Winterking (1987)

by Paul Hazel

  Hunt?” Strangely he could not read her face. “Or Mrs.

  Norfolk?” he suggested more tentatively.

  “That will not be necessary,” Wykeham interrupted.

  Plum’s eyes were suddenly on his. Her color deepened.

  “But I insist,” Longford rumbled. “After all, I had

  promised.”

  “You needn’t have,” Wykeham said. “Quite by chance I

  have managed to find someone myself.”

  After dinner, while the men were still seated and Plum

  was out of the room, Longford put the question directly.

  The Hill and the Tower

  71

  “What exactly do you know about this woman?” he

  asked.

  “Do either of you want tea?” Plum inquired from the

  kitchen where she had seemed for a time unusually quiet.

  Longford murmured noncommittally.

  “Yes,” Wykeham said. “Thank you.”

  They both heard the water spilling from the tap. With

  noisy efficiency Plum seemed to be clearing away, washing up

  and brewing the tea all at once. What’s got into her? Longford

  wondered. He glanced at the open doorway as her shadow

  passed. After several minutes Plum came in with a tray.

  “Nearly forty," Longford was saying. “1 daresay that

  seems a safe age in a woman.” But noticing the look on

  Plum’s face, he added charitably: “Of course age is merely a

  state of mind.”

  Rewarded with a smile, he turned again to Wykeham.

  “Certainly,” he said, “you woiddn’t object if Mrs. Longford

  were to call on her.” He looked to see Wykeham’s reaction

  and added, although nothing more was needed: “Certain

  little formalities. You can well understand.” Well satisfied

  with himself, he stood for a long moment in the middle of the

  room, smiling. Out of the corner of his eye Wykeham saw

  Plum look hastily away.

  They carried their tea into the parlor.

  The furniture, in large measure, had come with the

  parsonage. Except for a chair or two and a photograph of

  Longford’s father, looking very much like Longford himself,

  the furnishings were in fact Wykeham’s, having come down

  with the estate and passed along with the pulpit, for temporary use, from one minister to the next. There were pieces from a half dozen periods, English and Dutch, pieces elegant

  and droll, austere and operatic. Wykeham sank willingly into

  the stiff, horsehair sofa Longford loathed and seemed, Plum

  thought, almost immediately pleased with it. He balanced his

  cup on his knees in a way that made her think of an Oxford

  dandy. Yet, with his big hands and square shoulders, he

  would not have appeared out of place among the laborers her

  husband had hired on his behalf. Indeed, she imagined he

  was skillful at things that they were and her husband was not.

  Plum glanced across the room at her husband. The

  questions about Wykeham’s schooling and travels had been

  exhausted insofar as Longford had patience to ask or to listen.

  7 2

  WINTERKING

  Wykeham had already promised twice to visit Black Wood

  and pay a call on John Chance. Tim ran his blunt lingers

  along the spine of his book. She saw he was preparing himself

  and wished somehow she were sitting next to him and could

  slip her hand into his. Then he could ask what he liked. Yet

  she blamed herself for having argued with him earlier. Nevertheless, she dreaded the question. Only the strength of her deep affection kept her quiet.

  Longford arched his wide brows. “I have the distinct

  impression,” he said, beginning already well into his argument, “that there is a new tree in East Wood.”

  Wykeham waited.

  “Undoubtedly it isn’t the sort of thing you would likely

  have noticed?"

  Slowly Wykeham finished his tea. He glanced at Plum

  before he set his cup aside. Finally, he shook his head.

  “I didn’t think you would,” said Longford, disappointed.

  “Though I can assure you it is there now and wasn’t yesterday.”

  There was a pause. Plum had such a strong sense of

  impending disaster she nearly stood. She was looking for an

  excuse to mention the hour, to remind Wykeham that he

  ought to be going. She was even willing, somewhat contradictorily, to offer more tea though she knew perfectly well none was wanted.

  “You can imagine, I hope, my astonishment,” Longford

  was saying. “I have paid extraordinary attention to the trees

  in East Wood. There are one or two matters about them I

  had planned to discuss with you. Trivial, some might think.

  But from my own point of view I should say they were most

  important.” His handsome face tightened with seriousness.

  Plum saw him about to plunge once again along a path the

  young man, not knowing him, could not have expected to

  follow. She wished Wykeham were the gentleman she was

  now fairly certain he was not. Then he might have succeeded,

  where she admitted only failure, in diverting him.

  “A tree?” Wykeham showed no expression but Plum

  knew very well he goaded him.

  Longford nodded. “Precisely,” he said. “A tree where no

  tree had been.” His voice made an eager, quivering sound,

  not at all like a clergyman’s.

  The curtains stirred dully in back of him. Plum could

  hear the whisper of the cloth as clearly as if it were the sly

  The Hill and the Tower

  7 3

  whisper of women in the parish hall. A half dozen churches in

  a dozen years. A sadness fell on her. During their last months

  in Maryland, as elsewhere, there had been talk. She was

  prepared as well for silence. But Wykeham turned his head.

  “How did you first come to notice it?” he asked, without

  a trace of irony.

  Longford thought the question over. “It is easy enough

  to see,” he said at last. “But the reason I saw it, I believe,

  was that I so thoroughly hadn’t expected it to be there.” He

  drew a breath and eased himself up in the chair. “For a

  week," he said, “whenever I went out to Greenchurch, I had

  watched that little bit of wood. I was waiting to see, when the

  trees came to leaf, which wouldn’t bloom and were dead

  timber. You see 1 wanted your permission, a favor to some

  studies I am pursuing, to cut a few branches, maybe a tree or

  two, so I could get a clearer view from the house to the

  river.”

  Longford leaned a little nearer. “You, William, would not

  have minded. It was old wood and scarcely a leaf. . .” He

  remembered the top of the hill. There had been a view over

  great stretches of bare limbs and, in patches, the pearly mist

  of the river. “It would not have done much damage,” he said.

  “Dead wood and dying. I know, I am pleased to think, every

  inch of the timber. I had picked out the trees." Though he

  had just got himself going, he made himself stop. The night

  air moved the curtain. He was trying not to think of his wife,

  who was sitting very still, watching him.

  “It’s in this book,” Longford said because suddenly he

  was beginning to discover
that he had not the words for the

  turning of his own thought. “One of the two books,” he said

  after a moment, “you were kind enough to bring up from

  New Awanux. You didn’t by any chance happen to look

  through it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s in here,” Longford said. “Not the whole thing

  of course. I’ve seen the clues myself, followed them in fact for

  some time, until, quite independently, they led me here.

  Really the book is no more than the confirmation of my own

  work.” He leaned farther out and gave the small volume to

  Wykeham. He waited while Wykeham folded back the front

  cover. There was the same plate of a naked Indian Wykeham

  had seen in the shop on Abbey Street. On an inside page he

  7 4

  W IN TE R IN G

  found the title: T he C elt a n d the R ed Man: A Prelim inary

  Discourse on the O ld Welsh Origins o f the Algonquin Language.

  The book had been published in Boston in the middle of the

  last century. Wykeham turned past the table of contents.

  "Proofs,” the author began, “must not be arguments, but

  testimonies.”

  Longford cleared his throat.

  “I believe,” he said rapidly, “that the first Indians, the

  true Indians, were Welsh.” He forced himself to smile. “If

  you know how to look, everything points to it. Though I do

  sometimes wish I were an etymologist.” Indeed it annoyed

  him that he could pronounce a mere fraction of the words

  whose embedded sources and branching histories he had

  followed in his reading. He suspected, because he had not

  mastered the sounds, that some meaning always eluded him.

  “Yet I haven’t done badly,” he said. “I have made astounding

  progress, especially in the relationship between topography

  and language. And yet,” he said, “if only one had other lives.

  Time to pursue things thoroughly. Haven’t you wished that

  yourself?”

  “I thought they were Chinamen,” Wykeham said.

  “Oh they w ere,” Longford answered. “Yes. Very definitely. Beyond dispute. But later.” Suddenly he looked very grave. “It all sounds, I know, William, quite foolish. But it

  fits. Not perfectly by any means; but a sight better than any

  other explanation I’ve heard of. For one thing there are

  dolmens. Right here in the village. In Devon. Huge upright

  stones and root cellars. Though of course they aren’t root

  cellars at all. And writing on the bare rock! Not simple

  pictographs but whole stanzas: battles and eulogies, clear

  facts of history. In deep-cut Ogham letters!” An effervescence

  of spirit had filled him. He leaned forward as though catching

  the breeze from the window. Plum, for once, gazed at him

  without pity.

  “I know,” Longford said. “Certainly, I know what you

  think.” But his look implored Wykeham not to judge him too

  quickly. “I can show you the proof,” he admonished him.

  “And not only in the stones and cellars of the village.”

  Looking away, Wykeham began to explore the pages of

  the book. There were drawings of boulders cradled on smaller

  stones and drawings on Indian sachems, spear-armed alone

  by a poo! in a wood or surrounded by archers, Indians

  The Hill and the Tower

  75

  kneeling before altars or standing under the open sky on the

  bluffs at Ohomowauke. But for the most part there were

  drawings of letters, plate after plate of Ogham nicks and

  scratches, cut on squared stone or wooden billets, the English translations marching sensibly along underneath.

  “Stones can be forgeries,” Longford said. “I’m the first to

  admit that. The fanners who first settled here were learned

  men, university men not of few of them, reading Phoenician

  and writing Greek.”

  Plum was looking out the window. On the far side, across

  the darkened green, the lights were burning in Charon

  Hunt’s garage. She could make out a knot of men standing

  there. It was difficult to see their faces but their figures, in

  the illumination of the garage lamps, had a dramatic and

  furtive quality. Hunt himself had seldom been anything but

  polite to her. But Plum had always had the impression, even

  when he wasn’t, that he was scowling. He was a large man,

  strong and angular, of no certain age. He had masses of deep

  red hair crowding low on his forehead. It was not exactly that

  she objected to the man’s coloring. Yet neither was it entirely

  unrelated, she reflected, to the brashness and anger she

  sensed was inside him. He had as well, she knew, a habit of

  appearing where he was least expected, like the morning she

  had watched him speeding recklessly down the winding drive

  from Greenchurch, too preoccupied or too guilty to wave.

  The breeze touched her face and she sighed, wondering for

  the moment less about her husband than what Charon Hunt

  and his cronies were up to. She was all but certain they were

  up to no good.

  Wykeham’s gray-black eyes held no hint of amusement.

  Longford was explaining how the river, along the stretch

  that included both Ohomowauke and Devon, described, as

  though by a conscious act of will, an almost perfect letter “S.”

  “Except,” he said, “to my mind it isn’t properly an ‘S’ at all.

  At least not any longer. You see I’m rather persuaded that

  over the last half century or so it’s been changing.”

  He stood up. “I have,” he said, “if you care to have a

  look, some drawings of my own,” He went to his desk and

  pulled open the drawer. He was glad that Plum was there.

  He hadn’t, so far, explained this to anyone, not in any great

  detail. It was time she heard it fully. He spread a large

  wrinkled paper on the desk top.

  76

  WINTERKING

  “Come along, William,” he said. He looked back at his

  wife. Wykeham and Plum joined him silently.

  Longford smoothed the paper with the side of his hand.

  The map, to Plum’s embarrassment, looked like a drawing for children. Devon and Ohomowauke were marked clearly enough, as were the greater towns and cities to the

  south, but not with the orthodox cartographers symbols. For

  Bristol Longford had sketched a ridiculous frowning clockface

  and for Ohomowauke an owl made of flowers. Devon itself

  was a ring on nine towers, black on the land, and quite a bit

  larger than the size of the village seemed to warrant. Presumably the wavy lines meandering among them represented the river. There were too many lines, however, and they wandered

  confusedly. Longford traced a set of lines with his finger.

  “This is the old river,” he said, “the river one can still

  see on the government maps of the region. Oddly, the

  surveyors weren’t that far off. Quite surprising given their

  equipment. Less than a few meters error at any one point.”

  He traced the lines again, his finger following a gentler curve

  which tracked north from Bristol, bent around Ohomowauke,

  then south until in a sinuous line, leaving Devon, it swung

  north once m
ore along the far western edge. “But you would

  expect,” he added significantly, “at least I did, a common

  error.” He paused. “Well, there isn’t.” He gave a furtive

  glance at Wykeham, then turned again to the map. “Actually,”

  he said, “the error changes rather wildly.”

  Wykeham examined the lines carefully. “So you assumed,”

  Wykeham said, “that the error was common— because it

  should have been— and figured the difference."

  “Yes.” Longford looked startled. “Yes, of course.” For the

  first time he broke into a grin. “Though, to tell the truth, I

  had some sleepless nights before it occurred to me.”

  “And the true measurement?”

  Longford went on grinning. Indeed he couldn’t help

  feeling flattered by the way Wykeham put it. “Yes,” he said,

  pleased, “I have made, I think, a number of rather exact

  measurements.”

  Conscious of disloyalty, Plum turned again to the paper

  and found, even against her better judgment, her attention

  attracted to the largest of the nine towers scratched on the

  hillsides of Devon.

  The Hill and the Tower

  77

  “The channel is straightening,” her husband was saying.

  “The bends, I believe, have sharpened.”

  She bent over to examine the drawings more closely. At

  the base of the tower there was a sort of absurd scribble

  which she suspected must have been meant to be thorns.

  What an odd thing, she thought.

  “All I need,” Longford continued, “is the final measurement."

  “Which is from Greenchurch?” Wykeham asked. “From

  my hilltop?”

  Longford nodded.

  “For which you wish my permission to cut down not only

  the old trees but the inconvenient new one.”

  “Tim, ‘ Plum said, not listening, her eyes riveted on a

  small dark square hidden among the crosshatch of lines which

  suggested the stonework at the top of the tower. It was hardly

  more than a blot, with just a fleck or two of white highlights.

  Yet there was a feeling of delicate roundness and a suggestion

  . . , though it was silly. “Tim,” she asked, not aware she was

  interrupting him, her voice raised more than was necessary.

  He broke off and, annoyed with her insistence, turned.