Ferney (19 page)

‘We didn’t know that many people in Turnham Green. Not unless you counted awful Aggy and slimy Steve next door. I’ll know people here, you’ll see.’

‘Have you seen the old man?’ he asked suddenly. It wasn’t an accusation, just an interested question, and she wondered if it was his gift to her to fit the moment.

‘He’s been taken to hospital.’

‘Oh dear. Anything serious?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you think we ought to ring up and find out?’

‘That would be a nice thought.’

There was a phone in the caravan now. Gally hadn’t really wanted it, but Mike insisted he had to have one though it was really so he could reassure himself that she was all right in his
absences. She couldn’t wait to ring, but for the sake of prolonging the truce over Ferney which Mike seemed to be offering she hung on until they went in for a cup of tea.

Was she a relation? the hospital wanted to know. What a question. No she wasn’t and yes, she was more closely related to him than anyone in the history of relations. ‘No,’ she
said, ‘just a friend.’

The news was that he seemed a little better but they were keeping him in for observation. She put the phone down.

‘It’s a shame you two got off on the wrong foot,’ she said. ‘He’s very interesting. He knows such a lot about the local history.’

‘He’s an amateur,’ said Mike absently. ‘They’re dangerous. They’re always so sure they know more than they really do. Knowledge does change, you know.
You’ve got to stay abreast of the latest thinking.’

This is history, not nuclear physics, she thought, surely you know less as time passes, not more – but she kept it to herself.

‘Tell me about the book,’ she said.

He looked suddenly enthusiastic. ‘I think it’s being here gave me the idea,’ he said. ‘All these medieval field systems. It’s so clear to see. I want to do
something absolutely definitive about the way technology changed rural life. Plough designs had so much to do with it, you know – when they first used iron bands to edge the plough they could
really start to get more out of the soil. A total revolution, and this place sits right on the borderline between two agricultural systems. You’ve got all the herds of sheep on the chalk
uplands towards Salisbury Plain and down in the flat-lands you’ve got heavy soil.’ He looked almost embarrassed. ‘I sometimes think the place is trying to speak to me.’

‘Great,’ she said, and thought, it’s
shouting
at me.

They were going to Taunton the next day to look at bathrooms and as they were about to get in the car Mike said something Gally had been dreading.

‘Let’s go to the museum while we’re there. I’ll take the bottle and you can show them your ring.’

There wasn’t a way of saying no without having to explain and at least he had said ‘your ring’. It was in her pocket anyway, where it always was.

They looked at baths that thought they were elegant but failed to convince. Georgian, Edwardian, Victorian plastic pastiches. All she wanted was a nice old rounded, cast-iron bath, but modern
replicas with over-clever ball and claw feet were frighteningly expensive. They found what she wanted in a reclamation yard, chipped and scarred but real enough. Mike still complained about the
price, but they arranged delivery and picked up a solid, simple lavatory there at a bargain price to make him happier. Then they headed into the town centre.

Arriving unannounced, they had to wait for someone to talk to.

‘Shall we have a quick look round?’ Mike said.

Gally was fascinated and reluctant at the same time. The display cases beckoned her like a family scrapbook, but she recognized the depth of the unknown contained in them and the danger that
they might come out with a wider gulf between them if the fragments of old Somerset drew her in too far. In any case, however sensitively it had been laid out, the place smacked of Mike’s
analytical, intellectual approach and she feared it would feel like going to inspect the dissected labelled corpses of past friends.

The man who saw them was studious, friendly and at once interested in the bottle.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘If it was under the step, I’m sure it was a witch bottle.’ He tilted it against the light. ‘Mostly urine, I expect, plus all
kinds of other unsavoury bits and pieces. Do you know what the idea was?’

‘To protect you from witchcraft,’ said Mike.

‘Well, clearly. But the main idea was to identify the witch. Boiling your urine stopped the witch being able to urinate. The only way she could free herself from the spell would be to come
to your house to dig up the bottle.’

‘Then you scratched her,’ said Gally without conscious thought and the man nodded enthusiastically.

‘Absolutely. You scratched her to draw blood and after that you were cured of the spell.’ He looked at her appreciatively. ‘You know your folklore.’

Gally passed it off with a shrug as Mike raised his eyebrows. ‘When do you think it would have been put there?’

‘The date on the bottle’s a good clue,’ said the man. ‘Wine bottles were a pretty new idea. The landed gentry had them – that would be the owner’s initials
moulded into the neck seal – and they’d send them to be refilled at the wine merchant. This one was new in 1680, but they got out of date pretty quickly. The shape was developing very
rapidly round about then. They got more like bottles and less like blobs and so I should think ones like this would have been thrown out by about 1690 at the latest – too old-fashioned, you
see. There’s a pretty good chance we could work out whose it was from those initials.’

‘There’s something else, too,’ said Mike. ‘We found a ring under the step.’

I found the ring, not we, Gally said to herself and with the greatest reluctance she brought it out of her pocket and held it out.

The man made an appreciative noise. ‘That’s quite a find.’ He picked it up and looked at it carefully with a magnifying glass. ‘Stuart Crystal. It’s certainly old.
Seventeenth century obviously. Might I give it a quick clean?’

Gally nodded rather doubtfully and he left the room.

‘They’re from about the same time, then,’ said Mike. ‘That ring could be worth quite a lot.’

‘I wouldn’t want to sell it.’

She was thinking how close Ferney’s woman, the questionable Joan, must have come to finding the glove herself when she buried the bottle. It was only six inches off to the side.

‘Are you going to sell the bottle?’

‘No,’ he said, hurt. ‘I want it. Anyway it wouldn’t be worth nearly as much as the ring.’ Seeing her expression, he changed tack. ‘A ring like that ought to
be in a museum, really.’

They sat in silence for a while after that.

The museum man came back looking pleased with himself. ‘I’ve just given it a light clean, but I think a specialist needs to see this.’ He had it on a small plastic tray.
‘It’s definitely gold. The hoop’s enamelled black with some sort of scroll design on it, I think. Now the dirt’s off the crystal, do you see?’ He pointed with a pen.
‘Do you see the face on the bezel?’

Under the crystal was a light blue oval with, painted on to it, a man’s head. It had long, dark hair and flowing moustaches. ‘Charles the Second,’ he said.

‘So it’s a royal ring?’ said Gally.

‘No, no, no,’ said the man. ‘There were quite a lot of these. Certainly it would have belonged to a royalist, but I couldn’t go further than that. It is very unusual,
though.’ He pointed at the place where the bezel joined the hoop. ‘I’m pretty sure it’s a swinging bezel. It’s all seized up and I don’t want to force anything,
but it looks to me as though if you could swing the bezel round you would probably find the other side was a signet ring, and there’s definitely an inscription around the inside of the
hoop.’

‘So it could be valuable?’ said Mike.

‘It would certainly repay further investigation,’ said the man. ‘I’m trying to think what it could have been doing under the step. What’s your house
like?’

‘Just an old farmhouse. A cottage really,’ said Gally.

‘This isn’t the sort of thing you find in folk medicine. More likely someone hid it for safekeeping. Where is this house of yours?’

‘Penselwood,’ said Mike.

‘Ah, a wonderful place.’

‘It’s a house called Bagstone Farm.’

The man looked suddenly thoughtful, scratched his head.

‘Are you in a rush?’ he said. ‘We could just pop over the way to the county archive. That does ring a vague sort of a bell.’

Across the courtyard from the museum in the old castle building was a quiet, studious library, lined with books and box files. It was the sort of place Mike could lose himself in for hours and
which Gally would previously have shunned as freeze-dried, tasteless history. Now she looked at it with new eyes, wondering if it might hold scraps of the right answers if only she knew the
questions. The deputy archivist was a cheerful extrovert, oddly noisy in this silent place but the three scholars bending over their books at the tables seemed used to him.

‘Penselwood?’ he said. ‘Oh such a very rich place. Three Norman castles all inside a mile. How’s that for a puzzle? Two major ancient highways. Four battles, Iron Age
forts all over the place, the Pen Pits. You can’t walk a step without stumbling over something. Still you don’t want to hear me rabbiting on, do you?’ He considered his colleague
from the museum. ‘You’ve got a remarkable memory, Norman, or I wouldn’t even bother to start looking.’

He brought out a box file marked with the name of the village and started to shuffle through papers. Gally craned to see, fascinated by this evidence that part at least of the village’s
past had been recorded. She felt as an adopted child might feel, stumbling across its family tree.

Norman reached in. ‘I think I know where it would be. I was reading something one of the village people themselves wrote.’ He pulled out an old typescript. ‘This is it. Mary
Harfield’s local history. I remember. She quoted one of the older villagers saying her grandfather was re-roofing a house in Penselwood and he came across a drum, some armour and two swords
from Monmouth’s army, hidden right up under the old thatch.’ He thumbed through. ‘That’s it. I’m right. Local tradition is that Monmouth himself passed through the
village when he was escaping.’

Three exhausted men drew their horses up in a phalanx across Gally’s brain.

‘Where does Bagstone Farm come in?’ asked Mike.

‘Well, that was the house,’ Norman said. ‘That’s the point. They found Monmouth’s equipment in your house.’

Gally wouldn’t let them keep the ring at the museum, against Mike’s wishes and against their polite pressure. She promised to get in touch another time and arrange
to take it to a specialist and then she made Mike drive her home. On the way she came to a decision, aided by her distance from the house. It went against the grain for her to have to tell
half-truths, to be caught in some sort of cross-fire between Mike and Ferney. There should be space enough for both, she felt. She should have no reason to feel guilt about her liking for an
octogenarian, whatever strange history Ferney might insist they had. Equally, Ferney could hardly expect to overturn the present structure of her life.

‘There’s something I would very much like,’ she said.

‘Anything,’ said Mike facetiously.

‘I’m serious. I think you would find Ferney quite interesting if you gave him a chance. Would you have another go when he comes out of hospital?’

There was a silence. It was harder for Mike than she had realized. He knew how much it mattered to her and he was troubled by it.

‘Well?’

‘What is it about him?’

‘I don’t know for sure.’

‘Would you tell me if you did?’

She looked away.

‘Gally, listen. I know what you’ve been through. I don’t want you to be messed around by someone with weird ideas.’

‘You don’t know him.’

‘And you do? In just a few weeks?’

He didn’t understand her sudden smile and it sent him veering towards irritation, but he kept silent, breathed deeply and bounced back the other way.

‘If it really matters, I’ll give it a go.’

He went very quiet after that, turning it over in his mind, but after what she’d just heard in the archives she was unable to leave the clamouring fragments of history and memory to their
own devices, so she forced him to talk about it.

‘What exactly happened to Monmouth?’

‘Norman could be right. He certainly came through Selwood Forest. When they caught him at Horton he was in peasant’s clothes. I think there was something like five thousand
pounds’ reward out for him, an absolutely colossal sum, and they’d already caught the other two he’d been riding with.’

A vivid picture of Lord Grey and the exhausted Dutchman, Byser, came into her head – offering them drink, dressing a wound on Byser’s arm – all the stuff brought out of the
depths of her mind by Ferney last time, lurking in some halfway house of memory that she hadn’t suspected. Such pity.

‘Some woman saw him from her cottage and sent the militia after him and they found him half-dead in a ditch.’

Fear still clung to the memory like the smell that clings to burnt wood long after a fire.

‘What would they have done to people who helped Monmouth?’

‘Didn’t you learn anything in school? After the Inquisition it was every schoolkid’s favourite witch hunt.’

‘What?’

‘Judge Jeffreys and the Bloody Assize.’

She gasped and pulled back sharply.

‘What is it?’ Mike said, sounding alarmed.

‘Nothing.’ In the dark of her mind, the monsters moved. The need to know became the urgent need to stop knowing. If the floodgates opened now, she knew she would be swept away by
something unspeakably sad, unspeakably horrid. Now she knew exactly why the ring had been so carefully buried – an object which, if discovered, would have rushed them both straight to a
tortured death. She reached a hand into her pocket and pushed the heavy weight of it down under a handkerchief as if it might still carry that danger with it. They hadn’t died then, had they?
Neither of them. She knew Ferney had still been with her three years later when she met her end at Wincanton under the hooves of the horse, but she wondered what had happened in between and greatly
feared to find out because something was shrieking at her from behind the locked doors, something with echoes in the swirling flames of a burning car.