What Time Devours (41 page)

The barman had put on another disc.

“This them too?” asked Thomas.

“Yep.”

He skipped a few songs to get to the one he wanted and then went back to the bar. Thomas listened. It was slow and dreamy with an odd pattering keyboard in the background. It was a very different sound, but the lyrics had that same playful quirkiness. Something about being a dark horse . . .

“Did Elsbeth Church ever own a stable?” he asked the barman as he was clearing his plate.

“No, though lots of folk around here do. Famous horse-breeding country, this. Why?”

“Nothing,” he said. He was thinking aloud. “I read something about ‘scouring’ a horse. I figured it was some Britishism for grooming or something. I thought Pippa Adams might have been in a pony club. Her friend never talked about riding, but there was this reference to scouring the horse and . . . What?”

The barman was giving him an odd look. It was both quizzical and amused, as if he thought Thomas might be pulling his leg.

“Scouring a horse?” he repeated.

“Yes,” said Thomas. “What?”

“Scouring
a
horse,” said the barman, “or scouring
the
horse?”

“Oh.
The
horse, I guess. Why?”

“Go down that hallway.”

He pointed, an arcing gesture, full of energy. He was grinning, and it was Thomas’s turn to wonder if he was being kidded. “And take this,” he added, handing Thomas the green CD case.

“What . . . ?”

“Seriously,” said the barman. “Go.”

So Thomas went.

“Well?” called the barman.

“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” said Thomas.

“The pictures on the wall,” said the barman as if this should be obvious. “Show him, Doris.”

“Show him what?” Doris returned, wiping her hands as she squeezed down the hallway toward him.

“The horse!” returned her husband.

“Oh,” she called back. “Tough to miss, that is.”

Thomas turned, baffled, and then saw a large framed photograph. It was taken from the air, it seemed, and the background was a deep and vivid green: a hillside. On top of it was a white outline seemingly cut into the earth, a massive, stylized horse, hundreds of feet across, galloping across the countryside.

“Famous, is that,” said Doris. “The Uffington white horse. Very old. Ancient like . . . You all right?”

“Yes,” said Thomas. But he wasn’t. His sense of the puzzle had shifted and the pieces were reordering themselves in his head. “Where is this?”

“Couple of miles that way,” said Doris, orienting herself toward the kitchen and pointing.

“They put that picture on one of them records you were listening to before,” she said. “Local group. You won’t know them, being American and such.”

“XTC,” said Thomas, still gazing at the picture but raising the CD.

“Now, how’d you know them?” asked the landlady.

Thomas couldn’t take his eyes off the photograph of the white figure on the green hill, the source of the
English Settlement
cover art that both Alice Blackstone and Pippa Adams had pinned up in their rooms.

“A friend of mine was a fan,” he said.

CHAPTER 85

The scouring of the white horse, the barman told him, was once a significant local festivity. Every few years—seven, he thought—the people from the surrounding countryside would gather to cut back the encroaching turf to keep the horse clear. No one knew how long it had been going on, as they didn’t really know how old the horse itself was or what its original purpose had been. Some said it was an Iron Age advert for a local horse trading market, but most scholars thought it much older, about three thousand years old, and was more likely to have roots in some fertility cult or animal worship. What the barman referred to as the “Stonehenge nutjobs” used the fact that the best view of the horse was from the air to claim that it was some sort of marker created by or for visiting aliens. This last developed a kind of truth during the Second World War, when local people had been obliged to lay turf over the horse to prevent its being used as a navigation aid by German bombers.

“What’s the name of this song?” asked Thomas.

The barman had replaced the disc with one of XTC’s later albums. The song had a lilting, hauntingly dreamy melody over a backdrop of climbing arpeggios.

“Chalkhills and Children,” said the barman.

“I have to go,” said Thomas, picking up the disc. “Can I borrow this? I’ll be back.”

 

Thomas parked in a dusty and empty lot and followed a wooden sign that pointed right to something called “Way-land’s Smithy via the Ridgeway,” and to the left to the white horse. The Ridgeway path was hedged on both sides in the English country fashion, rambling tangles of bushes and little trees, with grass, nettles, and wildflowers at their feet. Turning toward the horse took him through a gate and into sloping pasture, the path unmarked except by a flattening of the turf. It climbed toward the ridge and then swept off, less distinctly, toward the crown of the hill, and the circular base—now merely a shape in the earth—of what had been an Iron Age fortress.

Halfway up, the breeze stiff and fresh in his face, Thomas was startled by a sudden movement off to his left. A rabbit, he thought first, but it was too big for a rabbit, and as it lolloped off into the longer grass, flailing hindquarters stirring up a spray of dew, he realized with a rush of delight that it was a hare. There would have been hares here thousands of years ago, he thought, and they were woven into the fabric of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon culture and mythology. For a moment he paused and scanned the surrounding hills with their patchwork of green fields and could see no sign of anything or anyone that would have been out of place three thousand years ago. Perhaps there had been more forest then, but up here he guessed the downs were largely unchanged.

Somewhere on the way up he lost a clear sense of the path and wondered if he had gone too far. The hill crest was still to his left and he was starting to skirt it, so he cut across the field till he came to a single-strand wire fence that was marked with a lightning bolt sign. He had no idea if it was actually electrified and could see no sign of whatever animal—sheep, presumably—it was designed to keep in or out.

Still
, he thought,
a little caution won’t kill you
.

He clambered carefully over, eyeing the wire as he swung first one leg over, then the other.

The climb was steeper here and once he had reached the ridgeline, the hillside fell away from the path—now unmistakable, if still unmarked—in a grand sweep. Moments later he came upon the fort foundation on the top of the hill, a wide, roughly circular embankment like a great bowl with the path running around its lip where a stockade had once been. But there was no sign of the horse.

He walked farther along the ridge, the wind even sharper now so that he felt he could lean into it, out over the edge, and be held up. Down below in the steep-sided valley the barman had called “the manger,” he could see a narrow black road. And beyond it was a curious little disk-shaped hillock, flat-topped like a green baize table.

“Dragon Hill,” the barman had said, because some local story said that this was where Saint George had done his one famous deed. Thomas remembered the way some version of that story had found its way into Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
, though whether Spenser knew this place, he had no idea.

A few more steps and he found it. He was gazing off into the distance, searching for it, when he realized that the ground beneath him had changed. He glanced down and found the bright white of the chalk. Up close, it was hard to make out the overall shape of the broken, serpentine lines, but the figure boasted only one dot and it was at Thomas’s feet right now. He hadn’t seen it coming, but he had wandered right onto the great horse’s head and stood now on its eye.

CHAPTER 86

Thomas found a phone box in the nearby village of Woolstone. He hadn’t been sure what he was looking for at the horse, but—as at Hamstead Marshall Park—there was no sign of disturbed earth, and the more he thought about it, the less likely it seemed that anyone could bury anything up there. The horse was, after all, the exposed chalk beneath the grass. How did a couple of bereaved women bury something in solid stone?

“English Heritage,” said a woman’s voice.

Thomas introduced himself quickly, politely, and got to his question.

“I’m researching the Uffington white horse, but my laptop has died and I don’t have a U.K. cell phone,” he said. “I wondered if I could ask you a few questions about the scouring and the physical structure of the horse itself.”

“I can’t tell you much without the files in front of me, but if you call back in about an hour, Grace will be in. She’s doing some evening research and will be able to tell you all you need to know.”

And more, suggested the slight smile in her voice.

“Grace . . . ?”

“Anson. Grace Anson. Let me give you the number so you don’t get trapped at the remote switchboard.”

He thanked her, hung up, and checked his watch. There was a pub across the road. He could stop there for dinner. The walk on the hills had tired him more than he realized; a seat and a sandwich sounded perfect. First, one more call. He checked the number, dialed, and went through the usual process of request and patient waiting as the verger was located.

“This is Ron Hazlehurst,” said the voice.

“Yes, my ecclesiastical friend,” said Thomas. “This is Thomas Knight, your transatlantic nuisance.”

Hazlehurst was delighted to hear from him. He asked about his “jaunt” to “the Continent” and the development of his mystery. Thomas gave him the short version and got right to his question.

“Your contact at the Sorbonne who looked into Saint Evremond’s papers for you?”

“François, yes,” he said.

“Have you spoken to him since?”

“No, why?”

“I’m just curious to see if he mentioned our little quest to anyone else. I got the impression that other people knew I was in the Champagne region and what I was looking for. The timing seemed coincidental at best.”

“I can call and ask him,” said the verger. “It may take a little time because we’re about to start evening prayer. Is there a number I can reach you at?”

Thomas looked around.

“I’m in a village called Woolstone. There’s a pub.”

“What’s its name?”

Thomas peered at the now-familiar image on the sign outside the timber-framed and thatched building.

“The White Horse,” he said.

Naturally
.

CHAPTER 87

Thomas took his pint of Arkell’s best bitter out of the timbered bar to a picnic table outside. He ordered a ploughman’s lunch (despite it being dinnertime), sipped his beer, and looked at the garden, which was classically English, complete with vast, fragrant roses and a fish pond where dragon-flies maneuvered like helicopters. Down here there was almost no breeze, and the day had stayed comparatively warm. It would be light for another couple of hours, but it was a soft light that was turning slowly to dusk as he sat, and he had the garden to himself.

The ploughman’s was a plate of bread and salad that hinged on an excellent dry white cheddar and a brown pickle relish that was sweet and tangy. He was halfway through his second beer when he was summoned to the bar to take a phone call.

The verger sounded sheepish.

“I suppose it’s my fault,” he said. “I didn’t insist upon secrecy.”

“Who did he tell?”

“He’s not sure, I’m afraid. An American.”

“Male or female?”

“Female. Young for a professor, but not inexperienced.”

Julia McBride
, Thomas thought.

“The thing is,” said the verger, “he got the impression that she already knew.”

“That I was going to Epernay?”

“No, that the Missing Play might have been sent to France by Saint Evremond and returned to the Champagne region after the revolution. He only told her because he was convinced she’d just made the same discovery.”

“She was already there?”

“The papers were checked out to her when he arrived. That’s how they got talking. He doesn’t remember everything he told her, and even less of what she told him. She was, he suggested, quite charming.”

“Yes,” said Thomas, “she would be.”

 

As soon as he had finished with the verger, he asked if he could make a call of his own. They could add the cost to his bill.

The barmaid, a pretty girl who he thought might be Russian or maybe Polish, seemed uncertain, but the landlady waved the question away and checked the clock on the wall.

“Hello, Miss Anson?” he said.

“Mrs.,” said an efficient voice. “You must be the gentleman inquiring about the white horse. What can I tell you?”

“The scouring,” said Thomas. “What is it exactly, and how long does it take?”

“Well, it has varied over the centuries,” she said. “Sometimes it was no more than a trimming of the turf and a lot of drinking and revelry, though it probably involved ritual activities and worship in ancient times . . .”

“What about recently?”

“Well, the horse was almost completely overgrown by the end of the First World War and was deliberately covered during the Second, but since English Heritage took over, things are both more regular and more scientific.”

“Can you tell me about the scouring in 1982?”

“That’s before our time, I’m afraid. English Heritage was established the following year by act of Parliament.”

“So who owned it before then?”

“The land around the white horse was donated to the National Trust by the Right Honourable David Astor in 1979, so they actually owned it in ’82.”

“And the scouring?”

“Since the horse itself was put into guardianship in 1936,” said Mrs. Anson, “the duty of maintenance and repair fell on the state. In 1982 this duty would have fallen to the Department of the Environment.”