Ferney (16 page)

‘Where did that come from?’ he said in surprise.

‘Oh, it’s just something I found at the house,’ said Gally. ‘It’s nothing much.’ She took it, too quickly, and made to put it back in her pocket.

‘Hang on a second. Can I see it?’ he said and she gave it to him reluctantly.

They went outside and he stood in front of the pub turning it over in his fingers.

‘Nothing much?’ he said. ‘You must be joking.’ He rubbed hard at it. ‘That’s gold and there’s a stone in it. It might even be a diamond.’

‘No, surely not. Do you really think so?’ she said brightly. ‘I expect it’s just glass. I was planning to clean it up and see.’

She held out a hand, but he didn’t want to give it back.

‘It’s got a bit of age to it,’ he said. ‘I think we should take it to a museum. It’s incredible. Where was it?’

She could bear neither to lie nor to tell the truth. ‘Near the front door,’ she said, ‘in the earth.’

He was sharper than she expected. ‘Which front door?’

‘The one in the middle – where it used to be.’

He stared at her. ‘I wish I knew what was going on here.’

Back at the house he insisted that she should show him and it was obvious straightaway that she’d been digging through the earth.

‘I wanted to see where the step used to be,’ she said lamely, hating the way circumstances were pushing her ever further from the path of pure truth, but Mike had his mind on other
things.

‘We should go deeper,’ he said. ‘There might be something else.’

‘It’s difficult. The ivy roots are in the way.’

‘We can cut through them, pull it all up.’

‘But that’ll kill the ivy.’

‘If you want the front door here, that ivy root’s got to go anyway.’

‘So you agree we should have the door here?’

‘Well, yes, maybe. We’ll see.’

It was the first moment at which Gally fully accepted the whole truth about the ring, that she had told the story herself, had been prompted but not manipulated by Ferney into saying what had
been buried and where it could be found. Until then she’d kept that aspect of the story wrapped up in her mind as a dangerous curiosity – something it was more comfortable to ignore, to
stay agnostic. Now, looking at the earth and the ivy root, she knew with complete certainty that she
had
known the ring was buried there and she now knew equally that there should be
nothing else there. Recognizing that knowledge, she also knew for certain that life was never going to be quite the same again.

There was no convincing way that she could tell Mike he was wasting his time, and what she had just learnt was claiming space in her mind, so, preoccupied, she helped with the harmless game.

It was doubly bewildering therefore when she discovered she was wrong. Mike had been working away with a trowel on the undisturbed surface just to the other side of the root for no more than two
or three minutes when they heard a pronounced ‘chink’.

‘There’s something else,’ he said excitedly. ‘It sounds like glass.’

He scratched around with the point of the trowel, then used his fingers to shovel out the loosened earth.

‘It’s a bottle.’ He sounded triumphant.

It must be modern, she thought, but when he’d exposed two inches of stubby neck, sealed with a hard earthy mass which seemed to cover a decayed cork, he destroyed that thought.

‘Brilliant,’ he said. ‘Look at this. Eighteenth century, I should say.’ He went on delving and the shape that emerged with difficulty from the packed earth had a conical
neck, widening out into a squat globule of black-looking glass. He eased it out of the hole. ‘It’s an onion bottle,’ he said. ‘What a find.’

Gally stared at it, disconcerted. The ring had been the embodiment of the faint shreds of a dream, only really surprising in its solidity and weight. This thing in front of her was completely
alien, unknown. It had no place there and that was wrong. Mike carried it to the builder’s stand-pipe, ran water over it carefully washing off the dirt. It shone iridescent, dark green. A
lump of earth came away from the side of it and revealed a round glass seal, moulded on to the neck.

‘Onion?’ she said faintly. ‘What have onions got to do with it?’

‘Oh that’s just what they call this shape,’ said Mike. ‘It’s an old wine bottle. Look at this. It’s got initials on the seal and a date. RW 1680. I think
there’s something inside it, too.’

He held it up to the sun. A thick layer of paste an inch deep covered the bottom and bulged under a jellied crust as he tilted it.

‘Why would it have been there under the step?’

‘I know why,’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s a witch bottle. That makes sense. They buried them under doorsteps to keep evil away.’

No, she thought, there were no witch bottles. We didn’t . . . Ferney didn’t believe in things like that.

‘What would be in it?’

‘A horrible mess, I should think. Blood and urine and bits of toenail. I seem to remember they used to burn their hair and put that in too. You wouldn’t want to open it.’

Gally hated the bottle and its uninvited intrusion into the faded archive of her memory, but Mike was as pleased as punch. It was his find not hers and she knew it gave him back a proprietorial
sense, put him back in the driving seat.

‘We could take it in next week,’ he said. ‘When I come home. Maybe we should try the Taunton Museum. I’m sure they’ve got people who would know. They could have a
look at the ring, too. I shouldn’t be surprised if they’re worth quite a bit, those two.’

‘You’re not saying we should sell them, surely?’ she said.

‘Well no, not the bottle. It would be nice to keep that, but the ring might bring in a few bob.’

‘I found the ring,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ and he just stared at her. ‘Anyway, what’s this “when I get back”
business?’

‘Oh, I was going to tell you – haven’t had a chance. I’m afraid I’ve been lumbered with a conference because Tony Briggs can’t go. Stafford or somewhere.
It’s only a couple of days or so.’

What seemed to her to be more alarming than anything else was that she wanted him to go and had to cover her disappointment when he said he didn’t have to leave until Monday afternoon. The
ring had pulled her off balance, swung her violently towards another world that already felt more compelling. There were a score of questions she wanted to ask and that, she knew, was something she
could only do in Mike’s absence.

Ferney wasn’t on the hilltop on Monday. She went straight there as soon as she was by herself, letting all the enormous implications of his words out into her conscious
mind immediately Mike had gone. She sat on the stone in Ferney’s place, but everything was uncompromisingly twentieth century. Aircraft from Yeovilton and a tractor refolding the tired earth
for the thousandth time dominated her sense of the scene before her. In any case she knew it was his hilltop, susceptible to his magic, not hers. Whatever was in her head seemed too big to think
about, so that she kept bouncing off it into something approaching laughter. There was happiness there – a muddled hope that here at last lay the clues to the bits of her that fooled her,
scared her, trapped her.

A more sensible voice questioned that. Where is all this going? she thought. Wouldn’t it be wiser to stop now? To stay away from the old man and just remember it as his joke? But that
wasn’t possible. Something inside her was pushing at the closed doors, determined to find its way back to freedom, and there were so many things she needed to ask. She recognized and felt
shocked by the sudden knowledge that Mike’s feelings were, for the moment, a side issue. That triggered a burst of guilt. Mike always put her first, she knew that. She owed him an
immeasurable amount for the months he had spent beckoning her out from her tunnel, even if she had so far been unable to follow his coaxing. She owed him devotion and affection, but the rest,
through nothing she could control, seemed in abeyance.

When she got to his house Ferney was up but sitting in his chair with a rug over his legs and she knew when she looked at him that in the three days since she’d seen him last he had lost a
lot more than seventy-two hours from the dwindling store of his years. He wouldn’t let her fuss over him, though he allowed her to make them both tea.

‘Do you feel well enough to talk?’

‘For a bit.’

She felt tender towards him in his illness, wanting to tuck the rug in around his legs but she knew she couldn’t, knew she was prevented by a sense of his dignity and the strength of his
character.

He looked at her hand and she knew he too had noticed the wedding ring, but he didn’t say a word about it.

‘Did anything come back?’ he asked suddenly. ‘After we talked before?’

‘Something turned up,’ she said. ‘Something that surprised me a lot. I showed the ring to . . .’ She was going to say ‘Mike’ but the oncoming word brought
with it an unexpected sense of betrayal and she choked it off. Betrayal of whom, she wondered. Of Mike? No, of Ferney.

‘. . . to my . . . my husband.’ That sounded worse. How could Mike be her husband?

Ferney gave a look of deep understanding which disconcerted her completely. ‘He insisted on digging where the step was. I couldn’t stop him.’

‘Why should you want to?’

‘Because I knew there wasn’t anything else there.’

He nodded, pleased. ‘So what did he turn up?’

‘An old bottle. Very old, in fact. It says 1680 on it and it’s sealed up. He says he thinks it was a witch bottle.’

Ferney looked startled for a second, then he lifted his head in acknowledgement of dawning understanding and nodded. ‘That would be it. Daft idea. They thought it kept you safe from
spells.’ He seemed to think some more. ‘Yes, I suppose that would definitely be it.’ He looked at her acutely. ‘It worries you.’

It wasn’t a question.

‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘it does.’

‘Why?’

‘Because . . . because I didn’t have the slightest idea that it would be there.’

‘And that was a surprise?’

‘Yes.’ Another admission that called for an explanation for herself as much as for him. ‘Because since this all started none of it has really surprised me completely –
but I didn’t know that until I had something to compare it all to and the bottle was that something. I simply didn’t know
anything
about it.’

‘Nor did I, but I can guess.’

‘Go on.’

‘You say it said 1680 on the bottle? Well it wouldn’t have happened in 1680. That was five years before the Duke of Monmouth came. The bottle wasn’t put there then, I’m
sure. It must have been, let’s see now, a good twelve years, maybe even fifteen after that.’ He looked across at the shelves. ‘Pass me that book, would you, that big white one on
the bottom shelf.’

She went to the shelf and ran her finger along a line of history books. ‘
The Encyclopaedia of Dates and Events
?’

‘That’s it.’ He coughed loudly, painfully, turning the pages. ‘Now, 1688. I thought so.’ He looked up at her searchingly, ‘You’ve got things that hurt
inside your head. I know that. This might help.’

‘It does help. It has already,’ she said softly.

‘What really frightens you?’ he asked and she should have told him, should have said Boilman and Burnman, but you couldn’t just bring them up into the open like that, not
without a bit of time, and thinking he was helping her he moved in to fill the lengthening silence.

‘I noticed before, you’re not too happy about horses.’

‘How did you notice that?’ she said, surprised.

‘When we talked about Monmouth and the others, arriving on their horses.’

She bit her lip, ‘It’s not a big thing. I don’t
hate
them at all, I’m just a bit nervous when they’re around.’ That was only the half of it, she knew
at a deeper level, but a childhood of horses, constantly afraid, constantly told not to be so babyish by her distant, horsy mother, had layered deep scar tissue over the first fear.

Ferney nodded and looked down at the book again. ‘Now, 1688. Prince William of Orange landed at Torbay. Call it come-uppance for what the king did to Monmouth, if you like.’ He
smiled at her. ‘It shouldn’t be like this. Me sitting here, telling you dry facts. It makes the words work much too hard.’

‘It doesn’t feel like that. I get pictures in my head.’

‘Join in, then. Tell me. It helps me fill in the gaps.’

This time she was a willing participant, waiting expectantly.

‘We went to Wincanton. You still called it by the old name, said it was prettier.’ He looked at her, questioning, but she frowned and shook her head.

‘Wyndcaleton,’ he said and the syllables chimed faintly somewhere. ‘Didn’t know anything special was going on that day. We were going to sell something. Eggs I expect, a
basket each. We came in the east end of town and walked straight into it. Soldiers everywhere – the Irish beast, Sarsfield and his mob, Irish Dragoons they called themselves. There must have
been a hundred of them. King James’s soldiers supposedly, but they were a bunch of ruffians really, barely a uniform amongst them that day, excepting Sarsfield himself and he was the most
dangerous man you ever saw.’

Nothing substantial came into her mind, which disappointed her.

‘Are you all right?’ he said, and she wondered why he was so solicitous.

‘Yes.’

‘We didn’t want to walk through them. You couldn’t be sure what they’d do, except that it wouldn’t be nice. We’d seen quite enough of Sarsfield and his louts
in the area. Then we saw the other lot coming out of town.’

A sudden piercing vision as if a powerful light had been switched on. In her mind’s eye a small band of men were leading a string of horses down a track between hedges. There were low
roofs beyond. She saw them stop, half of them turning back, leading the horses to safety. There was no doubting it, nor the acute fear it brought with it.

He saw her expression change. ‘You’ve got it.’

‘Yes, I think so . . . I don’t like it.’

‘Take it easy on yourself, then. Let it go. Don’t try to remember. Listen to me and I’ll tell you.’

He might as well have told her to turn off the sun.