hadrian’s great wall stood as a gallant reminder of the long-gone glory days, keeping out marauders while Bede remained steadfast under an ancient spell of protection.
Left to themselves, the old nature gods silently returned to Bede from the netherworld. The face of the Green Man, overseer of the growing seasons, lord of the harvest festivals and woodland creatures, began appearing again in the barks of trees. Chloris the Green Woman, consort to Jack-of-the-Green, gathered the scattered fairies into colonies and fanned their waning magic into sacred fire.
Comets, falling stars, and solar flares revisited the skies above the rumble-grumbles of the earth as it stretched and cracked its skin. Fresh waters bubbled anew from sacred springs. Bede’s Sprites sent forth its water-beetle messengers, the Egyptian scarabs’ distant cousins, to rally the twice-borns. Comeuppances, long overdue blew hot and cold out of season.
Vengeances lying dormant for eons, slithered from the withered skins of mummified enemies in a fresh colony of eager snakes in the grass. The Green Man retreated, and Bede Hall, savvy to the magnitude of old scores and subtle reprisals, had no option but to train its youngest champions and resident ghosts to prepare itself for war. Meanwhile, Bede Hall alternately languished and fretted