Ferney (20 page)

In the darkness her feet were wet and she was walking in coarse, sodden clothing towards a fire that held no promise of comfort but only utter dread. The fire was all she could
see through the rain, but she had been there so many times before that she knew exactly what she would find. The knowledge spared her nothing. The cauldron over the fire was as huge as ever and the
face of the man who stirred it was as vile, and when she walked, had to walk, up to the edge of the fire and, obeying his pointing finger, rose on tiptoe to look into the cauldron, she saw there in
the bubbling, steaming liquid the same grey-pink slabs of hacked bodies that were always there, and the head that bobbed and slowly revolved to show her its boiled eyes and burst, black lips was
known to her so that she screamed with full horror, undiluted by familiarity.

Violent motion followed. The cauldron rocked and a man’s arms pinioned her as she struggled to escape, still screaming. She hit out, hard, and the arms let go with a grunt. She hit out
again and this time her fist hit wood and the pain stopped her and brought her out of her sleep into the remains of their bed, with Mike hunched over next to her and rain pattering on the caravan
roof.

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Was that you?’

‘My nose,’ he said, indistinctly.

‘I’m sorry. Are you all right?’

‘Ummm. What about you?’

She gathered her wits, breathing hard. ‘Nightmare.’

He seemed to be recovering, straightening up and putting an arm round her.

‘I thought you didn’t get them here.’

‘First one.’

‘Want to tell me?’

‘It was the Boilman.’

‘Oh, Gally,’ he murmured and he hugged her silently for a bit, then she said, ‘It’s all right, he’s gone now.’

‘Let’s put the bed back together.’

Their bedding was wet by their feet where a roof-seam was showing its age, but she didn’t mind. She lay there in the dark with his arms around her as his breathing slowed into the rhythm
of sleep and felt again that deep fondness which was compromised by the glimpse of how much more there might be. She drifted off to sleep and the pressure of his arms kept the Boilman away. At
breakfast time she could pretend it was all forgotten. A fine summer morning was evaporating the last sheen of night-damp and their bedclothes were drying out, draped over the car for want of a
clothes line.

They drove down to Gillingham that morning to stock up with food and came back the long way by Zeals and Stourton because Mike wanted to check the opening times of the National Trust gardens at
Stourhead for a future expedition. From the main road they caught glimpses of the colonnaded façade of the great house between its long wings, honey-warm in the sunshine, but from the moment
she saw the first car park signs, the narrowing funnel shepherding glass-sided coach boxes of tourists to their heritage experience, shuddering with snorts of bass exhausts in the queue, she knew
it wasn’t something she had any wish to do.

The village, thick with camera-dangled visitors, was beautiful but unnatural in the sun. Mike made enthusiastic noises as they drove slowly through, looking at the lakes, the gatehouse, the
obelisks carefully laid out to carry the eye through the sweeping spaces where man had taken a valley and carved it into a vista.

‘Don’t you like it?’ said Mike, made curious by her silence.

‘It’s a bit contrived, isn’t it?’

‘Do you think so? I would have said it was one of the triumphs of the landscaper’s art. It was revolutionary in its time – the first full-scale example of the new natural look
after all those stuffy, formal gardens. It knocks spots off the rest.’

Gally tried to put her finger on what she felt. ‘Imagine someone doing it now. There’d be complete outrage, wouldn’t there? Suppose some billionaire City type bought a valley
and built himself an ultra-modern mansion, then decided to play God with the landscape for miles around. He’d have English Heritage and the Department of the Environment down on his head in
no time, wouldn’t he?’

‘But this isn’t ultra-modern . . . Oh, I see what you mean.’

Gally was laughing. ‘It was at the time, wasn’t it? Okay, it was mock-classical but that was ultra-modern then, wasn’t it?’ She knew as she said it that this was only one
layer of what she really thought.

‘Don’t you like it at all?’

‘Oh, I quite like it, I suppose. I’d like to come in winter, though, not now with all these people getting in the way.’ She thought suddenly of Ferney’s scale of time and
recognized her true feelings. ‘It’s not that old really though, is it?’

‘Of course it is. It’s seventeen-something.’

‘Three lifetimes, that’s all. Modern really.’

He looked at her without understanding.

‘It’s a funny thought, isn’t it, that barring natural disasters, they’ll never let it fall down now, will they?’ she said.

‘I hope not.’

‘Not for a hundred years? Five hundred years? Five thousand years?’

‘Well, that’s a pretty long time.’

‘No, but do you see what I mean? Unless something happens to the world, that place and all the other historic buildings are going to be there for ever effectively.’

‘What would you prefer, that we knock them down?’ said Mike with a touch of sarcasm.

‘Don’t be difficult. Now they’re starting to list 1960s office blocks as historic. If we go on doing that sort of thing
and
making sure all the old buildings stay up
too, there’ll come a time when the whole surface of Britain is covered with listed buildings.’

‘I’m sure we’ll manage to destroy enough of them somehow,’ said Mike. ‘What is this, a complaint?’

They drove slowly out of the village through a fantasy rustic arch of jagged rock.

‘They could make a start on that,’ said Gally and he laughed.

‘I like it,’ he said defiantly. ‘Stourhead, I mean, not just the arch. It’s one of the architectural wonders of the southwest.’

‘It’s not that I don’t like it,’ she said vaguely, but her spirits began to lift as she looked ahead at the long wooded spine of Pen Ridge, looking forward to this fresh
approach to their new home. They were out of the tourist danger zone now, leaving the last of the Stourhead lakes behind as the narrow road took them through the stone cottages of Gasper on a long
detour north, climbing up the side of the ridge. The cedars above them supported their high green copy of the hill’s contour on trunks that offered inviting summer shade, broken here and
there by logging tracks and the timber corpse piles awaiting collection. Gally looked at the logs as they passed, at the sawcut cross-section of their ringed history, and momentarily envied them
the certainty of that physical record.

At the top, in a dip in the long spine of the ridge, the road hairpinned sharp left to follow the summit southward. Instead of following it round, Mike turned into a track entrance, braked
abruptly and switched off.

‘Do you fancy a quick walk?’ he said. ‘If you think Stourhead’s too modern, there’s something just up here you’ll like.’

‘What?’

‘If I remember the map, Kenny Wilkins’ Castle is only a hundred yards up here. Let’s have a look.’

An unexpected reluctance took Gally by surprise. ‘Do we have to go now?’ she said. ‘I want to get back.’

‘That’s not like you. There’s lots of time.’

There was, but that wasn’t the point. She didn’t like it, but she got out anyway. They walked on warm tarmac up the slight rise through the woods towards Penselwood. There was
birdsong in the darting green sunshade of the high canopy and occasional scuffling in the dry disorder of woodland sediment covering the toes of the trees. Even under that disguise, there was no
mistaking it. As they reached the top and the road leapt suddenly ahead, a slot through the wood that marked the long spine of the ridge, an ancient barrier loomed out of the undergrowth to each
side, a massive, domed earth rampart fronted by a ditch that was still deep despite the efforts of the ages to fill it in.

Mike moved into friendly lecture mode. ‘It’s an Iron Age hill fort,’ he said. ‘Seven acres of it, apparently. Two hundred yards across. I looked it up in the books.
There’s a tradition that the Roman general Vespasian captured it with the Second Legion on his march west.’

That stirred nothing in her. The Romans had always seemed a sterile subject. He picked his way through the undergrowth, climbing up on the rampart. ‘It’s in incredibly good nick,
really,’ he said, looking round.

They picked their way along the right-hand parapet of the rampart which dominated the steep slope down the western side of the ridge. To their left inside the camp, between them and the road,
were scrubby beech trees and brambles. To the right, down the sharply angled side of the ridge, soaring conifers allowed glimpses of a vast landscape opening out below with no clear sight of the
bottom.

‘These trees wouldn’t have been here then,’ Mike said. ‘It wouldn’t have been any use without a proper view.’

‘So would they have felled them?’

‘The climate was different. They wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble. I’m sure it was a bare hill.’

They walked on round until they came to the far gateway where the road passed through, bisecting the long oval. This side of the camp was thick with cedars and the rampart was higher still, but
the trees blotted out almost all the view to the east.

‘Cenwalch now, your funny friend’s Kenny Wilkins, he was an interesting character.’

Gally was not at all sure she wanted to hear about Cenwalch, not here, but the price of stopping him telling her, of breaking the main spell which had always brought them together, seemed too
high.

‘Old Bede, who had a pretty good idea about most things, said Cenwalch was a truly second-rate commander, that he had a habit of messing up things and losing large chunks of his kingdom to
his enemies. That’s probably why he started looking for more land to the south-west.’

This was fine, she thought, whatever the disquiet was that she felt, she seemed to be holding it at bay.

‘Anyway he won a battle at Bradford-on-Avon in 652 and after that he controlled the land all down the side of Selwood Forest, so he’d probably been sitting down there looking up at
the Britons holding the ridge on and off for six years. Of course this was six hundred years after Vespasian.’

‘The trees would have grown by then, would they?’ she asked, wondering why it mattered.

‘I shouldn’t think so. Defending a fortress in a wood would have been a quick route to suicide.’

The memory of skylight stampeded through the trees so their trunks became glass in her mind and the horizon to the east chopped across them. A door in her mind, carelessly left unguarded, was
unlocked. For a wild, reeling, disorientating moment, she looked out across an ancient valley to the outline of the other great fort on the chalk heights of Whitesheet Hill. The ditch below her
feet was clear, the rampart refreshed into sharp profiled earth, stone and timber and she was frightened, frightened for her life. Mike spoke again and she staggered physically off balance as the
trees thickened abruptly around her in rescue. There was no pleasure here.

‘Let’s walk on,’ he said. ‘They think the fort always straddled the road like this.’

She wanted to go back to the car and drive away, but if they had to walk, the road at least was a modern-day bitumen anchor to her imagination.

She thought Mike hadn’t noticed anything, but she was wrong.

‘What upset you?’ he said when they’d gone a short way, leaving the fort behind them, a vague threat she would have to face again when they went back for the car.

‘I don’t know. I just didn’t like it there.’

‘I thought you liked everything about Penselwood?’

She sighed, shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s just the trees or the shade or something.’

‘It’s not old Ferney, is it? I have a feeling he’s getting at you in some way. Has he put some idea in your head?’

She was walking along keeping her eyes firmly on the ground, unwilling to take another risk with the shifting trees, and she answered more vehemently than she intended. ‘No, he
hasn’t. He’s not like that at all. Anyway you said you’d be nice to him. You know he’s ill. For all we know, he might never come out of hospital.’

‘He’s a tough old bugger, I should think. I’ll bet you a fiver he’s up and about inside a week.’

‘I’m not taking any bets on his health,’ she said firm!y.

‘That’s a pity.’

‘Why?’

‘Because that would have been the fastest five pounds I ever made.’

She looked up and saw an old man in a tweed jacket walking slowly along the road towards them from the direction of the village and she knew straightaway that it was indeed Ferney.

She was amazed to see him up and walking and it filled her with a sudden, ecstatic pleasure, but she knew without looking that Mike was studying her for a reaction and that she had roughly a
hundred yards to decide how to greet Ferney and how to handle the encounter between him and Mike in a way that would start them off in the new direction Mike had promised.

‘Oh good,’ she said. ‘He looks fine.’

‘He certainly does.’

‘Will you . . . will you be friendly, Mike?’

‘If he’s friendly to me.’

The distance was down to fifty yards and Ferney lifted a hand in greeting to them. They weren’t completely alone. From behind them she heard horse’s hooves and, looking round, saw a
middle-aged woman riding a chestnut mare trot out of a track into the woods and turn on to the road in their direction. Once on the road the horse stopped, the woman swung herself out of the saddle
holding the reins and picked up one of its forelegs to examine the hoof. As she did so, there was a shrill, rising blast of noise and an open-top Ford Escort in loud metallic blue with a louder
exhaust and music blaring came rocketing down from the village as if the country lane was a race-track. The young driver braked hard when he saw the horse, but it was too late. As the car swerved
past it to disappear round the bend through the old camp, the animal reared up, overcome with terror, jerked its reins from the woman’s hand and, ears flattened back and eyes rolling, bolted
down the road towards them.